>Whilst the KLA leadership pretty well marked themselves as bad eggs (after
>all, we got to hear an awful lot from them), I think it'd hardly be fair to
>characterise everyone who was forced or moved by circumstances to join the
>KLA as patriarchs and reactionaries. Many KLA fighters, especially in
>latter days, did indeed see themselves as socialists
I heard the same from many Western sources, but to what extent did they really see themselves as socialists and to what extent was the socialist label an ascription by the West (which initially simply saw the KLA as terrorists, and most terrorists, in the Western eyes, were Reds or Red proxies)?
Anyhow, suppose, for the sake of an argument, that you are right and that "Many KLA fighters, especially in latter days, did indeed see themselves as socialists." In my opinion, being self-described socialists has never been _by definition_ antithetical to being reactionary patriarchs. There are socialists, and there are socialists, you see.
BTW, the U.S. government did not shy away from allying itself with socialists (self-described or otherwise): partial alliance with Stalin's USSR in the latter days of WW2; aids for Yugoslavia in the days of anti-Stalinism; Nixon in China; support of Pol Pot (against the Vietnamese Communists); right-wing socialists of the West; etc. Imperialists have been flexible when the occasions demanded.
> >The West knows how to choose "the lesser of two evils" according to its
> >own >economic & geopolitical criteria.
>
>Not sure about that, either, Yoshie. They don't always get that right.
>I'm of the opinion, for instance, that the US's knee-jerk anti-independence
>stance in southern Africa, Indo-China and the like was pretty foolish in
>their own terms. They drove many a nationalist into Moscow's and Beijing's
>arms by simple virtue of reading every instance of pro-independence
>sentiment as necessarily bolshie. Much better to have seduced 'em than
>antagonised 'em, I reckon.
As I said, the West has chosen its allies "according to its own economic & geopolitical criteria," which are not the criteria of wise choices imagined by Habermasian critics of Habermas such as yourself.
> >Many leftists in the West, however, would
> >rather say a "pox on both houses," so as to maintain the beautiful
> >soul: the beautiful soul "lives in dread of besmirching the splendour
> >of its inner being by action and an existence," as Hegel criticized
> >in the _Phenomenology of the Spirit_. Imperialists could care less
> >about the beautiful souls of the Left, though. In their eyes, anyone
> >who opposes imperial ventures out of whatever motive -- socialist,
> >nationalist, anarchist, environmentalist, indigenist, religious
> >pacifist, black nationalist, contrarian, etc. -- is _by definition_
> >supporting the Enemy (in this case Milosevic); Remember how MLK was
> >treated by the U.S. government. And, objectively speaking,
> >imperialists are correct, at least in short terms: (objective, not
> >subjective) opposition to imperialists attacks = (objective, not
> >subjective) support of those who are attacked.
>
>Well, I reckon we fall too often for the terms of public debate. Hussein
>and Milosevic aren't difficult to demonise, and it's understandable that
>westerners would like to give their elected leaders, their taxes and their
>brave boys & girls in uniform the benefit of any doubt. As long as we
>confine our interventions to the contests of the moment and the gladiators
>beloved of the mass media (ie individualism and dehistoricisation), we
>might as welll fart at a thunderstorm.
>
>How did 'we' get to this? What role did 'we' play? How foreseeable was
>this? How often in other times and places have 'we' done the same things
>with the same consequences? Qui ganare? Questions like that are the way
>to go, I reckon. Each moment has a political economic history, and part of
>that history is always the suppression of that fact.
For what it's worth, I wrote the following thoughts for PEN-L, etc.:
+++++
>In response to the posting below by the editor of left.ru, we would say
>this:
>as a whole (and there are exceptions), the Western Left does not completely
>reject the mentality, the false consciousness created by its own ruling
>class, and this often cripples the Left when it comes to offering
>solidarity. This is particularly true if the Western media have
>systematically demonised a target for a while. It is clear to us from the
>behaviour of the Western Left that, if their own media keep calling somebody
>"the Beast of Belgrade" (for example), a good portion of the Left will start
>to be influenced by this before too long.
>On a different matter, statements distributed by us don't seem to be going
>out on the L-I list. Is there a reason for this?
>
>DHKC London Information Bureau
What DHKC LIB wrote is true, especially in that the U.S. Left's response has been very much media-driven, both in terms of which place in the world it pays attention to and how issues get framed in left discourse. This was not always the case, though; for instance, during the heyday of anti-colonial and/or revolutionary nationalist struggles (Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Intifada of Palestinians, etc.), the mass media in the West also demonized challengers to the Western hegemony, but leftists, on average, did not succumb to the media manipulation to the extent they did in the case of Yugoslavia.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc was a watershed event, in terms of the consciousness of the Western Left. No, even before the formal dissolution, the change in the Soviet Union had begun:
***** NARRATOR: [September 17, 1990, Helsinki, Finland] President Bush had isolated Saddam diplomatically. He met Mikhail Gorbachev to ask the Soviet Union not to stand in the way if America went to war with Iraq. Iraq was an old ally of the Soviet Union, but Gorbachev agreed. The cold war had just ended. Gorbachev did not want to risk his new relationship with America.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, Soviet President: [through interpreter] This was a key meeting. A country had been occupied. If, at that point in history, we had not been able to deal with that situation, everything else we had worked for would have been null and void.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_a.html> *****
In my view, the change had a disorienting effect on leftists in the West (this despite the fact that not all leftists in the West had looked upon the USSR favorably before its endgame).
Beyond the impact of the end of the USSR, more generally, many Western leftists, too, have become affected by the ascendancy of capitalism worldwide. They have lost a long-term goal (socialism worldwide), and short-term issues have begun to be framed in terms of "human rights." And many leftists now envision the Western military, economic, & diplomatic muscle as a vehicle for "humanitarian interventions." (It is telling that even the recent activist upsurge in the West -- anti-Sweatshop, anti-globalization, etc. -- has been often colored by such sentiments & sometimes by outright protectionist demands.)
It is ironic that, just at the moment when imperialism became more powerful than ever with the loss of the Soviet countervailing force, many Western leftists lost sight of imperialism altogether. To many of them, heads of states on the periphery are as bad as the empire, and for some, they are the main enemy. This loss of anti-imperialist consciousness is sometimes couched in the language of the defense of the working class and/or ethnic minorities in the states under attack by imperialists. No doubt they sincerely believe what they say; nonetheless, they forget that the energetic defense of countries attacked by the empire should not be predicated upon the said countries being paragons of socialist virtues.
At the level of rhetoric, terms revived from the days of World War II -- fascism, genocide, holocaust, etc. -- have done a good job of intimidating even leftists who were inclined not to accept the mass media's framing into toning down opposition to imperialism, lest they became associated with "fascism." This fear made an anti-war movement against the bombings of Yugoslavia very small. (Many leftists have said, by way of excuse, that they did not want to be part of the movement dominated by "Serbian nationalists"; this excuse, however, reveals that they were not well acquainted with the politics of Serbian diaspora in the West, since most diasporic Serbs have been liberals rather than nationalists -- it would have been hard to find supporters of the Milosevic government among them, too.) ++++++
Yoshie