Harry's Place

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.

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.

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.

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

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=14224

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.

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.

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’.

Nice article, but why is pond scum in the SWP news? Is it a matter of debate in some quarters?

the above point is answered at the FAQs of srebrenica genocide blog:

“[7] Were men and boys “only” victims of Srebrenica Genocide?

“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

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).

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).

great post MAH

Brilliant post MAH

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

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.

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.

funny, but all of the SWPers have gone silent?

where’s JohnG?

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.

“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?

Indeed, Alan, indeed.

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.

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?

‘excessive amount of details’ – the gravest threat we face…

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?

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.

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:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War#Casualties

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

@ 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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

early adopters of idiocy:
Choice phrase- am filing it for future use in arguments.

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.

“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.

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.

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?

Has anyone ever met him?

By all accounts, about several thousand cream cakes have.

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

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.”

Anyone remember Julie Burchill’s love affair with the Serbs?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,306307,00.html

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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lenin’s response entirely destroys Marko’s rather desperate misrepresentstions

Well, it doesn’t actually thought does it?

“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.

benny (from crossroads) mackie writes
The trouble is, after reading Marko’s piece, one feels drawn into a very obscure, irrelevant and esoteric world.
Dr. Marko Attila Hoare has also worked as a Research Officer at the International Criminal Tribunal…I am surprised he does not have better things to do than have scraps with irrelevant political micro-groupings on the internet… is also a supporter of John McCain who vying for presidency of the United States.

And, Benny, dear boy, if you knew anything, you’d be all too aware that Atilla was also at the time we’re talking about here a leading member of one of the Healyite WRPs (Workers Press) – not too difficult, mind you, considering they had about 15 members.

Anyway, Benny – did you die in a hotel fire, before turning up on the QE2 and sailing to Hong Kong Fooey? (that’s you, isn’t it at 2:17

“why this obsession about a word, genocide or not? It seems to be about raising an emotion rather than dealing with what it is”

A word is important, since genocide implies the planned eradication of a people – a race or ethnic group – whereas a massacre doesn’t. Srebrenica was a massacre that was an act of genocide, whereas Tiananmen Square was a massacre that was an act of state repression of opposition. It is legally important.

Richard Seymour has a point: When Marko says Richard “supported Serbian territorial expansion” in Croatia it has a slightly bizarre ring to it. When Marko’s fulminations are backed up by hasty copy and pastes from comment boxes one has to roll one’s eyes again. Amusing.

Dan,

Under a strict definition of genocide, Seymour (who otherwise sounds ludicrously like a Serbian propagandist) has a point: there must be a distinction between the kind of purposeful destruction of entire families (including the elderly, women and children) conducted by the Nazis or the Hutus, and massacres against men of military age (as was the case at Srebernica.) The former fits the definition at Nuremberg of the attempt to destroy an entire people, the latter does not — since the people (in the case of Srebernica, the Bosniacs) could regenerate their population. Thus the ICJ’s definition of genocide is not as strict as Nuremberg’s definition, although it was ostensibly derived from it.

p.s.: The massacres committed by the Khmer Rouge against opponents of their regime in Cambodia is also often called a genocide — due to its methodical destruction of entire families, tribes and clans — however, once again, according to the Nuremberg definition it was not a genocide because the massacres were carried out by Cambodians against Cambodians, whereas genocide entails the destruction of a people by a foreign people.

(**) Kamm vs. Seymour – can you imagine that pair debating?

Ho ho. Can I imagine it? How long have you got?

Benny vs. Amy Turtle.

“massacres against men of military age (as was the case at Srebernica.)”

But the massacres included male children. If someone kills off the entire male population and systemically rape women and girls, how can it be anything other than a genocidal act? The men are gone and the women are unsure whether or not subsequent pregnancies are the result of rape – and the girls, having lost their virginity through rape, will find it harder to find a husband. It is nothing but genocide and I celebrate the fact that Karadzic will have to answer for his crimes.

“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.”

I’ll call your bluff and remind you of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s opposition to all capitalist wars and its comdemnation of both sides in these conflicts . Their attitude was no different in the series of Balkan Wars as this article from the time demonstrates .

“Workers are always the victims .Needless to say, in this as in all wars it is the working class who suffer most. They do the fighting and the dying, they are raped and “ethnically cleansed”, and it is their lives and homes that count for most of the “collateral damage” whether or not they swallow the nationalist filth of their leaders.”
http://www.worldsocialism.org/articles/yugoslav_wars_myths_realities.php

And again in reply to a reader :-

“…Although we are in favour of the immediate stopping of all wars, i.e. of the killing of innocent workers on both sides, the posters you have seen proclaiming “Stop the Bombing” have not been put up by us, but by some Trotskyist group which is no doubt supporting Serbia as the lesser evil in the current NATO-Serbia war. So your criticism is misdirected…And just because we don’t support the NATO bombing campaign does not mean that we therefore support the Serbian army. We are against both sides, Serbian capitalism as well as NATO imperialism who are fighting over an issue—who should control the territories of the former Yugoslavia—which is not worth the sacrifice of a single worker’s life..”
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jun99/letsjun.html

‘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.’

