The Enemey Is Not Human, Rieff

• The following section is drawn from the book Slaughethouse - Bosnia and the Failure of the West (1995) by David Rieff


• Rieff concedes that all sides in the war committed atrocitites


• But he comes down hard on Serb leaders and on Western nations for failing to curb their aggression


• The slaughter of Bosnia is the story of defeat


• War has its laws, and soldiers, at least when they are failthful to their codes, rightly claim thiers to be an honorable as well as a terrible calling


• If Bosnia proves anything it is that this is a shameful lie


• 200,000 Muslims died in Bosnia in front of the world's tv cameras, while 2 million more were displaced


• A State formally recognized by the European Community, by the U.S., and by the UN was allowed to be destroyed


• The slaugter was led by a group of extreme Bosnian Serb nationalists


• They succeeded through a campaign of propaganda and terror


• Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was about methodically humiliating a people and destroying their culutre, as well as killing them


• A crucial factor in their success was convincing the Serbs they were an injured party


• The waves of UN officials who went to talk to the leader Radovan Karadzic proved to be a hopeless exercise


• Over the years Karadzic and other Serb leaders learned that the Un and the great powers were not going to lift a finger to stop them


• With the world community supine, the Serb leaders only had to win a propaganda war among thier people, which they did surprisingly well


• In reality, the victory of the ethnic nationalists was not inevitable


• They won because of what they did, and because of what others did not do - particularly the West - not because history was on thier side


• They won because the idea of Greater Serbia was coherent in a way that the idea of the Bosnian state never succeeded in becoming


• Because the Serb fighters had 100 guns for every one the Bosnian side had


• They won because they knew how to take old fears and complaints, repackage them, and cause otherwise decent Serbs to commit genocide

Glinkina: Crime and Corruption

Main Idea: The liberalization of the Soviet Union provided high governmental officials and top managers with an opportunity to take advantage of the system to reap huge profits. The police force also deteriorated and organized crime became a huge part of Russian life.

Organized Crime
An estimated 200,000 active criminal groups existed in Russia by the mid-1990s.

Retail markets in every Russian city are controlled by gangsters who collect a share of the revenues of each vendor.

It is estimated that from 1992 to 1994, over 20 percent of the petroleum output and one-third of the metals production were smuggled out of the country.

At one point, 70% of the raw materials shipped from Russia by rail through Lithuania never reached their legal destination, Kaliningrad. Railway personnel and costums officials conspired in these operations.

Government information indicates that roughly 70 to 80 percent of banks, as well as state and private companies, make payments to recketeers and corrupt officials.

Due to the access to former KGB operatives and the fact that law enforcement was lax, the cost of a professional murder in Russia is low.

Privatization
Most enterprises were privatized by the mid-1990s.

The first phase of "official" privatization entitled individual Russians to vouchers that were redeemable for cash or a share of industry. Criminal elements began to collect these vouchers through various means. With the vast amounts they collected, these groups bought up most desirable enterprises at giveaway prices.

Corrupt privatization aggravated Russia's financial woes, as the state disposed of valuable assets at extremely low prices.

The Oligarchs
A young, unscrupulous economic elite known as the oligarchs now controlled much of the Russian economy.

They were able to use their influence to influence government appointments and sway elections.

From the outset, the oligarchs have been reluctant to invest to modernize production.

The wealth of Russia was shunted abroad.

Illegal capital flight has also helped them shield their gains from taxation, undermining the capacity of government to finance itself adiquately.

STEPHEN SPENDER'S EUROPEAN WITNESS

Thesis: In Stephen Spendler’s account of the German city of Cologne, he describes a city and a people devastated by the war and struggling to make any sort of recovery
I. Few buildings remain habitable, most are empty
II. Thousands walk through the rubble that used to be the “hub of the Rhineland, with a great shopping center, acres of plate-glass, restaurants, a massive business street”
III. “The external destruction is so great that it cannot be healed and the surrounding life of the rest of the country cannot flow into and resuscitate the city”
IV. The people do not resemble residents, merely wanderers
V. The unscathed cathedral gives the city hope
VI. The destruction is a remarkable achievements of modern society in cooperation between several nations
VII. The city, held together by numerous civilizations for centuries, has died

Arbatov: New Russia

Russian economist Georgi Arbatov describes the tragedy of perestroika: it created too little incentive for the transition to a free market system, yet cut social services too much for the government to serve the Russian people.

Obvious that the old system is not functioning

Yegor Gaidar proposes a “Chicago school” program (so named after the influential group of U. Chicago economists who advocated laissez-faire)

Results: disastrous.

Some problems: inflation, loss of social benefits, lower quality of life

Losing pensions

Tremendous increase in medicinal prices

No social services: Education falling precipitously

Less access to culture: books, movies, etc.

Widespread corruption throughout the system

"The way of ordinary Russians has deteriorated remarkably."

Thomas Friedman's Globalization as An International System

Thesis: New York Times journalist, Thomas Friedman, maintains globalization is an international system only arrived at post Cold War. This new system also contains its own rules, and logic, and it influences our politics, environment, geopolitics, and economics for every country on the planet. Friedman thus notes the true international quality of our new economic system.

• Main difference between now and previous eras is the new degree and intensity with which the world is tied together into a single globalized marketplace.



• Previously, pre-1914, nations had been left out of globalization. It was now entirely global.



• New global system also different both technologically (previous era built around falling transportation costs, modern era built around falling telecommunications costs), and politically.



• Falling of tellecommunications costs makes success easier for smaller countries and even individuals.



• Globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system (like the Cold War the new system has its own structure of power, has its own rules, has its own dominant ideas, has its own perspective on the globe, has its own defining technologies, has its own defining measurement, has its own defining anxiety).



• Nonetheless, Globalization stands almost completely opposite in many qualities.



• Cold War about division, Globalization about unity (unity aided by new technologies of communication)



• Driving idea of Globalization is free-market capitalism



• Globalization not "frozen," like Cold War system; rather, it is a dynamic ongoing process.



• Globalization has a culturally homogenous culture, as opposed to Cold War separation



• Globalization has defining technologies different and more advanced than those of the Cold War system



• Last, and most important, Globalization has its own defining structure of power that is much more complex than that of the Cold War system, which relied on the balance between the US and USSR.



• Balance of globalization resulted from 1. traditional balance between nation-states; 2. system lies between nation-states and global markets; 3. Balance of individuals and nation-states.