Americans have very short memories. Two decades after 9/11 and we’re willing to let Muslim terrorists show up at the World Trade Center waving their flags and calling for Jihad. And less than a decade later, they were already pitching a Ground Zero Mosque.
China, like most of the rest of the world, forgets nothing. Like that thing most of us forgot about.
President Xi Jinping vowed to “never forget” NATO’s deadly bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, hours before arriving in Serbia on a swing through Europe aimed at dividing Brussels’ support for the US.
“Twenty-five years ago today, NATO flagrantly bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalist,” Xi said, in a Tuesday article published in Politika, Serbia’s oldest daily newspaper. “That we should never forget,” he added. “We will never allow such tragic history to repeat itself.”
During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, US missiles killed three Chinese journalists in a strike the White House later called a mistake and blamed on faulty maps
Xi is obviously exploiting the event for propaganda purposes in Serbia, but it is a safe bet that China hasn’t forgotten. And we can learn from that. There may perhaps be a virtue in letting things go and moving on when you’re genuinely at peace. It’s why we have Mitsubishi products across America. But only fools let things go when the enemy is around and not at peace with you.
The Chinese embassy bombing was a strange event that was never really resolved. The official story that it was an accident seemed improbable. What are the odds we’d accidentally bomb the Chinese embassy?
And an even stranger postscript to the story came out in 2021. I was about the only one who noticed because I was about the only one who read through a ghostwritten Bill Clinton-James Patterson thriller hoping that there was some material in it.
And yes there was. Including material I never expected.
A sad shake of Li’s head. “During those NATO bombing attacks to convince the Serbs to stop massacring their Muslim neighbors, the Serbs shot down one of the American stealth aircraft, their F-117 Nighthawk. The Serbs gathered up all the wreckage they could and made a deal.”
“A deal?” Jiang asks.
“Yes, a deal,” his boss says. “NATO was bombing the shit out of the Serbs’ military communications systems. And the Serbs offered us the F-117 wreckage—giving us about a five-year advance in stealth technology—if we would allow them to transmit military orders and information from our embassy basement. We were never sure whether NATO tracked down the source of those transmissions, but the American bombing destroyed that Serb military facility in our embassy. They said it was a mistake, and we pretended to believe them. We lost three of our dear comrades, including your father, but we gained so very much in stolen American technology.”
Sure, maybe it’s something the ghostwriter threw in while Bill Clinton didn’t bother reading it or, and this is really crazy, Clinton decided to casually mention what actually happened inside the outline for a thriller. That no one read.
The incident is somewhat obscure, but during Bill Clinton’s illegal invasion of Yugoslavia, an F-117A was shot down. Later that year, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed. The Clinton administration claimed it was an accident, but that was always implausible. The bombing allegedly killed Chinese intel officers pretending to be reporters.
But Americans are over something that happened 30 years ago. Americans are dying now of overdoses due to China and maybe 20% of the country is even paying attention. China however isn’t over it.