Btw, I've made several posts on the subject and I can't help but notice that you never bother responding to the many facts of the case that have been put up by me and other readers. You snip whatever would demolish your position and then deliberately misinterpret what remains. Are you sure you wouldn't be happier on alt.NATO.bomb.bomb.bomb?
GN:
Mort aux tyrans, comrade. Margaret's position hasn't been demolished.
Y'aint got squat to say about the National Question. You know why? 'Cause it's the hardest damn problem in the social sciences, of bourgeois or Marxist variety. The French were OK to take on the monarchs (till Napoleon sold out the revolution). Trotsky-Stalin-Lenin were OK to take out the Caucasus. But the NATO ain't OK to take out Milosovitch & do its bougeois Europe thing. Aint any of you had anything to say on this list about the people getting slaughtered *before* the US intervened. Too bizzy with the microsoft trial and power relations in porno. Aint any of you willing to say whether you are for or against the extension of bourgeois Europe and if not what it is you would like to see, and what role Milosovitch would have in your merry plans for European socialism without capitalism. The gradual evolution of his Serbia to democracy? Well I suppose. It's happened before. But I already said, the problem here is that he doesn't play like Salazar and Franco. He's not a tolerable local tyrant. You can't go burning down villages, and least it became less customary in European circles, even Portugal and Spain, as the area rolled out of WWII. The only people that can do that nowadays are the Philadelphia police force (remember that?) and the rest are nastier-than-normal tyrants. Let's not get *too* bogged down in romanticized notions of Ex-Yugoslavian socialism run by Serbian police. Maybe that's why they're so good at running their little fascist dictatorship now. Y'all so bizzy confusin' consumerist mindless ideologically hegemonic capitalism with real fascism (don't see any of you being carted off to jail, yet, anyhow) that y'all forget what the real thing looks like, and that lefties of both bourgeois and Marxist varieties sometimes did good by intervening. Y'all going to say the Viet Namese were imperialist in Cambodia. Chinese thought so. Imperialism like that we need more of. And are you really so hooked that you can't see it might be preferable for a bourgeois democracy (sometimes imperialist and cruel, sometimes much less so) to reign in the ugly bug. Who you going to get to do it? You ain't got squat to say or recommend. Write Mr. Milosovitch a letter. A sanction and a letter. All been done.
No: that's OK, as long as we don't bomb, it's OK for us to tittle on about leftie discourse and relations of power and consider ourselves opporessed as we sip our cappucino. And forget the damn Kosovars and Bosnians and all those weird names that sound like they're out of a Star Trek episode. (Cap'n Kirk! The Kosovar ship has opened fire!) Y'all remind of Max Weber's obsevations about early Christianity: Its pacifist threads could only have evolved in the midst of the most powerful empire of all time. Ain't one of you scarcely even thinks about the peasants on the coffee plantations as ya sip. Boo-hoo, they're bombing the Serbian Nazis. Milosovitch may be bad but his people are not. Anyone got anti-tyrant removal spray that *doesn't* involve the country he rules over? Boo-hoo, they might build a capitalist E. Europe and bring Starbucks there as well as crappy minimum wages. Not like Iraq, folks. No plans for democracy there or in the environ states. Different imperial game. Same capitalists, different game objectives.
Oh, ouch, I don't have health care, I'm oppressed! Indeed you are. But you're orders of magnitude away from being hunted down because of your skin or your language. Y'all gotta face the facts of the bourgeois state. Have to understand it's benign as well as its malign aspects. Otherwise you're lefties in fantasy land.
Except, the bourgeois democracies don't have the chutzpah to go in and take Milosovitch out the way the comrades did in the Caucasus, or Cambodia. So they may not do what they should do, and partial commitment is perhaps more to be feared than inaction.
And I see y'all coming out heavy and indignant on Margaret and everything and y'all don't even say who y'are and where ya is. Not even a first name like she does. -- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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