Changes

Jump to: navigation, search

Against The Double Blackmail

129 bytes added, 17:39, 27 May 2019
The LinkTitles extension automatically added links to existing pages (https://github.com/bovender/LinkTitles).
{{BSZ}}
The top winner in the contest for the greatest blunder of 1998 was a [[Latin]]-American patriotic terrorist who sent a bomb [[letter]] to a US consulate in [[order]] to protest against the American interfering into the local [[politics]]. As a conscientious [[citizen]], he wrote on the envelope his [[return]] address; however, he did not put enough stamps on it, so that the post returned [[The Letter|the letter ]] to him. [[Forgetting]] what he put in it, he opened it and blew himself to [[death]] - a perfect example of how, ultimately, a letter always arrives at its destination. And is not something quite similar happening to the Slobodan [[Milosevic]] [[regime]] with the [[recent]] [[NATO]] bombing? It is interesting to watch in the last days the Serbian satellite [[state]] TV which targets foreign [[public]]: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees are mentioned only as [[people]] fleeing NATO bombing, so that the overall [[idea]] is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only [[place]] in ex-[[Yugoslavia]] that was not touched by the war raging all around it, is not irrationally attacked by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals... For years, Milosevic was sending bomb letters to his neighbors, from the Albanians to Croatia and Bosnia, keeping himself out of the [[conflict]] while igniting fire all around Serbia - finally, his last letter returned to him. Let us hope that the result of the NATO [[intervention]] will be that Milosevic will be proclaimed the [[political]] blunderer of the year.
And there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the West finally intervened apropos of Kosovo - let us not forget that it was there that it all began with the ascension to [[power]] of Milosevic: this ascension was legitimized by the promise to amend the underprivileged [[situation]] of Serbia within the Yugoslav federation, especially with [[regard]] to the Albanian "separatism." Albanians were Milosevic's first target; afterwards, he shifted his wrath onto [[other]] Yugoslav republics ([[Slovenia]], Croatia, Bosnia), until, finally, the focus of the conflict returned to Kosovo - as in a closed loop of Destiny, the arrow returned to the one who lanced it by way of setting free the [[spectre]] of ethnic passions. This is the key point worth [[remembering]]: Yugoslavia did not start to disintegrate when the Slovene "secession" triggered the domino-effect (first Croatia, then Bosnia, Macedonia...); it was already at the [[moment]] of Milosevic's constitutional reforms in 1987, depriving Kosovo and Vojvodina of their limited [[autonomy]], that the fragile [[balance]] on which Yugoslavia rested was irretrievably disturbed. From that moment onwards, Yugoslavia continued to live only because it didn't yet notice it was already [[dead]] - it was like the proverbial cat in the cartoons [[walking]] over the precipice, [[floating]] in the air, and falling down only when it becomes aware that it has no ground under its feet... From Milosevic's seizure of power in Serbia onwards, the only actual [[chance]] for Yugoslavia to survive was to reinvent its [[formula]]: either Yugoslavia under Serb domination or some [[form]] of radical decentralization, from a loose confederacy to the [[full]] [[sovereignty]] of its units.
It is thus easy to praise the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the first [[case]] of an intervention - not into the confused situation of a civil war, but - into a country with full sovereign power. Is it not comforting to see the NATO forces intervene not for any specific economico-strategic interests, but simply because a country is cruelly violating the elementary [[human]] rights of an ethnic group? Is not this the only hope in our [[global]] era - to see some internationally acknowledged force as a [[guarantee]] that all countries will respect a certain minimum of [[ethical]] (and, hopefully, also health, [[social]], ecological) standards? However, the situation is more [[complex]], and this complexity is indicated already in the way NATO justifies its intervention: the violation of [[human rights]] is always accompanied by the vague, but ominous reference to "strategic interests." The story of NATO as the enforcer of the respect for [[Human Rights|human rights ]] is thus only one of the two coherent stories that can be told [[about]] the recent bombings of Yugoslavia, and the problem is that each story has its own rationale. The second story concerns the other side of the much-praised new global ethical politics in which one is allowed to violate the state sovereignty on behalf of the violation of human rights. The first glimpse into this other side is provided by the way the big Western [[media]] selectively elevate some local "warlord" or dictator into the embodiment of [[Evil]]: Sadam Hussein, Milosevic, up to the unfortunate (now forgotten) Aidid in Somalia - at every point, it is or was "the [[community]] of [[civilized]] nations against...". And on what criteria does this selection rely? Why Albanians in Serbia and not also Palestinians in [[Israel]], [[Kurds]] in [[Turkey]], etc.etc? Here, of course, we enter the shady [[world]] of international [[capital]] and its strategic interests.
