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The kinder, gentler side of loathing Once upon a time, in an era significantly less politically correct than this one, the comedian Gilda Radner, playing the ugly American on the U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live, coined the line, "What's all this fuss about Soviet jewelry?" It drew some laughs, and the levity was perhaps a useful buffer at a time when the matter of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union was painful to address. It had the lilt of Lady Astor's alleged Titanic line, "I ordered ice, but this is ridiculous." The point of these pressure-alleviators was simple enough. The world is ugly. To make it funny, even in its horror, is a nutrient. But the year 2000 mars the pond. A case in point: The Czech Republic has been reproached by the European Union (EU) for how it behaves toward its Romany, or Gypsy, population. They are second-class citizens, forced into moral and educational impoverishment by a state that does not consider them equal. The Romanies of today are the Soviet Jewry of another time. Just as Washington once warned Moscow, Brussels now warns Prague. Unless this ethnic prejudice is fixed, or at least made to appear fixed, the EU will growl further. But will it do any more than that? No. An American colloquialism may help. It goes, "Get real." The absence of war brings with it hefty doses of moral relativism. It permits massive, and massively self-righteous, interventions in Kosovo, say, but leaves Rwanda, Burundi, former Khmer Cambodia and Chechnya out of the story. It encourages the writing of hopeless sentences, such as this one from Time Magazine: "Reports of atrocities in Chechnya confirm that this conflict is all-out war and human rights mean nothing." And later: "Reports of atrocities in Chechnya suggest that neither side has any respect for human rights." In the last two world wars, Soviet Russia lost an estimated 50 million people. The tribal warfare in Rwanda coupled with two decades of purges in Cambodia saw another 15 million dead. Together, that's the current population of England, or nearly seven times the inhabitants of this country. Moral of the story: Context is fading from view. All-out war, like all-out extermination or all-out prejudice, does not dust off prisoners or do right by sick orphans. War and prejudice are so permanently atrocious that to assume the restraining presence of supranational law or EU edicts is worse than useless -- it is terrifying. Time writes of a Chechen woman sniper who is caught, her legs tied to two armored cars, and torn apart. "Perhaps the only thing more horrific than such a story," the magazine concludes, "is that it provoked no comment from either Kremlin officials or the magazine's Russian readers." Comment? What comment? Regret? Adrift in a voyeuristic, hyper-aggressive PlayStation world, bereft of limbless grandfathers to help us dispense with notions of war's moral hygiene, is it any wonder we can't get real? |
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.