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Activist
Editorial
Such a statement is archetypically characteristic of empire. When Noam Chomsky writes about “manufacturing consent,” he points to one of the principal dynamics of hegemony: the practice of defining reality. The empire tells its people what to pay attention to and what not, who counts and who doesn’t, who exists and who doesn’t—erasing entire populations for war and profit. Never mind, for example, that human rights groups report, predictably, that women in Afghanistan continue to face violence and discrimination. The women of Afghanistan only “existed” to justify our invasion. In the aftermath, they disappear—we no longer know about their existence. Never mind that we replaced the government of Afghanistan with a league of war lords and drug-runners and that in the aftermath, Afghanistan has become the leading heroin producer in the world. To empire, the people of Afghanistan only “existed” to give some local legitimacy to our strategic takeover of East Asia. In the aftermath, when corporate contracts have been signed, we simply don’t know about the existence of the drug problem and its effects upon the people of Afghanistan and the United States. Never mind that The Lancet, the most respected medical journal in the world, reported half a year ago that the invasion of Iraq had cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqis—mostly women and children and mostly from U.S. bombing. Or that UNICEF had reported that from 1991 to 1998 the sanctions and bombing had taken the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five. Those Iraqis are people we don’t know exist. And note, they were people of color made poor by policy, like so many of those abandoned and dying in the Gulf. We were so deluded by our government-media construction of reality that we believed—after killing 500,000 of their children—that the Iraqis would welcome invaders with open arms. The leopard has not changed its spots when it comes to people within its own borders. Interviewed by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America, President Bush said “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” But there were plenty of warnings, most notably in a five-part series in the Times-Picayune and from FEMA itself. It’s just that, in the need to prosecute the war that is supposed to make us more secure, the government diverted finances, personnel, and equipment from the protection of one group of people to the killing of another. When the Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million to shore up the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, the White House gave $5.7 million. When the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project asked for $62.5 million for improved drainage and pumping, the White House offered a mere $10.5 million. Meanwhile, the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus have just produced a well-researched report about where else the $204 billion dollars spent on killing people in Iraq could have gone: 1.8 million units of affordable housing, 40 million scholarships for university students, 27 million kids into the Head Start Program. So it’s not that no one anticipated the disaster; rather it is that the government decided that the problem (and the poor and people of color whom it would most catastrophically affect) simply didn’t exist. Here at the War Resisters League, nonviolence is always a form of remembering—an attention to marginalized and forgotten peoples. There can be many aftermaths of Katrina, as there could have been many aftermaths of the 9-11 attacks. Those of us committed to nonviolence are more determined than ever that that the aftermath be an end to the blindness that denies existence to those we have constructed as our enemies, and to those who we should have been calling our neighbors. |
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we observed the fourth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center,
our considerations of the aftermath of September 11, 2001, necessarily
blended with our reflections on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In
all the media coverage of the disaster of Katrina, and in all the media
coverage of the war in Iraq, one quote seems to summarize the attitude
of the U.S. government to both disasters: In a PBS NewsHour interview
with Jim Lehrer, FEMA director Michael Brown, reflecting on the TV coverage
of Katrina’s aftermath, said, “The American people understand how fascinating
and unusual this is, that we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist.”