Date: Sun, 04 Apr 1999 19:12:22 -0400
From: "Sean Gallagher" <sean-AT-iwkbaltlab.com>
Subject: Re: The Anarchist Attitude To War




Unka Bart wrote:

> Hi Dave, Roger, and the rest of you (the usual suspects),
> <snip>
> Here, we have a measure of agreement.  Yet my point is
> that *any* action against the perp is preferable to *NO*
> action against him.  I fully agree with the things you
> say about the ineffectual nature of the action taken thus
> far (merely bombing, no troops on the ground), I have made
> all those criticisms myself.  That said, I still prefer
> action.  This is a "Do something, even if it is wrong"
> situation, in my book, if ever there was one.
>

Hey, Unka -- having returned from one trip and now preparing for
another . ( :/ ) I wanted to cast my bread upon the waters with this
line, to mix some metaphors. You may have already seen my Alfred
Tennyson titled post, but anyway. . .

There's doing something-- anything-- to fix a situation, and then
there's doing something half-assed to cover your ass with no hope of
contributing positively. An air war against Serbia is a half-assed,
half-hearted thing.  But the Russians might have objected to the
Wermacht, the Royal  and US Marines, and the 101st and 82nd Airborne
descending on Kosovo, I suppose.

Well, the various bodies claiming to be the governing powers of the
Western world made this mess possible in the first place; now they're
forced to deal with it and all they care to do is lob explosives from
Stealth bombers that flew all the way from Kansas just to take out a
former Yugo plant with a million-dollar stealth stand-off tactical
worm-burner. That's real moral courage.

I understand Dave's reluctance to endorse state-sponsored military
antics. And I agree with you that something's usually better than
nothing. However, this particular something is worse than nothing;
it's the proverbial effort to teach a pig to sing.

There is no effective route to a solution from the current situation
that does not include playing escalladio on the Serbs. And that
solution no longer means just ending the situation--it now includes
preservation of the cojones of Billy C and Tony Blair and all those
other sensitive new age NATO leaders that have just used a variety of
alleged smart munitions to get in touch with their feelings.  Just
unilaterally ending attacks and declaring victory doesn't solve it for
them, so it won't  happen. But it would dramatically reduce the body
count for a few minutes. No, there's only one solution that's sanitary
enough for the likes of these guys--neutron bomb the whole damn
region. That way, the valuable real estate will still be left
standing.

That's not to say that doing nothing is acceptable.  What would
anarchist communities do when faced with someone like Milosevic?  Burn
their Yugos in protest? Waggle their fingers at him just to show him
that they're really, really mad? No, I think that there would be a
Lincoln Brigade or three, and as many bullets as they could hump over
with them with Slobodan baby's name written on them. Even if it was
anarchists facing this situation, there'd be only one solution once we
got to this point, just as there is now--the arming of the Kosovars ,
as many ground troops as could be mustered there to help them take out
the Serb police and military, and guerilla attacks on the Serb
military's flanks and centers of control.  And about twenty years to
do it in.