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Chris, nothing personal, but I sometimes really wonder if you are for real.
I do not mean to hurl any insults or ad hominems - I am really curious how people can seemingly miss what I see. And what I see is the following:
1. The Left is no more. Whatever is left of it is a joke, window dressing of imperial politics, skillfully manipulated by clintons, blairs, jospins and shroeders and their hordes of spind doctors to legitmate the rule of western plutocracy.
2. Whatever we can think of Soviet-style regimes and their rulers, they played a useful and generally positive role as a check on Western plutocracy's drive for profits and power. They do no more. They became what Chinese Cultural Revolutionaries aptly dubbed "paper tigers," supplicants begging for Western handouts. And with their demise there is no hope for the "thrid" and 'second" world countries to be anything but a reservoir of cheap labor, biological material, and dumping space for Festung Europa, and the US.
3. There are no effective constraints for the Western plutocracy to project raw power whenever they want. Distance is not a problem anymore, and any misgivings of the genral public can be easily manipulated away by the army of spin doctors.
4. If you think this war was about human rights of Kosovars, you also must be thinking that the 1st world war was about archduke ferdinand, and the 2nd world war was about gleiwitz and opressed german minority in poland. happy dreaming - and send me the stuff you've been inhaling if you can spare some.
In short - western imperialists won. Period. Their victory is total: military, economic, social and cultural. All we can do here is to turn off the lights, go home and tell your children that once upon a time there was a dream of a better and more just society - or get drunk if there are no children on board. Predictable - yet fuckingly depressing.
wojtek