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Subject: If you want to know what's really going on...
From: josule <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, Apr 9, 1999 1:44 PM
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rich Winkel)
Subject: What is the United States and NATO doing in the Balkans?
Date: 06 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT
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/** labr.global: 240.0 **/
** Topic: Glabal Capitalism Behind US-NATO Bombing **
** Written 5:27 PM Apr 4, 1999 by labornews in cdp:labr.global **
/* Written 3:25 PM Apr 4, 1999 by [EMAIL PROTECTED] in igc:labr.newsline */
/* ---------- "[PEN-L:4792] What is the United Sta" ---------- */
What is the United States and NATO doing in the Balkans?
Andrew Austin
Monday, April 5, 1999
Bombs are falling on Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. NATO has
turned up the heat on Slobodan Milosevic. In truth, NATO is attacking
the people of Belgrade. The West is disregarding human lives by
targeting a heavily populated area and degrading the infrastructure of
a major city. The immediate effects are catastrophic for Yugoslavians.
The long-term effect may be the destruction of their country.
In belligerent tones, President Clinton is telling the world that the
Yugoslav President Milosevic will pay "a very high price" for his
actions in Kosovo, actions being characterized by the Western media as
"genocide." Propagandists have cast Milosevic as the third coming of
Hitler. (Saddam Hussein was the second coming.) As in the Gulf War and
with Saddam Hussein, the United States has personalized the Balkan
conflict. As with the Iraqi people, receding into the background are
the people of Yugoslavia.
Well, that is not exactly true. The ethnic Albanians who live in the
Kosovo region of Yugoslavia are receiving plenty of attention in the
Western media.
And for good reason. Since NATO launched its air war over Yugoslavia,
some 300,000 ethnic Albanians have fled the province of Kosovo,
according to reports by Western authorities. Two hundred thousand are
on their way to the border. Western and Albanian sources report that
Serbian paramilitary units have been moving from town to town, forcing
ethnic Albanians out of their homes, herding them onto trains and
trucks, or forcing them to march to the borders of Albania and
Macedonia. These sources report the killing of Kosovar men by Serbian
death squads.
The images being shown on the television of trains and trucks bloated
with women and children are striking. The scene is eerily reminiscent
of a tragedy occurring some fifty years ago, when men and older boys,
separated from wives and children, were marched off to concentration
camps or to die over mass graves.
Officials in the West are predicting that if the present rate of
expulsion continues the Kosovo region could be "cleansed" of ethnic
Albanians within 10-20 days.
Tragedy compounds tragedy in Yugoslavia.
What happened? President Clinton told the people of the United States
and the world that NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary to
prevent the outflow of ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo territory into
countries to the South of Yugoslavia. The United States and NATO had
to act immediately, we were told, to prevent the conflict from
bursting the seams of Yugoslavia. Clinton warned of an immanent chain
reaction, of falling dominos leading inexorably to World War Three.
After all, the US leader told us, this is where two world wars began.
Of course, we were not told that it would be the United States and the
West who would topple the first domino.
NATO self-fulfilled the prophecy of a wider conflict. The air campaign
has immediately spread the civil war beyond the Yugoslav borders. The
enlargement of the conflict has occurred not only because the air
strikes have triggered the migration of Kosovo Albanians, a
consequence Western propagandists have tried to rationalize, but
because the West is organizing violence in Yugoslavia. With the
inevitable insertion of military forces on the ground, there will be a
full-scale war. Although to a Serb in Belgrade, it is already
full-scale war.
The West has successfully transformed a low-level civil war into an
international military campaign and caused an enormous refugee crisis.
We are left to wonder whether this was their intention.
To answer the question posed by this essay, the Kosovo crisis must
ultimately be projected against the background of the history and
structure of the capitalist world-economy and the network of
geopolitical relations and interests operating the state and military
machinery attendant to maintaining and expanding capitalism.
Capitalist globalization and the struggle against global communism
constitute the foundation for the present struggle and the ultimate
rationale for NATO. While framed as a defensive posture against the
world communism, American presence in Europe has been as an aggressor
in the struggle to advance world capitalism. NATO and the global
political and military umbrella of which it is a component have been
an integral component of the capitalist globalizing project, by
containing world communism, by putting down nationalist movements in
the periphery, and by incorporating into the global economic system
those territories formerly controlled by the Soviet Bloc. The alliance
with fascists has been a key part of this project. Since the early
20th century, fascism has been intrinsic to the logic of capitalist
development in Europe. After World War II, the logic of fascism was
globalized, although it has remained a logic subordinate to
liberalism, the ugly face of capitalism.
