Re: East Timor ( was Abundance (was Naderism)
- Original Message - From: Rob Schaap [EMAIL PROTECTED] G'day Lou, This is an excellent publication, although I sharply disagree with their support of UN troops in East Timor and the Mideast. -*What I can't come at* is damning the west for going in to prevent actual -slaughter from turning into almost inevitable genocide, no matter how much the -west helped to produce the constituent circumstances. Actually, what is amazing about the condemnation of support by the West for the East Timorese is that for decades Chomsky and others have made the fact that the West did nothing back in the 1970s to stop the initial invasion and mass murder as proof that it had a double standard of letting its allies commit genocide while condemning others like Cambodia. If the US and Australia had done nothing and let Indonesia slaughter the East Timorese, I guarantee that those like Louis and others who condemned intervention would use the lack of intervention as proof of the willful indifference of the West to genocide. (Note Louis's post on the failure of the West to save the Jews from the Nazis). Creating damned-if-you-do rhetorical attacks on opponents is all fine as propaganda, but it ultimately has little intellectual heft and eventually the hypocrisy does undermine the credibility of those playing the game. The US is condemned for failure to intervene against allies, except when it does take out allies or support movements that the Left supports (see East Timor or Haiti), well that is just ideological justification to support the broader interventionist policies. Which may be true, but that is convincing only to those already agreeing with the analysis that whatever the US or the West does must by definition be bad; for everyone else, opposing interventions like East Timor does more to make left opponents look hypocritical than undermine support for the Western regimes. -- Nathan Newman
Re: Re: East Timor ( was Abundance (was Naderism)
Nathan Newman: Actually, what is amazing about the condemnation of support by the West for the East Timorese is that for decades Chomsky and others have made the fact that the West did nothing back in the 1970s to stop the initial invasion and mass murder as proof that it had a double standard of letting its allies commit genocide while condemning others like Cambodia. Actually, Chomsky stresses that there is a single standard: mass murder in the name of corporate profits. If the US and Australia had done nothing and let Indonesia slaughter the East Timorese, I guarantee that those like Louis and others who condemned intervention would use the lack of intervention as proof of the willful indifference of the West to genocide. (Note Louis's post on the failure of the West to save the Jews from the Nazis). I am opposed to US intervention in principle. Period. Although I would have supported Vietnam's intervention into Cambodia or Tanzania's into Uganda against Idi Amin. There is a class difference. Creating damned-if-you-do rhetorical attacks on opponents is all fine as propaganda, but it ultimately has little intellectual heft and eventually the hypocrisy does undermine the credibility of those playing the game. The US is condemned for failure to intervene against allies, except when it does take out allies or support movements that the Left supports (see East Timor or Haiti), well that is just ideological justification to support the broader interventionist policies. The only answer really is to overthrow the US government and send all the criminals like Clinton, Bush Sr. and Jr. to prison. That's how world peace will be achieved, not by providing left apologetics for their criminal behavior. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: East Timor ( was Abundance (was Naderism)
Let us suppose, for purposes of argument, that this little syllogism is correct in its premises, and that one can reduce genocide to capitalism, and capitalism to the USA. [I can't help but point out, however, if only in passing, that the formulation has the effect of allowing one to elide all of the instances of genocide we have faced in the immediate past, from the slaughter of Tsutsis and non-genocidal Hutus in Rwanda to the rapacious 'ethnic cleansing' undertaken by the forces under the command of Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia; it also manages to avoid discussions of such little matters as the death of millions of Ukrainians, Crimeans, Baltic nationalities of Estonians, etc. under Stalin, and the auto-genocide of Pol Pot.] What is proposed is that the East Timorese should lie down and accept slaughter at the hands of the Indonesians, rather than call for UN intervention, in order to maintain an ideological argument for building an alternative to American capitalism. The thought that an ideological alternative based on the sacrifice of entire peoples to genocide might not be very attractive to the great mass of working people does not seem to have crossed this mind. The main cause of genocide in the world is capitalism. The main capitalist power in the world is the USA. By providing legitimacy to its adventures overseas, we undercut our ability to present ourselves to working people as a political alternative. For an interesting take on humanitarian interventions, I recommend an article by Steve Shalom on znet at: http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/ShalomHumnCri.html. Here is an excerpt on the classic instance of the dubious character of such interventions. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- .
