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Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster |
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ESSAYS ON: BOOKS RELATED
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Essays on
NATO/Kosovo |
Kosovo and “the Jewish Question” Whether or not it is true, as Václav Havel famously claimed, that NATO's attack on Yugoslavia represents the first war to be waged "in the name of principles and values," the first "ethical war," it might well be the case that it is the first act of armed aggression against a sovereign state whose popular legitimation relied almost wholly upon an alleged historical analogy. NATO spokespersons and apologists could not allude often enough to the Second World War, Hitler, and the Nazi regime's persecution of the Jews. They did this in lieu of providing reasoned justification for NATO's action, perhaps because under existing international law there was surely no such justification to be found. The NATO attack had to be presented as morally urgent, since it was manifestly illegal. For this purpose, allusion to the "Holocaust" and, in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's words, the "absolute evil" of its perpetrators, was the most obvious and effective instrument.* February 2000 |
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REVIEW OF
THE MONTH Forget humanitarian motives. This is about U.S. global hegemony. And more immediately, it is about the role of NATO as the U.S. conduit to Europe, at a time when the European Union is developing as a major pole of global capitalism that the United States needs to control. No doubt, as many commentators have pointed out, it is also about Russia and the geopolitical containment of a country that still remains a big player, the one major power that sits athwart Europe and Asia. With these larger objectives in mind, it is probably unnecessary to invoke oil supplies and pipelines—which are regularly, and often correctly, cited to explain U.S. military adventures, including this last one. But even these large objectives have to be seen in the context of a still larger strategy, which I can sketch out only very briefly here. June 1999 |
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NATO’s Balkan Adventure NATO decided to celebrate its fiftieth birthday with a bang in keeping with the changing character of the "defensive alliance." It assumed that a short, sharp war in the Balkans would rapidly bring Milosevic to his knees, and Kosovo would become the second NATO protectorate in the region. As I write, this ugly war is over a month old. It is a war that has little, if anything, to do with the people of the old Yugoslavia. This has been a war for U.S. hegemony in Europe and the world, the act of a triumphant imperialism designed to rub the face of its old enemy in mud enriched with depleted uranium. June 1999 |
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All material © copyright 2000 by Monthly Review |
