Apparatus Marxism in the Balkan war - 7-9 + afterword

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 1:11

VII
Caliban: Then the “banker turned politician Milosevic stepped in to divert the anger away from the government by whipping up hatred against Albanians living in Serb-run Kosovo… Milosevic put forward a simple answer to the economic crisis brought about by the madness of the market — blame the Albanians.”

Brownstone: Yes, Milosevic used Serb chauvinism. But you present a conspiracy theory of national and ethnic division. The IMF (and later Germany, by recognising Croatian independence) introduce evil from outside. Nationalism “inside" is an artificial thing — nothing but a tool for demagogues and conspirators to resort to. Why those demagogues should succeed is not explained, other than by the absence of “socialist leadership”.

The basic fact of the late 1980s was a Serb-chauvinist offensive for Serbian dominance in Yugoslavia. There had been an upsurge of Croatian nationalism at the beginning of the 1970s, but Serb nationalism was later the catalyst for all the other nationalisms that destroyed Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav army and state apparatus became, effectively, a tool of the Serbian republic within Yugoslavia. That gave the whole process its dynamic. That was the proximate cause of the break up of Yugoslavia. Without Serbia’s drive for dominance, the nationalisms of the other Yugoslav nations would not have made the sort of patent sense that led 90% of Croatians to vote for secession in 1991.

Caliban: No. Nationalism was only a demagogic tool of the bosses. “Milosevic was not alone in such vile tactics. His mirror image in Croatia was Franjo Tudjman. Their scapegoating led to horrific conflict."

Varga: Don't blame Milosevic too much! Others were as bad! We have walked backwards into new facts grudgingly doled-out, but they have been skilfully skewed out of their own perspective and into that of the makers of “the case against the war".

Caliban: “The people of the various ethnic groups did not live separately from each other, each in one republic or region. There was a large Serbian minority in Croatia as well as Bosnia. Croats also lived in Bosnia. Albanians lived in Serbia and so on."

Brownstone: Here the fact that Albanians lived in Serbia mainly as a compact 90% population of a distinct region — an internal colony! — is hidden. Why? To have a fairy tale of an ideal — Tito Stalinist — Yugoslav past!

Caliban: “When the rulers of each republic talked about Croatia for the Croats or Serbia for the Serbs, it inevitably led towards violence and ethnic cleansing."
Brownstone: False abstract symmetry that is concretely very pro-Serbian! It was Serbian nationalism that destabilised Yugoslavia.

Varga: Having now, by eliminating hard facts and story-cluttering detail, and cutting out anything that would contradict the “line” and propagandist intention; having misrepresented the dynamic with the unmistakable purpose of minimising Milosevic's responsibility, we can get down to some hard facts — selected facts.

Caliban: “When Tudjman's supporters attacked Serbs at Borovo Selo, Serbia/Milosevic unleashed his Chetniks (right-wing monarchist Serbs) to attack Croats."
Brownstone: Ah, who attacked first? Who fired the first shot? Remember, Tudjman is worse than Milosevic.

Caliban: “When war developed…"

Brownstone: “Developed?” Who waged war? For what purposes? Stop the War strives to give the impression, without flatly stating it, that Croatia attacked Serbia. In fact, both Slovenia and Croatia voted overwhelmingly for independence, and Milosevic then attacked both nations to try to maintain Serbian domination over them.

Caliban: “When war developed in the early 1990s, the US and Britain backed Croatia against Serbia. They were supporting the most right-wing government in Europe since the rule of the fascist General Franco in Spain!"

Varga: This is a masterly touch! Switch focus from the issue — the national conflict — to something not relevant, (unless the argument is that somehow Serbia made war on Croatia in order to defeat Tudjman's right-wing politics!) What is right-wing where, as in Serbia, Stalinist “red” and nationalistic-fascistic brown intermingle? In fact this is a Stalinist definition of right-wing.

