Upside Down

by Eduardo Galeano

  Little is said about the South, and never or almost never from the South’s point of view. In general, mass media news of the South reflects the prejudices of an outsider looking on from above and beyond. Between ads, television tends to stick to images of hunger and war. These horrors, these “fatalities,” occur in a hellish underworld and serve only to emphasize the paradise of consumer society, which offers cars to suppress distance, facial creams to suppress wrinkles, dyes to suppress gray hair, and pills to suppress pain, among its many suppressive marvels. Frequently, those images of the “other” world come from Africa. African hunger is portrayed as a natural catastrophe, and African wars are strictly “a black thing,” bloody rituals of “tribes” who have a savage habit of cutting one another to pieces. Images of hunger never allude, not even in passing, to colonial pillage. Never do they mention the responsibility of Western powers that yesterday bled Africa through the slave trade and single-crop plantations and that today perpetuate the hemorrhage through hunger wages and ruinous prices. The same is true of news about wars; there is always the same silence about the colonial legacy, always the same impunity for the white boss who mortgaged Africa’s independence, leaving in his wake corrupt bureaucracies, despotic military officers, artificial borders, and mutual hatred. And always the same omission of any reference to the northern industry of death that sells the weapons that so encourage the South to go on killing itself.

  * * *

  The Information Age

  Just before Christmas 1989, we all viewed horrendous evidence of the killings ordered by Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania.

  The crazed despot who liked to be called the “Blue Danube of Socialism” killed four thousand dissidents in the city of Timişoara. We saw many of the bodies, thanks to the global reach of television and the good work of the international agencies that feed images to newspapers and magazines. Long rows of dead bodies, deformed by torture, shocked the world.

  Later some papers published a correction, though not many read it. Killings had indeed occurred at Timişoara, but the victims numbered about a hundred and included some of the dictatorship’s henchmen. What’s more, those hair-raising images had been staged. The bodies had nothing to do with the story and were disfigured not by torture but by the passage of time. The news factories unearthed them from a cemetery and had them pose for the camera.

  * * *

  At first view, as the writer Wole Soyinka once said, the map of Africa looks like the creation of a demented weaver who paid no attention to the texture, color, or design of the cloth he was making. Many of the borders that splintered black Africa into over forty pieces can only be explained by a desire for military or commercial control; they have nothing at all to do with historical roots or nature. The colonial powers who drew up the borders were also good at manipulating ethnic contradictions. Divide et impera: one fine day the king of Belgium decided that Tutsis were those who had more than eight cows and Hutus were those who had fewer in the territory today occupied by Rwanda and Burundi. Although the Tutsis, shepherds, and the Hutus, farmers, had different origins, they shared several centuries of common history in the same physical space, spoke the same language, and lived together in peace. They did not know they were enemies but ended up believing it with such fervor that in 1994 massacres between Hutus and Tutsis cost close to a million lives. In the news coverage of this butchery, we never once heard, even by chance—and only rarely did we read—any acknowledgment of Germany’s or Belgium’s colonial assaults on the tradition of peaceful coexistence between two sister peoples or of France’s later contribution of weapons and military aid to facilitate mutual extermination.

  * * *

  Let’s Play War/1

  Yenuri Chihuala died in 1995 during the border war between Peru and Ecuador. He was fourteen. Like many other boys from the poor barrios of Lima, he had been recruited by force. They took him away and left no footprints.

  Television, radio, and the print media all praised the child martyr as a role model who gave his life for Peru. During those days of war, the daily El Comercio devoted its front page to glorifying the very young people it normally curses on its crime and sports pages. The cholos trinchudos—literally “carved-up half-breeds”—grandchildren of Indians, poor kids with spiky hair and dark skin, are heroes of the fatherland when they wear a military uniform on the battlefield, but these same noble savages are dangerous beasts, violent by nature, when they wear civilian clothes on city streets and in soccer stadiums.

  * * *

  What happens to poor countries is what happens to the poor of every country: the mass media only deign to glance at them when they suffer some spectacular misfortune that will be a hit in the viewers market. How many people must be slain by war or earthquake or drowned in floods for their countries to become news and show up on the map of the world? How many ghosts must someone dying of hunger accumulate before the cameras focus on him for once in his life? The world is like a stage for a gigantic reality show. The poor, the ones who always get overlooked, only appear on TV as some hidden camera’s object of ridicule or as actors in their own cruelties. Those unknown need to be known, the invisible to become visible, the uprooted to have roots. If something doesn’t exist on television, does it exist in reality? Pariahs dream of glory on the small screen, where any sow’s ear can turn into a silk purse. To get to the Olympus where the telegods reside, one poor soul on a variety show even shot himself on camera.

  * * *

  Let’s Play War/2

  Video games have a huge and growing public of all ages. Their proponents say that the violence in video games is innocent because it imitates the news and that such entertainment is good for keeping children off the streets and away from the lure of cigarettes.

