SWP blogger Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour supported Serbian territorial expansion
This is a guest post by Marko Attila Hoare
Show me a politically active person who, during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, claimed to ‘oppose all sides equally’, and - nineteen times out of twenty - I’ll show you a bare-faced liar and hypocrite. Almost invariably, people who claimed ‘not to take sides’ over the former Yugoslavia were people who tilted in favour of the Serb-nationalist side but lacked the courage and integrity to come clean about it. The most blatant example of this in the UK was the Trotskyist group ‘Socialist Workers Party’ (SWP) - more recently notorious as the fellow traveller of Islamists and anti-Semites in the campaign against the Iraq war.
During the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the SWP loudly condemned every instance of Western intervention directed against the Great Serb forces - while remaining defeaningly silent about every instance of Western intervention directed against the Croatians or Bosnians. It condemned Western forces when they fired upon Serb forces, but not when they fired upon Croatian or Bosnian forces. It opposed sanctions against Serbia while supporting the arms embargo against Bosnia. It denounced Germany’s support for the international recognition of Croatia, while remaining absolutely silent at its own, British Tory government’s diplomatic collusion with Serbian aggression. Indeed, it repeatedly defended Serb forces from the charge that they were guilty of either aggression or genocide - but then loudly accused NATO of ‘aggression’ when it intervened in Kosovo. The SWP lifted not a finger to oppose Serbian atrocities, but actively agitated within the labour movement and among the left against those of us who actually were campaigning against these atrocities. It only began to demonstrate in 1999 - and then it was in defence of Milosevic’s Serbia against NATO. It denied Bosnia had any right to exist whatsoever, while agitating in defence of Serbia’s ’sovereignty’. The SWP responded to the Serb assault on Srebrenica in the spring of 1993 by accusing Srebrenica’s defenders of having massacred local Serbs, so contributing to the political atmosphere in the West that made the Srebrenica genocide possible. It then opposed the UN war-crimes tribunal’s efforts to prosecute Serb war-criminals. In effect, the SWP agitated for the Bosnian people to surrender, lie down and die, in order to make way for an ethnically pure Great Serbia.
But formally, it ‘didn’t take sides’.
The more that time has gone by, however, the more the mask of phoney neutrality has slipped. Last Wednesday (23 July), in response to Radovan Karadzic’s arrest, the SWP’s most popular blogger, Richard Seymour of ‘Lenin’s Tomb’, declared that the proper solution to the Serb question in Croatia was ‘border rectifications’. In response to a left-wing critic, Paul Fauvet, who responded to his post, Seymour wrote:
So, you just accept the claims of Croatian nationalism, then? No negotiations, no border rectifications, no arrangements for the increasingly oppressed and demonised Serb minority, just take the land and tell the others to fuck off? Some socialist.
And again:
You’re stuck with your support for Croatian nationalism, then. It doesn’t occur to you for a second that there might be legitimate problems for an oppressed minority following an unnegotiated secession with no dialogue or border rectifications.
In the unlikely event that it isn’t clear to any reader what Seymour means when he speaks in favour of ‘border rectifications’, I should spell it out: he’s saying that the proper solution to the Serb question in Croatia was for part of Croatia’s territory, where Serbs lived, to have been taken from it and annexed to Serbia, thereby creating a ‘Great Serbia’.
Am I being unfair to Seymour ? Is there any other possible way of interpreting his words ?
To remind readers: before the war, roughly half of all Croatian Serbs lived in the areas of Croatia that were occupied by Serb forces in 1991. These areas amounted to nearly one-third of Croatian territory, and the majority of their inhabitants were Croats and other non-Serbs. If all these occupied areas were annexed to a Great Serbian state through ‘border rectifications’, there would still have been roughly three-hundred thousand Serbs remaining in a rump, independent Croatia - including large numbers in the Croatian capital of Zagreb and in other large Croatian cities. So ‘border rectifications’ could not conceivably have provided security for these Serbs; and, of course, they would have provided no security at all for the indigenous non-Serb majority in these lands. In other words, Seymour’s endorsement of Serbian expansionism cannot be justified in terms of supporting minority rights. It amounts simply to a retrospective support for the nationalist war-aims of the imperialist aggressor (NB the official position of Milosevic’s Serbian regime, during the war in Croatia, was that Croatia had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, but that the ‘Serb areas’ of Croatia - i.e. the parts of Croatia occupied by Serb forces - had an equal right to secede from Croatia).
