Friday, August 15, 2008

Who are the good guys again?

Remember during the breakdown in Yugoslavia when we couldn't figure out who the bad guys were and who the good were?

Milosevic seemed like a pretty bad guy, all things considered. Then there were those rumours of mass graves (that turned out to not exist or only contain equal numbers of fighting age men from both sides). And the Kosovo Liberation Army that Milosevic was fighting turned out to be a CIA front group armed with M16s. Then NATO started bombing and it seemed easy to pick a side. Clearly, we only bomb bad people.

So the whole thing with Ossetia, Georgia and Russia is really confusing as well. Russia? Definitely bad. Totalitarian state pretending to be a democracy. Trying to seize the oil (or was it an oil pipeline) from Georgia. Georgia? They don't seem to be nice either. Once the president of Georgia thought that he had American backing, he began bombing Ossetia, apparently destroying civilian houses and what not.

And the province of Ossetia? Probably just playing one side against the other.

And who are the good guys? Just about nobody, as per usual. Unless, of course, you count the civilians having their houses bombed while wealth, powerful people fight over oil rights. And nobody counts them until they're dead.

Recommend this PostProgressive Bloggers

2 comments:

Mike said...

Er, Srebreniza. No rumours of rass graves, but actual mass graves. Of unarmed men and boys machine gunned into ditches.

Rape Camps.

Milosevic was bad, as is Karadzic and Mladic. They deserve the same fate - death.

It is for this reason I am firmly an anarchist and libertarian.

Greg said...

People usually aren't buried with their weapons, especially if they were buried by their enemies, so "unarmed" is a presumption.

But yes, the Serbian generals and leaders were terrible people. I can't argue with that.

But were any leaders in that area any better? Weren't the Bosnians and the Croats and the KLA making mass graves of their own? The hate between these groups goes back centuries. And look how many civilians in Serbia were killed by NATO bombing. How can you possibly find the "good guys" in all of that?

But how do you get from there to libertarian?