Our Kosovo idiocy: Expensive bombing won't change this slaughterhouse of medieval hatreds

Plus: Have S.F. drag queens gone too far in mocking Catholicism?

By Camille Paglia

Apr 14, 1999 | Dear Camille,

Are you as frustrated as I am by the grouping together of women and children when military men talk shop about the atrocities of war? For example, "In Kosovo, many unarmed people are being massacred, including women and children." I hear this on television all the time during this crisis, and wonder at the phrase's survival in our enlightened time.

Laura Zander

Dear Ms. Zander,

Yes, there is a repellent vestigial sexism in treating "women and children" as a separate, helpless category of being. The political situation in ravaged Kosovo has reduced both men and women to the primitive stage of human life, when we were nomads barely surviving hand-to-mouth in a condition of passivity and fear. How fragile civilization is, and how little our dominant leftist or liberal theories respect it. Law and order are our barrier against savagery.

The American news media are, as usual, exploiting garish images of misery to whip up popular emotion. One of the worst examples yet was the cover photo of the April 12 issue of Time, which outrageously violated the privacy of a fleeing Albanian woman as, with bared breast, she nursed her infant child. Poking a camera at her on the open road was no different from spying on Diana's death car in Paris.

Now of course the rape card is being played by U.S. government spokesmen who want to keep war fever running high. As American warplanes make their hideously expensive bombing runs to Yugoslavia from the continental United States, we are being asked to see the current conflict in Manichaean terms of Serbian demonism and Albanian saintliness, the old chestnut of oppressors and victims. Inflammatory allegations of rape do not justify NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, which is impoverishing and brutalizing the very people we're supposed to be leading toward democracy.

The historical roots of this cycle of violence, where there were mass crimes and land grabs on both sides, are obscured from the American public, which didn't give a fig about the Balkans until the posturing Christiane Amanpour began her one-sided recitatives on CNN in the early 1990s. War-torn Bosnia became a convenient sob story for American intellectuals who didn't want to think about grave social problems right here at home after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which signaled a major crisis in race relations.

What galls me about our undeclared war on Yugoslavia is that the other members of NATO are not footing their fair share of the bill and that American tax dollars are being thrown down a sewer -- or rather into a shambles, a slaughterhouse of medieval animosities that we cannot solve. Every bomb or missile that falls is a gross waste of money that should be going to the restoration of America's inner cities; to primary education and vocational training; to day care, health care and elder care for the economically disadvantaged.

Political leadership means prioritizing in a world of endless crises. America has much more to fear from a turbulent Russia and a rising China -- whose leaders cannot guarantee the security or aim of their nuclear weapons -- than Europe does from a minor local despot. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, playing out her childhood scenarios (when she was the Czech ambassador's little princess in Belgrade), has systematically misinformed her distracted White House boss and the American people about the ancient, cold realities of Serbian nationalism. Albright's conceit and deceit have damaged the cause of women everywhere who aspire to high office and public responsibility.

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