Also, I call Tresy to analise, in the name of "decency" to dispute one
serious article ,  the one of M Neumann, Jewish professor from Canada, I
sent it earlier, which is the text of outstanding merit written by a well
known scientist. If Jared Israel is writting in campschrift style, M Neumann
certainly doesnt. Please, Tresy, try to "dissect"  this , very serious
article....  It is written below,
                                   Andrej
                                www.dissidence.org
"The thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit,
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit".

- George Orwell, poem written for Unknown Italian militiaman in
Spain, 1936


Serbia's Memories

By Michael Neumann
Professor of philosophy at Trent University, Peterborough, Canada.
Though my family suffered under the Nazis, I have for some years now felt
increasingly uncomfortable with talk about 'The Holocaust'. My dead
relatives, I suspect, would not feel honoured by the association of their
fates with some neo-Biblical shibboleth, nor would they welcome the
sentimental pieties whose chief effect seems to be the extension of an
almost inexhaustible line of moral credit to the most racist and vicious
tendencies of Israeli nationalism.

This year, these vague feelings unease have turned to disgust as 'Holocaust
Remembrance Day' became an exercise in 'holocaust denial'. As Western
leaders vowed to fight Serb atrocities and massacres in Kosovo, they ignored
that proverbial first casualty of war, the truth. Just as the Western powers
allied themselves with Stalin to fight Hitler, today they fight the Serbs,
not only with bombs, but with a distortion of memory and history that
matches Stalin's best efforts.

This is not to deny the reality of Serb atrocities, but only to put them in
their proper place. To do this requires three things: (i) a nodding
acquaintance with contemporary reality; (ii) a glance at recent Western
policies in the area; (iii) an honest look at the past.

Contemporary Realities

If we are merely to judge the Serbs, we can use any principles we like. But
we are not just judging the Serbs. We are literally waging an unprovoked war
of aggression against them: they did not attack us, we attacked them. We did
this, apparently, to make a better world, and, if that is our purpose, we
ought to take a look at how the world actually works today. We can then ask
whether our actions are likely to bring a higher moral tone to human
affairs.

What then, are the standards according to which the world operates - not the
ones it professes, but the ones it actually enforces? Here is my
understanding of the real 'international norms'. They are worthy only of a
barbarous species, but don't shoot the messenger.

First, killing hundreds of innocent people in a war is normally regarded as
regrettable but quite acceptable. The US did this in Iraq. The Russians did
this in Chechnya. Everyone did this in Bosnia, and NATO will do this in
Serbia. In all these cases, it was known with absolute certainty beforehand
that innocent people would be killed. No mainstream commentators suggest
that these are war crimes; they are quite correctly considered an inevitable
aspect of modern warfare. So these deliberate and intentional acts of
killing the innocent should be judged, not as outstanding atrocities, but as
part of the known, ordinary, expected consequences of war. Their moral
status depends on the moral status of the wars themselves.

Second, quantity does matter. There is a certain internationally accepted
proportion between the murder of innocents and the scale of the conflict. In
World War II, killing several hundred thousand innocent civilians was
entirely acceptable. In the Gulf War, killing a few thousand innocent
civilians was quite ok; killing several hundred thousand would not have
been. In a police action like Somalia, killing a few hundred would have been
perfectly fine. Oh, a few moralists might have whined about it for a couple
of weeks, but they don't set international standards. Not only would the
international community do nothing about it - that might be a matter of
political expediency - they would not even condemn it.

Third, though these sorts of killings are quite deliberate and intentional,
they are regarded as far less serious than the victimization of particular
individuals. This is the difference between Pinochet and Hitler on the one
hand, and Nixon or, say, the French Prime ministers who ran the Algerian war
on the other. The former individuals implemented policies that carefully
selected out some citizens of their countries and decided, through their
bureaucracies, exactly what cruelties were to be inflicted on people. The
latter merely pursued policies which deliberately caused the unjustified
death and suffering of many thousands of people. The former are considered
monsters. The latter are considered, at most, sons-of-bitches. The
distinction seems to depend roughly on the specific nature of the intention:
with monsters, unlike sons-of-bitches, the cruelties inflicted go beyond any
rational political purpose.

Fourth, the so-called and grotesquely misnamed international community, as
if displaying some awareness of its own barbarity, regularly condemns only
two things: monsters and agressive war. The vilest societies, like Mexico,
are passed over in silence, because that society's evils are 'systemic', not
monstrous, and not the product of warfare. No matter how long the suffering
of the Mexican (or Brazilian, or Indonesian, or Indian) people persists, no
one will ever suggest armed 'humanitarian' intervention to save them. This
is not because the world is too stupid to realize the extent to which these
people suffer. It is because war is regarded as the gateway to even greater
suffering and chaos. The first international crime, in the eyes of the
world, is agressive war, the unprovoked violation of a nation's territorial
sovereignty. Warfare to stop monsters is permitted, if at all, only because
monsters threaten by their acts to drag the world even further into
barbarism than it is already.

