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Why
Kosovo? Michael Stenton There will be readers of this book who have long
assumed, as a matter of course, that sooner or later America would use force on
behalf of the Kosovo Albanians. Others will have been very puzzled as the
Kosovo story grew and grew in 1998. Some readers may regard NATO's attack on
Serbia as a moral necessity and others believe that the 'West' has gone mad and
become mortally dangerous to the rest of the world. These views are so
different that there is likely to be a parting of the ways, a great
moral-political separation. Perhaps the West and the Rest will simply not
converse for the next generation. If anyone is genuinely interested in
Kosovan autonomy – as something other than a prelude to Greater Albania - they
would need a post-Milosevic strategy. A UN protectorate is not a policy, it is
a legal wrapper. There cannot be autonomy unless it is negotiated, and the two
sides have been refusing to negotiate for a very long time. Hence there will be
no autonomy. There will be partition for Serbia or defeat for the KLA. Neither
invading Kosovo nor bombing Belgrade can ever make true negotiations - dead
since 1989 – finally happen. The bombing war cannot achieve the settlement that
did not happen at Rambouillet, and it cannot bring back opportunities which
were deliberately thrown away. The immediate reason for the NATO war
on Serbia is the US attempt to dictate a Kosovo settlement rather than
facilitate a negotiation. Washington has ignored the lesson of Dayton, where
international agreement about principles preceded a real negotiation about
details, or rather it substitutes the myth of Dayton - US bombs solved the
problem - for the truth. More broadly we can see an American wish to assert
political and military leadership for the sake of doing so. Yugoslavia - since
1991 - has provided the excuse for redefining NATO's 'out of area' mission. The
Americans have been making threats constantly since 1991. There may be - though
this is probably still in the balance - an even worse motive in some minds: to
push Russia back into a hostile posture and restart the arms race. The point about these explanations of
NATO action is that they are not 'causes' in competition with each other. They
constitute a continuum of ambition along which the daily intentions of powerful
people can advance and recede. The foreign policy community in Washington has
been anti-Serb for some time, that is, they have chosen to live a mental world
where the briefing and historical understanding of Balkan events comes
ultimately from Bosnian Muslim and Albanian sources. The perspective is not, of
course, Islamic, but it is built upon a secularized Muslim view of the Serbian
problem. In 1994 this writer was told, by an official inside the State
Department, that 'there are two sorts of people in this building: anti-Serbs
and violent anti-Serbs'. This animus and this understanding would have been of
limited consequence if the only issue was Serbia. But the Serbian question
moved onto the global stage as it became evident that anti-Serbian intervention
- the Janissary option - would make possible a dramatic shift in US policy on
NATO and NATO expansion which would otherwise have been very difficult. This is provides an answer to the
question 'Why Kosovo?' The USA has been threatening the Yugoslav Army since
1991, but the earlier threats were premature and US policy was uncertain. What
launched Washington ambition into higher orbit was the transformation of Bosnia
and Herzegovina - and the Republic of Srpska in particular - into a NATO
protectorate. This seemed to show that high-handedness in the name of political
virtue could be made to work. But in so
far as it did work – for instance by excluding Radovan Karadzic's party from
power – it was based on aspects of the fine print of Dayton which have been
pushed harder and further than anyone predicted in 1995. NATO and the High Representative have
claimed the authority to go anywhere, do anything, dismiss anyone from office,
close down any TV station and even censor school books. American negotiators
were carried away by their success in pushing the Bosnian Serbs from one
concession to another. The whole experience of occupying Bosnia provided a
template for the Kosovo intervention. Washington calculated that Milosevic had
no serious alternative but to sign the same sort of treaty, a treaty which
would give America - through various institutional interfaces - carte blanche
to govern Kosovo as though it were a colony. American strategy in the Republic of
Srpska was, of course, noticed in Belgrade. At Rambouillet the Serbs found that
their worst fears justified. Not only would real Yugoslav authority in Kosovo
vanish beyond recall but Yugoslavia itself would be subject to NATO's military
control. At very least this would completely erase any feeble consolation
Belgrade might derive from the interim acceptance that Kosovo remained - in
empty form - part of Yugoslavia. If the RS precedents held good, Serbia itself
would be occupied after a succession of little crises and legal maneuvers. Many
people believed before Rambouillet that Milosevic would, before or after a
little bombing, sign up for Kosovan autonomy, but few would have thought so
after reading the plan carefully and considering the amazing military protocol.
