#1.
FERMENT
Vol.IX,#12
May 6,1996
Roy Lisker
Ferment Ferment Press
Movement Against Discrimination by Education
Council of Autonomous Scholarly Support
Mathematics Consultant for the Arts
Current address : 141 Congdon Middletown CT 06457
Mailing address: PO Box 243 Middletown CT 06457
Tel: 1-860-346-6957
E-Mail: aberensh @lynx. neu.edu
Internet:http://rendezvous.com/ferment
Vital Statistics, (Approximate)
Age: 18.0001440 x107 secs. Date of Birth: 6.12204x 109 secs A.C.E.
Weight: 29,483.48 gms Height: 181.61 cms.
This is the last issue of Ferment Vol IX. I can assure subscribers that volume X will contain a full range of at least 12 issues. I don't see how it can continue beyond that. Ferment for me has been unique as an effective vehicle for growth in writing and thought - which is why I don't want to stop producing it . But the numerous experiments I've tried seem to show that its' boundary conditions prevent it from reaching any public beyond its small, and prized, subscription list; writing for whom has given me all the satisfaction others receive from publishing in the media of embalmed reaction. Please renew your subscription if you wish to receive Ferment for the coming year. Thank you, R. L.
Western Civilization
,or:
Does a Bear Shit in the Woods?
,or:
What's Up, Holocaust?
,or:
Banquo's Ghost , or:
The Disorder at the New World Order versus
The Order in the Old World Disorder
,but not :
For all x, all y, x and y are men implies x=y YUGOSLAVIA!!!!!
(subtitled)
"Confused in all our Abdications"
-Roy Gutman, "Witness to Genocide"
Savage be the Balkans! 48 nationalities living together in Sarajevo , some for half a millenium .[1] If ethnic cleansing is an indigenous virus, it has taken a very long time to emerge from its basement: like legionnaire's disease , unwarning us, full blossomed.
A region of an indestructible resilience, of anomalous worldlines and manifest destinies, bewildering in its cultural wealth [2] ; of pathogenic peninsularity and oceanic hatreds; cave for minds as narrow as molecules, or souls boundless as mountains. Is this why it has always been the nettle of vexations to all architects of New World Orders? Tinder, or spark, or catalyst to discord, anarchy, chaos or global conflagration? Resistant to all despots since the turn of the century, stubber of goose-steps, jackboot slasher, victor,(at hideous cost), against the Sublime Porte, Franz Joseph, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Churchill , Stalin, until, having freed itself from all the arthritic ideologies of the 20th century, it intoxicates itself with home-brewed fascist rotgut, no less horrible than those which were sweated out.
Although the large-scale stability of Europe has not been on the agenda since the late 40’s, it has been the mother of all of the world wars since 1618 [3], and should not be taken lightly .[4] The spiritual ordeal of Yugoslavia is the docket of the 20th century : its phenomenology can stand representative for the undissipating birth torments of the entire planet. Briefly, the policies, character, strategic location and even the simple existence , of the republics and peoples of the Yugoslav federation have, in this century, (i) capitulated the Old New World Order of Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Romanovs; (ii) undermined the Anglo-American-Soviet dispensation fabricated at Teheran, Quebec, Moscow, Yalta , Potsdam; (iii) repelled the Germans , following a hideous orgy of self-destruction, with no more than nominal assistance from any great power, making them unique in Europe; (iv) destabilized the ‘fraternal', that is to say 'Stalinist' order of communist Eastern Europe .
In resume :
(i) Though I consider myself under an obligation never to believe that any war is ever inevitable, given the immoral fiber of the imperial ruling class of the age, World War I, probably was. [5] The sticking point of that war was Austro-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia in 1908. This violation to the doctrine of the Balance of Powers as defined by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, [6] was tolerated because the European co-signers wanted to keep the Turks - and other swarthy Orientals who were so unwestern-civilized that they couldn't even appreciate Mozart's Turkish Rondo - from reimposing their musky aromas. Europe and America even then awaited the wreck of the Ottoman Empire with livid impatience; not realizing then, as they do not realize now, that there are lots of innocent people living in that part of the world who might get hurt. The antiquated theory of the Balance of Powers, ( one might call it the converse of the Domino Effect ) , should not be denigrated: Tito used it to keep peace in Yugoslavia for 45 years.
(ii) Much of the violence between the Croatian ustashe and the Serbian chetniks in World War II revolved around control of Bosnia-Hercegovina [7]. The Muslims were always the victims; they seem to have been destined for this role even before the Turks came to occupy the Balkans in the 14th century. (Not being Turks themselves: they are descended from the Bogomil Christian-Zoroastrians who converted to Islam to escape relentless persecution from both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Bogomils, like Cathars and Albigensians, were guilty of the ideological crime of maintaining that evil really exists in our world. )
(iii) Anglo-American hegemony, of very recent origins in world history , is what people really mean whenever the solecism [8] of ‘Western Civilization’ is used to confuse the issues. The widest cracks in this hegemony during the Second World War were opened by the divergence of imperial objectives in the Adriatic and the Balkans .[9]
Monarchy has always been the British default mode. Churchill got Roosevelt’s hackles up by his efforts to place or replace discredited or defenestrated kings back on the thrones of Yugoslavia, Greece, Rumania and even Italy.[10] Then, towards the end of 1944, England sent troops into Greece to displace the partisan groups that had done most of the fighting; some of them were communist , but that wasn’t the point, nor does it justify anything. Churchill’s proposal that another D-Day landing take place in Croatia, to sweep north to Vienna and meet the Red Army, was surprisingly encouraged by Stalin but strongly opposed by Roosevelt [11] ; echoing what appears to be an eternal axiom of our foreign policy, he would never agree to anything that committed American troops to the Balkans. Finally the Trieste crisis, which almost led to the renewal of hostilities between England, the US, Yugoslavia and Russia. Who would have been fighting with whom, or for what, is no doubt unknowable - ( in the sense of Quantum Theory: the attempt to understand can only produce more confusion .)
