>On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> >LM's apology for Serb murder
>
> Whoa, Nathan. Isn't this a little overheated? I haven't seen LM
> taking an overtly pro-Serb line; it struck me more as a critique of
> NATO demonization of the Serbs. If what was called a death camp was
> not in fact a death camp, that doesn't qualify as apology for murder,
> does it?
I did not call it a death camp and neither did Penny Marshall or Ian Williams. Some people seeing the pictures did so, but LM went further than complaining about possible misuse of a photo. They published a report accusing Marshall and Williams of a fraudulent report AND TO THIS DAY refuse to admit that the camp was even a "prison", much less that torture and murder occurred there.
To engage in such a position is an apology for Serb murder that occurred at that camp, irregardless of larger issues. What could be a clearer apologia?
But to jump to the bigger issue:
>I think the postwar body counts have shown pretty conclusively that
>the genocide rhetoric - which, as I recall, you endorsed - was
>completely unearned. And I say this as no fan of Serbia or Milosevic.
Even your statement reflects the apologia that has fueled the attacks on leftists who supported intervention in the Balkans. You take the most extreme statement made, interpret it as even more extreme than what was meant, than say, "see the Serbs only killed 10,000 people and only expelled one million from their homes", and in Bosnia, they only committed wholesale slaughter and ethnic clensing, but since that does not match your definition of genocide equalling 50% murder of a population, so the Serbs were therefore unfairly crticized. It's an odd rhetorical style, which was reflected in the fact that NATO during the Kosovo war estimated that roughly 10,000 people had been killed, and lo-and-behold, that's about the number that has come out after the war's end. Yet you and others have seized on the outer-bound estimates by a few officials as what "was really estimated."
For the record, here is how I situated the repression in Kosovo last March, comparing it to Israel in relation to the Palestinians:
"Actually Doug, the full-scale level of ethnic clensing in the Balkans in the last few years is on a level few areas in the world match at the moment. The Kurds in Turkey have been repressed but the Turkish majority has not actually sought to drive them out of their homes and even out of their country. The Israel analogy to the Palestinians (which others on this list rushed to hold up in its unique brutality precisely because people were losing their homes) is probably the best on."
And as for the genocide word, here's is a post on April 12, 1999:
"Various people have posted numbers comparing deaths in Rwanda and other countries with Kosovo deaths as of the day of military intervention. The point of the intervention was not to respond to a genocide that had already occurred, but to prevent one."
And I also noted last March this odd mirror-image apolgia cycle by certain leftists in response to government propaganda:
"In fact, it is parts of the anti-imperialist Marxist Left that mirror the US government's inconsistency in shaping propaganda to downplay the human rights violations of those regimes that the US government targets, often flip-flopping denunciation of "US puppets" to support those "fighting imperialism." Sure there is a nuance or two of "critical support" with reservations, but the impression given by the weight of [various posts] of Serbian support mirrors the US government propagand of war."
The reason I posted this from last year is that it illustrates the problem that you and others keep imagining that others have said more extreme things than they did, then when it turns out that "only" mass murder occurred rather than genocide, suddenly the Serbs appear to be less murderous compared to an outrageous standard of crime you have established.
The bottom-line is that if the Serb killings were relatively low by your view, Serb deaths due to NATO intervention were completely negligible. Yet you and others continue to downplay the first and play up the later.
-- Nathan Newman