American strategy was always based on getting Milosevic's compliance, but by
1999 there was some determination that there would be bombing first and
compliance afterwards. Shortly before the Kosovo War started,
NATO expanded its membership to receive Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic,
and promises were made to the Baltic States.
Shortly afterwards encouragement was offered to Romania and Bulgaria and
the core military doctrine was changed at the Washington conference. We are
today confronted with a potent but frightening fait accompli: a redefined NATO
with a almost global remit to do humanitarian military interventions wherever
Washington pleases and a chorus of commentators crying 'Nato cannot afford to
lose'. Radical legal redefinitions are suddenly flashing up all over the
screen. The left-liberal governments of Germany, Britain and France have
allowed a sort of American coup d'etat against the NATO charter and the UN
charter. And everyone saw this one coming a mile off. The immediate, almost petty objection
to NATO asserting a humanitarian mission in Kosovo is that America is the
patron of the KLA. The Serbs are quite right about this. HMG knows it, the
French and Italians know it and so do the Russians; though NATO had to pretend,
at first, not to know. The French and Italian governments dare not complain,
just as the French and British dared not complain during the UNPROFOR period in
Bosnia when the Americans broke UN sanctions by delivering arms while
pretending to be about to do so. Newspapers
and TV companies, without a political signal, did not make the large
investigative investment necessary to check out the KLA story and follow the
heroin trail. Another, more difficult matter, is the
ideological pretext for intervention. During the Bosnian war and now again in
Kosovo we are told, or more exactly we are made to feel we are being told, that
a genocide was taking place; and we were told a little more plainly that ethnic
cleansing was a sort of racial persecution and the idea 'Nazi' was invoked
through the much repeated reference to horrors worse than anything seen since
the second world war. The prevention of
genocide must be an extremely powerful justification for armed action. But it is worth mentioning the record. The
USA was consumed with indignation when the Indian Army stopped genocide in
Bangladesh and when the Vietnamese Army topple Pol Pot. There were only threats of sanctions. What is happening in Kosovo remains to
be established; but for Bosnia it is simply not apparent that a genocide did
take place. The casulaties were, at every stage, much exaggerated. Politicians
still repeat the old Muslim claim that 250,000 people were killed in
Bosnia. But there is simply no evidence
for this figure. I believe the true figure is almost certain to be lower than
100,000 and could be as low as 50,000; it is probable that most died in battle
and quite clear that the casualties were not at all overwhelmingly Muslim. There was murder in Bosnia, sometimes
mass murder, but there is no evidence of genocide in the normal meaning of that
word. (The extensive definitions included in the Convention on Genocide, may
mean that anyone knocking down mosques is guilty of genocide; there are
certainly guilty Serbs on this count.) Ethnic cleansing is a charge that cannot
be contested. But taking Bosnia and
Croatia together, the Serbs ended up as much sinned against as sinning. Popular initiative and sinister instructions
from Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb have yet to be disentangled. The Serbs claim
that they did not start it, but in 1991-92 Belgrade had most of the advantages
and presumably carry the largest burden of responsibility. But the motive was not racial, as
Westerners assume all too easily. (If West Indians or Arabs were pushed out of
London or Paris the motives would assuredly be racial.) But among Serbs, Croats
and Muslims communal malice is not really racial - even less so than, say, in
Northern Ireland where at least the ghost of a
Celt/Saxon distinction lingers. Where ethnic cleansing was local it was
an act of bitterness and revenge. 'We do not want to live with them!' was
an accusation of treachery made by Serbs against those who had betrayed
Yugoslavia out of nationalist malice.
The punishment was to be sent to live in another part of the same small
country. ('If you can't stand Yugoslavia because of the Serbs; why should Serbs
take this Croatia or Bosnia of yours.')
