AN OFF AND ON COMMENTARY ON SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ISSUES
by John Q. Pridger, C.P.
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WATER UNDER THE KEEL
24 June 1999: Quite a lot has transpired since this commentary last appeared. There have been more high school shootings, as well as another war. Clinton's little NATO war in Kosovo has been the biggest event -- a war that resembled a video game, wherein the allies escaped without a single casualty, while zapping the enemy mercilessly. Clinton and our NATO allies decided that action was needed in Kosovo even if it was wrong. Of course, our bombing campaign was wrong -- there's no other way to describe it (even if it did result in a temporary end to the ethnic cleansing) -- and the costs will be incalculable. Simply stated, we stopped the ethnic cleansing through even greater carnage and mass destruction. It was a messy business to begin with, and our bombing undoubtedly made it many times worse. It isn't over, of course. Really, it's just beginning. We've found ourselves another quagmire, which will lead to untold and unending consequences. We're building capital -- but not the kind we need (bully capital) -- and it will continue to haunt us as a nation as time goes on. Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair are currently puffed up with their big victory. But what have we won in the final analysis? We don't really know yet, and won't for some time. We won the bombing campaign, but now comes the hard part -- dealing with the consequences. At very best, we'll be saddled with feeding a couple million people and rebuilding of an entire nation.
As always, the first casualty of any war is truth. The media is now rife with "truth as the victors see it," as they continue to justify NATO's actions and vilify the enemy. What is always lacking in such case is the whole truth. What is left out is a detailed account of what led up to the ethnic cleansing in the first place. It surely didn't happen simply out of shear meanness as we are being led to believe. There were events and developments that led up to it, (both ancient and contemporary) and justified it in the eyes of the Yugoslavian leadership, and that's what we are not being told. Not that anything can justify such wholesale human rights abuses as were apparently occurring, but more mayhem, brought on by outsiders, wasn't a constructive answer. For the time being NATO troops are viewed as saviors by the ethnic Albanian Kosovars -- but now Kosovar Serbs are fleeing their homes and their homeland.
Even if our intentions were noble, we in fact butted into somebody else's business and took sides in a centuries-old feud we don't understand (such things simply make no sense to us.) We should have used other means to influence the flow of events. Evidently, we missed the boat some time ago, when we might have been able to do some good through non-violent diplomatic means. We attacked and savagely bombed a nation that had not attacked nor provoke us in any way. We allegedly did it purely for humanitarian reasons. Our bombing caused a much larger humanitarian disaster -- one that is even now still building.
GOOD AND BAD ETHNIC CLEANSING
How do we choose between good and bad ethnic cleansing? Obviously, the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was bad. Perhaps the last time ethnic cleansing on such a scale took place in Europe was in 1948, when Palestine was cleansed of upwards of a million Palestinian Arabs. Apparently that was good ethnic cleansing. In that case, not only were we not outraged, we vied with the Soviet Union to be first to recognize the new state of Israel, and those who did the ethnic cleansing. Hitler's ethnic cleansing, of course, was very, very bad. But the post-war ethnic cleansing of millions of ethnic Germans from their traditional homes was merely viewed as tough 'taters. That was good ethnic cleansing.