Re: Germany sheds its pacifism

I AIN'T MARCHING ANYMORE
by John Lacny

	There must be some people in Belgrade old enough to remember the
last time the bombs fell there.  In 1941, they bore the Swastika; now most
of them bare the Stars and Stripes.  A better illustration of the
direction world politics has taken since the end of the Second World War
would be hard to find. 
	Is this hyperbole?  Perhaps, but it is no more so than Bill
Clinton's comparison between Milosevic's Serbia and Nazi Germany.  It
seems almost too easy to point out that these denunciations of Serb
atrocities come from the head of an Administration which acknowledges that
its own Iraq policy alone has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths,
yet still notoriously maintains that "the price is worth it."
	Serbian nationalists are convinced that the entire world is
against them.  It's always best to take their claims with a grain of salt,
especially considering that these people lay claim to Kosovo on the
grounds that the Serbs fought a battle there six hundred years ago.  Yet
the fact that a group of people is paranoid does not mean that everybody
is *not* out to get them.  The Serbs have reason to wonder why *their*
atrocities are a source of outrage in the West, while those of everyone
else are ignored.
	Consider the case of Franjo Tudjman, the man who more or less
constitutes the current government of Croatia.  Tudjman is the author of a
book which claimed that "only" 900,000 Jews died in the Holocaust (the
real number is 6 million) and that 70,000 Serbs died under the
collaborationist regime of the Croatian Ustashe in the same period (the
real number is at least 750,000).
	This same individual was invited to the opening of the Holocaust
Museum in Washington in 1993.  There, at the height of the war in Bosnia,
Clinton denounced the Serbs as the heirs of Hitler.  And Tudjman-- the
West's neo-Nazi client-- was soon to become responsible for the single
greatest act of ethnic cleansing during the last Balkan War: the expulsion
of hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia.
	Every variety of ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia bears
its part of the blame for the bloody dismemberment of the country.  (This
includes the Bosnian Muslims, whose regime was once hailed in the West as
an embattled haven of pluralistic tolerance, event though it was headed by
the Islamic fundamentalist Alija Izetbegovic.)
	With this noted, it is still difficult not to sympathize with the
Kosovar Albanians.  If anything, their nationalism is mostly a reaction to
the Serb chauvinism which made them the first victims of Yugoslavia's
impending disintegration as far back as 1989.  The Milosevic regime's
crackdown is the latest in a long line of outrages.
	However, it is necessary to realize that irridentism, while a
contagious bacillus, is also a deadly one.  The ascendancy of the Kosovar
Liberation Army-- encouraged, it is true, by the regime's repression--
cannot but bode ill for all ethnic minorities (not only Serbs!) in Kosovo.
This is not even to mention the uneasy communal truce which reigns in
neighboring Macedonia, a country with a large Albanian minority which is
the only former Yugoslav Republic thus far to have avoided direct
involvement in this ongoing series of wars.
	To side with one flavor of ethnic nationalism or the other in this
region is merely to heighten communal violence.  Furthermore, to embrace
Balkan nationalist agitation of one kind or the other is to ignore the
very real fact of Great Power manipulation. 
	In the case of Kosovo, the Clinton Administration has used
Albanian grievances as a vehicle for legitimizing NATO violence and
militarism generally.  This is part of a long-term strategy aimed at the
isolation of Russia and the eventual crystallization of a European power
bloc under US hegemony.  Needless to say, the prospect is not a good one
for any kind of lasting European peace. 
	In the meantime, people on the ground in Serbia and Montenegro--
as in Iraq-- are paying the price.  For US citizens of conscience, it is
ironically Clinton himself who has said it best: "If you don't stand up to
brutality and the killing of innocent civilians, you invite them to do
more."

John Lacny dreamt he saw Tito last night, alive as you and me.

(Lacny is an activist at the University of Pittsburgh)

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)