Because I have read Orwell and Catch 22, because I read about Stalin´s purges and Hitler´s Germany, and I was an impotent witness of the televised bombings of Baghdad, I do not take anything I see in the news at face value.
I know the laws of manipulation, I know speeches are carefully planned out, I know people die when it´s convenient in the narrative of international politics and economy. I know Big Brother could lie about aliens hiding massive destruction weapons in the desert and we would believe it.
Do I believe Osama is dead? Let me rephrase, do I believe this whole thing could be made up and people would buy it? Well, definitely. History has taught me that there is no limit to the lies of governments and politicians. If communists in Latin America were led to believe that Stalin was a revolutionary hero, then, anything is possible, and people will believe whatever.
Do I believe there was a conspiracy involved on 9/11? The whole thing certainly seemed fishy. Rephrase: do I believe the Bush administration might let something like that happen to justify an invasion? Let´s see, why wouldn´t they do it, for humanitarian reasons? because they didn´t wanna see innocent people die?
In a way, it turns my stomach that this horrible thing that happened in America seems to be the most horrifying thing that ever happened in history, while the American government has been responsible for so much destruction in the world throughout history, including an atomic bomb dropped “to maintain peace” just as Afghanistan was attacked to “save the peace”.
WAR IS PEACE is no longer literary Orwellian doublespeak. Whether we want to face it or not, we are living in 1984, in a world where enemies come and go when they are needed to foster hate against a certain people or religion or when it fits an empire´s economic goals.
Seeing Obama tell people to be happy because Osama Bin Laden had been killed felt exactly like one of those political meetings in 1984, where people enter into a hate frenzy against “the enemy.” My screenwriting tutor used to say it: Nothing unites more than a common enemy. I wonder who the new common enemy may be, now that Osama is gone.
The last 10 years of world history have just made me skeptical. People from either side tend to disagree with me. I don´t believe in angels and demons. I cannot see Obama as the angel and Osama as the demon. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between, and there are some things we´ll never know for sure.
On this day, I am thinking of the simple people who died when the towers fell, but I am also thinking of the children who were killed by bombs in Baghdad. And, hard as I try, I cannot see the difference between those deaths. I wish for a world where all human lives would be worth the same, precious human lives that no government or military man should have the right to take.
The prize of peace (Montevideo, May 2nd, 2011)
They´ll kill the criminals
and they´ll revive them in time
to justify
another invasion
another attack
on innocence
and guilt
with no telling apart
They´ll demonize
the evil man
the cause of all our ills
and unite Orwell´s sheep
against a common enemy
they´ll start a war
and get the prize of peace
We´ll fund the torturers
the dictators of the world
we´ll persecute the writers
and the thinkers
and the music men
but as long
as you give us your oil
and bow to us
and buy our multicolored
crystal beads
you´ll be alright
We´ll script
a massacre
of our own kin
if it needs be
and no one can escape
This mirage justice
like a roadkill
across the desert
a mere distraction
while lesser races
fall dead like ants
under the weight of the empires
and children blow up in the air
under the bombs
in some forgotten town somewhere
where there are no cameras