This is not a question of Seymour making an uncharacteristic slip. Yesterday (27 July), Seymour posted an article endorsing the denialist claims of the pro-Milosevic ragsheet Living Marxism concerning Serb concentration camps in Bosnia. Putting the term ‘concentration camps’ in inverted commas, Seymour writes of media coverage of these camps as a ‘deception’. His ire is directed not at the Serb fascists who ran these camps, but at the Western journalists who exposed them: ‘Journalists had effectively become co-belligerents with the Bosnian army and the their mujahideen auxiliaries, and anything that didn’t fit the script contrived by PR companies such as Ruder Finn, which was employed by both Croatian and Bosnian governments, or that of Washington and its allies, was out of the picture.’ Far from running concentration camps, the Serb fascists were merely running ‘a system of camps intended as prisons for those deemed suspect by forces deputised by the Republika Srpska.’ (For those who don’t know: Living Marxism’s denialist claims were discredited when it was successfully sued for libel by ITN over its accusations that ITN had falsified its coverage of these camps - Seymour is endorsing a story has already been very publicly disproved).
Seymour is on record as describing Milosevic’s dictatorship as ‘a state with an elected government, legal opposition parties, independent trade unions, and opposition demonstrations permitted’. He responded to the International Court of Justice’s recognition of the Srebrenica genocide by continuing to deny that genocide had occurred: ‘the massacre of thousands of men of military age is an atrocity, but under no reasonable definition is it genocide’.
How do you describe someone who denies a Serb genocide that has been recognised by three different international courts; who supports Serbian territorial expansion; who portrays Milosevic’s Serbia as a democracy; and who endorses Living Marxism’s already discredited denial of the existence of Serb concentration-camps ?
One thing’s for sure: you don’t describe him as someone who ‘doesn’t take sides’.
Comments
| 28 July 2008, 9:28 pm |
Marko
Superb article.
For those not familiar with it, the original Living Marxism concentration camp denial article can be seen at the following location:
http://web.archive.org/web/19991110185707/www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM97/LM97_Bosnia.html
I also suggest David Campbell’s two part article “Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism” published in the Journal of Human Rights Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2002), pp. 1–33 and Vol 1, No. 2 (June 2002) , pp. 143 - 172
Academics should be able to access these articles via Athens. For others they are worthwhile obtaining
Seymour may not be looking for a court case on the matter but he seems be taking the same political stance.
| 28 July 2008, 9:41 pm |
I bet you Socialist Worker wont dare print any of Seymours stuff about the role of the journalists.
Journalists had effectively become co-belligerents with the Bosnian army and the their mujahideen auxiliaries
(Sometimes the reputation might be warranted. Apparently, the photographer and reporter Janet Schneider, who liked to stare down the “corridor of death” and coolly stated that she had endured rape “more than once” in the course of securing a story, was directly involved in assisting Fikret Alic after his escape from Trnopolje). The sheer irrational fury unleashed when their role is challenged is indicative of the intense narcissism that has been channelled into the enterprise.
| 28 July 2008, 10:32 pm |
well written Marko, very informative
it seems like the comment box connected to the Seymour’s article on “Back to Trnopolje” is a denier’s paradise
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lenin/6720903829736503959/
this is disgusting:
“Bill Clinton, the US president at the time, and Tony Blair justified the war by claiming 225,000 Kosovo Albanian men had disappeared and that “genocide” was being carried out by Serbian security forces in the province.
No mass graves were ever found. Award winning journalist, Robert Fisk reported, “The number of Serbs killed in the five months since the war comes close to that of Albanians murdered by Serbs in the five months before Nato began its bombardment.””
Kosovo’s breakaway will inflame ‘cold war’ tensions by Chris Bambery
| 28 July 2008, 10:34 pm |
It seems rather odd that the massacre of Srebenica is classified as ‘genocide’ given that all or most of the bodies discovered were male.
Wouldn’t a genocidal act attempt to eradicate an entire cultural or relgious grouping? If the massacre at Srebrenica did indeed show evidence of genocide, it couldn’t have been a very successful one…
Given that Yugoslavia was a c. 20th construct, arguments over whose border is where and how many of a particular ethnic grouping were killed seem rather obtuse given the ongoing conflict. I wonder how long it will be before UK ’socialists’ confront the ongoing balkanisation happening under their very noses. Perhaps there will be sufficiently competent Gheg ethnologists on the campaign trail by then.
| 28 July 2008, 10:48 pm |
Modernity
Bambery made up the Blair/Clinton 225,000 quote by the way.
It was Ambassador Scheffer who said.
Mr. Scheffer said that 225,000 Kosovar men, ages 14 to 59, were unaccounted for, twice the estimate American officials gave last month. Some may be dead and some may be hiding in the hills, he said, adding that starvation and disease are widespread among the 550,000 ethnic Albanians driven from their homes but remaining in Kosovo.
| 28 July 2008, 11:09 pm |
Following up from Bekim’s point, the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as:
‘…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’
Note the ‘in part’ bit. The fact that the victims of Srebrenica were predominantly male makes no difference whatsoever. And Bosnian Serb actions throughout the war (as backed by Milosevic until 1994) were definitely applicable to points (a)-(c).
