Commentary / PERSPECTIVE ON INTERVENTION :...

Mass murder--pro and con. It just isn’t a question that allows for debate: Anything short of immediate emergency action to save the victims of “ethnic cleansing” is a shortsighted and complacent vote for suicide.

Western civilization has already ended--it ended at the gates of Auschwitz. In order to not go mad, we all, myself included, live as if this wasn’t so. After World War II, we returned to business-as-usual, not acknowledging our moral bankruptcy nor creating a firm base for a more sane future. It’s beginning to catch up with us. Bosnia is not an isolated incident, but a harbinger of worse to come unless it’s checked.

I see the haunted eyes of camp prisoners in “former Yugoslavia” on television. I listen to a barrage of rationalization, to talk of “quagmires,” of “the complexity of the situation,” and then look back at the hollowed-out faces that don’t allow the luxury of equivocation. I change the channel, move on to making plans for Thanksgiving, to meeting a work deadline. My private life is too full, my nervous system too weak and my attention span too short to hold on to the horror. But the haunted hollow eyes are my parents’ eyes 50 years ago, when they were in the death camps and the rest of the world sat complicitously by, and they are the eyes of all our children if we fail to act.