Member Gerald Swick, who writes for a newspaper in West-By-God-Virginia sent this in and I thought it Is something in which the rest of you might be interested: The editor of the Clarksburg Telegram is livid. A foreign country plans to kill some of its own inhabitants, based on their ethnic background. He demands the United States and other nations combine to wipe this vile government from the face of the earth. We're not talking about Kosovo here, nor Nazi Germany. The country involved was Russia, and the editorial appeared on Jan. 1, 1904. The Telegram had received word the Russians planned to kill Jews in celebration of Russia's Christmas Day. The editorial written in response proclaimed the proposal to kill Jews "as part of the festivities of the day is an outrage on Christian civilization, and the man who does not raise his voice against such wholesale and unwarranted murder is neither a Christian nor a civilized member of society. The nations of the earth have a duty to perform in this connection, and it is urgent that they act promptly and concertedly. The powers of modern civilization should hunt up their ammunitions of war and wipe Russia off the earth if that country attempts such awful butchery. The United States should not be the last to intercede for these helpless people. Warships ought at this moment to be on their way to that country to prevent any such outrage upon humanity... Sound familiar? It is unlikely Europeans raised their eyebrows over news of Russia's planned killings. The murder of Jews was frequently part of Christmas or Easter celebrations in Russia, the Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Sometimes the perpetrator was simply a drunken peasant with an axe, taking revenge on the people he viewed as "Christ killers." At other times, official pogroms resulted in relocation or more lethal harassment of the children of Israel. When the Nazis enacted their "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in the 1930s and 40s, they essentially brought assembly-line methods to a form of ethnic murders that had a long European tradition. (Ironically, the unthinkable scale of Nazi carnage caused the rest of the Western world to come to a turning point in Christian- Hebrew relations, eventually bringing the two groups into greater harmony than they had known in centuries.) So the lesson history teaches is that ethnic murder such as that now occurring in Kosovo must be stopped as soon as it starts, to prevent it from spreading. Right? Unfortunately, the answers provided by history are always multiple-choice, Put another way, Murphy's Rules of Combat No. 74 states, "All odd-numbered world wars begin in the Balkans." Political instability in the Balkans was the trigger for World War 1. The current situation there has restarted the hands on the nuclear clock, which had been edging away from world destruction. Perhaps history's lesson is Stay out of Southern Europe! Or perhaps the lesson to remember is, don't step into the middle of another country's civil war - which is what the situation in Kosovo is - or both sides end up hating you. America should have learned that in Vietnam. Another possible lesson from the past that applies to this situation is never start shooting at people unless you have clearly defined objectives; in short, how will you know you've won when the shooting stops? Anybody got an answer to that for the Kosovo question? Wars of pacification (Now there's a concept.) don't work very well. Ask the British, who found public support waned during their wars with the Boers and Zulus in what is now South Africa. Ask the Soviets about Afghanistan. Ask a Vietnam vet from America, Australia, Korea . . . or Viatnam. Pathetic pictures of refugees flooding out of Kosovo anger us, the same way, the "festive" killing of Jews in Russia angered the editorial writer at the Telegram in 1904. We want to do something to prevent another holocaust. But which multiple-choice answer is the one we most need to heed? "None of the above" is not an option. Back to Dispatch March 2001 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com