>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.
First, it might be right that Serb chauvinism is the central problem, but still wrong that the US (or UK) is a solution. After all, Mahdist slavery was a real problem in the Sudan and Egypt in the last century, but you would find few people today who would agree with colonisation of Africa undertaken by the British with the (possibly honest) intention of abolishing slavery.
Second the civil war in the Balkans does not fall neatly into place with good guys and bad guys. The KLA did engage in terrorist actions against Serb police as they have since against Serb civilians. You hope to fit the conflict there into some ready-made schema of racist oppressors and oppressed victims, but it doesn't work, as recent weeks have made clear.
Third, I'm very sorry that I reversed your relativism, please, by all means, let's have the relativism the right way around.
>
>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?
It's not my experience that the left has been rock solid on anti- imperialism up until now. For example, you complain that I quote Fanon repetitively (twice). But during his life time, Fanon was not such an icon as he became in death. The French Communists and Socialists opposed the Algerian independence movement. Much of Fanon's writing is precisely a critique of the liberal left for its equivocation on freedom for oppressed peoples. In Britain the left parroted the government propaganda against the Irish republican movement throughout their war against British occupation. The Labour Party opposed republicanism, sending party spokesman Don Concannon to Bobby Sands deathbed to tell him that they would not endorse the demand that republican prisoners political status be recognised. The Communist Party violently opposed republicanism, endorsing a murderous splinter group, the 'stickies' who assassinated several republican leaders. The largest Trotskyist groups here, the Militant and the SWP denounced the IRA as a sectarian organisation. In the conflict between Arab states and the US, leftists consistently lined up with the US denouncing Iran as 'clerical-fascist', and co-operating with the British foreign office in setting up oppositional movements against Khomeini and Saddam.
No doubt the US left have generally been more responsible, opposing such shams as Operation restore Hope, the US backed RPF invasion of Rwanda, the interventions in Panama and Haiti, and any suggestion that opposition to the intervention in Vietnam grew only after the VC started to inflict heavy casualties are unjustified. However, you are right to ask the question what has changed. But I am surprised that you don't look for an answer. I would have said that the change is obvious. The defeat of the anti-imperialist movements of the 1970s has left the Western powers with considerable room to manoeuvre, and it has disoriented the left. You are right to say that the willingness of the left to give uncritical support for imperialism is unnerving. But I take that as a sign that the left's ideological independence from the state was never that secure.
> 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.
Or put another way, the left, deprived of other vehicles for progressive change, such as national liberation movements, gravitated towards an identification with the institutions of Western domination in the rest of the world. In doing so, these institutions were lent a coloration of radical activism, but remained essentially instruments of Western domination, prettified for liberal consumption. Most bizarre in all this, is your unwillingness to believe that the Viet Kong, or Saddam Hussein, or any other nationalist movement did not commit atrocities.
>
>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.
That roughly would be my view.
>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.
That was not my view. Tito's system actually accelerated some of the ethnic conflicts that are evident today.
> 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.
Yes, that would be my view.
>
>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.
I hope I can win the argument on the 'facts on the ground' but Yoshie's theoretical objection still stands: any analysis that abstracts from the influence of the Western powers will necessarily give a distorted view. The secessionist movements were promoted in the West. Secession was not on the agenda until the West put it there.
>As in, were Serb atrocities worse;
Dead is dead. Are we talking about a body count, or degrees of torture? Do we line up the atrocities in Krajina and Vukovar?
>was Milosevic more agressive in expanding
>his chauvinist campaigns;
I'm not sure what this means. Serbs were living in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. These sizeable communities were bounced into states that they did not support. In the case of Bosnia, the Serbs were the largest ethnicity, and boycotted the referendum to a man. You can't call it expansionism when people defend their homes.
> were the Kosovars seriously endangered as a people
>by Milosevic's regime;
I'm not sure the Kosovars are a people, since they are not ethnically different from the Albanians. They were not endangered as residents in Kosovo until the Nato bombing - a bombing that they supported.
>what was the level of atrocities in Kosovo preceding
>the war;
Do you mean KLA atrocities against Serbs or Serb atrocities against Kosovars (that's a rhetorical Q.)?
> was Milosevic willing to concede some degree of real autonomy to
>the Kosovars in negotiations leading up to the war?
My guess would be yes. Milosevic is, as most agree, foremost a pragmatist. It is true that he stirred up the initial anti-Kosovar campaign. But as subsequent events have shown, his claim over Kosovo was by no means one of principle. The clearest evidence is the extraordinary skulduggery that the US negotiators got up to to prevent a compromise.
>
>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.
I don't think it disqualifies American citizens from having an opinion, or from doing something about it. As to the American State's rights, to impose a political solution outside of its borders, they seem to me to be automatically suspect. By what right are the people of the Balkans denied self-government? By what right are West European 'High representatives' appointed to rule over Bosnian and Kosovo?
As to racism - I don't think it is similar. There is a civil conflict in the Balkans, in which Serbs have been defeated by Croatian, Bosnian and now Kosovan secessionists. All sides in these conflicts have denounced each other in racial terms, though all sides retain a formal commitment to multi-culturalism. That's very different from a one-sided racial discrimination. After all, when did American blacks slaughter thousands of white southerners as the Croats did Serbs in Krajina? When did a black army slaughter whites as the Bosniac army did in Central Bosnia?
>
>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.
You elide the difference between the civil action of progressives and the military action of the US forces. I can see the former as a potential for good. But I think you are just naive to think that the US top brass can become a positive force of any kind. And the evidence is there to see. The end result is a colonial occupation.
>
>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.
The way I see it, the passive stance is the one that cannot see any kind of action other than action through the official channels, or through the military. That to me seems the passive stance: Standing on the sidelines, cheering the boys.
>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.
Fair point, but tell me, what is it about Serb atrocities that make them stand out for you, as against, say, American atrocities, or Kosovar atrocities, or Bosnian atrocities? -- Jim heartfield