Opinion
Eamonn McCann: War in Europe...here we go again
The baby boomers have become the baby bombers.
The governments most gung-ho for Nato's assault on Serbia are led by the
likes of Bill Clinton, who famously dodged the draft for Vietnam. Tony
Blair is a former member of CND. The Foreign Minister of Germany comes
from
the Green Party.
Their credentials as part of a generally progressive 60s generation have
played a big part in soothing the anxieties felt by many as Western war
planes systematically obliterate Serbia's power, transport and
communications systems, killing civilians in sizable numbers as they go.
These scenes aren't re-runs of horror movies from history, liberals and
even some who style themselves "socialist" repeatedly insist,
particularly
to themselves. Horrible as all war is, this time the West isn't out for
economic robbery, the conquest of territory, or to establish puppet
states
in the region.
The point and purpose of the exercise is to restore the rights of the
persecuted Kosovar people. This is a war for humanity, for civilised
values, starkly different in character from the brutal interventions of
imperialism in the past.
The Prime Minister conjured up for our contemplation pictures of the
refugees in biblical hordes fleeing the vast cruelty of their
oppressors.
Those close to him at the time say his voice trembled with emotion as he
spoke of "Scenes at which hell itself might blush."
He went on: "The only reparation we can make to the memory of those
heaps
of dead women and children (is to) clear out those responsible from the
province."
The Liberal William Gladstone, was referring, in 1876, to what became
known
as the "Bulgarian Atrocities", the massacre by Turkish forces of
thousands
of civilians in what is now Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria. His purpose
was
to mobilise public support for intervention.
The great powers did intervene, on various sides, and eventually, in
1878,
carved up the bleeding remains of the region between them, on terms
enshrined in the Treaty of Berlin.
Everywhere that great powers have used military might to impose their
will,
they have cited the suffering - almost invariably the genuine suffering
-
of particular peoples as their main motivation.
Writing at the outbreak of World War One, Lenin observed: "The
bourgeoisie
of each country asserts that it is out to defeat the enemy, not for
plunder
and the seizure of territory, but for the liberation of other peoples."
The Berlin settlement had helped provide the context for another round
of
rape and carnage. Russia went to war to save the Serbs from the Austrian
Empire. France joined in to free the people of Alsace Lorraine. Germany
cited Russian oppression of Poland. The British cause was the plight of
"poor little Belgium" - rendered in constitutional Irish nationalist
circles as "poor little Catholic Belgium."
Thousands of our own people were flung to eternity in the death-storm
which
followed - a slaughter still sentimentalised and even celebrated here on
an
annual basis.
What is the best outcome which might emerge from the Nato assault?
Perhaps
the refugees back home in a militarised protectorate in the south of
Kosovo, maybe all of Kosovo, facing a defeated, impoverished and bitter
Serbia through the barbed-wire border, still ruled by Milosevic, or by
someone even worse, while newly deepened grievances simmer on all sides,
and some made ready for the next round.
If British squaddies die in the enterprise, Blair will no doubt stand
erect
at the gravesides, one eye weeping, while the band plays the Last Post
and
Chorus, and then pipes the Flowers of the Forest.
It's not a new clean war the west is waging in the Balkans. It's nothing
but the same old story.