To summarize: In all its history, the world has come closest to enforcing
only one rule: don't send your troops over someone else's border. In all its
civilizing efforts, the world has managed only (a) hypocritically to deplore
the outrages of its friends, but not its enemies, (b) somewhat less
hypocritically, to punish the perpetrators of large-scale gratuitous torture
and of grossly irrational attempts to wipe out races and religions. Merely
to destroy peoples who stand in the way of your enrichment, like the
American or Brazilian Indians, draws only those protests which positively
reek of the intention to do nothing at all.

Now to apply this to 'the former Yugoslavia', we need to look at Western
policies and Balkan history.

Western Policies

Yugoslavia is a road to hell paved with some good intentions, some bad ones,
and much self-deception. As far as the good intentions go, the West has made
the fatal mistake of promoting quite incompatible doctrines: human rights
and ethnic nationalism. In so doing it has created a nightmare through which
it wanders like a crazed Dr. Frankenstein, screaming outrage at the forces
it has so carefully nurtured and unleashed.

Ethnic nationalism is distinguishable - though not by the Americans or their
European sycophants - from what leftists call the 'anti-colonialist' or
'anti-imperialist' nationalism of the Algerians, Vietnamese, Egyptians, and
many others. The latter is directed against the occupiers of an existing
political entity. These occupiers are of relatively recent vintage - usually
a hundred years or less. Anti-imperialist nationalism may go back further
than that in special cases: perhaps in Ireland, where there is a more or
less continuous but centuries-old history of conflict between the invaders
and the invaded, or in colonies where the invaders may have been in the
country for a longer time, but have always been a thin caretaker caste
imposed on a much larger general population. Anti-imperialist or
anti-colonialist nationalism seeks to rid a country that really is a country
of foreign occupiers who really are foreign and really are occupiers. It
seeks to reverse a conquest that manifests itself as an ongoing political
regime serving the interests of a foreign power. It fights on behalf of
everyone who was in the country prior to the occupation, regardless of race
or ethnic origin. In Vietnam, for example, the Vietnamese fought to expel
only the occupying Japanese, then French, then Americans, not any Chinese or
other minorities who resided within their borders.

Ethnic nationalism is quite different. The Americans, guilt-ridden, insular,
and ignorant, may see it as a variation on Black Power, an attempt to
reassert the pride, history, and social agenda of an oppressed ethnic group
or race. Neutrally defined, it is a movement which seeks to assert the real
or imagined identity of a real or imagined racial or ethnic group to right
real or imagined past wrongs. Of course, ethnic nationalism doesn't have to
be admirable, whether it is cozy British xenophobia or Hitler's struggle for
a Germany that united all Germans in a single state. Typically it looks back
to a distant, often mythical past, like the ancient Land of Israel or the
glorious days when Gothic tribes lived freely in the forest clearings of
Europe. To endorse ethnic nationalism is to endorse the legitimacy of this
backward glance to old myths and old injuries. In the last decade, the West
has pursued a consistent and relentless policy of supporting ethnic
nationalism in Yugoslavia. This started with the recognition of Slovenia and
Croatia. Once this step was taken, the idea that the West would somehow
sponsor the establishment of a multiethnic republic in Bosnia became either
an idiocy or a supreme expression of bad faith. Most likely it is the
former. The inappropriateness of Western policy has escaped the Western
press, at least, because it is peopled with deep thinkers who proclaim that
'to understand the happenings in the former Yugoslavia, you have to go back
to 1990', or, nowadays, as far back as 1968. You have to go back a little
further than that.

Why? Because to licence ethnic nationalism, as the West did when it
recognized Slovenia and Croatia, is to licence the rediscovery - or the
creation - of ethnic memory. Once you do this, you cannot set the rules for
what those memories are made of. You cannot tell Croats and Slovenes to
remember their ancient roots, but cut off Serbian recollections at 1986 to
serve the convenience of their enemies. You cannot encourage a region to
remember its ethnic identities yet prevent it from remembering all the
evils, lies, and distortions that go with those identities.

That this is exactly what the West wants everyone, and especially the Serbs,
to do, is disgraceful. America meekly applauds when 'persons of colour'
remember what was done to them 400 years ago. The world sits in shamefaced
reverence as Jews like myself are venerated for remembering what happened to
them 50 years ago, and are encouraged to milk it for all it's worth. And
perhaps this is right. But then it cannot be right to shake your head when
the Serbs dare to stretch their memories hundreds of years into the past,
but especially to the very time in history, half a century ago, that we
commemorate as we bomb their country. What is it that they remember?

