[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 59 (Wednesday, April 28, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E801]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           FREEDOM COMES AT A GREAT COST--``BLOOD AND SINS''

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                        HON. WILLIAM O. LIPINSKI

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 28, 1999

  Mr. LIPINSKI. Mr. Speaker, I offer the following column written by 
John Kass in the March 29, 1999 edition of the Chicago Tribune to be 
entered in the Congressional Record.

           Freedom Comes at a Great Cost--``Blood and Sins''

       If you were downtown Sunday, and if you passed near Halsted 
     Street, you may have seen the Greek Independence Day parade.
       The Near West Side is far from the Balkans and far from 
     Kosovo, but they were on the minds of everybody there. Those 
     present thought about the present and the past.
       We Americans come from so many different places. And there 
     are other national day celebrations for the peoples who 
     became free by their own hand and settled here.
       But my favorite and the only one that counts is July 4, for 
     all of us. That's when we Americans celebrate our 
     independence from Britain, the founding of our own empire, 
     and the strength of the union that was broken and recovered 
     at a cost.
       On Halsted Street, you would have seen children dressed in 
     old country costumes and men in what look to be white kilts. 
     You might have joked about men in skirts, especially if you 
     don't know what they did long ago.
       My great grandfathers and my great-great grandfathers 
     dressed like that, in 1821, in their rebellion against the 
     occupying power, the Ottoman Empire.
       They wanted their freedom after 400 years of occupation by 
     the Turks. They were tired of having to bow and kiss the hand 
     of their conquerors. So they came down from the mountains 
     with their long knives and guns, looking for blood--and they 
     found it.
       The Turks had spent four centuries in that land, and they 
     considered it their own, with their own villages and towns, 
     living side by side with the Greeks, mostly in peace.
       But the sultan didn't tolerate freedom. The captured Greek 
     soldiers were impaled on long poles for slow public deaths. 
     Churches were burned, the nuns and priests skinned alive, 
     villages cleansed, leaving only the stones to cry.
       Matching the pasha's barbarism with their own, the Greeks 
     committed unspeakable atrocities too. The English romantics 
     who had adopted the Hellenic cause, the dilettantes who 
     talked about fair play, were terrified.
       But war and rebellion isn't about fair play. Once it begins 
     it is about survival by people who are prepared to do 
     anything. To the horror of their Western European supporters, 
     the Greeks were prepared to do anything.
       They fought the sultan's armies, and they raided Turkish 
     villages, desecrating mosques, killing every man, innocent 
     women and children, the livestock, everything that moved.
       When they found Turkish soldiers, they did what the Turkish 
     soldiers did to them, until the Turks finally fled.
       The sins of the Greeks and the Turks were enough to send 
     generations to hell. But finally, 400 years of Ottoman 
     rule ended and part of Greece was free.
       What we forget when we celebrate these independence days is 
     the blood and the sins.
       Like I said earlier, my favorite is July 4, for all of us 
     Americans.
       In America, while we celebrate our ethnicity and diversity, 
     we should never forget that we're Americans first, even if 
     we're hyphenated. We're Americans because we believe in this 
     country and its freedoms, which is why we came here.
       The only group that didn't have a choice was black 
     Americans. They were liberated from slavery in a bloody Civil 
     War. Appeals to the better angels of our nature didn't free 
     the slaves.
       What freed the slaves were the deaths of hundreds of 
     thousands of Americans. The union was preserved, in part 
     because of the atrocities committed by Sherman's army as he 
     marched through the South, burning everything in his way.
       Today, we call those tactics terrorism and barbaric and 
     genocidal, but that's what was done to preserve the union. 
     And let's not forget the Indians.
       In our hyphenated ethnic celebrations, and when we sing the 
     unifying Star Spangled Banner on the 4th, we concentrate on 
     the positive images.
       The newspaper photo of the little boys, like my own sons, 
     eating souvlaki and waving. Or the tape of the little boys, 
     like my own sons, chewing on an ear of corn in July, waiting 
     for the fireworks.
       What's forgotten is how unions are preserved and how 
     independence is won--with the massacres of innocents, with 
     children burned in their homes, with women dragged on the 
     ground by the hair and finally dumped into graves
       It's not a video game and it's not clean. Americans are now 
     finally debating NATO's war against Yugoslavia. We're in it, 
     but many of us don't understand how and why.
       And we don't want to deal with how it will grow, if we do 
     what must be done to stop further atrocities against the 
     Kosovars now that we're there.
       We must understand the unspeakable violence, but we can't 
     let that determine our reasons or rush us. So we can't creep 
     our way in, distracted, rudderless, parsing the sentences of 
     our political leaders to guess at what they mean.
       If we're going to fight, we must fight to win. We already 
     fought to lose once, in Vietnam.
       But to win there will be a cost. So we better be prepared 
     to pay it. And we better understand it now.

     

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