Re: [Marxism] on US media and Kosova in the 1980s

["Michael Karadjis" <mkaradjis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I said, you'll get your answers bit by bit, I haven't ignored anything.





Louis Proyect wrote:

> Actually I referred as well to Miranda Vickers's "Between Serb and

> Albanian". She is a well-known defender of the Albanian secessionists. She

> also wrote:

>

> "'The position of a woman is that of a human being deprived of fundamental

> rights. Women were still kept secluded at home when they did not work in

> the fields, they received minimal education, and were totally subordinate

> to male authority. The emancipation of women is the first and foremost
task

> for the Kosovars as a people in order to achieve full emancipation. A

> community denying half of its members access to a full education can never

> be a civilised community.'

>

> "Gradually women participated more in public life. Only ten years earlier

> they hardly ever left home. All the same, women still had servile domestic

> tasks. Hartmut Albert, a guest in an Albanian home in Pec in 1979,
reported

> as follows:

>

> "'During our meal, between the tales, the patriarchal order in the

> household was evident once again. Only the men (including the 14-year-old

> son) gathered around the sofra (low table). Our host's wife approached
only

> to serve our food and clear the table. Then she waited silently at the
door

> with water and a hand towel until we wanted to wash our hands.'"



Thank you for informing me that Kosovars live in a patriarchal society.



However, given the discussion is about the issue of Serbia's colony in
Kosova

and the resistance of the Kosovars to this, I am not sure the meaning of you

sending 3 paragraphs of Islamophobia, which I could read in any number of
orientalist

descriptions of any number of Islamic, and for that matter, other 3rd world,
societies.

Does it mean that these oppressed Kosovar women needed their Serb overlords
there to

"liberate" them from such backwardness with their enlightened ideas? Like
Afghan women

needed the US to "liberate" them? Funny how Kosovar women seem rather
unappreciative of

the attempts by ultra-right Serb paramilitaries to liberate them. Such an
ungrateful lot.



> I see. NY Times reporters wrote about brutality toward Serbs in Kosovo

> because of these foreign policy alliances. And what is the explanation for

> the current brutality, like the murder of Serbs in Kosovo that has
prompted

> even the UN to demand the resignation of Albanian cops? GATT? Conflicts

> over the dollar and the euro? The declining rate of profit?



It doesn't occur to you that there is a difference between a time when the
Serb-Yugoslav

state exercised power over the Albanians and when the Albanians themselves
exercise this

power. If some Serbs were reportedly killed then during Albanian national
resistance (that

of course never happens in any other national liberation struggle, Palestine
for example?)

and if chauvinistic forces are attacking Serbs now, what that proves is that
Albanians are

just always like that, a violent, xenophobic type of people, right? That
then is the explanation

for the fact that they spent most of the century trying to throw off their
Serb rulers - not because it is natural to resist oppression, like
elsewhere, but because these naturally violent people simply didn't
appreciate the good things that nice serb socialists wanted to bring them,
like women's rights.



This I know is a caricature of your view, simply my reading of its logic.
Yet unfortunately this is the actual analysis of not only a reactionary scum
like Jared Israel, but also unfortunately, in a more sanitised way, of Diana
Johnstone (its all about their 'tribal structures' and other such pieces of
fantastic orientalism). Jared Israel, in being a rabid Zionist Likudnik and
Islamophobe, is more consistent than other apologists for Serb-nationalist
Islamophobia.



On the situation of the Kosovar Serbs now, I'll leave that to a post of its
own.



> Let's understand something. Imperialism has absolutely no interest in the

> plight of Kosovars, Kurds, Miskitos or any other peoples it finds

> convenient at one point or another to speak on behalf or arm. Their cause

> has to be evaluated on their own merits rather than on the basis of what

> Eagleburger or Kissinger say for Metternichian purposes.



