Panamarisen
20th January 2003, 20:55
This is a typical example of the cleverness and deepness of Galeano´s thinking.
¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!
The Madhouse
by Eduardo Galeano
Times of fear. The world is living in a state of terror, and the terror is in disguise: it is said to be the doing of Saddam Hussein, an actor who has already grown weary of playing the enemy so much, or of Osama bin Laden, a professional fear monger.
But the real author of the planetary panic is called the Market. This gentleman does not have anything to do with that intimate place in the barrio where one goes in search of fruits and vegetables. He is an omnipotent faceless terrorist who is everywhere, like God, and, like God, he is believed to be eternal. His numerous exponents announce: "The Market is nervous," and they warn: "The Market cannot be annoyed."
His thick criminal file renders him fearsome. He has spent his lifetime stealing food, assassinating jobs, holding countries hostage and manufacturing wars.
******************************************
The market sows fear in order to sell its wars. And fear creates the backdrop. Television sees to it that the New York towers collapse anew every day. What happened to the anthrax panic? Not one single official investigation discovered little or anything about those lethal letters: and there was also a spectacular increase in the United States military budget. And the fortune which that country is allocating to the industry of death is a not inconsiderable sum. Just a month and a half of those costs would be enough to do away with poverty in the world, if the United Nations' little numbers don't lie.
Every time the Market gives the order, the red alarm light blinks on the danger meter, that machine which converts all suspicion into evidence. Preventative wars kill based on doubts, not based on evidence. Now it is Iraq's turn. Once again that penalized country has been condemned. The dead would be able to understand: Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserve, which is exactly what the market needs in order to insure fuel for the squandering of the consumer society.
******************************************
Mirror, mirror: Who is the most fearsome? The imperial powers have a monopoly, based on natural law, on the weapons of mass destruction.
During the time of the American conquest, when what is now called the global Market was being born, smallpox and the flu killed many more indigenous than the sword and the harquebus. The successful European invasion owed a large debt of gratitude to bacteria and viruses. Centuries later, these fortuitous allies have turned into weapons of war, in the hands of the great powers. A couple of decades ago, the United States allowed Saddam Hussein to launch epidemic containing bombs against the Kurds, when he was the darling of the West and the Kurds were garnering bad press. But those biological weapons were made with stock that was purchased from a company in Rockville, Maryland.
In military matters, as in all the rest, the Market preaches freedom, but it does not like competition one bit. Supply is concentrated in the hands of a few, in the name of universal security. Saddam Hussein causes much fear. The world trembles. A huge threat: Iraq could use bacteriological weapons again and, much more seriously yet, it might at some point come to have nuclear weapons. Humanity cannot allow that danger, proclaims the dangerous president of the only country which has used nuclear weapons to assassinate civil populations. Was it Iraq which exterminated the old ones, women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
****************************************
Landscape of the new millennium:
People who do not know if they will find anything to eat tomorrow, or whether they will remain homeless, or what they will do in order to survive if they become ill or have an accident;
People who do not know whether they will be losing their job tomorrow, or if they will be forced to work twice as much for half the pay, or if their retirement will be devoured by the wolves of the stock exchange or by the rats of inflation; citizens who do not know whether they will be attacked tomorrow when they turn a corner, or if their houses will be ransacked, or if some lunatic will put a knife in their gut;
Campesinos who don't know whether or not they will have land to work tomorrow, and fishermen who don't know if they will find yet unpoisoned rivers and seas;
People and countries who do not know what they will do tomorrow in order to pay their debts which have been multiplied by usury.
Are these daily terrors the work of Al Qaeda?
***********************************************
The economy perpetrates attacks which do not get into the newspapers: every minute it kills 12 children through hunger. In the terrorist organization of the world, guarded by the military powers, there are a billion chronically hungry people and six hundred million obese persons.
Strong money, fragile lives: Ecuador and El Salvador have adopted the dollar as their national currency, but the population is fleeing. Those countries have never before produced so much poverty and so many emigrants. The selling of human flesh to other countries has created uprooting, unhappiness and capital. During 2001, Ecuadorians who were forced to seek work elsewhere sent more money back to their country than the total earned by exports from banana, shrimp, tuna, coffee and cacao.
