>I also believe, and believe others believe,
>tobacco capital was behind his impeachment. Certainly the "Independent
>Prosecutor" is not independent of connections with tobacco interests.
Undeterred by the eccentricity of his example Chris gets to the point (well sort of):
>Overall I maintain that bourgeois democracy is a hidden system of class
>rule, much as we have to take it into account and defend bourgeois
>democratic rights.
Well, ok, so the point is...
>
>By denouncing the "faking" of democracy in Bosnia, Jim Heartfield here, and
>Mick Hume in the pages of the "anti-imperialist"(?) Times, are covertly
>promoting illusions in bourgeois democracy instead of analysing the state
>as a means for managing conflict.
So, let's get this right. Me and Mick Hume are sowing illusions in bourgeois democracy because we both pointed out that the officials in Bosnia are appointed, not elected.
And by pointing out that the explicit claims of the OSCE and the UN to have democratised Bosnia are a sham, it is us who are spinning a yarn about democracy.
On the contrary. Outside of LM, Mick Hume's article in the Times, Dave Chandler's book, and his article in the recent New Left Review, no-one in Britain has actually tested the claims that Bosnia is a democracy.
The person who is sowing illusions in the so-called democratisation process in Chris Burford. Despite the Marxoid rhetoric, he tells us over and over again that imperial rule is for the best, that a protectorate is superior to independence, that the people of the Balkans aren't ready yet for democracy.
Burford is an apologist for class rule in the Balkans, and he objects because Hume pointed out the nature of this class rule.
And then, in a debating tactic that belongs in the sixth form he says, with a sulky flourish 'what's so great about your so-called democracy anyway?'
Indeed, why bother abolishing slavery (wage slavery's just as bad), or why bother fighting fascism (democracy is just another form of class rule), or who needs rights anyway (they're just a bourgeois illusion) Burford would say.
Of course it all sounds very profound: didn't you know democracy just an illusion Mr Paine, so don't bother with independence; oh silly Feargus O'Connor, you want to elect your members of parliament? Don't you know they are all whores anyway? Oh Monsieur Ouverture, you want to free the slaves? How outre!
And strangely enough this cynical pose is an even more obvious apologia for state rule in Bosnia than those who would try and tell us that it is a democracy. As we know, nothing that the West does in the Balkans will persuade him that they don't have a perfect right to civilise the savages. Oh yes, he says, its all very oppressive, but don't you know, state's are oppressive, so what's to complain about? -- Jim heartfield