Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 09:00:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: Yugoslavia


Louis Proyect:
I cc'd my piece on Yugoslavia to an old chum from Bard College. As should be 
obvious, we've been arguing the matter of intervention for some time now. 
This has not interfered with our friendship. The only thing that really 
seems to matter to him actually is whether his new Micron Pentium is 
running smoothly.

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The question in my mind is this: Can no issue of international importance
be detatched from the global north-south class struggle? 
Was the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia supportable because it stopped
a genocide or because it was done by an anti-imperialist power? What about
the Tanzanian intervention in Uganda? If Bangladesh were starving again and
a local right-wing dictatorship/imperialist stooge in position to
distribute food, should we oppose it? It seems to me that the Serbs have
undertaken acts that distinguish them as a moral threat to the conception
of human decency (as did Renamo, and perhaps Unita, and certainly the
deranged masses of Rwanda.) Among these, the Bosnian case is, if not most
awful and urgent, arguably the most demanding of practical action because
of the chips now on the table. For reasons, I suspect, of racism, the West
has not only accepted but found itself able to drive the horrors in Angola
and Mozambique and failed to respond decently to the sudden explosion in
Rwanda. But if the West fails also to behave decently in Bosnia, it is, I
think, frightening in a different way. It means that even when there is no
business to be done, even when it's imperialist agenda requires a large
international hit, the West cannot lift a finger to protect the old lady
being raped and robbed in the alley. That incapacity reports another level
of moral death.  In the wake of that death, I expect the impulse to local
slaughter and international anarchy accelerates more quickly than it will
otherwise. The Western imperium is, in my judgement, primarily an engine
for extractive domination of every target of opportunity. It is also,
however, a force for some order in the world. After it's unmasking as an
impotent with no successor of any kind prepared to fill the vaccum, Bosnia,
Liberia, Burma, and Pol Pot Cambodia become evermore the models, utterly
unrebuked. Besides, anybody who does what the Serbs have done deserves to
be stopped and rectified.  I am far from convinced that working hard to
build socialism is a respectable alternative to doing so.





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