Thursday 23 November 2017

Conviction Politics

By all means rot in your cell, Ratko Mladić. But what about the rest of them? Jeremy Corbyn and the Morning Star, the only national newspaper that took the same view, were right. Ask John Laughland, or Mark Almond, or Peter Hitchens, or any of the American paleocons.

The neocons ought to stay away from the Yugoslav Wars, although of course they won't. "Serbs Evil, Croats Sort Of UK, Muslims Saintly" was not taken seriously by any serious person even at the time, and it would not wash with anyone at all today.

The collapse of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as such, has been, and remains, an unmitigated disaster. A disaster visited upon Europe and the world by the EU and by NATO. Yugoslavia was authoritarian, but it was hardly so by the standards of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. It was multiethnic, and it was properly independent. It was also rather Anglophile. Margaret Thatcher even bowed to Tito's coffin. No one is all bad. 

On and on people bang about Corbyn and imaginary "anti-Semitism" or even "Holocaust denial". But for those, you needed the late Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Alija Izetbegović of Bosnia. Or you need the pro-NATO governments and parties in Eastern Europe, with their NATO-funded films glorifying those of their compatriots who fought for Hitler.

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