[Marxism] What does it take to stop a war?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/buhle260707.html
What Does It Take to Stop a War?
by Paul Buhle

     Harvey Pekar and Heather Robertson, Macedonia: What Does It Take to 
Stop a War? Illustration by Ed Piskor (New York: Villard Books, 2007), 
121pp, $17.95, pbk.

Readers who haven't watched the award-winning 2003 film American 
Splendor may still recall a younger Harvey Pekar on the Tonight Show, 
attacking network-owner General Electric and being banished for his 
commentary.  Pekar is still on the offensive, and Macedonia offers 
readers of art comics a critical look at a tough question.  Scholar 
Heather Roberson, a peace activist, worked with Pekar on a script about 
the little land-locked country that has been constantly endangered since 
the breakup of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.  It's a 
complicated story, too complicated for many comics fans.  But it gives 
the subject a serious treatment and also hints broadly at what a new 
generation of nonfiction comic art can do, especially for young readers.

The narrative begins with Heather, a Peace Studies major, arguing with a 
Political Science professor over lunch.  The professor gives her the old 
line that war cannot be prevented . . . but then concedes that 
Macedonia, in the very tinderbox of the Balkans, managed to dodge the 
proverbial bullet.  She wonders exactly how Macedonia emerged unscathed 
and, after an extended conversation with her boyfriend on details of the 
Kosovo conflict, decides to go see the country herself.

Cut to real-life Pekar: while on tour for his latest movie, he meets 
Heather and, intrigued by her planned journey to Macedonia, proposes a 
book about it, which will become this graphic novel Macedonia.  Roberson 
heads for Macedonia as a near-penniless scholar-observer, seeing and 
sometimes staying with contacts that she made in the US.  A woman 
traveling by herself, she repeatedly gets sexually harassed, but she is 
too tough to be defeated by any harassment, or even by the warnings of 
extreme personal danger.  Once in country, she threads her way through 
the bureaucracy to find the few officials willing to speak to her at length.

So, how did Macedonia do it?  There are billboards promoting 
disarmament: "Give Up Your Guns So the Children Can Play."  A good line, 
but doubtless as hard to enforce as it is difficult to make the 
country's new judicial system accountable.  There are honest officials 
who have the honest naiveté to believe that Harvard experts on "civil 
society" really have good advice.  But, more often than not, they only 
learn by practice that engaging the public through ombudsmen creates 
possibilities for redressing matters like the crookedness of the cops. 
Old habits and prejudices, like the supposed hopeless backwardness of 
Albanians or the Roma people, can be met with real services and job 
programs.

As it turns out, the Ohrid Agreement has worked, so far.  It's as if a 
security structure that the old Soviet Union proposed in 1950, vetoed by 
the US, has since stumbled into existence.

I don't think, though, Roberson ever solves the mystery of why Macedonia 
has escaped the worst of the horrors and may continue to do so.  Ethnic 
hatreds remain but seemingly do not get out of control -- perhaps 
because of the community sense of the Macedonian majority . . . or it 
may be just luck.  Roberson herself adds an Epilogue that the US and the 
EU have no credible commitment to anything like democracy and cannot be 
expected to support Macedonia except as a future profit-producer.  US 
attempts in particular to manipulate the Macedonians naturally extend 
into the foreseeable future.

And yet there is hope.  In showing something so different from Joe 
Sacco's memorable art-comic visits to the warring Balkans, and something 
so intensely detailed, Pekar and Roberson, with their able artist Ed 
Piskor, may not have produced a best-selling comic.  But it is a volume 
significant for art, politics, and narrative.  That should be plenty.

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