Benji, I think ’storm in a teacup’ is the phrase you’re looking for, old boy.

Leon

if that really is the case then Nuremburg surely is a crock of shite as it buys into a similar race mythology as that which underpinned Nazis?

The “offending” passage:

“The former fits the definition at Nuremberg of the attempt to destroy an entire people, the latter does not — since the people (in the case of Srebernica, the Bosniacs) could regenerate their population.”

They are political slogans but nonetheless I agree with them: “there is one race, the human race” and “the workers have no country”

I feel it is essential that progressive politics puts to death all notions of race, nationalism, patriotism et al and points out our common humanity and that we should look at Earth as our home

Could somebody please explain to me the point that Bekim al-Kukeshawi was trying to make earlier (2.17am today)?

Great piece Marko exposing this fraud Seymour. It always surprises me that those who most vehemently supported Milosevic’ destruction of Kosovan autonomy, are the same who think that the Croats were supposed to stand by and do nothing while a large part of their state was annexed by Serbia for ‘ethnic reasons’.

The reply by ‘Lenin’ Seymour is so full of inaccuracies and distorted generalisations that I’m sure that Marko will respond with a suitably erudite demolition, but for starters let’s deal with some obvious deficiencies.

Seymour, like so many other Stalinist reactionaries, fails to comprehend the nature of the federal Yugoslav state, as well as conveniently ignoring (or perhaps being ignorant of) the realities on the ground during 1989-1992. Tito’s 1974 constitution already provided a mechanism for each of the full constituent republics to become independent from the federation. Long before the Croation declaration of independence, Milosevic and the Serbs had already accepted and were pursuing the break up of Yugoslavia. It is flabbergasting that Seymour is blind to the reasons why Croatia’s declaration of independence had a legitimacy that the Krajinan Serb declaration of secession (never a republic or oblast in any Yugoslavian state), egged on as it was by Milsoevic in an attempt to provoke Croatian independence, did not.

The ‘increasingly oppressed and demonised’ Serb community to which Seymour refers reveals his willingness to indulge in the most ludicrous myths of Serb nationalism, most particularly trying to parallel the situation in the 1990s with 1940s occupied Europe. This is a bogus tactic used by all Serb nationalist organisations ( for an example of such foaming-at-the-mouth bullshit see here http://www.byzantinesacredart.com/blog/ ).

In its very declaration of independence, Croatia enshrined extraordinary rights to the Serbian minorities over and above the human and civil rights granted to all members of the newly sovereign republic. In its very first session as an independent state, the Croatian Parliament adopted ‘The Charter Relating to the Rights of Serbs and Other Nationalities in the Republic of Croatia’. The irony is that these protections were almost never needed by the Serbs who lived under Croat protection, but it was rather the Croats and Bosniaks in Serb controlled areas who needed to appeal to the UN, the EU, Amnesty and other international organisations for protection against abuses carried out by the Serb militias. While not excusing the isolated attacks on civilians which occured during Operation Storm (which Marko is entirely correct to describe as a ‘liberation’), the evacuation of the Serb inhabitants of Krajina was arranged by the Serb militiary itself, and the behaviour of the Croatian army bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fascist fearmongering propagated by the Serbian warlords.

‘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’

The Great Croat project in Bosnia was no better than the Great Serb project. However, the international community dismantled the Great Croat separatist entity in Bosnia, but not the Great Serb entity.

Thus, through the Washington and Dayton agreements, the ‘Croat Republic of Herceg-Bosna’ was abolished and the Bosnian Croats grouped with the Muslims in the Bosnian Federation. By contrast, the Republika Srpska was recognised and allowed to exist virtually as a state. On top of which, Republika Srpska received a much larger share of territory, both relatively and absolutely, than went to the Bosnian Croats.

So the international community has been much softer toward the Serb nationalists than it has toward the Croat nationalists in Bosnia.

The Serbs in Kraijina were forcibly removed.

the vast majority fled before anyone removed them 150,000–200,000 evacuated by the so called “Republic of Serbian Krajina” itself in fear at the possible revenge for the ethnic cleansing (and some racist murder) of 80,000 Croats 3 years earlier not to mention the complete destruction of the city of Vukovar/massacre of hospital patients. 2,000 defenders of Vukovar alone were killed 800 went missing and 22,000 were forced into exile. The wounded Croat fighters were taken from Vukovar Hospital to Ovcara near Vukovar where they were executed by Serbian forces from the official Yugoslav army.

I contrast whilst you are right to point out there were some war crimes commited by the Croats when they re-took those parts of their country formerly “cleansed” by the Serbs and then allowed to rot into a failed statelet in which 36,000 of its citizens were employed out of a population of 430,000. , the numbers of abuses are not in any way equal. Unprofor for instance documented 200 murders during operation storm. One can only imagine what Milosevic would have done to a group who three years earlier had razed a Serbian city and cleansed 80,000 people.

