Library:To kill a nation/Rational destruction: eliminating the competition: Difference between revisions

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Whatever the issue or policy at hand, it is the function of bourgeois intellectuals, academics among them, to deny that material interests are at stake. So with the NATO mission in the Balkans. While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that "this time" the US national security state was really fighting the good fight. "Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at the time, "but we have to do something." In fact, the air campaign was worse than stupid: it was profoundly immoral. And in fact it did work, destroying much of what was left of Yugoslavia, moving it closer to becoming a more privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor country of cheap labor and rich resources available at bargain prices, defenseless against capital penetration, so divided that it would never reunite, so battered that it would never rise again, not even as a viably competitive bourgeois country.

When the productive social capital of any part of the world is obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced—especially when the chronic problem faced today by western capitalism is one of overcapacity. Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or by WTO "free trade" agreements (as in Mexico, India, Africa, and elsewhere) diminishes the potential competition and increases the market opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness. To destroy publicly run Yugoslav factories that produced auto parts, appliances, or fertilizer—or publicly financed Sudanese or Yugoslav plants that produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below those of their Western competitors—is to enhance the investment value of Western automotive and pharmaceutical companies. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops or blown up by NATO bombs extends the ideological and communicational dominance of the Western media cartels. In a word, the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served a rational class interest.

NATO's attacks revealed a consistent pattern that bespoke its underlying political agenda. The Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia produced a list of 164 factories destroyed by the bombings—all of them state-owned. Not a single foreign-owned firm was targeted.¹ As I observed on a trip to Yugoslavia shortly after the war, the huge, state-run Hotel Yugoslavia was made uninhabitable by NATO missiles, while the corporate owned Hyatt Hotel, with its all-glass facade—as inviting a target as any mad bomber might want—suffered not a scratched windowpane. Buildings that displayed highly visible rooftop signs that advertised Panasonic, Coca-Cola, Diners Club International, and McDonald's, the latter replete with immense golden arches, survived perfectly intact.

Other political targets were hit. The Usce business center was struck by several missiles, rather precisely hitting the headquarters of Slobodan Miosevic's Socialist Party, along with the headquarters of JUL (Yugoslav United Left), a coalition of twenty-three communist and left parties, closely allied with the Socialist Party. Buildings used by the ministries of defense and the interior were also demolished. NATO destroyed or seriously damaged fuel storage facilities, oil refineries, chemical factories, roads, bridges, railway networks, airports, water supply systems, electrical power plants, and warehouses. This destruction paralyzed the production of consumer goods and added more than a million people to the ranks of the unemployed.

Kragujevac, an industrial city in Central Serbia, suffered immense damage. Its mammoth, efficiently state-run Zastava factory was demolished, causing huge amounts of toxic chemicals to spill from the factory's generators. Zastava had employed tens of thousands of workers who produced cars, trucks, and tractors sold domestically and abroad. NATO attacks left some 80 per cent of its workforce without a livelihood. Publicly owned Zastava factories exist all over Yugoslavia. The attackers knew their locations, and destroyed many of them. Those not bombed were out of production for want of crucial materials or a recipient for their products.²

It has been argued that the Yugo, the inexpensive state produced automobile, could never really compete with Western European or Japanese cars. But the Yugo was the most frequently used vehicle in Yugoslavia itself. It also sold some 180,000 in the United States in the 1980s, and many more in other countries. But by 2000 it was almost entirely out of production and gave no competition to overseas auto markets nor to whatever market remained in Yugoslavia.

In Nis, cruise missiles pulverized the tobacco and cigarette production plant, one of the most successful in Europe. Numerous state-run food-processing sites were leveled. A report by NBC has confirmed that NATO bombed the pharmaceutical complex of Galenika, the largest in Yugoslavia, located in Belgrade's suburbs. Our delegation was told that one worker-managed factory was contaminated with depleted uranium. The city of Aleksinac and additional socialist strongholds in southern Serbia were bombed especially heavily, resulting in many civilian deaths. Leaders from Aleksinac and several other cities in Serbia's "Red Belt" were convinced that they were pounded so mercilessly primarily because they were socialist, a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the region contained almost no heavy industry.

In Novi Sad, worker-managed factories that somehow had survived the pitiless years of sanctions were reduced to ruins, along with bus and train depots. Major bridges were knocked down, blocking all shipping on the Danube, contaminating the river's bottom with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, and severing most of Serbia from the rest of Europe. Because of its depth, the Danube was judged nearly impossible to clean.

Yugoslav electrical and construction firms used to be competitive with Western ones, winning contracts abroad on a regular basis. The NATO bombing eliminated that competition quite nicely. Heating plants and the entire oil-processing industry were badly crippled. Missiles that explode only after penetrating the earth's surface (being designed to destroy subterranean bomb shelters) were used to rip apart underground transmitter cables at an electrical power transformer station on the outskirts of Zemun. There was little hope of repairing these since international sanctions deprived the Yugoslays of the replace�ment parts made by Westinghouse.³

NATO attacks also were intended to terrorize and demoralize the civilian population. Libraries, theaters, hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, sanitariums, and geriatric homes were destroyed or badly damaged, with serious injury or loss of life to occupants. Schools attended by several hundred thousand students were destroyed or damaged. NATO bombed historic sites, cultural monuments, museums, and churches—something not even Hitler did.