I begin by discussing the policy foreground. There is much confusion
here, namely, the way the Western media has cast the struggle. I then
discuss three factors that have led to the United States involvement
in the Balkans: (1) the need to justify NATO, (3) the nefarious
alliance between Washington and Balkan fascists; and (3) the global
economic imperative.
What this essay will show is that despite the atrocities being carried
out by Serbian paramilitary units operating in Kosovo the West has
neither legitimate justification nor moral authority for organizing
war in the Balkans. Indeed, what the United States has been doing over
in the Balkans has made matters worse for the people of Yugoslavia,
Serbs and Kosovars alike. What is more, NATO action in the Balkans
represents a larger strategy to secure the Balkans for global
capitalism, and this involves destroying Yugoslavia. NATO is building
for itself the rationale--future NATO actions will be based on this
precedent--for transgressing national boundaries and putting down any
group who threatens the goals of the international bourgeoisie.
The Policy Foreground
In the foreground, we have to straighten out the account of the chain
of events immediately leading to the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Not
surprisingly, the United States and NATO contrived the situation they
used to justify the Kosovo intervention.
The event that ostensibly concerned the West was Yugoslav state
repression of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the Kosovo province
of Yugoslavia. The KLA, operating internal to Yugoslavia, had been
carrying out terrorist campaigns against the Yugoslav state. In
response, Yugoslav police and the military cracked down on the KLA.
The professed long-range goal of the KLA is to unite ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania into a greater Albania. The struggle
to regain the autonomy Kosovars lost with fall of the larger state of
Yugoslavia in the wake of the Cold War was viewed by Kosovar elites as
a step towards Kosovo independence, which would then lay the
foundation for the larger Albanian state. This position of relative
autonomy within Yugoslavia was supported by the United States and
Europeans powers. Serbia, threatened by the larger goal of succession
by Kosovo Albanians, rejected this position, and took the KLA problem
as an internal matter.
Whether one agrees with the aims of the KLA, it is entirely rational
given the logic of nation-states for the Yugoslav state to carry out
measures to preserve its existence against insurgents and to stabilize
territories under its control. Moreover, given the aims of the KLA,
concessions to the Kosovar leadership threaten the long-term survival
of Yugoslavia.
The conflict escalated until the United States and chief European
powers believed the struggle had reached a level justifying injecting
themselves into the situation as mediators. They drafted a peace
agreement and demanded that both parties sign the treaty, which called
for a truce. The demand was backed up by the threat of military force.
To show their commitment to peace, NATO began amassing troops in the
region.
This is what the West calls "diplomacy." It appeared to some
observers, however, that the West was setting up a "solution" that
whereupon its predictable failure, the West would be "forced" to
intervene militarily.
When both sides--predictably--rejected the agreement, the United
States approached the Kosovar leaders and asked them to unilaterally
accept the agreement with the promise that NATO would begin bombing
Yugoslavia. Under these conditions, Kosovar leaders quickly accepted
the truce.
NATO promptly invaded Yugoslavia.
Justifying NATO
One of the primary goals of the United States has been to maintain its
leadership in Europe. This is accomplished by strengthening NATO. Part
of the strategy has been to include Central and Eastern European
nations in the alliance.
More important is finding a purpose for the NATO alliance in the wake
of the Soviet threat. NATO was originally organized to protect the
West and the capitalist world-economy from the threat of world
communism. With the end of the Cold War, NATO lost its original
rationale--at least its ideological one. It has now become a pressing
concern of elites to find a new rationale to justify the existence of
the military umbrella.
It has been the long-standing position of the Clinton Administration
that NATO is a vital asset to the cause of peace in the Balkans. Their
position emerged during the crisis in Bosnia. In testimony before the
Foreign Relations Committee (US Senate) in 1995, then Secretary of
State Warren Christopher stated that "there will be no peace accord in
Bosnia unless NATO and the United States head the implementation in a
peace accord." Judging from the actions of NATO, the position holds
for Kosovo.
