Arundhati Roy (2002)- The Peace Blog
"Last year, like many others, I too made the mistake of scoffing at this post- September 11 rhetoric, dismissing it as foolish and arrogant. I've realized that it's not foolish at all. It's actually a canny recruitment drive for a misconceived, dangerous war. Every day I'm taken aback at how many people believe that opposing the war in Afghanistan amounts to supporting terrorism, or voting for the Taliban. Now that the initial aim of the war -- capturing Osama bin Laden (dead or alive) -- seems to have run into bad weather, the goalposts have been moved. It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We're being asked to believe that the US marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America's military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: In India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against 'untouchables', against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the US? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of native Americans upon whose corpses the US was founded by bombing Santa Fe?
None of us need anniversaries to remind us of what we cannot forget. So it is no more than coincidence that I happen to be here, on American soil, in September -- this month of dreadful anniversaries. Uppermost on everybody's mind of course, particularly here in America, is the horror of what has come to be known as 9/11. Nearly three thousand civilians lost their lives in that lethal terrorist strike. The grief is still deep. The rage still sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory."
"Since it is September 11 that we're talking about, perhaps it's in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: welcome to the world.
Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the September 11, 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. 'Chile shouldn't be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible', said Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon's national security adviser.
After the coup President Allende was found dead inside the presidential palace. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we'll never know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed. Many more simply 'disappeared'. Firing squads conducted public executions. Concentration camps and torture chambers were opened across the country. The dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. For 17 years the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock, of routine 'disappearances', of sudden arrest and torture. Chileans tell the story of how the musician Victor Jara had his hands cut off in front of a crowd in the Santiago stadium. Before they shot him, Pinochet's soldiers threw his guitar at him and mockingly ordered him to play.
In 1999, following the arrest of General Pinochet in Britain, thousands of secret documents were declassified by the US government. They contain unequivocal evidence of the CIA's involvement in the coup as well as the fact that the US government had detailed information about the situation in Chile during General Pinochet's reign. Yet Kissinger assured the general of his support: 'In the United States as you know, we are sympathetic to what you are trying to do', he said, 'We wish your government well'.
Those of us who have only ever known life in a democracy, however flawed, would find it hard to imagine what living in a dictatorship and enduring the absolute loss of freedom really means. It isn't just those who Pinochet murdered, but the lives he stole from the living that must be accounted for, too.
Sadly, Chile was not the only country in South America to be singled out for the US government's attentions. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Peru, Mexico and Colombia; they've all been the playground for covert -- and overt -- operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the despotic regimes and tin-pot dictators, drug runners and arms dealers that were propped up in their countries. (Many of them learned their craft in the infamous US government-funded School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which has produced 60,000 graduates.) If this were not humiliation enough, the people of South America have had to bear the cross of being branded as a people who are incapable of democracy -- as if coups and massacres are somehow encrypted in their genes. "
-Arundhati Roy, Sydney Peace Prize winner, September 2002 from http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~peer/arundhatiRoy.html
I would just like to say that a friend of mine has recently gotten an interview with the CIA. Every American that I talk to says it's an honor. For me, being a CIA agent is a disgrace. To play psychological warfare with the politics of other countries, and thinking the U.S. can control any politics of any country is not just racist...it is a completely uneducated attempt at controlling...something my friend never had the power to do because he was so paranoid. Those that are wicked always have a way of manipulating things as if they know they are the victors when they do succeed in manipulation. However, in the end, these men are wicked...and according to the character Jahman from the movie "Countryman", a movie dedicated to Bob Marley: "It's a force of nature, man. That's why there is no need to slay the wicked. Just leave them to face death and they will perish."
None of us need anniversaries to remind us of what we cannot forget. So it is no more than coincidence that I happen to be here, on American soil, in September -- this month of dreadful anniversaries. Uppermost on everybody's mind of course, particularly here in America, is the horror of what has come to be known as 9/11. Nearly three thousand civilians lost their lives in that lethal terrorist strike. The grief is still deep. The rage still sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory."
"Since it is September 11 that we're talking about, perhaps it's in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: welcome to the world.
Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the September 11, 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. 'Chile shouldn't be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible', said Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon's national security adviser.
After the coup President Allende was found dead inside the presidential palace. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we'll never know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed. Many more simply 'disappeared'. Firing squads conducted public executions. Concentration camps and torture chambers were opened across the country. The dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. For 17 years the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock, of routine 'disappearances', of sudden arrest and torture. Chileans tell the story of how the musician Victor Jara had his hands cut off in front of a crowd in the Santiago stadium. Before they shot him, Pinochet's soldiers threw his guitar at him and mockingly ordered him to play.
In 1999, following the arrest of General Pinochet in Britain, thousands of secret documents were declassified by the US government. They contain unequivocal evidence of the CIA's involvement in the coup as well as the fact that the US government had detailed information about the situation in Chile during General Pinochet's reign. Yet Kissinger assured the general of his support: 'In the United States as you know, we are sympathetic to what you are trying to do', he said, 'We wish your government well'.
Those of us who have only ever known life in a democracy, however flawed, would find it hard to imagine what living in a dictatorship and enduring the absolute loss of freedom really means. It isn't just those who Pinochet murdered, but the lives he stole from the living that must be accounted for, too.
Sadly, Chile was not the only country in South America to be singled out for the US government's attentions. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Peru, Mexico and Colombia; they've all been the playground for covert -- and overt -- operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the despotic regimes and tin-pot dictators, drug runners and arms dealers that were propped up in their countries. (Many of them learned their craft in the infamous US government-funded School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which has produced 60,000 graduates.) If this were not humiliation enough, the people of South America have had to bear the cross of being branded as a people who are incapable of democracy -- as if coups and massacres are somehow encrypted in their genes. "
-Arundhati Roy, Sydney Peace Prize winner, September 2002 from http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~peer/arundhatiRoy.html
I would just like to say that a friend of mine has recently gotten an interview with the CIA. Every American that I talk to says it's an honor. For me, being a CIA agent is a disgrace. To play psychological warfare with the politics of other countries, and thinking the U.S. can control any politics of any country is not just racist...it is a completely uneducated attempt at controlling...something my friend never had the power to do because he was so paranoid. Those that are wicked always have a way of manipulating things as if they know they are the victors when they do succeed in manipulation. However, in the end, these men are wicked...and according to the character Jahman from the movie "Countryman", a movie dedicated to Bob Marley: "It's a force of nature, man. That's why there is no need to slay the wicked. Just leave them to face death and they will perish."
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