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NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2005Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Milosevic war trial
For two years, the trial of Serbian war criminal
Slobodan Milosevic has ground on at The Hague. The International War Crimes
Tribunal has permitted him to present a totally ideological defense aimed at
Serbian nationalist opinion. Rather than attempting to rebut concrete charges
concerning 200,000 killed, millions driven from their homes in "ethnic
cleansing," or countless rapes in Bosnia, Kosova, and Croatia--all at the
hands of Serbian forces--in November Milosevic called as his first witness the
region’s most famous philosopher, Mihailo [Mihajlo] Markovic. Once a
principled socialist humanist, but since 1986 a rabid Serbian nationalist,
Markovic obliged by testifying that in Serbia in the 1980s it was the Albanian
minority that was oppressing the Serbs. As to Milosevic’s infamous March 1989 speech calling
for "armed" Serbs to "battle" the region’s ethnic
minorities--Markovic testified that Milosevic was really defending the
"need for unity, national equality, and tolerance." He held that
Western imperialist powers wanted to splinter Yugoslavia. Markovic has earned a place among those philosophers of the age of state-capitalism who used their dialectical skills to justify the most inhuman forms of oppression, from Heidegger and the Nazis, to various "progressives" and totalitarian Communism, to Foucault and Khomeinism. |
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