Mass graves have been seen in Kosovo. Our government tells us these graves ought to shock and horrify us because they are sure signs of Serb Atrocities.
If killing your foes in a war of secession
and then burying their bodies is an Atrocity, what I wonder is
the word that describes killing innocent citizens of a sovereign
non-aggressive nation and leaving their bodies out in the open?
Barbarous?
Wicked?
How about American?
Yes, American describes it perfectly.
During the last year America has bombed to death innocent citizens in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Yugoslavia. We didn't dig graves -- mass or otherwise -- for the dead. We left the dead for the buzzards and dogs. The folks in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Yugoslavia buried the remains of the people we killed.
It's the difference between being rich and being poor, I guess.
Rich countries can kill folks who are a great distance away. The sweet stench of the rotting bodies doesn't waft over us, inclining us to bury the dead if only to protect our nasal passages.
Poor countries, on the other hand, do their warring at close quarters, close enough to smell the dead, to catch the disease that thrives among decaying corpses. They fight for land to live on. And because they want to live on the land on which the dead bodies lay, poor warriors dig graves, sometimes mass graves. It's a messy undertaking.
We were a poor country once. Our land was littered with mass graves between 1861 and 1865. But now we're rich and have forgotten. Now we bomb people to death from miles away, and think ourselves more humane.