"THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT..."
by John Lacny
Upon the recent capture of three American soldiers, Bill Clinton
warned Serbia that "the United States takes care of its own." The men who
had just managed to get themselves into this unenviable predicament no
doubt took small comfort in the statement, coming as it did from the man
who signed welfare repeal.
Clinton's grandstanding did not take first prize for the day,
however. That went to Jean Kirkpatrick, who called Serbia's behavior in
Kosovo "the most clear-cut case of genocide since Pol Pot and the Killing
Fields." In doing so, she conveniently overlooked the Central America
policies of her own Reagan Administration, which resulted in tens of
thousands more deaths than Serbia's Kosovo repression has produced or
likely ever will produce.
She also overlooked roughly half a dozen regional wars and other
disputes which are in progress right now, which are every bit as bloody as
the Kosovo conflict (if not more so), and in which one side or the other
is an ally of the United States.
In Colombia, for example, the government has carried out the most
brutal counterinsurgency war in the Western Hemisphere, resulting in tens
of thousands of dead and hundreds of political opponents of the regime
systematically assassinated. For its efforts, the Colombian military
receives the most US military aid of any country in the hemisphere, all of
it cloaked in the lies of the "War on Drugs."
In Turkey-- an enthusiastic member of the NATO alliance which is
supposedly acting to stop Serb atrocities-- the military is waging war
against an ethnic group (the Kurds) which is seeking autonomy. The death
toll there has been roughly 40,000, with the number of displaced reaching
into the millions.
In both Colombia and Turkey, the government labels the insurgents
"terrorists" in precisely the same fashion as the Serbian regime denounces
the KLA.
There are other examples, but the conclusion should already be
obvious to anyone who retains even minimal capacity for critical thought:
for our rulers and media glibly to throw around a word like "genocide"
is-- to say the least-- an act of supreme hypocrisy. Moreover, it strips
the term of its properly terrifying connotation, encouraging the morally
repugnant tendency to draw easy parallels between the behavior of any
repressive regime on the one hand and the special horrors of the Holocaust
and fascism on the other.
In this case, the word is being used for the narrow political
purpose of convincing the populace of NATO countries that "we [sic] must
do something." This is simply not true. As Noam Chomsky recently pointed
out, a better course would be to follow the Hippocratic oath, which
states: "First, do no harm." Despite the protestations of NATO heavies to
the contrary, there can be no doubt that the bombing campaign has had the
effect of escalating Serb atrocities, and predictably so. Doing nothing
would at least not have made things worse.
And all of this is quite apart from the death and destruction
which is caused directly by NATO bombs falling on cities and towns such as
Pristina, Novi Sad and Belgrade.
The real reasons behind this latest campaign are not difficult to
discern: the Clinton Administration's insistence just before the first
bombing wave that NATO had to "maintain credibility" tells the whole
story. NATO is the military vehicle the United States uses for asserting
its hegemony in Europe, and the alliance wants to set a precedent for its
own use of violence with minimal UN sanction.
It is an unpleasant spectacle to see Boris Yeltsin-- the Chechen
blood on his hands only recently dry-- denouncing NATO's actions, but this
is merely proof that geopolitical hypocrisy is a universal vice. And in
any case, Russia is not unjustified in being apprehensive about a hostile
military alliance creeping ever closer to its borders and throwing itself
into a war against a Russian ally.
It is not farfetched to predict the hardening of antagonistic
military blocs and a possible re-ignition of the arms race. In this
atmosphere, the task of people of conscience worldwide will be not unlike
that of their counterparts in the years leading up to 1914: steadfast
opposition to chauvinism, xenophobia, and militarism of all kinds.
John Lacny holds dear the legacy of Prisoner 9653.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