Brownstone: Just as for decades, the USSR was taken to define the “left”, here Serbia is. If Milosevic is left, it is because of his and Yugoslavia's greater residue of Stalinism.
Caliban: The West made Tudjman the “good guy", when the “nationalistic frenzy of Serbia and Croatia boiled over into war, carving Bosnia up in 1992".
Brownstone: No mention of the fact that the Bosnian war was initiated and shaped by a Serbian drive to conquer and “ethnically cleanse” as much territory as possible for a “Greater Serbia” — or of the fact that the West then maintained an arms embargo against the Serb-beleaguered Bosnian government.

Caliban: “Tudjman strengthened his position after four years of war because he had the West's backing and NATO launched air strikes on Serb armies. Right-wing Serbs had killed Croats and Bosnian Muslims…”

Brownstone: Unconnected to Milosevic, who, we have been told, is not as right-wing as Tudjman, and assuredly “not a fascist”? In fact the wars for a Greater Serbia were organised and directed by Milosevic’s government.

Caliban: “Right-wing Serbs had killed Croats and Bosnian Muslims, most notoriously at Srebrenica. But it was Tudjman who went on to carry out the greatest ethnic cleansing of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Backed by Western firepower, he ordered an assault on the Serbs of the Krajina region of Croatia. Some 200,000 Serbs fled.”

Brownstone: In fact, there were many more Bosniac and Croat refugees from Serbian terror in Bosnia. But what follows from the justified condemnation of Tudjman? That it is Milosevic's turn now in Kosova? That is how things are in the Balkans… But, support Milosevic?

Varga: Again, note the strong nerves needed for this sort of work. Indignation at 200,000 expelled four years ago — displayed in the service of those who, as the authors write, are engaged in trying to drive out those of the two million Kosovar Albanians that they will not kill.

Caliban: “The wars in ex-Yugoslavia were terrible. But no side had clean hands."

Varga: Note the technique: Stop the War has “made the case against" all but Milosevic, and that is a “clever” negative way to make a case for Milosevic.
There is nothing quite so useful in skirting over difficulties as the truism. “Serbian, Croatian and Muslim leaders [were] all out to use the war in their own interests.” The judgement is both banal and unfair to the Bosnia Muslim leaders, but immensely useful in making the pro-Milosevic case “against the war". Everybody was equally bad, and so poor Milosevic should not be singled out.

Caliban: “The West excused its intervention as providing protection for the Bosnian Muslims.”

Brownstone: In fact, the UN and particularly Britain helped Milosevic against the Muslims. Stop the War's Great Satan, the USA, was then somewhat at odds with the countries like Britain, who were keenly colluding — under the UN flag — with Milosevic.
Varga: That cannot be Stop the War's line! This “case against the war" must exonerate Milosevic by condemning others as being as bad or worse. The Bosnian Muslims have to be bad too.

Caliban: “Their leader, Alia Izetbegovic, was equally guilty of whipping up nationalism during the war. That encouraged atrocities like the murder of hundreds of Serb civilians in Sarajevo by Muslim paramilitaries."

Brownstone: As history this is grossly unfair. It is a remnant of the SWP’s scandalous indifference and neutrality during the Bosnian war.

Caliban: History? It is the making of current history that interests the SWP!

Brownstone: As the Stalinist professor said: what is history but current politics and organisational needs read backwards?

Varga: The root here is blindness to national democracy and to national rights. The pretence that Stalinism solved “the Balkan problem" merges with the elitist idea that things like nationalism and religious conflicts are just the work of “bad men” who have their way in the absence of a “socialist leadership", a good counter-elite, which can magic such things away by focusing on wage struggles.

Caliban: “Every ruler in the region has played the nationalist card and each time the people who have paid for it have been the ordinary Serbs, Croats, Albanians, or Bosnian Muslims.”

Varga: A plague on all their houses!

Brownstone: Except where one house is in conflict with the US or NATO, the “Great Satan”! Then you enlist on Milosevic's side! Sectarianism towards the national question turns, at the touch of US/NATO intervention, into the most shameless apologetics for Serb chauvinism and propaganda on behalf of those who are attempting genocide!

