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
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
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
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 oes, 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
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
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.
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