From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Fwd: More on 'leftist' redbaiting of the anti-war movement
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 12:00:51 +0100



----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Hamilton" <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: 6. februar 2003 07.01
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Fwd: More on 'leftist' redbaiting of the anti-war
movement


>
> So the Balkans like the Arab world is a victim of its
> own backward ideas, rather than its place in the
> global economy? If only the blighters could abandon
> that perverse nationalism and distaste for democracy!
> With this argument we are on the way to support for
> imperialist intervention against semi-colonial
> barbarism as a lesser evil, though Harald to his
> credit opposed such interventions in the Balkans. Once
> again, it is necessary to connect nasty regimes in the
> semi-colonies with imperialism by understanding the
> material base that imperialism creates for that
> nastiness. Underdevelopment caused by
> superexploitation, the lack of any material base for
> the winning democratic rights, etc etc
> If imperialism only exists on a political, overt level
> - as conquest or intervention - then all we have is a
> (bourgeois) empirical  defintion of imperialism, and
> the Norways of the world get off scot free, or even
> look progressive by comparison with the semi-colonies.
> It's the same old argument, and it can only be
> resolved with the sort of nitty gritty political
> economy which the WSWS correctly points out is missing
> from the left redbaiters' article.


Seems I have to feed you this we tea-spoons.

Furst let us see what I reacted against::

"The Yugoslav tragedy, including its dismemberment in
1991 and the ensuing communalist strife in Bosnia and
Kosovo, was the product of a concerted campaign of
destabilization carried out by the US and the European
powers."

The whole cause of the Yugoslav tradegy simple reduced
to a concerted campaign from some evil outside powers
(the axis of evil, perhaps?).

To see the very real internal causes is not to place
South-Slavia outside of either the the global economy,
geography, history or politcal economy. It is among other
things to recognise that the region geoprahically
situated *in the world* at one of the main historical
crossroads of power, and it is to recognise the great
impact the Titoist political economy on what followed.
Then you can put this in the context the world economy
after the fall of "real socialism" - the turn towards far
grester doses of  market economy -- championed by
among others a certain Milosovic (IMF's man In Yugo-
slavia), anf then at last, as the least  important, you
can add the  so-called "concerted campaign," which
precisly was not concerted, as the bet on different horses,
U.S. for long on Milo and  his crew; Gemany on Croatia
and Tudjman, and so on. Then nore important, you should
turn to a part of poltical economy you forgot -- a criminal-
poltical  fief economy, extremely consciously and with
great skill using nationlism but above all fear as a lucrative
means of profit. And when the madness is first let loose it
becomes amost impossible to stay entirely neutral.
You can to a certain extent also explain Srebeneica -- and
other massacres -- by a political economy on a very
micro-level (housing, jobs etc).but only within the context
of the deliberte manipulation and exploitation of
historical memories. As for the IMF, Yugoslava got
almost exact the same medicine as Poland. One must
be stupid to the level that only leftist can be at times
to believe that the cause and barbarism of the Yugoslav
civil war(s) can be at all grasped such factors alone,
even if they certainly did not help much.
        Of course  this all has to do with capitalism, but
not reduced to schema so crude and stupid that one
would have to be be wholly brain-washed by capitalist
ideology at the level of the tabloid press or Hollywood,
to believe it. That is exactly the kind of level of "analysis"
one would expect from the so-called "the moral majority"

You have absolutely no idea of what political economy entails!

Some times stupidity is voluntary chosen.

Harald









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