The URL for my full post is
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9904/0176.html
and it also refers to evidence of massacres that have not been alleged to be "alleged".
Hinrich's quote from me is correct but the meaning of 'genocide' is not even confined to individual massacres. Nor can it be. Serious killing of minority populations by the Nazis only began as late as 1941 with the extermination of jews in the invaded slav territories. Progressive democrats must be prepared to act well before this point. France and Britain are rightly condemned for not uniting with Soviet Russia in 1939 against Nazi Germany.
The international convention of genocide makes an attack on a population or major section of a population for example by expulsion, a crime against this convention.
With the evidence of the appalling war in Bosnia and the ruthlessness with which the Serbs had tolerated if not encouraged mass clearances of population in the war of 1998 against the KLA, the genocidal policy of the regime was clear. Terror was clearly involved in moving a million people over the border. This was contrary to the Yugoslav constitution as well as the international convention on terrorism. The most eloquent and introvertible evidence of genocide was not the deaths, which turned out to be substantially less than in Bosnia, even though the regime still used paramilitaries, but the systematic policy of removing all forms of identity from Kosovans leaving the country. That was what was really eloquent.
It is Hinrich's prerogative to make the strength of his point by not debating, at least with me. But I meant no afternoon tea party, even though the conventions of orderly exchange should be observed.
I rather interpret his comments as suggesting he did not greatly disagree with the facts of the picture that I summarised, otherwise he could have clearly refuted them easily, and preserved a clear sense of the separateness of his position from mine.
Hinrich and others underestimate the enormous damage that Christian Muslim enmity can do to the cause of the unity of the peoples of the world against capitalism, and are approaching the question overwhelmingly from the point of view of the duties of progressives within an imperialist country.
There are indeed fascist forces that regroup and rise in many parts of the world. Some use the term socialism for this purpose. The Milosevic regime sent Serbs to prison for exposing atrocities by their side.
We must continue to keep our guard up against fascism. In this there are strange alliances. Just as the international progressive community made alliance with US and British finance capital against Afrikaner capital to help bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa....
No one is compelled to respond to any post. But the debate we need to address is a complex one. How to unite the greatest number of progressive working people against capitalism globally. In the course of that at times international finance capital may have a progressive aspect by comparison with local fascist capital.
I tried to be transparent about the class basis for this: (5th May 1999 to LBO talk)
>Capitalism has outgrown the nation state. It requires large
>supra-national markets. It requires multi-ethnic tolerance.
...
>When Blair and Clinton say the muslims of Kosovo are our own fellow men and
>women they are speaking for the ethics of advanced monopoly capitalism.
>...
>That is the economics of this war.
As the war unfolded there was a clear divergence from a position of progressive armed intervention favoured by forces like the Guardian and Ken Livingstone, to an imperialist bombing campaign outside Kosovo itself while the politicians did everything to appease pacifist sentiment on the left in the USA and Germany by not risking any casualties or one precious Apache helicopter. They also quite deliberately failed to work with the KLA so they could impose an imperialist settlement from above instead of basing themselves on the right of nations to self determination.
What was the overall net effect of this war? Probably it will never be fought in the same way again. It will widen the gap between Europe and the USA. It probably ensured that the west would not try to interfere in the brutal crushing of the Chechens.
However Tudjman's party were heavily defeated in Croatia, and Milosevic's in Serbia. Kostunica has paid a visit to Sarajevo.
That is in the interests of an international finance capital.
BUT, and this is what Hinrich cannot even contemplate as an argument requiring serious answer, it is *also* enormously in the interests of the working peoples of the Balkans if they are to have any possibility of regrouping and uniting against the longer term exploitation of international finance capital.
"Workers of all countries unite!" Does it have to be spelled out how damaging communalism is to that? Can we not see that instead of uniting against global capital the peoples of South East Asia are tearing themselves apart in Christian-Muslim conflict? That is why it was our bounden duty as people from a mainly judaeo christian cultural background to urge the maximum efforts to protect a vulnerable muslim population. I would not cede one centimeter to Hinrich on the passion with which fundamentally we are guided by certain deep principles.
I neither expect nor request a response from Hinrich, but until we can analyse the complex contradictions with a sense of context and the overall goal worldwide, the left at a global level will simply be reactive rather than effective. Ridiculous though it may seem on an e-mail list, I assume at all times the purpose is ultimately to be effective.
This conflict is linked into the conflict of perspective between anarchist critics of global finance capital and marxist critics. I see global pacifists as closer to the former than the latter.
Chris Burford
London