Re: Re: Re: East Timor ( was Abundance (was Naderism)
Leo Casey wrote: Let us suppose, for purposes of argument, that this little syllogism is correct in its premises, and that one can reduce genocide to capitalism, and capitalism to the USA. [I can't help but point out, however, if only in passing, that the formulation has the effect of allowing one to elide all of the instances of genocide we have faced in the immediate past, from the slaughter of Tsutsis and non-genocidal Hutus in Rwanda to the rapacious 'ethnic cleansing' undertaken by the forces under the command of Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia; it also manages to avoid discussions of such little matters as the death of millions of Ukrainians, Crimeans, Baltic nationalities of Estonians, etc. under Stalin, and the auto-genocide of Pol Pot.] The problem is that your history is unreliable. For example, the first occurrence of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia was directed against the Serbs of Kosovo. Extra! (www.fair.org) May/June 1999 Rescued from the Memory Hole The Forgotten Background of the Serb/Albanian Conflict By Jim Naureckas In times of war, there is always intense pressure for media outlets to serve as propagandists rather than journalists. While the role of the journalist is to present the world in all its complexity, giving the public as much information as possible so as to facilitate a democratic debate, the propagandist simplifies the world in order to mobilize the populace behind a common goal. One of propaganda's most basic simplifications is to divide participants in a conflict into neat categories of victim and villain, with no qualification allowed for either role. In the real world, of course, responsibility cannot always be assigned so neatly. Both sides often have legitimate grievances and plausible claims, and too often genuine atrocities are used to justify a new round of abuses against the other side. In presenting the background to the Kosovo conflict, U.S. news outlets have focused overwhelmingly on the very real crimes committed by Yugoslavian and Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians. In the process, they have downplayed or ignored the ways that Albanian nationalists have contributed to ethnic tensions in the region. These one-sided accounts have reduced a complex dynamic that calls for careful mediation to a cartoon battle of good vs. evil, with bombing the bad guys as the obvious solution. In order to eliminate any moral ambiguity from the NATO intervention, media attempts to provide context to Kosovo generally start the modern history of the conflict in 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic began using Serb/Albanian tensions for his own political ends. A New York Times backgrounder (4/4/99) by Michael Kaufman basically skips from World War II until 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic, now the Yugoslav president, first began exploiting and inflaming the historical rivalries of Albanians and Serbs. In Kaufman's account, the conflict was relatively dormant until Mr. Milosevic stirred up hostilities in 1989 by revoking the autonomous status that Kosovo had enjoyed in Serbia. The revocation of autonomy was a crucial decision, one which greatly destabilized the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian system and contributed to the country's breakup. The loss of autonomy was a grievance that helped pave the way for the rise of an armed separatist movement, in the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army. But the decision to end Kosovo's autonomous status did not come out of nowhere, or out of a simple Serbian desire to oppress Albanians. To get a more complicated picture of the situation in Kosovo in the '80s, Kaufman would only have had to look up his own paper's coverage from the era. Origins of ethnic cleansing? New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982 (11/28/82): In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs--Serbs and Montenegrins--out of the province. Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy, Binder reported (11/9/82): Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo's Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots. Ethnically pure, of course, is another way to translate the phrase ethnically clean--as in ethnic cleansing. The first use of this concept to appear in Nexis was in relation to the Albanian nationalists' program for Kosovo: The nationalists have a two-point platform, the Times' Marvine Howe quotes a Communist (and ethnically Albanian) official in Kosovo (7/12/82), first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a
Re: Re: Re: Re: East Timor ( was Abundance (was Naderism)
