[PEN-L:6077] Re: RE: Re: RE: (Fwd) NATO STARTED BOMBING TO HELP MILOSEVIC

[Rob Schaap <carob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

G'day Max,

Alright, just one more go ... although Bill Lear's fine post has done a lot
of the work for me.

>Sure you did, but the practical effect of a bombing halt is to
>hand the entire country to Milo, complete with a death warrant
>for Kosova.

On this particular point we ARE talking simple black'n'whites - as opposed
to just about every other point to do with this (where your demonstrable
capacity for nuance, fine distinctions and recognition of dialectical
complexities seems to have deserted you) - either we don't stop the bombing
(in which case we have no Albanians in Kosovo and profound destruction
across all of Yugoslavia) or we do (in which case some possibilities arise -
not as many as existed on March 23 - but some.  Oh, and innocent people stop
dying in anything like current numbers).  You ask me to wear the
consequences to conscience of stopping it; I ask you to wear those of not
stopping.  Simple.

>Right.  But some people are prone to revisiting what should have
>been done three weeks ago, instead of the choices in view right
>now.

Ahistorical nonsense.

>All the more reason for the independence of Kosova from Serbia.

Okay.  Tell us how this would come to be now.  What do you mean by
independence?  Do you recommend same for Basques, Sikhs, Tamils, Ambon
Muslems, Ambon Christians, Florez Catholics, East Timorese nationalists,
East Timorese integrationists, Ulster unionistrs, Ulster republicans, Texas
separatist militias, Fijian Hindus, Australian Aboriginees, Tyrolean
Italians, Amerindians, Cypriot Turks, Kurds, Ruthenian Czechs, Hungarian
Roumanians, Hungarian Serbs etc ?  And no motherhood stuff, Max.  Tell us
how it should be done.  Is the Kosovo question significantly different from
any or all of these?  Is it the same?  Are we not bombing enough nations?
Is that the problem?  Sheesh!

>I'm not sure what you're saying here.

That a post-bombing scenario ain't gonna please everyone, but it's better
than bombing.  Very little is actually worse than bombing, you see.

>I recall very little expressed
>support for Kosova from those opposed to Nato.  There has been
>more about Nato's nefarious plans to stoke nationalism and
>splinter the Balkans, as if the region wasn't a patchwork
>already.

The KLA ain't Kosovo.  Ask Rugova.  Ask the thousands of Albanian Kosovars
who were leaving Kosovo FOR BELGRADE up to a few weeks ago.  Ask anyone
outside bloody Washington!

And the splinters are more jaggedly ill-fitting than they were five weeks
ago.  And will be for a long time to come.

>A difference that crops up here is your equation or parity
>between the 'cause' of Serbians and Kosovans.  They are not
>equivalent.  The Serbian regime is the aggressor and oppressor.
>Serbian independence is not in question.  Kosova is the aggrieved
>party.  A bombing halt to me signals a halt to any commitment to
>put pressure on Milo, though the bombing itself has not been
>successful in this regard thus far.  Thus the real significance
>of simple anti-bombing politics is anti-Kosovan.

And because you don't bombe Djakarta, you are anti-East Timorese?  Saddam
and Milo are both more comfortable in their chairs now than they were before
the humanitarians moved in, Max.  They're not doing the bleeding, and those
who do are moving, mebbe reluctantly, behind their leaders.

>The fact that the event could have been a pretext does not mean
>an amended Rambouillet agreement would have been a solution
>(except to the SErbs' current travails).

It was a lousy document.  We're talking options here.  For the nth time,
bombing is not, and could never have been, a solution to anything that
should matter.

>I don't see any economic logic for the IMF in having the
>industrial capacity of Yugoslavia destroyed.  The Yugo working
>class is more productive with capital, not without it.  Profits
>and income to rentiers are more likely with capital.  Destroying
>it makes no sense from an economic standpoint.  The notion that
>this act solves any worldwide problem of excess capacity (too
>many Yugo's?) is ludicrous.

NATO is the military wing of a group of nation states.  Nation states have
strategic goals.  Political control comes with the economic destruction of
an intractable state.  Yugoslavian capital may be a pimple on gargantuan gut
of world capital, but it's all the capital Yugoslavia has.  Destroy that
capital, and you destroy whatever irksome independence Yugoslavia had.  This
is as true of Kosovo (which they profess to save) as it is of Montenegro
(with whom they assure us they have no argument) and Serbia (the vast
majority of whose population apparently go weeks on end without killing or
raping an Albanian).