Tim, the quote you’ve identified (as noted in Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon’s ‘Winning Ugly: NATO’s war to save Kosovo’) was an assessment by NATO during the war of Albanians who were unaccounted for at the height of the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing and terrorism against the Kosovar population. It was not (as I’m sure you appreciate) an actual claim that 225,000 people had been massacred. Bambery deliberately misrepresents that point, but then being a swuppie this means that he’s either lying through his teeth, or he’s too stupid to tell the difference. Either are likely.
As for the Fisk quote, I’d like to see the original (just in case this is yet another example of the Fisk’s creative approach to journalism), but here are the figures from the 1999 war:
Serb civilians killed by the NATO air campaign - 500 (identified by HRW).
Serb civilians killed by the KLA - 351 (from January 1998 to June 1999, according to Belgrade’s figures), around 1,000 (from June 1999, according to HRW).
Kosovar Albanians killed by the Serbian state security forces and VJ - 10,000 (according the ICTY figures).
What is of course impossible to count is the number of Albanians who would have been massacred had Milosevic’s government been left to its own devices in Kosovo. I think it’s safe to guess that the figure would have been high.
In any case, Marko’s excellent article demonstrates that for all their posturing and their pandering to radical Islamism, the swuppies don’t actually give a fuck about Moslems at all, and would be quite happy to see the latter slaughtered, provided that the killers were ‘anti-imperialist’.
| 28 July 2008, 11:12 pm |
Nice article, but why is pond scum in the SWP news? Is it a matter of debate in some quarters?
| 28 July 2008, 11:21 pm |
the above point is answered at the FAQs of srebrenica genocide blog:
“[7] Were men and boys “only” victims of Srebrenica Genocide?
No. According to the Association of rape victims in Sarajevo, Zene - Zrtve Rata (Women - Victims of War), hundreds of women and underage girls were documented to be raped during Srebrenica massacre. The Serb troops abused women and even children who they had herded into makeshift enclosures. Due to cultural stigma attached to rape, many women refused to testify against the rapists.
There were also reports of babies being taken away from their mothers and killed. Sabaheta Fejzic’s testimony is a sad one [click here to read testimony re-published from German Der Spiegel]. She witnessed Serb soldiers indiscriminately taking girls, boys, and men out of camp. They also took her husband and tore her baby son from her arms. She never saw either one of them again.
According to the Secretary-General’s Report, A/54/549, quote:
“389. The same day, one of the Dutchbat soldiers, during his brief stay in Zagreb upon return from Serb-held territory, was quoted as telling a member of the press that ‘hunting season [is] in full swing’… it is not only men supposedly belonging to the Bosnian Government who are targeted… women, including pregnant ones, children and old people aren’t spared. Some are shot and wounded, others have had their ears cut off and some women have been raped.” (source: The United Nations)”
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2007/07/srebrenica-genocide-questions-answers.html
| 28 July 2008, 11:27 pm |
the swuppies don’t actually give a fuck about Moslems at all, and would be quite happy to see the latter slaughtered, provided that the killers were ‘anti-imperialist’.
Well, exactly. hence their support for the biggest killer of Muslims in recent times (a certain S. Hussein Esq).
| 28 July 2008, 11:31 pm |
Re: Kosovo, Michael Totten has a stunning pair of articles on Kosovo and Albania and Macedonia. Shows our friends the Saudis in yet more positive light (NOT).
| 28 July 2008, 11:38 pm |
great post MAH
| 28 July 2008, 11:42 pm |
Brilliant post MAH
| 28 July 2008, 11:51 pm |
this seems interesting:
http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/Articles-Bosnia.htm
“”Living Marxism”: Poison in the well of history By Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian, March 15, 2000. Living Marxism magazine (LM), in denying reports on a Serbian-run concentration camp, accused a British TV station of distorting the truth about Bosnia. Mr. Vulliamy, who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp, explains why these Serb apologists had to be defeated in court. ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2000/mar/15/pressandpublishing.tvnews
| 29 July 2008, 12:08 am |
This is not surprising in the mentality of people whose heads are much more full of what they are against than what they are in favour of.
To recap:
1) Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were mass-murdering scum.
2) Edouard Berstein and Karl Kautsky were right.
| 29 July 2008, 12:08 am |
Bambery is probably lying, and not the sharpest.
I suspect he got his quote from Pilgers total distortion here
http://www.newstatesman.com/200603270016
It meant that the justification for the attack on Serbia (”225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 are missing, presumed dead”, the US ambassador-at-large David Scheffer had claimed) was an invention.
Pilgers definitely lying.
| 29 July 2008, 12:29 am |
I don’t go along with Seymour’s views but he is probably no more biased that the writer of this article. There is nothing unusual about minorities within other countries wanting to either establish their own state or join up with another country containing fellow countrymen. Sure, its all about race and nationalism but then it always is about race and nationalisn (or sometimes religion) and there is rarely one good or one bad side. Usually both sides or all sides are pretty bad.
