Kosovo: The Status of Human Brutality.

The current moral crisis in the Serbian province of Kosovo has once again forced the international community to confront the seemingly inextinguishable thirst in the heart of humanity for violence. Mass murder, despite the many reminders we leave for ourselves by preserving the empty furnaces at places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald, still seems to be regarded as a viable alternative, transcending ethnic and racial boundaries. Though outrage on an international scale tends to follow the discovery (whether latent or immediate) of such acts, one always feels that an act of true evil must be coupled with some other interest--economic or political--in order to truly gain the undivided attention of the international community.

As with history in general, personal biases and agendas play a crucial role in what is emphasized and ignored. Tibet exemplifies this point perfectly. The destruction of Tibetan culture and the killing of the Tibetan people was evident long before Hollywood decided to make it a popular issue; and though a certain degree of altruism may have supplied a fraction of Hollywood's motivation, its main impetus was plainly economic. If Kosovo were as remote as Tibet, in terms of geographic proximity and political interest, would the United States and the rest of the world be as interested? The answer is probably not. In short, moral outrage alone is generally not enough to inspire action on the part of the powers that be.

Precedents such as these are dangerous. Uniting the value of human life with its current political and economic worth serves to only devalue the importance of human life in general. Tying morality to money and leverage cheapens life and allows those in power to ignore terrible human rights violations--or even commit them--in order to secure an economic or political end.

The current situation in Kosovo offers an example of the most serious form of human rights abuse: ethnic slaughter. History is riddled with examples of this kind: the pogroms of the Middle Ages designed to destroy the effect and presence of Jewish culture in "Christian Europe"; the policy of removal of Native Americans brought to maturity by Andrew Jackson; the entire institution of slavery, which served to denigrate an entire race of people to the status of livestock. The gross evil unleashed upon the world by the Nazis, though by far the most popular example of genocide, is still contested by those who believe it to be a hoax. And though those who believe in such propaganda are usually relegated to irrelevance in most quarters, the example of Hitler proves that those previously considered pathetic and irrational can overcome mainstream sensibilities and twist them according to their own purposes. Even in the 1990s, vast human rights violations and acts of ethnic slaughter--embodied in the killings in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the inexcusable bloodshed in the African nations of Uganda and Rwanda--have come to poison our current legacy.

In many ways, humanity has excelled in attitudes and methods of mass persecution and murder. The question, then, is not whether acts of ethnic persecution and genocide will happen again, since the record of history has proven them to be irrepressible. Instead, the question is why do they continue to haunt humankind throughout history?

The answer seems to lie in the presumed dark side of humanity--the temple of brutality, which loses its vague aura of presumption with every new report of ethnic slaughter, such as those now occurring in Kosovo. Human barbarism seems to transcend the passage of time so thoroughly that even vast changes in our fundamental belief systems have left it unchanged. The church-sponsored pogroms of the Middle Ages, though inexcusable from any and all vantage points, were in some ways the symptom of archaic dogma, which at least served as a catalyst for humanity's sleeping potential for violence.

However, the same cannot be said for humanity in the modern era. Unlike our historical predecessors, twentieth-century humanity has well-developed concepts of human rights, democracy, and egalitarian social responsibility, and yet we still descend into the same pit of mass death and persecution, as if viciousness and death lingered on the periphery of human existence waiting to explode into the open. In fact, the argument could be made that the current moral state of humanity has actually decayed since the early part of the millennium, in light of humankind's greater degree of knowledge concerning what is right and wrong.

Ultimately, one is forced to confront the possibility of a tragic flaw existing in the heart of all humanity--the idea that at any time, given the right set of circumstances, one can be stripped of the clothes of civilization and moral responsibility and run brutal and naked into the forest of human barbarism.

Nicholas Baldoni has a B.A. in philosophy from Indiana University, was a frequent contributor to the Mishawaka Times in Indiana, and now writes on human rights issues as a freelancer. His e-mail address is [e-mail].