You do seem to have quite a bit more faith in capitalism than most around here.
Maureen
GN: A) Yes, I did exaggerate the relationships of clans with clans (anyone outside is total shit, etc.). But clans with clans also have their history of humongous wars, which far from peaceful also drove, for example, the settlement of Europe (the east to west movements which were gigantic inter-clan wars that spilled eventually into the settled parts of Europe). Nasty cross-continental stuff, not just gentle sharing and what have you.
B) I think that the "let's have socialism without capitalism first" game has been tried. I find it highly suspect. Capitalist brutality is an alternate form of brutality, not the implmentation of brutality where before there was none. The story of much of the Caucasus *before* the capitalist era was the expansion of *feudalism* into the clan zone; and the Ottoman empire had, as one aspect, the character of a feudal regime which held sway over Clan systems elsewhere, e.g. the Middle East. That was *also* nasty. Capitalism seems to be worse to the extent that mechanized slaughter is worse than artisanal sword/machete slaughter. But the latter, as history records, can generate kills in excess of 100,000, and those in eras where the population was a good deal lower than now.
Everything that is dirty about history is at play in the Kosovo conflict, dirty because there are no good guys. Only different groups pursuing their selfish goals to their own evil ends. My diagnosis of NATO goals in E. Europe, however, is: semi-peripheral bourgeois capitalism. In my personal view that maps out a bit better than Milosovic's rule through terror schema. -gn
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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