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-'''NOTE: This chapter is currently NOT finished and is under progress.'''{{Template:TKNsidebar}}What is still not widely understood in the West is that most of the ethnic cleansing throughout the former Yugoslavia was perpetrated not by the Serbs but against them. More than one million Serbs were driven from their ancestral homes in the breakaway republics. Some were triply displaced, uprooted from Croatia into Bosnia, then fleeing to Kosovo, and finally ending up in what remained of unoccupied Serbia.' As of the year 2000, the rump nation of Yugoslavia hosted more displaced persons per capita than just about any other nation, including some 300,000 who had always lived in Serbia and were internally displaced by the NATO bombing and related hardships .<sup>2</sup>
+{{Message box/Incomplete}}{{Template:TKNsidebar}}Whatever the issue or policy at hand, it is the function of bourgeois intellectuals, academics among them, to deny that material interests are at stake. So with the NATO mission in the Balkans. While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that "this time" the US national security state was really fighting the good fight. "Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at the time, "but we have to do something." In fact, the air campaign was worse than stupid: it was profoundly immoral. And in fact it did work, destroying much of what was left of Yugoslavia, moving it closer to becoming a more privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor country of cheap labor and rich resources available at bargain prices, defenseless against capital penetration, so divided that it would never reunite, so battered that it would never rise again, not even as a viably competitive bourgeois country.
-Three well-constructed refugee settlements built by the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia, intended as permanent homes, were destroyed by NATO air attacks, as was the headquarters of the Serbian Socialist party agency that dealt with the daunt�ing refugee problem .<sup>3</sup> The NATO attacks not only greatly increased the number of refugees but also destroyed many of the resources needed to cope with them, further exacerbating the FRY's housing and unemployment problems and adding to its deepening poverty.<sup>4</sup>
+When the productive social capital of any part of the world is obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced—especially when the chronic problem faced today by western capitalism is one of overcapacity. Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or by WTO "free trade" agreements (as in Mexico, India, Africa, and elsewhere) diminishes the potential competition and increases the market opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness. To destroy publicly run Yugoslav factories that produced auto parts, appliances, or fertilizer—or publicly financed Sudanese or Yugoslav plants that produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below those of their Western competitors—is to enhance the investment value of Western automotive and pharmaceutical companies. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops or blown up by NATO bombs extends the ideological and communicational dominance of the Western media cartels. In a word, the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served a rational class interest.
-Soon after NATO troops rolled into Kosovo, it was widely reported that the KLA itself had disarmed and disbanded. In fact, by early 2000, it was generally understood that KLA gunmen had not disarmed in any appreciable numbers. KLA personnel became the core of a civilian police force and administrative staff, the Kosovo Protection Corps, that did even less than the KFOR troops (NATO's Kosovo Force) to protect the non-Albanian minorities from violence. Indeed, former KLA members were soon involved in the misdeeds, including tortur�ing and killing local citizens and illegally detaining others.<sup>5</sup>The rule of law in Kosovo was visibly inverted, as criminals and terrorists became the law officers. John Pilger writes:
+NATO's attacks revealed a consistent pattern that bespoke its underlying political agenda. The Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia produced a list of 164 factories destroyed by the bombings—all of them state-owned. Not a single foreign-owned firm was targeted.<sup>1</sup> As I observed on a trip to Yugoslavia shortly after the war, the huge, state-run Hotel Yugoslavia was made uninhabitable by NATO missiles, while the corporate owned Hyatt Hotel, with its all-glass facade—as inviting a target as any mad bomber might want—suffered not a scratched windowpane. Buildings that displayed highly visible rooftop signs that advertised Panasonic, Coca-Cola, Diners Club International, and McDonald's, the latter replete with immense golden arches, survived perfectly intact.
-''<small>[We have witnessed] the installation of a paramilitary regime with links to organized crime. Indeed, Kosovo may become the world's first Mafia state. . . with war criminals, common murderers and drug traders forming an 'interim administration' that will implement the 'free-market reforms' required by the US and Europe. Their supervisors are the World Bank and the European Development Bank, whose aim is to ensure that Western mining, petroleum and construction companies share the booty of Kosovo's extensive natural resources: a fitting finale to the new moral crusade.<sup>6</sup></small>''
+Other political targets were hit. The Usce business center was struck by several missiles, rather precisely hitting the headquarters of Slobodan Miosevic's Socialist Party, along with the headquarters of JUL (Yugoslav United Left), a coalition of twenty-three communist and left parties, closely allied with the Socialist Party. Buildings used by the ministries of defense and the interior were also demolished. NATO destroyed or seriously damaged fuel storage facilities, oil refineries, chemical factories, roads, bridges, railway networks, airports, water supply systems, electrical power plants, and warehouses. This destruction paralyzed the production of consumer goods and added more than a million people to the ranks of the unemployed.
