91Èȱ¬

There is an easy way to explain away ruling over another people: the magical refrain "nobody's an angel" almost always is uttered by the wrongdoer, or the agent of the wrongdoer.

During the Milosevic pogroms, at least one very prominent paid lobbyist for Yugoslavia who used to work for the US government, would appear on certain high brow US TV interview shows and put on this very good acting performance, where, with a thoughtful and exceptionally pained "weight of the world" look, he would inform us unwashed American rubes that in places such as the Balkans "nobody's an angel," meaning, to the outside world, "Hey, don't waste your time defending Bosnians, because, supposedly, in the midst of Serbian genocide, at least one Bosnian fought back, and maybe also killed an innocent." That kind of spinning served to delay American intervention into Bosnia and cost many lives.

Human history, human behavior, and particularly humans who gain political power, can usually be relied upon to be un-angelic. It's surprising when we see an angel. In fact, while I might have seen ghosts periodically during my life, I have never actually seen an angel. Not even one. So let's toss aside this old canard when we need to determine what people is to be free and what people is to be enslaved or decimated by us, either eagerly or passively. By passive enslavement, I refer to the analog of the utility of the local butcher. Very few modern people in industrial consumer empowered societies want to raise their own animals and slaughter them personally in order to prepare the family meal. A supermarket's meat section is about as much bloodthirst as most of us really want to personally experience. We don't want to personally see the animal that we are to eat in its narrow pen, in a concentration camp like factory, and then turned into an industrialized food product where there is nothing spared. We don't want to get our hands bloody, we don't want to see the spark of life that god gave to that content cow, the dancing chicken, the intelligent pig, the pensive lamb, the sarcastic duck, the curious rabbit, the gregarious fish, or the nervous crab, but we do want their tasty meat, so that's why we rely on our butchers. We don't want to send our kids to work as butchers, we don't rush to laud butchers as our national heroes, but we see to it that they are gainfully employed. No questions asked. Don't ask, don't tell.

I live far away from Kosova, and I have nothing against Albanians, Serbs, Greeks or any other people. I live in a large nation the size of a continent and with few exceptions, as an English speaker, I rarely am caused to feel myself an alien. I am in the "United States of America," a state older than most European states as they are currently organized. But in every US state, in every county, in every town, there are traces of earlier peoples. Native American names of towns, of rivers, of valleys, of streets. Not far from where I live there is a road called "Indian Field Road" and it presently borders a golf course. Someone, at some time in that affluent New England town, there lived Native Americans, and this entire town was theirs, and in that field they raised their crops. After the English murdered the Indians, for several hundred years their descendants still carried some vestigial memory of these victims, even as they sink their little mottled white golf balls into those 18 little rat holes. The current generation of golfers could perhaps feel a little momentary guilt about playing golf on the former gardens of their ancestor's victims, but they could also silently bless the butchers for slaughtering those lambs, as a gift to their genetic progeny.

Today, most countries either vanquish and murder or displace the weak or they live on grounds where their ancestors did this butchery for them. No angels? The only angels that exist are already dead.

How then, since nobody alive is an angel, since angels at least have to be dead, and then presumably be properly registered by god as angelic, can one make some kind of judgment about whether this or that people deserves to be free? Nowadays there seems to be so many nationalities waiting in line in the world for someone somewhere to see their plight, to care, and to help them throw off their oppressors. How can we, with all of our important tasks, such as deciding which car to drive, what style of knot to tie our neckties, what kind of industrial food to microwave for dinner, find time to choose which submerged nations will be permitted to drown and which bullying nations will be rewarded for their butchery or "manifest destiny?" I don't have the answer-- sorry to waste your time for making you read this far -- but maybe an easy suggestion would be that we should try to put ourselves in the shoes of the victim.

Let's imagine ourselves unable to run our own country. Let's imagine ourselves needing internal passports that might restrict us from certain jobs or other benefits. Let's imagine that we should be afraid to speak our own language in a public place. Let's imagine that we cannot trust people who are not of our ethnicity, because that person might be an aggressive enemy or might be a passive enemy who understands our situation but who will turn their backs as their butchers slaughter us. Let's imagine that in every way we are marginalized, and that food supply, health care, clean and reliable water are kept from us. Let's imagine that the aggressor's settlers are overwhelming us and that they are backed by military and police power. Let's imagine that we have absolutely no hope for ourselves or our children or grandchildren, and even if we are not put up against the wall and shot, we are carefully being slowly slaughtered, with the aggressors having all the time in the world until our extinction.