“Seymour, like so many other Stalinist reactionaries”

But he’s a Trot!

“the numbers of abuses are not in any way equal.”

I didn’t say they were. I said that the differences between the three sides was an issue of scale. But the Croats did commit war crimes and ethnic cleansing. And the rounding up of Serb civilians in Krajina – many of whom were desperately poor and given little financial assistance by Milosevic – their expulsion and the burning down of their villages so that they could not return cannot be justified by the actions of Serb forces, over whom Serb civilians had no control.

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.

Idiot translated: “SWP blogger Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour supported Serbian territorial expansion.” How, when “Yugoslavia” is nothing but a cover name for Serb nationalism which ran rampant in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia) is it any “solution” to hold a federation together just so your favoured Serbs can eliminate anybody in adjoining territories?

Very progressive Seymour you right-wing runt.

their expulsion and the burning down of their villages so that they could not return cannot be justified by the actions of Serb forces, over whom Serb civilians had no control.

The Croatian government actually set aside two large areas for the Serbs of the Krajina but these were rejected and the Krajina Serbs declared an independence which could only be defended with Milosevic onside. When Milosevic abandoned the Krajina Serbs as a rabid disaster area Babic and friends did all the things you are complaining of in spades.

Indeed, the rebelled Croatian Serbs authorities continued to make efforts to ensure that they could never return, destroying villages and cultural and religious monuments to erase the previous existence of the Croatian inhabitants of the Krajina. Milan Babić later testified that this policy was driven from Belgrade through the Serbian secret police—and ultimately Milošević—who he claimed were in control of all the administrative institutions and armed forces in the Krajina

It is rich to complain about having done to you what you have already done to so many others.

What Dickie’s verbose nonsense tries to hide is what Dickie can’t possibly under any circumstances admit (because his own weltanschaung would disappear in a puff of logic if he ever did.) And that is that Milosevic’s government was the totalitarian double-nightmare of a descredited Communist party shacking up with actual fascists such as Seselj in order to play a final hand of rabid nationalism and land grabs using what was then the fourth largest army in Europe against a handful of Croatian policemen. Any attempt to suggest tha: 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. is de facto support of Milosevic.

I wonder what Mr Seymour would say if the Serbs decided to massacre Palestinians.

It is rich to complain about having done to you what you have already done to so many others.

Indeed. I recall at the time wanting Republika Srpska to be utterly destroyed, as a salutory lesson to the Serbian genocidalists.

To this day, I wonder if that would have been a better course of action.

How absolutely bizarre. An entire thread that ignores what someone has said repeatedly – in sum, that Milosevic was a brutal, murderous, nationalist thug – to attack something he didn’t say (but we can pretend he must have done, really, secretly).

spgb gray:

The word “genocide” (gens = people, -cide = killing) means the systematic attempt to destroy an entire people — as was the case during the Turkish genocide against the Armenian, in the case of the Holocaust against Roma and Jews, and Hutus against Tootsis in Rwanda. In my understanding, a solitary act of civilian slaughter — as in the case of Srebernica — does not qualify under this definition anymore than the WWII Japanese slaughtering whole villages in China did. Indeed, the Japanese generals were tried and executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not specifically for genocide.

I’m not saying the Karadicz shouldn’t end up jailed for life for the most heinous crimes — only that genocide isn’t one of them. However, if Dan is right that ALL males (children included) were killed in Srebernica, and not simply males of military age, then this (combined with the campaign of systematic mass rape against Bosniac women) may arguably be a case for genocide.

However, Srebernica is definitely not as clear-cut and straight forward as in the case of the Nazi or Rwandan Holocausts in which an entire people was systematically targeted for destruction by another people.

“Lenin and Trotsky chose to fight a civil war”?

No. They took Russia out of a war in which millions of kids were being slaughtered at the behest of assorted mass murdering scum.

The chap at Lenin’s tomb is a blinkered idiot, a tard, a butt-hole but Marko A.H. at times is little better.

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’.

I see nothing wrong with that assertion; in fact, I think that it is completely reasonable, and this, had the victims been Muslims, Croates, Serbs or Tongan Episcopalians.

The deaths of 8,000 poeple is a brutal slaughter, it is a muderous massacre , but in no way shape or form could it EVER BE CONSIDERED A GENOCIDE.

Not only am I tired of these sorts of abuses of language, I’m becomming somewhat frightened at the prospect of just how CHEAP AND MUNDANE AND BANAL the term “genocide” has been rendered by it’s obscene and frivolous overuse by twitchy, righteous prigs.

The murder of millions of Armenians and Jews is genocide. The complete eradication of the Arawak Indians of the Carribean and the Aborigines of Tasmania are genocides. The murder of North American Natives and the near total destruction of their cultures is genocide.

Srebrenica is NOT a genocide.

