File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 339


Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 09:50:15 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-TH: Re: blood feuds


In message <l03020913b12d43758833-AT-[130.244.113.41]>, Hugh Rodwell <m-
14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> writes
>James H jumps on the bandwagon:
>
>>Hugh departs from all semblance of historical materialism and delves
>>into psych-history and worse racial history.
>
>Well, well, and what is the evidence?
>
>>The origins of the current
>>balkan conflict are not to be found in either Antigone,
>
>Oh, yes, I claimed this, didn't I. "The origins of the current Balkan
>conflict are to be found in Antigone." Sure.
>
>>or ancient blood lusts,

>Let's look again at what I actually wrote:

>>>In the light of our discussions of Greek drama on the list we can link some
>>>of the actions and implications thousands of years back to the conflict
>>>between an arrogant state represented by Kleon and family rights
>>>represented by Antigone.

>>>This area of Europe has a fanatical attachment to family honour,
>>>>>vendetta, blood feuds and so on. In neighbouring Macedonia there are
>>>still >>festivals in honour of the dead where the family gathers on the
>>>grave >>and eats in ritual nourishment of the dead.

Hugh seems to wnat to have his cake and eat it. He objects to the
characterisation of what he says as tracing the conflict back to ancient
blood lusts, and then says
>>>This area of Europe has a fanatical attachment to family honour,
>>>>>vendetta, blood feuds and so on.
Hugh objects to the characteriation of what he says as
>"The origins of the current Balkan
>conflict are to be found in Antigone."
but at the same time says
>we can link some
>>>of the actions and implications thousands of years back to the conflict
>>>between an arrogant state represented by Kleon and family rights
>>>represented by Antigone.

What exactly is Hugh's complaint?

In message <l03020915b12d4eb62de7-AT-[130.244.113.41]>, Hugh Rodwell <m-
14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> writes
>There is no doubt whatever that it is the aggression of the Serbian state
>(within the general framework of the capitulation of the Stalinist
>bureaucracy and the imperialist offensive of the past few decades) that
>underlies the actual shaping of the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia. The equally
>repulsive Croatian state chauvinism is a mirror image of this. The creation
>on the basis of these conflicts of a fictitious muslim fundamentalist
>chauvinist state in Bosnia in the image-making media and imperialist
>propaganda in general (including those of the left who tail bourgeois
>opinion) is precisely that, a fiction. There is deep opposition to this
>kind of Muslimification of Bosnia among the Bosnian working class and in
>Sarajevo.

Here Hugh puts a pseudo-Trotskyist gloss on contemporary bourgeois
liberal opinion. Just as the war party in Britain and the United States
sought to demonise the Serbs as a people in order to justiy military
intervention, so too Hugh repeats the same myths of the exceptional
character of Serb chauvinism.

In fact all sides in this civil war committed atrocities, Serb, Croat
and Muslim. The origins of the war are not indigenous to the region, but
arise out of the conflicting foreign policies of Germany, Britain and
the US. Initially Germany accelerated the break-up of Yugoslavia by
indicating that it would recognise Slovenian and Croatian independence,
encouraging Tudjman's breakaway move. That in itself guaranteed that
Yugoslavia would descend into a conflict along ethnic lines as the Serbs
of Krajina were attacked.

It was the United States that accelerated the ethnic conflict. Up until
that time the US had, like Britain, favoured the maintenance of the
Yugoslav republic. But thrown by the initiative taken by the newly
unified German state in establishing and independent foreign policy, the
Americans struggled to regain the initiative. They decided to oveleap
the Germans with a yet more 'radical' policy, Bosnian independence.

George Kenney, a US official at the Yugoslav Desk of the State
Department developed the policy of encouraging Bosnia, and action which
he now says accelerated the drift into ethnic violence.

Bosnia, as the most heterogenous part of the Yugoslav Federation clearly
had most to lose from such a break-up. Its populations were pretty
evenly balanced between muslim, Croat and Serb. The referendum for
independence was boycotted by Serbs, meaning that some thirty per cent
of the population were forced into the new state and clearly had no
loyalty to it, since its character was unavoidably Muslim.

The only pressure for a multi-ethnic state of Bosnia comes from the
sabre-rattling liberals who sponsored independence and have since
recoiled in disgust at the entirely predictablee outcome of that policy:
that Bosnia is divided along ethnic lines.

Abstracting the Bosnian conflict from the broader influence of inter-
imperialist rivalries between Germany and the US, tends to misrepresent
the real relations in the Balkans. What was under Tito an essentially
petty conflict between rival ethnic groups over office and resources,
became a vicious war once it was cranked-up by the conflicting
influences of the great powers. This was after all that part of the
world which gave its name to the process of Balkanisation.

If you isolate the conflict from the imperialist influence that shaped
it, then you are left, naturally enough, with a lot of mysticla claptrap
about 'this part of Europe' and its supposedly exceptional barbarism.
-- 
James Heartfield


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