VIII

Varga: No account of the Balkans now can do without some interpretation of Balkan history. The problem for Stop the War is how to avoid letting inconvenient questions get an airing during this process, like the history of Serbian imperialism, or the real historical foundations of the national conflicts. Stop the War provides a chapter on “How past interventions sowed the seeds of bloodshed". It cannot be a history lesson. It must be a tendentious pretend-naïve quick tour. Blame “outside" intervention for everything!
Caliban: “As today, at each stage [the great powers] have claimed to be standing up for the rights of smaller nations in the region.”

Brownstone: So that shows that standing up for smaller nations is a bad idea? But has there ever been an “intervention" whose immediate objective (for NATO's own reasons, certainly) has been to stop the destruction of almost the entire population of a distinct national and geographical entity? Has there been anything even remotely like it?
Caliban: “Every intervention has brought misery, creating new divisions between ordinary people.”

Brownstone: Creating? The crime of the “interventionists" has been to drive the state borders through the living national entities. This made the national divisions more poisonous, but did not create them or the difficulty created by the intricate interlacing of the Balkan peoples.

Varga: Caliban strips the “ordinary” people of their national-ethnic identities and reduces them to blank pages on which either bad or good people write their messages.
Caliban: “Britain backed the seizure of Kosovo and the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1919-20.”

Brownstone: Your date is wrong. The Serbs seized Kosova in 1913 and won it back as part of the victor camp in 1918-19.

Varga: “The seizure of…" Who did the seizing? Serbia. And Trotsky rightly called it an act of Serbian imperialism.

Brownstone: For all its “anti-imperialism", this is an ultra-elitist, metropolitan-centric way of portraying the world.
On the one hand the big powers are responsible for everything; on the other, when for once in a blue moon they act to make horrors like Milosevic's less horrid, nothing matters but to oppose them. This writes the smaller peoples out of history.

Caliban: In World War Two “fascist Ustashe forces in Croatia systematically killed Serbs and Jews".

Brownstone: True. But why isn't there any account of the immediately more relevant bloody Serb reconquest of Kosova in 1945, which, for bloodshed and repression of the “natives”, rivalled the French re-establishment of authority in Algeria at the same time?

Caliban: But while the “Chetniks turned on Croats… a communist — Tito, who was half Croat and half Serb — succeeded in building a multi-ethnic anti-Nazi movement".
Brownstone: A communist! At last! Communist here is like “revolutionary" — it is good. But Tito presided over the reconquest of Kosova and its repression for more than two decades!

Varga: Tito was of Croat-Slovene parentage.

Caliban: We tell the truth about Tito! He “used the language of socialism, but maintained a strict regime of state control, with its own privileged ruling class".

Brownstone: Now, having backed two-thirds of the way through the pamphlet, we get, hidden away as a bullet point fact in a chapter about outside intervention, one of the central facts of the present conflict. Tito “granted Kosovan Albanians certain national rights".

Varga: Yes, don't be too precise. It limits what you can then say!

Caliban: “Milosevic reversed this as he drove to succeed Tito."

Varga: Evade the whole framework of national reality by blaming Milosevic's personal ambition! In fact, he latched on to an erupting movement of Serb chauvinism.
Caliban: However, “the West's intervention in the Balkans during the 1990s made the situation worse".

Brownstone: Yes — by collusion or quasi-collusion with Milosevic in Bosnia.

Caliban: No. “[The West] enshrined the idea that different ethnic groups who have often lived side by side now have to be forced to live apart, policed by NATO forces."
Brownstone: As distinct from “being forced" to live together or being butchered? Who is the undefined agent: who wants to force them? Whose policy did the West endorse? The role of Serbian imperialism is buried here. So is the underlying role of Titoist national policy.

Caliban: “For a century, revolutionary socialists have put forward the alternative of workers' unity in the Balkans across national boundaries."

