From: icdsm-italia @...
Subject: [icdsm-italia] N. Markowitz: The Death of Slobodan Milosevic
and the Death of Yugoslavia
Date: March 23, 2006 1:24:43 PM GMT+01:00
To: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/2964/
The Death of Slobodan Milosevic and the Death of Yugoslavia
By Norman Markowitz
3-16-06, 9:44 am
Slobodan Milosevic died recently in his prison cell in the Hague,
tried for war crimes by those NATO states that killed his nation,
Yugoslavia, when they intervened in the 1990s in a civil war inspired
by the imperialist powers and rightwing Croatian separatists during
and after the Soviet Union's destruction.
As part of the propaganda campaign used to justify NATO's massive
military intervention, the term "ethnic cleansing" was repeated
endlessly to portray Milosevic and those Serbians who fought to save
Yugoslavia as comparable to the Nazis during WWII. Jewish people in
the U.S. were particularly targeted by this campaign, even though
those knowledgeable about the region knew both of the bonds of
friendship between the Jewish people of the Balkans and the non-Jewish
people of Serbia, as opposed to the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of
rightist elements in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Rarely mentioned here was the fact that the separatists and
nationalists in Croatia, Bosnia and the Serbian province of Kosovo
often identified with and glorified World War II local fascists who
worked with the Nazis to carry out genocide against the Serbian
people, the Roma people (gypsies), and Jewish people of Yugoslav
nationality.
NATO had been established after WWII essentially to fight WWIII
against the Soviet Union in Europe and also to bring a number of
states, France and Italy particularly, with powerful Communist parties
at the time, into an anti-Communist, anti-Soviet alliance. With the
Soviet Union gone, NATO intervened in 1999 in a civil war in a country
still led by Communists, which had declared and sustained its
neutrality at the beginning the cold war period. Then the Yugoslavia
led by Joseph Tito was the only Communist-led nation not wholly
demonized in capitalist media, because Tito had broken on a variety of
issues with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership
After 1991, the imperialist powers saw Yugoslavia as another Communist
country to be destroyed, regardless of the heroism of its people in
fighting fascists during WWII and the remarkable achievements that
socialist Yugoslavia made for its own people and within the movement
of non-aligned nations.
Years ago, when Yugoslavia was fighting for its existence, I said in
an address to a peace group that if Milosevic had simply acquiesced in
the dismemberment of his country and/or aided and abetted it as
Mikhail Gorbachev did in the USSR, he would have been a hero to the
capitalist media---"our kind of Communist"--- meeting regularly with
Clinton and the two Bush presidents until he was ousted by some
Yeltsin figure. But he sought to rally the people of Serbia to fight
back, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia, and finally in Kosovo. Had the
foreign powers not intervened, I believe that Yugoslavia would have
survived, but they did and it didn't.
Civil wars are traditionally among the most bloody, and there were
great atrocities committed on all sides in the Yugoslav civil war,
just as there were atrocities committed by both sides in the American
civil war, particularly on the Union side by Sherman's armies in
Georgia and the Carolinas. There were also horrible massacres against
native peoples carried out by the Union side.
However, the Union side was the right side, fighting against both the
slaveholder confederacy and powerful empires, Britain and France, who
generally favored the confederacy in order to dismember the American
Republic so that they could gain economic power over it and
re-establish, in the case of the French, colonies in the Western
hemisphere. Had England and France intervened on the Confederate side,
as many feared they would, and the Confederates won, certainly Sherman
and others, had they been captured, might have been tried for "war
crimes." Lincoln especially, had he lived, might have been tried.
Although it was defeated, the Yugoslav side, which Slobodan Milosevic
led, deserves to be seen by anti-imperialists as the right side in the
Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s.
The trial of Milosevic was in effect a continuation of the cold war
"totalitarian" ideology that equates Communists with fascists out of
all historical contexts, a whitewashing of the history of Yugoslavia
and the imperialist nature of the NATO intervention. Unlike the
Nuremberg Trials, this was not an indictment of a state that built a
military machine for the purpose of launching a world war and
committed before and during the war unprecedented crimes against
humanity.
Rather it was the use of the classic guilt by association tactic, in
this case with the Serbian-Yugoslav role in civil war atrocities and
with statements like Milosevic's famous 1989 Kosovo speech denouncing
Albanians for their violence against the region's Serbian minority, to
illogically blame Milosevic, his government, and the people of Serbia
for both provoking the civil war and fighting it to achieve racist
"ethnic cleansing."
Unlike the Nuremberg trials where Hermann Goering, the leading Nazi on
trial, took poison to escape the gallows that he justly deserved,
President Milosevic maintained his innocence and for years condemned
the tribunal for both its failure to provide him with necessary
medical care and its lack of any real standing to try him, his
government, or the people of Yugoslavia. The statements attributed to
Dutch physicians in the capitalist press that Milosevic brought on his
own death by manipulating prescription drugs given him for political
reasons are, in my opinion, an example of blaming the victim.
