Violence

Posted on October 13, 2002 in Peace

People become truly odd when it comes to the question of violence against people they don’t know. They deny it, justify it, pretend it isn’t much, treat it as a joke.

When I went to Yugoslavia in 1992, I saw people with missing limbs or with terrible scars in both Croatia and Serbia. I came back to describe it and found two kinds of denial. The first was that of those from one side or another who wanted vengeance for some crime that the other side had done anyways. The second was the attitude of people who I call “the nasty nice”, people who could see the suffering of one side but didn’t want the other side talking about its pain. They performed the sacred duty of upholding the propaganda of jingoists. They sang two songs: violence is terrible and our violence doesn’t hurt at all.

You can watch this play out in both personal affairs and international ones. As one of his reasons for war, Chief Jingoist George W. Bush cries that Sadam Hussein tried to kill his daddy. It is true. But George Bush Sr. directed the armed forces to find and kill Sadam Hussein during the Gulf War. Here we have the petty politics of personal feud taken to the global level. The American people should just stay out of it, but they’re filling the second role, that of the nasty nice who remember 9-11 but forget the Iraqi men, women, and children who have died in repetitious American bombing raids.

The nasty nice buy the propaganda line. They’re not nice because they refuse to evaluate the whole truth and declare “Violence is wrong. It is not a thing to be ignored, threatened, done, or joked about.”