[lbo-talk] Chomsky v Marko

[Michael Pugliese]

Moving to a more general view, the American left has often played an
honorable role in advancing human rights: the right to organize in labor
unions, the end of segregation, legal and customary, the rights of women,
and, in more recent years, the rights of gays have all been championed and
fought for by socialists. So why should socialist support for human rights
stop short of the rights of the Albanian Kosovars to free themselves from
effective apartheid imposed by Slobodan Milosevic?
Even more chillingly, why should the Kosovars right to life itself be
implicitly or explicitly questioned by people who are prepared to agitate
continuously for example, against the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal? Indeed,
what would impel Abu Jamal himself to inveigh against NATO when it tried to
stop the massacres of Albanians? (See Mumia & The War, Workers World
Newspaper 29 April 1999)
If I rehearse the arguments of others, and try to demolish them, it is not
only to score points. I want to demonstrate that behind these contradictory
arguments, sometimes espoused simultaneously by the same people, there is a
common thread of metaphysical Marxism, in which facts are hewn to fit "the
line." In general, the line dictates responses to events. Of course, in this
sectarian universe, the lines actually vary a lot.
However, a common characteristic is a deep distrust, verging on hatred of
the United States Government.  Based on Vietnam, Panama, Central America and
so on, this distrust is entirely understandable. Unfortunately a principle
of US culpability, if extrapolated backwards, would lead to support for the
Nazis and the Confederacy. Looking at the behavior of some the theory's
present proponents, I am glad that this was not put to the test.
For example, the LA Teach In was held in a synagogue, and I could not help
wondering if at a similar meeting held in 1939 people would  have joined the
German American League in denouncing the war. In fact, they did. Communists
for the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact did indeed denounce the imperialist
British Royal Navy for starving German workers with the blockade.
There was also an interesting contrast with European social democratic
movements. While many European socialists did indeed oppose NATO action, the
mainstream socialists generally supported the principle of NATO
intervention, even if there were reservations about the form - high altitude
bombing. In this, they also reflected popular majorities. The Democratic
Socialists of America attracted the obloquy of the sectarian left by
supporting the principle of intervention while deploring NATO's methods
which risked civilian casualties.
Indeed one reason for the much more robust response by NATO to Serb
atrocities in Kosovo than to the earlier much bloodier atrocities in Bosnia,
or to the shelling of Dubrovnik and Kosovar, was the change in Europe's
political complexion. When Slobodan Milosevic began his project for a
Greater Serbia in 1991, conservatives of various shades ruled most European
countries. In contrast, by the time of Rambouillet eleven of the fifteen EU
governments were ruled by social democratic parties in various forms.
Included among them were Britain, France, Germany and Italy, the most
powerful members both of NATO and the EU - apart from the United States.
While many of these parties had traveled a long way towards the center
ideologically, they did and do share some basic internationalist and
humanitarian core values. When they presented Kosovo as a humanitarian and
moral tragedy that had to be dealt with, they could call upon long memories
of failing to deal with Hitler's German or Mussolini's Italy in a timely way
to reinforce the idea that action must be taken. The consequences of
Chamberlain's dismissal of Czechoslovakia as a "far away country of which we
know little," had not made isolationism a popular trait in most European
countries.
Therefore, anti-war opposition in it was distinctly a minority in the
European Left with the exception of the Greek socialists and Italian
ex-communists, who both had reasons for mistrusting American motives.
Anti-war activists in the US made much of the protests at the German Green's
conference on the war, but missed the major point, that the majority of the
Greens and of the population supported Berlin's participation in the
coalition against Serbia.

--
Michael Pugliese