Continuing on the previous theme, debunking the idea that “Peace” organizers are Democratic partisans, and that we were “silent” during the Balkan wars and when NATO bombed the Serbs, these articles from Sojourners debunk that notion. The peace movements were anything but silent. Maybe Democrats who backed the president’s involvements and strategies, but this was not the voice of the groups like Sojourners, with which I align my own political aspirations.
Not the Church of Ethnic Cleansing, Sojourners Magazine/July-August 1999
The basic principle was summed up in a statement issued by the Serbian bishops on the eve of NATO bombing: “The way of nonviolence and cooperation is the only way blessed by God.”
More from another article:
The U.S.-led NATO intervention in the Balkans seems to have provoked the humanitarian disasters it was intended to prevent. As widely expected, aerial bombardment of military targets in Serbia failed to deter a bitter retaliation by forces on the ground, resulting in a river of freshly displaced civilians and untold slaughter across the Kosovo countryside.
Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Democratic party’s administration’s handling of the situation.
The people hurling these arguments at me and asking “Why weren’t you so appalled then?” my reply would be: Had I known, and had I been blogging and connected to the things being written, and getting Sojourners at the time (which I don’t think I was), I would have been more informed. Janet and I were actually in the process of geting an adoption finalized during late 1998 and early 1999, and I was struggling with afulltime job that seemed destined for frustration.
It was far from a “oh. well, that’s a Democratic president that I voted for, and so he must be right”. I simpy did not know that much. It was a failure on my part to be so removed from the world realities. Now I’ve taken notice. Now a lot of people have, given that the stakes involve our own local security. I am extremely skeptical, and threrefore opposed, to the tact that the US has taken; it’s “Imperial Hubris” that will do NOTHING to DETER terrorism, but only increase the recruitment success. To continue to believe that it’s “what we stand for” that they hate, and not “what we do as an arrogant, materialistic, Western empire” is to deceive ourselves, allowing our nation to plunge deeper into the mold with which we have been cast by the Muslim world. For all the Religious Right’s preaching abnout the moral decay of America, they certainly seem clueless when it comes to recognizing how it might be possible for Islamic conservatives (and probably a lot of liberals too) to see the United States and its “Christian ways” as an iditement of the Western World and of Christianity itself. To see this is not be Anti-American. It is , indeed, to express our deepest ideals about this nation’s underlying philosophies that motivate it’s people to be disgusted when those ideals are betrayed.