No Subject

Dear Chris and All,

	I want to express my appreciation to everyone on the list who has
contributed to the discussion of the war in the Balkans.  In particular,
the articles by Chomsky and Zinn have done a lot to firm up my own views
on this monumental tragedy.  Also the posts from Gunder Frank, with which
I agree completely.

	But first, a little unabashedly self-serving news.  The University
of Chicago Press will bring out a revised Third Edition of my chronicle of
the next two centuries, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, in August or
September of this year.  I know that some of you have made use of this
book in courses.  The 2nd Edition, published in 1992, is still in print
and still available, but will be supplanted by the 3rd late this summer.
The ISBN of the 3rd Edition is 0-226-86903-2.

	Back to Kosovo.  I traveled through Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro,
and Bosnia in the summer of 1958, mostly camping out along the side of the
road.  The Titoist regime, for all its egregious faults, had done its best
to dampen and stifle ethnic rivalry.  Experiments in worker co-management
had given encouraging substance to the dream of a democratic and socialist
future for all the people of Yugoslavia.  Kosovo was an autonomous region
of Serbia, and although poor, was benefitting to some extent from the
surging economic growth rate of the country as a whole.  Everywhere I went
I was delighted by the warmth and hospitality of the Yugoslav people, and
impressed by their material progress, the apparent abatement of ethnic
bigotry, the high rate of intermarriage, the stunning beauty of the cities
and landscape, and the decline of religious fervor and fanaticism evident
in all the republics.  And of course I was entirely supportive of
Belgrade's policy of non-alignment in the Cold War.  Yugoslavia was a
beacon of sanity and progress in the Balkans.  

	Since then, of course, all hell has broken loose, all the old
demons have been set free, and I am sick at heart.  I offer no defense for
the repressive policies of the Milosevich regime in what was and should
always have been an autonomous Kosovo.  But as Howard Zinn reminds us, the
KLA opened fire.  With ruthless, almost insane disregard for the safety of
the Kosovar people, they declared war on Serbia.  And they had plenty of
help from outside--just how much and from whom we don't yet fully know.
NATO's lawless and inhuman assault on Serbia has at the very least
accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, strengthened the Milosevich
government, and raised the possibility of a new Cold War pitting the
Orthodox world against the Latin world.  The blood-stained Superpower that
gave us the massacre of millions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama,
and Iraq--to name just a few recipients of our humanitarian blessings--is
now wreaking devastation in Yugoslavia, in hopes of further consolidating
its death-grip on the world-system of late capitalism.  To the roster of
humanitarian heroes from Johnson and Nixon to George Bush we have now
added the name of William Jefferson Clinton.  How anyone on the Left and
anyone active in world-systems research can find a scintilla of
justification for the NATO Mad Bombers is beyond my comprehension.

	For peace in the Balkans,

	Warren Wagar


	W. Warren Wagar
	Department of History
	State University of New York at Binghamton