[lbo-talk] Chomsky v Marko

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Sat Nov 19 12:31:30 PST 2005


No doubt we will all be reading Marko Hoare when Noam Chomsky is long forgotten.

Marko writes of "the Clinton-Major policy of appeasing Milosevic's Serbia ", but between March 24th and June 8th 1999, Nato forces, backed by President Clinton bombed Belgrade every night, in a campaign aimed at Slobodan Milosevic. (And so we are clear, myself, I would not call that genocide, even though most of the people who were killed were Serb.) In May of that year, Clinton backed the decision by the International Criminal Court to indict Milosevic. Perhaps the point is truer of Clinton before 1999, or of Major, and especially Douglas Hurd. But even Major considered that "Milosevic was the driving force" behind the conflict. (Autobiography, 546).

I think the point is that Marko considers anything less than outright attack as appeasement. This is the smear implicit in Marko's argumentation. If you do not endorse his programme of action, then you are by definition on the other side. That is the kind of demand for obedience that puts Marko outside of the ordinary rules of debate, it seems to me.



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