Varga: Yes, but how? On the basis of what solution to the long-festered national antagonisms? What are the details? For tradition and “authority". Stop the War goes through the semblance of invoking Trotsky's pre-World War One writings on the Balkans, where he was a war correspondent in 1912-13.

Caliban: Trotsky wrote that “European diplomacy… manufactured the states that today occupy the Balkan peninsula… to convert the national diversity of the region into a regular mêlée of petty states… The new boundary lines have been drawn across the living bodies of nations… Every one of the Balkan states now includes within its borders a compact minority that is hostile to it. Such are the results of the work carried out by the capitalist governments."

Brownstone: What was Trotsky's programme on the national question? What does this quotation say about Stop the War's presentation of nationalism as whipped up by bad men? For Trotsky it is a result of national oppression inherent in the existing states.

Varga: In fact this quotation from Trotsky is used only to give authority to Stop the War’s description of “the West's" effect on the local peoples and their states. “Trotsky's description of the West's role has come true again and again." All outside interference (“the West") is here conflated to make maximum use for today of Trotsky’s old condemnations of Austro-Hungary and Russia. It is a way of sinking the concrete truth of the present and of recent history into earlier history and into abstract historical generalisations.

Brownstone: And in what way, from the point of view of over 90% of the people of Kosova, is Serbian rule less “outside intervention" than NATO’s? Given that NATO’s action had Kosovar Albanian backing, it was the least “outside” of the outside interventions.

Caliban: They have no right to ally with imperialism!

Brownstone: Who has a better right to define what they see as imperialist, or not, than the Kosovar Albanians themselves?

Caliban: “When the First World War broke out, the Serbian revolutionary Lapcevic stood up in the rabidly pro-war Serbian parliament and denounced the fighting. He said that Serbia ‘must cease to be a tool of the Great Powers and pursue instead the goal of a Balkan socialist federation’. He was against the oppression of the all the Balkan peoples, but he argued that to concentrate solely on the national question without regard to the wider issues of imperialism and its wars would lead to disaster.”

Brownstone: The key word here is “solely”. In fact, the programme adopted by the Balkan socialists in 1910 regarded the creation of a consistent democracy as the solution to the national imbroglios as an irreplaceable tool for making international working class unity possible.

Caliban: The Communist International's 1920 manifesto declared that in the Balkans: “Imperialism has created a series of smaller national states. It rules them through banks and monopolies and condemns them to unbearable economic and national hardship, endless conflicts and bloody collisions." “The Bulgarian revolutionary Kabakchiev argued that, although there were over one million Bulgarians split up between other states and divided off from Bulgaria by imperialism, it was necessary to go beyond nationalism."

Brownstone: Yes, but how? By solving the national question democratically!

Caliban: “The only way out is a Balkan socialist revolution. The great powers have ripped the region apart and prepared the ground for mass murder and terror. Revolutionaries have been the voice of sanity, of friendship across boundaries and of class unity."

Varga: The equivalent of that recently has been the repeated support by many big powers, including Britain and specifically on the Kosova question, for Milosevic as the “strong man” to keep the area quiet for capitalism. It is the Dayton accord, and the Rambouillet formula’s denial of independence to Kosovar Albanians. But from Caliban, all that — the basic, long-term political course of the big powers — attracts no criticism. His anger is directed exclusively against a subordinate and anomalous phase of big-power policy — the 1999 attempt to coerce Milosevic — and thus, more sharply, against the Kosovars who dared to disrupt the big-power settlement and in self-defence and in pursuit of their national rights.

Brownstone: Rambouillet, however, was a great deal preferable to Milosevic's attempt to clear Kosova of its population! Stop the War's position is to replace Dayton and Rambouillet not with a democratic, national, anti-colonialist regime but with Serb freedom to commit genocide. Without working-class unity, there will be no Balkan socialist revolution; and without a consistently democratic programme on the national question, there will be no working-class unity.

