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2010/12/1 Tom Cod <tomc...@gmail.com>: > ====================================================================== > Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > ====================================================================== > > > Then again, we had the Chetnik Great Serbian chauvinist collaborators of the > Axis in World War 2, Chetnik having been also aptly used as a political > epithet by Milosevic's political opponents against him and his followers in > the 80s and 90s. Emblematic of that, forces allied with Milocevic have > been demanding that Tito's remains be disinterred from his tomb in Belgrade > and sent back to Zagreb based on his ethnicity, at least according to Tito's > grandson. So let's not be too knee jerk in our analysis. The Chetnik may have been "Great Serbian" in the sense that they were monarchists and the monarchy was a Serbian monarchy. But it is seldom said that the agreement with the "barbaric" Serbians allowed the "civilized" Croatian (and Slovenian) bourgeoisies to step away from the losing party in 1918, and that this was a bitter medicine for those ethnocentrist elements in the Yugoslavian constituency. In fact, as a bourgeois fraction of the national front, the Chetniks were ambiguous in their relation with the foreign occupants, and this is why in the end the Yugoslavian people decided to support Titoist guerrillas, not just socialist but also representative of the lower strata of the peasantry as against the Chetniks. In fact, it is my own opinion that one of the worst mistakes of Titoism was to water down the sinister role of the Croatian and Slovenian petty provincial "nationalisms", who had never fought against the Austro Hungarian Empire up to the end of World War I but only wanted to have a "cultural-national" autonomy WITHIN that rotten body of shitty semi-feudal peasant exploitation with some privileged nodes of modern (but weak) capitalism. The Czech, Slovenian and Croatian bourgeoisies (who knows, even some of the subaltern classes too?) considered themselves above their less lucky "fellow" Slavs: Slovakia, Serbia, etc. and never fully accepted to be ruled by any of them or even sharing power with them. That is why every time imperialism reasserted its power in the area (by way of Germany during the late 30s/early 40s, by way of NATO after 1989) there appeared a fissiparous policy supported by those bourgeoisies. While the grip of the Serbian Royalists on the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croatians and Slovenians was resented by those more "Westernlike" sections of the country as an Oriental yoke, and today´s defenders of the break up of Yugoslavia consider it as a general Serbian malady, nothing is said of the supremacist environment that prevailed in Czechoslowakia, which during the 20s and 30s never accepted full equality between the West and the East of the country unless under the rule of the more "civilized" -i.e. half-Germanized- West. When Titoists got to power on a mainly Serbian-led war effort, and by Serbian-led I mean "led by the lower ranks of the Serbian society", they tried to begin to put an end to the "Western" tendencies of the Northern Republics. Among other things, they raised the Chetnik issue to an IMHO unacceptable equality with the Ustasha, and later on made the latter issue a minor one as compared to that of the Chetniks. The civil war between the Serbs thus became a substitute for the civil war between the lower strata of the Yugoslav society and _all_ of its bourgeois constituencies, where the leading role was _not_ that of the Serbian bourgeoisies but that of the Croatian bourgeoisies. Which had a temporary consequence of appeasement in the Northern Republics, but eventually turned out to become a part of the effort of Satanization of the struggle for Yugoslav unity during the 90s. > Like the Irish in > 1916, the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo had the right to accept material aid > from whomever. To me it is ironic, looking for example at the review pages > of Johnstone's books on amazon, to see leftists lining up with anti-Islamic > bigots worthy of O'Reilly and Beck. The Machiavellian dictum, often > ascribed to Mao, that your enemies enemy is your friend, has a lot of > applicability, but it is not a universal substitute for a concrete analysis > that starts from the facts. The Muslims of Bosnia and Kossovo had NEVER been a national minority in Yugoslavia up to the moment when Washington geniuses came to discover that Germany had taken the lead in the game of breaking up Yugoslavia. This is a first difference between them, then, and the NATIONAL insurgence in Ireland. Thinking differently implies to accept the British imperialist point of view that the Irish question is a "religious", and not a national, question. This said, the Muslims of Bosnia and Kossovo, of course, had every right to accet material aid from whomever, but in the same predicament is anyone who leads a struggle. What we must assess is the validity of that struggle, from the point of view of the general struggle for socialism. When your struggle appears as an outcome of an inter-imperialist brawl within the general imperialist movement to break apart a somewhat rebel country, I find it difficult to support it from the point of view of socialists. Not, of course, from the point of view of the imperialist bourgeoisies. But I suppose Tom Cod is NOT on this latter side... -- Néstor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
