Yugoslavia: what the media is hiding (The Guardian)

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

Is the following bizarre report from the Guardian of London, the Manchester 
Guardian--I get the MGW, the overseas edition? seems unlikely. The tone is 
all wrong. Anyway, the story is quite mad: Another, and more plausible, 
reading, is that the USP succeeded in stuffing the ballot boxes for 
Parliament, where attention was less focused, but was unable to do so 
credibly in the presidential race, given the deep and intense hatred for 
Slobo. I think it is fantasy toi suppose that the US or NATO was interested 
in invading Serbia to boot him, even if he's succeeded in fixing the 
elections: both Gore and the Shrub reacted to thsi suggestionw ith horror 
when it it was proposed in the debates, and quite understandably. 

I am frankly extremely disturbed to see leftists rallying around Milosovic 
and painting for themselves a  picture of events so utteraly at variance with 
the view that almost everyone else shares with good reason: this that 
Milosovic was a nationalistic thug with no ideological commitments to 
anything that remained of thre once great tradition of Yugoslav 
socialism--his wife, in contrast,  was a sort of ideologue, but her 
"socialism" was window dressing. It was M's nationalism that  made him go. 

Although not a Hitler, Stalin, or even a Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi, at least 
with respect to domestic opposition--in fact he tolerated a moderately high 
level of dissent at home so far as keeping the secret police in check 
went--but M was a brute who connived with other like-minded thugs to break up 
the forner Yugoslavia, helped the Bosnian Serbs wage a horrible war in 
Bosnia, carried out repressions in Kosovo and finally enaged in a frenzy of 
ethnic cleansing what, if did not leave tens of thousands dead, effectively 
poisoned relations between ethnic Albananians and Kosovan Serbs for 
generations to come. 

I am far more understanding of those who rally around in defense of Castro 
and the Cuban revolution, where, despite Castro's real repressivedness and 
lack of toleration of opposition at home, there is a living revolution with 
real siocial accomplishments to defend that is something far better than 
anything else that might be proposed to put in its place. I don't share the 
view that Cuba isa  great model for socialism, but it is a model of 
socialism, obe of the few still in play, and I do not look forward with any  
pleasure to what is likely to happen when Castro dies.

But Milosovic personally destroyed the model of socialism that I myself 
substantially advocated--not as far as its politics went, but its economics 
and its multinationalism and cosmopolitican character. I thought that 
Yugoslav self-management and market socialism was our best hope--I still 
do--and so I have a personal grudge against Slobo as one of its killers. I 
find it ironic that those of you who most savagely railed against this 
conception of socialism are now praising its undertaker as its legitimate 
heir and champion, and calumniating some of who urged the socialsim you 
rejected as merely a capiatlsit charade because we supposed are now CIA 
mouthpieces and NATO propagandists! You have a lot of nerve. 

I hope for better.

--jks

In a message dated 10/7/00 7:09:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:

<< Milosevic's governing party won a tremendous victory by gaining a 

 majority in both the upper and lower houses of Parliament.

 

 It is this result that the western powers are out to undo at any 

 cost, even to the point of attempting to spark a civil war or by 

 cooking up a provocation to justify an invasion of Yugoslavia.

 

 They are creating an extremely dangerous situation. But first of all, 

 the West must hoodwink the people into believing that Milosevic lost 

 the election and has fraudulently rigged the results. >>