From the point of view of the United States, engraving the names of citizens who died in the Vietnam War on an immense marble wall in Washington was a just act. From the point of view of the Vietnamese killed in the U.S. invasion, there are sixty walls missing.
* * *
In the Era of Peace, the name applied to the historical period that began in 1946, wars have slaughtered no less than twenty-two million people and have displaced from their lands, homes, or countries over forty million more. Consumers of TV news never lack a war or at least a brushfire to munch on. But never do the reporters report, or the commentators comment, on anything that might help explain what’s going on. To do that they would have to start by answering some very basic questions: Who benefits from all that human pain? Who profits from this tragedy? “And the executioner’s face is always well hidden,” Bob Dylan once sang.
In 1968, two months before a bullet killed him, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that his country was “the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.” Thirty years later the figures bear him out: of every ten dollars spent on arms in the world, four and a half end up in the United States. Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the very ones that can exercise vetoes in the UN Security Council. The right to a veto really means the power to decide. The General Assembly of the highest international institution, in which all countries take part, makes recommendations, but it’s the Security Council that makes decisions. The Assembly speaks or remains silent; the Council does or undoes. In other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit most from the big business of war.
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.
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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.
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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.
* * *
Among the ghosts of international terrorism, “narco-terrorism” is the one that’s most frightening. To say “drugs” is like saying “the plague” in another epoch: it evokes the same terror, the same sense of impotence, of a mysterious curse from the Devil incarnate, who tempts his victims and carries them off. Like all misfortune, it comes from outside. Not much is said anymore about marijuana, once the “killer weed,” and perhaps that has something to do with the way it has become a successful part of local agriculture in eleven states of the Union. In contrast, heroin and cocaine, produced in foreign countries, have been elevated to the category of enemies that erode the very foundations of the nation.
Official sources estimate that U.S. citizens spend $110 billion a year on drugs, the equivalent of one-tenth the value of the country’s entire industrial production. Authorities have never caught a single U.S. trafficker of any real importance, but the war against drugs has certainly increased the number of consumers. As happened with alcohol during Prohibition, outlawing only stimulates demand and boosts profits. According to Joe McNamara, former chief of the San Jose police force in California, profits can be as high as 17,000 percent.
* * *
Desire
A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said: “At your service, master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.”
Since he was a good boy, the man said, “I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.”
The genie made a face. “I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.”
Since he was a nice guy, the man said, “I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.”
The genie swallowed. “Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?”
* * *
Drugs are as “American” as apple pie—a U.S. tragedy, a U.S. business, but they’re the fault of Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, and other ingrate nations. In a scene straight out of the Vietnam War, helicopters and planes bomb guilty-looking Latin American fields with poisons made by Dow Chemical, Chevron, Monsanto, and other chemical companies. Devastating to the earth and to human health, the sprayings are next to useless because the drug plantations simply relocate. The peasants who cultivate coca or poppies, the moving targets in these military campaigns, are the smallest fish in the drug ocean. The cost of the raw materials has little effect on the final price. From the fields where coca is harvested to the streets of New York where cocaine is sold, the price multiplies one hundred to five hundred times, depending on the ups and downs of the underground market for white powder.
Is there a better ally than drug trafficking for banks, weapons manufacturers, or the military hierarchy? Drugs make fortunes for the bankers and offer useful pretexts for the machinery of war. An illegal industry of death thus serves the legal industry of death: vocabulary and reality become militarized. According to a spokesman for the military dictatorship that razed Brazil from 1964 on, drugs and free love were “tactics of revolutionary war” against Christian civilization. In 1985, the U.S. delegate to a conference on narcotic and psychotropic drugs in Santiago, Chile, announced that the fight against drugs had become “a world war.” In 1990, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates suggested that drug users be riddled with bullets “because we are at war.” Shortly before that, President George Bush had exhorted the nation to “win the war” against drugs, explaining that it was “an international war” because the drugs came from overseas and constituted the gravest threat to the nation. This war is the one subject never absent from presidential speeches, whether it’s the president of a neighborhood club inaugurating a swimming pool or the president of the United States, who never misses a chance to exercise his right to grant or deny other countries certification for their good conduct in it.