The harnassing of balkan massacres and the attachment of human rights *abuses*, in general, to the goals, ambitions and the geo-political aims of a groupuscule of greedy twats; this exploitation of suffering is to be comdemned in the stongest terms.

Were my left thumb an oil spigot spewing forth sweet, light crude, and were that thumb to develope a hangnail preventing the extraction of said sweet, light crude, then that hangnail, that little, tiny, innocent, inconsequential cuticle would be classed a ‘genocide’.

Marko’s and HP’s obsession with Srebrenica, the abuse of events at Srebrenica, and in this case the ridiculous and overblown use of the word genocide, is rendering what once was a term packing great emotional punch, a bland and banal cliché, so overused and bandioed about, it no longer raises an eyebrow.

Now don’t take issue with any of the ideas and arguments I put forward above; just pile on me and trash me as the resident Muslim-hater.

As *genocide* denier.

Allowing Marko to cry “wolf” over and over and over again on the subject of Srebrenica, and to allow him to abuse and cheapen the term genocide is a very short-sighted and dangerous thing to do because it could inadvertently become a prelude setting the tone, and a very banal tone at that, for future genocides which will then, no doubt, be greeted with studied indifference

You know, another day, another genocide.

La-di-dah.

Pass me the Ritz crackers.

According to international law, genocide is defined as the deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic or religious group in whole or in part. The Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide since it involved the wholesale slaughter of men and boys and the mass rape of women and girls, the effect of which would be to eliminate the Muslim population of the town.

“Srebernica is definitely not as clear-cut and straight forward as in the case of the Nazi or Rwandan Holocausts in which an entire people was systematically targeted for destruction by another people.”

The Rwandan genocide was not simply Hutus killing Tutsis, ie an entire people targeted for destruction by another people. The Interahamwe targeted both Tutsis and those Hutus who opposed their genocide. Hutus were also victims of Hutu extremists.

Having taken a fresh look at the picture of the demo, isn’t it ironic that the swuppies’ banners are overshadowed by a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini – a theocrat who was not exactly noted for his tolerance of secular leftists (e.g. the Tudeh)?

The Balkans are such a problem for Seymour not just because they blow a fatal hole in his current Islamophoba propaganda and reveals his hypocrisy and shallowness on this, but it also conflicts with his newer theories on the role of race in global affairs, where the game is to pretend that the west runs a racial hierarchy system and the white man is the source of all ill and targets Muslims for being darker skinned.

Being a childish SWPer, he used to just have a problem with any form of authority, sharing the same view of government as white supremacist militia groups in the US. In that context, the Balkan wars were blamed on the IMF and all the usual New World Order tropes. But the western inventions in the region to stop the bloodshed were PC wars in many ways – which doesn’t make them wrong – which doesn’t fit with this his newer racial ideology, therefore he struggle badly to make any coherent sense, hence this terrible bodge job.

I like this from Seymour:

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.

Giggles.

It shows you how much a BA in politics and history is worth, eh?

Read his post on pornography as well if you want a good laugh.

We’re certainly getting the unvarnished, uncensored Seymour of late. Great stuff.

They call him Gobbledygook Seymour.

in sum, that Milosevic was a brutal, murderous, nationalist thug

Who Seymour clearly thinks should have been left alone to do his worst.

I’m sure that one thing Richard has learn’t by writing about this issue.
“Wars , population movements and right to return sure are complex outside of Palestine”

read in a broad Ballymena accent

‘Fraid not – he’s as posh as fuck.

That little talk Richard gave you posted up a while ago was surely some type of pastiche. Thus always with Leninists

ps. please visit me blog, its awful and I could do with some feedback, ta.

Marko Attila Hoare regards as a ‘hero’ Martin Špegelj,the man who said this (to Josip Boljkovac) before January 1991 and before a shot had been fired in the wars of secession.

“As for border posts, when border posts are disarmed, then they will be disarmed, all of them, as many as there are, but leave Albanians five bullets in their automatic rifles, and the rest locked up in cellars and given food and water if this goes on for a few days. As for this, if something happens, then just give instructions to all your people who you know. Kill extremists on the spot, in the street, in the compound, in barracks, anywhere. Just pistol and into the stomach. That will not be a war, it will be a civil war in which there is no mercy towards anyone, women or children, that doesn’t concern us. Into homes, family homes, quite simply grenades.” (Špegelj)

“We are going to resort to all resources. We’re even going to use weapons. Knin we’re going to resolve in the same way. We are going to slaughter everyone. We have international recognition for that that we’re going to slaughter them now that this whore won in Serbia. Now the Americans, on the second day when he won, offered us all assistance, and until then everyone was speculating, they would, they wouldn’t, this way, that way, 1.000 combat vehicles.” (Špegelj)

“We are going to use all resources. We’re going to use weapons as well. Serbs in Croatia will never be there again for as long as we are there and we hope until now too their supremacy is a thing of the past. Their Knin will never be Knin again. We are going to enter Knin too. Knin has to disappear as Knin. All Croats should bear this in mind and we are going to create a state created at all costs, if necessary, at the cost of shedding blood.” (Boljkovac)

These racists and fascists are who Marko Attila Hoare supported then, and who he supports today.

