-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Hell, by your logic, Native Americans deserved what they got (or at least
>whites are morally equivalent) since there were plenty of scattered
>massacres of whites in response to European encroachment.
-Nathan, that analogy qualifies you for a career in public relations.
-With all this talk of "moral equivalence" I feel like I'm back in the
-days of Reagan and Kirkpatrick.
Since no one is paying for me for my arguments, I'm missing a check, and most of the people I am interested in getting a job with would dislike the argument, the response is purely ad hominen.
We are talking about genocide and the rights of resistance, and there are a whole set of paradigmatic cases that have been used in the discussion by most folks, and the US liability for genocide against Native Americans seems extremely relevant to US actions in purportedly fighting genocide elsewhere.
Various tribes committed real atrocities against innocent settlers and mounted full-scale armed rebellions against US government occupation of their lands. Such massacres were often used to justify driving those tribes off their land into reservations. The trope of resistance "justifying" repression, murder, ethnic clensing and genocide is a constant one. Picking out and comparing individual atrocities on each side is missing the forest for the trees- the question is the scale, comprehensiveness and systematic planning that qualifies actions as genocidal in intent.
Europeans of course did not have historic claims on the lands of America, but history is not the only mode of discourse in making claims. Manifest Destiny in occupying a relatively unoccupied country (especially after disease decimated the native population) was the US version of making its land claim, which has about as moral a basis as claims based on six-hundred year old battlefield littered with monasteries.
>There's a principle here, that ethnically driven murder,
>displacement, and appropriation is wrong, whether it's
>state-sponsored or "spontaneous." But the KLA's actions are
>symptomatic of the whole US/NATO approach to the region, which is to
>reinforce ethnic partitioning. That's what Bosnia's about, and that's
>what Kosovo is now about. Is it only wrong when Serbs do it?
As to ethnic partitioning, it was Milosevic himself who revived Great Serbian nationalism, so NATO had a fine partner in that ethnic nationalism dance. If anything, the human rights complaint is that the US and NATO sat out too much of the early 90s when Milosevic (and yes Tujman and others) were playing out ethnic partitioning with little resistance from the West. The KFOR forces should be doing all they can to preserve a multiethnic democratic Kosovo, but at least unlike Milosevic's regime, that is at least their official goal.
>Remind me how it's an act of resistance to loot Serb-owned stores.
Ah yes, abridging private property rights is now a horrific sin by the KLA among leftists shocked, shocked I say, that such human rights violations are allowed to occur during post-war reconstruction. That refugees who have lost their homes and businesses (often at the hands of those Serbs running current businesses) would privilege their own poverty and suffering over the property rights of a noble Serbian entrepreneur makes every socialist heart bleed I know.
As in, give me a break-- you and a large chunk of folks on this list could find all sorts of reasons to justify Lenin appropriating the property of Kulaks in Russia in the name of war mobilization and subsequent reconstruction.
I'm not going to justify such KLA actions as particularly noble, but you shouldn't engage in the silly rhetoric of suddenly discovering the sanctity of private property.
--Nathan Newman