  Video games speak a language made up of the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, horror-movie music, agonized screams, and barked commands: “Finish him!,” “Beat ’em up!,” “Shoot ’em!,” The war of the future, the future as war: the most popular video games take place on battlefields where the player has to shoot without a moment’s hesitation, destroying anything that moves. No pause or truce is possible against an enemy stampede of despised extraterrestrials, ferocious robots, humanoid hordes, ghostly cyberdemons, mutant monsters, and skulls that stick out their tongues. The more adversaries the player kills, the closer he comes to winning. In the already-classic Mortal Kombat, you get extra points for blows that decapitate the enemy and send his head flying, that knock his bloody heart right out of his breast, or blast his head into a thousand pieces.

  There are also a few video games that are not about war. Car races, for example. In one of them, a good way to score points is to run over pedestrians.

  * * *

  Lately, talk shows have become even more popular than soap operas in some Latin American countries. When the girl who was raped is interviewed, she sobs as if the man were raping her all over again … This monster is the new Elephant Man. Look, ladies and gentlemen, don’t miss this incredible sight … The bearded lady wants a boyfriend … A fat man says he’s pregnant. Thirty or so years ago in Brazil, freak shows brought scores of candidates out of the woodwork and garnered huge TV audiences. Who is the shortest dwarf in the country? Who has a schnoz so long his feet stay dry in the shower? Who is the wretchedest wretch of all? A parade of miracles passed through the studios: a girl with ears eaten by rats; an idiot chained to a bedpost for thirty years; a woman who was the daughter, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and wife of the drunk who made her a cripple. And every wretch had fans who screamed from the balconies in a chorus: “The winner! The winner!”

  The poor nearly always get top billing in crime stories. Any suspect who’s poor can be freely filmed, photographed, and put on display when the police arrest him. That way he’s sentenced by TV and the press before the trial begins. The media declare the pernicious poor guilty from the word go, the same way they condemn pernicious countries, and there is no appeal.

  At the end of the eighties, S
addam Hussein was demonized by the same mass media that had previously idolized him. When he became the Satan of Baghdad, Hussein shone as a star of evil in the galaxy of world politics, and the media’s lie machine took care of convincing the world that Iraq was a threat to humanity. At the beginning of 1991, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm with the backing of twenty-eight countries and broad public support. The United States, having just invaded Panama, invaded Iraq because Iraq had invaded Kuwait. With a million extras and at a cost of $1 billion a day, the big show, which writer Tom Engelhardt called the greatest megaproduction in the history of television, was a winner in the stadium of international TV, earning high ratings in every country—and on the New York Stock Exchange, which reached record heights.

  * * *

  For History Class

  During the year 1998 the globalized media dedicated the most space and their best energies to the romance between the president of the planet and a plump, voracious, talkative woman named Monica Lewinsky.

  In every country we were all Lewinskyized. We had her for breakfast, reading the papers; we had her for lunch, listening to the radio; and we had her for dinner, watching TV.

  I think something else happened in 1998, but I can’t remember what.

  * * *

  The art of war, cannibalism as gastronomy: the Gulf war was an interminable, obscene spectacle that paid homage to high-tech weapons and disparaged human life. In that war of machines led by satellites, radars, and computers, TV screens showcased beautiful missiles and marvelous rockets, extraordinary airplanes and smart bombs that with admirable precision turned people into dust. The venture killed a total of 115 North Americans. Nobody bothered to count the Iraqis, though estimates put the figure as high as a hundred thousand. They never appeared on camera; the only victim shown on TV was an oil-slicked duck. Later on, it came out that the image was a fake; the duck was from another war. Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque commented to Studs Terkel: “We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away.… Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no feeling of remorse.… Then we come home in triumph.”

  A few years later, at the beginning of 1998, the United States tried to repeat this feat. The immense communications apparatus geared up once again to serve the immense military apparatus by convincing the world that Iraq was, again, a threat to humanity. This time, the excuse was chemical and bacteriological weapons. Years before, Hussein had used U.S.-made poison gas against Iran and then had used the same gas to crush the Kurds, and nobody’s hair got the least bit mussed. But panic descended suddenly with the news that Iraq possessed an arsenal of bacteriological weapons: anthrax, bubonic plague, botulism, cancer cells, and other lethal pathogenic agents that any lab in the United States can purchase over the phone or by mail from a company called American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), located just outside Washington. United Nations inspectors, however, found nothing in the palaces of a thousand and one nights, and war was postponed until the next pretext.

  * * *

  The Electronic Friend

  The players, absorbed, in a trance, don’t speak to one another.

  On the way home from work or to work from home, thirty million Japanese find themselves playing Pachinko and to Pachinko they offer their souls. Players spend hours sitting in front of the machine, shooting little steel balls at needles to win prizes. Every machine is run by a computer that makes sure the players nearly always lose and also that they win once in a while to keep the flame of faith burning. Since gambling for money is illegal in Japan, you play with cards bought with money, and the prizes are paid in gadgets that can be exchanged for money around the corner.

