Upside Down, Page 3

  The moral code of the end of the millennium condemns not injustice but failure. Robert McNamara, one of those responsible for the war in Vietnam, wrote a book in which he admitted it was a mistake. That war, which killed more than three million Vietnamese and fifty-eight thousand Americans, was a mistake not because it was unjust but because the United States carried on in full knowledge that it could not win. By 1965, according to McNamara, there was already overwhelming evidence that the invading force could not prevail; nonetheless, the U.S. government continued as if victory were possible. The fact that the United States spent fifteen years visiting international terrorism on Vietnam in order to impose a government the Vietnamese did not want does not even enter into the discussion. That the world’s premier military power dropped more bombs on a small country than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War is utterly irrelevant.

  * * *

  Points of View/2

  From the point of view of the South, summer in the North is winter.

  From the point of view of a worm, a plate of spaghetti is an orgy.

  Where Hindus see a sacred cow, others see an enormous hamburger.

  From the point of view of Hippocrates, Galen, Maimonides, and Paracelsus, there was a disease called indigestion but none called hunger.

  From the point of view of his neighbors in the town of Cardona, Toto Zaugg, who wore the same clothes in summer and winter, was an admirable man. “Toto’s never cold,” they said.

  He said nothing. He was cold, but he had no coat.

  * * *

  After all, during that long butchery the United States was exercising the right of big powers to invade whomever they wish and impose whatever they choose. Officers, businessmen, bankers, and makers of opinions and emotions in ruling countries have the right to create military dictatorships or docile governments. They can dictate economic or any other kind of policy, give the orders to accept ruinous trade deals and usurious loans, demand servitude to their lifestyles, and enforce consumer trends. This right is a “natural one,” consecrated by the impunity with which it is exercised and the rapidity with which its exercise is forgotten.

  Power recalls the past not to remember but to sanctify, to justify the perpetuation of privilege by right of inheritance, absolving those who rule of their crimes and supplying their speeches with alibis. What schools and the media teach as the only possible way of remembering the past simply passes on the voices that repeat the boring litany of power’s self-sacralization. Exoneration requires unremembering. There are successful countries and people and there are failed countries and people because the efficient deserve rewards and the useless deserve punishment. To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty. Wealth and poverty emerge from eternity and toward eternity they march, and that’s the way things are because God or custom prefers it that way.

  * * *

  Points of View/3

  From the point of view of statistics, if a person earns a thousand dollars and another earns nothing, each of them appears to earn five hundred dollars when one calculates per capita income.

  From the point of view of the struggle against inflation, adjustment policies are a good remedy. From the point of view of those who suffer such policies, they spread cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and other damnations.

  * * *

  The Eighth Wonder of the World, Beethoven’s Tenth, the Eleventh Commandment of the Lord: on all sides one hears hymns of praise to the free market, source of prosperity and guarantor of democracy. Free trade is sold as something new, as if born from a cabbage or the ear of a goat, despite its long history reaching back to the origins of the unjust system that reigns today:

  • three or four centuries ago, England, Holland, and France practiced piracy in the name of free trade, through the good offices of Sir Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, Piet Heyn, François Lolonois, and other neoliberals of the day

  • free trade was the alibi all Europe used while enriching itself selling human flesh in the slave trade

  • later on, the United States brandished free trade to oblige many Latin American countries to accept its exports, loans, and military dictatorships

  • wrapped in the folds of that same flag, British soldiers imposed opium smoking on China, while by fire and in the name of freedom, the filibuster William Walker reestablished slavery in Central America

  • paying homage to free trade, British industry reduced India to the worst penury and British banks helped finance the extermination of Paraguay, which until 1870 had been the only truly independent country in Latin America

  • time passed, and in 1954 it occurred to Guatemala to practice free trade by buying oil from the Soviet Union, and the United States promptly organized a devastating invasion to set things straight

  • shortly thereafter, Cuba, also failing to see that free trade consisted of accepting prices as imposed, purchased outlawed Russian oil; the terrible fuss that ensued led to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the interminable blockade.

  These historical antecedents teach us that free trade and other such monetary freedoms are to free peoples what Jack the Ripper was to Saint Francis of Assisi. The free market has transformed the countries of the South into bazaars filled with imported trinkets that most people can see but not touch. Nothing has changed since the far-off days when merchants and landowners usurped the independence won by barefoot soldiers and put it up for sale. That’s when the workshops that might have incubated national industries were annihilated, when ports and big cities razed the hinterlands, choosing the delights of consumption over the challenges of creation. Years have passed and in Venezuela’s supermarkets I have seen little plastic bags of water from Scotland to drink with your whiskey. In Central America’s cities, where even rocks sweat buckets, I have seen fur stoles on fancy ladies. In Peru, I’ve seen German electric floor waxers for homes with dirt floors and no electricity; in Brazil, plastic palm trees bought in Miami.