Varga: Stop the War conflates the socialist level with the democratic — “socialism is the answer to the national question” — in such a way as to eliminate the democratic basis of working-class unity. And that, in turn, eliminates the possibility of working-class socialism! Their own sectist shadow gets in their light.

Brownstone: Worse. The future socialist unity of the peoples is counterposed to the defence, or even self-defence, of the oppressed and those facing extermination now!

Caliban: “Serbians cannot be free for as long as their country oppresses Kosovo. Kosovo cannot be free if it becomes a pawn in NATO's game and its liberation [sic] is taken up cynically by the US, Britain and the rest."

Brownstone: Very impartial and foreseeing and balanced! You do not mention the more obvious and urgent fact that Kosova cannot be free — or even exist as a nation — unless Serbian genocide is stopped.

Caliban: Since when has an imperialist power helped oppressed people other than when it hopes to use them as pawns?

Brownstone: Since when have socialists refused to support national liberation movements because they had such connections? For example, German imperialism helped Irish nationalist revolutionaries during World War One. It helped Lenin get to Russia in 1917. The Kosovar Albanians are not pawns being used as an excuse by the USA to enslave Serbs and others in the region.
You state blandly that “Kosovo cannot be free if… its liberation is taken up cynically by the US, Britain and the rest”. What do such words mean from people who fanatically resisted all attempts to get the “peace movement" you controlled to include calls for Kosovar rights and getting Serbian troops out of Kosova? They mean something different from a routine advocacy of political independence. They mean, for you, that the Kosovars do not deserve to be free, or even to live, “if their liberation is taken up cynically by the US, Britain and the rest”. You wind up with an unmistakable though unvoiced demand that Kosovar Albanians must sacrifice themselves to stopping the European Union from being intimidated by the USA!

Caliban: “Serbians have to support the right of Kosovar Albanians to self-determination, to decide their own future, and Kosovar Albanians have to be for harmony with Serbia and for an end to ethnic tensions. Their unity and respect for each other's national rights are the only way forward to lasting peace and progress.”

Brownstone: Balance and impartiality again! That could have been written 10 years, or fifty years ago, with any peoples you like substituted for Serbs and Albanians. What about the situation now, the issues and choices now? You have not raised — indeed, you have fought against raising — any proposal about Kosovar Albanian rights. You oppose the call for the genocidal Serb army to get out of Kosova. Your “balanced” statement is the equivalent of arguing around 1944 that the onus was on the European Jews to work for harmony with “Germans". You blame the Kosovar Albanian victims “equally" with their Serbian murderers and would-be murderers.

IX
Varga: Note the walking backwards technique again. Now, on page 22, it has been made “safe” to refer to self-determination for Kosova. Self-determination is a desirable element in the socialist future — just as friendship and harmony across borders in general is — but for now the lack of self-determination for the Kosovars is only one of countless problems in the Balkans, all ultimately due to big-power machinations. It does not have sufficient importance or relevance to imply any sympathy with the Kosova Liberation Army fighting for self-determination.
The pamphlet has a boxed-off section, “Who are the Kosova Liberation Army?" First, we get something resembling the truth. The KLA began in the mid 1990s. Before that, “most Kosovar Albanians had responded to their position as second class citizens by backing the non-violent movement led by Ibrahim Rugova".
Brownstone: Except that “second class citizens" is a prettification of Serb persecution in Kosova for the previous decade — let alone of the attempted extermination under way as Stop the War was written.

Varga: Then this: “But the West ignored their plight. The US-backed Dayton Agreement of 1995 declared Kosovo an integral part of Serbia."

Brownstone: Exactly like Stop the War — for now, as distinct from a future when there will be few if any Albanians left in Kosova, for which Stop the War bravely advocates future “self-determination”.