(iv) After breaking with Stalin in 1948, Tito shook up Cominform conformity all through the Cold War. The mental incarceration imposed by a harsh, bungling but unshakeable Russian despotism [12] , was constantly being lock- picked by the more innovative experiments of Yugoslavian communism. Admiration for the Yugoslavian model motivated the Poznan revolt in Poland in June of 1955 ; the Hungarian revolution of 1956, ( to which Tito’s response was ambivalent and confused ; apparently he drew the line at multiparty democracy ); and the Prague summer of 1968. [13]
Now, as of this writing, the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation has all but demolished the Utopian New World Order (some argue that it's completed the job ) , loosed upon the world by George Bush on August 30, 1991 [14] , who somehow imagined that ,consecrated on the blood-drenched sands of Iraq, he could, much in the manner of Bismarck's alchemic marriage of the Germanies in 1879 on the ravaged soils of France, unify the world .
I have discovered , at every turn, far more questions than there are answers:
(1) Why did the 6 republics and 2 provinces, 5 nations , 25 nationalities, ethnic groups and minorities of the Yugoslav federation , having managed to hold together through 35 years of Tito's rule and 4 constitutions, even maintaining an ( increasingly nominal ) cohesion for 11 years after his death, suddenly implode into conflagration within months of the Cold War's melting ?
(2) Why have all the great powers and organizational
structures of Bush's New World Order[15] , while contradicting each other at every level and in every crisis , yet pursued consistentl long-term policies which passively condone, or directly/ indirectly encourage, or even render overt assistance to Serbia's systematic genocide against the Bosnian Muslims?
It was these two overlooked or ignored open questions , (or merely beyond the reference frames of the press ) , that initially attracted my interest. Although I still don't have good answers for them , it seemed to me that they were related. Each of them is polyhedral, with many facets that reveal themselves depending on how they are turned in the dim illumination, and although both have been thoroughly and competently documented , no deeply inquiring eye has yet been directed to them.
Let me give a few examples. With regard to the first question there was this kind of consideration, which I would have thought was fairly obvious:
The remittances sent home by the Yugoslavian guest worker, that redoubtable semi-skilled European Chicano, were critical to the economic survival of Tito's 'self-managed socialism' [16] . The termination of the Cold War did away with over 4 decades of restrictions on the free movement of populations between Eastern and Western Europe. The flood of this competing , desperate labor force, willing to work for any wage under any conditions, made the Yugoslav guestworker redundant. These new demographics must have been a major factor when Yugoslavia's economy plummeted in 1990. [17]
Turning now to the second question: one knows that in Tito's Yugoslavia, ethnic nationalism in any form was equated with anti-communism. [18] It followed that the reverse was also true, that extreme anti-communists would readily make common cause with extreme nationalists. Exile groups of Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and others living in the West must have ingratiated themselves to the utmost with our powerful anti-communist organizations, whose enormous wealth has been instrumental in shaping American foreign policy for the last 50 years. This is certainly a factor to consider when seeking an explanation for the puzzling paralysis of Congress and the President since June 24,1991, when war first broke out in Slovenia and Croatia.
In very general terms: the brilliant internal balancing acts of Tito, Djilas, Rankovich and Kardelj, while preserving the artificial orders of applied pilasters of the Yugoslavian cathedral, had also depended on an equally ingenious system of external flying buttresses pitting capitalists against communists. As a liaison state for purposes of trade, negotiation, and espionage, Yugoslavia was able to render valuable services to both sides. “[Yugoslavia] became an anomaly within a world system that, in principle if not in fact, refused to recognize anomalies.... " (Thompson, op, cit, pg. 3) [19]
While following up on these issues , I was developing a long list of other questions, all basic , which I felt needed to be answers, ( from those people who claim to be able to answer them), and for which I could find none. The conclusion that a great deal of the truth is being hidden from us is foregone , not that I would want to believe otherwise : were the truth as silly as what we are supposed to believe, the world would be reduced to a conundrum of madmen and simpletons. Investing a great deal of effort over an adequate period of time would clarify many of these questions, though perhaps not the important ones. The genre that has been developed with Ferment through 15 years does not readily accommodate itself to articles of 200 pages or more in length. And so, I feel somewhat disappointed, in as much as I fancy myself , not as a question-monger, but as a bearer of revelations. The articles dealing with this subject , all too few, that will appear in Ferment Volume IX and Volume X , will therefore be filled with lots of questions, a smaller number of speculations and hypotheses, and as many dislodged facts and as I can bring to their defence. By doing so I am probably doing a disservice to my scientific education: scientists like their communications to be filled with facts , experiments, facts about their experiments, and more facts; and then, possibly, only a small number of questions. Persons like myself, who invert these priorities, are derisively cited as philosophers.
fffffffffffffffff
?
This checklist of questions will be followed by my attempts to deal with them, even if no answer is forthcoming:
[1] What are the immediate causes of the wars that have been raging on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since June 24,1995?
[2] What are the broader causes?
[[3] Why did the federation endure at all, even under Tito?
[4 ] Why did it last a full decade after his death?
[5] Why, although Gorbachev's perestroika brought no immediate restructuring of the government of Yugoslavia, as it did for Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself, its effects have been more devastating there than anywhere else?
[6] Why have the most powerful governments and organizations in the modern world left Bosnia to its fate? [20] , to a genocide so blatant that it can scarcely be characterized as "war? " [21]