Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 12:13:55 -0500 (EST)
From: danceswithcarp <dcombs-AT-bloomington.in.us>
Subject: Re: Aaron likes butchers




On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Joel Ng wrote:

> 
> The fact is that a solution could possibly take more than a century to
> settle. 

Bart made this same point on like, the third day of the war.  Maybe it
won't take all 100 years, but it will take a lot longer than any of the
"solutions" offered up around the wirld.  When people make their children
look upon heaps of dead, massacred relatives so the children can tell
their children what happened we are looking at a cycle of violence and
payback so deep we can't really imagine the depths of the hatred.

I'm reading a deep hystery of WWI right now (along with a slav account of
the battle of Stalingrad--can't stand reading about ethnic hatreds for too
long) and in the build-up to The Great War the Balkans are about where
they are now as far as ethnic and religious conflict goes.  Truly
incredible that here, 90 years later, the same people are trying to even
the same scores.   

What is very troubling about this 90 year reign of terror and
intra-national fratricide is that the only period of relative peace has
been during the Tito regime when force of arms kept the lid on.    

Why?  Well, here on the anarchy-list I've had years of absorbing the
theory that if we could just remove states and capitalism from the
equasion, people would start acting as normal as you and, well, me.  Of
course there has always been the voice saying, "Yeah, but what about
religious and ethnic conflicts?"  And the reply has also been that absent
the coercive mechanisms of the state and market these conflicts too would
fall by the wayside.

The Bad Thing(tm) is we don't live in a wirld absent of coercion, so we
end up trying to understand these things like the Balkans, and Israel and
Palestine, in a frame of reference that isn't complete; we keep hoping
that the ideal can surface even though we all agree it is submerged in
realities that prevent it from doing so.

This is why it comes down to choosing sides:  Ideally I want everybody to
get along and share A Big Global Hug.  Reality is an automatic weapon.  

Yes, roger and brian and bart and I have all baited and debated a
non-ideological line with nico, aaron, Haymarket and others.  Why? Because
the ideology doesn't fit for us.  I have no doubt that nico and aaron and
others believe with all of their hearts and souls that if (A) would
happen, then (B), (C), and (D) would fall into place, because this is what
they want to believe--that good, or the right thing, will always surface
if given a chance.

The porblem those taking the non-ideolgical side seem to have is very
simply, hystery.  The Balkans have had a jihad of one type or another for
600 years.  Even wirse, the simple wirdz "Israel" and "Palestine" are
rooted in an entirely different millenium than the one we are in, and now
we're headed into another one.  So essentially we are recognizing a
pattern of behavior that doesn't fit within the ideal and that is what we
base our judgements on, while others are more than comfortable to apply
the standards of the ideal to arrive at solutions.

So yes, I am tired of arguing points that seem plain as day to me, just as
I'm sure others are tired of doing so too.  Which brings me back to the
original premise of yours and Bart's, that these hatreds will take 100
years to smooth over, if it can be done even then.  Because if hystery
shows that the only extended peace has been bought at the price of state
(personality) coercion, it is very hard for some of us to comprehend how
this pattern will be broken by simply walking away and waiting on the
blood feuds to settle out.  They haven't so far, and in some cases they've
been going for thousandsa of years.

Does this mean I support a Pax NATO?  Not really.  What bothers me most in
all of this is the behavior of the nationalists serbs; they were bullies
against the helpless in Bosnia until they got their asses kicked, and now
they are playing the bullies in Kosovo, against an essentially unarmed and
helpless people.  The most popular theory going on how to deal with
bullies, the one each american kid knows, is a bully will bully until you
crack him or her in the nose and do it so hard it hirts.  Either that, or
you go to a bigger kid and sic him or her on the bully (NATO in this
case). 

It's rude, yes, but it wirks.  In my entire life I can only say I have
never been able to simply talk a bully out of kicking someone's ass, mine
included, and I am a wirld-class talker.

True, this is applying the mentality of children to international politics
and policies, but I'm not real sure any group of people who decide upon a
course of "ethnic cleansing" will understand anything different; "ethnic
cleansing" is after all, a basicaly juvenile approach. Are we lowering
ourselves to the bully's level?  Yes, because the down side is that not
all serbs support the cleansing, so we tend to bloody the nose of people
who are relatively innocent.  There is always a price.  

So there is the conundrum:  Which innocent noses get bloodied?  The
Kosovars?  The Serbs?  How do we choose, and how do we know we chose right
after we do choose?   

We can argue states and imperialism (although I find that the weakest one
of all) and Pax Americanas or Pax NATOs all we want and we will never
resolve these issues.  Why?  Because I do not believe that all ethnic and
religious conflicts really fall within the causual effects we attribute to
capitalism and statehood.  If perchance I would be right about this then
it follows that we will +never+ be able to offer solutions within the
traditional anarchist/anti-authoritarian framewirk simply because we are
trying to pound round pegs into square holes.

All political theory, and especially classical anarchism and democracy and
is essentially rooted in the notion that in the end WE are all alike and
that under a given set of conditions our behavior will follow certain
preconceived paths.  However, if this is not so then it is very easy to
understand the failure of states--like the liberal democracies--to
implement their ideals and in the same vein it becomes clearer why we
cannot implement anarchism or stateless cooperation on a global scale:  
We haven't yet figured out the real problems, so there are no acceptable
real solutions.

The tearing at each other here on the list over whether to NATO or not to
NATO certainly seems to illustrate the point I am trying to make:  Do
our political theories encompass the situations?

600 or 2000 years of bloodletting and the notion that it will take 100
years at least to end it points me in the direction that we have a severe
failure of ideological-driven solutions, so that's why we resort to
schoolyard tactics.  We may not be comfortable with them--most likely
not--but how else can you stop the bully?



carp