Varga: So at Dayton, the big powers should have insisted on Kosovar rights? Or is Stop the War's grievance that the big powers now depart from Dayton by insisting (at Rambouillet) on autonomy for the Kosovars within Serbia and on the Kosovars’ right not be killed and driven out?
If NATO's “concern” for Kosova were a mask for a drive to enslave Serbia, then this exposure of their inconsistency and hypocrisy could help establish that fact. But here the “exposure” is used to disqualify the NATO powers from playing any other role in Kosova than to leave Milosevic to carry through the Serbian-chauvinist logic of Dayton and to mask the truth about what Serbian imperialists are doing in Kosova.

Caliban: “Milosevic responded [to Kosovar guerrilla action] just as US backed governments responded to similar movements in countries like Turkey — with ‘search-and-destroy' military operation that killed civilians."

Varga: Ah, yes, so many people accept such things as normal. Why get excited over the Kosovar Albanians?

Brownstone: But what do socialists say about Turkey’s repression of the Kurds, for example? We support the Kurdish resistance, despite its bad politics. All this has only one possible sense to it — NATO should be consistently swinish; it has no business, no right, to complicate the simple schemata of certain socialists able to see only the heaviest blacks and the cleanest whites.

Varga: Now we get a skilful — and even gleeful — twist in the use of the “objective or hostile authority” or eyewitness. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook “denounced the KLA as ‘terrorists'". Madeleine Albright “hinted” at bombing the KLA too.

Brownstone: And if they had? What would Caliban's line be then? According to the method employed so far in Stop the War, our concern is such questions is only to detect what the interests and policy of “imperialism" is, and then invert them. The principle that all that matters is the interests and policy of imperialism is exactly like the attitude of the great capitalist states to Kosova, or to massacres in East Timor or Africa — only the conclusions are inverted.

Caliban: “They refused to support Kosovar independence even as the bombing began."

Brownstone: Like Stop the War — which, in addition, makes propaganda for Serbia against NATO and against the Kosovar Albanians!

Varga: Note this brilliant tactical zigzag to the “left”. Rambouillet stipulates autonomy for Kosova under Serb overlordship. NATO started bombing in order to impose that settlement. Stop the War advocates — no other conclusion follows from what it says — giving Milosevic a free hand to exterminate Kosovars — and at the same time criticises Rambouillet and NATO for advocating less than full independence for Kosova! Maybe that shrewd thrust will inhibit a few lefts who will think that the distance between autonomy and independence is greater and more important than the distance between autonomy and massacre!

Brownstone: And if NATO had supported Kosova Albanian independence? Wouldn't the destabilisation of the region which you fear, and they fear, perhaps have been the result? Would Stop the War denounce them for it? Is the suggestion here that “even" the NATO bombers don't back the KLA programme? Or conversely that NATO should support “independence? In which case, shouldn't Stop the War?

Caliban: “This has not, however, stopped the KLA continuing to look to the US. It is in danger of becoming the plaything of the NATO big powers in ways that can only harm Albanian and Serbian workers and peasants alike."

Varga: You must play every angle you can imagine! The KLA are bad because they are “terrorists” (as we know on the authority of Robin Cook and Madeleine Albright’s condemnations of them), and also because they have welcomed Cook’s and Albright’s assistance to save their people from annihilation.
Here we have the immensely variable and useful technique of using prefabricated, imprecise words — “plaything”, without indicating what “game” is being “played” — reinforced in iron by determination to obscure and hide what is actually going on.

Brownstone: How could the Albanian workers and peasants in Kosova be harmed by the KLA’s alliance with NATO worse than by being subjected to mass killing and displacement? What harm compared to what Serbia is doing to the Kosovar Albanians can conceivably come to the Serb people from it? What exactly are the KLA and the Kosovars, fighting for their very existence, obliged to do to serve the interests of Serbian workers and peasants, the overwhelming majority of whom are with Milosevic for now? Sacrifice themselves? Commit altruistic suicide for the greater good of anti-imperialism (and the prosperity of Serb imperialism)?