Balkan History

What the Serbs remember is that (i) they were conquered by the Ottoman Turks
and forced into virtual slavery for hundreds of years; (ii) Muslims were
spared this fate, and constituted the bulk of the landowners; (iii) some of
these Muslims were in fact Serbs, and converted in order to escape the
penalties of retaining their Orthodox religion. Unsurprisingly this resulted
in intense ethnic and religious hostility. There were frequent Serb revolts
and, after the Ottomans were expelled, much ethnic violence. This violence,
which involved shifting alliances among the Croatians as well as the Muslims
and Serbs, was ugly, but far from genocidal in the narrow sense of the word:
there were expulsions, but no one set out to exterminate a whole people.
(Here and throughout it is to be understood that references to the misdeeds
of peoples are used in the usual way, denoting a tendency, but nothing like
unanimity. They don't mean that thousands of Croats, Muslims, Serbs, or, for
that matter, Germans, weren't pure as driven snow.)

When the Nazis invaded, and Yugoslavia was destroyed, a 'holocaust' ensued.
It is beyond dispute that (i) the wartime atrocities were instigated by both
the Croats and the Muslims, not the Serbs; (ii) shortly afterwards, they
were organized by the Croats with the widespread and enthusiastic
participation of the Muslims, both Bosnian and Albanian; (iii) the scale and
viciousness of these atrocities were a whole order of magnitude beyond
anything the region had known in its vicious, atrocious history.
Confirmation of these statements can be found in (a) almost any book on the
region written before 1990 or so; (b) almost none after. If other words, all
those who have written on the 'tragedy of Bosnia' have practiced an
outrageous distortion of the history which is, quite precisely, what is
called 'holocaust denial' when it relates to the Jews.

Though the Croatians were certainly the main culprits, it is worth
specifying that both the Nazi General Staff and the Italian fascist civil
authorities found Muslim activities too vicious! This was the case, not only
in Bosnia, but also in Kosovo. In Tim Judah 's words: "Carlo Umilta, an
Italian civil commissioner, wrote of what he saw: 'The Albanians are out to
exterminate the Slavs.' In one region he found villages where 'not a single
house has a roof: everything has been burned. There were headless bodies of
men and women strewn on the ground.'"

Historians of the region sometimes dismiss all this by saying that 'there
were atrocities on both sides' - does it matter who started it, given the
viciousness of the Serb reaction? This is a distortion. It is quite true
that Serbian chetniks tortured and killed Moslems with surpassing cruelty.
It is misleading to say that 'the Serbs' did so. The largely Serb communist
forces not only engaged in no massacres, but, from late 1941 on, were
fighting the chetniks as well as the Nazis and Croatian fascists. In other
words, a largely Serbian force fought the Serbs who massacred Moslems, but
no largely Moslem force fought the Moslems who massacred Serbs, and no
largely Croatian force fought the Croatians who massacred Serbs. In this
clear and concrete sense, wartime massacres were committed by Serbs but not
'the Serbs'. Nothing similar can be said of 'the Croatians' or 'the
Moslems'. It is also worth noting that protests against anti-Serb atrocities
are recorded among the Bosnian Moslems, but not among the Moslems of Kosovo.

At the end of the war, Tito managed to make the Serbs forget this very
recent past, at least as long as his state survived. Against all
probability, the Serbs cooperated with 'the Croats' (and 'the Muslims') who
tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of their kin, precisely because
they did not regard them as 'the Croats' and 'the Muslims', even though they
were as much to blame as 'the Germans' whom we accuse of equally monstrous
behaviour. Everyone was to be regarded as a Yugoslav and a fellow communist,
and this viewpoint was promoted with all the resources of an authoritarian
state.

It should have been obvious to everyone that this was a wonderful
achievement. Tito had erased a recipe for endless mayhem but his successors
could not overcome a more formidable opponent: "Against stupidity the Gods
themselves strive in vain." With the decline of communism, ethnic
nationalism revived, and nobody thought to crush it. Instead, in an carnival
atmosphere, Slovenia became independent, laughing at the hesitant Yugoslav
troops who were restrained, perhaps, by some soon-to-be-lost remnant of
decency. Soon Croatia joined them, hardly troubling to conceal the trappings
of unrepentant fascism, and supported by the German government and the Pope.

The West represented, and still has the gall to represent, the idea of a
multiethnic republic as the key to ethnic peace. But the region already had
ethnic peace before the West destroyed it, and multiethnic republics are no
way of restoring it. On the contrary, Yugoslavia's stupendous triumph over
its very bitter past was due to a policy suppressing ethnic nationalisms in
favour of a secular, modern, blended Yugoslav and 'Serbo-Croatian' identity.
Tito stopped ethnic strife by founding a nonethnic state, not a
multicultural one. Every death, every atrocity, all the war and hatred of
recent years were caused by the willful undoing of his work.

