THE
WORLD IS NOT A WEBSITE
A
warm spring day in the Bay Area, and the sky so blue it hurts to look
at it: a perfect day for a demonstration, and I am glad to get out of
the house and away from my computer terminal. Having acquired the kind
of sickly pallor one associates with heroin addicts and computer nerds,
it is good to be out in the air and feel the sun on my face. The world,
I note with a pleasant shock, is not a series of websites. I have been
invited to speak at a rally at UC Berkeley, and all week I have looked
forward to the event with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Excitement
because I am aware for the first time that a significant number of Serbians
are reading this column -- not just Serbians living in Yugoslavia, but
Serbian-Americans who feel as isolated and alienated from our thoroughly
CNN-ized media reality as I do. Trepidation because I know I am in for
a run-in with the local leftists, who naturally dominate the Berkeley
scene.
ANTICIPATION
When
I get the list of speakers, my suspicions are confirmed: I spot the name
of Gloria La Riva, a leading light of the International
Action Center, a far-left group whose modus operandi -- and unreasoning
hostility to right-wing opponents of the war -- I described in an earlier
diary entry. Of course, she has gotten the same list, and is at this moment
fuming that those #$%$&*! Republicans have somehow infiltrated
her antiwar movement. Of course, the Serbian students at UC Berkeley,
in their innocence, are completely unaware of these factional rivalries;
in their isolation and desperation to prove that they are not monsters,
they have reached out to the right as well as the left -- an openness
that can only infuriate the dour dogmatists of the IAC and the Bay Area
Left in general. Driving up to Berkeley that morning, I know I am really
going to enjoy this.
BERKELEY
BALKANIZED
We
were supposed to meet up with the organizers at a cafe on Bancroft, but
I am half an hour late and so we proceed directly to Sproul Plaza: a concrete
concourse filled with milling students, on their way to class or simply
taking in the sun, stretched out on the lawn. There is at first little
sign of a demonstration: only the rows of tables, each one manned by a
few students, where the Balkanization of the Berkeley campus is on display:
the Korean-American Students Union, the Queer
Alliance, the Hispanic Forum, the Black Students Union, and the Armenian
Student Association (sporting a huge poster of Hitler that is meant to
represent the Turkish government, and the words "Armenian Holocaust"
in large black type over an exhibit of photos and testimonials of Turkic
savagery). I see only one political group tabling, the International
Socialists Organization, American followers of the British Trotskyist
Tony Cliff. But they, too, like everyone else, seem not to be paying much
attention to passersby -- their ostensible audience -- but are intently
talking to one another, oblivious to anyone who might be interested in
their literature. It is an inauspicious sign. The names of the organizers
on the email I received were overwhelmingly Slavic, and I wonder: will
it be only Serbian-Americans who will turn out for this rally?
SELF-RESTRAINT
IS THE
BETTER PART OF VALOR
I
spot Jelena on the other side of the plaza, and she spots me: although
we have never met, there is a mutual recognition when our eyes meet. She
is very young, and quite beautiful: tall, with long honey-colored hair
and a wide sensual mouth. She smiles, we shake hands and exchange pleasantries.
The others are beginning to arrive: Serbian students, most of them, the
men very tall and broadshouldered, have clambered up the side of Sproul
Hall and affixed a huge banner over the entrance: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.
A campus administrator is on the spot in moments, informing the flustered
and indignant Jelena that the banner must come down. Jelena tries to reason
with her, but it is futile: "regulations are regulations," says
the woman, smiling wanly. I turn to her and say "Gee, isn't that
what set off the Free Speech movement of the sixties?" She laughs
appreciatively, but does not relent, and I am tempted to ask what if that
banner said "Celebrate Black History Month", only barely managing
to restrain myself. Later, there will be plenty of opportunity to vent
my spleen at Berkeley's Birkenstock brigade. For now I smile pleasantly,
and introduce myself to the other speakers, who are already beginning
to arrive. I strike up a conversation with a Berkeley professor, who takes
umbrage at the propagandistic tone of the media, and asks me what I'm
going say in my speech: I tell him I'm going to be giving the conservative
perspective on events in the Balkans, and he looks somewhat startled but
amused, and we talk about the breadth and depth of right-wing opposition
to this war. "I think the audience is going to be somewhat surprised
by what you have to say," he said, apparently quite pleased at the
prospect. "But they really need to be shaken up a bit," I say,
"don't you think?"