-In the first few months that Kosovo was under KFOR occupation, 200,000 Serbs were driven from the province and hundreds were killed by KLA gunmen in what were described in the Western press as acts of revenge and retaliation, as if Serb civilians were not themselves war victims but war criminals deserving of retribution. Certainly that seemed to be the impression Cheryl Atkinson strove for when she began a CBS evening news report on the KLA attacks against minorities by saying, "Payback in Kosovo!"'<sup>7</sup>
+Kragujevac, an industrial city in Central Serbia, suffered immense damage. Its mammoth, efficiently state-run Zastava factory was demolished, causing huge amounts of toxic chemicals to spill from the factory's generators. Zastava had employed tens of thousands of workers who produced cars, trucks, and tractors sold domestically and abroad. NATO attacks left some 80 per cent of its workforce without a livelihood. Publicly owned Zastava factories exist all over Yugoslavia. The attackers knew their locations, and destroyed many of them. Those not bombed were out of production for want of crucial materials or a recipient for their products.<sup>2</sup>
-According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), "A wave of arson and looting of Serb and Roma homes throughout Kosovo has ensued. Serbs and Roma remaining in Kosovo have been subject to repeated incidents of harassment and intimidation, including severe beatings. Most seriously, there has been a spate of murders and abductions of Serbs since mid June, including the late-July massacre of Serb farmers."<sup>8</sup>
+It has been argued that the Yugo, the inexpensive state produced automobile, could never really compete with Western European or Japanese cars. But the Yugo was the most frequently used vehicle in Yugoslavia itself. It also sold some 180,000 in the United States in the 1980s, and many more in other countries. But by 2000 it was almost entirely out of production and gave no competition to overseas auto markets nor to whatever market remained in Yugoslavia.
-A joint report by the OSCE and UNHCR describes "a climate of violence and impunity" with attacks being directed against the dwindling Serb, Roma, Turkish, Egyptian, Jewish, and Gorani (Muslim Slav) populations.<sup>9</sup>Within months of the NATO occupation of Kosovo, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, "a sinister pattern of violence and intimidation is emerging. Serb houses are bombed and set ablaze" and Serbs are beaten and murdered in what amounts to "systematic ethnic cleansing."<sup>10</sup> (Most mainstream publications avoided the term "ethnic cleansing" as applied to the forced expulsion of Serbs and other minorities from Kosovo.)
+In Nis, cruise missiles pulverized the tobacco and cigarette production plant, one of the most successful in Europe. Numerous state-run food-processing sites were leveled. A report by NBC has confirmed that NATO bombed the pharmaceutical complex of Galenika, the largest in Yugoslavia, located in Belgrade's suburbs. Our delegation was told that one worker-managed factory was contaminated with depleted uranium. The city of Aleksinac and additional socialist strongholds in southern Serbia were bombed especially heavily, resulting in many civilian deaths. Leaders from Aleksinac and several other cities in Serbia's "Red Belt" were convinced that they were pounded so mercilessly primarily because they were socialist, a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the region contained almost no heavy industry.
-Cedda Prlincevic, the leader of Pristina's small Jewish community, told how Jews—who had lived securely when Kosovo was under Serbian rule—were driven from their homes, which were then pillaged and vandalized. KFOR saw it all, and allowed it to happen, he claimed. Before the war, Prlincevic in�sisted, he had never encountered anti-Semitism, from either Serbs or Albanians. Most of the Jews in Pristina had already intermar�ried or were the products of intermarriage, being Serbian�Jewish, Roma-Jewish, Albanian-Jewish, and the like. "We [Jews] were not driven out from Kosovo by Albanians from Pristina but by Albanians from Albania . . . they are in Kosovo now."<sup>11</sup>
+In Novi Sad, worker-managed factories that somehow had survived the pitiless years of sanctions were reduced to ruins, along with bus and train depots. Major bridges were knocked down, blocking all shipping on the Danube, contaminating the river's bottom with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, and severing most of Serbia from the rest of Europe. Because of its depth, the Danube was judged nearly impossible to clean.
+Yugoslav electrical and construction firms used to be competitive with Western ones, winning contracts abroad on a regular basis. The NATO bombing eliminated that competition quite nicely. Heating plants and the entire oil-processing industry were badly crippled. Missiles that explode only after penetrating the earth's surface (being designed to destroy subterranean bomb shelters) were used to rip apart underground transmitter cables at an electrical power transformer station on the outskirts of Zemun. There was little hope of repairing these since international sanctions deprived the Yugoslays of the replace�ment parts made by Westinghouse.<sup>3</sup>
+NATO attacks also were intended to terrorize and demoralize the civilian population. Libraries, theaters, hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, sanitariums, and geriatric homes were destroyed or badly damaged, with serious injury or loss of life to occupants. Schools attended by several hundred thousand students were destroyed or damaged. NATO bombed historic sites, cultural monuments, museums, and churches—something not even Hitler did.
+[[Category:To kill a nation]]