The other thing is this “His ire is directed not at the Serb fascists who ran these camps” - all bad guys are called fascists these days (that’s how you know they are the bad guys I guess) but its total crap. They might have been extreme nationalists, they might have been the most evil bunch out there but by no stretch of the imagination were they facists.
| 29 July 2008, 1:23 am |
“no more biased” ?
oh, the “they are all as bad as each other” argument?
which is a variation of “I don’t take sides” line
Hmm, but is that with, or without, the genocide denial?
| 29 July 2008, 1:44 am |
Indeed, Alan, indeed.
| 29 July 2008, 2:17 am |
Seeing that this thread is all about cultural imperialism and ethnic displacement, and following on from messrs Sackcloth and Ashes (must be too young for that one?) clarifying ‘genocide’, I felt it might be sensible here to highlight the ‘genocide’ as defined by S&A and the UN going on in Tower Hamlets, aka Sylhetistan.
Since the 1970s, there has been a concerted effort to ‘drive out’ by force of numbers and cultural-religious blunt instruments, the indigenous population of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney.
During this process of colonialisation, members of the indigenous population have been attacked and murdered, cultural facilities have been firebombed, and schools and other civil infrastructure have been segregated. More recently, attempts have been made to impose a permanent Sylhetistan/Jalaluddeenistan character to some areas by the permanent renaming of transport facilities.
The numbers of displaced number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. They now mostly reside as refugees in areas such as Waltham Forest, Redbridge and Havering. Some have even been displaced from these areas for a second time, most notably in the borough of Waltham Forest.
Would the right honourable gentlemen consider this to be worth a mention? No doubt, ethnic Albanians and Bosnian-Muslims have formed part of the human tide of misery dispossessed by this cultural avalanche.
| 29 July 2008, 2:30 am |
Alan Ji, for straight heads, not littered with any excessive amount of details, Leon Trotsky - Edouard Bernstein; Wladimir Lenin - Karl Kautsky were mass-murdering scum. Polish-Belorussian Felix Dzherzhinsky was mass-murdering scum. Georgian Josif Dzhugashwili (Stalin) was mass-murdering scum. Catholic Austrian Adolf Hitler was mass-murdering scum. Atheist MaoTseTung was mass-murdering scum. Iranian Muslim - Homeini was mass-murdering scum. Afro-Catholic- Marxist and Fascist at the same time, Mugabe is mass-murdering scum. Libia’s Kadafi is mass-murdering scum. Sudan’s Bashir and his mentor Turabi are mass-murdering scum. Putin is mass-murdering scum. Castro brothers are mass-murdering scum. Chinese Communist Party, Vietnamese Communist Party. Laotian regime, all followers of those mentioned above and many many more are mass-murdering scum. The Leftist “intellectual elites” of Eurabia, American Leftists and extreme Right, Asian and African pseudo-democrates, Australian cowards on both sides of political spectrum, all of them are a cowardly, repulsive mass-murder appeasing scum… Got the picture?
| 29 July 2008, 2:40 am |
‘excessive amount of details’ - the gravest threat we face…
| 29 July 2008, 4:11 am |
What an odd post. The trouble is, after reading Marko’s piece, one feels drawn into a very obscure, irrelevant and esoteric world. It matters not a jot what the SWP’s views are on all this.
Dr. Marko Attila Hoare is Section Director of the European Neighbourhood at the Henry Jackson Society. He has also worked as a Research Officer at the International Criminal Tribunal, participating in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.
With such a grand title and solid resume I am surprised he does not have better things to do than have scraps with irrelevant political micro-groupings on the internet.
Dr. Marko Attila Hoare is also a supporter of John McCain who vying for presidency of the United States.
Given his stances, it does strike me is odd that Dr. Marko Attila Hoare supports a candidate who voted against the Intelligence Authorization Bill, which contained a provision implementing the standards of the Army Field Manual across all services, and banned waterboarding. Previously, McCain made a stand against torture, and supported the implementation of the Army Field Manual.
How confident is Dr. Marko Attila Hoare that torture will not be used by the USA if his preferred presidential candidate is elected?
| 29 July 2008, 4:28 am |
Oh dear Benjamin, you’re going to be attacked for whataboutery or something very soon, best duck and run for cover very quickly.
Just a quick question about the “border rectificaton”. I can’t pretend to know much about the demographics in the region but what does the border rectification actually stand for? What I mean is, specifically which parts of the former Yugoslavia is Lenin calling to be absorbed by a “Greater Serbia” and which parts of those areas actually do have majority Serbs? If it is the case that some of this area is majority Serb and they wished to be part of Serbia then, by standards of self-determination, what would be the main problem with that?
