Concerning the war in Serbia, most of the discussion on this list
has chosen to take the NATO bombing as the primary target. Stop the NATO
bombing! I have spent a political life opposing imperialism and will
continue to do so, but I feel strongly now that a simple anti- NATO/US
strategy is just too easy and simplistic in this situation.
Milosevic has moved from being a pathological CP aparatchnik prior
to 1989 to a proto fascist in the 1990s. The evidence is clear. The
present ethnic cleansing of Kosovo is an attempt to clear muslims out of
Serbia a 500 year old dream and build a Greater Serbia. This was the
nationalist dream that was frustrated by the creation of a multinational
Yugoslavia between 1919 and 1924 and its solidification under Tito. There
is absolutely no doubt that if Milosevic is not defeated now, he will
continue the ethnic cleansing, begun in Croatia in 1991 and continued in
Bosnia- Herzogovina, by invading Montenegro. Calls for negotiations are
just naive in the face of this fascism. Milosevic must be stopped.
Equally, the US-led NATO onslaught against Serbia has little if
anything to do with any kind of human rights concerns. If the concern
really was the Kosovo population being murdered, raped and displaced by
Milosevic then the war would have been from the start against the military
and para-military units responsible for the pogroms in Kosovo. In fact,
the US/UK-led NATO war has been a complete and utter disaster. Its aim is
to re-stabilize the political economy of a crucial and volatile part of an
already shaky (economically) Europe. NATO has now revealled itself as the
military wing of an economic globalization that is bad news for everyone.
It is an imperialist war.
History does repeat itself as farce. For me the most tragic thing
about this whole conflict is that we seem to be revisiting 1914, at least
as far as Belgrade intellectuals are concerned. The e-mail lists, airwaves
and newspapers are filled with Serbian intellectual outrage against NATO
and in utter denial of Serb ethnic cleansing, genocide, fascism. In 1914,
remember, socialists caved in and supported their national ruling classes
in World War I. That has happened again in Serbia today. The cruelest
historical comparison is that a defeated Serbia today will repeat the
tragedy of Germany and Italy in the early 1920s where socialists turned
nationalists bred fascists. The cruelly nationalist response from the
majority of Belgrade intellectuals suggests that this has already
happened. Where are the Serbian intellectuals today willing to oppose
Milosevic, Serbian nationalism, fascism?
So where does this leave us? I think the only principled position
is to advocate bilateral defeat. Milosevic has to be stopped, but there
should be no illusions that the carnivalesque Belgrade fuck-you to the
bombing will disappear. By bombing Belgrade instead of stopping the
genocidal apparatus in Kosovo, NATO has guaranteed that even without
Milosevic a broad- based Serbian fascism will prosper. At the same time,
a NATO victory would be disastrous. Economic versions of the New World
Order are one thing; military versions are quite another.
But bilateral defeat seems to be exactly where we are headed.
Everyone knows that the NATO campaign is a disgusting failure at the cost
of many lives, and yet it has been powerful enough to stop Milosevic (the
Village Voice reports that Milosevic is moving his personal fortune to
South Africa ....).
For principled, strategic, bilateral defeat.
Neil Smith
Department of Geography
and Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture
Rutgers University
Piscataway NJ 08854
phone: 732 445 4103 (Geography)
732 932 8679/8426 (CCACC)
fax: 732 445 0006 (Geography)
732 932 8683 (CCACC)
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