Uruguay and Argentina are also expelling their young children. The emigrants, the grandchildren of immigrants, are leaving behind them destroyed families and memories which bring pain. "Doctor, they broke my heart": in what hospital can that be cured? In Argentina, every day a television contest offers the most coveted prize of all: a job. The lines are extremely long. The program picks the candidates, and the public votes. The one who sheds, and extracts, the most tears is the one who gets the job. Sony Pictures is selling the successful formula all over the world.
What job? Whatever comes. For how much? For whatever and however. The desperation of those who are seeking work, and the anxiety of those who fear losing it, forces them to accept the unacceptable. The "Wal-Mart" model" is being imposed throughout the world. The number one company in the United States forbids unions and extends hours without paying for the extra time. The Market is exporting its profitable example. The more wounded the countries are, the easier it is to turn labor rights into scrap paper.
And it also ends up being easier to sacrifice other rights. The sires of chaos sell order. Poverty and unemployment cause criminality to proliferate, which spreads panic, and the very worst flourishes in that breeding ground. The Argentine military, which knows much about crimes, is being invited to fight crime: come and save us from crime, Carlos Menem clamors loudly. Menem is an employee of the Market who knows a lot about crime, since he practiced it brilliantly when he was president.
**************************************************
Extremely low costs, thousands in profits, zero controls: an oil ship splits in two and the deadly oil slick attacks the coast of Galicia and beyond.
The most profitable business in the world creates fortunes and "natural" disasters. The poisonous gases which oil sends into the air are the main cause of the ozone hole - which is now the size of the United States - and of the climatological madness. In Ethiopia, and in other African countries, drought is condemning millions of persons to the worst famine of the last twenty years, while Germany and other European countries are experiencing floods which have been the worst catastrophe of the last half century.
Oil creates wars as well. Poor Iraq.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Check out our website http://www.zapatistas.org/index.html
¡Que se cumplen los acuerdos de San Andrés!
¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!
The Madhouse
by Eduardo Galeano
Times of fear. The world is living in a state of terror, and the terror is in disguise: it is said to be the doing of Saddam Hussein, an actor who has already grown weary of playing the enemy so much, or of Osama bin Laden, a professional fear monger.
But the real author of the planetary panic is called the Market. This gentleman does not have anything to do with that intimate place in the barrio where one goes in search of fruits and vegetables. He is an omnipotent faceless terrorist who is everywhere, like God, and, like God, he is believed to be eternal. His numerous exponents announce: "The Market is nervous," and they warn: "The Market cannot be annoyed."
His thick criminal file renders him fearsome. He has spent his lifetime stealing food, assassinating jobs, holding countries hostage and manufacturing wars.
******************************************
The market sows fear in order to sell its wars. And fear creates the backdrop. Television sees to it that the New York towers collapse anew every day. What happened to the anthrax panic? Not one single official investigation discovered little or anything about those lethal letters: and there was also a spectacular increase in the United States military budget. And the fortune which that country is allocating to the industry of death is a not inconsiderable sum. Just a month and a half of those costs would be enough to do away with poverty in the world, if the United Nations' little numbers don't lie.
Every time the Market gives the order, the red alarm light blinks on the danger meter, that machine which converts all suspicion into evidence. Preventative wars kill based on doubts, not based on evidence. Now it is Iraq's turn. Once again that penalized country has been condemned. The dead would be able to understand: Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserve, which is exactly what the market needs in order to insure fuel for the squandering of the consumer society.
******************************************
Mirror, mirror: Who is the most fearsome? The imperial powers have a monopoly, based on natural law, on the weapons of mass destruction.
During the time of the American conquest, when what is now called the global Market was being born, smallpox and the flu killed many more indigenous than the sword and the harquebus. The successful European invasion owed a large debt of gratitude to bacteria and viruses. Centuries later, these fortuitous allies have turned into weapons of war, in the hands of the great powers. A couple of decades ago, the United States allowed Saddam Hussein to launch epidemic containing bombs against the Kurds, when he was the darling of the West and the Kurds were garnering bad press. But those biological weapons were made with stock that was purchased from a company in Rockville, Maryland.
