>Well, I meant to imply, though I guess I didn't state, that
>extermination/exodus/exile is the only way for the central power to
respond to
>"people's war" (even if carried out only by a minority of the population).
The
>Serb operation has resemblances to Operation Phoenix (driving Vietnamese
to camps
>and urban areas, where not killed) and the French camps in Algeria. Also the
>British camps for the Boers in S. Africa at the first part of this
century. "It's
>the way to go" when trying to secure political control of a large, hostile
>territory.
>
>I don't recall Mao addressing the issue of mass slaughter of the "sea of the
>people" as a response to guerilla warfare.
> -gn.
Yes, I do not think that is discussed by supporters of Mao, certainly not those that implied that people's war could be fought in all countries of the world. The Chinese revolution was a great political and military feat stretched over 15 years, but I cannot help thinking that there were particular factors that allowed red power to continue long enough to accumulate strength and go on to victory.
The land of China has given rise periodically to peasant risings. But in the 20's, the division of the war lords, the rising bourgeois democratic tide, and the influence of the Soviet Union allowed a big start for the communist party. The attack by the Japanese from 1931 allowed the possibility of united front policies of unity and struggle. Even though is was the KMT that benefitted overwhelmingly from western aid, it could not directly attack the Red base areas during the anti-fascist war. And by 1945 they were strong enough to prepare to win the contest of power directly.
Although the base areas were in poor areas, the enemy was not strong enough to drive the entire population out.
The Serbs nationalists could drive the Albanians out of Kosovo. They had done it in the Nis area in the 1870's. They had done in Bosnia this decade without shame. They were prepared to do it in Montenegro and in Macedonia.
The robustness of the response to the KLA attacks last year were strictly not ethnic cleansing, but implied the politics of ethnic cleansing. And war is politics continued by other means.
So what is even more significant than the graves and the human bones in burned out houses, which are now being discovered - because there were no doubt "excesses" by paramilitaries in the first couple of weeks of NATO's ill-judged campaign - are the piles of thousand of confiscated and torn identity cards and passports. These are eloquent. The water was to be drained from the pond, and the fishes were to die.
For the leftists who say we should have supported the bourgeois democratic right of nation states to expel a million of their inhabitants (despite that being specifically against Tito's constitution), it is fair to put the question: would you think the western governments should have had posts on the borders condescendingly staffed by counsellors and paramedics with morning after pills? Is that not also a form of imperialism, because capitalists would have done business with Milosevic whatever the ethnic identity of the workers in the rich mines of Trepca? Serbian ethnic purity would have been no problem.
And the US could have easily absorbed a million Albanian refugees who would work for lower wages and help compensate for the falling rate of profit in the USA.
The trouble with the left moralists, is that they start off trying to formulate policy as if were a revolutionary situation, on the grounds that it is purer to do so. But we are not in a revolutionary situation, and they do little more than sideline themselves, and turn marxism into revolutionary cynicism. It is deeply unmaterialist and deeply unmarxist as an approach.
Chris Burford
London