The Irrepressible Rothbard by Murray N. Rothbard

Author:Murray N. Rothbard [Murray N. Rothbard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978–1-61016–260-9
Publisher: The Center for Libertarian Studies, Inc.
Published: 2000-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

HANDS OFF THE SERBS!

June 1993

I used to think that the ultra-left, not the Social Democrats or the Commies, but the “independent-radical” left, a floating melange of left Trotskyites, pacifists, and left-anarchists, while hopeless and evil on “domestic” questions, were at least sound and consistent in opposing American war and intervention abroad. (I also used to think they were good on free speech, but that’s all gone with the rise of the Hate Crime and Sexual Harassment movements.) After all, they proudly called themselves, “the anti-war movement.” But there’s no “anti-war left” left anymore. So either they’ve changed radically without even realizing it, or I was naive and they were Commies all along. (I suspect the latter, otherwise how could a “dedicated anti-war” movement become pro-war so darned quickly, that is as soon as the Cold War against Communism was over?)

It started with the Gulf War, when lifelong anti-war warriors, people like the Red troubadour Pete Seeger and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, suddenly whooped it up for war. Even Noam Chomsky, left-anarchist and always a gutsy battler against American war, supported the Gulf War. The argument given by these people was that this was the holy “United Nations” conducting the battle and not really the United States. In short, that the cause of a war-making world government is more important to them than anti-war principles. Showing that these people were not really against imperialism or foreign military intervention (they were always, of course, in favor of foreign economic intervention such as foreign aid), but in favor of world government imperialism, and war-mongering.

Well, I like to say that everyone is entitled to one deviation. Maybe it was an aberration. Maybe the full moon was out.

But there are no excuses left anymore. The entire “anti-war left” has now joined the rest of the rotters on the Respectable Spectrum: liberals, Establishment centrists, Official Conservatives, neoconservatives, and virtually everyone else, in hysterical calls for intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia. This time, it’s not because the United Nations is behind the war; on the contrary, the UN is getting as much flak as the U.S. from this “international community” of war-mongers. Why have they “sat it out,” they charge, in the face of “Serbian aggression” and expansionism against the poor Bosnian Muslims?

As usual, there are disagreements about the extent of military intervention demanded; but as usual, the “moderates” are either liars or self-deluders, since timid and moderate first steps will obviously not work, and then the precedent being set and intervention begun, the pressure will become irresistible for ever more accelerated steps, until the maximum pain is inflicted. No-fly zones, air strikes against artillery, all will fail; and now, the war crowd is beginning to call, not yet for bombing Belgrade—the only Serbs they can find and target—but for bombing the “bridges” near Belgrade where supplies are being sent to the Serbs in Bosnia. Bombing Belgrade itself will follow, and when that won’t work, which it won’t, the Unthinkable will be voiced: nuking Belgrade, using “clean” nukes of course to avoid the fallout’s harming other peoples.

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