Syndicate: Vlada Petric: RE Susan Sontag

[bo.pejic@snafu.de (Bojana Pejic)]

From: Milovan Destil Markovic <mar.tol@snafu.de
To: "Bojana Pejic (E-Mail)" <bo.pejic@snafu.de
Subject: Odgovor na Susan Sontag: Vlada Petric Beograd.com
Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 02:41:06 +0200


Introduction

It seems that 50 days of persistent bombing of Yugoslavia, with repeated
"collateral damage" and increasing numbers of innocent citizens killed due
to "unintentional
errors," has produced a unique effect on people of Yugoslav extraction in
this country.

This phenomenon is particularly interesting from a psychological
standpoint, because the emotional impact of the inhuman destruction
affects individuals directly,
regardless of their political persuasion or social background.

As a result, more and more Americans of Yugoslav origin, who left the
Communist regime and involved themselves wholeheartedly in the social,
economic, and
cultural life of the United States, are beginning to reconsider their
faith in the "New World Order."

Also among the disillusioned are those who were born in this country, but
have become gradually aware of the injustice and double standards their
government exercises towards the land of their fathers.

Vlada Petric, renowned film theorist and professor at the Visual Arts
Department, Harvard University, has spent three decades teaching at
various American
universities, and was the first Curator of the Harvard Film Archive.
Throughout this period he did not participate in any political action in
this country, dedicating all his
intellectual capacity to education, but he vigorously supported the
massive demonstrations against Milosevic's authoritarian regime in
Yugoslavia.

Triggered by the article in The New York Times Magazine, in which Susan
Sontag justifies the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia, Professor Petric felt
compelled to get involved and wrote a response to Sontag, which appears here.

Editor


Why Are We Bombing Kosovo?
- How Susan Sontag Promotes War -
                                                      by prof. Vlada Petric

     Realizing that the NATO attack on Yugoslavia "has been bungled," the
initiators and supporters of this military intervention in Europe are now
trying to present the
action as a "moral" issue. In her article entitled "Why Are We in Kosovo?"
(The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999), Susan Sontag provides for the
war a
rationalization that sounds like a call to revenge. Instead of asking her
ill-conceived question, it is more appropriate to ask, "Why Are We Bombing
Kosovo?"
Because by bombing Kosovo--and Yugoslavia, for that matter--we will never
"be" in Kosovo. To achieve this and to resolve the Kosovo conflict--which
Sontag
irresponsibly proclaims "not that complicated"--there exist only two options:

     a) Instant invasion that would involve bitter fighting on the ground,
resulting in great casualties among the soldiers (which one can argue to
be
     justifiable), with enormous losses of innocent people on all sides.
     b) Persistent negotiations that may last long, yet are worth every
innocent human being destroyed by the brutal military machine and by
single-minded
     political thinkers like Sontag.

    Untouched by the tragic aspect of the situation in the Kosovo province
of Yugoslavia, Sontag recommends war as the best solution, posing yet
another question:
"How can you stop those bent on genocide without war?" It seems
inconceivable that an artist, who is supposed to put humanistic ideals
above politics, can conceive
such a question, and conclude that "not all wars are unjust." In her mind,
the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is a "just war" (read: "just aggression")
although it "has
been bungled," but she fails to explain why this war is doing badly. To do
so, she would have to admit that, after NATO intervention, the number of
Albanian Kosovar
refugees who had to leave their homes has increased from a trickle to a
flood, while many hundreds of innocent people have been killed throughout
Serbia,
Montenegro, and Kosovo, due to "technical and logistic errors." In a
"just" war, of course, errors must be justified, and Sontag assumes the
role of an arbitrator who
declares that it is "only a small portion of the suffering that the
Milosevic government has inflicted on neighboring peoples." What a
grotesque rationalization: a "small
portion" of the prescribed punishment of a people for the misdeeds
committed by both their own and other leaders! This implies blind
retribution that can only ignite
more hatred and continue the killing. As an educator, I fortunately
learned that such a vindictive method of "teaching" people how to behave
does not work, since it
expands violence and encourages retaliation.

    Dividing wars between "just" and "unjust," Sontag estimates how much
retaliation is "necessary" to punish the nation she proclaims as the sole
culprit for the war in
what once was Yugoslavia. She readily equates the Serbian people with the
Milosevic regime, which is like declaring the Russian people responsible
for the Stalinist
atrocities, or claiming that all Germans are guilty for what Hitler did to
the Jews, Gypsies, Serbs, and other ethnic minorities in Europe. Only a
mind infected by hatred
can produce and popularize such a monstrous concept.

    To support her thesis, Sontag recalls her experience in Sarajevo
during the Summer of 1993, comparing the ethnic civil war in Yugoslavia
with the Nazi slaughter of
the German Jews. Again, her comparison is tendentious and severely flawed,
motivated by one-sidedness. Certainly, the shelling of Dubrovnik,
Sarajevo,
Vukovar--as well as ethnic cleansing--is wrong, just as the bombing of
Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis, Podgorica, Pristina, and many other cities in
Yugoslavia is wrong and
counter-productive. Moreover, bombing as an ultimatum cannot bring the
warring parties to a negotiating table, particularly if the "supreme
judge" unequivocally
supports only one side in the conflict.

    Promotion of war, whether labeled as "just" or "unjust," is a crime
against humane consciousness, because it excludes concern for the innocent
citizens trapped in
the power struggle for political, military, and economic supremacy. Deaf
to the cries of the innocent Yugoslav citizens threatened by NATO bombs,
Sontag proposes
bloody retribution as a "just reaction" to the Kosovo conflict, and poses
her final question "Can we really say that there is no response to this?"
Of course, there is and
should be a response, but not by warmongering and encouraging more
bloodshed, as Sontag does, with the pretense of extinguishing the "radical
evil in the world."
By killing innocent people, Susan, you would create more evil in the world.

    There have always been those who glorified war as a means of resolving
discord between states and nations and some even label wars as "holy,"
blessed by
God. Today, when nothing is sacred any more, we have to oppose ideas that
place ideology above human life, instead of contributing to the
supercilious militaristic
logic that is "a dangerous aberration of human consciousness," as Mirko
Kovac, the great Serbian writer and both Susan's and my friend, would say.
Unconcerned
with peoples' suffering and the multiplication of innocent victims, Susan
Sontag promotes her "just" war" from an Italian coffee bar on the sunny
Adriatic coast.

Professor Vlada Petric taught film history at the Visual Department,
Harvard University from 1973-1997. He is the founder and first Curator of
the Harvard Film Archive.
Retired, he lives in Cambridge, completing his two books on film theory
and aesthetics.
______________________________________________________________

Milovan Destil Markovic		Atelier: Tel/Fax +49(30)6239503
mar.tol@snafu.de
Under Construction: www.snafu.de/~mar.tol
Monumentenstr.24
D-10965 Berlin
Tel: +49(30)7866599



-----------------------------
Bojana Pejic
bo.pejic@snafu.de
Phone/Fax: (+49) 30-787 52 90


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