The Serbs were also aware that the Croats and Muslims were quietly
confident that independence for their countries would accelerate a voluntary
emigration of Serbs. Even where ethnic cleansing was
controlled and strategic this idea of punishment or retaliation was still
effective. But there was also a sort
national deterrence theory on offer: if you do 'x' we will punish your people
'y'. It had nothing much to do with the racial dreams and demons which drove
the fascists of the forties. What the Serbs did in Croatia in 1991 and in
Bosnia in 1992 was a brutal retort to the declarations of independence. But it was also a less bloody alternative to
fighting a winner-takes-all war on indisputably Croat or Muslim territory. It was the improvisation of a crazed
Yugoslav who could only retain power by plugging into Serbian nationalism but
who never stopped believing that his opponents were Yugoslavs who would somehow
wish to settle pragmatically. If the Serbs had levelled Zagreb to the
ground 'to save Yugoslavia' the West might have understood, but the milder
policy of ethnic cleansing was extremely visual, it seemed exceptionally cruel
and neo-nazi although it was far from being the most violent option. True, some atrocities were committed by
Serbian fascists; but they did not control state policy or define Serbian
hopes, and their Croat and Muslims cousins behaved just as badly. Once the neo-Nazi hypothesis was launched, everything
that happened was additional evidence. Hence, the bombardment of Sarajevo
(1992) was an outrage, but the bombardment of Belgrade (1999) can become a duty
that strains few consciences. Since it is the perceived ideological
context for human suffering that arouses the strongest feeling, it is worth
saying that Milosevic is no more a racist than was Stalin or Suleiman the
Magnificent. His ethno-terrorism has
not received convincing interpretation.
It is not compulsive but yet it seems to fascinate him. It obtains a
short-term kick of gutter nationalist enthusiasm, it covers Serbian patriotism
with shame but it is above all a signal to the powerful that it is time to make
crude bargains with 'the Man' in Belgrade. All these three qualities appeal to him.
Ethnic cleansing is not Milosevic's redneck solution to the Kosovo problem – he
knows that the Albanian civilians will probably go home in the end - it is the
tool of a clever, cruel but often foolish man with a perverse understanding of
political reality. It is intimidation plus a declaration of power and
authority: Ottoman and Bolshevik in the worse sense of those words. His
foolishness, and parochialism, has lain in demanding to be understood as the
Yugoslav that he is; his perversity is his reasoned but wrong estimate that
being cruel to civilians can force his opponents and enemies to act
responsibly. * * * * Milosevic is often described as a man
who does tactics not strategy. The judgment assumes, unreliably, that his goals
would be nationalist if he were strategic about them. But he did, it seems,
make a huge strategic choice. He decided to accept what he once worked so hard
to avoid - war in Serbia. This decision was, it now seems clear, already made
when he dismissed Jovica Stanisic, his security chief, immediately after the
Holbrooke agreement in October 1998. Kosovo was slowly pushed into disaster
when America started pawing at it. Military intervention in Kosovo was not
remotely a regional requirement before 1998. Unfortunately, European governments
reacted to American pressure in a direct, separate and not a collective way.
Europe was curiously passive judged against the previous diplomatic inclination
to leave the Balkans to settle down.
