Buchanan and Chomsky have similar positions on Kosovo

[Borba100@xxxxxxxxxxx]

In a recent post, Owen Jones seemed to suggest I (Jared) am a Buchananite.
This is not true.

During the first half of the Yugoslav wars of secession, Pat Buchanan said
that Croatian secession was justified by the jingoism of the Serbian
monsters, that the Serbs had viciously oppressed the Croats and Slovenians
and forced them to secede, and that the Serbs should be bombed to the stone
age.

Now his position seems to have altered. At his recent nominating convention
he said that the attack on Yugoslavia was vicious, that the justification was
manufactured, BUT that Milosevich is a thug and a war criminal   That gives
him a stance quite similar to (perhaps slightly better than) that of Chomsky,
concerning the attack on Yugoslavia.  Buchanan has also criticized his past
support for invading Panama. On "humantarian intervention" in general,
Chomsky is weaker than Buchanan.

The difference between Buchanan and Chomsky ON YUGOSLAVIA is that  Buchanan's
position has evolved whereas Chomsky has consistently put forward what the
mass media puts forward, but with an anti-NATO twist

The importance of Buchanan, of course, is that his willingness to depart from
his earlier extreme Serbophobia (i.e., his blaming the secession of Croatia
on Serbian nationalism) his willingness to stop harping on this and attack
the bombing and expulsions from Kosovo by the KLA/NATO indicates that many
people in his huge base of support are disturbed by the the Kosovo war.

The key problem in the US is to build an antiwar movement that actively
includes Black and white working people.  Buchanan, with his large white
working class base,  might be able to help do this if he came out and
apologized for his racist attacks on Black people and called for Black white
unity.  It would also be nice if he stopped Jew-baiting. (Perhaps he has made
some movement on these critical issues of racism, but I am unaware of it.)

owen says << Actually the fascist on a US payroll that I am
 has actually read several books on the subject,  >>

Please, no more silly straw men. I did not say Owen is a fascist or on the US
payroll - I don't know Owen from Adam and I have no reason to think ill of
him on a personal level.  I was making a serious (not ad hominem) point: that
IN YUGOSLAVIA (i.e., among people who are truly familiar with the situation)
as opposed to IN BRITAIN (where Owen is) the only people who say the Serbs
oppressed the Croats under Tito are a) fascists  (or, I should have said,
people under the influence of fascists) or b) people working for the immense
US propaganda apparatus to provide statements "from Yugoslavs" , statements
intended for Western consumption.  I therefore attributed Owen's repeating
this frankly absurd statement about Serbs oppressing Croats  (which by the
way happens to be the same line that Buchanan took on Croatia) to Owen's
ignorance.

Owen says he has read <<"Kosovo: How Myths and Lies Started a War" by an
American professor who opposed the war, though for her own liberal-pacifist
reasons.>>

Is he arguing that I would oppose this book because the author is a
liberal-pacafist?  The Vietnam antiwar movement, in which I was active,
included  liberal-pacifists and conservative pacifists, whites with racist
ideas, whites who hated racism, Black people of all political philosophies,
vegetarians, people worried about fluoridation, dentists and so on.  Mass
movements get to be mass by having some diversity; they grow fastest if
limited only by common purpose.  Doesn't that make sense?

The question is, what is the common purpose?  In the Vietnam war it was "US
Out of Vietnam". Those who blamed the Vietnamese for war crimes never got
anywhere because TV coverage kept showing the US burning down villages. The
US elite has corrected that, so now we have a big problem.  Some who are
'antiwar' are also 'anti-the-victims-of-thewar.'

Our antiwar movement will never grow unless organizers go to the people and
expose the lies told about the Serbs because the key to NATO's ability to
attack Yugoslavia is Serb-baiting.  It's as simple as that. The key to the
Vietnam war was anti-communism - but now the key is racism against Serbs.

Why can't a liberal pacifist hate and expose racist lies as well as anyone
else?

Jared