Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 09:24:32 -0500 To: static at lists.panix.com From: Ken Strayhorn <ken at dukecomm.duke.edu> Subject: Re: kilgore, unis
Doug, to Ben:
>ben schwartz wrote:
>
>>What are you saying here? That we're inconsistent for not stopping every
>>act of barbarism?
>
>I'm saying that humanitarian concern has nothing to do with the bombing.
>It's about turning NATO into a US-dominated "zapping force," as Tariq Ali
>put it, sidelining the UN and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation
>in Europe. Since Clinton and his pet, Blair, are running this, liberals in
>both countries have signed on in a way they wouldn't have had it been Bush
>and Major.
I'd say that has been the strangest aspect of this whole episode to me: war fever on the left. Face it - when you see right-wingers indulge in war mongering, you think nothing of it. When you see lefties with "blood and guts in their teeth" (tm Arlo Guthrie) you begin to wonder if millennium doom is just around the corner.
>>Gotta say one last thing on this. Growing up Jewish I was handed a pretty
>>strict doctrine on the Holocaust, one aspect of which was that no nation
>>helped the Jews. Everyone stood by, Roosevelt could have attacked the
>>camps earlier, Churchill didn't want to, blah blah blah. One Sunday school
>>teacher I had theorized that if Hitler had killed dogs the world would have
>>gone after him, but not for Jews. As a kid I never questioned this. But
>>from the Khmer Rouge to Rwanda to Serbia, its been a real revelation to me
>>how the world will just stand by and let _anybody_ get lined up and shot,
>>not just The Tribe. So, I feel slightly better and much worse all at the
>>same time.
Barbara Tuchman wrote that the study of history could be quite depressing at times when you realize that it's not just the 20th Century that has been blood-soaked.
Strayhorn