The enemy is at home

[Seth Ackerman]

Hear, hear. Excellent post.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jim heartfield [SMTP:jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk]
> Sent:	Thursday, April 15, 1999 8:59 PM
> To:	lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject:	The enemy is at home
> 
> In message <005201be878a$8a17ba40$41517e86 at rosserjb-b000.jmu.edu>, J.
> Barkley Rosser, Jr. <rosserjb at jmu.edu> writes
> 
> Quoting Denitch and Williams' article.
> 
> >>
> >>    Sadly, some on the left are angrier about NATO's bombing
> >>    than they are about the Serbian forces' atrocities, even though
> >>    Milosevic's men have killed more in one Kosovan village than
> >>    have all the airstrikes. 
> 
> Everyone else has sounded off against this, so I suppose I am just
> playing it safe, but this opening line includes the entire confusion
> that besets the new breed of left-wing war mongers.
> 
> There is an old fashioned argument whose logic seems to me to be
> unavoidable: 'The Main Enemy is at Home'.
> 
> My country (in my case Britain, but others here might say the US) is
> at
> war with Yugoslavia. I don't live in Yugoslavia, I live in here in the
> civilised West. What I say is largely directed to the people I know.
> 
> What would it mean if I went around Britain denouncing Milosevic and
> his
> war. It would mean that I was taking sides with the militarists here,
> and parroting their propaganda. If I was talking to an audience of
> Serbs, I would say something different, like 'lay off the Albanians'.
> But I'm not talking to Serbs.
> 
> The left-wing militarists identify Nato as an instrument of good, as
> though it were a welfare law, or a new public school. But it's not. It
> doesn't hand out welfare payments. It blows up trains and convoys of
> refugees. There is no way to make war progressively. You can only make
> war destructively. And the only way that you can justify that is by
> dehumanising your enemies.
> 
> Who is all this Serb-trashing aimed at? Do Denitch and Williams think
> that they are reading Nation in Belgrade and will see the error of
> their
> ways? Of course not. It is directed at those parts of the radical
> intelligentsia who refuse to go along with this war-fever. They want
> to
> whip up chauvinistic hatred of a people, so that bombing them becomes
> more palatable. But the people on the train didn't force Albanian
> refugees from their homes. And the convoy of Albanian refugees
> certainly
> didn't do it. But if the Serbs as a people are demonised, then
> 'collateral damage' becomes acceptable.
> 
> Real radicalism means challenging the prejudices of your own day, not
> re-hashing them and giving them more vigour. With the whole country
> wrapping itself in war fever, critical thinkers should be trying to
> call
> the consensus into question, not beefing it up. There is a good reason
> that the militarism of the West troubles me more than that of
> Milosevic.
> Its because - quite apart from the exponential imbalance between
> Nato's
> war machine and Milosevic's - the militarism that is constraining
> British and American society is its own militarism, not Milosevic's.
> 
> Despite the ill-mannered slanders of the War-mongers, there is nobody
> in
> the West that has any illusions in any 'progressive' character of the
> Yugoslav government. It is not necessary here to challenge such
> beliefs.
> People in the West do have absurd illusions in the progressive
> potential
> of stealth bombers, 'precision weapons', air wars, and ground troops.
> Those illusions are what needs challenging here.
> -- 
> Jim heartfield