Word: pogroms
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...answer, provided in James Carroll's fascinating, brave and sometimes infuriating history, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (Houghton Mifflin; 616 pages), is St. Augustine. In the year 425, shortly after Christians slaughtered the Jews of Alexandria in the first recorded pogrom, the influential church father cautioned, "Do not slay them." He preferred that the Jews be preserved, close at hand, as unwilling witnesses to Old Testament prophecies regarding Jesus. Augustine's followers elaborated on the idea, writes Carroll: Jews "must be allowed to survive, but never to thrive," so their misery would be "proper punishments for their...
Sentimentally, of course, Western leaders would like nothing more than to act decisively to end the pogrom in East Timor ? but sentiment seldom trumps geopolitics in the affairs of state, and geopolitics is a cynical business. Back in December 1975, the U.S. gave Indonesia a nod and a wink to proceed with its invasion of the tiny country, whose Portuguese colonial administration had collapsed. In fact, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had been in Jakarta the day before Indonesian troops went in. With South Vietnam having collapsed only eight months earlier, Washington wasn't about...
Trouble is, few people disagree with the moral imperative of a war grounded in humanitarian principles. Milosevic's relentless pogrom in Kosovo ensures that. But from Day One, NATO's promise of victory by air power has seemed a limp match for the human costs of the campaign. And as the political leader who got the West into this war, Clinton is charged with the responsibility to make it work...
...making Americans more cozily familial or deeply religious or keenly responsive to the needs and obligations of society. They led to a fence outside Laramie--and then, what? Is this Pat Buchanan's war for the soul of America? Manliness, perhaps? Or are the older paradigms more telling: Pogrom, Crusade, Massacre of the Innocent, crucifixion...
...other news, Slobodan Milosevic continued his pogrom in Kosovo (against Muslims, I might add). Once again the powerful and morally upstanding leaders of the Western world looked concerned--just for a minute--and then, at the urging of powerful and morally upstanding business leaders, went back to dealing with the global economic meltdown (and/or the Tripp-Lewinsky-Starr scandal...