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September
20, 2001
The View
from Mexico
Faceless Enemies
By Adolfo Gilly
There were many thousands, the White
House still does not dare say how many, who died in the terrorist
attack against the twin towers. They were office workers: not
the rich who live in their beautiful neighborhoods, but the employees
and workers of the rich, everyday men and women. That is how
they appeared in the desolate photos on the streets of the financial
district after the attack. Americans or not, their pain is ours
today, those of us who live, work and are like them, as it has
been before for all civilian victims, the same as them, in all
the cities bombarded by the armies of these times.
Killing those who work in Wall
Street in cold blood is as stupid and atrocious as it would be
to blow up a Ford factory with all its workers in order to punish
the business, or to bombard Baghdad in order to punish Saddam
Hussein. All terrorism is appalling, as is today's nameless crime
of the twin towers.
But, in order to understand
it, it is not helpful to start by looking for the guilty. The
first question is not: "Who was it?", but rather: "Why
did this happen?" In cases like this, conspiracy theories
do not explain anything. It does not seem sensible, in the current
state of things, to imagine a domestic conspiracy of dark forces
in the United States. The dimension of the affront against national
pride and the magnitude of the humiliation suffered by its government
excludes this shaky hypothesis from the very start. The fact
that President Bush goes and seeks out safety in a military base
in Nebraska, instead of going to New York, where the people were
expecting him and calling out for him, is another indication
of his confusion (and, incidentally, of the stature of those
leaders who were born into wealth and educated on golf courses).
The tragedy of the twin towers,
and the suicide attack which knocked down a part of the Pentagon,
did not come from a high level conspiracy. They are, on the contrary,
a product and an image of the present state of the world. The
world policies dictated by international financial power - whose
symbol is Wall Street, supported by the Pentagon and administered
by the men and women in the White House - have sown human and
material disasters throughout the world . They have crushed rights,
they have destroyed or dismantled peoples' organizations, they
have imposed the inhuman law of capital in the name of the "markets."
How many times have we heard that this measure is not possible,
nor is that policy, because the "markets" will not
allow them? And, when we ask who they are, where they are, how
we could talk with the "markets", we are presented
with merely an invisible hand, a faceless ghost, nothing, no
one: the governments don't know, the businessmen can't, the politicians
don't dare, because this is the state of things, and nothing
can be done.
Many people, more and more
throughout the world, have tried to have some influence on that
state of things, to defend the rights of human beings, to have
dialogue with those governments and those technicians through
whose voices the dictatorship of the "markets" speaks.
That dictatorship which provokes famine, wipes out jobs, smashes
salaries and destroys social rights everywhere. The last mass
attempt was in Genoa. More than 200,000 demonstrators gathered
together in peace in order to have their voices heard by the
big men of this world. A few hundred desperate people, the Black
Block, who were quickly isolated by the demonstrators, resorted
to violence. Berlusconi's police beat, kicked, jailed and mistreated
the demonstrators and broke them up, thus leaving the arena free
to the violent and desperate, turning them into the symbol of
the protest. The demonstrators had faces, and they belonged to
organizations. The Black Block were anonymous, violent, faceless.
They were not provocateurs (except for a few), they were desperate.
But the big men of the G-8
did not want to confront, nor to engage in dialogue with, organized
social forces, which are, by nature, opposed to terrorism. In
the same way as the anonymous "markets", the policies
of those big men prefer to confront the violent faceless enemies
which the inhuman brutality of their policies engender. Those
enemies, real and true, are useful for them for legitimizing
their own atrocities against those forces and against those human
beings throughout the world - those who are the same in their
joys, in their work and in their travail - to those thousands
and thousands which faceless terrorism assassinated in the twin
towers.
It took a good part of the
nineteenth century, and all of the twentieth, to win the rights,
the regulations and the laws which protect work in all its forms
in many countries. It took two world wars and many revolutions
and rebellions to reach the balances expressed in the United
Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those
balances are a thing of the past, and the Pentagon had a lot
to do with their destruction. They were demolished in almost
one fell swoop, like the twin towers. In their place is left
this world in ruins and the faceless dictatorship of the markets.
This dictatorship, which does
not know or recognize interlocutors, has spawned a faceless enemy
as its twin tower: terrorism at unprecedented levels. It, the
same as the "markets", does not recognize borders,
nor can it be trapped. It is reborn every day amid the rubble
of old pacts and past rights. Organizations destroyed by the
"markets" are fighting for justice and right, which
are their living environment and their raison d'etre. But, when
justice is denied and right is exchanged for private pacts, there
is only room for vengeance left. That is terrorism, child and
mirror of the "markets".
The United States government,
humiliated, declares itself to be in a state of war. Against
whom, why? Does the most powerful government in the world have
the right to lose its peace of mind and to cry out for revenge?
If those leaders are too blind and deaf to reflect on the state
of the world, then it is our job to do so. But not about them
and their madness, but about how to go about creating the forms
of organization and defense of social and political rights and
of freedom from the two faceless enemies: the markets and their
spawn: terrorism.
Seven years ago, in the Mexican
south, the Zapatista rebellion leveled a warning. They have not
wanted to listen to it, they closed paths off to them, they mocked
their ability to make politics and their will to preserve rights,
peace, life. More than once Marcos told them that, after and
beyond them, would come those from society's cellar, the faceless
and nameless storm of the humiliated, the affronted, those who
have always been treated like dirt by governments and officials,
by the rich and the masters. One more time the Fox government
manipulated, lied and mocked agreements and commitments: "No
way, if they don't want to accept what we tell them, that's their
problem, life goes on," say their officials.
It is this same government
which wants, without the least notion of the state of the world,
to tie Mexico - as partner and junior ally, confidante and subordinate
- to the world power which created that state of things, and
which seems willing to drag all of us along in a faceless violence
that knows no borders. Good sense and history points to the opposite
policy: take care of the country, and keep at a respectful and
reasonable distance those who - whether from power or terror
- want to replace reason with fury and justice with revenge.
CP
Professor Adolfo Gilly is a
scholar of Mexican politics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México (UNAM). He has written extensively about the
Zapatistas. His recent publications include Chiapas: La Razón
Ardiente, Ensayo sobre la Rebelión del Mundo Encantado
(1997) and México, el Poder, el Dinero, y la Sangre (1996).
From 1997 to 1999 he served as adviser to Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas. He also wrote the introduction for Franz Fanon's
A Dying Colonialism.
This article originally appeared
in La Jornada. Translation by Irlandesa.
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