Review of Rohini Hensman's Indefensible: A Challenge to
Pseudo-Anti-Imperialism
By Frieda Afary
September 10, 2018
Excerpts:
Are you are incensed by the lies
of so-called anti-imperialist leftists who defend Vladimir Putin and Bashar
al-Assad? Do you want to engage in international solidarity with struggles for
democracy, social justice, and revolutionary transformation in countries that
have been plagued by imperialist intervention? Then this book is a must read for
you.
The case of Bosnia-Herzegovina
was the “earliest post-Cold War example of sections of the Left supporting
right-wing ethnoreligious nationalism.” (p. 95) Pseudo-anti-imperialists
denied that the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo were driven by
Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s drive to build a “Greater Serbia.”
Hence, In 1992, when Bosnia-Herzegovina held a referendum and declared
independence to separate itself from an ongoing war between Serbia and Croatia
(whose leader Franjo Tudjman was as nationalistic as Milosevic), many on the
Left sided with Serbia.
When the Serbian military and
paramilitary forces started a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian and
Kosovar Muslims as well as people of multiethnic origin, and placed many Muslim
women and men in rape camps and concentration camps, leftists such as James
Petras continued to side with Milosevic. Petras dismissed the heroic
struggle of the Bosnians who wanted to maintain a multi-ethnic identity and
labeled them “fundamentalists” and “terrorists.” (p. 114)
Although NATO and the U.S. had
mostly colluded with Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing and only belatedly took
military action against Serbia in the face of a world outcry, leftists like
Michel Chossudovsky attributed the war to NATO. They claimed that “It was
not president Milosevic but NATO that started the war in Yugoslavia.” (p. 112)
Even most of those leftists and socialists who did not support Milosevic simply
freed themselves of any responsibility for taking sides and claimed that what
was taking place in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo was a “civil war” and not a
struggle against genocide and ethnic cleansing. In the words of Hensman, this
“is the first time in the post-Soviet world that such a clear convergence
between neo-Stalinism and neo-fascism is discernible.” (p. 116)
Read the full review
here.