>Why is the US government doing all this?
>
>1. To prevent people (esp. Americans & Europeans) from questioning the
>continuation & enlargement of the NATO.
>
>2. To get the American public used to the idea & reality of sending troops
>abroad even in a context where it is impossible to claim a 'quick,
>painless, and decisive' victory.
>
>3. To secure the Balkans as militarily strategic areas under the US/NATO
>control, which will become very useful when Russian people, fed up with
>capitalism (= unpaid wages, collapsing living standards, diminishing life
>expectations, general chaos, mob rule, etc.), will finally stage some kind
>of uprisings (whose political character it is impossible to predict from
>here).
>
>4. To erase the memory of Yugoslavia (which represented an alternative
>model of Socialism) by claiming that the region is (and has been always)
>nothing but competing ethnic groups whose interests the US/NATO claims to
>ajudicate, thus assuming political & ideological control.
All this is true, or at least part of the truth. But there is a wider truth too. There is a fast accelerating agenda of global government, whether to control damage to the environment, to stabilise international financial disorder, to control unpredictable "terrorist" activity. This is a dialectical process in motion. It brings things as contradictory as the arrest of Pinochet, and the establishment by the British House of Lords that former presidents do not have immunity against charges of torture, and on the other hand the extradition of Ocalan to Turkey with the help of US secret services.
Blair, Clinton and Schroeder are all the faithful servants of capital, and all also, and this is the contradiction, have to help the developing agenda of world government appear to stand above classes and nations with a degree of impartiality and justice. Therefore they have become more than imperialist bodies striving to redivide the world, though that goes on. They have become a nucleus of world government. Therefore their credentials to act as police are under scrutiny.
The right of the Kosovans to self determination is a sound working class and marxist right. It was upheld in the former Yugoslavia. It should be upheld now. The fact that Clinton and Blair are upholding it does not make it wrong.
The line of total opposition to every action of one's own ruling class is a clear and moral line but it is not dialectical, and it is not materialist. Certain actions of these governments will be progressive, certain will not.
What we should be doing is shifting the agenda.
We should be saying, why is the right of self-determination not also being upheld for the Kurds?
Chris Burford
London