American history sometimes accounts genocides, such as those by General Andrew Johnson, later elected President. Other times it accounts American genocides as an almost inescapable reality, with the story of Native Americans simply dying from smallpox, just because they did not have resistances to European diseases. The latter story tells of a non-genocide genocide, where other peoples' countries got depopulated without the bloodthirsty involvement of European settlers. The sancity of the aggressor's ancestors cannot be defiled by their butchery in this tale. The problem is that it leaves out the fact that it was known that "selling rum to Indians" weakened the victims' ability to defend themselves and weakened their resistance to disease. Even earlier than the deportation of the Cherokees in the "Trail of Tears" of 1838 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_tears), it was known by Americans that giving blankets of people infected with smallpox could transmit smallpox to the recipients of those "gifts." But giving poisons to Native Americans or committing biological warfare on Native Americans is just too ugly a memory for Americans, really showing a premeditated kind of butchery. That kind of behavior is what we might properly call "pure evil," as opposed to the butchery found in the "clash of civilizations" tale, where a fearful gun-toting pilgrim or pioneer was virtually forced to kill, "only" because s/he wanted to take another's land. Premeditated butchery stories tend to be downplayed in national histories, because they evidence crimes that ordinarily would result in imprisonment or worse, rather than grants of large swaths of land, prosperity, and other bounty for generations to come.

I would not want to live feeling like an oppressor, would you? Probably not, so let's please put aside this thoughtful and always endlessly stupid evaluation of ancient, medieval and even recent Balkan history, and look at the reality today. Kosova is an overwhelmingly Albanian place, and the best case that Serbia has for controlling it is that there are some old religious sites there and a few towns near Serbia that are ethnically Serbian towns. This is among the weakest possible claims that any nation could offer as justification to control another people. So give the Serbian towns to Serbia and free Albanian Kosova, and safeguard the Orthodox religious shrines, since religious piety is very important to politicians in Serbia. As for Russia, don't let it continue to play its own imperial games. Putin shall forever create ill both inside and outside Russia's borders, only causing Russia to lag behind most other states, due to a cynical, wasted and demoralized population. If the European Union in 2007 cannot stand up to Russia (or Serbia) on Kosova, then it should admit finally that it is a purely economic trade association and not the embryonic democratic and humanitarian transethnic federal state that it often pretends to be. If it cannot defend Kosova openly and clearly, the EU might as well disband and ask the European Free Trade Association if it would permit its members to convert to EFTA members.

For Serbians, they finally will be free to be themselves, rather than to be hated occupiers of other people's countries, living in paranoid Byzantine dreams of conquest and revenge. Murderous behavior affects even those who might think themselves innocent in the form of corrosive guilt, so it is best to be freed from oppressing another nation as soon as possible, for one's own sanity, for the sake of one's own national spirit and one's personal growth.

For any decent person, it is inexcusable to advocate trampling over other people. From a selfish viewpoint, persecuting others can also produce at least a certain uncomfortable feeling in one.

About the place where I live, there are supposed to be few or no "Indians," but for about a year the night manager of the vegetable department of my local supermarket was a Native American. He was a cautious but friendly man and he not only kept his department tidier than his predecessor, he also generously would go back to the storeroom to find the freshest herbs that I asked for. (Doing more than the absolute minimum to avoid being fired is almost NEVER done by anyone in this large Dutch-owned supermarket, almost as if by regulation.) Unfortunately for me, this man is not at that supermarket anymore. I hope that he was promoted to a better position or that he found a better job in a friendlier place. I miss him, and I'm sorry that my relationship with him was only a perfunctory one. The vegetable department also isn't run properly. It's a mess, and it never has the things that I want to eat. So in search of better vegetables, I have to drive to another market in that neighboring town via Indian Field Road, which causes me to think of that man, of where he came from, of his life, of where he went to, and of the thousands of ghosts of the murdered Indians living in the rich people's golf course. Then I get my vegetables and herbs and drive again past the Indian Field on my way back home to my family. I forget about this history for about a week, and then when I return to Indian Field Road, I remember these crimes anew. And then I forget again, for a while.

Between all the great cities of Europe are the most beautiful fields and forests, sanctuaries of blessed life and dwelling places of the ghosts of untold numbers of displaced, forgotten, and murdered nationalities. The civilization of the cities of Europe still depends upon this vast countryside for its sustenance, but there is always a distinctly bitter taste to vegetables or meat fertilized by ghosts. Maybe this is why wine, beer or vodka is said to be so necessary to enjoy one's meal. Maybe it's why we caramelize our food when cooking, to sweeten the flavor. It's easier in a sugary half-stupor to think of oneself as an angel, but I think that probably the best way to avoid self-destructive guilt feelings or outright bloody hands might be to just do the right thing while we are on this earth. After all, the angels in heaven are watching us, while we are still arguing here on this shared earth.