those fake refugees

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Wed Mar 31 21:05:11 PST 1999


I had written:


>>yes. as an immediate solution: open the borders and allow anyone
who wants to leave Kosovo and Serbia free passage to australia, the US and the rest of Europe. as a longer term solution, we work to replace a racialised struggle with a class struggle, both there and globally, but first perhaps here.<<

Yoshie replied:


>Not a bad idea, but you know that they will _never_ do that. They
didn't do that even in the midst of WW2 when Jews, Romas, Serbs, homosexuals were being subjected to the real Final Solution.<

and they are unlikely to call a halt to the bombing in the near future. they are unlikely to do many things that we would raise as demands. that this has not been raised as a demand by the left in the midst of the campaign against the bombings tells me only that it is a demand that will not be allowed to be thought.

that, rather than meet the manipulation of the television images of refugees for the purposes of more bombing and a full-scale war, rather than challenge all the hand-wringing over the Serbian government's ethnic cleansing with a challenge to our governments' racist boundaries (a demand to open the borders), you prefer to reproduce racist articles!


>I do not speak for the author of the article, because I don't agree
with his point of view.<

mmm. then why would you reproduce it? it was not only unnecessary in order to make any arguments you might wish to, it was racist. of this, you have nothing to say?

and let me also signal another warning: the characterisation of a group of people as drug runners and criminals, *even though* it may well be true that this is a or the means of economic activity, should be something that anyone from the US smells a mile off as laden with the kind of racism that is de rigeur in the US and those countries caught up in US orbits.

you know I do not support the KLA (as I do not support the bombing or NATO intervention). it is not necessary to argue this through recourse to seethingly racist material, but that you have, tells me something else.

so, I'll be blunt: the reproduction of racist propaganda is the unavoidable cost of supporting the nationalism of the Serbian govt, and you were bound to pay up sooner or later.

racism has shifted from being a sideshow, a pretext (for intervention, against intervention) to being the only text.

angela



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