Gearoid O Tuathail wrote in response to my brief comments:
>
>1. MORAL EQUIVALENCING.
>Serb fascists = KLA fascists. CNN = Serb Media. "They're all the same." This
>is a refusal to engage the particularity of the conflict, to analyze and
>empirically determine who is repressing whom.
This is a simplification of what I said. Saying two sides have both killed
large numbers of people for very dodgy reasons does not mean I think their
reasons are the same or that they have killed excatly the same numbers or
any other 'sameness' that Gearoid O Tuathail infers...
> 2. DON'T INTERVENE IF "PEACE" CANNOT BE ESTABLISHED: i.e. DO NOTHING (WHILE
> GENOCIDE UNFOLDS).
>"This region" = The Balkans = the non-West. Implicitly this echoes the common
>conception of that the Balkans has been a violent quagmire for centuries that
>is perpetually unstable. Peace is impossible in the region. "History"
>overwhelms everything. Again, there is are refusal to engage the specifics of
>the region's history, to see the region in non-ethnocentric terms, and to
>distinguish between the negative peace of Milosevic's police state (where
>peace is a consequence of repression) from the possibility of an alternative
>positive peace (admittedly difficult given the brutalizing Kosovars have and
>are suffering from the Serbian state).
Again you are infering all sorts of arguments that I did not make. No,
those things were not implicit in what I said, and if you have read any of
the previous postings I have made (see my previous discussion with James
Blaut, or the excellent paper from Cornerhouse that I referred people to a
few months ago) you will know that I explicitly reject historicist
arguments about regional and ethnic identity.
Of course I can dstinguish between 'the negative peace ' of repression and
'positive peace' that is the whole point of being against the bombing, AND
being opposed to Milosevic. What NATO will impose on the former Yugoslavia
after they have done with it - that will almost certainly be a negative
peace too.
Certainly the actions of Srbian military and irregular forces have made
positive peace difficult, but so too have the actions of NATO. This does
not mean we should settle for the simple but negative option of bombing.
> 3. IMPERIALISM, THE PHANTOM MENACE!
>
Ha ha, very funny... not!
>This is an assertion not a fact.
It is an opinion.
>Rambouillet was tough on the Serbs but
>considering the blatant violation of the Holbrooke negotiated accord in 1998
>and the Serbian state's record of violating ceasefires and the Dayton Accords
>in Bosnia, this toughness was justified. Also, Rambouillet was unfair to the
>Kosovars, denying them their overwhelming aspiration to escape Serb
>sovereignty.
Agreed, Rambouillet was rejected by all sides except NATO which, I think
goes some way to supporting my opinion on it?
>Refusing the binary offered by war is an important political position.
>However, we are inevitable forced to choose also. Your choice is, I would
>argue, based on an obsolete and abstracted notion (in this case) of
>imperialism as a phantom menace. The "unaccountable" notion is unsustainable,
>given the fact that we have a media exposing NATO's 'mistakes,' governments in
>NATO very concerned about maintaining their coalitions, and a US
>administration long driven by public opinion polls.
>
Imperialism is neither a phantom nor abstracted. It is a very real
phenomenon that you can experience on a day to day basis. It is, agreed, a
shorthand, for many seemingly diverse processes from, for example, the
increasing power of transnational corporations, and the Vision 2020 of the
US Space Command for 'full-spectrum dominance'. But I feel my job as an
academic is to put things together and see what they mean, not to
artificially isolate facts and treat them asif they have no connections and
no context...
>"A ha, a war by Detroit's barons to crush the threat from the Yugo! Now it
>makes sense... :) "This conflict, of course, has a political economy but
>political economy is not DRIVING this conflict.
>
Actually it's German car-makers who stand to gin most from the destruction
of the Yugo factory, and if I was a worker at that plant I would not be as
blase as you about it. I t isn't really very funny. And, if you read my
post you will notice that I said that the drivers were military and
economic (to which I should add political)...
>The anti-NATO stop-the-bombing position, in this case, is based on three
>refusals: to distinguish morally between the sides, to overcome common myths
>about the region, and to get beyond crude rhetoric about imperialism.
>
I am sorry but this is not only inferring things not said, it is a crude
caricature of the anti-war movement, which is very diverse and composed of
people from all sorts of backgrounds who have come to opose NATO's actions
for all sorts of reasons - socialist, pacifist, anti-imperialist etc etc.
Likewise the proponents of the war have differing reasons for supporting
it; and I would not caricature you in the same way.
David.
David Wood
PhD Student ('The Rural Peace Dividend')
Department of Agricultural Economics and Food Marketing
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
0191 222 5305
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