But the European public is not really very different; educated Europeans
and educated Americans seem to have an identical impatience with Balkan
quarrels and a identical willingness to drop bombs on problems. Clinton is not a bomber because he is
gazing at opinion polls. He is a bomber because bombing is what America does
best. American bombing must be made to work - somewhere, someday - if CNN-led
military utopianism is to be globally intimidating. The future will have
arrived only when America is truly equipped to win a war by remote-control. The military experiment which beckons to his
advisers more than the predicament of civilians whose position it has made at
least an order of magnitude worse than before. If air power fails yet again
they are more likely to demand escalation than to settle. Senator McCain has
already thrust himself to the forefront of Republican contenders for the
presidency by demanding a 'real' war, a new American doctrine ('rogue state
rollback') and a warning that the EU cannot have a 'defense identity' other
than NATO. If NATO were going to attempt to make a
civilized demonstration of force, there would have been a build-up of NATO
divisions in Croatia and Hungary with the capture of Belgrade as the military
goal: there would have been a Free Serbia committee and a declaration in advance
to partition or, less plausibly, limited autonomy, and an initial demand or
resignation of the President and fresh elections. This would have been no less
illegal, but, after a promise to the UN of withdrawal in nine months, it might
have won grudging Russian tolerance. But the Class of '68 have decided on
high-tech massacre not a war with a useful outcome. The empty minds have grown
sinister. They know that in the long term, infantry is the Achilles heel of
NATO. Imperialist high-mindedness is back but
in a genuinely new form. Christian religion, national flags and national
rivalry will play little or no part. But the Western yearning for excitement
and importance which took the British to Peking, Kabul and Khartoum, the French
to Fashoda and Saigon and the Americans to Manila has now re-emerged not as the
search for colonies to 'exploit' but as the search for places where the moral
fiber and technical superiority of Western civilization can, once more, be
demonstrated by all means including violence. America will conduct this
process, sometimes for very specific strategic or economic reasons, but an
expanded First World is already collectively engaged in one way or another. The old imperialism flourished on the
back of the enormous technical and cultural superiority of Europe to the rest
of the world, and it shrank rapidly as the colonized world acquired European
skills, science and military expertise. But perhaps European imperialism
crumbled too quickly. Soviet and American hostility hastened its end. The
British in particular were curiously unresisting, though they seemed determined
to advertise their military skills in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya and Arabia. The
truth is that the end of imperialism was not what it seemed. It is possible that the natural decay of
colonial rule - as seen in India - was artificially accelerated elsewhere
leaving a sense in imperial heartlands that something wrong, unnecessary and
premature had happened even among imperial servants whose commitment to
self-government was perfectly genuine. During the Cold War there was an
absolute ideological requirement for 'the West' to abandon what remained of
empire, because the fire in the Chinese Revolution was anti-imperial. But there
was also a requirement for the use of post-imperial advantages. Iran, for
instance, is the enemy of America today because of the ruthless Anglo-American
pursuit of these advantages. But as the patriotism of the neo-imperial British
middle-class went off-shore - in exactly the financial sense of that word - the
second strongest economy in Europe went into a decline. The James Bond films
represented the fantasies of British post-imperial families hoping to do well
in an American world. Good old England was still a bit special, but one's hopes for the good life - fast,
cosmopolitian, sybaritic, sexual and violent - depended on plugging into the
larger host. European neo-imperialism in the Cold
War context was deflagged, stripped of symbolism, unified, globalized and made
US-friendly. (France was the
interesting, if hesitant exception.) But it was the passion that could not
speak its name until Cold War neo-imperialism could be reflagged as globalism.
This happened only at the very end of the century - between the Gulf War and
Kosovo War. Post-colonial governments had been much less competent and far more
grandiose than they should have been; then they became venal and often
contemptible. Anti-colonialism lost its
intellectual power well before it was pushed away as irrelevant. It had no explanation of post-colonial
bungling except that the legacy of imperialism was still poisoning the former
colonies. By the eighties it was an
open secret in the European heartlands that decolonization had failed. The
colonies needed strong patronage again, but the patrons had found a way of
collecting such advantages as were worth having without the expense and
military exposure of formal empire. In 1968 it had seemed that the swelling
