Re: M-TH: paragraph on Balkans
In response to Rob, my expaination would be that with the collapse of the socialist bloc, and the catastophic effects of capitalism on Russia, Imperialism (in the dual guise NATO the EU) is attempting to pick off all of Russia's neighbours before it has chance to recover. Yugoslavia was the only bulwalk to this advance eastwards (completing the West's 1939-45 war aims). Like in the old Austro- Hungary, they aim to cut it up redistribute it to border states and so isolate and weaken Russia. A Marxist response is far than obvious to me. Other than all out support for Y.C.P., as some argue (we can't support the KLA), there is no real group to support (like Kashmir) and we are left merely hurling abuse at NATO. All fair comment, John. Of course, the west is paying a big price for all this. You can destroy economies, oppose neighbours to each other, manipulate leaderships, discipline labour, and control economic policies, but you can't make people like you. I still think buying them off would have been a better idea (and a lot cheaper) for the imperialists than blowing them away. Another few decades of the sort of shit that characterised 20th century Europe has been irrevocably installed, I'm afraid. As for a rhetorical response, I'd hesitate before articulating all-out support for anybody in this mess - separating the internecine issue from the NATO issue is something worth doing. We have to avoid being seen to side with infamy at any price (unless we have just cause to believe the infamy is tendentiously constructed - but Srebrenica cured me of that illusion in this particular regard, regardless of what has actually transpired in Kosovo itself) - we've enough unhelpful associations (whether with the actual or the discursively framed) going against us already. Support the oppressed everywhere, but never at the price of buying into arguments which presume social cleavages we reject. If white kills black, man kills woman, or Slav kills Albanian, the idea is not to pick sides in fights fought on untenable premises (eg all blacks/women/Albanians against all whites/men/Slavs). 'Tis the fight itself, and the pre-modern idealist prejudices that inform or legitimate it, that must be fought. As racism/sexism/ethnicism/nationalism are the enemy of us all, so is it the generalised exchange relation that oppresses us all. Mebbe the bringing together of theory and praxis (the raison d'etre of this list) is muchly to do with critiquing the former categories in light of the latter. Meanwhile, I'm happy to hurl abuse at the hypocritical murdering bastards at NATO. They are the provisional wing of the exchange relation, for mine. Cheers, Rob. --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: paragraph on Balkans
It seems that the debate on the war on MTh has stalled without many recognising the truth of the Trotskyist position argued early on in the war. The elementary truth of imperialist oppression and the Anti-imperialist united front necessary to defeat it seems to have got lost in the thaxis. Rob's position has the air of not wanting to take sides for fear of being sucked into pre-modernist extremes. George argues for duel defeatism. But these are positions which allow NATO to get away with murder. We are already sucked into barbarism by rotten reactionary imperialism which cannot make everyone modern. Only socialism can do that. Therefore we have to take a side in every question by assessing the gains for the working class so that it can advance to socialism. On Yugoslavia the Trotskyist position is clear - unconditional defence of Yugoslavia against NATO. Yugoslavia is oppressed by imperialism - the main enemy. A defeat for Yugoslavia will be a defeat for workers everywhere, including Kosovo. A victory for Yugoslavia will only be possible if Yugoslav workers and soldiers combine with the workers in the NATO countries and their lackeys like Australia and NZ, and force NATO out. Militant international workers action against NATO is the only course. Only that will create the conditions for socialism and the end to the horrors Rob wants to avoid. Defending Yugoslavia does not mean capitulating to nationalism. On the contrary, imperialism keeps nationalism alive as a means of divide and rule. The national question is the class question. The Balkanisation of Yugoslavia is NATO's testing ground for the Balkanisastion of the whole of Asia. By defending Yugoslavia workers in the NATO countries have to renounce their own nationalism because they are similtaneously calling for the defeat of their "own" countries. Hence workers in oppressor countries must overcome their nationalism to defend Yugoslavia. Workers in oppressed countries (like the Serbs and Kosovars) have the right to defend themselves. That's why we call for the right of self-defence and multi-ethnic militias which includes Serbs and ethnic Albanians. When NATO and imperialism are defeated or out of the Balkans, we can call for the implementation of self-determination for Kosovo. It may be that the result will be a Kosovar Socialist Republic in a Balkan Federation which will include Serbia, Croatia and Albania. (On this question, a recent Los Angeles Times article reports that 1,000s of military age Kosovar men are free in northern Kosovo without any sign of oppression. If that is the case in the middle of a NATO war, that is a sign of hope that Serbs and ethnic Albanians can settle the Kosovo question by getting together to get rid of their respective bourgeois misleaders). Defending Yugoslavia does not mean agreeing with Milosovic. On the contrary, Milosovic cannot and will not defend Yugoslavia because he has a class interest in profiteering from its oppression by imperialism. He is about to do a deal with NATO and is looking for a face-saving formula. However, while Milosovic is leading the army and defending Yugoslavia a military bloc with him is necessary. The lessons of the Anti-Imperialist United Front beginning with the case of China in the 1920's are vital here. In any military bloc with Milosovic, the workers must maintain their armed independence. Thus, in the Yugoslav army the rank-and-file have to organise to take control of the army; to encourage the formation of multi-ethnic militia; to act against any reactionary paramilitaries engaged in ethnic cleansing; and