Syndicate: Polarization

[ichael.benson@pristop.si]

(1) "Made in China". 

Strolling beside the Adriatic, we come to a kiosk selling, not 
sunglasses, bathing suits, beach-balls, etc., but hundreds of 
different kinds of graphics-heavy, well-packaged, cheap plastic toys. 
These include: what looks like an entire division of the US Army, 
complete with rocket launchers, little green soldiers, tanks, jet 
fighters, American flags, etc. And in another box: a substantial, 
miniaturized percentage of the British Army, with troop carriers, 
artillery, planes, tanks etc. All the garish promo text on these 
boxes is in English, and at the bottom of each package, it says, in 
small letters: "Made in China."  

No, ironies never cease. 

When it comes to the Balkans, as the saying goes, they've always 
produced more history than they can consume locally. Why not export 
some? For example, to China?

(2) Boy, when they fuck up, they don't mess around -- they really, 
truly, definitively fuck up, and in world-historical terms. Imagine, 
for a minute, the spooks of Langley, Virginia. It's late at night, 
the TV is on, CNN tuned low, there are pizza boxes and cups of 
cold coffee strewn all around, they're examining their 
seven-year old tourist maps of Belgrade, feeling very important 
and world historical, marking doomed buildings with a highlighter 
pen. But why are these maps so old, you might ask? Because, like most 
cities, Belgrade doesn't feel a need to print an all-new, updated 
city map every year. Why should they? They don't get any tourists 
anyway. 

But, you say, this is the CIA -- with a budget of ten gadzillion 
dollars a minute! Well, forget satellite photos: it doesn't even 
occur to these people to pick up the phone, call Belgrade information 
-- hello, do you speak English? -- and simply confirm a street 
address. "Could you tell us what's at this address, please? What did 
you say? The... CHINESE EMBASSY?" 

Just as it didn't occur to NATO to call the TV Serbia switchboard, 
and say: "you have 20 minutes to get yourself and everyone else out 
of there, because we just launched one. No joke." 

(3) Had an insight into he nature of polarization and war 
recently. Went something like this: Chinese students, 
raging, roiled, one of them with that "target" inked onto the top of 
his bald head -- yes, the  ubiquitous Serbian self-martyrdom 
PR-victory of a symbol (I say it admiringly! Admiringly!); yes, on 
his head, facing up -- well-placed not for the squinty-eyes of 
satellite-guided cruise missiles (the ostensible audience), but for 
the squinty eyes of a crack team of international photojournalists 
(the intended audience). 

So what's it doing, then, in Beijing? This *Serbian* target? What's 
it doing there, if not serving as symbolic proof that the projection 
of Balkan polarization has reached its farthest possible throw? Pure, 
hieroglyphic, epigrammatic, diagrammatic, polarization: the US 
Embassy, the raging pissed-off Chinese students, the cops in-between 
with instructions to let 'em do what they want. A haiku, a veritable 
parable, a miniature of Balkan polarization, export style. 

I mean, who gave a damn about Serbia in China before? This is the 
disease that Milosevic has brought to the world since he stabbed his 
mentor Stambolic in the back in '87 (while grabbing power with the 
other hand). These splits and divisions and fissures and cracks, now
reaching way far out on the map, all the way across ancient trade 
routes, silk roads, yellow rivers, rice patties, encompassing the 
whole globe. They're his great achievement.

But, you ask, wasn't it Yankee Imperialist airpower that torched the 
Chinese Embassy, after oxymoronic military intelligence (read: the 
CIA. Disassemble immediately, do not reassemble; leave in small 
scattered pieces in Arlington, Virginia; prime pig-farming land), 
etc? How to blame it, then on, Slobodan? Do you blame everything on 
Slobodan Milosevic?

(4) Well, yes, actually. Or, at least, in particular, this specific, 
tragic, millennial, global, Balkan polarization. Not the same 
phenomenon as 'Balkanization', but close. Here we have everybody 
taking sides everywhere. Very dangerous. The Chinese students who 
once built a statue of liberty in Tiannenmen Square are now burning 
the American flag. The Macedonian slavs are streaming out of the 
predominantly Albanian parts of Macedonia; they're selling houses, 
land. They know what's about to happen, and they're preemptively 
self-polarizing. The western liberal left is divided, polarized, at 
odds over the use -- any use -- of western military power. Some 
recognize fascism when they see it; others think that dusting off 
that particular word is "rhetoric". It "isn't useful". (Advocating 
the *military defeat* of fascism, meanwhile, is seen as some kind of 
dopey naive collusion with the only evil they've ever trained 
themselves to recognize.) 

The right is also divided, between those who think we "don't have a 
dog in this fight" (and the band strikes up the tune! And the lyrics 
continue: "so why not give the JNA a green light..." i.e., 
descendents of James Baker, in chorus) -- and those who council 
massive land invasions, a total leveling of Belgrade, etc. The German 
left-center coalition government is increasingly polarized, balancing 
under their new glass Reichstag dome between 'no war... well, not for 
much more' Greens, and 'stay the course, use the Luftwaffe' others. 
The Italians? They're freaked out, simultaneously sympathetic about 
the refugees and paranoid about them taking to boats and heading for 
Italy, and what's more very unclear about if they can stand being 
NATO's main aircraft carrier anymore.

Blair? He's revved himself up into Churchillian overdrive, but all by 
itself the British Army isn't remotely up to the rhetoric. Clinton? 
He's completely polarized, but this goes without saying. He 
wants the steak, and the fish. He wants the reefer, but not the 
inhalation. He wants the blow-job, but not "sexual relations with 
that woman". He wants a war without any casualties; he wants to be 
*seen* to "take a stand against ethnic cleansing", while 
not-so-covertly sending signals that he'll negotiate. This is the 
same guy, remember, who made a "never forget" speech alongside Elie 
Weisel at the inauguration of the Holocaust Museum in Washington -- 
at the exact same time as Serbian shells were raining down on 
Sarajevo during the *third year* of siege. 

