Jared said: > Why the casual bait? It wasn't any kind of bait, casual or otherwise. You know, because we talked offlist, that I compared the fall of the USSR with the later fall of Yugoslavia, not only in geopolitical/historical terms but also in terms of the personal fall out, ie how they effect participants and those directly involved. I was close enough to events in the USSR after 1987 to count in some ways as a participant-observer. I had family there. It was a hard time, and very bruising. A lot of people lost everything, even their lives. Utter scum and social dregs suddenly became the new ruling class; the country fell into an abyss of crmininality. People stopped you arguing by pointing guns at you. It was a desperate time, and still is, altho it's become routinised and predictable, which sort of humanises terror a little. It felt like the end of the world if you were there, and I WAS there. I wasn't somewhere else looking in. But somehow you have to move on. I admired your fight but what are you fighting for now? I don't think you are as closely involved in Yugo affairs as I was in Russian (your emails don't come from an address in Belgrade, put it like that). I could resent being told I'm baiting you when what I am doing is giving you some comradely advice, ie advice that is unpleasant and requires wrenching decisions no doubt, but which is true. >A) I have never been a cheerleader of > anything. This > sentence is a perfect illustration of precisely the technique of > lying which > I analyzed in the article about which Mark is "commenting." Using this > "if-Jared-is-a-man-he-will-stop-beating-his-wife" method, one takes a lie - > in this case, that I cheerlead for the Serbian socialist party - > and states > it in such a way that it seems like an established fact. Thus "if Jared is > NOT MERELY a cheerleader" assumes that I am AT LEAST IN PART a cheerleader. Jared, this is to misrepresent and mix up too many things at once, and make a porridge out of my words, and make me guilty by association. I'm not going to debate with you in these terms. It's only a month or so since you were here shilling for the likes of Pavel Borodin, a US stooge, Yeltsinite grave-robber and nomenclaturshik of the very worst kind. We have a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease on this list unfortunately. You have to keep your bearings, and understand that the wider issues are what count, like for instance, the issue of the Balkans not just as a plaything for German revanchism etc but as a crucial pathway for energy from the Cauacasus and Caspian. That's what we need to be discussing. Much worse things happened to much more honest communists during and after the fall of the USSR, than had or will ever happen to the House of Milosevic. You have to move on. This doesn't mean betray people, byt we don't want to be like the old veterans of Napoleon's wars who infested French cafe's and talked about nothing else until about 1840. > My pride is this: I expose lies of Empire and I regularly reach > huge numbers > of people . Second, I am not or sale. Other than that, I have no > pretensions of being a big revolutionary. Honourable ambitions. > B) We write about many issues other than the slander of Yugoslavia on > Emperor's Clothes; suggested reading list below. That being the > case, what is > the meaning of Mark's admonition except that we DROP the issue of > Yugoslavia? Well, I definitely do not mean that. Mark _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
