Will Tears Ever Stop?
By John Gerassi
(John Gerassi Professor of Political Science,
Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY,
e-mail: tgerassi@qc1.qc.edu)
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 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
spokes person 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?