In military matters, as in all the rest, the Market preaches freedom, but it does not like competition one bit. Supply is concentrated in the hands of a few, in the name of universal security. Saddam Hussein causes much fear. The world trembles. A huge threat: Iraq could use bacteriological weapons again and, much more seriously yet, it might at some point come to have nuclear weapons. Humanity cannot allow that danger, proclaims the dangerous president of the only country which has used nuclear weapons to assassinate civil populations. Was it Iraq which exterminated the old ones, women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
****************************************
Landscape of the new millennium:
People who do not know if they will find anything to eat tomorrow, or whether they will remain homeless, or what they will do in order to survive if they become ill or have an accident;
People who do not know whether they will be losing their job tomorrow, or if they will be forced to work twice as much for half the pay, or if their retirement will be devoured by the wolves of the stock exchange or by the rats of inflation; citizens who do not know whether they will be attacked tomorrow when they turn a corner, or if their houses will be ransacked, or if some lunatic will put a knife in their gut;
Campesinos who don't know whether or not they will have land to work tomorrow, and fishermen who don't know if they will find yet unpoisoned rivers and seas;
People and countries who do not know what they will do tomorrow in order to pay their debts which have been multiplied by usury.
Are these daily terrors the work of Al Qaeda?
***********************************************
The economy perpetrates attacks which do not get into the newspapers: every minute it kills 12 children through hunger. In the terrorist organization of the world, guarded by the military powers, there are a billion chronically hungry people and six hundred million obese persons.
Strong money, fragile lives: Ecuador and El Salvador have adopted the dollar as their national currency, but the population is fleeing. Those countries have never before produced so much poverty and so many emigrants. The selling of human flesh to other countries has created uprooting, unhappiness and capital. During 2001, Ecuadorians who were forced to seek work elsewhere sent more money back to their country than the total earned by exports from banana, shrimp, tuna, coffee and cacao.
Uruguay and Argentina are also expelling their young children. The emigrants, the grandchildren of immigrants, are leaving behind them destroyed families and memories which bring pain. "Doctor, they broke my heart": in what hospital can that be cured? In Argentina, every day a television contest offers the most coveted prize of all: a job. The lines are extremely long. The program picks the candidates, and the public votes. The one who sheds, and extracts, the most tears is the one who gets the job. Sony Pictures is selling the successful formula all over the world.
What job? Whatever comes. For how much? For whatever and however. The desperation of those who are seeking work, and the anxiety of those who fear losing it, forces them to accept the unacceptable. The "Wal-Mart" model" is being imposed throughout the world. The number one company in the United States forbids unions and extends hours without paying for the extra time. The Market is exporting its profitable example. The more wounded the countries are, the easier it is to turn labor rights into scrap paper.
And it also ends up being easier to sacrifice other rights. The sires of chaos sell order. Poverty and unemployment cause criminality to proliferate, which spreads panic, and the very worst flourishes in that breeding ground. The Argentine military, which knows much about crimes, is being invited to fight crime: come and save us from crime, Carlos Menem clamors loudly. Menem is an employee of the Market who knows a lot about crime, since he practiced it brilliantly when he was president.
**************************************************
Extremely low costs, thousands in profits, zero controls: an oil ship splits in two and the deadly oil slick attacks the coast of Galicia and beyond.
The most profitable business in the world creates fortunes and "natural" disasters. The poisonous gases which oil sends into the air are the main cause of the ozone hole - which is now the size of the United States - and of the climatological madness. In Ethiopia, and in other African countries, drought is condemning millions of persons to the worst famine of the last twenty years, while Germany and other European countries are experiencing floods which have been the worst catastrophe of the last half century.
Oil creates wars as well. Poor Iraq.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Check out our website http://www.zapatistas.org/index.html
¡Que se cumplen los acuerdos de San Andrés!