Billy Bragg — this machine bombs Belgrade
By Sean Healy
There has been a soft spot for Billy Bragg in many socialists' hearts — certainly in mine. He's even produced a t-shirt acknowledging it: "Socialism of the heart", it reads.
Over the years though, that spot has been getting smaller and smaller as Bragg's song-writing has become more wishy-washy and more moderate.
Bragg's current tour is to promote his new album Mermaid Avenue, made up of previously un-released Woody Guthrie lyrics put to the British musicians' music. While Guthrie's strong radical streak, dating back to the 1930s, is undeniable, one has to wonder about Bragg's. "I'm not a political songwriter", he said ad nauseam on Triple J, "I'm an honest songwriter".
That's not quite true. Bragg still has politics; they've just changed. From an early 1980s alignment with the socialist left, Bragg is now little more than a mainstream "left" social-democrat.
During his April 13 Sydney concert, Bragg made much of his anti-fascist credentials, speaking admiringly of the motto that Woody Guthrie pasted on his guitar ("This machine kills fascists").
To give him his due, Bragg's past credentials are impressive. But it is what he's using those credentials to do that is less than impressive. Bragg has become a convert to the cause of NATO intervention in the Balkans, all in the name of "fighting fascism".
In the introduction to Guthrie's song, "You fascists are bound to lose", Bragg expounded his views on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He first crossed himself: "It's horrible to think that NATO, supposedly set up for defence, is now bombing cities in Europe." He also expressed his obviously genuine shock and outrage at the conditions faced by Kosovar refugees.
Drawing an analogy between Hitler and the rise of fascism in the 1930s and Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosova, he then declared his support for NATO's bombing: "I know it's hard but we have to do something, we can't allow fascism to go on the march again or allow repeats of scenes from the 1940s."
He argued for the use of ground troops too: "We have to go in there and put ourselves between those armies and the innocent civilians."
Who the hell is "we"? "We" are the very military powers that he started his career opposing. But the Western military powers have never shown any interest in preventing atrocities in the Balkans; their concern has been ensuring "stability". The West's interests are entirely strategic and geopolitical. Their interests are all about who runs Europe, just as they were in World War II.
In the early 1990s, when Milosevic was on the rise, NATO powers opposed moves for Kosovan independence. During the Bosnian war, NATO imposed, and enforced, an arms embargo that had no impact on the Yugoslav army and their militias besieging Sarajevo, but which frustrated Bosnian attempts to defend themselves. Even before the current war, NATO and Milosevic agreed that Kosovan independence is out of the question; NATO's Rambouillet agreement would have given the Kosovars only a derisory degree of autonomy.
For that matter, the Western military powers have about as much interest in preventing Serb chauvinist-inspired atrocities in the Balkans as they did in opposing the original rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, as now, these powers were more concerned with preventing popular liberation movements from gaining the advantage than with stopping such inhumanities.
During the Spanish Civil War, for example, the Western powers imposed an arms embargo that provided the template for the 1990s Balkans. That earlier arms embargo did nothing to prevent a Nazi-backed Franco consolidating power but it did everything to slowly strangle the anti-fascist struggle of the Republic's armies.
The "humanitarian" concerns of Blair and his ilk about Kosova have as much to do with the prosecution of this war as Margaret Thatcher's concern for the Falkland Islanders had to do with her war with Argentina in 1982.
Billy Bragg understood that then. He doesn't seem to understand it any more.