Letter to the WSWS by P. Harris

25 June 1999

The following letter, sent by P. Harris, a supporter of the Balkan war, is answered by David North, the chairman of the WSWS Editorial Board. North's answer can be accessed at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/dn-j25.shtml

To the editors,

It is somewhat ironic that you, who take pride in declaring yourselves anti-Stalinists even as you attempt to deny Serb responsibility for a huge mass of war crimes, have adopted the exact same habits of twisted reasoning and blind faith that also enabled the Stalinists to deny or justify the huge number of atrocities committed in the name of "defending socialism."

In your editorial "Kosovan 'mass graves' agitation: US media seeks to justify NATO war" (By the Editorial Board, 18 June 1999) you refer to "alleged mass grave sites" and you spend well over one third of the 2200 word editorial explaining why the press accounts of these emerging details are suspect and not to be believed, etc. Blindly rejecting the massively mounting piles of evidence—and burned, mutilated Kosovar bodies—you insist that it was the NATO bombing that at least in part caused any massacres:

"The combination of this intensified civil war and the NATO bombing touched off a killing spree in which the most fanatical and brutal Serb nationalist elements, especially paramilitary groups like the ‘White Eagles,' played a major role."

Not only does this quote show that you yourselves are conflicted—for in it you appear to acknowledge the mass killings perpetrated by the Serbs—but in this way you conveniently ignore the undisputed facts that all of this violence by "the most fanatical and brutal Serb nationalist elements" was well-planned and coordinated from the highest level of the Serbian government, as was also the case in Croatia and Bosnia in the previous wars of the Yugoslav breakup.

It is also ironic that you accuse the press in the NATO countries of trying to retroactively justify the war against Serbian oppression in Kosovo, whereas the truth seems to be exactly the opposite: faced with the indisputable proof of atrocities and crimes against humanity carried out by the Serbs on a vast scale, it is you who are trying to retroactively justify your opposition to the war. But you cannot escape history's judgment.

As more and more grisly facts are uncovered and documented by swarms of reporters and human rights investigators from a variety of independent international organizations, your denial of Serb responsibility just makes you look pathetic and silly in the eyes of the entire world. It also serves to further discredit your totally schematic and inflexible analysis of current events. Your analytical method seems to rely only on one side of Marx's work, your own version of a class-based political-economic analysis, never leavened by any of Marx's humanism and common sense.

In this way you do a great disservice to socialists and to socialism, which is nothing if not a call for fundamental justice, equality, and freedom for all people, including Albanians. In light of the spectacular failure of your political analysis and predictions, you should rethink your approach, this time taking into account the rich humanistic elements and traditions of Marx's historical analysis.

P. Harris