by John Gerassi
I can't help crying. As soon as I see a person on TV telling the
heart-rendering story of the tragic fate of their loved-one in the World Trade
Center disaster, I can't control my tears. But then I wonder why didn't
I cry when our troops wiped out some 5,000 poor people in Panama's El
Chorillo neighborhood on the excuse of looking for Noriega. Our leaders knew he
was hiding elsewhere but we destroyed El Chorillo because the folks living there
were nationalists who wanted the U.S. out of Panama completely.
Worse still, why didn't I cry when we killed two million Vietnamese, mostly
innocent peasants, in a war which its main architect, Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara, knew we could not win? When I went to give blood the other day, I
spotted a Cambodian doing the same, three up in the line, and that reminded me:
Why didn't I cry when we helped Pol Pot butcher another million by giving him
arms and money, because he was opposed to "our enemy" (who eventually stopped
the killing fields)?
To stay up but not cry that evening, I decided to go to a movie. I chose
Lumumba, at the Film Forum, and again I realized that I hadn't cried when our
government arranged for the murder of the Congo's only decent leader, to be
replaced by General Mobutu, a greedy, vicious, murdering dictator. Nor did I cry
when the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno, who had fought
the Japanese World War II invaders and established a free independent country,
and then replaced him by another General, Suharto, who had collaborated with the
Japanese and who proceeded to execute at least half a million "Marxists" (in a
country where, if folks had ever heard of Marx, it was at best Groucho)?
I watched TV again last night and cried again at the picture of that
wonderful now-missing father playing with his two-month old child. Yet when I
remembered the slaughter of thousands of Salvadorans, so graphically described
in the Times by Ray Bonner, or the rape and murder of those American nuns and
lay sisters there, all perpetrated by CIA trained and paid agents, I never shed
a tear. I even cried when I heard how brave had been Barbara Olson, wife of the
Solicitor General, whose political views I detested. But I didn't cry when the
US invaded that wonderful tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada and killed innocent
citizens who hoped to get a better life by building a tourist airfield, which my
government called proof of a Russian base, but then finished building once the
island was secure in the US camp again.
Why didn't I cry when Ariel Sharon, today Israel's prime minister, planned,
then ordered, the massacre of two thousand poor Palestinians in the refugee
camps of Sabra and Shatila, the same Sharon who, with such other Irgun and Stern
Gang terrorists become prime ministers as Begin and Shamir, killed the wives and
children of British officers by blowing up the King David hotel where they were
billeted?
I guess one only cries only for one's own. But is that a reason to demand
vengeance on anyone who might disagree with us? That's what Americans seem to
want. Certainly our government does, and so too most of our media. Do we really
believe that we have a right to exploit the poor folk of the world for our
benefit, because we claim we are free and they are not? So now we're going to go
to war. We are certainly entitled to go after those who killed so many of our
innocent brothers and sisters. And we'll win, of course. Against Bin Laden.
Against Taliban. Against Iraq. Against whoever and whatever. In the process
we'll kill a few innocent children again. Children who have no clothes for the
coming winter. No houses to shelter them. And no schools to learn why they are
guilty, at two or four or six years old. Maybe Evangelists Falwell and
Robertson will claim their death is good because they weren't Christians, and
maybe some State Department spokesperson will tell the world that they were so
poor that they're now better off.
And then what? Will we now be able to run the world the way we want to? With
all the new legislation establishing massive surveillance of you and me, our
CEOs will certainly be pleased that the folks demonstrating against
globalization will now be cowed for ever. No more riots in Seattle, Quebec or
Genoa. Peace at last.
Until next time. Who will it be then? A child grown-up who survived our
massacre of his innocent parents in El Chorillo? A Nicaraguan girl who learned
that her doctor mother and father were murdered by a bunch of gangsters we
called democratic contras who read in the CIA handbook that the best way to
destroy the only government which was trying to give the country's poor a better
lot was to kill its teachers, health personnel and government farm workers? Or
maybe it will be a bitter Chilean who is convinced that his whole family was
wiped out on order of Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who could never
tell the difference between a communist and a democratic socialist or even a
nationalist.
When will we Americans learn that as long as we keep trying to run the world
for the sake of the bottom line, we will suffer someone's revenge? No war will
ever stop terrorism as long as we use terror to have our way.
So I stopped crying because I stopped watching TV. I went for a walk. Just
four houses from mine. There, a crowd had congregated to lay flowers and lit
candles in front of our local firehouse. It was closed. It had been closed
since Tuesday because the firemen, a wonderful bunch of friendly guys who always
greeted neighborhood folks with smiles and good cheer, had rushed so fast to
save the victims of the first tower that they perished with them when it
collapsed. And I cried again.
So I said to myself when I wrote this, don't send it; some of your students,
colleagues, neighbors will hate you, maybe even harm you. But then I put on the
TV again, and there was Secretary of State Powell telling me that it will be
okay to go to war against these children, these poor folks, these US-haters,
because we are civilized and they are not. So I decided to risk it. Maybe,
reading this, one more person will ask: Why are so many people in the world
ready to die to give us a taste of what we give them?
John Gerassi is Professor of Political Science at Queens College and the
Graduate Center, CUNY.
---
["The International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a report that at least
3.3 million people had died since the war broke out in August 1998 and IRC's
mortality study was completed in November last year."--"Congo war claimed
3.3 million lives," AFP, April 9, 2003]
Copyright © 2001 John Gerassi
