War Machine VIII- Tito, Ethnic Violence in Yugoslavia, and Socialist Leaders
The more I read about Tito, Josip Broaz, the more I come to realize just how big a deal this guy was for socialist movements in the fifties and sixties. The western media wanted to conflate all leftist ideology with Soviet communism, but in reality, many of the successful socialist states that were not simply unstable governments in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that had been conquered by the Red Army after World War Two owe much of their success to Tito in Yugoslavia. What really boggles my mind is that I had never even HEARD OF this guy until a little while ago when I saw his name mentioned in connection with Nasser and the Non-Aligned movement of states. My history books are conspicuously silent on the Yugoslavian role in world-wide socialism, except to declare it a Soviet puppet. This story does not stand up to close examination. This is not an in depth post. I will, however, attempt to connect events in Yugoslavia to the other leaders and countries which have been the subject of previous posts on this thread.
Leftist governments in Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, India, Egypt, China, Indonesia, Ghana, and many other states were all used as scarecrows by the western media. They were “evidence” of a global communist conspiracy lead by Russia. Even Palestinian nationalism, which is possibly the most obvious and easy to grasp of leftist causes, was conflated with the goals of the Soviet Union. The reality of the matter is that many of these states received financial, military and/or political support from Tito’s Yugoslavia. Castro may have made deals with the Soviets, particularly through occupied Czechoslovakia, but Cuba was never the Russian satellite that the American hawks wished it would become.
I think its blatantly obvious, but for the sake of the wags let me state for the record that I am not a socialist. I believe that political justice is a conditional affair. Socialism is appropriate for certain states, particularly states which have been sold off piece by piece to foreign investors, and robbed of their natural resources by western imperialism. Without a period of socialism, these states will never regain their de facto independence in the fullest (read: economic) sense. This is not done because of the will of “the people,” of course, this is done because of leaders. When the goal to achieve national liberation includes a mass movement, these leaders must become powerful magicians. What I mean by this is that they are MAKERS OF IMAGES that facilitate emotional identification, between people, through symbols, to weave the identity of the masses together. The masses react according to uncritical emotional responses, so if you can see to it that the people are all more or less on the same page in terms of emotional responses to symbols and images, you can gather their emotional energy into a single force. People who are able to do this are worth paying attention to.
These people rarely raise out of impoverished or disadvantaged conditions. Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevera were both part of the aristocratic or privileged class of their countries. In India, Nehru was a member of the Saraswat Brahmin caste. Other socialist leaders show signs of early achievement as well. Castro and Nasser were from middle-class families, and both considered to be excellent and gifted students. They were all people who recognize that the enervation of foreign imperialism was turning their countries into subordinate colonies, and that the only way to fight against a superior military power which kept wealth in the hands of the few was to stir up the people and use the power of numbers to assert authority. This decision, under the conditions indicated, is thoroughly just and correct.
Tito was different. Before he went to fight the Russians and ended up being sent to prison (to be later liberated by the Red Army after the Russian revolution) he was a machinist who had failed second grade and dropped out of school. Working class, poorly educated, and incredibly handsome, (wait.... what’s that last one doing there?) he doesn’t seem to fit the mould of the leader. One can only imagine that it was being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army that changed him. He didn’t seem to take to it.
In 1912 Tito was arrested for antiwar propaganda, and as a result, in 1915 he was sent to fight the Russians, wounded, captured, and brought into the fold of Communism when the camp at which he was held was liberated by revolting workers in 1917. During those two years, however, it is clear that he began to assert himself as an authority figure. Tito was elected camp leader by the other inmates. This is the first instance that I have been able to find, with my admittedly limited resources, of Tito occupying a leadership position. I need to get my mitts on a biography of this guy.
Tito’s brand of Communism, labelled “Titoism” by Stalin, (he rejected the term, as Nasser rejected “Nasserite”) is possibly the most truly significant threat to western hegemony. In a nutshell, Tito believed that socialism could not be universalized. That Marxist principles were the guiding influence, but that the particular conditions of each state to which they were being applied had to be taken into consideration in order for the government to function effectively. The inability to do this on the part of Soviet Russia was what lead to horrific atrocities in Turkmenistan, Czechoslovakia, Chechnya, and elsewhere. The same lesson can be applied to democracy, as we see in America’s ridiculous attempts to install a western-style democratic process in Iraq and Afghanistan. Political justice, just to repeat myself, is conditional. Any attempt to apply a political system to a state without taking the particular conditions of that state into consideration is bound to result in chaos and bloodshed.