A
HISTORY LESSON
My
fear that this is going to be a gathering of mainly Serbian students turns
out to be groundless. As the sound equipment is moved into place, a line
of students holding signs and the giant banner that had to be taken down
faces the plaza, in front of the microphone. It is lunch time and plenty
of students are sitting on the lawns, but our audience is not entirely
passive. A number of students are standing around watching, curious and
now silent as Jelena introduces the first speaker. Desa Wakeman is a Serbian-American
academic, a sprightly older woman with a distinguished air, who explains
the history and meaning of the Serbian national mystique in a richly accented
voice. She recites the long litany of martyrdoms, mass expulsions, and
many tragedies that make the history of Serbia seem like a poem by Lord
Byron. I can almost hear Ravel's "Pavanne for a Dead Princess."
The audience is politely attentive, but a bit restive as the saga of Serbia
continues. It is nearly ten minutes into her speech and she is only up
to the Twelfth Century. Of course, this underscores the complexity and
hidden dangers of U.S. intervention in the Balkans, albeit in a way Desa's
audience will absorb only by implication. For if it takes this long to
explain what is going on, what the facts are, and who did what to whom,
then is this something the United States wants to get involved in? Look
at all those furrowed young brows trying to make sense of the long record
of recriminations and blood feuds, apocalyptic battles and glorious defeats
that make up Balkan history. Will they want to die for Kosovo tomorrow,
if they are called -- for a cause that seems murky, at best? Desa is making
a good job of it, and the applause -- particularly loud from the Serbian
students -- makes her smile.
A
PLEA
Jelena
and Jasmina Vujic make impassioned speeches that seem to focus on the
unfairness of the news coverage: they are clearly hurt by having to watch
the tragedy unfolding in their country through the prism of a warmongering
media which has placed itself at the disposal of the NATO High Command.
There is a plaintive undertone in Jasmina's voice, and it is heartbreaking
to hear it; it reminds me of the character in horror writer Shirley Jackson's
classic short story, "The Lottery," who loses the draw and pleads
with her friends and neighbors before they stone her to death.
THERE'S
NO BUSINESS
LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
At
the last moment, I ask Jelena to change my introduction: in addition to
being editorial director of antiwar.com, I also want to be identified
as representing the San Francisco chapter of the California
Republican Assembly. Why not come out of the closet completely? My
speech is a synopsis of yesterday's diary: the Left has been transformed
into the War Party, and the antiwar movement of the new millennium is,
in large part, a creature of the Right. I observe that, as the editor
of antiwar.com, I am posting material from conservative commentators and
not many from the Left because of the great dearth of the latter. I gleefully
point out that the great majority of Republicans in the House and Senate
voted against the bombing. There are a few catcalls at the edge of the
crowd, but I plough right on through, my rather loud voice drowning them
out with one rhetorical crescendo after another. I cannot resist pushing
my political incorrectness to the limit -- and perhaps beyond -- by remarking
that I fail to see how constructing a Muslim state in the heart of Christian
Europe can possibly be in the national interest of the U.S. I conclude
by making the case for a single-issue antiwar movement: the cause of the
Serbian people is that important and urgent. I am really having
a high old time of it, and the applause is much louder than the catcalls.
What is really gratifying is the sincerity in the voice of a distinguished-looking
old Serbian who clasped me by the shoulders when he shook my hand and
told me he had never heard a better exposition of Serbian history. The
Serbian students were equally appreciative, but not everyone was so pleased,
as the next speaker made all too clear.
