Superducks and underducks
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by Eduarfo Galeano
Le Monde diplomatique
August 2004
EVERY day we spend $2.2bn on killing each other. Global military
spending in effect pays for huge hunting parties in which hunter
and hunted are of the same species; the winner is whoever kills
the biggest number of his peers. Think how all this money could
better be spent to provide food, education and healthcare for
deprived children worldwide.
The first impression is that such vast expenditure on arms is
grotesque. Does it appear more justified if we look closely at
the context? The official line is that the wastage is essential
to the global war on terror. Yet common sense suggests that ter-
rorists are grateful for the many weapons in circulation and so
much military action under way. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
have greatly stimulated terrorism: you do not need to be a stat-
istician to notice the increasing number of attacks. Wars are
state terrorism, which feeds and is fed by private terrorism.
Recent figures have shown signs of a recovery in the economy of
the United States, with growth returning to a satisfactory
level. Many experts agree that this growth would be much weaker
without funds released in connection with the war in Iraq. In-
vading Mesopotamia was great news for the US economy. It was not
such great news for those who died or their relations. Which
makes more sense: the economic statistics or the voice of Span-
ish politician Julio Anguita, speaking as a grieving father, who
said "a curse on this war and all wars" (1)?
The five largest arms producers are the US, Russia, China, the
United Kingdom and France. They are also the countries with a
veto in the United Nations Security Council. It insults common
sense to make those who provide the world's weapons the guaran-
tors of world peace.
These five countries are in charge. They run the International
Monetary Fund and all (except China) are among the eight coun-
tries that take most key decisions at the World Bank and the
World Trade Organisation, where the right of veto exists but is
never used. Surely it would be common sense for the struggle for
world democracy to begin with the democratisation of interna-
tional organisations. But common sense hardly has a chance to be
heard, let alone vote.
Many of the worst crimes and injustices on earth are carried out
through these three international organisations: the IMF, World
Bank and WTO. Their victims are the disappeared - not the people
who vanished under military dictatorships but the things that
have gone under democracy. Over the past few years, my country,
Uruguay, has seen jobs, decent wages, pensions, factories, lands
and even rivers disappear. The story is the same all over Latin
America and in many other regions. We are even seeing our chil-
dren disappear, reversing their forebears' emigrant dreams and
heading for Europe and elsewhere. Does common sense tell us that
we have to endure avoidable suffering and accept these tragedies
as the work of fate?
Little by little, the world is getting less and less fair. True,
the difference between a woman's salary and that of a man is not
quite the gap it once was. But at the current sluggish rate of
progress, wage equality between men and women will not be
reached for 475 years. Common sense does not advise us to wait
for it to happen: as far as I know, women do not live that long.
True education, based on common sense and leading to it, tells
us we must fight to regain what has been taken from us. The
Catalan bishop Pedro Casaldaliga (2) has worked for many years
in the heart of the rainforest in Mato Grosso, one of the poor-
est states in Brazil. He says that it may be true that if you
give a man a fish you feed him for a day while if you teach him
to fish you feed him for life; but there is no point teaching
anyone to fish when the rivers have all been poisoned or sold.
A circus trainer teaches bears to dance by hitting them on the
neck with a spiked stick. If they dance correctly; the trainer
stops hitting them and they get fed. If not, the torture contin-
ues, and the bears go back to their cages hungry. The bears
dance for fear of blows and of going hungry. To the trainer,
this is good sense. But do the bears see it that way?
After the second hijacked plane of 9/11 hit the second tower of
the World Trade Centre, it began to disintegrate; people rushed
to the stairs to get out quickly. A Tannoy message ordered all
workers to return to their desks. Workers had to use their com-
mon sense: no one who obeyed that order can have survived.
To save ourselves, we must work together. Like ducks in the same
covey. Collective flying works like this: a duck sets off and
makes way for two others, who are then followed by another pair,
whose energy inspires a fourth pair to join, and so on, so that
the ducks fly in an elegant V formation. Each duck at some time
flies both at the head of this V and at its tail. According to
my friend Juan Diaz Bordenave (3), who is no palmipedologist but
still knows what he is talking about, no duck ever felt like a
superduck when it was heading the V nor like an underduck flying
at the tail. At least ducks have kept their common sense.
--
* Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer and journalist. His
(Memory of Fire trilogy (1985-89) was published in English by
Quartet, London and WW Norton, New York. His most recent book
published in English is Upside Down: a Primer for the Looking-
glass World (Picador), New York, 2000.
(1) Julio Anguita Parrado was the son of Julio Anguita, the for-
mer leader of Spain's Izquierda Unida (United Left); he was a
journalist for the Madrid newspaper El Mundo, embedded with US
soldiers in Iraq. He was killed by an Iraqi missile in Baghdad
on 7 April 2003.
(2) Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, born in 1928, has held the bishop-
ric of Saõ Felix de Araguaia for 35 years. In 1992 he was nomi-
nated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
(3) Juan Enrique Diaz Bordenave is from Paraguay, an essayist,
media expert and author of Comunicación y Sociedad, Busqueda,
Buenos Aires, 1985.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
<http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/08/16galeano>