[News] Superducks and underducks < by Eduardo Galeano

[News at freedomarchives.org]

    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

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