And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
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via Catherine Davids
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 13:27:13 EDT
Subject: Peace, War & Genocide (Embargoed 4/16)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FROM UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
FOR RELEASE: WEEK OF APRIL 16, 1999
COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez
ON THE MEANING OF PEACE, WAR AND GENOCIDE
What is war? One does not need to be a four-star general to know what it is.
However, Madeleine Albright assures us that what is happening in the Balkans
is
not war.
What is peace? That's an easy one. However, the forces attempting to stop
the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and bring about peace are furthering the
concept
of "We had to destroy them to save them."
What is genocide? Most of us are pretty sure what it is. Yet 1986 Nobel
Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel wrote recently that what is happening in Kosovo
constitutes ethnic cleansing, but is no holocaust.
Albright is being clever, reminiscent of Oliver North, or perhaps she's just
being Clintonesque. NATO is destroying Yugoslavia and contributing to the
decimation of the region -- to save the Kosovars. And yet, as we all know, we
will all soon be footing the bill to help rebuild the region. Eisel's comments
are disconcerting when one considers the Slobodan Milosevic-led butchery
taking
place in Kosovo. The attempt to rank atrocities is mind-boggling -- as though
they were competitions. To his credit, he has made the argument that when
despots run amok, society has the moral right to put a halt to their madness.
What comes to mind regarding Kosovo is a passage from "Hell, Healing and
Resistance" by David Hallock (The Plough Publishing House, $25): "No one knows
better than those who 'were there,' that war is hell."
With high-tech missiles dropping over the Balkans from a safe distance, we
think this old adage is no longer applicable; NATO forces are not getting
close
enough to "be there" -- to see, smell or feel the devastation they are
inflicting.
George Mariscal, who edited "Aztlan and Viet Nam" (University of California
Press, $18.95), says that this kind of conflict we are waging -- which has
been
dubbed "the Nintendo war" -- desensitizes us to the actual effects of war.
In his book of essays, Mariscal, who is a Vietnam veteran, presents and
analyzes many disparate views of the 1960's war -- our last real war and the
one
that refuses to disappear from our national consciousness. The essayists do
agree on a few things: that war is indeed hell and that it will take Vietnam a
few generations to recover from it. They also agree that people of color
fought
and died disproportionately on the front lines of the jungles of Southeast
Asia,
and that many U.S. soldiers continue to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder.
In our view, as bad as PTSD is, it serves a societal purpose -- to remind us
never to wage mindless wars. Hallock notes, "PTSD is an after-effect of all
war." He writes, "Without a doubt, PTSD is most acute in veterans who have
seen
or participated in the killing of defenseless people."
Without traumatized witnesses at home to remind us of the horrors of war and
without societal PTSD, we as a nation may become inclined to go to war much
more
often.
Because of his Vietnam experience, Mariscal doesn't believe governments are
always forthcoming as to the actual reasons for intervening. He's not a
pacifist
and believes in "just wars." However, in this case he argues: "If genocide was
the actual reason for intervening, then it's ridiculous that ground troops
were
not sent in to halt the ethnic cleansing. And if genocide was our concern,
then
why didn't we also go into Central America and Africa?"
Perhaps, by not challenging government propaganda, society was deluded into
believing that the atrocities in Central America and Africa were not
holocausts.
More likely, at least in the case of Central America, we did not intervene to
stop the atrocities because the perpetrators were our allies.
It is understood that the purpose of the United Nations is to bring about
peace, but it should also be in the business of investing in programs that
foster understanding among peoples so solutions can be found before the only
resort left is military action. In this post-Cold War era, civil society and
the
U.N. need to have a full discussion as to what constitutes genocide. And we
need
to agree that the job of the U.N. -- and not the job of military alliances --
must include halting genocide. Its job, of course, should not include
devastating peoples and nations.
Perhaps that's why the action in Kosovo is not a U.N.-sponsored mission.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
* Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales are authors of Gonzales/Rodriguez:
Uncut & Uncensored (ISBN 0-918520-22-3 UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies Library,
Publications Unit. Rodriguez is the author of Justice: A Question of Race
(Cloth ISBN 0-927534-69-X paper ISBN 0-927534-68-1 Bilingual Review Press)
and the antibook, The X in La Raza II and Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming
Human. They can be reached at PO BOX 7905, Albq NM 87194-7904, 505-242-7282
or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gonzales's direct line is 505-248-0092 or
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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