By inviting everyone to reclaim their ethnic memories, the West has stirred
all the old dreams of revenge. The Serbs alive today are poisoned by acts
committed during their wartime childhood, or that of their parents: "I
should like to kill every Turk there is", said a Serbian girl in 1941 whose
aunt and three cousins had been raped and then murdered by the Moslems. When
you stir up the past, you stir up old hatreds.

But do these feelings excuse the crimes of the Serbs? Yes, that's exactly
what they do: the crimes are indeed crimes, and there is indeed some excuse
for them. Certainly the Serbs should respect human rights, and Serbs who
have tortured Albanians deserve punishment. Just as certainly the West has
created a situation in which no reasonable person would expect human rights
to be respected. The Serbs had a country - not their own, but something
better, a country in which they could live and put the past behind them. It
has been deliberately and systematically destroyed , with considerable
outside help. The Serbs fought, first to keep it, and then to establish a
nation of their own. They do not deserve collective punishment, or an
assault on their sovereignty, without the neutral judgement that a UN
mandate would provide and which, significantly, the world is not prepared to
grant.

The world does not judge Serbia as NATO wants it to be judged because Serbia
has, in fact, done little or nothing worse than many NATO members have done
at one time or another. The ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs is not
an attempt to wipe out a population, but to secure a state against its
enemies. That thousands of people are killed in such actions, and hundreds
of thousands driven from their homes, is entirely within the boundaries of
accepted international practice - however much we might like to think
otherwise. Neither Bosnia nor Kosovo are anything like Rwanda, or the Nazi
empire, or any other attempt to exterminate a whole population. The Serb
leaders are sons-of-bitches, but their involvement in those genuine
atrocities committed in Kosovo is, as far as we know, not so certain,
deliberate and direct as to make them monsters. In other words, they are
members in good standing of the international community, perhaps in line for
a Nobel prize - certainly they have less to answer for than Henry Kissinger.
They are blameworthy, but not much moreso than the Czechs and Poles who
expelled German civilians in 1945.

The point here is not that two wrongs make a right, but that international
standards can be raised only in ways the world will accept. If a relatively
pure institution like the UN wants to raise them, fine. But the NATO cannot
raise standards by waging aggressive war to punish Serbia for crimes born of
desperation, against NATO-sponsored former enemies who were only too happy
to participate in full-fledged genocide against the Serbs. This vigilante
justice does not exactly set a precedent whose value outweighs all the
additional suffering produced each time NATO exacerbates the civil war it
instigated.

There is only one solution to this horrible problem. It is nasty, simple and
obvious. There must be a Greater Serbia, including the Serb republic in
Bosnia, a Greater Albania, with a portion of Kosovo annexed to the existing
Albanian state, Croatia must be maintained, and a Muslim republic
established in Bosnia. In other words, the ethnic cat cannot be put back in
the bag. The region must now be divided along ethnic lines, and ethnic
cleansing, itself cleansed, must be officially and internationally
sanctioned. Then a peace will be possible on the basis of territorial
sovereignty, the very principle whose violation started the whole miserable
business, and whose continued violation makes matters worse at every turn.

This may be possible through negotiation. If not, it will have to be
established and maintained, for at least decades, by force. Eventually, very
expensive economic aid may perhaps avoid numerous repetitions of the horrors
with which we have become familiar. And perhaps the West will learn not to
embrace ethnic separatists as 'freedom fighters'.

------------------

Sources (selected):



----------, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 1985 issue.

F.W.D.Deakin, The Embattled Mountain, New York and London (Oxford University
Press) 1971.

Richard Gwyn, "Demonizing the Serbs, to save face", Toronto Star, April 23,
1999,
http://www.thestar.com/back_issues/ED19990423/news/990423NEW02c_OP-GWYN.html

Paul N. Hehn, The German Struggle Against Yugoslav Guerillas in World War
II: German Counter-Insurgency in Yugoslavia, 1941-1943, New York (Columbia
University Press) 1979.

Tim Judah, "Cycle of revenge haunts Kosovo", Guardian Weekly, 11 April 1999,
p. 5.

Fitzroy MacLean, Disputed Barricade: The Life and Times of Joseph Broz-Tito,
London (Jonathan Cape) 1957.

Fitzroy MacLean, Eastern Approaches, London (Jonathan Cape) 1949.

Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941-1945: A Record of Racial
and Religious Persecutions and Massacres. Translated from the French by Lois
Perkins. Chicago (The American Institute for Balkan Affairs) n.d. [1961].

Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, New York (Columbia
University Press) 1968.

Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History, London (I.B.Tauris) 1995.

Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, Oxford
(Oxford University Press)1990. Originally published in Hebrew by Schocken
Publishing House Ltd., 1987.