According to the "[[Project]] CENSORED," the top censored story of 1998 was that of a half-[[secret]] international agreement in [[working]], called MAI (the Multilateral Agreement on Investment). The primary [[goal]] of MAI will be to protect the foreign interests of multinational companies. The agreement will basically undermine the sovereignty of nations by assigning power to the corporations almost equal to those of the countries in which these corporations are located. Governments will no longer be able to treat their domestic firms more favorably than foreign firms. Furthermore, countries that do not relax their environmental, land-use and health and labor standards to meet the [[demands]] of foreign firms may be accused of acting illegally. Corporations will be able to sue sovereign state if they will impose too severe ecological or other standards - under NAFTA (whic is the main [[model]] for MAI), Ethyl Corporation is already suing Canada for banning the use of its gasoline additive MMT. The greatest [[threat]] is, of course, to the developing nations which will be pressured into depleting their [[natural]] resources for commercial exploitation. Renato Ruggerio, director of the World Trade Organization, the sponsor of MAI, is already hailing this project, elaborated and discussed in a clandestine manner, with almost no public [[discussion]] and media attention, as the "[[constitution]] for a new global [[economy]]." And, in the same way in which, already for [[Marx]], [[market]] relations provided the [[true]] foundation for the [[notion]] of [[individual]] freedoms and rights, THIS is also the obverse of the much-praised new global [[morality]] celebrated even by some neoliberal [[philosophers]] as signalling the beginning of the new era in which [[international community]] will establish and enforce some minimal [[code]] preventing sovereign state to engage in crimes against humanity even within its own territory. And the recent catastrophic [[economic]] situation in [[Russia]], far from [[being]] the heritage of old Socialist mismanagement, is a direct result of this global [[capitalist]] [[logic]] embodied in MAI.
How, then, are we to [[think]] these two stories together, without sacrificing the [[truth]] of each of them? What we have here is a political example of the famous drawing in which we recognize the contours either of a rabbit head or of a goose head, depending on our [[mental]] focus. If we look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community enforcing minimal human rights standards on a nationalist neo-[[Communist]] [[leader]] engaged in ethnic cleansing, ready to ruin his own [[nation]] just to retain power. If we shift the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the new capitalist [[global order]], defending the strategic interests of the capital in the guise of a disgusting travesty, posing as a disinterested enforcer of human rights, attacking a sovereign country which, in spite of the problematic [[nature]] of its regime, nonetheless [[acts]] as an obstacle to the unbriddled assertion of the [[New World Order]].
However, what if one should reject this [[double]] [[blackmail]] (if you are against NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic's [[proto-Fascist]] regime of ethnic cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global capitalist New World Order)? What if this very opposition between enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists, and the heroic last pockets of [[resistance]] against the New World Order, is a [[false]] one? What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are not the opposite to the New World Order, but rather its [[Symptom|SYMPTOM]], the place at which the hidden TRUTH of the New World Order emerges? Recently, one of the American negotiators said that Milosevic is not only part of the problem, but rather THE problem itself. However, was this not clear FROM THE VERY BEGINNING? Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the Western powers, playing for years into Milosevic's hands, acknowledging him as a key factor of [[stability]] in the region, misreading clear cases of Serb [[aggression]] as civil or even tribal warfare, initially putting the blame on those who immediately saw what Milosevic stands for and, for that [[reason]], desperately wanted to escape his grasp (see [[James]] Baker's public [[endorsement]] of a "limited military intervention" against Slovene secession), supporting the last Yugoslav prime minister Ante Markovic, whose program was, in an incredible case of political blindness, seriously considered as the last chance for a democratic market-oriented [[unified]] Yugoslavia, etc.etc.? When the West fights Milosevic, it is NOT fighting its [[enemy]], one of the last points of resistance against the [[liberal]]-democratic New World Order; it is rather fighting its own creature, a monster that grew as the result of the compromises and inconsistencies of the Western politics itself. (And, incidentally, it is the same as with Iraq: its strong [[position]] is also the result of the American strategy of containing [[Iran]].)
