Pax Europa

[Dennis R Redmond]

This may sound whacked-out, but I had an almost visceral reaction to the
photos of the three captured US soldiers flashed across the Web.  That's
when the Serbs lost the battle for US public opinion (of course, the cards
were stacked against them, but the one way to piss off Americans is to
parade war prisoners on CNN). It's something that I felt personally --
this instinctive reaction of, "Those goddamn *bastards* are gonna pay for
this", immediately countermanded by the knowledge that this is NATO's
dream scenario, the perfect excuse to blast Belgrade to cinders, killing
hundreds of people we will never see or be able to mourn. It's always
worth remembering that we critics of the system are ourselves enmeshed in
the thing, and on the deepest levels imaginable; that, after all, is why
the total system is total. Maybe we shouldn't think of multinationalism
and neonationalism, the two most powerful political currents of our day,
merely as objective tendencies; maybe they course and eddy into the very
depths of our subjectivities. Hence the difficulty of saying anything
meaningful about the war: on some level we know, somewhere, that this
public display of violence is merely the tip of the neocolonial iceberg,
that the true forms of dominion are like vast, restless mountains,
thundering in the distance -- the giant multinationals and their ilk,
busily plundering the earth, doing far more daily violence to the ecology
and human beings than the generals could ever imagine. Which recalls to
mind the true winner of the whole mess: the EU, quietly wheeling and
dealing while the US takes the public blame, an unstoppable colossus
growing new industrial tentacles by the hour, relinking the formerly
delinked Visegrad, the Balkans and the CIS zones. Let's just hope the
Euroresistance is growing as fast as Eurocapital, or the 21st century
could get real ugly in a real hurry. 

-- Dennis