[Fwd: Re: current discussions]

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Jones wrote:


I never said anything remotely like the notions mark attributes to me. I
pointed that it is fallacious to argue that Serbian men are too
gender-egalitarian to rape women in wartime, both because they are NOT
particularly gender egalitarian and because people do things in wartime
that cannot be predicted by their peacetime behavior.  In my view, this
line of discussion about the enlightened serbian man is all flimflam --
it's intended to discredit reports of atrocities committed by Serbian
troops and paramilitaries in Bosnia and Kosovo, and to make a favorable
contrast with bosnian Muslims ("Islamists,' as Jared Israel regularly
refers to them, although everybody knows that Bosnian Muslims are not
fundamentalists, or even particularly religious on the whole) and
Albanian men -- portrayed by Mark Jones as slavemasters out to traffick
the "womenfolk" of the "serbs" (ie Serbian men).

  Needless to say -- although I did say it -- it is wrong to tar a whole
people, even the male half of it, with the brush of atrocity.  Think of
all the Serbian men who refuse to fight, for example! They are heroes. I
suppose mark would have them put in jail, along with the women in Black
and other peace activists.

  Kosovo didn't happen overnight. There was more than a decade in which
Serbia denied Albanian Kosovars basic civil rights. There was a lot of
racism against Albanian Yugoslavs all over Yugoslavia-- "our niggers" as
one Macedonian literary man told me. the high birthrate of albanians was
a source of endless attack -- "they" are outbreeding "us."   Serbia
ruled Kosovo with a very heavy hand -- in general the situation of
Albanian Yugoslavs was the sort of thing Leftists are usually all in a
lather about. For ten years Kosovars resisted nonviolently.  It got them
nowhere.
  I don't support the KLA-- which has by no means unanimous support
among albanian Kosovars. I have no idea what the best solution for the
kosovo crisis is. And no one is asking me. Perhaps there is no hope for
either Kosovar Serbs, now being pushed out through violence, or for
Kosovar Albanians, who will live in an "ethnically pure" violent,
poor,thug-run mini-state .  If I were one of those, I would try very
hard to emigrate. But the Serbian govt had a big hand in making the mess
that is now ongoing.  As a Yugo friend said to me, back in l985, "Kosovo
is our Northern Ireland." she was member of the CP, btw, and married to
a bosnian Muslim. A lovely man, and not an "islamist."

Katha

> Katha's politics, insofar as they are intelligible, seem to be based on her
> assumption that the solution to the problem of male violence in world
> capitalist society lies in some way in Serbia, with Serbian men.