I appreciate your efforts and you have provided a lot of useful information. At the same time I think you need to look carefully at what you are writing and how it might be taken. You certainly do paint a picture that seems to imply that the Albanians pretty much deserve whatever is happening to them, a view that I think is not held by most people on this list, even though almost all of us oppose the war.
You declare that I should present my own version of postwar history. Of course I have now in two different messages pointed out to you personally that what happened in WW II and after was importantly affected by what happened immediately before the war, namely a reactionary royalist dictatorship by the Serbs over all the other Yugoslav peoples. You have conveniently ignored this rather crucial piece of history. I believe that I am the one that has been staring all of this history very hard in the face, so to speak, and accepting it for what it is. It is not pretty, mighty little of it anyway. The relative tolerance and progressivism of the Tito regime is one of the few bright spots; certainly little that has happened on any side since his death merits such a description.
What I found and find objectionable is your demonization of the Albanians coinciding with your more or less complete buying into nearly all of the worst of the Serbian nationalist and chauvinist stories and mythologies. I can understand that my pointing out to you that the kinds of arguments you have used against the Albanians would be tossed off this list if applied to a lot of other peoples (shall we discuss the high birth rate of the Palestinians in the Gaza strip?) makes you very uncomfortable and annoyed. But I think that you need to look very closely at what you have written. It is frankly appalling, however much time and energy went into it.
As for my demonization of Milosevic, one reason I preferred to do that was to avoid demonizing the Serbian people as a whole. After all, let us say that what the Serbs as a whole did in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now Kosovo-Metohija is very bad (some would disagree). Also, let us say that Milosevic is a moderate compared to some other Serb political leaders, which is true. Then one can very easily end up in a Thomas Friedman situation that says the Serbian people are a bunch of evil racist chauvinists who deserve to be bombed into non-existence a la the Goldhagen argument vis a vis the Germans.
I for one reject this argument. But I do not see any simple explanations of this. There are deep ethnic conflicts with wrongs committed on both sides. Outside powers of various sorts have gotten involved in various ways and in some cases exacerbated things, including some parties in the US and Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. This most recent war effort by the US and NATO is simply unacceptable and causing far more death and destruction than anything it is accomplishing. But I am more willing to blame it on misguided incompetence than on some grand imperial scheme to dismember socialist Serbia. What has been imperialistic has been the manner in which it has been conducted and the assumption of the right to conduct it in violation of international agreements and law. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu <pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu> Date: Thursday, May 20, 1999 6:54 PM Subject: [PEN-L:7086] Re: L. Proyect on Albanian Kosovars
>Barkley wrote:
>> Well since I've promised to say nothing
>>demonizing about that nice charmer in Belgrade
>>who undoubtedly cries at the opera, allow me to
>>annoy a bunch of people on this list on another front...
>
>Look, I took off from work today to write what I wrote, most of it relying
>on Miranda Vickers, a passionate defender of Kosovar self-determination. Go
>ahead and write your own fucking version of what happened in Kosovo from
>WWII to 1989. Be my guest. In the meantime, most of the crap you write
>seems completely innocent of historical accounts, either pro or con Kosovar
>nationalism. I am starting to get the picture that the Internet is not a
>scholarly resource for you, but an escape from scholarship. Perhaps it is
>amusing like talk radio. "Let's hear from our next caller. Barkley from
>Virginia. What's on your mind, Barkley?" "I think Milosevic is rotten and
>the Kosovars are decent." "Anything else". "Nope, that's about it." "Okay,
>let's hear from our next caller, Benny from the Bronx..."
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
>