Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

So it’s no surprise that the permanent members of the Security Council enjoy the right to do whatever they like. In recent years, for example, the United States freely bombed the poorest neighborhood in Panama City and later flattened Iraq. Russia punished Chechnya’s cries for independence with blood and fire. France raped the South Pacific with its nuclear tests. And every year China legally executes ten times as many people by firing squad as died in Tienanmen Square. As in the Falklands war the previous decade, the invasion of Panama gave the air force an opportunity to test its new toys, and television turned the invasion of Iraq into a global display case for the latest weapons on the market: Come and see the new trinkets of death at the great fair of Baghdad.

Enigmas

What are those skulls laughing at?

Who is the author of anonymous jokes? Who is that old guy making wisecracks and spreading them about the world? What cave does he hide out in?

Why did Noah let mosquitoes on the Ark?

Did Saint Francis of Assisi love mosquitoes too?

Are the statues we ought to have as numerous as the ones we have and don’t need?

If communications technology is more and more advanced, why do people communicate less and less?

Why is it no one understands communications experts, not even God?

Why do sex education books make us want to give up sex for several years?

In wars, who sells the weapons?

Neither should anyone be surprised by the unhappy global imbalance between war and peace. For every dollar spent by the United Nations on peacekeeping, the world spends two thousand dollars on warkeeping. In the ensuing sacrificial rites, hunter and prey are of the same species and the winner is he who kills more of his brothers. Theodore Roosevelt put it well: “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons in the world. The United States has half of them; Russia and, to a lesser degree, other powers, the rest. The owners of the nuclear monopoly scream to the high heavens when India or Pakistan or anyone else achieves the dream of having its own bomb. That’s when they decry the deadly threat of such weapons to the world: each weapon could kill several million people, and it would take only a few to end the human adventure on this planet and the planet itself. But the great powers never bother to say when God decided to award them a monopoly or why they continue building such weapons. During the Cold War, nuclear arms were an extremely dangerous instrument of reciprocal intimidation. But now that the United States and Russia walk arm in arm, what are those immense arsenals for? Whom are these countries trying to scare? All of humanity?

Every war has the drawback of requiring an enemy — if possible, more than one. Without threat or aggression — spontaneous or provoked, real or fabricated — the possibility of war is hardly convincing and the demand for weaponry might face a dramatic decline. In 1989, a new Barbie doll dressed in military fatigues and giving a smart salute was launched onto the world market. Barbie picked a bad time to start her military career. At the end of that year the Berlin Wall fell; everything else collapsed soon after. The Evil Empire came tumbling down and suddenly God was orphaned of the Devil. The Pentagon and the arms trade found themselves in a rather tight spot.

Enemy wanted. The Germans and the Japanese had gone from Bad to Good years earlier, and now, from one day to the next, the Russians lost their fangs and their sulfurous odor. Fortunately, lack-of-villain syndrome found a quick fix in Hollywood. Ronald Reagan, lucid prophet that he was, had already announced that the Cold War had to be won in outer space. Hollywood’s vast talent and money were put to work to fabricate enemies in the galaxies. Extraterrestrial invasion had been the subject of films before, but it was never depicted with much sorrow or glory. Now the studios rushed to portray ferocious Martians and other reptilian or cockroachlike foreigners with the knack of adopting human form to fool the gullible or reduce production costs. And they met with tremendous box-office success.

Points of View/9

From the point of view of the economy, the sale of weapons is indistinguishable from the sale of food.

When a building collapses or a plane crashes, it’s rather inconvenient from the point of view of those inside, but it’s altogether convenient for the growth of the gross national product, which sometimes ought to be called the “gross criminal product.”

Meanwhile, here on earth, the panorama improved. True, the supply of evils had fallen off, but in the South there were longstanding villains who could still be called on. The Pentagon should put up a monument to Fidel Castro for his forty long years of generous service. Muammar al-Qaddafi, once a villain in great demand, barely works anymore, but Saddam Hussein, who was a good guy in the eighties, became in the nineties the worst of the worst. He remains so useful that, at the beginning of 1998, the United States threatened to invade Iraq a second time so people would stop talking about the sexual habits of President Bill Clinton.

At the beginning of 1991, another president, George Bush, saw there was no need to look to outer space for enemies. After invading Panama, and while he was in the process of invading Iraq, Bush declared: “The world is a dangerous place.” This pearl of wisdom has remained over the years the most irrefutable justification for the highest war budget on the planet, mysteriously called the “defense budget.” The name constitutes an enigma. The United States hasn’t been invaded by anybody since the English burned Washington in 1812. Except for Pancho Villa’s fleeting excursion during the Mexican Revolution, no enemy has crossed its borders. The United States, in contrast, has always had the unpleasant habit of invading others.

A good part of the U.S. public, astonishingly ignorant about everything beyond its shores, fears and disdains all that it does not understand. The country that has done more than any other to develop information technology produces television news that barely touches on world events except to confirm that foreigners tend to be terrorists and ingrates. Every act of rebellion or explosion of violence, wherever it occurs, becomes new proof that the international conspiracy continues its inexorable march, egged on by hatred and envy. Little does it matter that the Cold War is over, because the Devil has a large wardrobe and doesn’t dress just in red. Polls indicate that Russia now sits at the bottom of any enemy list, but people fear a nuclear attack from some terrorist group or other. No one knows what terrorist group has nuclear weapons, but as the noted sociologist Woody Allen points out, “Nobody can bite into a hamburger anymore without being afraid it’s going to explode.” In reality, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history took place in 1995 in Oklahoma City, and the attacker wasn’t a foreigner bearing nuclear arms but a white U.S. citizen with a fertilizer bomb who had been decorated in the war against Iraq.

A Star Is Born?

In mid-1998, the White House put another villain up on the global marquee. He uses the stage name Osama bin Laden; he’s an Islamic fundamentalist, sports a beard, wears a turban, and caresses the rifle in his lap. Will this new star’s career take off? Will he be a box-office hit? Will he manage to undermine the foundations of Western civilization or will he only play a supporting role? In horror movies, you never know.