Re: [Marxism] re: Milosevic '89 speech, etc.

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

John M Cox wrote:
> my reply: really, Lou, that's unworthy of you; I wrote that I agree with
> 'almost all' of what Michael Karadjis had posted to this listserv, and you
> reply with an excerpt from an article written by SOMEONE ELSE in the Green
> Left Review. (and for the record, i don't agree with this article's
> analysis of Tudjman.)

John, Ernest Mandel said that the DSP was adapting to Croatian
nationalism. That is the most striking feature of Karadjis's last post
here. It was cut from the same cloth as the GLW article I cited. It
appears that this adaptation is of a long-standing character. If you do
a search on "Croatia" in the GLW archives, you find all sorts of really
off-kilter articles that are written in the same spirit as Karadjis's.
For example, a 1991 article titled "Behind the war against Croatia"
quotes a leader of the Croatian Coordinating Committee totally
uncritically. She says:

"Milosevic, Kadijevic and Raseta argue that the invasion of Croatia --
the destruction of cities, towns and villages and the brutal attacks on
the civilian population -- is for the protection of the Serbian minority
in Croatia. This ignores the reality of the Croatian constitution, the
charter on human rights and the charter on the rights of Serbs and other
ethnic minorities in Croatia. This argument is only a screen to hide the
real agenda of Milosevic and the Serbian generals.

"The war against Croatia is a war by the oppressor against the
oppressed. It is an attempt to crush the desire of the Croatian people
for self-determination and to provide all the other republics and
minorities in the former Yugoslavia with an example of what to expect
should they rise up against the regime in Belgrade."

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1991/39/39p28.htm

To print this kind of garbage without even the slightest attempt at a
balancing perspective amounts to apologetics.

> This has been a feature of the periodic debates on
> yugoslavia on the listserv, and of the replies to Michael's contributions:
> taking one or two things, sometimes out of context, rather than dealing
> with many of the more substantive arguments.

The main issue is the class character of Yugoslavia as far as I am
concerned. So far I have yet to see a substantive defense of the
proposition that Yugoslavia was capitalist. Everything I have written
about Yugoslavia is influenced by my reading of Leon Trotsky's "In
Defense of Marxism". If others feel more akin to Branka Magas and
Quentin Hoare, that's their problem.

--

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