Varga: Stop the War quotes a strikingly naïve assertion from Tribune that no Serb civilians have been killed by the KLA. Considering the reality of ethnic conflict and ingrained, hate-clogged nationalism, that would indeed be remarkable. “This is simply not true”, insists Stop the War, thereby reinforcing an impression of morally-upright concern for truth in every detail.

Brownstone: The same schoolmasterly scruples and heroic anti-imperialist energy that served so well in Stop the War's exhaustingly severe and righteous discussion of the Holocaust!

Caliban: “Killing Serbs has been part of the KLA's guerrilla strategy."

Brownstone: Killing Serbs? Soldiers? Paramilitaries? Police? How could it not be? And, in an ethnic conflict like this, how could it not be Serb civilians too?

Varga: That is the nature of such things. It is almost always part of national liberation movements.

Brownstone: From people here engaged in a propaganda war against the Kosovar Albanians on behalf of the state organising and fomenting mass murder and mass displacement, isn't this to risk looking simply obscene?

Caliban: The KLA has “targeted Serbian security forces, but it has also attacked civilians by throwing grenades into Serb cafés".

Varga: You see? Milosevic may have “horrible policies”, but the KLA — an army of the 90% majority people in Serbia’s colony — are at least as bad. How can you defend the Kosovars, even from genocide, if they do such things?

Brownstone: Of course, chauvinism and murder beget chauvinism and murder in communal conflict. If the absence of such horrors were a precondition, then we would never have supported any national liberation movement anywhere, ever! Socialists should judge the overall picture; and judge it politically. Decisive for socialists, democrats and consistent anti-imperialists is the fact that the Kosovars, the vast compact majority in Kosova, were faced with being driven out or killed — and entitled to defend themselves. They were entitled to ally as they needed to, without necessarily being defined by their allies.

Varga: For Stop the War, all these questions are incidentals, to be fended off or marginalised as seems best. Essentially, the pamphlet and Socialist Worker's coverage was assembled in the belief that with suitable propaganda a large anti-war movement could be built, in alliance with pacifists, confused old anti-US or anti-German chauvinists like Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner, and the many lost tribes and sects of Stalinism and kitsch Trotskyism.

Brownstone: Not since October-November 1939, when the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain started to build a pro-Hitler-Stalin campaign for “peace” — meaning, “let Hitler win” — has anything like it been seen.

Caliban: “What began as very small protests [over Vietnam] snowballed into mass demonstrations that even affected the mood of the US soldiers in Vietnam. Opposition to wars has always started with a minority of the population revolted by the barbarity they see before them…. Socialists connect the struggle against war with struggles against poverty, bad housing, racism and all oppression…”

Varga: All the bad news that's fit to print, except that which damages our government's enemies…

Caliban: “… Then we will be fighting a class war — the only war that can end war."

Varga: This is a very clever touch for, in fact, Stop the War's own approach is not according to the general guidelines it outlines. Stop the War is fighting not class war but, on the propaganda front, Serbian ethnic war against the Kosovar Albanians. As a means of “getting” at NATO.

Brownstone: Stop the War was a sterile attempt to create an ersatz anti-war movement, arbitrarily, mechanically, and on the basis of lies. This passage conveys the only unadulterated truth in the whole pamphlet — in what it reveals of the thinking at the heart of the whole strange business, the attempt to lie into existence a mass anti-war movement.

Varga: The right emotional note needs to be sounded. In Stop the War there is a picture showing soldiers holding a wrapped up human being over a camp fire. The caption says they are Belgian soldiers roasting a live Somali child in 1992…

Brownstone: Indignation about the Somali child in 1992 — if the caption is to be trusted — is here put to the service of the butchers of Kosovar Albanian children in 1999! In World War Two and in the Cold War both sides made “anti-imperialist" propaganda, both sides exposed atrocities — of the other side. The Germans made much anti-British Empire propaganda. They printed telling accounts of the pioneering British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War! They also made a great fuss over the bodies of thousands of Polish officer POWs killed by the Stalinists in 1939-40 and found in the Katyn Forest in 1943. Both sides told much truth — about their enemies. Independent socialists tell the truth about both sides.

