Antifascism or Isolationism? -- LIFEBOAT

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Date Posted: 15:01:09 02/10/00 Thu
Author: W.H.
Subject: Antifascism or Isolationism?

Three positions can be identified on the question of Serbian/Yugoslav military activities before and during last year�s NATO bombing of Yugoslavia:

� Position one: the Yugoslav armed forces and police committed large-scale atrocities. NATO and the KLA are in the right. The government of Yugoslavia is in the wrong.
� Position two: Serbian behaviour has been unacceptable, but not as much so as is often claimed. There is right and wrong on both sides.
� Position three: There is no evidence that Yugoslavian government forces violated human rights or international law. Yugoslavia�s struggle is a struggle for justice and deserves unqualified support. NATO is in the wrong.

This is the starting point for discussion in an article by Jared Israel called Crimes of Fascism, Crimes of Silence, on the netsite http://www.emperors-clothes.com/. As a self-identified man of the Left, Jared Israel condemns his comrades in both Europe and the United States (including Noam Chomsky, perhaps especially Noam Chomsky) for supporting, at best, position two. Position two, as he says, is not enough in itself to justify the total annihilation of Serbia, but it contributes to the weakening of the resistance to that prospect.

One of the most discouraging aspects of the experience of the last ten years for anti-war Leftists (and for others who expect Leftists to be anti-war) is a sense of having been abandoned by all pro-European politicians and political activists. On the one hand there are the familiar figures of establishment politics, on the other the Joschka Fischers and Daniel Cohn-Bendits, and apart from them only a small residue of apparently schizophrenic "revolutionary marxists" and radical ecologists who are hostile to the former but at the same time not willing to support the Yugoslavs unless they change their political leadership - half-way through the government�s term of office and in conditions of war.

Real atrocities are now occurring in the Balkans, and there is little reaction. Hundreds of Serbs, "gypsies", Muslim Slavs, pro-Yugoslav Albanians, Turks, Croats, Jews, have been driven out of Kossovo. Over seventy-five Orthodox churches and monasteries have been razed to the ground. Frequently the job has been done professionally, with dynamite, followed by officially-organised celebrations. Monuments that survived centuries of Ottoman, Austrian, Fascist Italian and Nazi German rule, have fallen victim to six months� rule by NATO.

At Orahovac and other smaller centres ghettoes have been created resembling miniature versions of the infamous Warsaw ghetto. The occupation troops are preventing thousands of people from leaving Kossovo. They are kept without electric light, heating or adequate food and water, at the mercy of terrorist attacks by Albanians. The NATO/KFOR forces, some of the most highly trained professional soldiers in the world, "cannot" prevent these attacks. Murders of unarmed civilians, including old people and children, are without exception described by the media as "revenge attacks". Serbs are being held without protection, perhaps with the calculation that some of them will break and become available as "witnesses" to war crimes at the UN�s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague.

At the same time that these crimes are being committed, it is increasingly recognised that the reports of Serbian ethnic cleansing of Albanians were fabrications. For anyone who was really interested there is nothing new about this news. As early as last April it was known from leaks to the German press that the German Foreign Ministry regarded accusations of open persecution linked to Albanian nationality as "unverifiable". According to the Ministry the activities of the Yugoslav security forces were not aimed at the Kossovo Albanians as an ethnically defined group but at military opponents and their suspected or real supporters. A state-organised program of persecution aimed at the entirety of the ethnically defined category of Albanians did not exist and had not existed in the past.

Even in the period of NATO bombing those attacking Albanians were not the Yugoslavian federal or local authorities but "enraged citizens", some of whom were arrested by the Yugoslav government. When the bombing started the government doubled the term of imprisonment imposed for crimes of racial hatred. It also armed Albanians loyal to the state.

As a final point, when after the withdrawal of the Yugoslav forces from Kossovo forensic teams from 17 countries were brought into the province to locate some of the 500,000 (later amended to 100,000, then 40,000) Albanians who NATO spokesmen claimed to have been killed, a total of 2,108 bodies were found, of all nationalities. It has not been determined how many of these were killed by Serbs and how many by the KLA or NATO.

None of this is much discussed. Mainstream politicians here in Greece prefer to concentrate on questions they can feel optimistic about, such as the improvement in Greek-Turkish relations, and not to be too inquisitive about what else is happening. Greens and the extra-parliamentary Left, who a few months back were engaged in vigorous discussions of the developments in Yugoslavia, have gone quiet.

Jared Israel and his collaborators (who include Diana Johnstone, former press officer of the Greens in the European Parliament and author of the important but little-known book "The Politics of Euromissiles" (Verso, 1984) are isolated voices. Though the site is now posting articles in six European languages, its influence - unfortunately - remains marginal.

What is happening in the US?

A rather more influential antiwar movement is developing in the USA. Centred on the site www. antiwar.com, it has its political leader, the presidential candidate and former Republican Pat Buchanan. Buchanan�s recent book "A Republic, not an Empire", is a best-seller.

Antiwar.com is not antifascist. What it argues - in contrast to Jared Israel - is not that Blair-Clinton are promoting fascism (Who is shocked today by such charges?) but that these "Third Way" politicians and the media that serve them are modern-day exponents of the "interventionism" of Woodrow Wilson In World War I and Franklin Roosevelt in World War II. The antiwar.com writers also take it for granted that today�s attacks against Serbia foreshadow a future wider confrontation with Russia.