In the last decade, the West followed a [[Hamlet]]-like procrastination towards [[Balkan]], and the present bombardment has effectively all the [[signs]] of Hamlet's final murderous [[outburst]] in which a lot of people unnecessarily die (not only the King, his true target, but also his [[mother]], Laertius, Hamlet himelf...), because Hamlet acted too late, when the proper moment was already missed. We are clearly dealing with a [[hysterical]] [[acting out]], with an escape into [[activity]], with a gesture that, instead of trying to achieve a well-defined goal, rather bears [[witness]] to the fact that there is no such goal, that the [[agent]] is caught in a web of conflicting goals. So the West, in the present intervention which displays all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent [[aggressivity]] without a clear political goal, is now paying the price for the years of entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the final assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically accepting bombardments as the price to be paid.
When the Western powers [[repeat]] all the [[time]] that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that the Serb [[aggressive]] [[nationalism]] [[enjoys]] the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not [[passive]] victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the nationalist spell. On the other hand, this misperception is accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people are [[living]] in the [[past]], fighting again and again old battles, perceiving recent situation through old [[myths]]... One is tempted to say that these two cliches should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "[[good]]," since they let themselves be manipulated with [[obscene]] [[pleasure]]; there are also no "old myths" which we [[need]] to study if we are really to [[understand]] the complex situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its [[needs]], opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To paraphrase the old Clintonian motto: no, it's not the old myths and ethnic hatreds, it's the POLITICAL POWER STRUGGLE, stupid!
So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the Serb state propaganda: they regularily refer to [[Clinton]] not as "the American president," but as "the American Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on their state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were "Clinton, come here and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also his brain?". This is where the NATO planners got it wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable to forecast that the Serb reaction to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social [[life]]... And the Western counterpoint to this [[obscenity]] is the more and more openly racist tone of its reporting: when the [[three]] American soldiers were taken prisoners, CNN dedicated the first 10 minutes of the News to their predicament (although everyone knew that [[Nothing|NOTHING ]] will happen to them!), and only then reported on the tens of thousands of refugees, burned villages and Pristina turning into a [[ghost]] town. Where is the so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to protest THIS [[horror]] taking place in their own backyard, not only the - till now, at least, bombardments with relatively very low casualties?
The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnivalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic [[music]] on the streets, under the motto "With music against bombs!", playing the [[role]] of the defying heroes (since they [[know]] that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets). Although it may [[fascinate]] some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene carnivalization of the social life is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly dance on the streets, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place.
What all this means is that the [[impasse]] of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is not simply the result of some particular failure of strategic reasoning, but depends on the fundamental [[inconsistency]] of the very notion of which this intervention relies. The problem with NATO acting in Yugoslavia as an agent of "militaristic [[humanism]]" or even "militaristic pacifism" (Ulrich Beck) is not that this term is an Orwellian oxymorom (reminding us of "Peace is war" slogans from his 1984) which, as such, directly belies the truth of its position (against this obvious pacifist-liberal criticism, I rather think that it is the pacifist position - "more bombs and killing never brings piece" - which is a fake, and that one should heroically ENDORSE the [[paradox]] of militaristic pacifism); it is neither that, obviously, the targets of bombardment are not chosen out of pure [[moral]] consideration, but selectively, depending on unadmitted geopolitic and economic strategic interests (the obvious [[Marxist]]-style criticism). The problem is rather that this purely humanitarian-[[ethic]] legitimization (again) thoroughly DEPOLITICIZES the military intervention, changing it into an intervention into humanitarian catastrophy, grounded in purely moral reasons, not an intervention into a well-defined political struggle.
