The Written Word
for September 3, 2000.

The terrible shooting at Columbine High School near Denver, the one in Toronto and the situations in Kosovo, Indonesia and other world hot spots are not unrelated. Nor is the Mark McSorley cutting down of Donald Brashear in a Boston-Vancouver hockey game.We live in a violent world and an unstructured violent world where everyone, including nations we see as friends, and indeed Canada itself, see fit to take the law into their own hands when they think it necessary.

I want to say something personal here but I suspect that many of my generation will feel the same. I simply cannot watch violence. I watched with great difficulty Platoon some years ago and, apart from the language, they tell me that’s nothing compared to, say, Saving Private Ryan. I couldn’t watch Piano because I heard about the scene where a finger was cut off.

Why can’t I watch these things? Because I’ve never been desensitized nor has the rest of my generation in Canada save those who fought in Korea.

The war movies we watched showed violence but nowhere near to the same degree nor was the violence anything like as graphic as it is now. Moreover, in those times there was a feeling of order in the sense that people had respect for property. As a child I would never find a door in the house locked. People left their keys in the car and their bicycles unlocked.

Now it wasn’t all virtuous by any means but I hitch hiked rides without the slightest fear – my parents weren’t concerned either.

We’ve changed as a society. Part of that was the fault of previous generations. We pretended that there weren’t any problems of discrimination and when minorities made a fuss, we gave them a stern lecture in law and order. We looked upon the poor as something that the rich could easily handle through the Junior League, the Thrift shop and Christmas donations to the Salvation Army. So I cast no blame but only say that we have changed dramatically in the 50+ years since World War II.

But how does this link up with Kosovo and where’s the linkage between Kosovo and other violence of recent years?.

In 1945 we put together an organization called the United Nations. No wars were supposed to take place except as police actions authorized by the United Nations Security Council. In 1949 several countries including Canada put together a defensive organization called Nato.

The horrific situation in Kosovo has been brewing for some time – centuries, in fact. Unquestionably in the past few years it has got worse and without doubt President Milosovic of Yugoslavia has retained power because he has been able to fan the flames of Serb nationalism. The question arose, what should we do about the situation where horrible things were happening including outright genocide?

We all agreed we should do something but the United Nations Security Council was clearly not going to authorize force because China and Russia opposed it. That they opposed it because they considered Chechnya and Tibet respectively as internal matters is no doubt true – just as Britain would no doubt veto proposed Security Council action in Northern Ireland. The question then becomes do we simply say to hell with the United Nations and become vigilantes? Evidently the answer to that question is yes because Canada went along with going to war with Serbia without a declaration of war and without consent of its own parliament.

What do young people then see in this world? They see violence in its rawest form with nothing whatever left to the imagination. They see video clips of doctor assisted suicides. Nothing is spared in the effort to put as much bloody violence as possible in front of them.

Then they see their country in a shooting war where trains and caravans of innocent civilians are killed with only perfunctory expressions of apology from Nato … and they see this war as having been taken not as a police action through the proper channels but by an organization whose reason for being is defensive, not offensive.

In a sense, President Milosovic is right when he saw the attempts to broker a settlement as leading inevitably to Kosovo independence. While no one for a moment can condone his methods one must at least concede that it’s not easy for a Head of State to agree to a plan which dismembers his country. On the other hand, the civilized world is right to claim the right of self determination of peoples and to defend as best possible violent attempts to prevent it.

This means one of two things – war or diplomacy.

I’m no peacenik – I understand that war can sometimes be the only alternative. But if you do go to war, it must be for the purpose of ending it successfully and quickly. Nato failed on both counts in Kosovo and has in fact made the plight of the Kosovars infinitely more terrible than it was.

But what about diplomacy? Recognizing that things will be bad for Kosovars no matter which way you go, wouldn’t it have made more sense to work on getting Russia and China to put pressure on Yugoslavia through the Security Council than bombing and killing people while hastening the ethnic cleansing process in the bargain?

But I return to my theme … it is any wonder that there is the kind of violence as we have seen in high schools when the example society shows its younger people is one of violence everywhere they look accompanied by an utter disregard for the law when it doesn’t suit their government?