The Balkans are such a problem for Seymour not just because they blow a fatal hole in his current Islamophoba propaganda and reveals his hypocrisy and shallowness on this, but it also conflicts with his newer theories on the role of race in global affairs, where the game is to pretend that the west runs a racial hierarchy system and the white man is the source of all ill and targets Muslims for being darker skinned.

Sound of hitting nail on its head. What it reveals is that the ideology of the deranged SWP types is first and foremost to adopt reactionary anti-Western positions, rather than any concern for human rights or anti-Islamism.

Hmm, I see the loons are out in force.

Great post as always, Marko.

‘Fraid not – he’s as posh as fuck.

I’ve remarked about this before. Ballymena my fucking arse. Malone Road, more like.

Great post as always, Marko.

Despite the fact that Marko has demonstrated he knows fuck all about Northern Ireland, I generally fully agree with him on the Balkans. This post was one of his better ones.

How much of Lennys blog is really his own views?
We know for instance that during the SWPs dalliance with Galloway he was posting what he was told.
Sometimes claiming it as his own work.

“Thank fuck I don’t have to defend this stuff anymore” was his line once Georgie locked them all out.

So perhaps this line on the Balkans will wither if the Central line changes.

I don’t mind his accent. It’s quaint. He sounds a bit like Lt Col Tim Collins – one of his heroes I believe.

Never mind his accent, what is the guy like? Is he tee-total? Is he a back-packer?

These racists and fascists are who Marko Attila Hoare supported then, and who he supports today.

I know.

And let’s not forget all that Far Right Saudi agitation in Bosnia in the late 80s and 90s to which Nato turned a blind eye. Arms purchases, the dissemination AND imposition of wahabbi ideology, the construction of austere wahabbi mosques and the thousands payed out to Bosnian Muslim women to encourage them to dressin Arab clothing and headscarves.

The Palestinains consider their ( largely self-imposed) plight a “holocaust” and a “genocide”, and are now building a museum to highlight Israeli *atrocities*.

And why not?

They’ve taken their cues from the Srebrenica fisaco, at the same recognising that the techniques employed by Bosnian Wahabbi fighters often consisted of embedding combattants among innocent civilians, using them as human shields and then daring the enemy to open fire.

When the bluff is called, The Israelis are too principled and won’t shoot.

But as the Bosnian Wahabbis learned, the Serbs will.

The Serbs who committed this massacre, at least those still at large, should be tried and condemned.

And so should the Bosnain commanders who willfully used civilians, just as the Palestianians and Hamas do, as human shields.

John P: I don’t take you seriously. You are corrupted by hate.

I think with Seymour he sees the world as an academic exercise and enjoys the challenge of promoting and defending a contrarian thesis as best he can, attempting to fit it all together with his obscure brand of anti imperialism and Marxism, no matter how flawed or outrageous. It’s like he’s been set another task by his teachers, and he likes that. He’s good as academic tasks.

But now that he has finally finished further education maybe he will stop playing games and decide to start looking the world in the eye for a change.

Has anyone met him?

John P: I don’t take you seriously. You are corrupted by hate.

Jihadis, dear, often embed their fighters amongst civilians.

Hamas and Hezbollah do this in the occupied terrotories and so did the Jihadists in the Balkans during the 90s.

If people still WON’T see that, then they are corrupted by utter stupidity.

And to refer to the the deaths of 8,000 , as tragic as it may be, as a ‘genocide’ and is an obscene and immoral use of a word for narrow partisan purposes.

The term genocide should only be spent with great ECONOMY and after a great deal of deliberation.

Harry’s Place’s short-sighted expropriation of the word to describe events at Srebenica is about as pound-foolish as one can get.

A Far Right Croat nationalist who kites his anti-Serb sentiments on the backs of dead Bosnians, bosnians for whom he never gave give a rat’s ass, should not be allowed a freepass on this.

I challenges Marko’ improper and inappropriate employment of this term as being self-serving, narrow-minded and altogether ethno-partisan in nature.

‘Tis not I who am corrupted by hate, but rather Marko

What words will we spend when an embedded nuke is detonated by jihadis in a Western capital?

What terms will remain in our arsenal to accurately describe the millions of casualties?

“Demographic downsizing”?

To describe 8,000 deaths as a genocide is an example of a shrill, overblown and immoral misuse of language that does an obscene, sick injustice to those tens of millions killed by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.

And this dumbing down of language is becomming a personnal concern of mine.

I recently watched an interview with an animal rights activist 9 a real winner!) who descrfied a cull of wolves in western America, a MUCH NEEDED cull, as a “holocaust”

Here, here, John. P.

“Harry’s Place’s short-sighted expropriation of the word to describe events at Srebenica is about as pound-foolish as one can get.”

You are an ignorant little man, aren’t you? ICTY has termed it genocide. It has a little more authority on these matters than a prejudiced bigot like you.

