Why America Is Hated:‘Who
do we cry for?’
Will Tears Ever
Stop?
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
Professor of Political Science
Queens
College and the Graduate Center, CUNY