This posting is intended to be sent to the Marxism mailing list.as
well as to the L-I and Crash lists Please, Lou Pr, resend it.
Dear comrades,
I am leaving Buenos Aires tomorrow, and I have already unsubbed of
the Marxism list for a while. As a final goodbye, I gave a reading to
the list's archives and, to my amazement, I see that we have a
wonderful piece of racist rant here, emitted by a hitherto unknown
list member (being a lurker is no sin, but first impression must be
carefully prepared ALWAYS) on the noble Serbian people. Yes, I wrote
the NOBLE Serbian people, and I want proof that they are not.
In fact, I intended to write a good humored "see you later", but I
simply can't. There is something particularly sinister in that mail,
something that brings to my mind the worst collections of the history
of imperialism and racism in South America, something I can simply
not let pass through unchallenged. I know that, since I am unsubbed,
I will not be able to reply to the answers that this piece will most
probably receive. A pity. But this is a matter of revolutionary
morality, not less than that. And I have always been true to this
kind of things.
That piece attacks the Serbs, as if they were Blacks in the deep
South and the sender a new Ku Klux Klan member. The Serbs! Yes,
those perverted Serbs who are the only Balkan people who _massively_
took care of the Jews during the Nazi invasion, the only Balkan
people who never surrendered to Germany, the only Balkan people who
still dreams with a unified Yugoslavia, the only Balkan people who
managed to step back from privatization programmes, the Balkan people
that has suffered in silence the most repugnant programme of
intervention in internal affairs, the Balkan people that is still
receiving hundreds of thousands of displaced people from all over
former Yugoslavia without asking for the nationality, the only Balkan
people that has been able to confront succesfully an attempt at
invasion. Yes, those are the Serbs.
I find the attitude displayed on that mail as something absolutely
incompatible not with being a Marxist, which can be understood, but
with being a honest and decent person. This mail is a stab not only
against the Serbs, it is a stab directly placed in the middle of the
chest of every oppressed people on planet Earth.
And with a bleeding heart I will add that this attitude is produced
by what cannot be understood but as a concocted and organized
campaign that has coopted even heroes of my youth such as the (up to
now) great Noam Chomsky. I think that Jared Israel has made us a
great service in disclosing this unbelievable attitude of our former
(at least my former) intellectual and moral hero. I have a book by
Chomsky lurking somewhere in my messy library, the book that opened
up my eyes on the drama of Viet Nam. This book is called _At war with
Asia_, and on this book Chomsky explained that the differences
between the "doves" and "hawks" in relation to Viet Nam were
bullshit. He said that both "doves" and "hawks" were in agreement as
to the essential morality and justification of the criminal American
intervention in Viet Nam.
The Chomsky of 1970 proclaimed to the world that this was a perverted
position, because what really mattered, the only thing that really
mattered in fact, was that the United States of America, the most
powerful and terrible monster that human history had constructed, was
waging an unjust colonial war against a people that was struggling
for national unity and revolution. He stood up there against those
who considered the war "just" on the American side, that is those who
were eager to accept the slanderous campaign against the Vietnamese
(exactly in the same way rightists in Argentina say, when speaking of
the "disappeared" that "something evil they must have done"), and
whose only worry was how many American GIs would die (who cares about
the millions dead among the enemies of American imperialism, ever?).
He shouted at them that the duty of a revolutionary was to oppose the
war, oppose intervention, and support with all her or his powers the
Viet Namese people, not because the Viet Namese had done anything
wrong (which he was bold enough to demonstrate a fabrication, BTW),
but because intervention in foreign affairs is unacceptable for a
revolutionary in a First World country.
Today, Chomsky acts like his enemies of yore. He shares in the
demonization campaign against the Serbs, a campaign that says that is
demonizing only Milosevic and his party. Thus, he pays a good service
to the imperialist bourgeoisie he (or let us say it THE OTHER
CHOMSKY) once fought against.