Furthermore, what we are witnessing today is the strange phenomenon of the blurred line of [[separation]] between private and public in the political [[discourse]]: say, when the [[German]] [[defense]] minister Rudolph Scharping tried to justify the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, he did not present his stance as something grounded in a clear cold decision, but went deep into rendering public his inner turmoil, openly evoking his doubts, his moral dilemmas apropos of this difficult decision, etc. So, if this tendency will catch on, we shall no longer have politicians who, in public, will [[speak]] the cold impersonal [[official]] [[language]], following the [[ritual]] of public declarations, but will share with the public their inner turmoils and doubts in a unique display of "sincerity." Here, however, the mystery begins: one would expect this "sincere" sharing of private dilemmas to act as a counter-measure to the predominant [[cynicism]] of those in power: is not the ultimate cynicist a politician who, in his public discourse, speaks in a cold dignified language about the high politics, while privately, he entertains a distance towards his statements, well aware of particular pragmatic considerations that lay behind these high principled public statements? It thus may seem that the natural counterpoint to cynicism is the "dignified" public discourse - however, a closer look soon reveals that the "sincere" revealing of inner turmoils is the ultimate, highest form of cynicism. The impersonal "dignified" public [[speech]] counts on the gap between public and private - we are well aware that, when a politician speaks in the official dignified tone, he speaks as the stand-in for the Institution, not as a [[psychological]] individual (i.e. the Institution speaks THROUGH him), and therefore nobody expects him to be "sincere," since that is simply NOT THE POINT (in the same way a judge who passses a [[sentence]] is not expected to be "sincere," but simply to follow and apply the law, whatever his sentiments). On the other hand, the public sharing of the inner turmoils, the coincidence between public and private, even and especially when it is psychologically "sincere," is cynical - not because such a public display of private doubts and uncertainties is faked, concealing the true privacy: what this display conceals is the [[Objective|OBJECTIVE ]] socio-political and ideological [[dimension]] of the decisions, so the more this display is psychologicaly "sincere," the more it is "objectively" cynical in that it mystifies the true social [[meaning]] and effect of these decisions.
The crucial feature of the [[postmodern]] ethnic [[fundamentalism]] is thus double: on the one hand, it is "reflexive" nationalism, a reflexively CHOSEN one, no longer the immediate relating to a national substance; on the other hand, it does designate the return to absolute immediacy - but, as [[Hegel]] would have put it, as the result of a long [[process]] of mediation - say, the stupid skinhead who beats up [[foreigners]] just for the fun of it IS the restored immediacy, the result of the total reflexivization of our daily lives.
The ultimate paradox of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is thus not the one about which Western pacifists complain (by bombing Yugoslavia in order to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, NATO effectively triggered a large-scale cleansing and thus created the very humanitarian catastrophy it wanted to prevent), but a deeper paradox involved in the [[ideology]] of [[victimization]]: the key aspect to take note of if NATO's privileging of the now discredited "moderate" Kosovar faction of Ibrahim Rugova against the "radical" Kosovo Liberation [[Army]] (not only does KLA get no [[help]], but even its financial assets are blocked, so that they cannot buy the arms and are thus exposed to the onslaught of much better equipped Serb army and slowly decimated). What this means is that NATO is actively blocking the only and obvious alternative to the ground intervention of Western military forces: the full-scale armed resistance of the Albanians themselves. (The moment this option is mentioned, fears start to circulate: KLA is not really an army, just a bunch of untrained fighters; we should not trust KLA, since it is involved in drug trafficking and/or is a [[Maoist]] group whose victory would led to a Khmer Rouge or Taliban regime in Kosovo...) In short, while NATO is intervening in order to protect the Kosovar victims, it is at the same time well taking care that THEY WILL REMAIN VICTIMS, not an [[active]] politico-military force capable of defending itself: even if NATO will eventually occupy the entire Kosovo, it will be a devastated country with victimized population, not a strong political [[subject]]. What we [[encounter]] here is again the paradox of victimization: the Other to be protected is good INSOFAR AS IT REMAINS A VICTIM (which is why we are bombarded with pictures of [[helpless]] Kosovar mothers, children and elder people, telling moving stories of their [[suffering]]); the moment it no longer behaves as a [[victim]], but wants to strike back on its own, it all of a sudden magically turns into a terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking Other...