  Another path, the inverse one, was taken by developed countries. They never had Herod to their childhood birthday parties. The free market is the only commodity they produce without any subsidies, but it’s only for export. They sell it, the South buys it. Their governments generously aid national agricultural production so that they can flood the South with food at ridiculously low prices despite ridiculously high costs, and so condemn the farmers of the South to ruin. The average rural producer in the United States receives state subsidies a hundred times greater than the income of a farmer in the Philippines, according to UN figures. And don’t forget the ferocious protectionism practiced by developed countries when it’s a matter of what they want most: a monopoly on state-of-the-art technologies, biotechnology, and the knowledge and communications industries. These privileges are defended at all cost so that the North will continue to know and the South will continue to repeat, and thus may it be for centuries upon centuries.

  Many economic barriers remain high, and human barriers higher yet. No need to look further than Europe’s new immigration laws or the steel wall being erected by the United States along its border with Mexico. This is no homage to the Berlin Wall but one more door slammed in the face of Mexican workers who refuse to acknowledge that the freedom to change countries is money’s privilege. (To make the wall less unpleasant, the plan is to paint it a salmon color, display tiles of children’s artwork on it, and leave little holes to peek through.)

  * * *

  Language/1

  Companies are called “multinationals” because they operate in many countries at once, but they belong to the few countries that monopolize wealth; political, military, and cultural power; scientific knowledge; and advanced technology. The ten biggest multinationals today earn more than a hundred countries put together do.

  “Developing countries” is the name that experts use
to designate countries trampled by someone else’s development. According to the United Nations, developing countries send developed countries ten times as much money through unequal trade and financial relations as they receive through foreign aid.

  In international relations, “foreign aid” is what they call the little tax that vice pays to virtue. Foreign aid is generally distributed in ways that confirm injustice, rarely in ways that counter it. In 1995, black Africa suffered 75 percent of the world’s AIDS cases but received 3 percent of the funds spent by international organizations on AIDS prevention.

  * * *

  Every time they get together, and they get together with pointless frequency, the presidents of the Americas issue resolutions insisting that “the free market will contribute to prosperity.” Whose prosperity, they don’t say. Reality—which exists even if sometimes barely noted and which is not mute even if sometimes it keeps its mouth shut—tells us that the free flow of capital only fattens drug traffickers and the bankers who offer refuge to their narco-dollars. The collapse of public financial and economic controls provides good cover, allowing for the more efficient organization of drug distribution and money-laundering networks. Reality also tells us that the green light of the free market helps the North express its generosity, by offering the South and East as gifts its most polluting industries, its nuclear waste, and other garbage.

  * * *

  Language/2

  In 1995, the Argentine press discovered that certain directors of the state-owned Banco Nación had received $37 million from IBM in return for a service contract $120 million above the usual price.

  Three years later, the directors acknowledged that they had taken the money and deposited it in Swiss bank accounts, but they had the good taste to avoid using the word “bribe” or the rude expression “payoff”: one of them used the word “gratuity,” another said it was a “douceur,” and the most delicate among them explained that it was just “a sign of IBM’s happiness.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Language/3

  In the Victorian period, one did not speak of trousers in the presence of an unmarried woman. Today, there are certain things one can’t say in the face of public opinion:

  • capitalism wears the stage name “market economy”

  • imperialism is called “globalization”

  • the victims of imperialism are called “developing countries,” much as a dwarf might be called a “child”

  • opportunism is called “pragmatism”

  • treason is called “realism”

  • poor people are called “low-income people”

  • the expulsion of poor children from the school system is measured by the “dropout rate”

  • the right of bosses to lay off workers with neither severance nor explanation is called “a flexible labor market”

  • official rhetoric acknowledges women’s rights among those of “minorities,” as if the masculine half of humanity were the majority

  • instead of military dictatorship, people say “process”

  • torture is called “illegal compulsion” or “physical and psychological pressure”

  • when thieves belong to a good family they’re “kleptomaniacs”

  • the looting of the public treasury by corrupt politicians answers to the name of “illicit enrichment”

  • “accidents” are what they call crimes committed by cars

  • for the blind, they say “the unseeing”

  • a black man is “a man of color”

  • where it says “long and difficult illness,” it means cancer or AIDS

  • “sudden illness” means heart attack

  • people annihilated in military operations aren’t dead: those killed in battle are “casualties,” and civilians who get it are “collateral damage”

  • in 1995, when France set off nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the French ambassador to New Zealand declared, “I don’t like that word ‘bomb.’ They aren’t bombs. They’re exploding artifacts”

  • “Getting Along” is what they call some of the death squads that operate under military protection in Colombia

  • “Dignity” was what the Chilean dictatorship called one of its concentration camps, while “Liberty” was the largest jail of the Uruguayan dictatorship

  • “Peace and Justice” is the name of the paramilitary group that in 1997 shot forty-five peasants, nearly all of them women and children, in the back as they prayed in the town church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico.

