Re: Of Nationalist Thugs (and those who enthroned them)

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:59 AM 10/08/2000 +1000, you wrote:
> Then, in March of 1992, 'we' sought to impose the Lisbon accord (which
> 'we' would do again at Dayton), explicitly and deliberately perpetrating a
> three-way ethnic division within a sovereign state, effectively enshrining
> nationalist leaders (who owed their  popularity to the now desperate
> economic times) and their armies.  Ethnic partition is henceforth the
> theme, and ethnic cleansing almost inevitably its manifestation (at
> Dayton, 'we' would further weaken Belgrade's authority by imposing a
> supervisory occupation force - which helped the ethnic cleansing along
> where it was not happening neatly enough - witness Krajina and the
> eventual bombing of Yugoslavia).

when do they (the "Western" power elites, "we" in Rob's message) ever
learn? After the first European World War, the main principle besides "the
right of nations to self-determination" (from which Russia was explicitly
excluded, BTW) was ethnic nationalism. Hey, let's slice up Austria-Hungary
(and much of the rest of Eastern Europe) using the borders between
different ethnic homelands! Let's not define people by their common
humanity but by their language and/or religion! Of course, these
ethnic  boundaries are usually vague, while there are lots of people of
mixed ethnicity. But Versailles followed this rule, rather than trying to
democratically unite different ethnic groups that lived in historically or
geographically reasonable units. Maybe they didn't want other issues --
such as class -- to raise their ugly heads. But even though ethnic
nationalism violates official liberal principles, it was used. This created
several statelets that were too small and one (Czechoslovakia) that was an
artificially united combination of two ethnic states (which promptly split
up when given the chance). Not only did this create economic instability (a
bunch of states with inadequate economic bases competing with each other,
in an international economic regime preminiscent of today's IMF
monetarism), but it encouraged the rise of opportunistic politicians who
used ethnicity as the main way to unite their countries, the way Tudjman
(the US good guy) and Milosevic (the US bad guy) did in recent years. (Note
that these countries definitely _needed_ uniting, since they started out as
artificial creations in post-war chaos.) The combination of bad economic
conditions and rampant ethnic nationalism was explosive. Obviously special
German conditions and Hitler himself added some unique ingredients to the
mix, but this raw material was central to the rise of Nazism. That version
of capitalism's spread to the rest of Europe was supported by the ethnic
nationalist leaders of many countries, BTW. (Somehow extreme versions of
economic nationalism find themselves united by the very act of hate (along
with those cool uniforms and insignia), despite that officially they hate
each other. There's also the sharing of scapegoats, i.e., the Jews, the
Rom, gays, commies, etc.)

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine