Pete Seeger
As the last decade of the twentieth century dawned, mankind was momentarily able to rest a bit easier, secure in the knowledge a nuclear holocaust between the world’s superpowers was highly unlikely. Fears of instant inhalation and the possible extinction of the human species inspired by Neville Shute’s “On the Beach”, Carl Sagan’s “Nuclear Winter” and numerous other books and television dramas were suddenly replaced by a surge of optimism.
For the first time since the Versailles Treaty concluded the “war to end all wars”, there was a beacon of hope … hinting the United States, using its bully pulpit, and working through the UN in cooperation and collaboration with other nations, could foster global democracy and lead the peoples of the earth into an era of world peace.
Tragically, such dreams were quickly extinguished … in the hills and cities of Bosnia … in mountain villages across Peru … in the jungles of Cambodia … in the barren wastelands of Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. It quickly became apparent neither reasoning, cajoling nor threatening was effective when dealing with regional despots, fanatic nationalists, religious zealots or terrorists. As has been the case for centuries of human history, the real or implied use of force remained the only language such antagonists understood.
Meanwhile, man’s capacity to brutalize his fellow beings continue with unabated and ruthless efficiency. With few nations (primarily former Soviet republics) openly warring against one another, this legacy of violence is now largely confined to bitter internal conflicts. Such armed insurrections are currently underway in more than three dozen countries spread across six continents.
Increasingly, targets of these insurgents have become their own civilian populations … with civil terror being one of their desired ends. Men, women and children are routinely murdered, maimed, raped and starved because of their ethnic, religious or political heritages … or simply because they were going about their business and were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
However, there is one significant difference between these tragedies in the 1990s and similar horrors of the past. Whereas there were few visual or other records of the atrocities which took place in Stalin’s Gulag archipelago, in Moscow’s Lubiyanka Prison, during successive slaughters in the Balkans throughout the NAZI’s extermination camps or in Cambodia’s killing fields … modern communication technologies now bring the reality of the gore, pain
and suffering of this inhumanity into homes around the globe on a daily basis, irrespective of where it takes place.
For the first time, the public is able to witness the horrors of the conflicts which their leaders have historically hidden from their people. Safe in their bunkers, these architects of war and revolutions have always feared truthful revelations about combat and the atrocities which inevitably accompany a war might so repulse their people … they would rise in protest.
In fact, public passions so stirred can move governments to action, as was the case in with American involvement in Vietnam. Nightly images from places like the Mekong Delta and Hua molded public opinion more rapidly and more solidly all the speeches of all the anti-war activists. More recently, the American led intervention in Somalia was prompted by worldwide revulsion at the nightly vision of thousands of starving humans, many of which were young children.
At the same time, however, more than a year of horrifying pictures and millions of feet of video have done little more than document the relocation or extermination of a large segments of Bosnia’s Muslim population. Neither the United States nor any other nation seems inclined to intervene to prevent the routine bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and starvation to which the world continues to bear witness.
In such instances, the physical destruction of a nation or a city and its people, together with the weariness and physical toll on the participants may become the only road to end such tragedies.
Despite the end of the Cold War, our world remains a truly dangerous place. And, while all fellow travelers on Planet Earth, nations seem increasingly unwilling or unable to stave off or resolve local conflicts which take a terrible toll in human lives each year.
Perhaps America can genuinely assume the mantle of leadership and, working through the United Nations, sponsor a movement committing each member nation to expend at least as much on health care, nutrition and the protection of human rights as they do on their military, police and arms purchases. The world might quickly become a safer and more peaceful place … with less need for “flowers gone to graveyards everywhere“.
