Well, no, and I have tried to search around for a few more clues about Zizek but he is elusive. I pick up a dialectical teasing with contrasting subjective superficial perspectives on reality. There also appears to be much bitterness in his feelings towards Serbia.
What do you think he means by the "total occupation" of Serbia? Something different and perhaps more philosophically profound than the mere occupation of Serbia, to which he may also be opposed.
To be direct, I certainly do not support an occupation of Serbia, nor a defeat of the Serb people as such. My dilemma comes as a European this is all near home. If by the 90's our governments were getting involved in giving out food charity to victims of fascist attacks while maintaining their regional political and economic domination, I would rather they were confronting fascism directly. There is imperialist appeasement as well as imperialist aggression.
It is imperialist to be a condescending saviour as well as imperialist to be a military aggressor.
It was imperialist of the west to issue any threats to enforce the Rambouillet agreement. It was imperialist not to disabuse the KLA, that the west could win them effective independence. It was imperialist to try to manipulate the KLA in order to avoid the risk of a militant islamic movement establishing itself in Europe. It was imperialist for the USA to present a strategy to Europe that made Europe entirely dependent on the USA.
Perhaps the critical mistake was in withdrawing the OECD monitors instead of negotiating for them to be replaced with monitors from within Yugoslav civil society, negotiating by means of economic levers (imperialist measures of course but less violent). On the other hand the open fighting required some force to keep peace by suppressing one side. Either Serbian or UN or NATO. It was perhaps reasonable to suppose that Kosovo would lose at least 1/4 million refugees as a result of the fighting over the space of a year, while the KLA came to realise it could not win a people's war, and the figure could have been 1/2 million even without the trigger of NATO bombing. That figure would have caused fighting to break out in Macedonia with partition of that country on apartheid lines. It is not necessary to demonise imperialism in order to criticise it, just as it is not necessary to demonise Milosevic to criticise the regime.
Yet reactionary fascism is reactionary fascism, and somehow it has to be confronted. What would have been a better way to do it?
Chris Burford
London