Read this you fool and then shut up for once – http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/2004/p860-e.htm

“And this dumbing down of language is becomming a personnal concern of mine.”

Spelling should be a personal priority for you. Once you have added English literacy to your woeful skillset, you will be better qualified to lecture people on what words mean.

There is something to be said that all parties during the wars in former Yugoslavian were responsible for atrocities. No one group was without blood on its hands. However, since the Serbs had the best stock of weapons, they were able to and did commit the worst of the atrocities out there. The Croats, under that revoluting neo-Nazi thug Tudjman killed an awful lot of innocent civilians too. That’s no apology for what the Serbs did, but maybe it gives a bit more perspective.

Dan,

“According to international law, genocide is defined as the deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic or religious group in whole or in part. The Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide since it involved the wholesale slaughter of men and boys and the mass rape of women and girls, the effect of which would be to eliminate the Muslim population of the town.”

If this is the case then what about the pogroms against the Jews of Poland and White Russia during the 19th century? Their aims were likewise the destruction of Jewish shtets and ghettoes — i.e. towns. Yet these have never been condemned retroactively as acts of genocide. Neither have many other wholesale slaughters never been condemned as genocides. For instance, no one speaks of the “genocide by the Romans against Carthage” or the “Egyptian genocide against Meggido” — yet by your definition they certainly were… I think there must be a strict definition of the term — as the attempt to destroy a whole people — if it is to have any meaning.

A Far Right Croat nationalist who kites his anti-Serb sentiments on the backs of dead Bosnians, bosnians for whom he never gave give a rat’s ass, should not be allowed a freepass on this.

Liberty (it seems) is the right to talk utterly offensive toss about a poster whose nuanced reflections on the Balkans and humane attitude contrast with the nasty and mean spirited racist Serb nationalism of John P.

There is something to be said that all parties during the wars in former Yugoslavian were responsible for atrocities.

there is something to be said for understanding that around 200 murders took place as the Croats re-took land from which their parents and grandparents had been murderously expelled three years previously. To put it into perspective 200 patients at Vukovar hospital were massacred by Serbian forces on November 20, 1991.

Anyone wanting to suggest that all parties in the Balkans were equally responsible for atrocities is seeking only to excuse the genocide unleashed on both Croatia and Bosnia by the ultra-nationalist plans for a Greater Serbia

Presiding Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Theodor Meron stated:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks], the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.

The US congress stated:

…the policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 and 1995 with the direct support of Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević and its followers ultimately led to the displacement of more than 2,000,000 people, an estimated 200,000 killed, tens of thousands raped or otherwise tortured and abused, and the innocent civilians of Sarajevo and other urban centers repeatedly subjected to shelling and sniper attacks; meet the terms defining the crime of genocide in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in Paris on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951.

Some British “left-wingers” supported the Serbs and should now quit the denial (which fools nobody) and hang their heads in shame at the part their over-confident ignorance played in the deaths of innocent people in the Balkans during the 1990s.

They won’t do so of course because they don’t care about the racist murders which are all just a game to them.

p.s. I think what’s at stake here is not merely linguistic, nor is it a result of modern attitudes towards mass slaughter. More likely, such killing is in itself a result of modernity — because before the modern era committing acts of genocide was very difficult, almost impossible, to carry out. It is modernity itself, with its technologies of extermination, of mass communication and mass identity, that has created the conditions and opportunities that make a genocide possible.

‘The deaths of 8,000 poeple is a brutal slaughter, it is a muderous massacre , but in no way shape or form could it EVER BE CONSIDERED A GENOCIDE.’

Hmm… I wonder… should we accept the verdict of two different international courts – the International Court of Justice and the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide ?

Or should we accept the verdict of the viscerally racist, terminally stupid and deeply nasty John Palubiski (‘John P.’) – whose pathological racial hatred of the Balkan Muslim peoples and spectacular ignorance of everything to do with the Balkans are an embarrassment even to read, and who lacks any mental qualifications to comment on the topic whatsoever – that the Srebrenica massacre was not an act of genocide ?

The verdict of two panels of learned judges, or the verdict of a hysterical, bigoted nobody whose sole contribution to any debate, ever, is to rant and rave about how much he hates Muslims ?

Tough one, that.

These racists and fascists are who Marko Attila Hoare supported then, and who he supports today.

I know.

Ah. A “resistor-John P.” axis. Appropriate in so many ways.

“Thank fuck I don’t have to defend this stuff anymore” was [Seymour's] line once Georgie locked them all out.

That’s really all you need to know about Seymour and his political integrity. All the rest is commentary.

Marko.
Check your e mail.

Ah. A “resistor-John P.” axis. Appropriate in so many ways.

Indeed. Keep going left and eventually you’ll meet the far right.
Resembles the John Pilger-John Laughland axis.

The deaths of 8,000 poeple is a brutal slaughter

Well, we’re making a little progress from the weekend, but it’s still incoherent, fact-free, paranoid nonsense. The ICJ and the ICTY call Srebrenica an act of genocide. That’s good enough for me.

