COMMENTARY: The immorality of morality

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ There is much moral posturing about Kosovo, most of it self-aggrandizing and […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ There is much moral posturing about Kosovo, most of it self-aggrandizing and profoundly immoral.


The classic example is Mary Robinson, onetime president of Ireland and now United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights. She announced recently that, if, indeed, some Serbs might be indicted for war crimes in Kosovo, so, too, might some NATO generals be indicted for the crime of killing innocent civilians.

Such an attitude provides Robinson with a moral highground from which she can denounce everyone with a fine impartiality and aloof self-righteousness. I am free of the prejudices of Clinton and Blair as well as Milosevic, she says in effect. I see the faults on both sides. I am free to condemn both sides and call upon both of them to stop their war crimes.

The advantage of such a stance is that Robinson and others like her take the same stand, including the pope, have excused themselves from facing the awful truth that in Kosovo the Serb government, with the eager assent of the Serb people, has perpetrated the worst genocide Europe has witnessed since 1945.

Milosevic is a vest-pocket Hitler. The Serb people are no different from the Germans who supported the Nazi holocaust.

In their refusal to condemn the murder, rape, arson, breakup of families, destruction of villages and towns, and expulsion of people from their homeland, Robinson and others like her who think they are morally superior, are in fact guilty of the worst immorality. They need only turn on their television and watch the Kosovar refugees to know that appallingly immoral events are occurring.

Their argument that NATO is equally immoral because it is doing the only thing it can to prevent Serb butchery is in effect a denial of the Serb guilt. If everyone is immoral, no one is immoral.

Robinson argues the guilt of the NATO generals on the grounds there is no”proportionality”_ one of the criteria for the just war _ in their tactics, a notion which is deliberately and culpably ignorant. Good military strategy would have suggested that on the first day of the raids NATO destroy the power grid of Serbia, cutting off all electricity and water supply. This would have brought the war to quick end.


Instead it refrained from such action and merely puts out the lights on occasion with its graphite bombs because, as it says, it is not waging war against the Serbian people.

No proportionality, Ms. Robinson? Gimme a break!

I am not advocating a military victory which destroys the water supply of a people. I am saying a decision not to use such a strategy is a sign of almost heroic restraint. Robinson and her ilk, however, must ignore that decision because their preconceived notion is that NATO is equally guilty. Indeed they seem to have an absolute need, a hunger, a craving for the picture of equal guilt.

How many people has NATO deliberately killed? How many women have its soldiers deliberately raped?

It is an obscene immorality to compare NATO bombing errors with mass murder and mass rape. NATO does its best to avoid bombing errors. Serbia deliberately murders and rapes. Only the morally depraved can fail to see the difference.

In Robinson’s logic, those who finally defeated Hitler were no different from Hitler. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was as much a war criminal as Heinrich Himmler. How can the Vatican condemn the use of morning after pills by rape victims and not condemn an army using rape as a deliberate political weapon?

Equally immoral is the Rev. Jesse Jetstream, as Mike Royko used to call him, who undercut NATO’s efforts and provided Milosevic with a major propaganda victory. Would the Rev. Jesse have visited Hitler during the war and given him a propaganda victory _ and himself lots of airtime?


Do I exaggerate when I compare Milosevic to Hitler? Tell me how. Fewer murders? Maybe. No determination to wipe out a whole people because of their religion? Maybe. Other than that, both are mass murderers. To pretend otherwise is evil.

What I don’t understand is why have so many people who ought to know better taken the side of mass murderers and rapists under the pretense they are as moral as the NATO leaders.

There is no one so blind as he who will not see.

DEA END GREELEY

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