Henry C.K. Liu
Nathan Newman wrote:
> Put me down for the reluctant support for the bombing camp. The expressed
> moral position that the US government is by definition more immoral than any
> other opponent, and thus can never be the justified party in a military
> conflict feels like a reductionist political position that assists knee-jerk
> political posturing while undermining critical analysis of choices in
> specific situations.
>
> Hegemony is not a matter of pure repression; even military hegemony is
> extracted through suppression of barbarism that many who oppose the hegemon
> find an even worse alternative. One can argue that the US as the hegemon
> may even play a role in feeding the very barbarism that in turn justifies
> its military actions. That is reasonable and I agree with that.
>
> So what? We should protest those actions that feed that barbarism- the
> poverty, the intolerance, the political self-dealing among elites, and so
> on. Unfortunately, the protests during that phase of the cycle are never
> that large.
>
> But when that barbarism has taken off and transformed itself into the
> slaughter and repression we have seen documented in Kosovo, protesting the
> military actions of the hegemon to stop that slaughter leaves the victims of
> that barbarism to die and suffer. So we end up doing little to short-circuit
> the hegemon's role in feeding the barbarism, while curtailing the hegemon's
> corresponding role in stopping the barbarism - a rather unbalanced role for
> the Left to play in this cycle.
>
> Yes, we should vigorously condemn the arms trade the US participates in that
> feeds local conflicts; we should condemn the ways US protection of Turkish
> and Israeli repression of their minority populations creates a climate that
> can justify dictatorial slaughter of Kosovans in the name of "national
> security"; we should do the historical analysis of how the assaults on
> Yugoslavian pluralistic sovereignty, dating from the preemptive recognition
> of Slovenia, started the chain of nationalist posturing that led to the
> present ethnic clensing.
>
> But to allow Kosovans to die because you can't stomach the fact that the
> potential savior of their cause is also partly the cause of their distress,
> well that's frankly an immaturity in the face of the hypocrisy and nastiness
> of the moral compromises that we face in our global system. I respect the
> pure pacifist position that argues that a pure ideal of non-violence in all
> conflicts can feed an ethnic of "study war no more." But almost no one on
> this list at least is promoting that view, but merely the view that war by
> the US specifically cannot be justified. And it is that position that seems
> untenable in this case.
>
> I am quite open to the arguments that bombing cannot be successful in
> helping the Kosovans. That pragmatic argument that bombing merely
> strengthens the Serbian leadership and intensifies repression may be valid.
> But there are two responses- one is to call for a pull-out; the other is to
> discuss the moral imperative of the war and whether a deployment of troops
> in Kosovo to prevent ethnic slaughter may be needed. That would be a
> serious escalation of the conflict, but that is a response to the pragmatic
> arguments about the limits of bombing Yugoslavia into submission.
>
> On the more ideosyncratic side of why I support the intervention, I was
> travelling in Eastern Europe back in 1990- a few years before the whole
> Yugoslavia conflict fully exploded. I was in Bratislava and ran into an
> alternative radio journalist from the US who had just come from interviewing
> ethnic Albanians down in Kosovo. He was still shaken from the experience.
> Yugoslavia military officers and found him there and were at first hostile
> in a limited way, demanded to know his business and so on. They then
> demanded to check his backpack. They found tapes of his interviews and
> played one.
>
> The second they heard Albanian words on the tape, their hostility turned
> from casual hostility to full-out deadly threat. The journalist was hauled
> down to the police station and given a classic 36-hours psychological
> third-degree - bright lights, being kept awake straight for the whole
> period, verbal threats and a general regime that shook the journalist to his
> heart. My impression was that only the fact that he was an American
> probably kept the regime non-physical in its torture.
>
> This was back in 1990, note, when there was no large Kosovan mobilization.
> It is the reports of slaughter in Kosovo combined with the news blackout
> imposed by the government that makes the whole situation chilling. We know
> enough about the slaughter in Kosovo that to find out later that wholsesale
> genocide is happening would morally stain today's protests to their roots.
>
> --Nathan Newman