President Milosevic's family, in exile in Russia and other places,
have denounced his treatment and death, as have Russian doctors whom
he wished to receive treatment from. In the U.S. and other countries,
Communist party leaders often sought treatment for serious illnesses
in the Soviet Union because they could not trust treatment in their
own countries. In one famous case, Henry Winston, a Smith Act
political prisoner and later Chair of the CPUSA, lost his eyesight
because U.S. federal prison authorities failed to provide him with the
necessary medical care.
In the "investigations" of the House Un-American Activities Committee
and the Smith Act Trials in the United States, statements by Communist
leaders were often taken out of context, and, through guilt by
association, Communist leaders were made to appear responsible for all
real, imagined, and exaggerated crimes committed in the name of the
Communist movement.
This is the legacy of the trial and death of Slobodan Milosevic---a
HUAC-style trial by those who dismembered Yugoslavia as a socialist
country, creating a Balkan map today that is more similar to Hitler's
"New Order" of 1941 than the Europe of 1945. It was a trial in which
the fascist genocide of WWII, which the world calls the Holocaust, was
relativized and trivialized by a propaganda campaign to justify
imperialist conquest and the "transformation" of NATO into a military
force that can theoretically now be sent anywhere on earth to
intervene in civil wars, siding with whomever it chooses.
The 18th century French philosopher Voltaire wrote that history is a
"pack of tricks" played on the dead. The history of ruling classes and
victorious nations is often that. For Slobodan Milosevic, the
propaganda tricks were first played while he and Yugoslavia fought for
life. Now, all of us who are against imperialism must fight to set the
historical record straight if the people are not to be misled by those
who cloak imperialist domination and conquest in slogans about the
advance of "democracy" and the protection of "human rights."
Reach Norman Markowitz at pa-letters @ politicalaffairs.net
==========================
IN DIFESA DELLA JUGOSLAVIA
Il j'accuse di Slobodan Milosevic
di fronte al "Tribunale ad hoc" dell'Aia"
(Ed. Zambon 2005, 10 euro)
Tutte le informazioni sul libro, appena uscito, alle pagine:
http://www.pasti.org/autodif.html
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/icdsm-italia/message/204
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27 -- 00043 Ciampino (Roma)
tel/fax +39-06-7915200 -- email: icdsm-italia @ libero.it
http://www.pasti.org/linkmilo.html
*** Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006, intestato ad
Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA, causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC ***
LE TRASCRIZIONI "UFFICIALI" DEL "PROCESSO" SI TROVANO AI SITI:
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/transe54.htm (IN ENGLISH)
http://www.un.org/icty/transf54/transf54.htm (EN FRANCAIS)
Subject: [icdsm-italia] N. Markowitz: The Death of Slobodan Milosevic
and the Death of Yugoslavia
Date: March 23, 2006 1:24:43 PM GMT+01:00
To: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/2964/
The Death of Slobodan Milosevic and the Death of Yugoslavia
By Norman Markowitz
3-16-06, 9:44 am
Slobodan Milosevic died recently in his prison cell in the Hague,
tried for war crimes by those NATO states that killed his nation,
Yugoslavia, when they intervened in the 1990s in a civil war inspired
by the imperialist powers and rightwing Croatian separatists during
and after the Soviet Union's destruction.
As part of the propaganda campaign used to justify NATO's massive
military intervention, the term "ethnic cleansing" was repeated
endlessly to portray Milosevic and those Serbians who fought to save
Yugoslavia as comparable to the Nazis during WWII. Jewish people in
the U.S. were particularly targeted by this campaign, even though
those knowledgeable about the region knew both of the bonds of
friendship between the Jewish people of the Balkans and the non-Jewish
people of Serbia, as opposed to the thinly veiled anti-Semitism of
rightist elements in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Rarely mentioned here was the fact that the separatists and
nationalists in Croatia, Bosnia and the Serbian province of Kosovo
often identified with and glorified World War II local fascists who
worked with the Nazis to carry out genocide against the Serbian
people, the Roma people (gypsies), and Jewish people of Yugoslav
nationality.
NATO had been established after WWII essentially to fight WWIII
against the Soviet Union in Europe and also to bring a number of
states, France and Italy particularly, with powerful Communist parties
at the time, into an anti-Communist, anti-Soviet alliance. With the
Soviet Union gone, NATO intervened in 1999 in a civil war in a country
still led by Communists, which had declared and sustained its
neutrality at the beginning the cold war period. Then the Yugoslavia
led by Joseph Tito was the only Communist-led nation not wholly
demonized in capitalist media, because Tito had broken on a variety of
issues with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership
After 1991, the imperialist powers saw Yugoslavia as another Communist
country to be destroyed, regardless of the heroism of its people in
fighting fascists during WWII and the remarkable achievements that
socialist Yugoslavia made for its own people and within the movement
of non-aligned nations.
Years ago, when Yugoslavia was fighting for its existence, I said in
an address to a peace group that if Milosevic had simply acquiesced in
the dismemberment of his country and/or aided and abetted it as
Mikhail Gorbachev did in the USSR, he would have been a hero to the
capitalist media---"our kind of Communist"--- meeting regularly with
Clinton and the two Bush presidents until he was ousted by some
Yeltsin figure. But he sought to rally the people of Serbia to fight
back, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia, and finally in Kosovo. Had the
foreign powers not intervened, I believe that Yugoslavia would have
survived, but they did and it didn't.
