By Eduardo
Galeano
from La Jornada September 21, 2001
Translated by Justin Podur
In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.
The terrorists killed workers of 50 countries in NYC and DC, in the name of
Good against Evil. And in the name of Good against Evil President Bush has promised
vengeance: “We will eliminate Evil from the world”, he announced.
Eliminate Evil? What would Good be without Evil? It’s not just religious
fanatics who need enemies to justify their insanity. The arms industry and the
gigantic war machine of the US also needs enemies to justify its existence.
Good and evil, evil and good: the actors change masks, the heroes become monsters
and the monsters heroes, in accord with the demands of the theatre’s playwrights.
This is nothing new. The German scientist Werner von Braun was evil when he
invented the V-2 bombers that Hitler used against London, but became good when
he used his talents in the service of the US. Stalin was good during World War
Two and evil afterwards, when he became the leader of the Evil Empire. In the
cold war years John Steinbeck wrote: “Maybe the whole world needs Russians.
I suppose that even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe Russia’s Russians
are called Americans.” Even the Russians became good afterwards. Today,
Putin can add his voice to say: “Evil must be punished.”
Saddam Hussein was good, and so were the chemical weapons he used against the
Iranians and the Kurds. Afterwards, he became evil. They were calling him Satan
Hussein when the US finished up their invasion of Panama to invade Iraq because
Iraq invaded Kuwait. Father Bush that particular war against Evil upon himself.
With the humanitarian and compassionate spirit that characterizes his family,
he killed more than 100 000 Iraqis, the vast majority of them civilians.
Satan Hussein stayed where he was, but this number one enemy of humanity had
to step aside and accept becoming number two enemy of humanity. The bane of
the world is now called Osama bin Laden. The CIA taught him everything he knows
about terrorism: bin Laden, loved and armed by the US government, was one of
the principal ‘freedom fighters’ against Communism in Afghanistan.
Father Bush occupied the Vice Presidency when President Reagan called these
heroes ‘the moral equivalents of the Founding Fathers.’ Hollywood
agreed. They filmed Rambo 3: Afghani Muslims were the good guys. Now, 13 years
later, in the time of Son Bush, they are the worst of the bad guys.
Henry Kissinger was one of the first to react to the recent tragedy. “Those
who provide support, financing, and inspiration to terrorists are as guilty
as the terrorists themselves,” he intoned, words that Son Bush would repeat
hours later.
If that’s how it is, the urgent need right now is to bomb Kissinger. He
is guilty of many more crimes than bin Laden or any terrorist in the world.
And in many more countries. He provided ‘support, financing, and inspiration”
to state terror in Indonesia, Cambodia, Iran, South Africa, Bangladesh, and
all the South American countries that suffered the dirty war of Plan Condor.
On September 11 1973, exactly 28 years before the fires of last week, the Presidential
Palace in Chile was stormed. Kissinger had written the epitaph of Allende and
Chilean democracy long before when he commented on the results of the elections:
“I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist
because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
A contempt for the people is one of many things shared by state and private
terror. For example, the ETA, an organization that kills people in the name
of independence in Basque Country, says through one of its spokespeople: ‘Rights
have nothing to do with majorities or minorities.’
There is much common ground between low- and high- tech terrorism, between
the terrorism of religious fanatics and that of market fanatics, that of the
hopeless and that of the powerful, that of the psychopath on the loose and that
of the cold-blooded uniformed professional. They all share the disrespect for
human life: the killers of the 5500 citizens under the Twin Towers that fell
like castles of dry sand— and the killers of 200 000 Guatemalans, the majority
of whom were indigenous, exterminated without television or the newspapers of
the world paying any attention. Those Guatemalans were not sacrificed by any
Muslim fanatic, but by terrorist squads who received ‘support, financing,
and inspiration’ from successive US governments.
All these worshipers of death are in agreement as well on the need to reduce
social, cultural, and national differences to military terms. In the name of
Good against Evil, in the name of the One Truth, they resolve everything by
killing first and asking questions later. And by this method, they strengthen
the enemy they fight. It was the atrocities of the Sendero Luminoso that gave
President Fujimori the popular support he sought to unleash a regime of terror
and sell Peru for the price of a banana. It was the atrocities of the US in
the Middle East that prepared the ground for the holy war of terrorism of Allah.
Although the leader of the Civilized World is pushing a new Crusade, Allah
is innocent of the crimes committed in his name. At the end of the day, God
did not order the Holocaust against the followers of Jehovah, nor did Jehovah
order the massacres of Sabrah and Shatila or the expulsion of Palestinians from
their land. Aren’t Allah, God and Jehovah are, after all, three names for
the same divinity?
A tragedy of errors: nobody knows any more who is who. The smoke of the explosions
forms part of the much larger curtain of smoke that prevents all of us from
seeing clearly. From revenge to revenge, terrorism obliges us to walk to our
graves. I saw a photo, recently published, of graffiti on a wall in NYC: “An
eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
The spiral of violence creates violence and also confusion: pain, fear, intolerance,
hatred, insanity. In Porto Alegre, at the beginning of this year, Ahmed Ben
Bella warned: ‘This system, that has already made mad cows, is making mad
people too.” And these mad people, mad from hate, act as the power that
created them.
A three year old child, named Luca, told me: “The world doesn’t
know where its house is.” He was looking at a map. He could have been
looking at a reporter.