>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 05/27/99 02:07PM >>>
In message <v0401170bb37082318001@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>[An otherwise unremarkable statement by the Yugoslav Sociological Assn
>forwarded to the Marxist Literary Group list quoted a Washington Post op-ed
>by Robert Kaplan, theorist of humanitarian imperialism, that said we needed
>the Balkans to gain access to Caspian Oil.
The view that the war over Kosovo is being fought out of some narrow pecuniary interest strikes me as small-minded in the extreme. (I never believed that the Iraq war was fought over oil, for that matter.)
Why is it that the left feels the need to reduce itself to some kind of right-wing caricature of narrow economic determinism when talking about war? Politics operates at a level that is at many mediations from economics, and war even more so.
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Chas.: Yes, but ultimately doesn't social being determine social consciousness, and shouldn't that be reflected in a historical materialist explanation, despite Engels letter to Bloch and all that ?
What is the matter with finding that the world bourgeoisie have complex economic motives which are both narrow and specific to the region AND ,as your analysis below suggests, broader in maintaining a world dominant military force to police for global capitalism all over the world ? In this case, can't we say both are motives ?
I agree with much of your analysis regarding assemblyline "dictator" production. It really is getting ridiculous. The end of the Cold War has really screwed up the U.S. fundamental military propaganda story.
Charles Brown
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The well-springs of this war have very little to do with the region itself, but arise entirely out of the needs of the Western establishment. To force the point, this is the same war that was fought in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda and now reconvened in Kosovo.
The same routine operation of demonising the enemy dictator, throwing around accusations of genocide, war crimes and so on, the same 'humanitarian intervention' rhetoric comes into play.
The purpose of this rolling war against third world 'Hitlers' is to re- motivate the Western alliance after the Cold War. It is a war that is undertaken out of a desperate need to provide a rationale for Western superiority and control. They need an enemy against which they can invest themselves with a moral purpose.
The enemy is whichever luckless leader (usually a former ally) who gets volunteered for the job. Scrabbling around in the Kosovan dust looking for some kind of rare mineral wealth (or for that matter 19c ideas about routes of military influence) is a mistake. In fact it is what Marx called 'commodity fetishism', the belief that objects rule men. -- Jim heartfield