Caliban: “The 20th century is ending as it began — punctuated by war.”

Varga: For its final chapter, Stop the War chooses the blandest, broadest appeal — to naive pacifist sentiment.

Brownstone: What they actually purvey is nihilism and fatalism against the Kosovar Albanians — the Kosovar Albanians who had a right to defend themselves and wage a war of liberation — and the right to the backing of honest socialists when they did it.

Caliban: “They say their wars are against tyranny and evil, and for democracy and liberation. The reasons change over the years. But each time lies are pumped out to mask the truth of what all wars are about — power, control and the ability of the world's rulers to carve up the globe and make profit. And in every war the rich and powerful of each nation send ordinary working-class soldiers to die for them."

Brownstone: Then there are no wars of liberation? There are no just wars? From Stop the War's point of view, as stated here, Serbia should not shoot down NATO planes.

Varga: Now, on the last page, when the reader has been led backwards right to the end, for the first time language appropriate to what is happening in Kosova is used — but so tilted as to minimise Serbia’s attempted genocide in Kosova as just another workaday horror of capitalism. “The Kurdish minority in Turkey face oppression every bit as savage as that meted out to the Albanians in Kosova."

True, the Kurds are savagely oppressed — though there has not, as far as I know, been an attempt to drive out the entire Kurdish population or wipe them out by systematic murder and displacement. Not even here, on the last page, does Stop the War make plain reference to the likelihood of the whole Kosovar Albanian population being driven out or butchered — as they certainly would have been had the Serbian drive in Kosova continued.

It is also true that Kurdish nationalist groups have accepted aid from the CIA against Iran and Iraq. Why didn’t the SWP then start supporting Iran and Iraq against them?
Caliban: “But Turkey is a member of NATO and a key ally of the US and Israel. So the West arms Turkey.”

Brownstone: So the big powers are hypocrites? Yes, they are murderers, accomplices to murder, gangsters and shameless liars and hypocrites. And the underlying moral and political rationale for your stand is best summed up in the demand that they should be consistent hypocrites?

We shouldn't believe them or trust them? Of course not! And we should take the same approach to Stop the War! You use your general indictment of capitalism to excuse, minimise and make invisible the specific horrors in Kosova.

Afterword

On one level, to anatomise the techniques of a work like Stop the War might seem to be beside the point. Its faults come not from honest ignorance, muddle or confusion of thought. The muddling up and confusion of thought themselves come from something else: from the need to justify a “line” arrived at arbitrarily according to someone’s “bright idea” that a big anti-war movement would be good for “the party” just then.
The point is that the prevalence of “Apparatus Marxism” and of an “Apparatus Marxist” culture over a very long time helps make possible both the taking of such arbitrary party-solipsistic decisions as the SWP leadership’s decision to build an anti-war movement in defence of Slobodan Milosevic — and that is what it was! — and the tissue of muddled reasoning and nonsense that is Stop the War.

It makes it acceptable. It educates people not to look too closely at what exactly is said, or what the real implications — as distinct from the party-useful immediate implications — of what is said and done are. The degeneration becomes cumulative. It becomes seemingly irreversible. Attempts like this article to stand against it come to seem either irresponsible pedantry — “You don’t want to fight imperialism! You don’t want to build a revolutionary party!” — or a worthy but hopeless attempt to control the waves and tides.
This examination of the SWP’s grotesque tissue of apologetics for the most savage regime in recent European history, at the point where it had embarked on a systematic attempt at genocide in Kosova, points to how things really stand here: for Marxism as a guide to both honest analysis and revolutionary action nothing less is at stake than the choice: “to be or not to be”. Unless the poisonous swamp is drained, then real Marxism in politics will over time become an impossibility.

We have put the pamphlet Stop the War on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s website at www.workersliberty.org

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