I also see that Lenin does argue that Radovan Karodzic should be put on trial for war crimes and has no truck with those who say, “Karodzic shouldn’t be put on trial because the US is much worse.”
Right, Benjamin, where are you hiding? I think I’m going to need some of that cover.
| 29 July 2008, 4:52 am |
As for the Fisk quote, I’d like to see the original (just in case this is yet another example of the Fisk’s creative approach to journalism),
The Mighty Google at your service:
http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/smurd.htm
Some more estimates on the number of casualties:
| 29 July 2008, 5:16 am |
I am surprised he does not have better things to do than have scraps with irrelevant political micro-groupings on the internet.
Which may explain why he’s not responding to you.
Obligatory ad-hominem aside, do you have an opinion on McCain’s statements on totture? The actual, specific stance, I mean. There is one, and your silly little comment gives the impression that you’re not aware of it.
| 29 July 2008, 8:46 am |
“Leon Trotsky - Edouard Bernstein; Wladimir Lenin - Karl Kautsky were mass-murdering scum”
Bernstein and Kautsky? I’ve not read anything so odd in ages.
On the other point, it’s no surprise that fascists stick up for one another.
| 29 July 2008, 8:49 am |
the massacre of thousands of men of military age is an atrocity, but under no reasonable definition is it genocide … unless it is being done by perfidious Zionists or evil Merkins, in which case my little helpers (what you think I have time to write that shit all by myself) will spew out pages and pages of poorly researched apologetics in which I loudly and ever more hysterically rend my clothes and tear out my hair.
| 29 July 2008, 8:52 am |
Benjamin old chap,
Don’t you feel that your attack on Marko’s post was not only not relevant, it was ad hominem?
Unlikely some others here, I do appreciate your contributions but be a good chap and please try and stick to the subject at hand.
| 29 July 2008, 8:59 am |
Edouard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky were not mass-murdering scum Bogdan of Australia; neither had power. Both were vilified by Lenin for their arguments for historic patience and for democratic methods.
They were amongst the many left wing figures of the late 19th century who thought “revolution” meant creation of democracies. By that standard, the most successful 20th century revolutionary was Clement Attlee.
Lenin and Trotsky chose to fight a civil war, strangle an infant democracy and create the Soviet Union. That is why it is important to be rude about them to modern-day trotskyites.
| 29 July 2008, 9:00 am |
@ Dave: I’ve not read anything so odd in ages
The use of the term Eurabia is if there were any doubt, the key to his state of mind.
| 29 July 2008, 9:22 am |
Great article, Marko.
If it is the case that some of this area is majority Serb and they wished to be part of Serbia then, by standards of self-determination, what would be the main problem with that?
As Marko says, the area under discussion in Croatia had a majority of non-Serbs. In Bosnia, the problem is more difficult; areas that show as having a majority of Serbs on maps are actually showing that the majority of farmers (two-thirds in communist Bosnia) were Serb. The ethnic composition of the towns was very different. In Kosova, non-Serbs* were simply treated by the authorities at best as if they didn’t exist, at worst as non-humans, fit only for torturing and killing. In any case, the Serbs did not choose self-determination, they chose genocide.
*Goranci and Roms were occasionally treated as humans, if it suited the needs of the Serbs at that moment.
| 29 July 2008, 9:36 am |
“the massacre of thousands of men of military age is an atrocity, but under no reasonable definition is it genocide ”
Lenny has lots of other definitions of genocide.
Economic sanctions on Iraq being one.
| 29 July 2008, 9:36 am |
“The use of the term Eurabia is if there were any doubt, the key to his state of mind.”
For once, I’m forced to agree with you: it’s a definite “tell”—just as “dhimmi” is for the Islamophobes (”how many times do I have to tell you that Islam is not a race!”), or “neo-conservative!” and “Islamophobe!” is for the reactionary left.
I wonder if the strange spelling of “Edouard” and “Wladimir” has some anti-Semitic connotation that I’m unaware of—in which case he may be one of those purveyors of the “Jewish-Bolshevik-capitalist conspiracy” school of sociological analysis.
| 29 July 2008, 9:41 am |
Do you have an opinion on McCain’s statements on totture?
I was moderately impressed by McCain’s seemingly unequivocal statements against torture in the Republican debates and elsewhere. However, it didn’t take him long to vote against himself. Similarly Obama voted for FISA, and made hardline statements about the death penalty. In the bizarre world of political punditry, these obvious gymnastics are about a coming together in the centre - but think about what that actually means.
| 29 July 2008, 9:44 am |
It matters not a jot what the SWP’s views are on all this.
Pace Cohen’s thesis in “What’s Left”, I am encountering these views in areas where you wouldn’t expect me to to if your claim was true.