to call for a truce if and when it is necessary for the workers movement to survive. Communists lead this movement by forming cells in the army and in militias and workers councils. Dave Bedggood In response to Rob, my expaination would be that with the collapse of the socialist bloc, and the catastophic effects of capitalism on Russia, Imperialism (in the dual guise NATO the EU) is attempting to pick off all of Russia's neighbours before it has chance to recover. Yugoslavia was the only bulwalk to this advance eastwards (completing the West's 1939-45 war aims). Like in the old Austro- Hungary, they aim to cut it up redistribute it to border states and so isolate and weaken Russia. A Marxist response is far than obvious to me. Other than all out support for Y.C.P., as some argue (we can't support the KLA), there is no real group to support (like Kashmir) and we are left merely hurling abuse at NATO. All fair comment, John. Of course, the west is paying a big price for all this. You can destroy economies, oppose neighbours to each other, manipulate leaderships, discipline labour, and control economic policies, but you can't make people like you. I still think buying them off would have been a better idea (and a lot cheaper) for the imperialists than blowing them away. Another few decades of the sort of
Re: M-TH: Imperialism and Serbia
The Independent (London), May 13, 1999 'An Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe should be wound up' Robert Fisk How much longer do we have to endure the folly of Nato's war in the Balkans? In just 50 days, the Atlantic alliance has failed in everything it set out to do. It has failed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian war crimes. It has failed to cow Slobodan Milosevic. It has failed to force the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. It has broken international law in attacking a sovereign state without seeking a UN mandate. It has killed hundreds of innocent Serb civilians - in our name, of course - while being too cowardly to risk a single Nato life in defence of the poor and the weak for whom it meretriciously claimed to be fighting. Nato's war cannot even be regarded as a mistake - it is a criminal act. It is, of course, now part of the mantra of all criticism of Nato that we must mention Serb wickedness in Kosovo. So here we go. Yes, dreadful, wicked deeds - atrocities would not be a strong enough word for it - have gone on in Kosovo: mass executions, rape, dispossession, "ethnic cleansing", the murder of intellectuals. Some of Nato's propaganda programme has done more to cover up such villainy than disclose it. And, as we all know, the dozens of Kosovo Albanians massacred on the road to Prizren were slaughtered by Nato - not by the Serbs as Nato originally claimed. But I have seen with my own eyes - travelling under the Nato bombardment - the house-burning in Kosovo and the hundreds of Albanians awaiting dispossession in their villages. But back to the subject - and perhaps my first question should be put a little more boldly. Not: "How much longer do we have to endure this stupid, hopeless, cowardly war?" but: "How much longer do we have to endure Nato? How soon can this vicious American-run organisation be deconstructed and politically 'degraded', its pontificating generals put back in their boxes with their mortuary language of 'in-theatre assets' and 'collateral damage'"? And how soon will our own compassionate, socialist liberal leaders realise that they are not fighting a replay of the Second World War nor striking a blow for a new value-rich millennium? In Middle East wars, I've always known when a side was losing - it came when its leaders started to complain that journalists were not being fair to their titanic struggle for freedom/ democracy/human rights/sovereignty/soul. And on Monday, Tony Blair started the whining. After 50 days of television coverage soaked in Nato propaganda, after weeks of Nato officials being questioned by sheep-like journalists, our Prime Minister announces the press is ignoring the plight of the Kosovo Albanians. The fact that this is a lie is not important. It is the nature of the lie. Anyone, it seems, who doesn't subscribe to Europe's denunciations of Fascism or who raises an eyebrow when - in an act of utter folly - the Prime Minister makes unguaranteed promises that the Kosovo Albanians will all go home, is now off-side, biased - or worthy of one of Downing Street's preposterous "health warnings" because they allegedly spend more time weeping for dead Serbs than the numerically greater number of dead Albanians (the assumption also being, of course, that it is less physically painful to be torn apart by a Nato cluster bomb than by a Serb rocket-propelled grenade). President Clinton - who will in due course pull the rug from under Mr Blair - tells the Kosovo Albanians that they have the "right to return." Not the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, of course. They do not have such a right. Nor the Kurds dispossessed by our Nato ally, Turkey. Nor the Armenians driven from their land by the Turks in the world's first holocaust (there being only one holocaust which Messers Clinton and Blair are interested in invoking just now). Mr Blair's childish response to this argument is important. Just because wrongs have been done in the past doesn't mean we have to stand idly by now. But the terrible corollary of this dangerous argument is this: that the Palestinians, the Armenians, the Rwandans or anyone else cannot expect our compassion. They are "the past." They are finished. But what is all this nonsense about Nato standing for democracy? It happily allowed Greece to remain a member when its ruthless colonels staged a coup d'etat which imprisoned and murdered intellectuals. Nato had no objection to the oppression of Salazar and Caetano - who were at the same time busy annihilating "liberation" movements almost identical to the Kosovo Liberation Army. Indeed, the only time when Nato proposed to suspend Portugal's membership - I was there at the time and remember this vividly - was when the country staged a revolution and declared itself a democracy. Is it therefore so surprising that Nato now turns out to be so brutal? It attacks television stations and kills Serb journalists - part of Milosevic's propaganda machine, a
