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Reply to National Lawyers Guild Article

This is a reply to a letter from a member of the National Lawyers Guild enclosing an article from the Spring 1999 issue of its newsletter. The Guild itself took a position condemning the bombing, but the article in question, The Kosovo Conundrum: Imperialism or Genocide dissents.

Dear ...,

Thanks for your letter of the 5th, and sorry I didn't get back to you regarding the case in Oregon I called you about a month ago. Thanks also for your help in this case: Rob now has a decent lawyer. The details can be found at /thaxton.html.

I was impressed by the article about Kosovo from the National Lawyers' Guild newsletter, and am not at all 'derisive' about it. I don't think its authors are as dumb as they make out. It is a sophisticated rationale for mass murder. I disagree with your claim that the left in general opposed the NATO bombing. In general, the left supported it. In the USA, many of its most passionate opponents were conservatives and libertarians.

Whereas the article says we can "hardly endorse" the KLA, and agrees that we should be "concerned about" it, it claims that the main source of human rights violations in the Balkans is Milosevic and his government. It offers not a shred of evidence for this assertion, though one of the authors, Kathleen Johnson, worked for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as well as the United Nations, that dovish institution, in such suspiciously neutral-sounding capacities as "adjudicator", so she should be well versed in the fake evidence produced by these bodies to demonize the Serbian government. Even if these insultingly transparent fabrications were true, it would not give weight to the argument of this article for supporting the murder of civilians in Yugoslavia. In fact, bombing strengthens governments, as NATO is well aware. The fact that many on the left are naive enough to swallow the stories of human rights violations is no excuse. Murder is murder. Like the governments and media (or do I repeat myself?) Gespass and Johnson frequently mention the president of this small country as though he were an important factor in the Balkan catastrophe, implicitly merging many of the innocent victims of NATO's bombing with Milosevic.

The article uses the old "if the USA had entered the second world war earlier could it have prevented the Holocaust?" argument. To accuse these liberal scum of naivete seems inadequate. The Allies were quite happy with the Nazi death camps, and guilty of as many crimes as the Axis powers. There is nothing to choose between them. Logically, the lawyers deduce that opponents of the Kosovo massacre would have to oppose the US intervention in World War Two. Unfortunately, they lack the courage to follow the logic one step further.

The authors of this article think they are qualified to weigh the fate of millions in their cosy little liberal minds. Though they admit that none of the alternatives were "without flaws or dangers", they decide to support one of them - arial bombardment of civilians, and the occupation of Kosovo by the veterans of Vietnam under the command of one of the butchers of Bloody Sunday. Lawyer jokes about the bottom of the ocean hardly do them justice. The phrase "get cancer, you stupid arrogant liberal bastards" somehow seems more appropriate.

The title of the article "The Kosovo Conundrum: Imperialism or Genocide" is misleading to say the least. The NATO attack on Yugoslavia did not prevent racial violence, it multiplied it by orders of magnitude. Attacks on Albanians, Serbs, Romanies and others by the KLA, and to a lesser extent, by Serbian paramilitaries, have increased many times since the bombing started. Today, NATO is actively assisting ethnic cleansing. The rulers of NATO were aware of this. Only their liberal camp followers are stupid enough to believe that a racist massacre could help to prevent racist massacres. And what's the conundrum? Am I missing something? It seemed fairly straightforward to me. Major powers cause massacre by bombing civilians and arming ethnic death squads. The left support them.

Courtesans of state power, enemies of peace and freedom, the left are the political equivalents of Monica Lewinsky. The Kosovo massacre is not the first, and nowhere near the greatest, orgy of mass murder they have supported. As the truth emerges, I can only hope the left's support for this butchery will accelerate its demise.

I enclose an article from the libertarian magazine Liberty, which has consistently opposed the murder of Yugoslavian civilians by the US government, and all state murder. I hope you'll be in San Francisco in October - I look forward to seeing you, and hope you'll have reconsidered your allegiance to the blood-stained flag of leftism.