So while it doesn’t matter what the SWP’s views are on this, they are early adopters of idiocy that is finding a broader audience.
And, yes, a very good post by MAH.
| 29 July 2008, 9:51 am |
Franjo Tudjman was no angel. What happened in Krajina was nothing short of ethnic cleansing - Croats were indicted by ICTY as a result, although Tudjman himself escaped censure. The difference between the Croat, Serb and Muslim forces was the difference in degree of terrorism against other ethnic group. And few seem to recognise Tudjman’s territorial expansionism. Was the Bosnia Hrvatska project any better than the Srpska project? Has everyone forgotten Tudjman’s deal with Milosevic in Karadjordjevo?
| 29 July 2008, 9:52 am |
So while it doesn’t matter what the SWP’s views are on this, they are early adopters of idiocy that is finding a broader audience.
Early adopters? Wow, that will be departure for the SWP, hey? Chuckle.
| 29 July 2008, 10:06 am |
What happened in Krajina was nothing short of ethnic cleansing
Was it like fuck. What happened during Operation Storm was that the Serbs, who had illegally and violently established a failed insurgent state (which they ethnically cleansed non-Serbs from), were militarily defeated by the legitimate government, and they decided to throw their toys out of the pram and forced the Serbs living there to flee. voluntarily leaving, and then refusing to come back whenever peace breaks out, and the opportunity to come back is available to them, isn’t ethnic cleansing, sunshine.
| 29 July 2008, 10:08 am |
why this obsession about a word, genocide or not?
It seems to be about raising an emotion rather than dealing with what it is
Murder is murder - be it one, 100 or 6 million
| 29 July 2008, 10:09 am |
Here is Seymour’s response:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/07/little-evil-me.html
Little evil me? posted by lenin
I really am going to have to insist that Harry’s Place stops with its cult of my personality. First they plugged my speech at Marxism, then they, er, ‘celebrated’ my graduation, and now this. The author, presumably in all seriousness, says that I “supported Serbian territorial expansion” in Croatia. Marko, dearest, I was thirteen when that shit started and wouldn’t have known Serbia from a tennis shoe. What he means to say, perhaps, is that I would have supported such a procedure. His ‘gotcha’ consists of a retort in the comments box to someone brazenly supporting Operation Storm, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed. This is what I said:
So, you just accept the claims of Croatian nationalism, then? No negotiations, no border rectifications, no arrangements for the increasingly oppressed and demonised Serb minority, just take the land and tell the others to fuck off? Some socialist.
…
You’re stuck with your support for Croatian nationalism, then. It doesn’t occur to you for a second that there might be legitimate problems for an oppressed minority following an unnegotiated secession with no dialogue or border rectifications.
Hoare then goes on to offer his interpretation services to HP Sauce readers, who at this point would be snapping their crayons in puzzlement: “he’s saying that the proper solution to the Serb question in Croatia was for part of Croatia’s territory, where Serbs lived, to have been taken from it and annexed to Serbia, thereby creating a ‘Great Serbia’.” His over-hasty prosecutorial zeal has led Hoare to neglect to ask the author of the quoted ripostes whether in fact he is indeed “saying” that, but I believe I have the advantage here. After all, I am not the one who [would have] supported the logic of secessionism in the first place, and therefore I would have no problem explaining why the construction of separate states based on ethnic exclusivity would be no solution. It is Hoare who, considering Croatia’s secession legitimate and worthy of full-throated support, has to answer why the Krajina Serbs were not entitled to independence from Croatia (and political union with Serbia if they wished). This is particularly the case since the Serbs living in Krajina were, like other Serbs living throughout Croatia, genuinely victims of repression and ethnic hatred by a state whose early gestures included the rescuscitation of fascist symbolism. But if there is going to be secession, ought there not be negotiations as opposed to a unilateral military take-over of the territory? Might there not be a concession of territory by both parties, or are the borders of some states eternal and inviolable, like the Holy Mother’s virginity? The logic of supporting ethnic nationalism in Croatia, an ultra-reactionary political project from its inception, is what has produced Hoare’s hysterical twaddle. Anything that might appear as remotely sceptical about Croatia’s inherent right to dispose of the territory (and the people living there) as it wishes must be taken as an affront.
