My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.4, #13, October 5, 1998

THE MEANING OF "NEVER AGAIN"

The nations in their majesty
United in their uselessness
Will send the Blue Beret.
Martin Newell

This column is an act of confusion, an attempt to come to terms with the issue of Kosovo, which leaves me deeply at war with myself. As one who came of age during Vietnam, and married a conscientious objector, I have reservations about using military force to solve political problems. I know that war solves one problem, but creates others. I have never been comfortable with the idea that Americans have the right to impose our idea of morality on other countries of whose culture and history we know nothing. And as the mother of a 25-year-old--what used to be thought of as draft age--I have to ask whether this is a cause I would see my son sacrificed to.

On the other side of the ledger is our historical failure to rescue the Jews from Hitler. When we liberated the death camps in 1944, our leaders professed official horror. And official innocence--we did not KNOW.

This is, of course, nonsense. Our leaders may not have understood the full extent of the persecution of the Jews, but they knew it was happening. As many Jews were attempting to flee the noose that was closing around them, our government did not even accept its full immigration quota from Eastern Europe in any of those pre-war years. During the war our generals were asked to bomb rail lines that carried Jews to concentration camps, and they refused. England's leaders actually prevented Jews who had miraculously escaped Hitler's clutches from emigrating to Israel. If Hitler committed murder on an unprecedented scale, it was with the unacknowledged complicity of the official "good guys."

Still we said "We did not know." But we also said "Never again."

Now, as I look at Slobodan Milosevic, starting all over fresh in Kosovo after he has already murdered perhaps hundreds of thousands in Bosnia, it seems to me the time has come to put up or shut up. As long as CNN continues to show us mass graves, homes destroyed by mortars, and the mangled bodies of children, we can not claim we do not know. As a long hard winter in the Balkan mountains begins to close in on refugees driven there without food, shelter, or clothing, the western democratic governments are being forced into a moral choice.

Of course we would all prefer a bloodless, diplomatic solution. We would prefer not to risk our pilots and planes in bombing runs, and above all, we would prefer not to send our young men to fight on the ground and in the mountains. We would much rather sit down and negotiate with Milosevic.

Just like we negotiated with Hitler, allowing him one little strip of territory at a time, signing away the lives of Jews with every strip.

Unfortunately, diplomacy is unable to deal with genuine evil. And in the person of Milosevic, the western democracies are confronting evil. He is willing to exterminate anybody in his way. He encourages his troops to attack women and children with mortar fire, conduct mass executions of young men, commit rape as an act of deliberate terror, and round up other civilians and herd them into concentration camps--all while smiling at the diplomats and saying, "No, you misunderstand, that is not our policy." Confronted with irrefutable filmed evidence, he will say vaguely that perhaps a few soldiers got carried away.

What monsters like these have going for them is that they know we do not care quite enough to risk our own young men's lives to stop it. When Milosevic thumbs his nose at the world a little too openly, we do the bare minimum. We drop a few bombs, and drop food for the starving refugees. Confronted with the show of force, Milosevic backs down.

For a while. Because he knows that eventually we will become bored. Eventually the pesky CNN cameras will go someplace else. And then he will attack again. The whole dance will begin anew--stiff diplomatic notes, pointed remarks in the United Nations, Serbian assurances that these events are not really happening, but if they are, they are certainly not sponsored by the government. It all takes so much time, and so much will on the part of the western democracies.

And we don't have that will. We all have our own problems to deal with, and God forbid our newscasts should have to take time away from breathless new details about Monica. God forbid that money that could be going to a tax cut should go into military adventures in the Balkans. God forbid that young Americans risk their lives just because genocide is being committed in some far off country.

So we will continue our economic boycotts, which strangle the country's economy, and make lives miserable for the poor, but leave Milosevic untouched. We will probably use air power again, even though our bombs have been ineffective--in a country of mountains, we cannot safely fly low enough to target our damage precisely. We have not destroyed Milosevic's ammunition depots, airfields, munitions factories. We have not destroyed his capacity for murder.

So the question becomes, what did we mean when we said "Never again"? Did we mean exactly that, that we would never again allow genocide?

Or did we mean that we would only allow it to be done when TV cameras were not watching? Did we mean that we would allow it only if stopping it required too much sacrifice from us (and we could salve our consciences by pretending to be doing something about it)?

If we DID mean "Never again," we would have to do something real, send actual troops, to fight on the ground. We would have to take out the bullies up close and personal. This would be no TV war--some of our sons and daughters would die, or be maimed.

Or we could keep on making fine speeches, and hope that CNN will just stop showing us all those people bleeding and dying. Because the damn pictures won't let us be innocent, and there they are every night, spoiling our dinners, like T.S. Eliot's "children at the gates, who cannot pray and will not go away."

I have just argued myself into a war, because the second choice is indefensible. So now comes the hard question--if I am willing to send other women's sons and daughters to war for this cause, would I be willing to see my own son go? My bright, funny, snotty but loving young man, who would have been murdered by Nazis because his father is Jewish? Hell, would I be willing to go myself if they had any use for an overweight gray-haired lady whose only talents are with words and information?

And I'm afraid the answer is: yes, I would. Because if we will not stand up against the monsters, we are not worth saving.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.