Justice and taking sides

[Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky <nestor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

El  9 Oct 99 a las 14:21, Paul Flewers nos dice(n):

>
> The problem with LM's coverage of the Yugoslav war is that
> in its concentrating upon purely responding to the
> anti-Serb bias in the liberal press in Britain, by the
> mid-1990s its coverage at times started to look more like
> a damage-limitation exercise on behalf of the Belgrade
> regime. The odd statement that LM didn't actually side
> with any of the warring parties tended to get obscured by
> the rest of the magazine's coverage.

"Empareja, y largamos".  This is a cry that was given when
someone in the Pampa wanted to run a horse race against
the owner of a better horse. "Empareja"  means "give me a
handicap". Equality, in this case, meant to give a handicap
to the one with the weaker horse.

Not siding with any of the warring parties, IMHO, implied
to do what LM actually did. Please note that I do not even
know how does LM look, and that the acronym makes me think
of Liggett and Myers, or the LM cigarettes, and not of a
magazine in London.

When a big bully is hitting a little boy, one should say
"Ojo que al pibe lo defiendo yo" ("Be careful, I am
defending the kid"), or shut up. This is what I understand
as the position a revolutionary must take. If I were in
Yugoslavia, I would probably side with the ones who are
oppressed by the so blamed Serbian / Milosevic jingoism.
And if I honestly found out that there is none in that
situation, then I would say nothing.

But I live in Argentina, a country that has demonized
Yugoslavia and has helped the Croats killing of Yugoslavs (and
some Argentinians, by the way) by selling them arms and
ammo. And LM, so far as I know, is published in London.
True equanimity, in these cases, is to put weight on the
Yugoslav case.

So that sorry Paul, but you are wrong. LM may be the bag of
dung so many people on this list think it is, I do not know
though I respect most of the people who hate LM. But on
this issue, the journalists of LM seem to have done the
right thing.

Nestor.