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Milosevic dies before trial verdict, Bush is next on docket

THE HAGUE - Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, labeled the "Butcher of the Balkans" for his role in the 1995 genocidal massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, was found dead in his cell on Saturday, a few months before a verdict was due in his UN war crimes trial. A tribunal spokeswoman said there was no indication the 64-year-old Milosevic, who suffered from a heart condition and high blood pressure, had committed suicide.

Milosevic was charged with 66 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in indictments covering conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.

"The death of Slobodan Milosevic, a few weeks before the completion of his trial, will prevent justice to be done in his case," said the tribunal's chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte.

But now there is room on the docket at the International Criminal Tribunal for George W. Bush and members his inner circle, said a spokesperson for the court. "We are prepared to present evidence of their complicity not only in planning and waging a war of aggression against sovereign Iraq, but also in the murder of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, in addition to the torture and humiliation of several thousand detainees, many of whom are still being held in violation of Geneva Conventions."

Satire using a loosely re-written news article published today in the Reuters.

Labels: Satire

Fairies for compassion and truth

I dreamed last night that Commander-in-Chief Bush, his assistant Dick "You can't dodge this bullet" Cheney, and Field Marshall Rumsfeld were each visited in their sleep by a voracious Compassion Fairy. A gang of these fairies has been successfully making the rounds in the White House and in Congress, at night feeding on their victims and sucking from them the ability to love other humans. They were attracted to these three leaders because of their frequent declarations in favor of a culture of life, which is like spraying pheromones in the fairies' faces. Hungry for compassion, they stayed the night attached to the three men. In the morning aides were summoned to the men's beds to remove the carcasses of the three Compassion Fairies: They had starved to death.¹

1.  It is important to note that their remains were buried on the White House lawn, next to the rotting dead bodies of the Truth Fairies who had similarly starved to death.

Ecce homo

The killing of Christian Peacemaker Team member Tom Fox brings around in full circle the purpose of his presence in Iraq. The American was there to call attention to the dehumanization of the US occupation in that country and through his death he makes the US occupation a truly human tragedy. But we ought not to make of him any kind of symbol: in doing so we would steal from him the very humaneness he was trying to give to the grotesque situation our government has created in the Middle East. He was killed violently via gunshots and torture, the very trademarks of America in Iraq today.¹

1.  Or perhaps we want to think this because we believe that this is how America now brands its version of militarism in the Middle East.

Nostra culpa

On Sunday the Viennese political activist Brigitte Schön followed up on what Bernard-Henri Lévy had to say about the "semi-comatose" state in which he found the American left after following in the footsteps of Tocqueville.¹ Schön attributes much of this torpid stiffness to too much time at the computer screen, reading articles within our own circle of cherished writers and, she says, "celebrating the feeling that we might be able to change whatever we want to change by just writing the kind of highly opinionated piece I am about to write."² Her solution is to pass on the more comfortable "cyber ersatz" and get back involved in the "physical protest," which is the only thing that has worked. Who could disagree with her?

While I don't think of myself as a member of the "American left," I am too horrified by what I find being espoused by those on the "American right" to want to be found leaning in the latter direction. As a Christian, I believe it's not my duty to be a political activist, so whether I'm politically left or right or somewhere in the gap is really for me an irrelevancy. But our contemporary political situation does, and should, concern all Christians when our representative government in this two-century-old republic becomes the very thing that Christians cannot in good conscience embrace or accept—torturing innocent people, destroying whole cities, promising to help but doing far more harm than good, making up a war so that the nation is in a permanent state of emergency, classifying historical documents, spying on each other, turning away from the poor and the hungry and the homeless, telling lies, believing the lies.

Schön's recommendation—and Lévy's complaint, too—must therefore apply to all Christians committed to issues of social justice and to those Christians who, like Friends, see that of God in all people. It is one thing to write and blog in the style of the old pamphleteers and tract publishers, and it is another to step outside this when we find that we're just passing around these pamphlets and tracts among ourselves. At some point, we're going to see ourselves making the transition from Charles Bukowski's self-congratulatory phrase "My shit don't stink" to actual autoerotic conduct, loving the words, the phrases, the poetic melody of it all, and how our preaching makes the choir sing louder and sweeter. The streets shouldn't be silent.

I am reminded that Jesus did not raise his hand and heal a country or even a group—he did this one person at a time, and often with a touch. So when we appreciate why his teaching was oral, we can understand more fully, I think, why the only recorded writings of Jesus were made in the sand [John 8:6].³

1.  Bernard-Henri Lévy: "A Letter to the American Left" (translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), Nation, February 27, 2006. Archived at Common Dreams News Center.
2.  Brigitte Schön: "The Limits of the Internet or The Silence Of the Streets," CommonDreams.org, March 5, 2006.
3.  But then I repeat myself.