A report by Steven Erlanger on the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians in The New York [[Times]] (May 12 1999, page A 13) renders perfectly this logic of victimization. Already its title is tell-taling: "In One Kosovo [[Woman]], An Emblem of Suffering" - [[The Subject|the subject ]] to be protected (by the NATO intervention) is from the outset [[identified]] as a powerless victim of circumstances, deprived of all political [[identity]], reduced to the bare suffering. Her basic stance is that of excessive suffering, of traumatic [[experience]] that blurs all differences: "She's seen too much, Meli said. She wants a rest. She wants it to be over." As such, she is beyond any political recrimination - an independent Kosovo is not on her agenda, she just wants the horror over: "Does she favor an independent Kosovo? 'You know, I don't care if it's this or that,' Meli said. 'I just [[want]] all this to end, and to feel good again, to feel good in my place and my house with my friends and [[family]].'" Her support of the foreign (NATO) intervention is grounded in her [[wish]] for all this horror to be over: "She wants a settlement that brings foreigners here 'with some force behind them.' She is indifferent about who the foreigners are." Consequently, she sympathizes with all the sides in an all-embracing [[humanist]] stance: "There is [[tragedy]] enough for everyone, she says. 'I feel sorry for the Serbs who've been bombed and died, and I feel sorry for my own people. But maybe now there will be a conclusion, a settlement for good. That would be great." - Here we have the ideological [[construction]] of the [[ideal]] subject-victim to whose aid NATO intervenes: not a political subject with a clear agenda, but a subject of helpless suffering, sympathizing with all suffering sides in the conflict, caught in the [[madness]] of a local clash that can only be pacified by the intervention of a benevolent foreign power, a subject whose innermost [[desire]] is reduced to the almost [[animal]] craving to "feel good again"...
Therein resides the [[falsity]] of the otherwise admirable Tariq Ali's essay on the NATO interventionin Yugoslavia: "The claim that it is all Milosevic's fault is one-sided and erroneous, indulging those Slovenian, Croatian and Western politicians who allowed him to succeed. It could be argued, for [[instance]], that it was Slovene egoism, throwing the Bosnians and Albanians, as well as non-nationalist Serbs and Croats, to the wolves, that was a decisive factor in triggering the [[whole]] disaster of disintegration."� The correct insight and the incredible naivety are here closely intermingled. It certainly is true that the main [[responsibility]] of [[others]] for Milosevic's success resides in their "allowing him to succeed," in their readiness to accept him as a "factor of stability" and tolerate his "excesses" with the hope of striking a deal with him; and it is true that such a stance was clearly discernible among Slovene, Croat and Western politicians (for example, there certainly are grounds to suspect that the relatively smooth path to Slovene independence involved a silent informal pact between Slovene leadership and Milosevic, whose project of a "greater Serbia" had no need for Slovenia). However, two things are to be added here. First, this argument itself asserts that the responsibility of others is of a fundamentally different nature than that of Milosevic: the point is not that "they were all equally [[guilty]], participating in nationalist madness," but that others were guilty of not being harsh enough towards Milosevic, of not unconditionally opposing him at any price. Secondly, what this argument overlooks is how the same reproach of "egoism" can be applied to ALL actors, inclusive of Muslims, the greatest victims of the (first [[phase]] of the) war: when Slovenia proclaimed independence, the Bosnisn leadership OPENLY SUPPORTED the Yugoslav intervention in Slovenia instead of risking confrontation at that early date, and thus contributed to their later sad fate. So the Muslim strategy in the first year of the conflict was also not without opportunism: its hidden reasoning was "let the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs bleed each other to exhaustion, so that, in the aftermath of their conflict, we shall gain for no great price an independent Bosnia"... (It is one of the ironies of the Yugoslav-Croat war that the legendary Bosnian commander who successfully defended the besieged Bihac region against the Yugoslav army, commanded two years ago the Yugoslav army units which were laying a siege to the Croat coast city Zadar!).