  In 1998, the Japanese made offerings of $500 million a day in the temples of Pachinko.

  * * *

  Manipulation of world news by the military isn’t the least bit surprising if you consider the modern history of communications technology. The Pentagon has always been the principal funder of and the principal client for all new developments. The first electronic computer was created to fill a Pentagon purchase order. Communications satellites grew out of military projects, and it was the Pentagon that first set up the Internet to coordinate its operations across the globe. The multimillion-dollar investments made by the armed forces simplified and accelerated the development of communications technology and made it possible to promote their criminal acts worldwide as if they were contributions to world peace.

  Fortunately, history is also nourished by paradox. The Pentagon never suspected that the Internet, born to program the world as a great battlefield, would be used to spread the words of pacifist movements usually condemned to near silence. That said, the primary effect of the spectacular development of communications technology and information systems has been to radiate violence as a way of life and as the dominant culture. The communications media, reaching ever more people in more places, accustom us to the inevitability of violence and train us for it from childhood.

  On screens—movie, TV, computer—things blow up and bleed ceaselessly. A research project at two universities in Buenos Aires measured the frequency of violence on children’s TV in 1994: one scene every three minutes. The researchers concluded that, by the age of ten, Argentine children have seen eighty-eight thousand acts of violence, not counting the many violent incidents suggested but not portrayed. The dose increases, they found, on weekends. A year before, a poll taken on the outskirts of Lima revealed that nearly every parent condoned that sort of programming: “Those are the programs the kids like.” “That way they’re entertained.” “If they like them, it must be okay.” “It’s better. That way they learn what life is like.” And also, “It doesn’t affect them, it’s nothing.” At the same time, research carried out by the Rio de Janeiro state government concluded that half of all the violent scenes broadcast on the Globo television network were on children’s programs; Brazilian children get brutality shot at them every two minutes and forty-six seconds.

  Hours spent in front of the television easily surpass those spent in the classroom, when hours are spent in the classroom at all. It is a universal truth that, with or without school, TV programs are children’s primary source of formation, information, and deformation, as well as their principal source of topics for conversation. The predominance of TV pedagogy is particularly alarming in Latin America in light of the recent decline of public education. In their speeches politicians are prepared to die for education, and in their acts they proceed to kill it, thus liberating children to take more classes in consumption and violence from the small screen. In their speeches politicians denounce the plague of crime and demand an iron hand, and in their acts they encourage the mental colonization of the next generation. From early on, children are trained to find their identities in merchandise that symbolizes power and to get hold of it with a gun.

  Do the media reflect reality or shape it? Who begets whom? Is it the chicken or the egg? Wouldn’t a better zoological metaphor be a snake biting its own tail? We give the people what they want, say the media to absolve themselves. But the supply they offer in response to demand creates more demand for more of the same supply; it becomes a habit, creates a need for itself, and turns into an addiction. In the streets there is as much violence as on television, say the media. But violence in the media, which expresses the violence of the world, also promotes more violence.

  Europe has had some healthy experiences with the media. In several countries television and radio achieve a high level of quality as public services, run not by the state but directly by organizations that represent diverse sectors of civil society. These experiences, threatened today by a stampede of competition from commercial outlets, offer examples of communication that is truly communicative and democratic, able to speak to people’s human dignity and their right to information and knowledge. But that is not the approach that has been promoted internationally. The world has been slipped a lethal cocktail of blood, Vali
um, and advertising by private U.S. television networks. They’ve imposed a model based on the proven notion that good is what makes the most profit at the least cost and bad is what pays no dividends.

  In Greece at the time of Pericles, there was a tribunal for judging things. It punished the knife, for example, that had been the weapon in a crime, sentencing it to be broken into pieces or thrown into the depths of the sea. Today would it be fair to condemn the television set as the Taliban does? Those who consider TV to have an evil heart slander it by calling it the idiot box. Yes, commercial television reduces communication to business, but obvious though it seems when you say it, TV sets are innocent of the use they are put to and the abuse committed with them. That fact shouldn’t stop us from raising an alarm about what all the evidence makes evident: this, the most worshiped totem of our times, is the medium that has been employed most successfully to impose on the four cardinal points of the earth the idols, myths, and dreams designed by the engineers of emotions and mass-produced by the factories of the soul.

  * * *

  Language/5

  Several anthropologists traveled about the countryside on Colombia’s Pacific coast in search of life stories. An old man told them: “Don’t record me, I speak so ugly. Better to get my grandchildren.”

  Not far from there, anthropologists traveled about the countryside of Grand Canary Island. Another old man welcomed them, served them coffee, and regaled them with hallucinatory tales delightfully recounted. And then he, too, said: “We speak ugly. They’re the ones who can talk, the kids.”