anti-imperial chorus in the General Assembly of the United Nations would stamp
out neo-colonial bad practice, but the tide seemed to turn against the third
world after 1973. In the 1980s the British lived in
reduced circumstances. They did not
make their machine-tools any more but they did have GCHQ at Cheltenham and sold
Harrier jump jets and fancy avionics, and could get Sidewinder missiles on a
priority basis. During the Falkland war, some Germans grumbled enviously that
they were not allowed do to that sort of thing any more, and the French elite
were very sour and expressed considerable distaste for British jingoism. Now
that is all behind us. The French have almost stopped (in public) sulking about
American leadership, the Germans have been greeted as America's chief partner
in Eastern Europe, and the British have no wish to fight solo ever again. We
can all go to war together, when we feel good about it, and be equally engaged
in the collective assertion of 'Western values'. We can even bomb TV stations
in their name. The fall of the Berlin wall was always
likely sooner or later. What was less obvious, until 'Desert Storm' in Iraq,
was how this would reinvigorate something to be called 'the West'. But not
until the siege of Sarajevo was it clear just how strong the current would
become. After 1989 everyone was invited
to bid for a special relationship with the USA, and everyone wanted to bid. For
the first time ever, the imperial terrain at America's feet matched and
exceeded Britain's imperial sway a hundred years before. America's imperial potential was not
lessened by the collapse of communism, it was enhanced. America had also changed since the
Vietnam era. Until the 1970s Washington seemed short of overseas expertise to a
degree Europeans found exasperating. The Europeans still had the old men who
knew best and they still had the right contacts. But by the 1990s, American universities were out-performing
Europe in the production of second and third world specialists. Even more
striking, the younger generation of aspirant politicians and bankers in the
third world were likely to have been educated in those same American
universities. American immigration policy turned out to have had - deliberately
or not - a truly imperial value. Modern America does not have the
unchallenged economic hegemony of the Eisenhower years, but in 1998/99 it did
not need European assistance to act or understand or to make policy. Indeed,
America could project its understanding and policies onto Europe as the media
market became more global. This, conversely, was more necessary than ever. The Europeans had to be persuaded not to use
their real economic muscle to set up in opposition to America in places like
the Balkans. Most Americans might still have little interest in distant parts,
but the same had been true of most Englishman in 1900. The US foreign policy
establishment has to work out just how far that matters and how much it does
not. But they usually get their way. Imperialism, as Kipling knew and as
Victor Kiernan repeated and as Edward Said reminds us, is a cultural force.
Said’s leftism, his invocations of ‘secular humanism’ and his anxiety to make
reading literature a contribution to universal liberation may seem tedious to
the unsympathetic, but he is right to notice that the assumptions of
imperialism did not disappear simply because racism went out of fashion and the
colonies became independent. Culture continued to carry the existential marks
of the imperial condition and opportunity can reignite imperial functionality
however apparently buried and dormant. The pride of the English in their law,
of the French in their lawyers and of the Germans in their Ordnung is very old - much older than that brief moment of hubris
called 'scientific racism' - and America has inherited all three. America's own
contribution has been to perfect the repudiation of racism and sexism and make
it the centerpiece of the Euro-American message. CNN provides the most
intensely ideological images since the Nazi newsreels. The benign ethos of
globalism is endlessly displayed as multi-racial kitsch. The skepticism of the
anti-racialists of yesteryear is neutralised by the utopian selflessness of
modern marketing. Cultural imperialism was seductive,
compelling for its host and culturally intimidating. Victims and opponents were
invited to contemplate the strength of a dominant culture and despair. What has
changed is that we call it 'global'. The experience in the Balkans today is of
resourcelessness. One must plug into the West - its power centers and its
culture - and pray for favor and try to be noticed in the right way. Hence the
readiness of Balkan countries to damage themselves to help America damage
Serbia. Looking for favor is the only game in town. If only it were just the
money! Imperial culture - today one says global culture - confiscates respect
for what is local and native and replaces it with something universal however
bad. Africa yesterday, the Balkans today. A Macedonian Albanian announces that
he prefers Coca-Cola to Cyrillic. It is at exactly this point that imperialism
is recognizable as an appropriate name for what is on offer. The intermittent moral absolutism of
the West cannot be opposed by mere condemnation. Its one potent question - are
we prepared to watch them die or starve or wallow in ignorance or criminality?