SORRY, WE DID NOT KNOW YOU ARE THE CHOSEN NATION! CARNIVAL IN THE EYE OF THE STORM
The standard topic of critical [[psychiatry]] is that a "madman" is not in himself mad, but rather functions as a kind of focal point in which the pathological tension which permeates the entire group (family) to which he belongs finds its outlet. The "madman" is the product of the group pathology, the symptomatic point in which the global pathology becomes visible - one can say that all other members of the group succeed in retaining (the appearance of) their sanity by condensing their patholoogy in (or by projecting it onto) the sacrificial figure of the madman, this exception who grounds the [[Global Order|global order ]] of group sanity. However, more interesting that this is the opposite case, exemplified by the life of Bertrand Russell: he lived till his death in his late 90s a long normal life, full of [[creativity]] and "healthy" [[sexual]] satisfactions, yet all people around him, all members of his larger family, seemed to be afflicted with some kind of madness - he had [[love]] affairs with most of the wives of his sons, and most of his sons and other close relatives committed [[suicide]]. It is thus as if, in a kind of [[inversion]] of the standard logic of group sanity guaranteed by the [[exclusion]] of the "madman," here, we have the central figure who retained (the appearance of) his sanity by way of spreading his madness all around him, onto all his close relatives. The task of a critical analysis is here, of course, to demonstrate how the TRUE point of madness of this social network is precisely the only point which appears "sane," its central paternal figure who perceives madness everywhere around himself, but is unable to recognize IN HIMSELF its true source.
And does the same not hold for the predominant way the Serbs perceive their role today? On the one hand, one can argue that, for the West, Serbia is a symptomal point in which the [[repressed]] truth of a more global situation violently breaks out. On the other hand, within ex-Yugoslavia, Serbs behaves as an island of sanity in the sea of nationalist/secessionist madness all around them, refusing to acknowledge even a part of responsibility. It is eye-opening to watch in the last days the Serb satellite state TV which targets foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees are mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO bombing; the overall idea is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that was not touched by the war raging all around it, is attacked by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals...
No wonder, then, that the atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnivalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto "With music against bombs!", playing the role of the defying victims (since they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets). Although it may fascinate some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene carnivalization of the social life is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly dance on the streets, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place. So when, in the nightime, crowds are camping out on the Belgrade bridges, participating in pop and ethnic music concerts held there in a defiantly festive mood, offering their bodies as the live shield to prevent the bridges from being bombed, the answer to this faked pathetic gesture should be a very simple one: why don't you go to Kosovo and make a rock carnival in the Albanian parts of Pristina? And when people are wearing papers with a "target" [[sign]] printed on them, the obscene falsity of this gesture cannot but strike the eye: can one imagine [[The Real|the REAL ]] targets years ago in Sarajevo or now in Kosovo wearing such signs?
In what is this almost [[psychotic]] [[refusal]] to perceive one's responsibility grounded? During a recent visit to Israel, a friend told me a hilarious [[joke]] about Clinton visiting Bibi Netanyahu: when, in Bibi's office, Clinton saw a mysterious blue phone, he asked Bibi what this phone is, and Bibi answered that it allows him to dial Him up there in the sky. Upon his return to the States, the envious Clinton demanded of his secret service to provide him such a phone at any cost. In two weeks, they deliver it and it works, but the phone bill is exorbitant - two million dollars for a one minute talk with Him up there. So Clinton furiously calls Bibi and complains: "How can you afford such a phone, if even we, who support you financially, cannot? Is this how you spend our [[money]]?" Bibi calmly answers: "No, it's not that - you see, for us, Jews, that call counts as a local call!" The problem with Serbs is that, in their self-perception, they tend more and more to imitate Jews and [[identify]] themselves as the people for whom the phone call to God counts as a local call...