  * * *

  RACISM AND SEXISM 101

  Subordinates owe eternal obedience to superiors, just as women owe obedience to men. Some are born to rule, others to be ruled.

  Racism, like sexism, is justified by genetic inheritance. The poor are damned not by history but by biology. Their fate is written in the blood, and worse yet, their inferiority chromosomes carry the evil seeds of crime. When a poor, dark-skinned man approaches, red lights flash and alarm bells ring.

  FABLES, LABELS, AND SIMPLE UNABLES

  In the Americas and Europe the police hunt stereotypes guilty of wearing an unconcealed face. Every nonwhite suspect confirms the rule written in invisible ink in the depths of our collective conscience: crime is black or brown, or at least yellow.

  This demonization ignores history. Over the past five centuries, white crimes aren’t hard to find. No more than one-fifth of the world’s population in the Renaissance, whites already claimed to embody God’s will. In his name they exterminated untold millions of Indians in the Americas and abducted untold millions of blacks from Africa. White of skin were the kings, vampires, and flesh traders who founded hereditary slavery in the Americas and Africa, so that the children of slaves would be born slaves in the mines and on the plantations. White were the authors of the countless acts of barbarism that civilization committed over the centuries, imposing white imperial power on the four corners of the earth by blood and fire. White were the heads of state and the warrior chiefs who, with a hand from the Japanese, organized and executed two world wars in the twentieth century, killing sixty-four million people, most of them civilians. And white were those who planned and carried out the Holocaust against the Jews, Reds, Gypsies, and gays in the Nazi death camps.

  The certainty that some are born to be free and others to be slaves has guided all empires since the world began. But it was with the Renaissance and the conquest of the Americas that racism became a system of moral absolution at the service of European gluttony. Since then, racism has ruled, dismissing majorities among the colonized and excluding minorities among the colonizers. In the colonial era racism was as essential as gunpowder, and in Rome pope after pope slandered God by attributing to him the order to loot and plunder.

  In America a new vocabulary was invented to locate people on the social scale according to their degree of degradation by miscegenation. “Mulatto” was, and is, a mixture of white and black, an evident allusion to the mule, the sterile offspring of a male donkey and a mare. Other terms classified the thousand colors engendered by the successive embraces of Europeans, Americans, and Africans in the New World: English names like half-caste, quadroon, octoroon, mustee, sambo, griffe, or the Spanish castizo, cuarterón, quinterón, morisco, cholo, albino, lobo, zambaigo, cambujo, albarazado, barcino, coyote, chamiso, zambo, jíbaro, tresalbo, jarocho, lunarejo, and rayado. And there were Spanish names meaning “turn-back,” “there-you-stay,” “hang-in-the-air,” and “I-don’t-understand-you,” to baptize the fruits of these tropical salsas and to define greater or lesser degrees of hereditary damnation.

  * * *

  Identity

  Where are my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material? My first American ancestor … was an Indian, an early Indian; your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan.

  —Mark Twain, who was white, in the New York Times, December 26, 1881

  * * *

  Of all the names
, “I-don’t-understand-you” is the most revealing. In the five centuries since the so-called discovery of America, we’ve had nothing but I-don’t-understand-yous. Christopher Columbus thought that the Indians were from India, that Cubans lived in China and Haitians in Japan. His brother Bartholomew burned six Indians alive when all they had done was bury Catholic medallions so the new gods would make their crops fertile. When the conquistadors arrived on the eastern coast of Mexico they asked, “What is this place?” The natives answered, “We don’t understand a thing,” which in the Mayan language sounded like “Yucatan,” and that is what the region has been called ever since. When the conquistadors reached the heart of South America they asked, “What is this lake?” The natives answered, “Water, sir?” which in the Guaraní language sounded like “Ypacaraí,” the name promptly conferred on the lake near Asunción, Paraguay. Indians were always beardless, but in his Dictionnaire universel of 1694 Antoine Furetière described them as “furry and covered with hair,” because the European iconographic tradition held that savages were always hairy like monkeys. In 1774, the priest charged with teaching catechism in the town of San Andrés Itzapa in Guatemala discovered that the Indians worshiped not the Virgin Mary but the serpent crushed under her foot, the serpent being a Mayan divinity. He also discovered that they venerated the cross because it was shaped like the sacred meeting of the rain and the earth. At the same time in the German city of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant, who had never been to America, declared that Indians were “incapable of civilization” and were destined to be exterminated. In fact, extermination was occurring, though it had little to do with their nature: not many Indians survived the harquebusades and cannonades, the attacks of virus and bacteria unknown in the Americas, and the endless days of forced labor in the fields and in the gold and silver mines. Many were condemned to the lash, the stake, or the gallows for the sin of idolatry. Those “incapable of civilization” lived in communion with nature and believed, like many of their descendants today, that the earth is sacred, as is all that walks on it or grows from it.