July/August 1999

The Culture of Violence
by Richard Deats

After the murder and mayhem at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, President Clinton said in his weekly radio address that "every one of us must take responsibility to counter the culture of violence. The government must take responsibility to counter the culture of violence."

That is indeed true. But just what does it mean? The military-industrial complex and our militarized foreign policy are not even discussed when the President and the Congress debate the sources of violence in our country. When the President—who has ordered the bombing of Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia and Kosova—admonishes high school students to say no to violence, he exhibits a blindness to the obvious. The same is true of Congress. When our legislators grappled with the culture of violence in June, they focused on violence in the media and handgun violence but, like the President, they studiously avoided militarism as a possible factor. They ignored the hundreds of billions of dollars the US spends on the military. They ignored the fact that the US leads the world in the manufacture and export of arms. Is there no connection between violence at home and the refusal of our country to join the rest of the world in ratifying the anti-landmine treaty? Is there any relationship between unleashed violence at Columbine and the terror rained down on Serbia—including the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium? The Cold War has been over for a decade but we have yet to see the long-awaited peace dividend or nuclear abolition. In the biggest increase in military spending since the Cold War, the President has called for $112 billion in additional military spending over the next five years. Clinton has even revived Reagan's discredited Star Wars project. Little wonder that we see ample evidence of a culture of violence.

In this issue we focus on the war in Serbia and Kosova. It is essential that we reflect on this war before we are faced with the next crisis and the next call to arms. For years there were warnings about Kosovo as the next arena of conflict, yet the unprecedented nonviolent movement there could not attract US interest and support (see the Jan/Feb 1998 Fellowship account of that movement). It was only when the Kosova Liberation Army arose and violence escalated that our policymakers began to pay attention: the KLA, fighting fire with fire, was speaking a language we understand. Because ethnic cleansing is so reprehensible, public opinion went along with the US-led NATO bombing, approving of the atrocity of bombing as the way to deal with the atrocities of Milosevic. But, as Arthur Waskow observed, "It is as if the only conceivable response to Mississippi's resistance to segregation had been the bombing of all its major cities." As in Iraq, a whole people is made to pay for the evil policies of its leader.

Bishop Artemijia of the Serbian Orthodox Church roundly criticized the bombing, saying, "The bombs gave the pretext to the expulsion of a great number of Albanians and gave the pretext to the exodus of the Serbs. And democratic forces in Serbia are now almost nonexistent; and President Milosevic is triumphant in his phantom victory; and there is a lot of anti-Western feeling among Serbs that will stop democratic processes in this area for a long time to come."

In the last issue of Fellowship we spoke of the UN's call for a culture of peace and nonviolence. If this is to be more than an empty call, then we will have to imaginatively move away from bankrupt policies to utilizing all the peacemaking skills we can muster.

Richard Deats