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Earlier this year I underwent a major cancer operation. Both the operation and its sequelae were like a nightmare. I felt like a man who was unable to swim, lost in the aquatic depths of an infinite and dark ocean. But I didn’t drown, and I’m very happy to be alive.
Harold Pinter
After coming out of a personal nightmare, I found myself in an even more annoying public nightmare: the nightmare of US hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerency. The most powerful nation that has ever existed in the world was at war with the rest of the world. ¨If you’re not with us, you’re against us¨, has said President Bush. He has also said: ¨We will not let the worst weapons of the world to fall in the hands of the worst leaders of the world¨. Exactly. Look at yourself in the mirror, pal. That’s you.
The United States is now developing advanced systems of ¨mass destruction weapons¨, ready to be used when they want. They have more weapons than all the rest of the world together. They have abandoned the international treaties on biological and chemical weapons, and have rejected the international inspection of their own factories. The hypocrisy of their statements, contradicted by their own facts, sounds almost like a joke.
The US believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. The other deaths are unreal and abstract, and they have no consequences. They never mention the three thousand deaths in Afghanistan.
They never mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who have died because of the US and British sanctions that have deprived them of the basic medications. They never mention the effects of depleted uranium used by the United States in the Golf War. The radiation levels in Iraq are terribly high. Children are born without brain, without eyes, without genitals. When they are born with ears, mouths or rectum, all it comes out of them is blood.
They never mention the two hundred thousand people who were killed in Eastern Timor in 1975 by an Indonesian government that was inspired and supported by the United States.
They never mention the five hundred thousand deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina and Haiti because of the supported and subsidized actions from the United States.
They no longer mention the millions of deaths in Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia.
They seldom mention the desperate situation of the Palestinian people, a key factor of worldwide concern.
What a way to misjudge the present! What a way to distort history!
The peoples never forget. They never forget the deaths of their own, the never forget torture and mutilation, they never forget injustice, they never forget oppression, they never forget the terrorism by the great nations. They not only remember, they also hit back.
The atrocity that took place in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of revenge against the constant and systematic actions of state terrorism, for many years and everywhere, by the United States.
In Great Britain, they are now warning the public, so they adopt a ¨¨watchful¨ attitude towards the possible preparation of terrorist actions. The language they use is by itself ridiculous.
How can public watchfulness take place? With a handkerchief covering the mouth in order to prevent the effects of a poisonous gas? However, the terrorist attacks are quite likely to happen, the inevitable result of the despicable and shameful servile attitude of our prime minister towards the US. Apparently, a terrorist attack with toxic gases was avoided a few days ago in the London subway. But something like that could perfectly happen. Thousands of children use the London subway everyday to go school. If an attack with toxic gases killed them, the responsibility would fall completely on our prime minister’s shoulders. There is no need to say that the prime minister never uses the subway to travel.
The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plot for the premeditated murder of thousands of civilians, allegedly with the purpose of freeing them from their dictator.
The US and Great Britain have set out on a journey that can only lead to an escalade of violence across the globe and end up in a catastrophe.
It is obvious, however, that the Unites States is eager to attack Iraq. I think they will. Not to control their oil, but because the US administration has now become a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are the only language they know. Many Americans, as we know, are horrified by their government’s attitude, but it seems like there’s nothing they can do about it.
Unless Europe finds the solidarity, the intelligence, the courage and the will to defy and resist the power of the United States, it will eventually deserve the definition given by Alexander Herzen, which was recently quoted by the London newspaper The Guardian: ¨We are not the doctors. We are the disease¨.
Harold Pinter won the Literature Nobel Prize in 2005.
from Cuba Now-Arts & Culture April 23, 2007
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