(5) Meanwhile the Serbs in Kosovo are rampaging, blowing heads off, 
torching villages, raping, murdering, driving 1.5 million people into 
graves, madness, other countries; chasing them into the hills to 
starve; slitting throats, torching mosques, land records, documents, 
archives. Words can't describe it; certainly the word 'polarization' 
would have to work overtime to describe it.

(6) The mailing lists are also polarized, at war, hornet's nests. 
People remembering better times write despairing e-mails, then give 
up. Tired of the mono-subject with its battle-lines, they want to 
get back to ruminating peacefully over the implications of cyber-this 
and virtual that. I even confronted my own alter-ego on-line 
recently, a kind of pure stupid confirmation of polarization. It made 
me think about some things, like: is this an *equal-opposite* 
polarization? Does the pro-Milosevic bias of the other 'me' imply 
that I'm somehow now whatever fire-breathing pro-NATO-war caricature 
could be constructed, I mean out of a semi-understanding of my true 
position? In *that* version of me -- the version held by the other 
'me' -- am I supposed to be enjoying, or getting some kind of 
satisfaction from, the horrific spectacle of the success of all of 
Milosevic's efforts? Under which heading I include all of the 
destruction being rained down on Serbia by NATO? 

(5) One little story. We go to Rab, two weeks ago; an Adriatic 
island not far from the Herzegovinian hinterlands. This is a place 
that should be prosperous, fat with tourist money. But it isn't, 
because Croatia hasn't had more than one and a half good tourist 
seasons in ten years. At a distant corner of the island, we look for 
a room to rent, and wind up in a faintly seedy-looking town. Since 
we're right in front of the large busy central cafe-bar, we decide to 
ask, despite the seediness, if there might be some rooms to 
rent nearby -- maybe in nicer terrain, farther away. A squinty, 
dangerous-looking dude, late 30's, deep tan, long hair, the 
owner of the joint, says he'll call some friends and ask. He invites 
us inside. He's wearing a big gold medallion with someone's 
silhouetted face on it -- gold chain, engraved letters, etc. I don't 
quite get who that face is, but when we go inside we see, up on the 
wall -- exactly where the smiley Josip Broz Tito portrait must've 
been, once - a blurry B&W framed picture of a scary-looking guy in a 
retro-military uniform. Hawk eyes, long nose.

I ask one of the waiters who it is -- even though I'm already 
beginning to suspect. "Ante Pavelic", he says. As if it's 
the most normal thing in the world.

Only the leader of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia in the 40's. Pal 
of Himmler, creator of death-camps, mass murderer of hundreds of 
thousands of Serbs, Jews,  Gypsies, etc.

So -- a quick, profound case of the Deep Europe creeps. The gold 
medallion, of course, is also of Pavelic. And suddenly, the 
crowd of shifty-eyed, beer-drinking, chain-smoking louts hanging 
around the bar slams into clear focus: all the owner's Ustache war 
buddies. 

And we get out of there, of course, as quickly as we can without 
running. But just before we go, there's a loud roar of jets over the 
Adriatic, heading for Serbia. And I suddenly realize (and you'll just 
have to either 1. trust me on this one or 2. disagree with me; your 
choice) that the Pavelic on the wall and the itchy-trigger-finger 
beer-drinkers and the Hell's-Angel-from-hell bar-owner wouldn't be 
there -- or at least, not in anything like the way they are -- if it 
wasn't for Milosevic. The guy who set the ethnic-difference demons 
free, starting in 1987. The great polarizer. The guy who laid the 
groundwork for Croatian fascism, Franjo Tudjman, HDZ, etc. The one 
who armed and supported the first wave of ethnic cleansing by the 
Kraijna Serbs in 1991, producing the first round of radicalized 
refugees thirsty for revenge. 

And I look up at the invisible jets, and I think to myself: they 
wouldn't be going, obviously, where they're going, if not for this 
same reason -- this same man. This war-lord in his self-created 
Balkan Mordor. And I realize that *I* also wouldn't be standing 
there, hearing and seeing all this, if it wasn't for Milosevic. How 
so? Because we're on the island of Rab due to the Slovenian 
independence day vacation weekend. And this also, very probably, 
wouldn't have happened without Milosevic. (And if it had, it would 
have taken place in another way: quietly, like Slovakia separating 
from the Czech republic, for example.)

So, it makes a perfect triangulation, produced, directed and 
edited by Milosevic: Ustache killers in an uneasy retirement, 
military jets in the sky, the placement of an observer who is there 
in the first place because of a national independence day that might 
never have happened. The whole picture is a lesson about the nature 
of power. It's the victory of that man's power, pure and simple. 
Because power is really all about engineering the reality around you 
to suit your tastes, isn't it? Applying your own warped reality, 
literally, to reality -- so that *actual reality warps*, and follow 
the contours you've made for it. From Bill Gates (no bodies, at least 
that I know of) to Slobodan Milosevic (250,000 and counting).

(6) I remember Yugoslavia. It was a great country. The people had 
real spirit. They were proud, they knew how to have a good time, they 
were very hospitable, they smoked too much and were charismatic. They 
played the best rock and roll in the socialist world. I miss it. 
Polarized to death.
Michael Benson  <michael.benson@pristop.si>
<http://www.ljudmila.org/kinetikon/> 
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