Saint Slobo

[I] just [want] to join the general chorus of disgust at Justin Raimondo's "Canonizing St. Slobo." He ... sings the praises of Kostunica and the DOS (apart from Djindjic) whilst refusing to ever acknowledge that the West has paid for OTPOR and paid for and chosen Kostunica, and that Antiwar.com itself has carried articles from establishment newspapers writing about suitcases of cash being carried over the border into Yugoslavia directly from Washington....

...It is not rational to write in one paragraph about propaganda and demonization and then to lambaste Christopher Black for pointing out that all other mass graves have turned out to be fiction! Raimondo's attack on Black, Clark etc. seems to be because they are Socialists or Communists. ...This ... splits the antiwar movement, and that is unforgivable.

Please bring back George Szamuely ... who is always intellectually honest and has never, when so much of importance is at stake and so many lives are at risk and have already been sacrificed to the New World Order, wasted a word to indulge in personal foibles and prejudices.

~ Tara McCormack, London, UK

Justin Raimondo replies:

If barely half a dozen letters is a "general chorus," then the entire antiwar movement is indeed no bigger than the Slobodan Milosevic Fan Club – a truly depressing prospect, and one that I will do all in my power to prevent. I don’t believe it, however, as I have a much higher opinion of the intelligence and integrity of our regular readers. Is it really necessary to point out that Vojislava Kostunica is not a twenty-something OTPOR activist with a paint-gun, but a Serbian patriot who has opposed NATO, has a long history of opposing Djindjic, and led the opposition to Milosevic’s commies? And I would submit, Tara, that before you accuse Kostunica of personally accepting "suitcases of cash" from the CIA, you’d better get your facts straight. If old Vojislav is laughing all the way to the bank, then why, pray tell, is he still wearing a suit that looks like it was old ten years ago? You have Kostunica confused with Rolexed, yuppified Djindjic.

McCormack’s inability to make anything but the crudest distinctions is underscored by her anger at my lambasting of Christopher Black "for pointing out that all other mass graves have turned out to be fiction." But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that there just may be something to the bodies now being dug up on Serbian soil. What is going to come out of those holes they are digging in the ground? I don’t know, but I’m not going to rule anything out in advance based on some rose-colored glasses view of Slobodan Milosevic.

It is not a "personal foible" or even a "prejudice" that causes me to view Milosevic as something less than a saint, but a certain knowledge of the crimes of Communism, as well as a hard-headed realism when it comes to the reality of war. Yes, the stories put out by the NATO-crats were indeed grossly exaggerated: we are a looong way from the figures of one hundred thousand, fifty thousand, and ten thousand dead Kosovars once routinely referred to by the War Party. The Kosovo mass graves turned out to be a chimera: however, I don’t rule out, in principle, the possibility that a man like Milosevic was entirely capable of killing hundreds, if not thousands, if he thought it served his political ends.

As for George Szamuely, we would be delighted to publish his column, but, unfortunately, brilliant writers often have trouble understanding or accepting the concept of the deadline, a capitalist tool of oppression that keeps the literary masses in eternal thralldom. Hopefully he’s reading this: please come back, George. All is forgiven.

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Judges of Nations

I found [Joseph Stromberg's, "Judges of Nations"] ridiculous to the extreme, and curiously dishonest. As a 11th generation New Englander, indoctrinated into the Congregationalist Protestant church, I assure you that truth and justice are prevailing messages of Protestant doctrine. ...Americans who respond to "humanitarian intervention" are not the evil ones – it [is] those that color black as white [and] turn"capitalist exploitation" into "humanitarianism." ...Stromberg's brazen article uses microscopic perspective as a tool to deceive. I usually find Antiwar.com much more discerning of propaganda.

~ Asea

Editor's note: Mr. Stromberg's reply can be found in his column (July 20), "Hegel, Well-Regulated Police States, and Empire."

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Helpless Taxpayer

I am an American artist who has worked in Macedonia every year for the last 5 years. I am very concerned about the situation there now. I talk to my friends there often – I worry about their safety. I avidly support the cause of Macedonian nationalism – it is a wonderful state that deserves a chance for life. Big business America disgusts me. I am a helpless taxpayer – nothing else.

To be in Macedonia ... is to be alive – to be in growth-oriented suburban America is a form of death. Let's all hope that Macedonia makes it!

~ D. Roberts

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Privatizing Interventionism

Mr. Raimondo is 100 % right regarding the need for a serious investigation into the recruiting of American army vets, and civilians, to destabilize Serbia and Macedonia. Buried somewhere in the Washington Post's article yesterday on the three Albanian-American men found in the Serbian "mass grave" was the fact that they had gone to fight for the KLA. Nowhere in the article did it mention that this is against the law, as page four of every US passport clearly states. As no doubt the rest of the mass media will follow the Post's lead in oozing sympathy for the deceased, the illegality of their actions will probably remain unmentioned.

More serious, of course, than a few patriotic but misguided civilians is the coordinated and government-backed work of MPRI, an opportunistic bunch of killers who profit hand over fist by inflicting suffering on people in other countries. I'm sure that I speak for many of your readers when I urge you to provide more detailed investigations of their covert and terroristic activities, which not even the loftiest "human rights" rhetoric can justify.

~ Chris Deliso, San Francisco, CA