Civil wars are traditionally among the most bloody, and there were
great atrocities committed on all sides in the Yugoslav civil war,
just as there were atrocities committed by both sides in the American
civil war, particularly on the Union side by Sherman's armies in
Georgia and the Carolinas. There were also horrible massacres against
native peoples carried out by the Union side.
However, the Union side was the right side, fighting against both the
slaveholder confederacy and powerful empires, Britain and France, who
generally favored the confederacy in order to dismember the American
Republic so that they could gain economic power over it and
re-establish, in the case of the French, colonies in the Western
hemisphere. Had England and France intervened on the Confederate side,
as many feared they would, and the Confederates won, certainly Sherman
and others, had they been captured, might have been tried for "war
crimes." Lincoln especially, had he lived, might have been tried.
Although it was defeated, the Yugoslav side, which Slobodan Milosevic
led, deserves to be seen by anti-imperialists as the right side in the
Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s.
The trial of Milosevic was in effect a continuation of the cold war
"totalitarian" ideology that equates Communists with fascists out of
all historical contexts, a whitewashing of the history of Yugoslavia
and the imperialist nature of the NATO intervention. Unlike the
Nuremberg Trials, this was not an indictment of a state that built a
military machine for the purpose of launching a world war and
committed before and during the war unprecedented crimes against
humanity.
Rather it was the use of the classic guilt by association tactic, in
this case with the Serbian-Yugoslav role in civil war atrocities and
with statements like Milosevic's famous 1989 Kosovo speech denouncing
Albanians for their violence against the region's Serbian minority, to
illogically blame Milosevic, his government, and the people of Serbia
for both provoking the civil war and fighting it to achieve racist
"ethnic cleansing."
Unlike the Nuremberg trials where Hermann Goering, the leading Nazi on
trial, took poison to escape the gallows that he justly deserved,
President Milosevic maintained his innocence and for years condemned
the tribunal for both its failure to provide him with necessary
medical care and its lack of any real standing to try him, his
government, or the people of Yugoslavia. The statements attributed to
Dutch physicians in the capitalist press that Milosevic brought on his
own death by manipulating prescription drugs given him for political
reasons are, in my opinion, an example of blaming the victim.
President Milosevic's family, in exile in Russia and other places,
have denounced his treatment and death, as have Russian doctors whom
he wished to receive treatment from. In the U.S. and other countries,
Communist party leaders often sought treatment for serious illnesses
in the Soviet Union because they could not trust treatment in their
own countries. In one famous case, Henry Winston, a Smith Act
political prisoner and later Chair of the CPUSA, lost his eyesight
because U.S. federal prison authorities failed to provide him with the
necessary medical care.
In the "investigations" of the House Un-American Activities Committee
and the Smith Act Trials in the United States, statements by Communist
leaders were often taken out of context, and, through guilt by
association, Communist leaders were made to appear responsible for all
real, imagined, and exaggerated crimes committed in the name of the
Communist movement.
This is the legacy of the trial and death of Slobodan Milosevic---a
HUAC-style trial by those who dismembered Yugoslavia as a socialist
country, creating a Balkan map today that is more similar to Hitler's
"New Order" of 1941 than the Europe of 1945. It was a trial in which
the fascist genocide of WWII, which the world calls the Holocaust, was
relativized and trivialized by a propaganda campaign to justify
imperialist conquest and the "transformation" of NATO into a military
force that can theoretically now be sent anywhere on earth to
intervene in civil wars, siding with whomever it chooses.
The 18th century French philosopher Voltaire wrote that history is a
"pack of tricks" played on the dead. The history of ruling classes and
victorious nations is often that. For Slobodan Milosevic, the
propaganda tricks were first played while he and Yugoslavia fought for
life. Now, all of us who are against imperialism must fight to set the
historical record straight if the people are not to be misled by those
who cloak imperialist domination and conquest in slogans about the
advance of "democracy" and the protection of "human rights."
Reach Norman Markowitz at pa-letters @ politicalaffairs.net
==========================
IN DIFESA DELLA JUGOSLAVIA
Il j'accuse di Slobodan Milosevic
di fronte al "Tribunale ad hoc" dell'Aia"
(Ed. Zambon 2005, 10 euro)
Tutte le informazioni sul libro, appena uscito, alle pagine:
http://www.pasti.org/autodif.html
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/icdsm-italia/message/204
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27 -- 00043 Ciampino (Roma)
tel/fax +39-06-7915200 -- email: icdsm-italia @ libero.it
http://www.pasti.org/linkmilo.html
*** Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006, intestato ad
Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA, causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC ***
LE TRASCRIZIONI "UFFICIALI" DEL "PROCESSO" SI TROVANO AI SITI:
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/transe54.htm (IN ENGLISH)
http://www.un.org/icty/transf54/transf54.htm (EN FRANCAIS)