I've noticed that all the lap-top bombardiers on LBO have gravitated towards a similar theme, 'democracy is not all that it's cracked up to be'. Max, Margaret and here (not a war supporter) Angela all tend to the same conclusions - democracy = tyranny, life is more important than freedom etc etc.
This of course is the substantial component of the human rights ideology that was inaugurated with the drafting of the United Nations Declaration in New York in 1944. Seeking a legal basis for the occupation of the lands of the defeated Axis powers, the Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss were careful to qualify political representation as the basis of the extension of the UN's writ. Instead they drafted a set of rights that claimed to be more 'fundamental' than such things as free speech and the rights of representation: human rights to life, shelter etc etc. (Substantially these drew upon the left's argument against political liberalism, that it left the question of social equality unaddressed - but unlike the left, the UN charter was not attached to a popular movement).
Armed with a charter that addressed human welfare, the allies felt confident that they could trump all questions of legal representation, and, most importantly, the right of nations to self-determination. As an occupying force in Europe, suppressing popular uprisings in Greece, and, suppressing the 1948 worker's councils in Berlin, the UN Charter gave the allies carte blanche to suspend all political rights in the interests of a more fundamental 'human right' to life, shelter, a home.
This discourse of human rights is patently flawed. It has been so consistently subverted to cynical geo-political goals that it has to be queried. It has been the mainstay of US imperial policy throughout the second half of the century. And today it gives rise to such lunacies as 'bomb them into peace', 'down with the ceasefire'.
The logical flaw in the human rights discourse is this. People who have no political representation will tend to lose out in their access to social goods. The way to guarantee someone's welfare is not to leave his social provision to a third party, but to support his political rights. Prisoners, orphans, refugees are famously victim to exploitation, for obvious reasons. Once aid and welfare organisations become their effective voice, those agencies will tend over time to substitute their goals for those of the people they represent.
In the War in Kosovo, the KLA's tactical error was to make itself a conduit for US policy in the region. Orienting its war aims not to any strategic position on the ground, but instead to Western audiences, it lost control of the process that it had initiated. Now the Kosovars have been reduced to pawns variously of Nato, the Yugoslav govt., the Macedonian govt.. The more that the West substitutes its own aims for those of the people of the Balkans, the less weight those people's lives will have. Already the deaths of Serbs are seen as inconsequential, reported as if they were a mere pre-text for Milosevic's propaganda. And so too are the deaths of the Kosovars made into something they are not: melodrama, schmaltz for newspapers and TV companies. Crocodile tears that are simply unmeant, but functional to a prior - racial - hatred of the Serbs.
In message <00c001be8181$32ce55a0$71e13ecb at rcollins>, rc-am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> writes
>a brief note to Jim h on the election of governments from the wildcat
>article:
>
>"The first "free" (I.e. multi-party) elections held in the Republics of
>Yugoslavia, in 1990, were a veritable referendum on war. In all the major
>protagonist Republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina,
>ethnic nationalist parties won clear victories over Yugoslavist
>representatives of the old Communist League and non-ethnic liberal parties.
>[...] Effectively, the citizens of Yugoslavia were
>asked: "Are you in favour of ethnic slaughter? Yes/No"."
>http://www.webcom.com/wildcat/Yugoslavia.html
In message <000801be8184$f73a1e80$6f6088d1 at sawicky>, Max Sawicky
<sawicky at epinet.org> writes
>
>Oy. Things seem really hopeless. All I can ask is, in your vision of the
>world, is there any relief from routine outbreaks of barbarism and mass
>slaughter?
May I suggest the simplest one? Target that military organisation that has done most damage: Nato.
-- Jim heartfield