After Guernica, Belgrade
by Camile Paglia
from her column in Salon Magazine 3/31/99

I write this as multimillion-dollar missiles and bombs are falling yet again, unleashed far from America's bustling, indifferent shopping malls and decaying inner-city schools, which can't even afford books. How, in this century of Picasso's great 1937 protest painting, "Guernica," can American and European bureaucrats still so blithely order terror tactics from the air? Barbarism deployed against tyrants makes us equally barbaric.

By clumsily antagonizing an economically and politically unstable Russia, the "humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo by NATO (pushed along by Clinton's inept foreign-policy team) runs the terrible risk of destabilizing the world for two more generations. Welcome to the new millennium!

Camille Paglia is the author of Sexual Personae, a cultural commentator, and a fierce critic of political correctness.