RUDE
AND CRUDE
Jelena
introduced Barbara Lubin as the representative of something called the
Middle Eastern Children's Alliance: she turned out to be woman who looked
to be somewhere in her mid-fifties, with a fiercely angular face and graying
hair. Her tone was irritable, and she was obviously perturbed, like a
vegetarian who has been invited to a steak barbecue. After repeating the
improbable story that the United States is dumping radioactive
bombs on the Serbian people, without offering any proof, and pointing
out that killing is, after all, a bad thing -- what a trenchant analysis!
What a revelation! What profundity! -- she turned to the real topic of
her talk: me. "And as for the Republicans, and right-wingers like
Pat Buchanan and the last speaker -- I am not aligned with them,
and will never align with them," she ranted, condemning both
me and most of the active opposition to this war to Coventry. We, she
explained, are worse than the warmongers -- although, again, she did not
bother to prove her thesis but merely stated it, as if it were a self-evident
truth. That is how fossilized and impotent the American Left is today:
their ideology has been reified into a religion, its doctrines are experienced
as revelations and thus beyond reason or explanation.
AN
OPEN LETTER
I
am sitting with the Serbians, and they clearly are not pleased with this
turn of events; they are shocked, but are too polite and nervous to acknowledge
it, and so they smile, while the older ones shake their heads. Don't worry,
says one, we are with you. "I didn't realize there would be these
tensions among the speakers," says Jelena, apologetically, and I
rush to reassure her that I am not made of glass and not at all offended.
Vigorous debate is the American Way. I don't want to embarrass Jelena
and the others by walking over to that harpy and telling her what I think
of her sour sectarianism, and I restrain myself, content in the knowledge
that I can do it here and reach many Serbian students. And so, let's get
to it: Ms. Lubin, you obviously do not really care about the fate of the
Serbian people who are now under the bombs that your tax money is paying
for. This is just another radical cause where you can push your tired
leftist line, where you can peddle the same old by-now-seriously-damaged
goods to an increasingly unappreciative crowd. If you had a moral bone
in your body you would not direct your fire at opponents of this ugly
and increasingly bloody war. Never have I witnessed a more sickening display
of self-indulgent sectarianism and sheer rudeness. Your behavior was despicable
and I challenge you to own up to it and publicly apologize to the organizers
who worked so hard to put that demonstration together. They have everything
to lose if the antiwar movement in this country is led by asinine ultra-leftists
like yourself, and it is a pity they didn't realize that you would screw
them over so royally. There -- now I feel much better. Moving right
along . . .
GLORY,
GLORIA LA RIVA
The
next speaker was Gloria La Riva, who is well-known in San Francisco leftist
circles as a venerable fixture at demonstrations for every imaginable
cause. She is there to talk about her recent trip to Belgrade, in the
company of Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General who has now become
a radical gadfly. Clark keeps popping up in places like Iraq and Yugoslavia,
berating his former colleagues in the ruling elite, often in the company
of Gloria and her fellow Trotskyists. Gloria is a thin, intense woman
who is no longer young. Her stringy black hair is tied back in a loose
braid, like an Indian squaw, and she has a rather large mole with more
than a few spikes of black hair sprouting luxuriously from the tip, like
a forest crowning a mountaintop. In the moments before she is to take
her place at the podium, she paces, drawing deeply on a cigarette stuck
between her thin lips. Jelena introduces her as representing the International
Action Center, and I think to myself: what an innocuous name for such
an exotic group as the Workers World
Party to hide behind. The content of her speech was a catalogue of
horrors, all perpetrated deliberately by a malevolent ruling class of
top-hatted capitalists, and of course the evil underlying this war is
not hubris, or stupidity, or good intentions gone horribly wrong, but
sheer blood lust on the part of the evil capitalists, whose only goal
is to make money. There is a strange incongruity in the evil she describes
and what supposedly motivates it: for if profit is all that motivates
the War Party, then surely there are easier ways to pursue it than starting
a war. The political risks, let alone the gravity of such an entrepreneurial
scheme, would seem to outweigh whatever profits are to be made; and while
the desire of the armaments industry to make a post-Cold War comeback
is surely an important component of the War Party, this hardly explains
the enthusiasm for this war on the Left. Why, even the Fourth International
and the parties associated with it in every country but the U.S. have
jumped on the anti-Serb bandwagon. Do they support this war for
the "mega-profits" it will bring them? Is Vanessa Redgrave beating
the war drums so that she can go on tour with the USO in Kosovo? But what
made Gloria's speech so memorable was not its content but the voice in
which it was delivered: a hi-pitch screech that grated on the inner ear
and that just kept coming at you, without inflection or any real passion.
