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| America: The World's Most Violent Nation? |
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| If You're An Absolute Idiot..... |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, May 19, 1999. I live among people from all around the world, mostly European, granted, but also Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Kiwis, and Australians. During the course of the day, it is not unusual for groups of us to be watching television when the news appears, often highlighting the Kosovo bombing, the refugees, the absolute ethical cesspit that is and has been the Balkans for centuries. Almost immediately, a very badly acted pageant begins, with the Europeans taking the lead. It turns out that America doesn't know what it is doing in the Balkans, and that it's so much worse since the bombing started and, in any case, what do you expect from a nation that still has the death penalty? Clearly America is a violent country - obviously the most violent - and that's why the world, and poor, poor Europe especially, is going to hell in a hand basket. It is hard to do dramatic justice to such scenes, but you must imagine those lines being delivered with the heads at ninety degree angles to me, the older, gray haired white American male in the audience. And those thin, tight, irritating European smiles with closed lips, only partially due to the paucity of dentists east of Reykavich….. Unfortunately for those travelers used to badmouthing the United States while they themselves avoid military service, employment, or reality, I am not given to accepting these observations, especially from Europeans, especially from the vantage of age. First off, world, the United States is probably not the most violent country, this charge has always been absurd. It is true that America took up the myth of the white knight, transmogrified it to the cowboy, and gave him a legal gun. Cultures that fear the hoi poloi think that foolhardy, and they ridicule us for it. Anyone who has ever traveled, spent time in the world's bars and in the world's streets, must know this. Here is the proof. If a man slugs his wife here in Boulder, police are called and it is mandated that charges be brought. It becomes a multiple statistic, a product American culture - the home of baseball - loves. It also becomes a statistic available for Europeans to use condemning our violence. In virtually any other nation on earth, this does not become a statistic but a family or village story. The police are not called, the neighbors are not particularly upset if it doesn't happen too often. Even where this is considered a taboo, statistics are not reliably kept, because there is no financial incentive to do so except here in the United States, where police budgets are dependent upon this sort of thing. If there is a riot here on the Hill in Boulder, people are arrested, the full horror of burning sofas in the streets is documented and it becomes a million dollar project with people's legal lives in the balance. Even in Britain, where guns are essentially illegal, there is a comparable amount of violence because fist fights outside pubs or soccer matches are not even of particular interest to the participants, much less the police. And because the world's police forces are not very good outside the United States - which is very scary and very true - a whole lot of crimes are just forgotten. If a body washes ashore in an African harbor, nobody does fingerprints or tries to trace it down beyond running notices in the local paper. They have no resources to do more. It is an accidental death off a boat, and the connection to a man seen being hustled into a car by thugs four hundred miles inland is never made. This is not a slam against Africa. But it is true. Given that until recently the United States was one of the very few nations where lots of people could legally assemble and vaguely riot at all, it seems somewhat fanciful to consider this a sign of love of violence. Especially in the Latin countries, where ritual animal abuse, wife beating, and the more ridiculous aspects of machismo are venerated, and the corrupt governments are not so inclined to keep crime statistics beyond suspect political troublemakers, the charges against the United States are, shall we say, hollow. And now, America is bombing the Serbs solely because Europe, which would be the first to benefit from the carnage, doesn't want to upset its neighbor. Let us be blunt here. Clinton is only secondarily concerned with the plights of the Kosovo refugees. He is most concerned that the Serbs, risen high in the region, would start systematically to slaughter Moslems and Catholics. There is ample reason to believe that absolutely. Turkey along with all the more extreme Islamic nations, would start supplying, for humanitarian reasons, the Moslems. Greece and Russia would support Serbia, because of the anti-Semitic Orthodox Church and the assumption they are all the same people. The recently Nazi Croats, supported by Germany, would, in order to retrieve land as much theirs as Serbia's, eventually move in the north. Do not laugh at the absurdity of it. The exact same thing happened three times before World War One in this century. Do you hear me? There were three major Balkan wars between 1900 and 1914, many small ones, and the Serbs started the major conflict by encouraging the assassination of the Austrian arch Duke. I will be the first to say that Milosovitch could have appeared as a Croat, as a Bosnian Muslim, and we would now be bombing Sarayevo or the Dalmatian coast because a Croatian or Bosnian expansion was imminent. Either way, Europe would, and still could, find itself with a huge, vicious war that would make the current conflict seem no more than a soccer riot. When the fruits of the European diplomacy took root in 1914 and Europe plunged into a war that really did not end for thirty years, Sir Edward Gray - one of the few people who intuitively knew how horrible it would be and not previously known for his poetic gifts, looked out his office window as the trial blackout swept London. "The lights are going out all over Europe," he reliably mumbled. "They will not be lit again in our lifetime." He was prescient, and until the United States became the power company in 1945, the lights were indeed out over that self-congratulatory abode of petty nations. It is reassuring that England is even more adamant than the United States about crushing Milosovich, and so is the current German government, two of the four nations who suffered most by ignoring words like "ethnic cleansing" in the past. |
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