Bill SprichtJust another WordPress weblog

Last Thursday I met a good friend of mine, a Russian, at a cafe in Vienna for a farewell drink or two; he’d been in Vienna all of February attending a language class. He also invited two people (a Hungarian and an Italian) from the class and one other guy he’d met in Vienna (a Greek). Small talk ruled for a bit, but eventually one of them, the Greek, got around to asking my opinion about the current President of the United States. (I find the choice of topic interesting: war is about to break out in Iraq, yet I’m first asked my opinion of the personage in the White House rather than the event itself. This is just another example of how absolutely obsessed many Europeans are with George W. Bush the person.)

Anyway, I went straight to the main point and said I supported the president and the coming war in Iraq. I then said something really stupid: that I knew I was probably the only person currently on the European continent who supported the war. I try to remind myself not to say such things, because they cater to the impression that the Western Europeans are “Europe” and ignore the newly-emerging Eastern and Central European countries, many of whose people (and whose governments) support the American position. Of course I was speaking to a Greek, so he wasn’t exactly Western European either, so perhaps this point doesn’t apply. But you get my meaning: we should stay away from saying “Europe” when discussing the anti-war, anti-American sentiment. This rule is not easy to stick to, since it’s such a big chunk of Europe that is opposed to us.

He and I had a very nice and polite back and forth. The Hungarian then joined in. He was also quite a nice guy, and I still think he probably always is, on average, a very nice guy, despite how angry I later became. We had the standard back-and-forth about Bush, Israel, the UN, Hussein, etc. Everything was fine. I mean, we were in strong disagreement, yet it was fine for quite a long while. But then he said he fully believes that the United States purposely dropped bombs on civilians in Afghanistan. At first I doubted that I had understood him correctly, so I spoke very slowly, very clearly, and asked, “Let me make sure I understand, because this is important. Are you saying you believe that the United States bombed civilians, knowing they were civilians, out of revenge for September 11?”

“Yes.”

I said farewell to my Russian friend, wished him a safe trip and left. Probably the best thing.

The Hungarian man could have told me that George W. Bush was the most evil man who ever walked on our planet, worse than a combo Hitler-Stalin, and I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did. My attitude towards absurd judgments like those about the president is that they will be proved false or exaggerated in the long run; they are largely based on conjecture, not on judgments of things that already happened. But in this instance the Hungarian was talking about an event in the past that really did happen — alas, we killed civilians in Afghanistan — and accusing the US airmen and their superiors of premeditated murderer.

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