- will not go away even if we know that feeding them or stopping their wars
will rarely have the exact effect we would wish. Genuine dilemmas about our
human responsibility for one another are there to reactivate the viral
imperialism of the re-extended West. And every argument against imperial mission-creep
is the siren song of the Devil. Arguments from complexity are not so much
judged as felt theologically. If the war against the past is a just war, its
justice is meant to be revealed in its pragmatic simplicity. But it is a war
that will need lots of lies. In any
case, the more arrogant the new doctrine, the greater the willingness to lie
for the truth. The spiritual niches in which
communities once sheltered from mainstream influences are blown away as
remorselessly as the rainforest is cut down. Whether we like it or not - a
phrase most editorialists manage to employ in every pronouncement they make
about the Kosovo war - everyone looks likely to end up inside a belief system
defined by some sort of globally-viable ideology. The process is long past half-way. And what is viable is partly
intellectual and partly power politics. The power to authorize new lies is what
the Orthodox always feared in Rome; the power to authorize new lies about law,
and defend them with a censorship of fact, is what half the world fears about
the West today. We can all chose some
modern half-truth that serves the West against the Rest in the way the filioque served those aggressive Latins
who pushed the Roman curia into a contest with the Greeks. Can there be anti-imperial critical
thought that is not a rehash of Marxism?
The debate about liberation theology suggests this question has engaged
Roman Catholic attention for some time, and it is quite possible that in the
Orthodox world, as well as in Latin America, an expiring Marxism has donated
something to Christian democratic politics.
Mexico, South Africa, Iran and Israel all have serious reservations
about the Kosovo aggression. These are
special countries - theologically aware - which simply cannot be uncritical about
the West. In Western Europe the
greatest doubts are in Italy and Ireland. The Frankfurter
Allgemeine is very cross that the Pope disapproves of the Kosovo War. Why,
the paper thundered, should we have studied carefully Catholic just war
doctrine if it all goes out of the window the moment the old man gets cold
feet? But why did the old man get cold
feet? The Pope had no difficulty about being a militant friend of Croatia and
Bosnia. However, he has now seen something he does not like, which others saw
earlier. He has seen war for war's sake, war as the political demonstration of
a vast ambition, war as the moral toy of the immensely rich who will refuse to
pay for, or even think about, the damage they will do. The war in Iraq has
taken place, is still taking place. The Pope disliked that too. Unless there is an understanding of war
so universal that it can act as a check on the powerful, we will not escape the
universal death that we learnt to fear a generation ago. Clinton and Blair may
imply that they will solve this problem by making a universal empire to abolish
war. But they cannot deliver. The
pretence is so empty and unreal that the idea has to be left work for itself to
create a feeling that in a shrinking world, and with a lot of US
R&D... The truth is, surely, that
the children of the fifties and sixties did not live in fear; they were far too
complacent, but they were saved by extremely serious minorities - both in power
and opposition - who did their worrying for them. This old guard has now
departed. The new generation of Western
leaders feel the Bomb has gone away. They have dropped the showy moralism of
their youth: it lost them votes and the electors seemed not to want to know. In
any case, it is evident that the middle ground now wants them to be resolute. Much of the lazy support for nuclear
disarmament was linked to the pain and distress caused by having to think about
nuclear weapons and nuclear theories. The present thought-pattern is perhaps as
follows: nuclear deterrence was obscene and we wanted it to go away; but people
did not want a purely moral position so we agreed to ignore the question
completely. It has now gone away, as we always wanted, and we are not going to
bring it back by taking deterrence seriously again. The feeling of the times is
that since the USSR has gone, no one will play brinkmanship with NATO. But one
regiment of the old guard that kept us safe was a part of the USSR. It may no longer be there, yet the bombs
remain. Did not we, in our days of
perceived conventional weakness, refuse to rule out first use of nuclear
weapons? The strategic risks of the war against
Yugoslavia may be as small as NATO would like to believe. But the strategic
question in Moscow has been transformed. It has become terribly simple - 'If
not now, when?' Let us hope that the answer is 'later' and that the emphasis is
still on conventional weapons. Eventually we may be told that the Kosovo war
started because excited politicians overruled the planners and professionals. The planning took place during Clinton's
impeachment, but the President could not have cancelled if he had wished. The
decision to bomb Belgrade without a complete war plan suggests considerable
confidence even if we judge it as incompetence. This confidence may, of course,
have a pragmatic basis called 'Milosevic', but the confident rhetoric of the
war seems to express a broader confidence that preceded it. After all,
confidence in getting Euro-American public support has been, it seems, entirely
justified. But the confidence that Russia cannot react does not come from the
politicians. The moral ballast provided by the
Second World War generation is now too small to help. There is a large public -
larger in Europe than America - sufficiently unfamiliar with war to be tempted
by violent utopianism and insufficiently inquisitive to ask whether there is
anything more to Kosovo than the propaganda barrage about atrocity. As in
Bosnia, atrocity becomes the whole story. If we are not Christian we are still
post-Christian and this means that we still can yearn for utopia where heaven
stood, for a potent value where there was faith and transcendence. Society must
in some way refer to a utopian goal, and so must leadership. A world justified
without any utopian elements would be deeply uncomfortable. But there is a
problem. Some forms of utopianism have been dumped: above all social equality.