“A resitor-John P. axis”:
Sort of like having our own Hitler-Stalin Pact right here on HP!

“Keep going left and eventually you’ll meet the far right.”
Yes, it is best to think of the political spectrum as a circle. Go far enough in either direction, left or right, and you will connect with the other end of the spectrum, right or left. Two points where extreme left and extreme right tend to meet are attacking Jews and defending Serbs.

“There is something to be said that all parties during the wars in former Yugoslavian were responsible for atrocities. No one group was without blood on its hands.”

Yes, but genocide was largely committed by Serb forces, whereas ethnic cleansing carried out by Croats and to a far more limited degree Muslims (who were the main victims in the Bosnian war) largely involved forced displacement rather than the deliberate destruction of Serbs as a nation (in whole or in part, as international law defines genocide).

“The Croats, under that revoluting neo-Nazi thug Tudjman killed an awful lot of innocent civilians too.”

Tudjman was awful, but if you looked at his personal history you’d not call him a neo-Nazi. An ultra-nationalist and ethnic chauvinist, but not a Nazi.

“If this is the case then what about the pogroms against the Jews of Poland and White Russia during the 19th century? [...] these have never been condemned retroactively as acts of genocide.”

Maybe they should. I’ve no problem with describing any deliberate destruction of an ethno-national or religious group, regardless of the aggressor. I don’t really know enough about these events to make an informed judgement.

“no one speaks of the “genocide by the Romans against Carthage” or the “Egyptian genocide against Meggido” — yet by your definition they certainly were…”

Perhaps, but there are not many Carthagians around to state their case.

“I think there must be a strict definition of the term — as the attempt to destroy a whole people — if it is to have any meaning.”

Take your argument to the UN, where the definition of genocide was coined. I am relying on the definition in international law and as understood by judges who have ruled on these matters.

“mean spirited racist Serb nationalism of John P.”

He’s not a Serb nationalist. He probably couldn’t give a damn about Serbs. He’s coming from a position of pathological hatred of all Muslims and as such will attempt to downplay their plight in places such as Bosnia. I find it insulting, but then again he is an illiterate lunatic so it’s best not to take anything he said seriously.

“Some British “left-wingers” supported the Serbs and should now quit the denial …”

There were some British centrists and right-wingers who also sought to protect the Serbs from criticism. I remember attending a debate at Westminster Central Hall in the 1990s in which Peter Mandelson (sporting a rust-tinted moustache at the time) argued for military action and Tory MP Jerry Hayes opposed it on the grounds that all belligerents were equally bad and the Serbs were as much victims as the Muslims.

I agree with Hasan Prishtina about Srebrenica.

There were some British centrists and right-wingers who also sought to protect the Serbs from criticism.

I am fully aware of that but I think you will find that here we are talking about the SWP blogger “Lenin”.

Serbian Ultra-Nationalists protest against the planned extradition of Karadzic to the Hague Tribunal. Serbian President Tadic has recieved numerous death threats since Karadzic’s arrest Read “Serbs Protest Genocide Arrest of Karadzic” at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/29/world/main4303870.shtml

For a great picture of Karadzic looking like a practioner of alternate medicine. See http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/54390

stuart @ 29 July 2008, 2:37 pm

” “Lenin and Trotsky chose to fight a civil war”?

No. They took Russia out of a war in which millions of kids were being slaughtered at the behest of assorted mass murdering scum.”

Perhaps you’d like to offer us an opinion about whether that was before or after they started the civil war that created the Soviet Union?

And another opinion about whether or not the pair of them disagreed about the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk?

Breaking news: The extradition of Karadzic to the Hague is underway!

Take that, Seymour!

Alan Ji,

reply to post 30/7 12.55am.

It’s a bit odd how you turn the notion of taking Russia out of a war that has seen miilions of young lives taken on all sides as ’starting’ a war. Should Russia have continued fighting world war one?

The fact is the Bolsheviks were one of the few parties to oppose the war, nearly all the Labour type parties across Europe backed the war, hence they backed what you term ‘murderiing scum’.

The mood in Russia by 1917 was for land reform, for soldiers no longer fighting, for the non Russians to no longer be part of the Russian Empire. In implementing such measures the Bolsheviks met with resistancve both internally and externally (from foreign troops including British).

I understand Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin all had different opinions over Brest-Litovsk.

As regards the actual thread topic I’m not convinced that the SWP actually support Serbian ethnic cleansing any more than the millions of British people who opposed the Iraq war supported Saddam Hussein. I’m afraid people can oppose NATO operations without supporting Karadic and can oppose US invasions without supporting Saddam. Just as opposing McCarthyism in the US did not amount to supporting Stalin.

I’m afraid people can oppose NATO operations without supporting Karadic and can oppose US invasions without supporting Saddam.