> Evidence of a desire to liberate Kosovo would be an invasion.

Have you seen the pictures of central Pristina?  The smoke clouds that dot
the Kosovar countryside?  What does 'liberation' mean here?  Mebbe some kind
of silly formalistic negative freedom (even there I have profound doubts -
we're talking replacing one master with another, I think - or mebbe a
greater Albania we might have to bomb next year because it's being nasty to
the now defenceless Serbs), but not the freedom that comes with controlling
one's own productive asstes.  We bombed those.  And someone else is gonna
have to provide the capital to feed 'em, heal 'em. house 'em, teach 'em, and
employ 'em - conferring on that someone an overbearing lump of political
clout.

>As I mentioned above, my perception of anti-bombing is not that
>it was motivated by or associated with support for Kosova.  There
>were tales (originating in Western intelligence services and
>commercial media outlets) of the KLA as terrorist drug runners
>and Kosovar nationalism as of a piece with an international
>Albanian mafia.

Once more, THE KLA IS NOT KOSOVO.  Maybe more so than it was five weeks ago
- but that's NATO's doing.  And not one person here or elsewhere has
characterised Albanian Kosovars as mafiosi.  To accuse them thus is to
accuse them of racism - the sort of claim that'd require some serious
evcidence around these parts.  And nationalism, so often the product of
externally imposed suffering, is a universally bad thing, in my view.  But
by this reasoning, we would do well to look at the forces that engender it,
rathet than focus always on the symptoms - hard to do because just mebbe
we're the disease, eh?

>There was and is continual effort to discount reports of Serb
>atrocities (by condemning all conceivable sources for such
>reports).

There's evidence about that (gasp) the NATO PR machine is inclined to tell
fibs while they think they can get away with 'em.  Such a fib was central to
the adventure that has hitherto killed a million Iraqis.  So it's not
insignificant, is it?

>There is the parable of an international imperialist
>crusade against a phantom Russian working-class regaining power.

Political power relations in Russia are unpredictable - Yankophobia is
unsurprisingly salient there.  Whilst I see no hope of anything
approximating a socialist upswell, I'm sure I'm not alone in seeing the
possibility of some kind of Bonapartist xenophobic formation - something
closer, perhaps, to fascism than socialism.  Terrible news for everybody,
but also a scenario that would worry the architects of this inhuman
volatility (ie the politicians, experts and capitalists NATO represents).
So mebbe they're doing what they did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - warning
Russia.  Which promptly got hold of the Bomb and embarked on the Cold War
(and its many hot manifestations).  On that view, what we're doing in
Yugoslavia is to Russia as bombing Austria flat would have been to Weimar
Germany.  Hitler would have enjoyed the latter scenario, I think.

>There was opposition to Nato establishing any kind of larger role in the
world.

NATO has no legitimate role any more, Max!  That is why it's busy fashioning
one for itself.  And yeah, I oppose NATO establishing ANY role in the world.

>Somehow or other the mining complex was supposed to be important to
capitalists.

One of the many things (along with navigable water ways, bridges,
communications networks and working factories etc) that would be pretty
important to Yugoslav strategic discretion though.

>Much was made of the
>inconsistency and hyporcrisy of Nato, Clinton, etc. vis-a-vis
>other national struggles.  When the tribulations of Kosova were
>raised, people said stuff like, what about East Timor?  As if the
>latter situation somehow invalidated the former.  Very little
>support for Kosova.

We were just highlighting the bleeding obvious fact that NATO was not
supporting Kosovo.  You can't overstate the hypocricy, nor the suffering
that ensues.

>Simplifying matters, I pose
>the disagreement as Nato's Imperialist Crusade versus EU
>Periphery Pacification.  The former implies a great escalation of
>current hostilities, the latter a cooling off.  I think the
>chances of the latter are much greater, tho not 100%.

The big EU suits are also NATO suits.  A lot of EU suits don't like what
NATO's doing.  At least one reckons it ain't doing enough.  Either way, NATO
is demonstarbly not cooling anything off.  It's heating it up - firing
nationalism, paranoia, racism and militarism in the hearts of yet another
generation.  The chances of 'the latter' were realistic if not high on March
23rd.  They are practically zero now.

That's your precious bombing in a nutshell, Max.  Not just death and
suffering now.  But death and suffering in the future.  When, of course,
we'll have forgotten what we're doing now, and we'll do it all over again.

You're only 35, Max.  You might still be around.  I'd love to see your posts
then ...

Cheers,
Rob.