Changes
The LinkTitles extension automatically added links to existing pages (https://github.com/bovender/LinkTitles).
</font><p class="b" align="justify"><font face="Times New Roman,Times,Courier" size="3">NATO's bombing of [[Yugoslavia]] is over. It is therefore [[time]] to ask what the [[meaning]] of this war war. What were its [[ideological]] and [[political]] consequences?<br>
Not long ago, Vaclev [[Havel]] maintained (in an essay titled "Kosovo and the End of the [[Nation]] [[State]]") that the bombing of Yugoslavia, for which there was no UN mandate, "placed [[human]] rights above the rights of states. . . . But this did not come into [[being]] in some irresponsible way, as an act or [[aggression]] or in contempt of [[international law]]. On the contrary. It happened [[about]] of respect for rights, for rights that stand above those which are protected by the [[sovereignty]] of states. The Alliance acted out of respect for [[human rights]], in a way commanded not only by [[conscience]] but by the relevant documents of international law." This "higher law" has its "deepest roots [[outside]] the perceptible [[world]]." "While the state is the [[work]] of man, man is the work of God." In [[other]] [[words]]: NATO can violate international law because it is acting as the immediate [[instrument]] of God's "higher law." If that's not [[religious]] [[fundamentalism]], the [[concept]] has no meaning.<br>
Havel's [[statement]] is a great example of what Ulrich Beck back in April called "military [[humanism]]" or "military pacifism" (in a feuilleton in the <i>Sueddeutscher Zeitung</i>). The problem is not so much one of Orwellian oxymora like the famous "War is Peace." (In my opinion the term "pacificism" was never meant seriously. When [[people]] buck up and are honest with themselves, the [[paradox]] of military pacificism [[disappears]].) [Translators note: "pacifism" has a broader meaning in [[German]] than it does in [[English]] - it includes roughly everything we would [[think]] of as "anti-war sentiment" or "anti-war movement." So a free [[translation]] of "military pacificism" would be roughly "war by people that have always said they were against it." But Beck's phrase is kind of famous, so let's leave it.] The problem is also not that the targets of the bombing weren't chosen on entirely [[moral]] grounds. The [[real]] problem is that a purely humanitarian, purely [[ethical]] justification for NATO's [[intervention]] completely depoliticizes it. NATO has shied away from a clearly defined political solution. Its intervention has been cloaked and justified exclusively in the depoliticized [[language]] of [[universal]] [[Human Rights|human rights]]. In this context, men and [[women]] are no longer political [[subjects]], but [[helpless]] victims, robbed of all political [[identity]] and reduced to their naked [[suffering]]. In my opinion, this idealist [[subject]]-[[victim]] is an ideological [[construct]] of NATO.<br>
Not only NATO, But Also Nostalgics [[on the Left]], Misunderstand the Causes of the War.<br>
Today we can see that the paradox of the bombing of Yugoslavia is not the one that Western pacifists have been complaining about -- that NATO set off the very ethnic cleansing that it was supposed to be preventing. No, the [[ideology]] of [[victimization]] is [[The Real|the real ]] problem: it's perfectly fine to [[help]] the helpless Albanians against the Serbian monsters, but under no circumstances must they be permitted to throw off this [[helplessness]], to get a hold on themselves as a sovereign and independent political subject - -- a subject that doesn't [[need]] the kindly shelter of NATO's "protectorate." No, they have to stay victims. The strategy of NATO is thus [[perverse]] in the precise [[Freudian]] [[sense]] of the [[word]]: The other will stay protected so long as it remains the victim.<br>
But it's not only NATO that depoliticized the [[conflict]]. So has its opponents on the pseudo-Left. For [[them]], the bombing of Yugoslavia played out the last act of the dismemberment of Tito's Yugoslavia. It acted out the end of a promise, the collapse of a Utopia of multi-ethnic and authentic [[socialism]] into the confusion of an ethnic war. Even so sharp-sighted a political [[philosopher]] as [[Alain]] [[Badiou]] still maintains that all sides are equally [[guilty]]. There were ethnic cleansers on all sides, he says, among the Serbs, the Slovenes and the Bosnians. "Serbian [[nationalism]] is worthless. But in what respect is it worse than the [[others]]? It is more popular and it goes back further in time, it has more weapons at its disposal and in the [[past]] it doubtless had more opportunities to act out its criminal passions . . Certainly, [[Milosevic]] is a brutal nationalist, just as much as his colleagues in Croatia, Bosnia or Albania . . . From the beginning of the conflict the West has been on the side of the weaker nationalisms (the Bosnian, the Kosovar) and against the stronger nationalisms (the Serbian and, by means of subtraction, the Croatian).<br>