Thus Justin Raimondo (antiwar.com) writes: "The Western media swoons at the sight of Russian fascists, such as Pamyat, and thrills to the bizarre exploits of Zhirinovsky and his misnamed "Liberal Democratic Party". They are sure to give the rise of Russian nationalism banner headlines. Certainly, after all those phony Hitler sightings over the years - Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, all you�ll remember were given the "he�s another Hitler" treatment - journalists will gasp and even thrill at the sight of the real thing. At last - they will think - an enemy worth fighting! Finally, a morally unambiguous battle, a replication of the one our parents fought with honour: now we can redeem ourselves for the sin of obstructing the war effort during the Vietnam era. It will be the final expiation of the baby boom generation, and mark their ultimate transformation. While remaining true to their leftie "ideals", in the end they wind up as replicas of their parents, antifascists all."

Isolationism

It is worth remembering that the anti-fascist mentality that many think so natural a part of life was not widespread in the interwar period. As noted by Buchanan, until May 1940 when Hitler�s armies invaded France, "isolationism" was virtually the consensus in the U.S. In the eyes of the public, the Great War of 1914-1918, the war which was to "put an end to war", had not been waged for some high ideals or vital national interests. The United States had gone into the war because na�ve Americans had been fooled into pulling Britain�s chestnuts out of the fire.

Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. But after the war the empires of Britain, France, Japan, all expanded. The world didn�t become more safe for democracy but, in Buchanan�s words, "for the worst enemies of democracy": Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler. Of the allied countries only the Finns paid off their war debts to the U.S. In 1933 25% of American workers were unemployed. The Americans regarded their former allies as ingrates. The real victors of the Great War, they said, were the capitalists, the arms manufacturers, the merchants of death.

As for the Germans, when they accepted an armistice on Wilson�s terms, they were treated as war criminals. An intolerable burden of reparations payments was imposed on them. They were denied basic rights. Self-determination was granted to the former subjects of Germany and Austro-Hungary but denied to millions of Germans and Austrians, who were forced to live under the rule of Frenchmen, Italians, Czechs and Poles. Bleeding and dismembered Germany was loaded both with the cost of the war and with the responsibility for having started it. In 1914, Buchanan says, the Kaiser didn�t want war, wasn�t planning war. After the initial error of the blank cheque issued to Austria so that it could punish Serbia for the murder of the Archduke, the Kaiser begged the Tsar of Russia to call off his mobilisation.

"There is no more certain war of provoking hatred than to force an individual to sign an admission of guilt which he believes in his heart to be false. This shocking humiliation, without precedent in the annals of Christendom, created the thirst for revenge which was so artfully exploited by the National Socialists."

Buchanan does not believe that guarantees should have been given to Poland. "If Chamberlain had not made his two huge mistakes, firstly of getting implicated in the affairs of Czechoslovakia and then humiliated, and subsequently issuing a guarantee to Poland, he would have had no problems in securing a large majority in the House of Commons in favour of neutrality in a war between Germany and Poland. If he had supported isolationism on these two questions, supplemented by a decisive emphasis on rearmament, drawing a realistic line in the sand - Britain, the sea-lanes, the Empire, France, the English Channel - Churchill would never have become Prime Minister. After defeating Poland, Germany would have gone on to attack Russia.

By the autumn of 1940 the Battle of Britain had been won. There was no longer danger of a German attack on England. The Americans had no reason to fear a Nazi empire which possessed neither a navy worth mentioning, apart from submarines, nor bombers capable of crossing the Atlantic. If Germany lacked the power to conquer Britain, it represented no danger at all to the United States, whose industrial capacity was many times that of Germany.

The credibility of the isolationist "America First" committee was sunk along with the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. The isolationists disappeared from mainstream politics. "The history books were written by interventionists", says Buchanan. Senator Joseph McCarthy in a lifelong career of hunting Communists never did anything comparable to the treatment handed out to the "isolationists".

�America has neither permanent allies nor permanent enemies" (George Washington)

Whatever one�s opinion of Buchanan�s theories about the past, the implications for the future are crystal-clear. "The state which America needs above all to lock into a democratic trajectory is Russia. Making allies of countries which were part of the Soviet Empire, rubbing Russia�s nose in its defeat, we treat it as the Allies treated Germany at Versailles, pushing it out of the Western camp, making it into a permanent enemy. To take a pawn we risk the queen."

It is not necessary to regard Buchanan and his fellow-thinkers as our friends. What concerns them is the danger that by perpetuating the enmity of the past toward Russia, the U.S. is diverted from the more significant struggle with Communist China. Present-day isolationists are concerned that Russia might be pushed irrevocably into the embrace of China instead of being kept in the "Western" camp. On questions such as nuclear weapons, Buchanan is in no way less hypocritical than Europeans. His politics serves a very specific purpose in overall American strategy. His role is to be the bogey man for the European ruling class, wheeled out whenever Americans want to accuse Europe of "not pulling its weight", not doing "its fair share" of policing the world.

Still, by comparison with the demented politics of the hegemonic bloc in the "international community" and NATO, Buchanan is - on everything but the nuclear front (where Clinton has now adopted his policies) - clearly a saner voice. If Europeans refuse to be intimidated by the threat that the U.S. is going to sabotage the United Nations or withdraw from it (in reaction e.g. to rumours that the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague could "perhaps" put not just Milosevic and Karadjic on trial but also the war criminals of NATO). If the anti-nuclear movement can utilise European disagreements to push the discussion not where Buchanan might like to see it going but in the direction people thought they were moving in the 80s; if many Americans� desire to be "a Republic not an Empire" can be seen not as part of a policy of blackmail but as a token of acceptance of European leadership, on the basis of which the peoples of Europe and America will compete not for mastery of the world but in a contest for development of the most perfect form of democracy, then the new American "isolationism" will be seen as indisputably positive. The unacceptable European politicians are those who want us to believe something different.

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Re: Antifascism or Isolationism? -- Binkie, 18:33:42 02/19/00 Sat