New World Order

“Yugoslavia – Peace, War & Dissolution,” by Noam Chomsky, 2018

This is a 'libertarian' socialist compendium of Chomsky’s articles on Yugoslavia, with an introduction by Andrej Gurbacic and historical background and interviews by Davor Dzalto.  Yugoslavia originated out of an anti-fascist struggle against the Nazi and Italian military machine, uniting a number of regions, ethnicities and religions on a class line, against all bourgeois logic.  After achieving victory, it broke with Stalin's USSR in 1948, developed a different economic method in 1950 based on workers self-management and became a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955.  The key player was Josef Broz, i.e. Tito, who led the partisan movement that defeated the Wehrmacht and its allies, along with help from Soviet and Bulgarian armies.

Chomsky as a ‘libertarian socialist’ was attracted to the Yugoslav experiment, as this was a different path to take by the League of Communists.  He followed the ebbs and flows of repression and progress in this one party state.  While workers councils existed in Yugoslavia, they did not have political power.  Yugoslavia integrated Bosnian, Slovenian, Albanian and Serbian peoples and Islam, Orthodox and Catholic religions as parts of its matrix. Families intermarried, lived in various regions, intermixed socially with other ethnicities and worked together on job sites. The League of Communists contained all the various identities, and this was mandated in the governing structure.  This ‘travesty’ was not to be according to Germany, the U.S. and NATO, and they blocked with reactionary local nationalists in the 1990s.  These wars eviscerated Yugoslavia, capped by 4 months of NATO/Clinton bombings in 1999 which destroyed bridges, factories and television stations, mostly in Belgrade.  The wars in Yugoslavia were a phase of ‘humanitarian’ imperialism.

Prior to this Yugoslavia slowly spun like a centrifuge, throwing each region apart, starting with Tito’s death in 1980. IMF loans to Yugoslavia predicated on austerity measures and privatizing public assets and a lack of almost any central planning didn’t help.  The nationalist power desires of regional leaders and their own independent militaries, including Serbia also contributed to the centrifuge.  The collapse of the old workers’ state was completed in 1992 when the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ended after declarations of independence by Croatia and Slovenia.

CHOMSKY INTEVENES

I’ll go over each contribution by Chomsky.  Chomsky’s first article is about the push for party-line orthodoxy in Belgrade University’s philosophy department in the early 1970s, which had deviated from the Party line on various unclear matters, perhaps leftist. Universities were run at that time by a council of professors, staff and students, which is far more democratic than the present U.S. method.  Tito, while first making a speech backing academic freedom, then forced through a reform where government appointees would have the majority in the university councils, thus allowing them to fire academics.

Second concerns the international NATO interventions in Yugoslavia in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR.  Guns began to flow to Croatian ultra-nationalists from various sources, firstly from Hungary.  Germany has always seen the southern Balkans has part of their sphere of influence. Germany, hence Europe, immediately recognized Croatia and then Bosnia-Herzegovina as independent countries.  This set the stage for ethnic violence between different ethnicities, as each place had significant Serbian minorities and Bosnia a large Croatian minority.  Clinton and the NATO turned down the 1993 Vance-Owen peace treaty, which would have prevented much destruction.  Instead Clinton sought Iran’s help in sending Islamic fundamentalists to Kosovo and Croatia, the latter a region that was majority Albanian but also had a Serbian minority. After the blood was shed, the U.S. and NATO finally made a deal with Milošević that Chomsky says could have been achieved by negotiations.

MASSACRES

As to massacres, Chomsky points out that everyone knows about the massacre of Croatians in Srebrenica but no one pays attention to the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina by Croatian fascists.  Dzalto notes that the definition of ‘genocide’ was changed by the European courts to fit their own agenda, which was also done by the imperialist media like CNN and the NYT.  In this context, Chomsky was framed by the liberal Guardian for being a ‘massacre denier’ and also red-baited.  Chomsky demolishes the Guardian article as a good example of inaccurate defamation propaganda.  Chomsky’s point in the book is to mention that Srebrenica had become a base for Ustaše killers operating against Serbian civilians.  The Serbs counter-attacked after the Ustaše left and committed their own killings and massacres.

Humanitarian Bombs Falling on Belgrade

Chomsky notes that over Kosovo the U.S. ignored the ‘democratic’ non-violent movements in Serbia and Kosovo, ignored negotiations with Serbia, ignored the start of violence in Kosovo started by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – and ignored international law and the U.N.   Instead their diplomacy consisted of issuing the Rambouillet ultimatum, which called for NATO occupation of all of Serbia.  Then they ignored the diplomatic response of the Serbian Parliament.  So Clinton, Madeleine Albright and the U.K. claimed the U.S. had a right to use violence to ‘save Kosovo.’ Chomsky notes that the central allegation for bombing was a ‘pre-plan of ethnic cleansing by Serbia.’  But no evidence for this was forthcoming.

What actually happened, which even the U.S. military under General Wesley Clark understood, was that the violence and ethnic cleansing would get much worse during the bombings.  And it did.  International monitors were conveniently withdrawn.  More civilians, mostly Serbs, were killed and more refugees created in the bombing than the ethnicities that died in Kosovo in the prior months (which was mostly KLA attacks on Serb civilians and police).  As a response, the Serbian military took revenge on Albanians.  Chomsky goes into detail on this as well as the NATO propaganda inverting facts and timelines.  The U.S. preference for thuggish military action was again on view in a perfect quartet of imperial hubris.

At the same time, ethnic cleansing, refugees and mass murder were happening on larger scales in Turkey, Columbia, Sierra Leone, East Timor and Palestine.  But since this was all being committed by U.S. allies, it went unnoticed.  The hypocrisy meter was running at 100% - and it still does.  Chomsky, as is his skill, eviscerates U.S. terminology about what Serbia was doing as ‘a new Holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ – basically calling those who use this term for the many-sided ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia as Holocaust revisionists.  Sloppy and propagandistic use of terms is nothing new of course.  He also looks at the convoluted usage of phrases like ‘New Humanism,” “New Interventionism,” a "Just and Necessary War,” “enlightened states” - and a “New World Order” the intervention brought forward.  Opponents outside the imperial nexus of the New World Order called it a return to a colonial mindset, ‘might makes right’ “cloaked in moralistic righteousness.”

After all this, Serbia’s Milošević was removed by a votes of his own population… not anything the U.S. or NATO did.

These various small countries – previously othered as ‘the Balkans” - have now become cheap resource and labor neo-colonies, or as tourist destinations for the rest of Europe.  “Humanitarian imperialism” has become another weapon in the arsenal of U.S. political elites, used again and again.  If you’ve forgotten about the fate of Yugoslavia, are blinded by the cuddly Bill Clinton, or prefer to think that Amurica is democratic, this book will be cold tonic.  Yugoslavia – born out of a struggle against fascism, then done in by the imperial supporters of ethnic neo-fascism.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” “War With Russia” (Cohen); “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 3, 2020