Leo is relatively new here, so he probably does not know that we have been over this a number of times. I don't think that there is much need to repeat it again. On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 11:25:09AM -0400, Louis Proyect wrote: Leo Casey wrote: Let us suppose, for purposes of argument, that this little syllogism is correct in its premises, and that one can reduce genocide to capitalism, and capitalism to the USA. [I can't help but point out, however, if only in passing, that the formulation has the effect of allowing one to elide all of the instances of genocide we have faced in the immediate past, from the slaughter of Tsutsis and non-genocidal Hutus in Rwanda to the rapacious 'ethnic cleansing' undertaken by the forces under the command of Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia; it also manages to avoid discussions of such little matters as the death of millions of Ukrainians, Crimeans, Baltic nationalities of Estonians, etc. under Stalin, and the auto-genocide of Pol Pot.] The problem is that your history is unreliable. For example, the first occurrence of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia was directed against the Serbs of Kosovo. Extra! (www.fair.org) May/June 1999 Rescued from the Memory Hole The Forgotten Background of the Serb/Albanian Conflict By Jim Naureckas In times of war, there is always intense pressure for media outlets to serve as propagandists rather than journalists. While the role of the journalist is to present the world in all its complexity, giving the public as much information as possible so as to facilitate a democratic debate, the propagandist simplifies the world in order to mobilize the populace behind a common goal. One of propaganda's most basic simplifications is to divide participants in a conflict into neat categories of victim and villain, with no qualification allowed for either role. In the real world, of course, responsibility cannot always be assigned so neatly. Both sides often have legitimate grievances and plausible claims, and too often genuine atrocities are used to justify a new round of abuses against the other side. In presenting the background to the Kosovo conflict, U.S. news outlets have focused overwhelmingly on the very real crimes committed by Yugoslavian and Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians. In the process, they have downplayed or ignored the ways that Albanian nationalists have contributed to ethnic tensions in the region. These one-sided accounts have reduced a complex dynamic that calls for careful mediation to a cartoon battle of good vs. evil, with bombing the bad guys as the obvious solution. In order to eliminate any moral ambiguity from the NATO intervention, media attempts to provide context to Kosovo generally start the modern history of the conflict in 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic began using Serb/Albanian tensions for his own political ends. A New York Times backgrounder (4/4/99) by Michael Kaufman basically skips from World War II until 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic, now the Yugoslav president, first began exploiting and inflaming the historical rivalries of Albanians and Serbs. In Kaufman's account, the conflict was relatively dormant until Mr. Milosevic stirred up hostilities in 1989 by revoking the autonomous status that Kosovo had enjoyed in Serbia. The revocation of autonomy was a crucial decision, one which greatly destabilized the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian system and contributed to the country's breakup. The loss of autonomy was a grievance that helped pave the way for the rise of an armed separatist movement, in the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army. But the decision to end Kosovo's autonomous status did not come out of nowhere, or out of a simple Serbian desire to oppress Albanians. To get a more complicated picture of the situation in Kosovo in the '80s, Kaufman would only have had to look up his own paper's coverage from the era. Origins of ethnic cleansing? New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982 (11/28/82): In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo's remaining indigenous Slavs--Serbs and Montenegrins--out of the province. Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy, Binder reported (11/9/82): Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo's Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots. Ethnically pure, of course, is another way to translate the phrase ethnically clean--as in ethnic cleansing. The first use of this concept to appear in Nexis was in
Re: Re: Re: East Timor ( was Abundance (was Naderism)
I am sure that my history is unreliable, by the lights of the history of former Yugoslavia according to Milosevic and his apologists. No doubt my history of Rwanda is also unreliable, by the lights of the history of Hutu Power and their apologists. And so on. I have yet to learn of the perpetrators of acts of genocide who did not find some reason to blame their victims, from the American campaign against the indigenous people of this content to the Nazis' denunciations of Jews to the genocidal Hutus' complaints against the Tsutsis. There is always some historical event, no matter how remote [Serbian ultra-nationalists love to go back centuries], which can be presented as justification for blood baths. Too bad that anyone who knows the first thing about the recent history of Kosova knows that prior to the repression begun by Milosevic, the Albanian majority in the province was organized behind a non-violent movement seeking national autonomy and full rights. The problem is that your history is unreliable. For example, the first occurrence of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia was directed against the Serbs of Kosovo. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- .
