America and the reality behind the mask!

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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
e-mail: tgerassi@qc1.qc.edu