> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> The appeal of descriptions of Serb chauvinism in the West is that it
> lets you feel morally superior...It was round that time that the
> strategy of pointing up examples of racism amongst third world peoples
> was first developed as a way of relativising the obvious fact that race
> prejudice was primarily an expression of colonial domination.
What bothers me, and why I keep arguing the point and playing the role of "imperialist" in folks view, is that the same reverse relativism is used by some lestists to justify local colonial domination. As in, see the United States is bad and racist, so how can it object to racist or colonial oppression done by a local bully.
It is rhetorical nonsense to say that the goal of liberal and left supporters of the Kosovo intervention are motivated by the desire to have the US feel superior to other countries. Most (like myself) have taken great joy in denouncing this country as barbaric, racist and imperialist in the Vietnam War, in the undermining of freedom in Central America, and in its brutal slaughter in Iraq. Just as most of us have spent much time attacking the internal culture of racism against blacks, immigrants and other oppressed peoples.
The attempt by anti-interventionists to shoe-horn the left supporters of intervention into some kind of simple racist, colonial category (as in your repetitive citing of Fanon) reflects a failure of analysis. Most of those folks like myself who were "wrong" on Kosovo were "right" on almost every past imperialist war, from Vietnam to the Gulf War. So without using your simple all-purpose anti-colonist swiss army knife, how do you explain the shift towards support for intervention among a modestly large segment of the human rights and traditional left?
One analysis I remember seeing of the different components of support for Kosovo intervention argued that left supporters were actually continuing their attitudes of opposing white colonial rule, and mapping the urban Christian serbs into the role of colonialist versus the poorer Islamic Kosovars who have the role of typical oppressed third world country oppressed by the "West" (Serbs in this case.) In that analysis, Serbs lost their left support not because they were inferior to the West, but because they were too similar for sympathy. The NYTIMES article reinforces that sense of similarity in describing a "slacker" culture of urban youth not very alien to our own, even if the supporting institutions are corrupt.
That's not an unreasonable analysis but simplifying. Support for Kosovo intervention did not occur overnight based on reflex sympathy. There was nearly a decade of human rights agitation, where a consensus among a large chunk of the left emerged that while there had been abuses and even atrocities by many forces, the consistency and agressiveness of Serb atrocities put it into a different class of human rights violators in the region. Among those (like myself) who held that view, no one was stupid enough to ignore the semi-facist Croatian nastiness, but Serbia was continuing in its support for atrocities in Bosnia, Kosovo and threatening other interventions in areas around the region. All of this preceded the Kosovo intervention.
Now, there is another chunk of the left that analyzed things differently. They saw Serbia as at worst no worse than its neighbors with atrocities the results of conflicts stemming from Western-induced independence movements. Part of the sympathy for Serbia was that its economy and structure held onto more of the legacy of Tito's socialist system, unlike Croatia or Slovenia which had dumped symbols of Yugoslavia in favor of either Western liberalism or (in the case of Croatia) symbols of its fascist past. They saw most reports of Serb atrocities as selective reporting, propaganda to support an anti-Serb campaign. And the Kosovo intervention was then just a campaign to impose NATO control on the Balkans.
Okay, these are two reasonable camps of opinion on the Left, both motivated by good will and good values. The difference is attributable maybe a bit to theoretical differences but mostly to interpretation of facts on the ground. As in, were Serb atrocities worse; was Milosevic more agressive in expanding his chauvinist campaigns; were the Kosovars seriously endangered as a people by Milosevic's regime; what was the level of atrocities in Kosovo preceding the war; was Milosevic willing to concede some degree of real autonomy to the Kosovars in negotiations leading up to the war?
You argue that the war was about rendering the Serbs less-than-human; I think of racism and xenophobia as something all too human that occurs every day in the United States. There is the response that this disqualifies the US from having an opinion and right to act in regards to similar racism in the Balkans. But then (and we've used that analogy before) it was the same argument used by the South in the US to oppose the North imposing laws and even troops in support of desegration in the South.
The argument that only perfect actors can take action is a trap for progressives, since it is a stance that encourages passivity in the face of greater evil. A deep conservative argument against socialism is that people are too immoral to be trusted with trying to improve the world, so better to let each person alone in liberty to contain the evil that can be done. There are obvious critiques of that as a defense of our corporate capitalist system, but the rhetoric of fear of action for good is similar to what many anti-interventionists assume. If the US state cannot be trusted to oppose cultural and ethnic clensing against a defenseless people (if that was the factual situation - we disagree on that), how can we go to people and suggest they trust that same state with control of their health care?
The libertarian and racist Right is at least consistent on the Kosovo situation. They argue the government is by nature corrupt and a danger to liberty, so any action by government, whether intervention in Kosovo or in promoting universal health care, is merely a sign of elites seeking to control other people. Past wars were reluctantly supported by that Right as a necessary evil to stop the state-centered expansion of the Soviet Union, but with the end of that threat, the rest of the world should be left to stew in its own juices unless they directly threaten US's soveriegnty. So much of the Right, from Pat Buchanan to Phyllis Schafley, all opposed the Kosovo intervention using the rhetoric of relativism between US and Serbian actions.
It is fascinating how much of the rhetoric on LBO and freerepublic.com are parallel. They are the two places I know where Stratfor is read with such sympathy and consistency.
"facts are stupid things" as Ronald Reagan once said, and unfortunately the pro- and anti-interventionist left on Kosovo disagree based on such "stupid things." We disagree on whether Milosevic was willing to grant autonomy - I doubt that anyone with an obviously planned system of ethnic clensing in place was really negotiating for the alternative of autonomy. But that's a question of fact. And we disagree on the level of atrocities and their relative importance. Which is a reasonable set of differences.
I at heart think it is tragic that so many leftists have adopted a passive anti-intervention position that puts them in company with the racist Right in this country, but I understand the factual interpretation of events that lead to that without having to argue that this similarity of position means that they have become racists.
Similarly, I wish the fact that leftist pro-interventionists share the same policy position on Kosovo as centrist politicians like Clinton or Blair did not lead to the argument that we then share the exact same motivations.
--Nathan Newman