The Terrifying Spectre of Revenge
"The Axe forgets, but not the tree."
- African proverb.

What are they thinking?
In their practical silence. Inside the closed space of their strategic
multi-ethnic inscrutability. The faceless billions who scratch for survival
on an endangered planet they played no role in jeopardizing. The traditional
indigenous people who for thousands of years have accorded their arcadian
labors and likes with host mother earth's most elemental needs. The
hopelessly poor masked in the mannerism of their false docility. The
economically exploited who win no notice for their injuries; the tortured
who suspect a westerly identity of their torturers absentee sponsors; the
defenseless and displaced whose homes have been flooded by ancient waters
loosed from new and needless western-financed dams, or destroyed by child
soldiers brandishing modern western arms. The heirs to storied occupied
lands where the descendants of those who taught the world to read and write
are groped at checkpoint after checkpoint by heedless western hands; the
sullen dangerous shadows that overpopulate our domestic prisons.
Yestertime's humanity. Slavery's final harvest.
And, of course, the shackled and violated devout of Guantanamo, Bagram and
Abu Ghraib.

Victims all, they are, and by the millions. Infinite. Farflung. Misleadingly
dissimilar. Joined only in the fog of a common humiliating experience
occasioned by a common opponent, consistently indifferent to their
unpublicized suffering.
What is the inevitable consequence to us all of their combusting,
all-consuming and predictably pan-destructive rage.

The question never posed by Americans, perhaps not even to themselves, is
the question that obsesses the most resilient of the world's cultural,
political, and economic victims" Do we Americans see ourselves as we are
seen by the eyes of the world?

- When our soldiers abduct, at gunpoint, a popular, democratically elected
President of Haiti together with his wife in the ink of night and dragoon
them 5000 miles across the Atlantic to an unrevealed destination.

- When Lawrence Summers (then a World Bank Vice President and currently the
President of Harvard University) urges the World Bank in a memorandum to
incentivize American industries to dump their toxic waste in poor countries:

"I have always thought that (these countries) are vastly
underpolluted! From this point of view, a given amount of health impairing pollution should
be done in the country with the lowest costs, which will be the country with
the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic
waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to
that!"

- When banana farmers on the tiny democratic Caribbean island of St. Vincent
commit suicide after an American administration blocks access to their sole
export market- Europe - for the fruit of their sweat.

- When officials in Washington decree unilaterally (against a rising tide of
global opinion) that no American can be brought to book before the
International Criminal Court, no matter the egregiousness of the crime known
to have been committed.

- When Curt Weldon, a member of the United States Congress, proposes
blithely to the prime minister of a tiny Caribbean democracy that the prime
minister allow his vegetal island to be used as an American practice bombing
range.

- When President Dwight David Eisenhower approves plans to assassinate
Congo's estimable Patrice Lumumba, and ensuing American Presidents
successively prop up the US-client, corrupt dictator, Joseph Mobutu, who
ultimately rises to power and ushers his country toward the warring hell
that, until recently, claimed up to a thousand Congolese lives a day.

- When American society makes one out of every eight prisoners in the world
an African American.

- When American officials force weak African governments to cut back
spending for the education of their people, the inoculation of their
children, and the productivity of their farmers.

- When massive American-approved, World Bank dam projects in India
dispossess the poor of their land and water, and place these long-held
natural resources at the disposal of the rich.

- When visionless western industricrats cook the earth, thaw the icecaps,
raise the oceans and submerge the littoral homelands of millions of
defenseless innocents worldwide.

- When our nation tells brown nations that they cannot have the Weapon that
America has and, alone among nations, twice deployed to incinerate hundreds
of thousands of unwitting, defenseless civilians.

- When we, invincible within the impenetrable and unfaltering extolment of
our own virtue, rain a blistering and concussive death upon 100,000 Iraqi
men, women, and children who never ventured from their country and posed no
threat to a single one of us.

- When our country, in a post-colonial world comprised of young nations
freshly jealous of their hard-won, but fragile, self-determination, can, it
would appear, only relate to the world, friend and foe alike, through might
or muscle of one stripe or another.

What do they think of us? The common people of the world? The anonymous
poor, the near-poor, and those of moderate means. The laboring hard grinders
who dream of little more than a small, but better, future for their
children. In Africa? Across the Middle East? Asia? On the islands of the
Pacific and Atlantic? What do they think of us as we consume 40% of the
world's energy and account for half of its military expenditures.

An America that topples and erects governments, here and there, willy-nilly,
with near-oblivious caprice; an America that strides indifferently across
the globe with demonstrable disdain for human rights; an America that shoves
and bullies and listens only to those it has marginal cause to fear; an
America whose public policies and private ventures have contributed, more
than those of any other nation, to the destruction of the living earth on
which we all must depend to survive as a species?

- What could they possibly think of us, this jury of the faceless billions
of whose very existence Americans are but dimly (if distortedly) aware? In
the now-lengthening remissions during which they are not paralyzed by our
glittering materialism or drawn self-destructively into the vortex of our
compelling self-absorption?

- What possibly could the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have
demonstrated, unnoticed, for the restoration of a democracy that our country
dashed with handsomely fitted-out local thugs, think?

Or, what could their Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune, muster strength enough to
think, jailed and hovering, as he is, near death in the last days of his
pro-democracy hunger strike that has received disquietingly less attention
in the United States than the successful breast cancer surgery of an
Australian pop-singer?

I would suppose that were we able, (or inclined), to poll the planet, we
would discover that America is now more intensely disliked than ever before
in its history. After all, the distance between what we are, and what we,
ever-fulsomely, claim to be, makes us out to be something of a rather
monumental fraud. The truth is, we have never cared much about what others
thought of us, largely because there never before existed any meaningful
prospect for exacted consequence
until now.

Owing to hubris, we have been maneuvered into a murderous insurgency in
Iraq. And so, a small fraction of those who dislike America now has American
soldiers precisely where they want them.

My fear is that the Iraq war, which American leaders tragically
misunderstood from the very beginning, may mark the opening of a horrific
chapter in human history with painful implications for the entire planet.
Terrorism, put simply, is war, privatized. It is vastly more mobile, and
easier to mount and prosecute successfully, than state-mounted war.

We must face the fact that our country has done hurtful things in the world
that the vast majority of Americans know little to nothing about. The
victims remember, however, even if we cannot.

We are now entering, I fear, Einstein's doomsday nightmare.
In the beginning, only America had nuclear weapons. Then, Britain. Now North
Korea, India, and Pakistan. Soon, if not already, (according to the writer
Arundhati Roy), Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, South Korea, Cuba,
Nepal, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Denmark, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Bosnia,
Singapore, Burma, Uzbekistan. Even Afghanistan, and then, sooner or later,
and probably sooner, much sooner, private religious, ethnic, and racial
armies, where all wounds are fresh and well-remembered.

A little humility and a measure of foresight might have spared us all the
monstrous forthcoming grief.

Randall Robinson (rr@rosro.com)
author of The Debt What America Owes to Blacks

Comments?

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.grupo-utopia.com/blog/mt/mt-tb.cgi/216