The Clinton Administration and Western propagandists have advanced
this position by preying on the widespread belief among Americans and
Europeans that the people of Balkans are simply incapable of governing
their affairs. It needs to be remembered that the belief itself has
been accomplished through the ethnicization of class and nationalist
struggles over resources and territories. This is a classic propaganda
strategy.
Propagandists characterize the struggle in the Balkans as "tribal
conflict." The people of the Balkans are characterized as "primitives"
held in thrall of "irrational" religious, racialist, and nationalist
interests that have dispossessed them of the capacity for reason.
Their "backward" aspirations must be subdued, and they must "for their
own good" be brought into the "community of nations" (although of
course each under their own ethnic state). In the case of the Balkans,
the rhetoric has been reinforced by the propagation of an apocalyptic
vision where "racial hatred" lets loose a hell on Earth.
In the past, Washington's solution to the problems of "backwardness"
has been to advocate "modernization," that is, spreading "democracy"
(capitalism) to the infected region. Following this logic, the peoples
of the Balkans must be "civilized." This is a solution that can only
be carried out by the most civilized people in the world: the leading
countries of NATO.
One of the usual ways Western Europeans and the United States civilize
people is by killing them. Witness the bombing of Belgrade.
Washington and the Fascist Alliance
To a Serb, stealth bombers over Belgrade must look like just one more
chapter in the biography of her people. For hundreds of years, wave
after wave of empire builders, from the East and from the West, have
taken turns beating down Serbians. The land of Kosovo is holy ground
for Serbs because it was there they were defeated by the Ottoman
Empire. The Serbs celebrate defeat the way the United States
celebrates victory. This is because defeat is all the Serbs have ever
known.
If you are a Serb, it is quite likely that you will have an older
relative who will tell you about the last time the empire-builders
sought to annihilate the Serbian people. Back then, during World War
Two, some 750,000 people in Yugoslavia, mostly Serbs, but also Jews
and Gypsies, were murdered by the Croatian Ustashi. It must seem to a
Serb today, watching Belgrade burn, that the present intervention of
the West is a continuation of the fascism that burned their
grandparents.
Serbs who accuse the West of fascism are not imagining things.
Fascist, racist, and nationalist forces have played and continue to
play a central role in organizing the destruction of Yugoslavia.
Afterall, the recent history of the Balkan conflict clear testifies to
this fact.
Is there a connection between Washington and fascism, racism, and
nationalism in the Balkans? Consider the fascist alliance that exists
in one of the two major political parties in the United States, the
Republican Party.
The fascist alliance in the Republican Party is the various ethnic
clubs who call themselves "heritage groups." They constitute the
National Republican Heritage Groups Council. They make up fascist wing
of the Republican National Committee. There are no black or Jewish
ethnic groups in the NRHGC. There are Bulgarian, Cossack, Romanian,
Byelorussian, Slovak, and Croatian fascist and racist clubs. The NRHGC
had a direct line to power during the 1980s and early 1990s in the
Reagan and Bush Administration, playing a key role in fashioning US
policy in the Balkans. One of their principal goals was the
destruction of Yugoslavia, especially the Serbs.
Playing the central role in the NRHGC concerning US policy in
Yugoslavia have been, of course, the Croatian Republicans. Croats have
been the enemy of the Serbs for a long time. The Croatian Ustashi
allied with Nazi Germany during WWII. In 1941, Germany conspired with
the Croatians to declare Croat independence from Yugoslavia. There
began immediately mass exterminations of Orthodox Serbians.
During the 1980s, the GOP openly observed and celebrated the "Croatian
Day of Independence." See, for example, the 1984 Guide to Nationality
Observances published by the "National Republican Heritage Groups
Council of the Republican National Committee," signed by then chairman
of the RNC, Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Junior. Official Republican Party
literature, their propagandist clearly aware of the untidiness of the
Nazi-Croat alliance, note the "unfortunate association" of the Croat
Ustashi with the Nazi Party of Germany.
What the RNC glosses is how the German Nazis were horrified witnessing
the cruelty of the Croat Ustashi. The Ustashi liquidated whole Serbian
villages with no mercy. Ovens at Jasenovac burned Serbs alive.