When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the nationalist spell. On the other hand, this misperception is accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people are living in the past, fighting again and again old battles, perceiving recent situation through old myths... I am tempted to say that these two cliches should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "good," since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths" which we need to study if we are really to understand the complex situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its needs, opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To paraphrase the old Clintonian motto: no, it's not the old myths and ethnic hatreds, it's the POLITICAL POWER STRUGGLE, stupid!
So where, in all this, is the much praised Serb "democratic opposition"? One shouldn't be too harsh of them: in the present situation of Serbia, of course, any attempt at public disagreement would probably trigger direct death [[threats]]. On the other hand, one should nonetheless notice that there was a certain limit that, as far as I know, even the most radical Serb democratic opposition was never able to trespass: the farthest they can go is to admit the monstrous nature of Serb nationalism and ethnic cleansing, but nonetheless to insist that Milosevic is ultimately just on in the series of the nationalist leaders who are to be blamed for the [[violence]] of the last decade: Milosevic, Tudjman, Izetbegovic, Kucan, they are ultimately all the same... I am not claiming, agains such a [[vision]], that one should put all the blame on Serbs - my point is just that, instead of such pathetic-apolitical generalizations ("they are all mad, all to blame"), one should, more than ever, insist on a [[Concrete|CONCRETE ]] POLITICAL ANALYSIS of the power struggles that triggered the catastrophe. And it is the [[rejection]] of such an analysis that accounts for the ultimate [[hypocrisy]] of the pacifist attitude towards the Kosovo war: "the true victims are women and children on all sides, so stop the bombing, more violence never helped to end violence, it just pushes us deeper into the vortex..."
There is nonetheless [[another]], more disturbing aspect to be discerned in this false carnivalization of the war in the Serb media. The usual Serb complaint is that, instead of confronting them face to face, as it befits brave soldiers, NATO are cowardly bombing them from distant ships and planes. And, effectively, the lesson here is that it is thoroughly false to claim that war is made less traumatic if it is no longer experienced by the soldiers (or presented) as an actual encounter with another human being to be killed, but as an abstract activity in fron of a [[screen]] or behind a gun far from the explosion, like guiding a missile on a war ship hundreds of miles away from where it will hit its target. While such a procedure makes the soldier less guilty, it is open to question if it effectively causes less [[anxiety]] - one way to explain the strange fact that soldiers often fantasize about killing the enemy in a face to face confrontation, [[looking]] him into the eyes before stabbing him with a bayonet (in a kind of military version of the sexual False [[Memory]] Syndrome, they even often "[[remember]]" such encounters when they never took place). There is a long [[literary]] [[tradition]] of elevating such face to face encounters as an authentic war experience (see the writings of Ernst Juenger, who praised them in his memoirs of the trench attacks in World War I). So what if the truly traumatic feature is NOT the [[awareness]] that I am killing another human being (to be obliterated through the "dehumanization" and "objectivization" of war into a technical procedure), but, on the contrary, this very "objectivization," which then generates the need to [[supplement]] it by the [[fantasies]] of authentic personal encounters with the enemy? It is thus not the fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video [[game]] behind computer screens that protects us from the reality of the face to face killing of another person; it is, on the opposite, this fantasy of a face to face encounter with an enemy killed in a bloody confrontation that we [[construct]] in order to escape the [[trauma]] of the depersonalized war turned into an anonymous technological [[apparatus]]. So is not the Serb carnivalization of the daily life also ein Abwehr-Mechanismus gegen die Kriegsmachinerie?
Anonymous user

Navigation menu