Re: Hot Pursuit

["Owen Jones" <owen.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Macdonald said:

> There was an "independant leftist against Nato" (see Jay Moore),
> Maja (see Owen Jones, Nestor (I'm not going to do the disservice of trying
> to spell this by memory))and Djorde (see JM again) among a few others. Their
> complaints were that Milosevic was an opportunist, to wrap it up in a word.
> No one ranted hatred of Albanian Kosovars here, just Nato and the fascist
> KLA.

 Just a few comments. Their criticisms of Milosevic were not, I'm afraid,
restricted to him being an opportunist - at least that is not what Maja
thinks. Maja calls him 'Gentlefuck' these days: to explain, apparently Milo
translates as Gentle, and Sevic is slang for 'fuck'. She doesn't call that
bastard such abuse for nothing.

 Let's think a little about the Serb regime. Serbia is a country where the
richest man is the Minister for Privatisation. Milosevic and his political
partner/wife are quite good at getting rid of dissent - since the more
threatening dissent comes from the Left, they have in fact hijacked that
position themselves (the 'Yugoslav Left Party' and the 'Socialist Party' -
pseudo-leftists, at best). That is why the dissent in Serbia comes from the
Right - from reactionaries like Vuk Draskovic of the Serb Renewal Movement.

 With a population of around 10 million, Serbia also has a police force of
100,000 (that is 1% of the population - and would make a modest army
relatively speaking). These are in fact trained supporters of the Milosevic
regime; at the same time as building this lot up, Milosevic crushed the
Yugoslav Army out of a deep fear arising from his regime's insecurity that
they might try to overthrow him. Maja has had many encounters with the
police, most of the time involving batons.

 Milo was once the stooge of Western imperialism, indeed, one of the
features of his petty-bourgeois opportunism. His regime sold such industries
as the phone company to the Italian bourgeoisie (want to know why they were
'moderate' in their approval of the bombardment of Yugoslavia?) It has
scrapped all of the remaining working class democracy there was under Tito's
Stalinism, helped rather than hindered Western imperialism's project of
dismembering Yugoslavia, based itself on ignorant petty-bourgeois
nationalism, privatised half of the economy and is now embarking on more
'market reforms' (Maja thinks he could very easily soon be getting in to bed
with American companies again), got involved in wars such as those in
Croatia and Bosnia with disastrous consequences... The list goes on. He has
been a disaster to the Yugoslav proletariat, and was the champion of the
Yugoslav reversion to capitalism.

 Yet some on the Left still adore that thieving regime, on the grounds that
it is the best out of two evils.

 Cheers,

        Owen