Hoare also reminds readers that I don’t agree with describing the camps run by Bosnian Serbs as ‘concentration camps’. He of course redacts my description of said camps, and omits to mention that the main thrust was that there were similar camps with similar atrocities maintained by all the warring parties in Bosnia, with little attention paid by our vigilant press. He also says I am endorsing Living Marxism’s claims, which have been ‘disproved’ in court. In fact, I endorsed the verdict of Phillip Knightley, citing him twice, not that of Thomas Deichmann, cited nowhere. The court did not ‘disprove’ the points that a) not all those present were emaciated like Fikret Alic, because people could be fed, and therefore the broadcast was wrong to give the impression that people were being forcibly starved; b) many people could come and go, and therefore not all were imprisoned; and c) those who were prisoners were not being held by barbed wire, but by armed guards, which point was obscured because it disrupted the symbolism of the concentration camp. Those were the points I cited. And at at any rate, I am not as content as Hoare evidently is to accept a court’s verdict at a libel trial as the final word on a complex, multifaceted historical record. In anoyhrt bid to establish my evil-doing propinquities, Hoare explains that “Seymour is on record as describing Milosevic’s dictatorship as ‘a state with an elected government, legal opposition parties, independent trade unions, and opposition demonstrations permitted’”. It is enough to state the obvious to be indicted in Hoare’s petty tribunal. And finally: “He responded to the International Court of Justice’s recognition of the Srebrenica genocide by continuing to deny that genocide had occurred: ‘the massacre of thousands of men of military age is an atrocity, but under no reasonable definition is it genocide’.” This point is telling, but not in the way Hoare thinks it is. After all, it would not in itself matter whether such an unspeakable atrocity was genocide or ‘merely’ a massacre. The condemnation or otherwise of such conduct does not depend on defining it in this way. But for supporters of Croatian and then Bosnian nationalism, it has to be genocide because they know the word functions not in a literal way but in a propagandistic sense. Prophylactically, it isolates the Bosnian Serbs as uniquely malevolent in that conflict, and therefore provides the prior justification for the vicious ethnic nationalism and brutality of the HVO and BiH and their auxiliaries. It affirms a narrative elaborated since 1991, long before Srebrenica became a household name, in which the Serbian government was the Nazi threat refulgent (thus making fascist-loving Tudjman an anti-fascist resistance leader). That is why people like Hoare consider it monstrous to dispute the term - his absurd, whitewashing narrative of heroic Croatian nationalism depends on it.
The entirety of Hoare’s infantile imposture is animated by this imperative. The histrionics about me having ’supported’ something called ‘Great Serbia’, based on a couple of flimsily parsed comments box exchanges, truly befit someone who described Operation Storm as “the liberation of Krajina” and who spends much of his time trying to defend the insupportable proposition that the salient characteristics of Croatian nationalism in its militant phase - its reactionary anti-semitic leadership, its revival of fascist regalia, anti-Serb racism, repression, war crimes and ethnic cleansing - were merely incidental to a great liberation struggle.
| 29 July 2008, 10:09 am |
early adopters of idiocy:
Choice phrase- am filing it for future use in arguments.
| 29 July 2008, 10:10 am |
The definition of genocide is the destruction of a group in part or in whole. The massacre of all male members of an ethnic group - and no-one doubts this happened due to the documentary evidence - is a genocidal action. I am puzzled by anyone who attempts to portray it as anything but genocide.
| 29 July 2008, 10:15 am |
“who spends much of his time trying to defend the insupportable proposition that the salient characteristics of Croatian nationalism in its militant phase - its reactionary anti-semitic leadership, its revival of fascist regalia, anti-Serb racism, repression, war crimes and ethnic cleansing - were merely incidental to a great liberation struggle”
To be fair, it wouldn’t take would take much adapation to fit this perfectly to Lenny’s tited old defence of the Baath and Islamist terrorism against the Iraqis. I wonder if he sees the irony—I assume not, though.
| 29 July 2008, 10:17 am |
I tried to read Dickie’s response, but I kept falling asleep. I even tried imagining him reading it out in a broad Ballymena accent, but it was no good. The whole pompous windbag-esque nature of his reply defeated me. Compared to Dickie, rven the Koran is the soul of brevity.
| 29 July 2008, 10:28 am |
Last night I actually dreamt I met Richard “Lenin” Seymour. I don’t know why. I hadn’t read this blog entry and haven’t really thought about the guy for a long time. Spooky, eh? I was excited to meet him and argue with him, but he seemed surly, aloof, spurned my offer of a beer (he told me that alcohol diluted his revolutionary mindset) and left with his back-pack to go trekking in the Peak District. Are my psychic powers correct? Has anyone ever met him?
| 29 July 2008, 10:47 am |
Has anyone ever met him?
By all accounts, about several thousand cream cakes have.
| 29 July 2008, 10:57 am |
I tried to read Dickie’s response, but I kept falling asleep. I even tried imagining him reading it out in a broad Ballymena accent, but it was no good. The whole pompous windbag-esque nature of his reply defeated me. Compared to Dickie, rven the Koran is the soul of brevity.
Why he has to write in such a style is beyond me, and it has always baffled me. He can clearly write well, but choses to hide this behind a lot of pretentious waffle. I guess it’s just a symptom of academia. He is unable to write with any sort of clarity.
