Eccentric Flower:199904/bottlenecks and kosovo
From Eccentric Flower
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april tenth bottlenecks and kosovo Oh my goodness, has it really been four days? I'll tell you a secret. One of the main reasons I didn't write anything here is because I said the next one was going to be about Kosovo. Then I realized I'd been saying that for a couple of days, and that I didn't really want to write about Kosovo. I have a lot to say about it. Too much, in fact. So much that I don't think I can unkink it long enough to write about it. Meanwhile all manner of other topics have been fermenting and building up pressure behind that bottleneck, and now I have too much to say for one postcard, and can't imagine how I'm going to remember it all in time. This is similar to the problem with them smutty twenty-six stories. I have to write them in order. The E story - which I posted today - was the toughest yet; I had to start it four times. And when people read it, they're going to wonder what all the effort was about. It has no actual sex, so unless you have this particular kink, it will do nothing for you. Meanwhile, other stories further down the list are dying to escape from my head - but I have not specified the alphabet rule just to torment myself: I know that if I skip around, I'll never come back to write the problematic one. Knowing what's coming is the only way I can create enough backpressure to get past the hard bits. But back to Kosovo. The only real reason I wanted to write about Kosovo at all is that I saw these posters plastered around the university advertising a meeting "to protest the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia," and this made me grit my teeth. Listen up: There is no such thing as Yugoslavia, and there never was. The Serbs and Croats had a marriage of convenience in pre-World War I europe, to prevent larger, better armed powers from overrunning them. Anyone who's ever played the game Diplomacy, which is set up to reflect the Europe of that time, will understand this. That marriage of convenience lingered long past when it was ripe for divorce because it was held in place by the workings of a dictator. Yugoslavia as you know it is Tito's fault. The only amazing thing is that it lasted as long as it did after him. The real question of Kosovo, and the general Serb/Croat/Albanian situation, is not whether the U.S. is making a mistake. It is not whether NATO is making a mistake. (And do not assume that the U.S. and NATO agree on politics here, because they're acting for completely different reasons.) The real question is whether you let a land self-segregate; whether it's right to permit a place to Balkanize itself into little homogenous clumps. On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be a good reason why not. If they'd be more peaceful in their own company, then let them, right? I mean, obviously we can't let them slaughter each other (at least, not if they're white), but what's a little border reworking in the name of peace? Well, for starters, what do you tell the Croats who've had farms in one place for four generations, but are now displaced because they're in ethnically Serb territory? Who recompensates them for something that has no adequate compensation? And where are the lines? If Kosovo secedes today, where will its borders be? It's not that simple. Never mind the bombs. When Milo the Slob is dead - curse his exploitative soul - the real issues will still be there. My pizza's out of the oven, so I'll move on to my other topics in a while.
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