Clinton took over this foreign policy orientation. Indeed, when a
renegade contingent of naive and freshman Republicans were set to pull
the funding from the Yugoslav military operation several days ago,
Clinton called the GOP leadership into the White House and reminded
them of Washington's commitments in the Balkans. Republicans emerged
from their meeting and quickly shelved the Republican proposal and
turned immediately to voting for and approving air strikes in
Yugoslavia.
With the Serbs having just confronted the heirs of the Ustashi dream
of independence in the recent Balkan civil war, history is not just a
story of the past for Yugoslavia. History is now. And year by year,
day by day, history is dissolving Yugoslavia.
Globalizing Capital
Following World War II, it was the goal of the United States to
achieve global leadership. Through the political and military hegemony
the United States accomplished, capitalist elites transnationalized
the capitalist mode of production. The people of the world now stand
upon the threshold of global society, and this society is a thoroughly
capitalist one.
The backdrop of the struggle is therefore global capitalism and the
fall of the state socialist world-system. The fall of communism opened
up vast regions formerly under control and influence of the Soviet
regime for reorganization into peripheral zones subordinate to the
capitalist world-economic core. Since the break-up of the socialist
world-system, transnational corporations have taken an interest in
Central and Eastern Europe, including even Russia. They have already
injected into the region labor-intensive, low-wage industries.
Regional elites have worked with the globalizers to make the region
attractive to investors, for example, by privatizing industries
formerly owned by the people.
The United States has facilitated capitalist development by supporting
and implementing a neoliberal project throughout the territories
formerly controlled by communist regimes. This has involved the
introduction of World Bank and IMF promoted economic policies
involving domestic reorganization of the entire regional economy.
These policies have caused widespread misery among people who once
enjoyed a relatively high standard of living under socialism. The
region is being set up to become the European equivalent of the
Mexican Maquilladora, with EPZs (Export Processing Zones)
proliferating the countryside of the once multiethnic socialist state.
Once the region is politically stabilized, there is little doubt that
capital will flood the region.
Conclusion
The United States and Europe have been carrying out a program to
create and strengthen zones of influence in Central and Eastern
Europe. It is these efforts, based on economic and political
objectives, that have produced conditions favorable to the rise of
interethnic struggles. These interethnic struggles have been fostered,
and often even instigated, by the West. The long-standing goal of
European powers has meant that a peaceful resolution to the break-up
of Yugoslavia was to be avoided, and, indeed, that differences and
conflicts in that region are to be heightened and focused.
One of the principal strategies for transnationalizing and
institutionalizing global capitalism has been the process of
Americanization, of enculturating the world population with the tenets
of Americanism and institutionalizing the capitalist mode of
production. NATO, a key player in the capitalist war on workers and
peasants in that region, represents Americanism in Europe. For years,
NATO stood on the fault line of the world-historical system, with
capitalism on one side, and communism on the other. The West versus
the East. NATO secured the holding pattern that world capitalism had
to assume while state socialism exhausted itself in perpetual war
readiness and economic isolation.
Any state organizing to stand apart, or appearing to stand apart by
demanding some autonomy, from the global economic order, if that state
represents a strategic asset to the globalizers, is a direct threat to
Americanism, of capitalism in its global phase of development. Threats
to Americanism threaten US interests. The United States has worked
tirelessly to undermine any agreement that pushes the United States
out of the Balkans or diminishes US leadership position in Europe. The
United States has seen to it that conflict in the Balkans and
interethnic atrocities continue. War raising is inherent in the
strategy being pursued.
Since the establishment of American political-military hegemony,
capitalism has globalized and world communism has fallen. Western
Europe remains the conduit through which American hegemony is
channeled. Against this backdrop, the final chapter of Yugoslavia has
all but been written.
Today, we are seeing the final strokes being penned. Yugoslavia, her
history in her present, may soon find herself part of a distance past.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
** End of text from cdp:labr.global **
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For further information and insights, visit the following websites:
http://www.lbbs.org/ZMag/kosovo.htm
http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/tragedy.htm
http://www.transnational.org
http://www.onebm.com/golem/kosovo.html
http://www.workers.org
http://www.truthinmedia.org
http//Listen.To/TheNews
www.mises.org
http://www.worldnetdaily.com
http://www.natvan.com
http://www.flex.com/~jai/topnews.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/
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Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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