About September 11th

The best moral condemnation of the incredible atrocity of New York and Washington was given to me by an Angolan religious nun with tears in her eyes: "I have felt anger at times against the United States because what we have suffered ourselves is such, that I do not desire the same for anybody else, not even for that country who is so much to blame for our Calvary". She said this while watching the scenes appearing on TV of little Palestinian children applauding the terrorist attack. (Poor little ones that have been breast-fed on hatred without their knowing it).

I resort to these words because I think they bear more authority than mine can, to express what should be more than a simple condemnation: the trembling one feels for the wickedness that can take possession of human hearts, and for the cold-bloodedness with which this wickedness can act, not in a moment of blindness but slowly, day by day, looking for their cruel objectives step by step.

But it is an elementary truth that immorality cannot be eliminated by only condemning it. It is necessary to examine its reasons and to hit upon correctly its remedies. The reflections that follow go in this direction. They make no pretension of being exhaustive, and are preceded by an apology if, as I fear, they go off the main point.

1. Safety does not exist

Not nuclear umbrellas or anything of their likes! The biggest terrorist attack of recent years has been committed with just steel knives! Hatred, madness, fanaticism or despair are more to be feared than all human weapons. As the old prophet Isaias said, peace is not the fruit of wars nor of war victories, but only of justice.

2. The dead make us feel pain not because they are our own but because they are human beings.

A few years ago, in Rwanda and in the space of three days, the number of people who were killed was not ten thousand, but hundreds of thousands of people. That atrocity in which the whole world was somewhat at fault, for geostrategic and militarist reasons, had a very much less impact on us; and no UEFA ever thought of cancelling any soccer match or anything similar. A decision to do any such thing would have seemed to us ridiculous then and unjustifiable. And, nevertheless, when solidarity is not truly universal, it runs the threat of being converted into servility.

3. It is not going to be World War III.

Not because the enemy has not been well identified, but because, after Vietnam, we are not in a mood for wars but only for vengeance. The first condition for our wars is that the victims should not be us. We are not ready to fight if we have to see dead bodies arriving home and strange letters of condolence from high-ranking military officials. We are not capable of bearing other consequences like petrol shortage, the collapse of the Share and Financial Markets and economic crises. Our comfort is our weakness. And so it happens that in a fight in which the contenders on one side comprise those who have a lot to lose and on the other side people who are ready to die, it is possible that the latter could turn out stronger despite their being less well-armed.

4. Much less is it a question of "the war of Good against Evil".

This oversimplification of President Bush can be forgiven on account of the emotion of the moment. But with a little more seriousness and sincerity we might be obliged to say that perhaps in part we deserved it.

Perhaps not for personal faults but because we have built a civilisation and a regime of (small) freedoms, based on the exclusion and oppression of other people.

The United States launched the atomic bomb, and has still not asked forgiveness for having done so. It committed acts of terrorism in Iraq, invaded Guatemala, Santo Domingo and Granada when it so desired, trained in the School of the Americas an infinite number of Latin American torturers, and has maintained a bias that makes it impossible to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Europe has followed a hair-raising colonial policy in Africa ranging from the slave-trade (for which we have not apologised as yet) to the most refined torture. Permit me to reproduce two quotes of our European culture taken from Le Monde Diplomatique edited last August (pg. 14), in an article that was not written in the wake of the terrorist attacks in North America, but previous to the Durban Conference which turned out a failure:

"No philanthropy or racial theory can convince rational people that the preservation of a tribe of brutes in South Africa is more important for the future of humanity than the expansion of the great European nations of the white race in general... Since it is a matter of people or individual beings who produce nothing of value, they can lay no claim to the right of existence".

This text of 1912 is at the basis of many of our conducts and policies. How else could the fathers of our modernity such as Montesquieu and Voltaire defend slavery. Later the "pacification" of Indonesia by the Netherlands cost 70,000 deaths. The price of the capture of the Philippines by the USA amounted to 200,000 lives; the current revelations on torture in French Algeria are hair-raising... And we could go on and on in this vein. The only difference is that we have forgotten but they haven't.

Allow me to repeat myself: we are children of a culture that built its small spaces of civility and freedom on the basis of exclusion and camouflaged crime. We abolished slavery when it was not economically necessary (for this reason the practice is now being resuscitated). Difficult though it is for us to acknowledge, the road to pacification has gone through twisted, crooked paths. And we should examine ourselves to make sure that what afflicts us in the barbarity of September 11 is really the pain of human beings (sacred irrespective where they come from) and not the humiliation of our unconfessed feeling of First World superiority. Not many years ago, Helder Cámara defined violence as a "diabolical spiral": because when someone treats us badly, he ends up bringing out the worst in us. Let us not forget this.

José Ignacio González Faus
Published in La Vanguardia
September 27, 2001.

On a wall in New York someone wrote:

"An eye for an eye leaves the world blind".

From this city of Kazajstan, a country which is an example of harmony among men and women of different origins and religious confessions, I wish to send out a sincere appeal to all, Christians or followers of other religions, to work together to build a world without violence, a world which loves life and which advances in justice and solidarity. We cannot permit what has happened to make division among people stronger. Religion should never be a source of conflict.

From this place, I invite both Christians and Muslims to offer an immense prayer to the one and omnipotent God so that the great gift of peace may reign in the world. That all nations, supported by divine wisdom, may work everywhere to build a civilisation of love in which there is no room for hatred, discrimination and violence. From the bottom of my heart, I ask God to maintain the world in peace. Amen.

(John Paul II, Astana,September 23, 2001)

There is a strong resemblance between terrorism that is handmade and that of a high level technologic nature, terrorism of religious fundamentalists and that of market fundamentalists, terrorism of the desperate and that of the powerful, terrorism of mad individuals at large and that of uniformed professionals. All share the same contempt for human life: the assassins of the five thousand five hundred citizens crushed under the debris of the Twin Towers, that toppled over like dry sand castles and the assassins of the two hundred thousand Guatemalans, mostly native, who were exterminated without any TV or newspapers in the world taking any notice of them. The Guatemalans were not killed by any Muslim fanatic but by military terrorists that received "support, finances and inspiration" from the successive governments of the USA.

(Eduardo Galeano)