Beg your pardon: we’re armed against the poor
By Eduardo Galeano
If international justice truly exists, why does it never bring the powerful to justice? The authors of the worst butcheries don’t go to prison. Could it be because they hold the keys to the prisons?
Why are the five powers who have the right to veto at the United Nations untouchable? Does that right have a divine origin? Do those who engage in the business of war protect the peace? Is it fair that world peace is entrusted to the five powers that are the main producers of weapons? No offense to the drug traffickers, but isn’t this, too, a case of “organized crime”?
Those who everywhere demand the death penalty don’t demand it for the masters of the world. God forbid. They ask for death for the murderers who use knives, not for those who use missiles.
One wonders: so long as those justice-minded people are so eager to kill, why don’t they ask for the death penalty for social injustice? What’s fair about a world that every minute sets aside $3 million for military expenditure, while every minute 15 children die of hunger? Are we humans the only animals specialized in mutual extermination and have we developed a technology of destruction that is incidentally annihilating the planet and all its inhabitants? A curable disease? Against whom does the so-called international community arm itself to the teeth? Against poverty or against the poor?
Why don’t the capital-punishment zealots demand the death penalty for the values of the consumer society, which daily attack public safety? Doesn’t the bombardment of advertising that hammers millions and millions of unemployed or ill-paid youths invite them to commit crime by repeating to them, night and day, that to be is to have, to have an automobile, to have brand-name shoes, to have, to have, and who doesn’t have is nothing?
And why isn’t the death penalty imposed upon death? The world is organized in the service of death. Or doesn’t military industry manufacture death as it devours most of our resources and a good portion of our energies? The masters of the world condemn violence only when others practice it. And this monopoly of violence translates into an inexplicable fact for extraterrestrials and an insupportable fact for us terrestrials, who still want to survive, against all evidence — we humans are the only animals who specialize in mutual extermination and have developed a technology of destruction that incidentally is annihilating the planet and all its inhabitants.
That technology feeds on fear. It is fear who manufactures the enemies that justify the excessive military and police expenditure. And while we’re imposing the death penalty, why not sentence fear to death? Wouldn’t it be healthy to end with this universal dictatorship of the professional bogeymen? The sowers of panic condemn us to solitude, deny our solidarity; save yourselves, crush one another, your neighbor is always a danger, watch out, be very careful, this guy will rob you, that guy will rape you, that baby carriage conceals a Muslim bomb, and if that woman looks at you, that innocent-looking neighbor, for sure she’ll give you the swine flu.
Eduardo Galeano is a writer and journalist. Center for Collaborations in Solidarity.