Comradas and friends, the current situation in Yugoslavia is
extremely serious. Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav government, are
subject to a campaign of slander and delusion that proclaims enormous
amounts of lies as if they were uncontested truth (and
_uncontestable_ truth). This campaign is fueled within Yugoslavia
proper, by coopting and corrupting elements of the progressive
groups, and putting them to work -wittingly or unwittingly- against
their best interests. The imperialists could not break down
Yugoslavia by military means. Now they're lavishly funding a movement
within the country that, under cloak of "opposition against
Milosevic" will bring on the Yugoslavs the worst consequences.
This story is a very well known one here in South America. The
Paraguay war of the late 1860s, which laid Paraguay bare of males
older than 14, was also waged in the name of the "destruction of the
repugnant criminal Francisco Solano López". The final consequences of
that war were that Paraguay, a country whose spinal chord was an
independent and fierce peasantry (just like Yugoslavia), the most
advanced country in South America, the only one that had no
latifundia, no foreign debt, no slavery, and had built the first
blast furnace and was operating the first railroad in South America,
that country (or what remained of it) saw the land given to foreign
and local great landowners, the first foreign debt contracted, and
the beginning of an ordeal that lasts to this day bring them into
"civilization".
In my own country, the political climate in the 1950s was identical
to that of Yugoslavia today. The petty bourgeoisie, the
"intelligentsia", were all convinced that we had a blood stained
tyrant in power; foreign funds and funds provided by the local
oligarchy freely flowed to support everyone who would have a saying
against Perón; the Argentinian working class, the militant working
class that had supported the Bonapartist regime which had turned
Argentinian capitalism upside down and attempted the adventure of
becoming an independent, just, free and sovereign nation, was
demonized as a bunch of Fascist lumpenproletarians. Most "Leftists"
were at the vanguard of this reactionary campaign. The Communist
Party boomed against Fascists, most of the Trotskyist sects accused
Perón of being either a British or an American agent, the Socialists
spoke of graft and state terror...
A vast array of complicities and perverted links was established
between the managers of the whole plan and the mostly unwitting -but
many on the payroll- middle class intellectuals. Some were awarded
interesting prizes after Perón was overthrown. Some were given posts
as translators in the United Nations (Cortázar), others were turned
into icons of scientific endeavour (Houssay), still others were put
at the head of the new Universities.
My people, my folkspeople, began by the same stroke a road towards
disaster that has brought Argentina to the brink of dissolution.
As a brother in my soul and in my beliefs of the Yugoslav people, I
here want to clearly state that the continuous repetition of the
motto "the Serbians are criminals, Milosevic is a criminal" serves
the imperialists in the best of ways. I, for one, won't remain silent
while self-appointed Marxists share in this orgy of lies and slander.
I am sick at what I see. I am sick and honestly would not have
imagined such a thing to happen on our lists. I hereby give my full
support to the heroic and embattled Serbian working class, because
they seriously risk to be defeated by the manoeuver of isolation that
Mr. Soros is funding and the CIA must certainly be backing. When,
forty years in the future, the files of this agency of evil are
declassified, we shall see the dark, thick, mucky and miserable chain
of complicities, cross-interests, and funds that has been flowing
into Yugoslavia to wage a final, electoral battle against the Serbian
people. Where shall we say that we stood on that moment? I prefer to
be as proud tomorrow as convinced I am today.
My party has been awarded, by the mass of anti-Peronist Leftists, the
badge of "Red whores of Perón" in the 50s. I thought that
civilization had finally prevailed. This kind of stupid optimism is,
I reckon now, unworthy of a revolutionary. Civilization will prevail
when we, the "red whores of the besieged rulers of the Third World",
come to power. Not before. I give my most wholehearted support to the
Yugoslav working class that supports the JUL, even though I am not a
partisan of the JUL. I know where my duty is.
It is against those who, from the "Left", apply to the Serbs the Jim
Crow law, in words at least.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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