All-American violence: From Kosovo to Littleton

by Himself
May 1999

PACIFIC NOWRTHWEST, USA - When Bill Clinton addressed the nation in the the wake of the Columbine school shootings, he admonished that "...we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons." Meanwhile, US jets rained indiscriminate death in the form of cluster bombs and depleted uranium tipped munitions onto the people of Kosovo and Serbia.
     This bombing was supposedly intended to drive the Serbian forces out of Kosovo and stop their "ethnic cleansing" of the majority Albanian population. It was in support of the KLA, a loose confederation of alleged organized criminals, freedom fighters and misfits, with a history of undisciplined guerilla actions often aimed at civilians. Instead, the air attacks intensified the exodus of Kosovars, legitimized the KLA as a political voice in the region, destroyed much of Serbia's civilian infrastructure and strengthened the hand of Slobodan Milosevic. Worst of all, it demonstrated to our children that if cursory diplomacy does not succeed, it's best to resort to violence.
     This is not intended as a defense of the indefensible actions of the Serb police and military, but rather as an ellucidation of underreported facts. There are no "good guys" in this conflict, only bad guys and lots of civilian victims.
     While the targets of the air attacks were ostensibly military (though often actually civilian), the attacks will have a long lasting effect on civilians, as unexploded cluster bombs explode and the depleted uranium (with a half-life of 40,000 years) infiltrates the food chain.
     A subtler form of violence is also at work in Serbia, aimed especially at the very old, very young and sick. The destruction of civilian infrastructure (water treatment plants, power plants, sanitation facilities, roads and bridges) and the continued economic sanctions will have untold (and underreported) effects on the civilian population for many years to come. This echoes the situation in Iraq, where Unicef estimates that 4,500 children younger than 5 are dying every month due to malnutrition and preventable disease. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated in December 1995 that over one million Iraqis, more than half of them children, had died as a direct result of sanctions by that point.

arlier on the day of the Columbine shootings, Clinton told the people of Littleton "these dark forces that take over people and make them murder are the extreme manifestation of fear and rage with which every human being has to do combat. The older you get, the more you'll know that a great deal of life is the struggle against every person's own smallness and fear and anger..." Clinton should know, having presided over a campaign of air terror that killed thousands and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes in Kosovo, and a barbarous campaign of hunger and disease that continues to kill thousands of children every month in Iraq.
     So what about violence in our schools? In the view of liberals, it could be stopped, or at least its effects greatly mitigated, if we restricted access to the types of weapons used in these shootings (which often include hunting rifles).
     Conservatives sputter that if only the existing laws were enforced (which place almost no restrictions on the sale of hunting rifles), and perhaps the Ten Commandments were posted in schools, the problem would go away. They also like to blame "culture" in the form of television, video games, pop music and movies.
     Of course, both groups have valid points (except for that wacky Ten Commandments bit). Guns are too easy to get ahold of, and pop culture is rife with violence that surely gives unstable people bad ideas. Many people see the truth on both sides, and this is not lost on the great prevaricator. Clinton latched on to this mood in a classic feat of triangulation, and made a show of asking Hollywood and the gun industry to help reduce violence.

ut placing the blame on pop culture and the gun industry overlooks the obvious: At our core, we are a violent nation. We have always been a violent nation, with roots in the Spanish Inquisition, the British Empire, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocide and forced relocation of the American Indians. This nation was built on violence, and continues to prosper from global hegemony based on military might.
     The US is not known internationally as a benign superpower. As a nation, we have consistently come down on the side of oligarchy and tyranny, be it in Guatemala, Cuba, East Timor, Iran or Chile, to name a few. The US has routinely aided in the overthrow of democratically elected governments and stamped out populist movements when they have challenged the rights of corporations, and supported dictators who protect the interests of multi-nationals doing business in their fiefdoms.
     At home, our only real jobs program for disadvantaged youth is military service, where young men are trained to kill without remorse before being spit back into the inner cities with no real job skills. Why don't we look at this when we speak of the problem of violence in our cities? Why was an essay by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, the son of a retired Air Force officer, in which he portrayed himself as a shotgun shell (doing what shotgun shells do, killing people) acceptable on the grounds that he aspired to a military career?
     Was the irony lost on all of us when the fighter jets flew in tight formation over the thousands of mourners at the huge open air memorial service in Littleton?

ntil we look at ourselves in the mirror and see our true nature, that of an international brute and thug, gun control and media censorship will be nothing but perfume on the pig. These measures-- particularly gun control-- may indeed have a meritorious effect on the rate of violence in our country, but they do nothing to address the cause of that violence (and the issue of censorship would be an unacceptable encroachment on the First Amendment). Perhaps it is impossible in a world ruled by the violence of unrestrained capital, but we must try to reconstruct our nation in the image of our stated ideals: liberty and justice for all-- at home and abroad. Until we develop an international policy of equanimity and civility, we can expect there to be a lack of civility at home and pernicious and persistent violence in our homes, schools and neighborhoods. The connection should be clear by now. Violence begets violence.