Now that's just like Barkley to obtain vicarious pleasure in imagining His
Excellency dead and
then imagining as well that the present Kosovo mess might not have followed.
But why not
pick on some of the pro-NATO heroes? Imagine that Clinton's inordinate
sexual desires got the better of him last fall and he had a passionate
affair with Madeline Albright and she had a fatal heart attack during sex.
Imagine also that at the same time Tony Blair dies in a fatal accident on
his way to a dinner engagement with Margaret Thatcher. Now a diplomatic
solution allowing UN rather than NATO occupation forces to keep the peace in
Kosovo would be possible with the blessing of Milosevic and the FRY
parliament. Isn't that just as plausible a possible world?
Cheers, Ken Hanly
J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:
> Michael,
> I do not think that "evil emanates from a single
> person," certainly not always. But when one person
> seems to be generating a lot of it, I do not see any
> reason not to point a finger and hold responsibility.
> In this case, let's think about it carefully. This is
> repetition of stuff I have said before, but, oh well.
> Why did the Croatian-Bosnian war happen (in which
> over 200,000 people died)? I can see three theories:
> 1) imperialist plotting (Gervasi-Proyect)
> 2) inevitable contradictions of misguided Yugoslav
> economic system
> 3) rampant and unavoidable nationalism
> 4) rampant nationalism exacerbated by power-hungry
> Milosevic.
> I take seriously the work of Sean Gervasi and I do
> think that German and to a lesser extent US plotting
> contributed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. But I also
> think that once democracy of some sort was allowed that
> probably Slovenia and Croatia at a minimum would have
> seceded. They had long resented having funds redistributed
> to Kosovo-Metohija and Macedonia. Maybe they could
> have been kept in a federation within a democratic
> structure, just as North Italy stays in Italy despite unhappiness
> over similar redistributions to the Mezzogiorno. But that
> would have required that there be no threat of a takeover
> and imposition of authority by one group led by a noisy
> leader, which was definitely going on after 1989.
> Much as I have been a fan of the old Yugoslav system
> and defended elements of it on this list, nevertheless, it
> did experience extreme difficulties in the 1980s. Growth
> stopped, unemployment soared, and inflation seriously took
> off. Some of this was exacerbated by IMF requirements
> (imperialist plotting!), but it must also be faced that the IMF
> was able to get its mitts in because of the high foreign
> indebtedness that Yugoslavia had acquired. That seems to
> be something that soft budget constraint market socialist
> countries as a group experienced. Thus, Hungary and Poland
> also had high foreign indebtedness in contrast with
> Czechoslovakia, a hardline command socialist economy.
> Furthermore, for whatever reason, we know that regional
> inequality had sharply increased. Paul Phillips has suggested
> that some of that may have been reversed or at least slowed
> during periods after workers' management became more
> influential. But we know that Slovenia in particular did quite
> well, with an unemployment rate averaging only 1.7% in the
> 1976-87 period while Kosovo-Metohija's averaged 29.6%
> during the same period, and with the ratio of their per capita
> incomes being about nine to one by the time of the breakup,
> this despite all the redistribution of revenues from Slovenia
> to Kosmet.
> Of course one can argue that the imperialism aspect
> showed up in the foreign indebtedness, that this was the
> inevitable outcome of market socialism and the integration
> of Yugoslavia into the world economy on a market basis.
> That may be, but then somehow Hungary has avoided getting
> into wars with Romania, Slovakia, or Serbia over the Hungarian
> populations located in those countries in territories that used
> to be part of Hungary. Why is that?
> Certainly there are deeply rooted ethnic and religious
> conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. But they were not always
> leading to wars, and in the nineteenth century there was a
> genuine "Yugoslav nationalist" movement based on the idea
> that the south Slav peoples had more in common than separated
> them. I would argue that the tragic economic differences that
> have emerged for whatever reasons have certainly exacerbated
> all of this. But they still do not explain war, slaughter, "cleansing."
> Well, we get down to the hard fact that 600 years after the
> Battle of Kosovo Polje, a power hungry League of Communist
> party leader for Serbia gave a firebreathing speech at Kosovo
> Polje (June 28, 1989) demanding an end to autonomy for
> Kosovo-Metohija and a reimposition of Serbian rule, despite
> the Serb population being a very small minority. There is no
> question that this speech was reported widely throughout
> the former Yugoslavia and that this actively stimulated the
> separatist movements in Slovenia and Croatia and also in
> other republics as well that had not had strong separatist
> movements before then (Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia).
> Ethnic Serbs did attack first in Vukovar, in Krajina, and in
> Bosnia-Herzegovina, all with the strong support of Milosevic,
> thus fully justifying the paranoia of those who wanted out.
> Of course the rampant nationalism argument would say
> that even if Milosevic had died in 1986, then some other
> chauvinist schmuck would have taken over, like Arkan or
> Vojislav Seselj. Maybe. But it may well also be that without
> Milosevic's 1989 speech and subsequent actions following up
> on it that such political figures would never had an opening,
> that Serbian politics would have resembled Hungarian and
> that there would 200,000+ people alive today who are not
> alive. Unfortunately, all though the other factors are certainly
> in there, it is very hard to avoid this one.
> Social forces are obviously important, but would
> World War II in Europe happened if Adolf Hitler had died
> in World War I?
> Barkley Rosser
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Friday, May 14, 1999 12:34 PM
> Subject: [PEN-L:6814] Re: Re: Gregor Gysi letter to Slobodan Milosevic
>
> >Barkley raises an important question. If we buy into the fact that all
> evil
> >emanates from a single person, then the strategy of demonization works
> well. I
> >suspect we should look at larger social forces.
> >
> >
> >J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:
> >
> >> would the 200,000+ of the
> >> Croatian-Bosnian war be alive if he had died of a
> >> heart attack in 1986?)--
> >
> >Michael Perelman
> >Economics Department
> >California State University
> >[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >Chico, CA 95929
> >530-898-5321
> >fax 530-898-5901
> >
> >
