Re: Kosovo? -- And in a while let's remember the List's Parameters

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Katha Pollitt wrote:

> Any thoughts about Kosovo? . . . And the place that expresses my
> politics hardly exists: against the bombings, against Milosevic.

Katha,

There are a number of maillists where the NATO aggression can be and is
being discussed and debated in great detail -- lbo in particular, but also
marxism and pen-l. And while I hearitly endorse the proposition that
everything is relevant to everything, there still remains a need for some
domains in which only some things are discussed. LBO, PEN-L, and
Marxism, for example, have not had for some time any discourse on the
particular concerns of women or of the feminist movement -- which is why
such lists as this are potentially of great importance, and why the
moderators
have striven over time to confine the list to topics which are of *direct*
relationship to marxist feminism, and to discourage topics which while of
interest to any marxist (including feminist-marxists), are not of direct
interest
to the emancipation of women.

All that said, I can no longer resist myself a brief response to your
remarks
on Serbia. (I know you said Kosovo -- but I don't consder that a topic which

citizens of the imperial metropolis can have a directly *political* concern
with.)

You write, "...my politics hardly exists: against the bombings, against
Milosevic."
But for an American (or for a Frenchman, a German, an Indian, or a Bolivian)

"against Milosevic" can have no political content; it is merely an
expression of
a private moral conviction, of interest to your mother or your analyst, but
not
to the political realm. It can only mean, practically, to support the
US/Nato
aggression -- which doesn't care one way or another. Only opposition is
political.

Or to summarize it, as General Smedley Butler put it in a speech after he
had retired (paraphrased: I don't have the exact quote to hand): If the U.S.

will keep its money-grubbing. blood stained fingers off the rest of the
world,
they will work out their problems.

>
>   What seems so sad too is that the good work of women in ex-Yugoslavia
> for peace and equality and against violence has gone completely by the
> board. Nobody wants to hear from them!

Many things are sad. Some things are within our potential reach. It is those

I am concerned with. And incidentally, a subscriber to marxism has
regularly been forwarding long posts he receives from one of those women.
Her name is Maja. She feels the whole world is against her and her fellow
Serbians.

May I suggest that everyone get opinions more or less irrelevant to m-fem
off her/his chest in the next couple days, and then drop those threads.

Carrol