Yes I completely agree. The cause of the Kosovars, their right to resist
oppression and set up their own state, has its own merits independent of
what Clinton, Albright and others say or do for 'Metternichian', 'Wilsonian'
or other purposes. Glad you agree, but I thought you didn't.



I wrote:

> >Throughout that time, the US continued its polices of arming the

> >repressive state. In the 1980s, the US sold Yugoslavia $193 million worth

> >of air-to-surface missiles and air defence radar systems. After Milosevic

> >came to power in 1987, US support continued, with $96 million in arms and

> >training supplied, including fighter aircraft, tanks and artillery. All

> >this US-supplied weaponry was used against hundreds of thousands of

> >Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars in the 1990s, subjected as they were to the

> >imperialist arms embargo. Likewise, officers of the Yugoslav Peoples Army

> >were trained by the US until 1992.



and you replied:

> The repressive state? I guess that its class nature is a matter of

> indifference to you.



Does the fact that all those imperialist arms were going to the Yugoslav

'workers state' mean the class nature of the state was of indifference to

Washington? Probably not. But they figured that in the hybrid type of

State that late 'market socialism' had become, there were class forces

Arising within the state apparatus and elsewhere in the economy that

Were more to their liking. Preening Milosevic was part of this same

process. Which other workers' states did they arm?



> Fixated on the late 1980s, aren't we?



Not particularly, that was just the discussion that I poked in on. I see
establishing what happened in the 1980's, particularly 1988-89, as crucial
for analysing the 1990's, such as understanding that the years of sending
Serb workers to kill their fellow workers in neighbouring countries was
about the politics of a crony-capitalist land-grab, not some clever way of
"defending socialism".



I wrote:

> >the bourgeois Serbian nationalist movement launched by the chauvinistic
intelligentsia with their 'memorandum' in 1986



You replied:

>

> Another reference to chauvinism. I think that Milosevic's "infamous"
speech

> would have put a cork in these kinds of allegations by now. For a speech

> that was reputed to be tantamount to something Hitler delivered at

> Nuremburg, it sounds much more like an appeal for equality between

> nationalities to the impartial observer.



My reference was clearly to the memorandum of 1986, not Milosevic's speech
of 1989. In the latter, he comes out abundantly clearly as the spokesperson
for bourgeois serbian nationalism. Certainly, he does not engage in open
hate speech. He was far smarter than that, leaving it to his supporters and
clones around the country's intelligentsia. It sounds like an appeal to
equality between nationalities to you, because somehow you miss the context
of a leader making a speech in his colony, a few months after he has
massacred and sacked striking miners and suppressed the Yugoslav
constitution there, about the glories of his nation's history of resistance
to ottomans etc and then saying that this glorious nation is under threat
again? From whom? Was he talking about the IMF? The WB? The US? The EC? Not
the Albanian natives by any chance. Nuremburg? Let's not talk silly.



> Seized power? I love the purple language. It is like reading Christopher

> Hitchens. When Milosevic lost the elections a couple of years ago, he was

> willing to abide by the results. That did not prevent the
imperialist-backed gangs from sacking the parliament. Some dictator.



Well I suppose I put the word 'seized' to describe things like immediately
getting his main communist rival, who opposed national chauvinism, expelled
from the party, a purge which then continued around the country.



On 2000, I guess the working class Serb masses were not as assured as you
are that he would go. Very convenient to reduce them all to 'gangs'. We hear
that used as a description of working class youth in western sydney all the
time.



Dictator? Who said any such nonsense. It is just as silly to call Milosevic
a dictator as it is to call Sharon or Bush a dictator. Oppressor nations
often offer reasonably wide-spread bourgeois democracy for their own people
(Serbs, Israelis, Americans) while acting with unrestrained brutality in
their colonies (Kosova, Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq)



>I am far more interested, however, in the view of the Washington Post and
the CIA than Marxists intoxicated on their own theories.



The question of who is intoxicated with their own theories on the Yugoslav
question is of course highly subjective. No-one would ever suggest you were
guilty of such a thing.



Michael Karadjis





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