Trapped between concerned Americans buying duct tape and excited Americans listening to Tom Brokaw glorify WWII, I often find myself out of place. Having grown up in Eastern Europe--a region that has been, without exaggeration, continuously raped and tortured by war throughout its history--my view on this gutter of human behavior leaves no room for paranoia, apathy or enthusiasm. Products of ignorance, these three common attitudes toward war among some Americans have become more explicit in light of recent events.
This ignorance on the part of many Americans is quite understandable. In order to comprehend and appreciate war in its full glory, it must be taken beyond the context of an army traveling across half of the globe to fight a ogue state"" for the sake of ""preserving freedom."" If one's perception is based on past experience, America's collective memory of war is unreliable.
Fortunately, history has been kind to this country--it has been almost 200 years since continental America was invaded by a foreign army. The scars healed and the monstrous details of war were erased from the national conscience. As a result, when painting a mental picture of war, an average young American forms bright associations with honor and patriotism, not starvation and mass murder--the less colorful and more accurate associations of an average young European, who every day has to find a balance between a mild taboo on war and permanent reminders of its consequences.
In the United States, on the other hand, broad symbolic values and undefined threats to those values--essentially rhetorical tools--have become more genuine than the brutal realities of war itself. A sociological phenomenon described as ""virtual war"" has emerged--a war fought somewhere far away that struggles to find its way into the conscience of civilians through the television screen and is immediately blocked out in favor of ""The Simpsons."" This is precisely the decisive factor that shapes long-term national attitudes towards war--civilian involvement.
Civilian casualties on the home front introduce an entirely different dimension of war with extremely painful implications. This is where the perceptual differences between Europe and the United States come into play. One cannot demand much from American citizens--although in its recent history the United States has been at war with countries too numerous to mention--its people have hardly been through war. While the war in Vietnam was an American tragedy, it was nevertheless the war in Vietnam. Thus I humbly thank those Americans, who are currently making efforts to sympathize with this tragic aspect of war--they have learned the real lessons of Sept. 11.
Deaths of the innocent put aside, inquiries into war on the home front have quite a bit more to offer us. During the 1999 NATO campaign in Yugoslavia, for instance, there were probably no more than 700 civilian casualties as a direct result of the air strikes. A relatively small number, isn't it? Fewer than the number of gun homicides every month in the United States.
Add to those deaths the destruction of 59 bridges, nine major highways, seven airports, radio and television broadcasting stations, a 70 percent cutoff of electricity production and oil refinery capacity, a 23 percent increase in unemployment, more than 100,000 refugees and a psychological devastation of a national populace in a country not much larger than Wisconsin. You can now begin to assess the full impact of the ""peacekeeping"" campaign. (Can't help but resort to sarcasm--bombing to achieve peace makes as much sense as binge-eating to lose weight.)
This is not a Marxist attack on American foreign policy. Nor is it an outcry for pacifism. It is merely a realistic and sincere warning against a catastrophe based on firsthand experience. Many have pointed out the irony of ""Germany preaching to the world about peace all of a sudden."" I don't find this at all ironic. If any state has the credibility to propagate peace and warn against the dangers of war, Germany seems like the ideal candidate and it would be wise to listen. There should be no idealism involved in attempting to prevent a war. Common sense is sufficient. Trust me.
