Theatre of Good and Evil
By Eduardo Galeano
In the fight between Good and Evil, it is always the people who contribute the dead.
The terrorists have killed workers from fifty countries, in New York and in Washington, in the name of Good against Evil. And, in the name of Good against Evil, Bush is vowing vengeance: "We are going to eliminate Evil from this world," he announces.
Eliminate Evil? What would happen to Good without Evil? It is not only the religious fanatics who need enemies in order to justify their madness. The arms industry and the huge military apparatus of the United States also need enemies in order to justify their existence. Good and evil, evil and good: the actors change masks, heroes become monsters, and the monsters heroes, as those writing the drama demand.
There is nothing new about that. The German scientist Werner von Braun was evil when he invented the V-2 rockets which Hitler fired on London, but he became good the day he put his talent at the service of the United States. Stalin was good during the Second World War and evil later, when he went on to lead the Evil Empire. During the Cold War years, John Steinbeck wrote :
"Perhaps the entire world needs Russians. I would bet that they need Russians in Russia also. Perhaps they call them Americans." Later the Russians became good. Now Putin is also saying : "Evil must be punished."
Saddam Hussein was good, and the chemical weapons he used against the Iranians and the Kurds were good. Later he became evil. He was called Satan Hussein when the United States - who had invaded Panama - invaded Iraq because Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Bush the Father was in charge of this war against Evil. With the humanitarian and compassionate spirit which characterizes his family, he killed more than one hundred thousand Iraqis, most of them civilians.
Satan Hussein is still what he was, but this number one enemy of humanity has fallen to the category of number two. The scourge of the world is now called Osama Bin Laden. The Central Intelligence Agency taught him everything he knows about terrorism: Bin Laden, loved and armed by the United States government, was one of the main "freedom fighters" against communism in Afghanistan. Bush the Father was Vice President when President Reagan said that these heroes were "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."
Hollywood was in agreement with the White House. It was during those times that Rambo 3 was filmed: the Afghan Muslims were the good guys. Now they are the most evil of evil, in Bush the Son's times, thirteen years later.
Henry Kissinger was one of the first to react to the recent tragedy. "Those who lend support, financing and encouragement to them are as guilty as the terrorists," he sentenced, with words which President Bush would repeat a few hours later.
If that is so, then one would have to begin by bombing Kissinger. He would be found to be guilty of many more crimes than Bin Laden, and all the terrorists in the world, have committed. And in many more countries: acting in the service of various United States governments, he lent "support, financing and encouragement" to State terror in Indonesia, Cambodia, Cyprus, Iran, South Africa, Bangladesh, and in the South American countries which suffered from the dirty war of the Condor Plan.
On September 11, 1973, exactly 28 years before today's fires, the presidential palace in Chile was burning. Kissinger had anticipated Salvador Allende's epitaph - and that of Chilean democracy - when he commented on the election results: "There's no reason for us to have to accept a country's becoming Marxist because of the irresponsibility of its people."
Contempt for popular will is one of the many concurrences between State terrorism and private terrorism. To give just one example, the ETA, which kills people in the name of the independence of the Basque Country, said, through one of its spokespersons: "Rights have nothing to do with majorities and minorities."
Home grown terrorism and high level technology terrorism are very much alike, that of the religious fundamentalists and that of market fundamentalists, that of the desperate and that of the powerful, that of madmen on the loose and that of uniformed professionals. All of them share the same contempt for human life: the assassins of the five thousand citizens crushed under the rubble of the Twin Towers, which collapsed like castles built on sand, and the assassins of the two hundred thousand Guatemalans, mostly indigenous, who have been exterminated without TV or the newspapers of the world ever paying the slightest bit of attention.
They, the Guatemalans, were not sacrificed by any Muslim fanatic, but by terrorist soldiers who received "support, financing and encouragement" from successive United States governments.
All of those who are in love with death also share in their obsession with reducing social, cultural and national conflicts to military terms. In the name of Good against Evil, in the name of the One Truth, they all resolve everything by killing first and asking questions later. And in that way they end up feeding the enemy they are fighting.
It was the atrocities of Shining Path which, in large measure, provided a breeding ground for President Fujimori, who, with considerable popular support, imposed a regime of terror and sold Peru for the price of a banana. It was the atrocities of the United States in the eastern Meditteranean/southwest Asia which, in large measure, have provided a breeding ground for the Holy War of terrorism of Allah.
Even though the leader of Civilization is now urging a new Crusade, Allah is innocent of the crimes which are being committed in his name. At the end of the day, God did not order the nazi Holocaust against Jehovah's faithful, and it was not Jehovah who dictated the killings of Sabra and Chatila, nor who ordered the Palestinians to be expelled from their lands. Are not Jehovah, Allah and God three names for one same divinity?
A tragedy of misunderstandings: it is no longer known who is who. The smoke from the explosions forms part of a much more enormous smokescreen which is preventing us from seeing. From vengeance to vengeance, terrorism is forcing us to walk to the grave. I am looking at a recently published photograph: on a wall in New York some hand had written: "An eye for an eye leaves the world blind."
The spiral of violence engenders violence, and also confusion: sorrow, fear, intolerance, hate, madness. In Porto Alegre, early this year, the Algerian Ahmed Ben Bella warned: "This system, which has already maddened cows, is driving the people mad." And the madmen, mad with hate, are acting in the same way as the powers which generate them.
A three year old child, called Luca, recently commented: "The world doesn't know where its house is." He was looking at a map. He could have been looking at a news program.
Translated by irlandesa