Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

They won’t vomit from the stench of bodies rotting in the sun, only from the occasional spoiled hamburger.

They won’t be deafened by the bombs that blow people and cities to pieces, only by the fireworks at the victory celebration.

They won’t be kept awake by the eyes of their victims.

In 1991 the United States, which had just invaded Panama, invaded Iraq because Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

Timothy McVeigh was programmed to kill. In basic training, they ordered him to scream, “Blood makes the grass grow!”

Pursuing that ecological end, they showered the map of Iraq in blood. Planes dropped enough bombs to make five Hiroshimas, then tanks buried the wounded alive. Sergeant McVeigh crushed quite a few amid the sand dunes. Enemies in uniform, enemies with none. “They’re collateral damage,” he was told to say.

He won a Bronze Star.

Upon his return, he was not unplugged. In Oklahoma he killed 168, among them women and children. “They’re collateral damage,” he said.

But they didn’t pin another medal on his chest. They gave him a lethal injection. And he was discharged.

In the predawn hours of February 13, 1991, two smart bombs blew apart an underground military base in a neighborhood of Baghdad.

But the base wasn’t a base. It was a bomb shelter filled with sleeping people. In a few seconds, it became a funeral pyre. Four hundred and eight civilians were burned to a crisp. Among them were fifty-two children and twelve infants.

Khaled Mohammed’s entire body was an open wound. He thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. Crawling on hands and knees, he managed to get out. He couldn’t see. The fire had sealed his eyelids shut.

The world couldn’t see either, because TV was too busy exhibiting the new killing machines being launched on the market.

After Iraq came Yugoslavia.

From afar, from Mexico, Aleksander listened on the phone to the fury of war over Belgrade. When the telephones worked, and they did off and on, he heard the voice of Slava Lalicki, his mother, barely audible over the roar of bombs and the wail of sirens.

Missiles were raining on Belgrade, and every blast echoed again and again in Slava’s head.

Night after night, for seventy-eight nights in the spring of 1999, she could not sleep.

When the war ended, she still couldn’t. “It’s the silence,” she said. “This insufferable silence.”

While missiles were endured by Yugoslavia, celebrated on television, and sold in toy stores everywhere, two boys achieved the dream of a war of their own.

Since they had no enemy, they made do with whoever was at hand. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen and left their high school cafeteria littered with the wounded. This happened in Littleton, Colorado, a town that relies on a missile factory owned by Lockheed Corporation. Eric and Dylan did not use missiles. They used pistols, rifles, and bullets they’d purchased at a local department store. After killing, they killed themselves.

The media reported that they’d also planted two propane bombs to blow up the school and everyone in it, but the bombs did not go off.

The other crazy plan they hatched was barely noted. These two death-loving boys wanted to hijack a plane and crash it into the twin towers in New York.

Two and a half years after that high school bullet-fest, New York’s twin towers collapsed like dry sand castles.

The terrorist attack killed three thousand workers.

President George W. Bush was thus given a license to kill. He declared eternal war, a world war against terrorism, and soon invaded Afghanistan.

This terrorist attack killed three thousand peasants.

Bursts of flame, explosions, howls, curses; TV screens were seething. Every day they replayed the tragedy of the twin towers, intertwined with the blast of bombs falling on Afghanistan.

In a town somewhere, far from this global madness, Naul Ojeda was sitting on the floor with his three-year-old grandson. The boy said, “The world doesn’t know where its house is.”

They were looking at maps.

They could have been looking at the news.

The entertainment industry thrives on the loneliness market.

The consoling industry thrives on the anguish market.

The security industry thrives on the fear market.

The lying industry thrives on the stupidity market.

How do they gauge their success? On the stock market.

The arms industry too. Their stock prices are the best news in every war.

A few months after 9/11, Israel bombed Jenin.

The Palestinian refugee camp was reduced to an immense hole in the ground, filled with bodies and wreckage.

Jenin’s hole was the same size as the one left by the twin towers.

Apart from the survivors sifting through the debris in search of their loved ones, how many people saw it?

As was his habit, the president of the planet thought things through:

To do away with forest fires, cut down the forests.

To cure a headache, cut off the head.

To liberate the Iraqis, bomb them to smithereens.

So, after Afghanistan, it was Iraq’s turn.

Iraq yet again.

The word oil did not come up.

Iraq was a threat to humanity. Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Any day now that terrorist tyrant might drop an atom bomb on your street.

That’s what they said. Later on, the truth came out. The only weapons of mass destruction were the speeches that made them up.

Those speeches lied, and so did the television, the papers, and the radio.

Smart bombs, however, dumb as they seem, did not lie. By disemboweling unarmed civilians in the fields and on the streets of the invaded country, smart bombs told the truth about war.

It happened on September 11 in the year 2001, when the airplane hijacked by terrorists slammed into the second of New York’s twin towers.

The instant the tower began to tremble, people dashed for the stairs.

Suddenly, midexodus, the loudspeakers came on.

The loudspeakers ordered everyone back to work.

Those who did not obey improved their chances of survival.

The prime minister of Israel made the decision. His defense minister conveyed it. The head of the army explained that they were going to use chemotherapy against the Palestinian cancer. The brigade general declared a curfew. The colonel ordered the hamlets and the planted fields to be razed. The division commander sent in tanks and blocked access to ambulances. The captain gave the order to start shooting. The lieutenant told the gunner to fire the first missile.

But the gunner, that particular gunner, was not there. Yigal Bronner, the final link in the chain of command, had been sent to prison for refusing to go on killing.