PHA-Exchange> Superducks and underducks by Eduarfo Galeano

[Claudio]

   Le Monde diplomatique
   August 2004

                      Superducks and underducks
                          by Eduardo Galeano

EVERY day we spend $2.2bn on killing each other. Global military spending in
effect pays for huge hunting parties in which hunter and hunted are of the
same species; the winner is whoever kills the biggest number of his peers.
Think how all this money could better be spent to provide food, education
and healthcare for deprived children worldwide.

     The first impression is that such vast expenditure on arms is
     grotesque. Does it appear more justified if we look closely
     at the context? The official line is that the wastage is
     essential to the global war on terror. Yet common sense
     suggests that terrorists are grateful for the many weapons in
     circulation and so much military action under way. The wars
     in Afghanistan and Iraq have greatly stimulated terrorism:
     you do not need to be a statistician to notice the increasing
     number of attacks. Wars are state terrorism, which feeds and
     is fed by private terrorism.

     Recent figures have shown signs of a recovery in the economy
     of the United States, with growth returning to a satisfactory
     level. Many experts agree that this growth would be much
     weaker without funds released in connection with the war in
     Iraq. Invading Mesopotamia was great news for the US economy.
     It was not such great news for those who died or their
     relations. Which makes more sense: the economic statistics or
     the voice of Spanish politician Julio Anguita, speaking as a
     grieving father, who said "a curse on this war and all wars"  (1)?

     The five largest arms producers are the US, Russia, China,
     the United Kingdom and France. They are also the countries
     with a veto in the United Nations Security Council. It
     insults common sense to make those who provide the world's
     weapons the guarantors of world peace.

     These five countries are in charge. They run the
     International Monetary Fund and all (except China) are among
     the eight countries that take most key decisions at the World
     Bank and the World Trade Organisation, where the right of
     veto exists but is never used. Surely it would be common
     sense for the struggle for world democracy to begin with the
     democratisation of international organisations. But common
     sense hardly has a chance to be heard, let alone vote.

     Many of the worst crimes and injustices on earth are carried
     out through these three international organisations: the IMF,
     World Bank and WTO. Their victims are the disappeared - not
     the people who vanished under military dictatorships but the
     things that have gone under democracy. Over the past few
     years, my country, Uruguay, has seen jobs, decent wages,
     pensions, factories, lands and even rivers disappear. The
     story is the same all over Latin America and in many other
     regions. We are even seeing our children disappear, reversing
     their forebears' emigrant dreams and heading for Europe and
     elsewhere. Does common sense tell us that we have to endure
     avoidable suffering and accept these tragedies as the work of
     fate?

     Little by little, the world is getting less and less fair.
     True, the difference between a woman's salary and that of a
     man is not quite the gap it once was. But at the current
     sluggish rate of progress, wage equality between men and
     women will not be reached for 475 years. Common sense does
     not advise us to wait for it to happen: as far as I know,
     women do not live that long.

     True education, based on common sense and leading to it,
     tells us we must fight to regain what has been taken from us.
     The Catalan bishop Pedro Casaldaliga (2) has worked for many
     years in the heart of the rainforest in Mato Grosso, one of
     the poorest states in Brazil. He says that it may be true
     that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day while if
     you teach him to fish you feed him for life; but there is no
     point teaching anyone to fish when the rivers have all been
     poisoned or sold.

     A circus trainer teaches bears to dance by hitting them on
     the neck with a spiked stick. If they dance correctly; the
     trainer stops hitting them and they get fed. If not, the
     torture continues, and the bears go back to their cages
     hungry. The bears dance for fear of blows and of going
     hungry. To the trainer, this is good sense. But do the bears
     see it that way?

     After the second hijacked plane of 9/11 hit the second tower
     of the World Trade Centre, it began to disintegrate; people
     rushed to the stairs to get out quickly. A Tannoy message
     ordered all workers to return to their desks. Workers had to
     use their common sense: no one who obeyed that order can have
     survived.

     To save ourselves, we must work together. Like ducks in the
     same covey. Collective flying works like this: a duck sets
     off and makes way for two others, who are then followed by
     another pair, whose energy inspires a fourth pair to join,
     and so on, so that the ducks fly in an elegant V formation.
     Each duck at some time flies both at the head of this V and
     at its tail. According to my friend Juan Diaz Bordenave (3),
     who is no palmipedologist but still knows what he is talking
     about, no duck ever felt like a superduck when it was heading
     the V nor like an underduck flying at the tail. At least
     ducks have kept their common sense.
       ________________________________________________________

     * Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer and journalist. His
     (Memory of Fire
     trilogy (1985-89) was published in English by Quartet, London
     and WW Norton, New York. His most recent book published in
     English is Upside Down: a Primer for the Looking-glass World
     (Picador), New York, 2000.

     (1) Julio Anguita Parrado was the son of Julio Anguita, the
     former leader of Spain's Izquierda Unida (United Left); he
     was a journalist for the Madrid newspaper El Mundo, embedded
     with US soldiers in Iraq. He was killed by an Iraqi missile
     in Baghdad on 7 April 2003.

     (2) Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, born in 1928, has held the
     bishopric of Saõ Felix de Araguaia for 35 years. In 1992 he
     was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

     (3) Juan Enrique Diaz Bordenave is from Paraguay, an
     essayist, media expert and author of Comunicación y Sociedad,
     Busqueda, Buenos Aires, 1985.

                                      Translated by Gulliver Cragg
   <http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/08/16galeano>