You can’t have this both ways. Part of the Stop the War argument against Iraq was that Saddam was not murdering people at the rate which he had in the past and there was therefore no urgency to an invasion. Part of the SWP paper-seller’s that I ran into anyway arguments against nato and serbia was that all parties were equally as horrible (a point brushed aside in the most horrifc way by the weeks of mass killings at Srebenica. The ignorance of those whose naive understanding of Balkan politice translated as “a plague on all their houses” allowed the little-Englanderism of the likes of Douglas Hurd to seem sensible as people were dying.

I think the problem is that many posters on this site have arrived at a political position of supporting so called liberal interventionsm which actually amounts to not only endorsing mass killings but supporting territorial gains by the west the effect of which is to encouage the process further.

To cover their tracks they get into libellous type arguments about left wingers supporting ethnic cleansing here and there, as if a group of left wingers thousands of miles away are somehow present and cheering it on.

The British left have no responsibilty for the mess that arose after the fall of Yugoslavia, the positioning of all the key powers and the horrific aftermath. However, it would be nice if the broad left movement could at least spot the political dynamics after the fall of the ‘communist bloc’ and note how the western powers, notably the US, is seeking at every oppurtunity to extend its influence eastwards under the guise of ‘human rights’, whether in Serbia, Afghanistan or Iraq.

If you think that’s fine then fair enough but it’s the politics of PNAC in the US and has no place on the political left.

For anyone interested, here is my refutation of Seymour’s latest offering:

http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/more-on-richard-lenin-seymours-support-for-serbian-imperialist-expansion/

However, it would be nice if the broad left movement could at least spot the political dynamics after the fall of the ‘communist bloc’ and note how the western powers, notably the US, is seeking at every oppurtunity to extend its influence eastwards under the guise of ‘human rights’, whether in Serbia, Afghanistan or Iraq.

I think it would be jolly well nicer old chap if the hard left stopped fantasising about American hegemony and responded instead to the suffering of the weak and oppressed at the hands of the genocidal (as the left always has.)

Otherwise what is to distinguish you from the hard right?

“I think it would be jolly well nicer old chap if the hard left stopped fantasising about American hegemony”

What, you mean there is no such thing? The left shouldn’t concern themselves with the actions of US multinationals and their backing from the US armed forces (to paraphrase Thomas Friedman) – even if such interests are served by the Saudi rulers or Saddan Hussein or the fundamentalists fighting in Afghanistan? Not a problem for the left? Just concentrate on ‘human rights’ and rest assued that US ‘hegemony’ doesn’t exist and most certainly does not involve dealing with human rights abusers?

Thanks for the guardian link, modernity.

What, you mean there is no such thing?

Well there are theories but I seem to remember saying that the point was to change the world not interpret it. Anyway a “multinational” is not “America.”

The left should stick to hard proven facts and leave what may or may not be to the philosophers.

“The left should stick to hard proven facts and leave what may or may not be to the philosophers.”

What, like ‘multinational’ is not ‘America’? Factually, what I referred to was ‘US multinationals’, meaning companies based in the US who operate globally.

So am I to take it that in seeking to ‘change the world’, but not ‘interpret’ it, we should not worry in the slightest about companies such as Exxon and the like?

You can spend your days theorising about such rubbish for all I care but it won’t make you a leftist.

“You can spend your days theorising about such rubbish for all I care but it won’t make you a leftist.”

Equally I’m not bothered about failing to match your theoretical criteria as to what constitutes leftism.

Equally I’m not bothered about failing to match your theoretical criteria as to what constitutes leftism.

The world is totally disinterested in what you think anyway.

It’s a bit odd how you turn the notion of taking Russia out of a war that has seen miilions of young lives taken on all sides as ’starting’ a war. Should Russia have continued fighting world war one?

It did eventually anyway in Poland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish-Soviet_War

“The world is totally disinterested in what you think anyway.”

Well the whole universe is disinterested in what you have say so there!

“It did eventually anyway in Poland.”

But not really a continuation of world war one, in fact revolutionary Russia was being attacked by numerous foreign armies. Double standards?

I see Marko Attila Hoare is too much of a coward to explain his support for the fascists, Martin Špegelj and Josip Boljkovac or their plans to murder anyone who stood in their way. Could any of his far-right comrades on this blog come to his aid?

Also it is a little rich of Hoare to quote the ICTY since he was a paid employee on the Milosevic case which failed to produce any evidence for his absurd claims.

Go away and stew at the incarceration of your muslim-murdering hero resistor. We have taken apart your lies about Špegelj and left you simpering before.

Scum.

I believe that this is a piture of Richard Seymour, so it is not as if he is a cream cake guzzling tub of lard.

http://direland.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/richard_seymour_1.jpg

That’s Father Dougall McGuire, isn’t it?

It is not.

Here’s yer man:

http://bp2.blogger.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/SI3UVZnKnVI/AAAAAAAABfs/NtGpmeGn0eU/s1600-h/homo-fest.jpg

the young fellow me lad more or less dead centre, taking his weekly tin whistle lessons from bishop Brennan.