In Tito’s case, ethnoreligious tension was a significant obstacle to national unity. He overcame this obstacle, but once he was dead, the Clinton administration was able to exploit these tensions and tear the country of Yugoslavia apart. What had required a Fascist state to hold together before the revolution, and required an iron-fisted secret police to maintain afterward, broke down because of Clinton’s “Humanitarian” intervention. Don’t get me wrong, Ronald Reagan’s affectionately named “shock therapy” approach to force Yugoslavia to accept Neoliberal reforms (Tito died in 1980, by the way) set the stage for Clinton’s coup de grace. Both parties can share the blame, but Clinton definitely delivered the final blow with the NATO bombings.
On March 13 2006, Democracy Now did a broadcast about Milosevic’s death. I think that it is important to quote this at some length. It is not directly about Tito, but throughout the War Machine and The Abyss is in the Pyramid threads, we have examined the consequences for countries that had bold and rebellious leaders that stood up to American power. The events in Yugoslavia in the 90’s are consistent with that paradigm. Tito was largely responsible for uniting the Yugoslavian people into a real, independent, socialist nation. After his death, the west used its influence to exasturbate ethnic tensions. Both of the individuals being interviewed below (Chris Hedges of NYT and the Nation, and Jeremy Scahill who writes for antiwar.com) inform us that ethnic violence INCREASED after NATO began bombing. This would be the obvious result from any rational consideration of the effect of a foreign power attacking a country in a chaotic ethnic dispute, and yet ethnic violence was supposedly the rationalization for the attack itself. We see this as the same rationalization for the escalation of the American war in Iraq, for the occupation of Afghanistan, for the partition of India and Pakistan (which also caused more ethnic violence than it ever could have prevented) and many other international disputes.
“AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we want to got to a clip now from Richard Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the NATO bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia. This was his reaction to Milosevic's death.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I was kind of astonished. This is somebody I knew very well, but I think that justice was served. He spent the last five years of his life in jail. I never thought he would be a free man again. I didn't think he should be. He started four wars. He wrecked Southeastern Europe. Over 300,000 people died, over two and a half million homeless because of Milosevic, and he paid the price, and although he won't serve out many years in jail, he paid the price by ending his life in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the NATO bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Chris Hedges, your response.
CHRIS HEDGES: I just want to comment a little bit on what was said before. There certainly was mujahideen in Bosnia. I actually went into one of their camps and interviewed them. But I think they were a pretty minor force. I don't want to lose sight of the fact that 90-plus percent of the victims of the war, the people who were killed, were Bosnian Muslims. This does not in any way excuse the terrible suffering that many Serbs endured, including in Operation Storm. The most effective ethnic cleansing in the entire Balkan -- or the entire wars of former Yugoslavia was, indeed, carried out by Croatia, but the worst suffering was really meted out towards the Muslims.
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I think that the United States -- it is very true that the United States, especially when there was a rift between Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs, certainly empowered Milosevic and used him as a way to force the Bosnian Serbs to bend towards U.S. will, especially of course, at Dayton, but at many other times, such as the taking of the hostages of the U.N. peacekeepers, getting them freed and this kind of stuff.
It is a messy, complicated game. And I think it's -- probably when the history of the Clinton administration is written, it's Bill Clinton's greatest moral failing, as well as, of course, a failing in terms of foreign policy. Remember that when the Holocaust museum was dedicated shortly before Clinton took office, Elie Wiesel got up and spoke about Bosnia, because, of course, Wiesel understands the lessons of the Holocaust, which is that when you have the capacity to stop a campaign of genocide and you do not, you are culpable in some way for that genocide, and that was something that on an intellectual level Bill Clinton knew and understood, yet for three-and-a-half years, he never had the spine. He would not stand up to the Pentagon, to Colin Powell, and react, and it went on and on and on.