More bizarrely for a response cloaked in the style of disagreement, he actually confirms most of MAH’s points. Odd bloke
| 29 July 2008, 11:03 am |
Great article Marko.
On the genocide issue it should be understood that in the Serb nationalist weltanschauung the Muslims of Bosnia are just forcibly converted Serbs so the best way to reconvert (according to this “logic”) was to kill the men and rape the women. In 1993 an EEC mission estimated that there had been at least 20,000 rapes of muslim women by Serbian “troops”. One case, relating to offences against Muslim women in the Bosnian town of Foca, wa the first time that the IWCT had considered rape as a crime against humanity.
they might have been the most evil bunch out there but by no stretch of the imagination were they facists.
I would find it hard to describe Arkan’s tigers or Seselj’s (Vice President to Milosevic) Chetniks as anything but “fascists.”
| 29 July 2008, 11:10 am |
Anyone remember Julie Burchill’s love affair with the Serbs?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,306307,00.html
| 29 July 2008, 11:19 am |
On the genocide issue it should be understood that in the Serb nationalist weltanschauung the Muslims of Bosnia are just forcibly converted Serbs so the best way to reconvert (according to this “logic”) was to kill the men and rape the women
The wholly stupid thing about this insane Serb Paranoia in this is that the “Muslims” of Bosnia are anything but. They’re no more Muslim than Richard Dawkins is a Christian.
| 29 July 2008, 11:20 am |
“Why he has to write in such a style is beyond me, and it has always baffled me. He can clearly write well, but choses to hide this behind a lot of pretentious waffle. I guess it’s just a symptom of academia. He is unable to write with any sort of clarity.”
Herman
I always think of Dick as a wordy writer, forever overloading passages with this and that reference, who perhaps still lacks experience or courses in good writing. KISS is a great principle (here it is Keep it simple Seymour). Using jargon is impossible in technical writing as there is no other concise and precise way of putting things. However Dick writes turgidly no matter what.
A lucid left wing blogger is Phil BC of A Very Public Sociologist. (Phil is doing a Phd and his posts are written in clear English)
Still, there are those who love Dick’s writing, just like there are those who think Ollie Kamm is readable
| 29 July 2008, 11:44 am |
And I’ll do it singing in my wet suit
The last public performance of someone in a wet suit I knew of involved people urinating into it for the purposes of sexual gratification.
| 29 July 2008, 11:52 am |
Running Lenny’s article through MS Word’s readibility statistics gives him a Flesch Reading Ease score of 35 - about the same as the Harvard Law Review. But then, that’s a scholarly law review, and he’s writing a blog. Flowerly language can be good for comic effect if used sporadically(*), but Lenny lashes it on everywhere.
(*) I’m never quite sure how much of Olly Kamm’s verbosity is self-parody.(**)
(**) Kamm vs. Seymour - can you imagine that pair debating?
P.
| 29 July 2008, 11:54 am |
The last public performance of someone in a wet suit I knew of involved people urinating into it for the purposes of sexual gratification.
The Ballymena Fringe Festival has really come along since the Good Friday agreement.
P.
| 29 July 2008, 12:00 pm |
Lenin’s response entirely destroys Marko’s rather desperate misrepresentstions, so - naturally - it is met here with loud claims about not being bothered to read it, ad hominem attacks on its author, and peculiar backpacking fantasies. Par for the course, I suppose.
| 29 July 2008, 12:14 pm |
Lenin’s response entirely destroys Marko’s rather desperate misrepresentstions
Well, it doesn’t actually thought does it?
| 29 July 2008, 12:17 pm |
“Was it like fuck. What happened during Operation Storm was that the Serbs, who had illegally and violently established a failed insurgent state (which they ethnically cleansed non-Serbs from), were militarily defeated by the legitimate government, and they decided to throw their toys out of the pram and forced the Serbs living there to flee. voluntarily leaving, and then refusing to come back whenever peace breaks out, and the opportunity to come back is available to them, isn’t ethnic cleansing, sunshine.”
The Serbs in Kraijina were forcibly removed. That’s why some Croat military officers were indicted by ICTY. It was, according to ICTY, a crime against humanity. Your refusal to acknowledge Tudjman’s role in ethnic cleansing is not better than those apologists for Serb war criminals who claim that Muslims were not subjected to genocidal policies. Tudjman himself was an ethnic cleanser, he just got away with it.
Theres a few of them out there with similar arguments.
John Game argues that the Croat recapture of the Krajina was ethnic cleansing and the equivalent of the massacre at Srebrenica “because they’re both ethnic cleansing”
Thus in SWP world recapturing territory from an expansionist Serbia is ethnic cleansing and morally the same as shooting 8000 people in the back of the head.
You will also notice the quibling about the figures at Srebrenica because all the bodies have not been dug up.
This from people who claim that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed, a figure which presumes Iraqis have hidden over a million bodies.