A problem of public health has been turned into a problem of public security that respects no borders. It’s the Pentagon’s duty to intervene on any battlefield where the war against “narco-subversion” and “narco-terrorism” (two new words that put rebellion and crime in the same bag) is being waged. After all, the National Anti-Drug Strategy is directed not by a doctor but by a military officer.
Frank Hall, former head of the New York police narcotics squad, once said, “If imported cocaine were to disappear, in two months it would be replaced by synthetic drugs.” Commonsensical as that might seem, the fight against the Latin American sources of evil continues because it offers the best cover for maintaining military and, to a large degree, political control over the region. The Pentagon wants to set up a Multilateral Anti-Drug Center in Panama to run the drug war waged by the armies of the Americas. For the entire twentieth century, Panama was a major U.S. military base. The treaty that imposed that humiliation on the country expired on the final day of the century, but the drug war could well require that the country be rented out for another eternity.
For some time now drugs have been the major justification for military intervention in the countries south of the Rio Grande. Panama was the first to fall victim. In 1989, twenty-six thousand soldiers burst into Panama, guns blazing, and imposed as president the unpresentable Guillermo Endara, who proceeded to step up drug trafficking under the pretext of fighting it. In the name of the war on drugs, the Pentagon is making itself at home in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. This sacred crusade—Get thee hence, Satan!—also gives Latin America’s armies another reason for existing, hastens their return to the public stage, and provides them with the resources they need to deal with frequent explosions of social protest.
General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, who headed up the war on drugs in Mexico, no longer sleeps at home. Since February 1997, he’s been in jail for trafficking cocaine. But the helicopters and sophisticated weaponry the United States sent him to fight drugs with have proved quite useful against upstart peasants in Chiapas and elsewhere. A large portion of U.S. antidrug aid to Colombia is used to kill peasants in areas that have nothing to do with drugs. The armed forces that most systematically violate human rights, like Colombia’s, are those that receive the most U.S. aid in weapons and technical assistance. For years, they have been making war on the poor, enemies of the established order, while defending the established order, enemy of the poor.
After all, that’s what it’s about: the war on drugs is a cover for social war. Just like the poor who steal, drug addicts, especially poor ones, are demonized in order to absolve the society that produces them. Against whom is the law enforced? In Argentina, a quarter of the people behind bars who have not been sentenced are there for possession of less than five grams of marijuana or cocaine. In the United States, the antidrug crusade is focused on crack, that devastating poor cousin of cocaine consume
d by blacks, Latins, and other prison fodder. U.S. Public Health Service statistics show that eight out of ten drug users are white, but of those in jail for drugs only one in ten is white. Several uprisings in federal prisons labeled “racial riots” by the media have been protests against unjust sentencing policies. Crack addicts are punished a hundred times more severely than cocaine users. Literally one hundred times: according to federal law, a gram of crack is equivalent to one hundred grams of cocaine. Practically everyone imprisoned for crack is black.
In Latin America, where poor criminals are the new “internal enemy,” the war on drugs takes aim at a target described by Nilo Batista in Brazil: “black teenagers from the slums who sell drugs to well-off white teenagers.” Is this a question of drugs or of social and racial power? In Brazil and everywhere else, those who die in the war on drugs far outnumber those who die from an overdose.
* * *
I’m Curious
Why do people mix up coca and cocaine?
If coca is so perverse, why is one of the symbols of Western civilization called Coca-Cola?
If coca is outlawed because it is used for bad ends, why isn’t television outlawed too?
If the drug industry is outlawed because it’s a murderous business, why don’t they outlaw the arms industry, which is the most murderous of all?
By what right does the United States act as the world’s drug police, when it buys half of all the drugs the world produces?
How is it that small planes loaded with drugs enter and leave the United States with such astonishing ease? How come state-of-the-art technology that can photograph a flea on the horizon can’t detect a plane flying by the window?
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