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AMY GOODMAN: But I wanted to just get a quick response from Jeremy Scahill to Chris Hedges.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think Chris Hedges really hits it on the head when he talks about the Clinton model for military humanism being applied in Iraq . There are many similarities between what Clinton did in Yugoslavia and what Bush has done in Iraq. One of the top among them is the fact that Clinton scoffed at the international community. He refused to get United Nations authorization and instead went with a NATO alliance attack on Yugoslavia.
The other fact that is painful is that the Clinton administration is deeply implicated in the campaign of ethnic violence and killing that happened in Kosovo, because, Amy, when I was on the ground in Kosovo interviewing Albanians, they said that life was horrible under Slobodan Milosevic, and there were all sorts of killings and disappearances and systematic human rights abuses, but that the real slaughter happened once NATO started bombing, once the United States started hitting Kosovo. It gave cover for paramilitary forces to move in and take out whole villages of people. I also interviewed several Serbian special forces guys, as well as regular army guys, who described the same thing, that a week into the bombing, two weeks into the bombing, which began seven years ago this month, that's when the ethnic targeting really began.”
Western history makes the ludicrous proposition that the Non-Aligned movement of states was a smokescreen for Soviet Communism. Titoism was incredibly influential, and the threat that it presented was very real. In his autobiography, “In Search of Identity,” Anwar al-Sadat claims that Nasser modelled his Egyptian state on Tito’s Yugoslavia because of their “close personal friendship.” Tito’s influence was clear in Nasser’s decision making, and the Egyptian soldier was not above going to Tito for advice. Both men made their political bones in the military, both men had leftist credentials, and both men sat in a delicate balance between opponents in the Cold War. Tito could help Nasser understand the delicate politics of continental Europe, and Nasser could help Tito understand Islam, which would be crucial to his own project for national unity.
Sadat’s treatment of Tito is interesting. As is clear from any casual reading of his autobiography, the man never met an ass he didn’t kiss. At the same time as he heaps praises on Tito’s skills as a warrior, however, he is careful to depict him as an agent of the U.S.S.R., in compliance with the American paradigm that he declared allegiance to shortly after taking office. This may have been a calculated move on his part, or he may have actually believed it. I am inclined to believe the latter. Sadat was a particularly low-watt bulb. Its a shame that he got assassinated. A leader as cowardly and treasonous as Sadat does not deserve such a glorious death. Especially after he said such nice things about Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood in his book.
Tito was one of the major players on the world stage, and Yugoslavia was one of the few Non-Aligned states that did not fall to regime change through assassination or military pressure from either side of the Soviet Union. It did fall, however, without its leader.
This is the lesson that we learn when we understand that political justice is conditional. Everything rests on the leader. There must be a mind competent to decide what is appropriate for the conditions of the state. Competence, in this case, means not dedicated to an ideology which would trump particular circumstances. The categorical imperative does not work in human ethics, and so it does not work in political ethics either.
It is important, I believe, to look at revolutionary leaders when we are examining the issues of power and authority. Their ideology is not as important as the success that they have achieved. To end on a mild personal note, I always write wearing my “Che” cap. I may believe that Communism is a contagion upon the human spirit, but that was a man who got shit done, and whose image has become emblematic of leftist ideology all over the world. People who couldn’t find Cuba on a map wear t-shirts and put up posters with his face on it. That is real power: the power to extend phallic energy through images to impact the way that people think, feel and react. That is the power a leader MUST have to be successful. In his “Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” Julian Jaynes puts forth the theory that non-linguistic people “think” in these images. When the king told them to do something, their mind was left with an impression of his face and words. Linguistic people of the age of literature think in WORDS, which are far less likely to have the same kind of emotional impact. Television, music, and movies have destroyed the age of literature, and dragged the masses back down into the realm of pure images...
and this is the realm in which they are subject to the Will of the magician. Crowley tells us that every artistic creation is a magical act because it is tied to the creative principle. The same can be said for every act of leadership, and every act of authentic authority. The libidinous energies which make those impositions of Will possible and effective are the same energies that we use to create objects of artistic expression, create children, and attract sexual partners. Power, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, is sexy, sexy, sexy.
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