Crossposted at Kos
Yesterday, in ToqueDeville’s long thread over at Kos, I ended up in a semi-shouting match, into which I shouldn’t have gotten in the first place, defending the IAC. I have never worked with the IAC, though I have several friends who have, but I felt it ridiculous that the IAC, top to bottom, was being singled out as a bunch of ‘WWP (world workers party) genocide deniers’. One bone that I picked with my interlocutor was the issue of the former Yugoslavia, for which I was promtply called a ‘genocide apologist’. Well, call me what you will, but I thought I might diary my position on the the former Yugoslavian situation – as it is both something on which I wouldn’t mind constructive feedback and something which may turn some heads.
I opposed the Kosovo war, first and foremost, because I am a pacifist [as some of you may know]. It wasn’t just that though. When I was in college in the early ’90’s, there was a very active group of Croatian nationals on campus who were among my acquaintences. I had listened to them on many occasions speak of the struggle for Croatian liberation and centralized Serbian offensives against it. And at the time, I generally agreed; that is until I started investigating their claims. To my surprise, I found that Croatian nationalism was actually rooted in the resurrection of the former Ustashe movement – the Croatian fascists that had committed numerous war crimes during WWII.
As the ’90’s progressed & more tumult, death and civil war emerged in the former Yugoslavia, I began to hear the same litany of offenses against the Serbs in the MSM as I had heard from my former Croatian friends. I was suspicious, to say the least. As the situation in Bosnia worsened, I did more research about the leader of the Bosnian calls for secession, Izetbegovic. Lo and behold, I found that he was also a former fascist as well.
And then there’s Kosovo. By that time, the internet was in full force, so it was pretty easy to find information about the ‘Contras of the ’90’s’ – the KLA. It was a thuggish group of ethnic purist drug-runners, doing the bidding of the opium producers in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Needless to say, the whole thing stank to high heaven.
But what about the ‘war crimes’? What about Srebrenica? What about the ‘rape camps’? [hmm, I think we’ve heard about those again recently]. So what about them. Is there any proof. Have we found any mass graves, anywhere? Do we have any corroborating proof of the existence of ‘rape camps’? No. And that should be patently obvious by the failure of the trial of Milosevic in a, no less, rigged courtroom.
So what really happened? Well, there was a civil war. Why? What caused it? Who’s to blame? A whole hell of a lot of forces caused it and a hell of a lot of people are to blame. Were there war crimes committed? Yes, but mostly not by the Serbs. In fact, the single most inexcusable war crime of the entire decade was the Croatian assault on Krajina, where 20,000 Serbs were slaughtered and 250,000 Serbs were driven from their homes, after which Croatian leader Tudjman stated, “There can be no return to the past, to the times when Serbs were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, a cancer that was destroying the Croatian national being… So it is as if they have never lived here…They didn’t even have time to take with them their filthy money or their filthy underwear!” So you want to talk about ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’… hmm
But what is really to blame? Greed. With the fall of the Soviet Union, every eastern block country was forced to make a deal with the devil – sell off your public works & we’ll turn back on the spicket of money. Most agreed, except Yugoslavia – the most ethnically diverse, successful socialist state of the eastern block. There was a lot of money to be made. The Serbian leadership stood in the way & with the economic insanity insuing from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ethnically diverse state was ripe for dissolution. It was the only way it could be coralled into globalism.
Books and articles that are very informative on this issue are below:
Problems with Milosevic’s Trial
Diane Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade
Michael Parenti on media issues
And many more.
And I leave this little rant, with a disclosure. I am not a “communist” [though I often self-depricatingly refer to myself as one]. I believe in Marx’s idea of freedom philosophically, i.e. we are all equal, self-creating beings deserving the conditions in which we can make our own lives, doing what we see fit, without the discrimination of class, race, religion, gender, or other idealogies that divide us against ourselves and each other. But I also believe Marxist economics to be a subset of capitalism [as he was himself an avowed capitalist]. Marxist economics need to be fought equally with Capitalist economics today, because they both rest in the fallacy of ‘endless resources’ & the primacy of production. These are both ideas that are leading humanity to it’s doom. So for all of you knee-jerk anti-communists out there [who have incidentally never read Marx], don’t assume that this defense Serbia has anything to do with my ‘Global Communist’ agenda.