What is left is the pursuit of ever-widening self-realization, which is
arguably utopian. But something more generous is required. As we withdraw from
constructed utopianism we seem to find more causes which require strategies of
rescue, of utopian intervention. The idea that we want war because we
want someone to take the pictures of suffering off the TV screen is too simple.
We may guess that someone will take the pictures off, we may know that similar
events often take place without pictures even being shot, but this does not
matter. The world is big and wicked, but when we are invited to say thumbs down
to bad people we do so because life and TV must include some moral
dimension. Turning thumbs down is what
we have time for, it is how we can do something. Everyone must have rights
which indicate the way out of their suffering, including animals, and we can
intervene to enforce those rights. A post '68 generation whose idealism
was always unstructured and was progressively compacted by the shrinking of
Left convictions wants to rescue the suffering. The objection that intervention
is a set-up, that there are better causes, that the facts do not fit the
crusade, misses obvious points known to all viewers. TV is always selective,
and not everyone (or every animal) can be helped; and it feels right to apply
the Good Samaritan principle even if the TV selects which roads we tread.
Manipulation does not matter if we are fundamentally confident that globalism
is liberating and progressive. To be capable of 'doing something'
sustains moral self-respect, if we can suppress the thought that we are not so
much moral actors as consumers of predigested choices. Intervention in foreign
parts was, in the days of old empire, often imposed on reluctant politicians by
newspaper campaigns against 'barbarism' inspired by a few militants. Not much
has changed. Good, old-fashioned imperial hysterics have revived in the CNN
era. America is now Everyman. Once there was a president who declared himself
ein Berliner but said it in such wonderfully bad German that he clearly did not
believe it. Today another president imaginatively supposes all suffering souls
to be virtual Americans. This is an imperialist kitsch - 'the last, best hope
of mankind' - to which, unfortunately, most educated Americans can
respond. It is an imperial delusion. A consent to war rooted in
parliamentary debate would enable Europe to inform Washington that there is no
room for Turkey in NATO while Turkish Kurdistan lacks the security and freedoms
we hope to bestow on Albanians. But if
consent is a demotic reaction to pictures the political contract can be extremely
narrow. An impulse purchase is made and repeated until there is a pattern.
There is almost no moral exertion in today's assent to NATO violence. The bangs
and flashes of NATO bombs incinerating chemical plants, TV studios and power
stations will, if sustained long enough, even more terrible for civilians than
fifteen minutes to pack and a trek to the Albanian border. But the citizen-viewer wants to make a
shopper's quick decision and is fed up of hearing excuses. There may be worse
to come. It would be foolish to doubt that one element in the approval ratings
of the war is the sheer pleasure of getting to see those wonderful glowing
explosions. We are living in a virtual Coliseum
where exotic and nasty trouble-makers can be killed not by lions but by the
magical machines of the Imperium. As the candidates for punishment - or
martyrdom - are pushed into the arena we react to the show as imperial
consumers not as citizens with a parliamentary right to stop it. In 1994 there were some negotiations in Bosnia
between a Muslim and a Serb about exchanging prisoners. The Muslim asked why
the Serbs love war so much. It was a friendly, even sentimental Yugoslav
question, and in asking it the Muslim could show how moderate he was by simply
forgetting the history of Islam. Angry and frightened people will soon be
asking the same question of the West, and they will not be ready to believe the
retort that we do not love war or that what we do today has no connection with
what we did when our imperialists first made the globe small and tried to make
it orderly.
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