It was a simulation of emotion, the words belted out like bullets from
a machine-gun, and all strung together in phrases that were merely slogans.
In hearing her speak, one got the definite impression that she thought
in slogans, abbreviated staccato phrases that she spit at the audience
like so much rhetorical phlegm. She ended her speech with a rather restrained
"endorsement" of Ms. Lubin's vitriol -- a final slap in the
face to the student organizers.
MARCHING
THROUGH BERKELEY
Now
it was time for the march to take place: the idea was that, having convinced
and fired up the student masses to take up the antiwar cause, the crowd
of students who gathered to watch the proceedings would now take to the
streets. About fifty demonstrators or so lined up, after some coaxing,
and we took off down the street. It soon turned out, however, that we
were headed in the wrong direction, and so we made a U-turn -- not too
difficult, considering our small numbers -- and filed out into the streets.
We marched around the block, to the studied disinterest of most pedestrians
but to the enthusiastic cheers of a few. As we hit the halfway mark, two
characters with skull-and-bones tattoos on their arms sneered loudly and
declaimed that we were "a bunch of fucking communists"! To be
red-baited and baited by the reds all in the space of an hour --
such are the perils of the new antiwar movement.
AFTERMATH
Afterward
we all sit in a cafe, and the Serbians are charming. We talk about political
philosophy, I explain libertarianism (or try to) to an earnest but somewhat
vague young man. There is little talk of Ms. Lubin's faux pas, except
expressions of surprise from Jelena. In talking to Desa I discover that
she already knows of me through my articles in Chronicles
magazine, the flagship organ of paleo-conservatism and staunch opponent
of this war. She reads the magazine faithfully, and says she is honored
to meet me. Of course, it is not surprising that a Serbian academic would
know of Chronicles, which has taken up their cause in this country
with such erudition and genuine understanding. "You know, what I
love about the magazine is the beauty of the language," she says,
and it is wonderful to find one of the magazine's few subscribers in this
group, as if to confirm my right to be here. Ms. Lubin is nowhere in sight,
but Gloria shows up and takes a seat. She doesn't look at me or talk to
me. Perhaps it is just as well.
A
PREMONITION
I
bid adieu to Jelena and the others, ebullient in the afterglow of an event
that didn't go at all badly. The turnout was not bad, considering that
there are no admitted American casualties as yet, and the students seemed
receptive if questioning. As I walk to the car, I cannot help thinking
of what young Jelena and her friends are up against: a propaganda machine
that is working day and night to twist and bend reality, and blot out
(or bomb out) any alternative view of NATO's bloody "liberation"
of Kosovo. Will it really take body bags coming back from the Balkans
to convince Americans that this war is a disaster for America and the
world? If and when that happens, it will be necessary for the antiwar
movement to extend way beyond the small circles of Serbians and eccentric
leftist sects that have been organizing demonstrations. Seen from this
perspective, today's demonstration is an ominous portent: on a warm spring
day in sunny California, I felt a chill of foreboding.
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Justin
Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author
of Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
(with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the
Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
(forthcoming from Prometheus Books).
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