When Maxims Mislead
Galeano, Eduardo
The Upside-Down World Eduardo Galeano When Maxims Mislead "NEW YORK, MADRID, LONDON: TERRORISM STRIKESANEW." Versions of this headline adorned many of the world's newspapers on July 8, the day...
...The unions used to defend the workers, back in times that now seem prehistoric...
...The raining of bombs and then the doling out of contracts for the reconstruction of the countries they annihilate...
...There is no more lucrative business on the face of the Earth than this practice of industrial-scale assassination...
...Not so: lies have very long legs...
...Lies have short legs...
...So long they outrun the denials of the liars...
...It sheds crocodile tears each time the shit hits the fan, then feigns innocence of the consequences of its actions...
...They didn't mention either Afghanistan or Iraq...
...The unions, weakened and persecuted, can do little to help, and God, it would seem, is busy elsewhere...
...The deadly impunity of the serial killers who are heads of state...
...The military industry needs to produce fear to justify its existence...
...The atrophy of the unions, or their outright prohibition, has started to become normal...
...and U.K., the people repaid them with reelection...
...Does this mean the guerrilla leaders...
...In 1776, the Declaration of Independence of the United States affirmed that all men are created equal...
...Weren't-aren't-the bombings there also terrorist attacks, which in the case of Iraq occur daily...
...The twin engines of power now are fear and fear: fear of losing one's job, fear of not finding a job, fear of hunger, fear of homelessness...
...Crime doesn't pay...
...Iraq, bombarded, occupied, humiliated, becomes the preeminent school for crime of our day...
...Isn't it always, or almost always, the working class that suffers casualties in these attacks and in war...
...Then a few years later the first Constitution refined this notion, establishing that for the purposes of the census, each black would be counted as three-fifths of a person...
...But only one works now: greed has disappeared, at least for laborers...
...Wars require weapons, weapons need wars, and wars and weapons need enemies...
...What fraction of a person are Iraqis counted as today...
...After shouting to the four winds that Iraq was a danger to humanity, Bush and Blair admitted publicly that the country they invaded and annihilated had no weapons of mass destruction...
...Versions of this headline adorned many of the world's newspapers on July 8, the day after the explosions in London...
...Its invaders, who call themselves liberators, have set up there the most prolific nursery of terrorists, fed by hopelessness and desperation...
...But in today's world, work is worth less than garbage...
...That is a state secret...
...In reality, the saying calls on the poor laborers to wake up early, and comes from the times when it was work that paid...
...Its subsidiary, the industry of fear, devoted to the manufacture of enemies, is today the primary source of profits for entertainment and communications companies...
...In subsequent balloting in the U.S...
...President Bush needs Him day and night for his divine mission of planetary conquest, in which God guides his every step...
...In Hollywood, screenwriters pile fright upon fright: as if earthly terror were not enough, they add threats from other planets...
...The sowing of anti-personnel mines and then the selling of prostheses...
...It is a vicious circle: The world becomes a slaughterhouse that becomes a madhouse that becomes a slaughterhouse...
...The devil provides the weapons...
...And now, abandoned to their fates, people are obliged to accept whatever their employers want: twice the hours for half the pay...
...The bombardment of lies from the factories of public opinion...
...Alas, not even such proverbs know what they are saying...
...For the international organizations that fight for human rights, this scandalous violation provokes little response...
...Greed and fear were the two motors of the universal system of power-the system that was called capitalism back when I was born...
...The world spends $2.2 billion per day-yes, per day-on the military industry, that industry of death, and day by day that figure rises...
...The early bird gets the worm...
...State terror, the prolific father of all terrorisms, finds the perfect alibi in the terrorisms that it generates...
...The chemical weapons of consumer society that are maddening the climate and polluting the air...
...At last a true saying...
...By mail, fax, telephone, telepathy...
...The poison gas from the factories of fear that make us accept the unacceptable and turn indignity into a feature of destiny...
...But the owners of the world do not need to worry: The atrocities that the fanatics and madmen commit provide them their justification and grant them impunity...
...Some people are more equal than others...
...God couldn't be such a bastard...
...But the most famous multinational companies, Wal-Mart and McDonald's, openly and unapologetically deny workers their right to unionize and throw into the street whoever dares to attempt it...
...Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of "The Open Veins of Latin America" and "Memories of Fire...
...The endless multiplication of armaments versus the dwindling attention to poverty...
...How do they communicate...
...Today, no one has the faintest hope of getting rich by working...
...The labor movement, the fruit of two centuries of workers' struggle, is in crisis around the world, as are all the instruments of collective and peaceful defense of people who live off their labor...
...So they say...
...It must be the devil that provides the weapons, or at least the weapons of mass destruction, the real ones, the ones Iraq didn't have and that are ripping the world apart...
...The successful bankers...
...Don't they deserve the same respect and the same compassion as the victims of any expression of disdain for human life...
Vol. 69 • September 2005 • No. 9
