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MY SUNDAY JOURNAL
By Dalton Roberts
IPS Features
2-23-03
THE TWO FACES OF OUR ENEMIES
Russian writer Yevgeny Yevrushenko gave me a touching view of war
in his autobiography.
He was a small boy when his mother took him back to Moscow after the
Germans had been beaten down. German prisoners were paraded single file
through the streets of Moscow.
First came the generals and officers with their arrogant struts. Someone
in the crowd yelled, "They smell of deodorant, the bastards."
Guards had a hard time keeping the Russians - mostly women -- from
rushing them.
Then came a column of German soldiers, emaciated, unshaven, all in
pitiful rags and filthy, some in bloodstained bandages. He says,
"The street fell silent; the only thing you could hear was
shuffling boots and creaky crutches."
An elderly women in tattered boots gently pushed a policeman aside
saying, "Let me through." There was something about her that
made the policeman step aside. She walked up to a German so exhausted he
could hardly walk and handed him the end of a loaf of black bread.
Suddenly women started running up to the soldiers shoving bread and
cigarettes into their hands. They were enemies no longer. They were
people.
We all have an instinctive knowledge it's not the poor soldiers on
either side that start the wars. They just do the killing and the dying.
They are the ones who step on the land mines and get legs blown off.
They're the ones captured and abused, taking the brunt of hatred they
did not desire to create.
This eyewitness account gave me the opening to look with compassion on
our current enemies. Not the terrorists who fly planes into building and
blow up innocent people or those who would bomb and starve women and
children to cram their own idea of "democracy" down their
throats. But those poor souls on both sides who get out front and take
the bullets, shrapnel and bayonets.
I cannot hate the citizens of another country just because someone wants
me to hate them. They are the victims of a tyrant who would as soon kill
them for opposing him as to kill us. In this "war," they are
two-way victims - victims of their own dictator and victims of our bombs
and sanctions. Like many Americans, they hold their babies in their arms
while they die from lack of medical attention.
Someday we will learn how to present the beauty and highest values of
America as skillfully as we make star war weapons that level entire
cities. We'll zip open our chests and say, "Look at this good
heart. All we want is to be your friends. Let us join hands and be
brothers and sisters and create a decent world for our children."
I pray for that day. How I hope to live to see it.
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