ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 6, 1996 TAG: 9607080013
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GLEN T. MARTIN
AMERICANS HIDE the brutal reality of our lives under a mythology every bit as bestial as that of the Aztec Indians of 16th century Mexico who made human sacrifices to their sun god Quetzalcoatl. We live in a system that sacrifices human lives to the accumulation of wealth.
Your June 27 news article announced that "Bedford's largest employer may move," with the possible loss of 300 jobs. Why would an employer move and throw people into unemployment, some into despair? The answer is the same as the reason big corporations exploit child labor or the 28 cent-an-hour minimum wage in Haiti. The worldwide economic empire over which the wealthy 10 percent of Americans preside is an empire allowing the death of millions from starvation and lack of health care, water, sanitation or homes. It isn't a system of life, designed to provide basic necessities or dignity to human beings. It's a system of death, designed for profit for corporations.
It was said in an article several months ago that the human-rights group exposing these corporations was "a human-rights lobby during the Central American wars [when] the committee opposed U.S. support for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and the military government in El Salvador.'' What it didn't mention is that U.S. support for vicious military groups is part and parcel with our worldwide economic empire. Whenever unspeakably poor people try to reorganize their societies to use their countries' resources for survival, either the Central Intelligence Agency or U.S. military immediately act to destroy this possibility. Those resources belong to U.S. transnational corporations, not to the people, who must work for our corporations at starvation-level wages and allow the wealth they produce to be transferred to their American masters. This is why our government hates Cuba so much, since the Cuban people managed to get out from our system of exploitation, and today are practically the only Latin American people enjoying health care, universal education and a decent standard of living.
This is also why the U.S. government acted so brutally to destroy the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua after 1979. The Nicaraguan people had managed to throw out the U.S.-installed and supported dictator Somoza whose family dynasty had robbed his country blind in collusion with U.S. corporations. Within two years, the Sandinistas had instituted universal health care and education, and were acting to provide small plots of land to the starving, desperate majority of their population. The United States couldn't allow this since the people of the entire Third World might soon get the idea that their countries' resources could be used for their own survival, and our empire of global capitalism would soon crumble. The terrorist Contra army we organized, equipped and housed across the border in Honduras didn't fight a war with the Sandinista army. It attacked health-care clinics, schools, cooperative farms run by the poor. It raped, pillaged and terrorized the civilians of northern Nicaragua, in conjunction with a strangulating U.S. economic blockade, until the agonized citizens were forced to vote out the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections.
I recently toured Nicaragua where "democracy" has been restored for six years. The poor are back to our preferred Third World model of starvation and misery. Health care is again private, and only the rich can afford it. Children's bellies are again swollen from parasites and malnutrition. Schools now cost money, and poor children no longer attend. Unlike during the Sandinista years, thousands of starving street children and teen-age prostitutes again appear on Managua's streets. Shantytowns with thousands of forgotten and displaced people are found in every part of the country.
A June 26 article's big headline was ``Bomb kills Americans." It was about the terrible terrorist bombing of a housing complex in Saudi Arabia. President Clinton was on television that day stating that we wouldn't tolerate attacks on American lives anywhere in the world.
All terrorism is terrible. But our worship of our global empire is perhaps epitomized in the assumptions behind this response. There's something special about "Americans." We're somehow superior and more civilized, so an attack on an American life is more serious than an attack on others. The more than 2 million human beings we destroyed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos don't count for much. The more than 200,000 people butchered and tortured in El Salvador and Guatemala during the '80s, with the support of "U.S. advisers" and billions of our tax dollars, don't count for much. But if anyone dares to do to us what we routinely do to others, we're outraged.
Our god is ourselves, our power and our empire - a global system where by those who possess wealth are legally institutionalized to exploit poor people to extract yet more wealth. This is glorified in exalted images of the flag, the nation, free enterprise, military strength, law and order, even "democracy."
In the book of Revelation, it speaks of "the great beast" of sin dominating the world at the end of days. The most evil aspect of this great beast is that people will worship it without knowing it as sin. Sin and evil work in this way: They're hidden from plain view. Our worship of ourselves and our system is hidden within the assumptions behind headlines such as "Bomb kills Americans."
Glen T. Martin is an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University.
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