Phantom towers (page 2)
Feminist reflections on the battle between global capitalism and fundamentalist terrorism
by Rosalind P. PetcheskyIF WE LOOK ONLY at terrorist tactics and the world's revulsion against them, then we might conclude rather optimistically that thuggery will never win out in the end. But we ignore the context in which terrorism operates at our peril, and that context includes not only racism and Eurocentrism but many forms of social injustice.
In thinking through a moral position on this crisis, we have to distinguish between immediate causes and necessary conditions. Neither the United States (as a state) nor the corporate and financial power structure that the World Trade Centers symbolized caused the horrors of September 11. Without question, the outrageous, heinous murder, maiming and orphaning of so many innocent people--who were every race, ethnicity, color, class, age, gender and some sixty-odd nationalities--deserve some kind of just redress. On the other hand, the conditions in which transnational terrorism thrives, gains recruits and lays claim to moral legitimacy include many for which the US and its corporate/financial interests are directly responsible even if they don't for a minute excuse the attacks. It is often asked lately, why does the Third World hate us so much? Put another way, why do so many people, including my own friends in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, express so much ambivalence about what happened, both lamenting an unforgivable criminal act and at the same time taking some satisfaction that Americans are finally suffering too? We make a fatal mistake if we attribute these mixed feelings only to envy or resentment of our wealth and freedoms and ignore a historical context of aggression, injustice and inequality. Consider these facts:
The United States is still the only country in the world to have actually used the most infamous weapons of mass destruction in the nuclear bombing of innocent civilians--in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The US persists to this day in bombing Iraq, destroying the lives and food supplies of hundreds of thousands of civilian adults and children there. We bombed Belgrade--a dense capital city--for eighty straight days during the war in Kosovo, and supported bombing that killed untold civilians in El Salvador in the 1980s. In the name of fighting Communism, our CIA and military training apparatus sponsored paramilitary massacres, assassinations, tortures and disappearances in many Latin American and Central American countries in Operation Condor and the like in the 1970s, and has supported corrupt, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere--the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, the Saudi dynasty, and let's not forget the Taliban regime itself. September 11 is also the date of the coup against the democratically elected Allende government in Chile and the beginning of the 25-year Pinochet dictatorship, again thanks to US support. Yes, a long history of state terrorism.
In the Middle East, which is the microcosm of the current conflagration, US military aid and the Bush administration's disengagement are the sine qua non of continued Israeli government policies of attacks on villages, demolition of homes, destruction of olive orchards, restrictions on travel, assassination of political leaders, building of roads and enlarging of settlements that deepen the occupation of Palestinian territories, and continual human rights abuses of Palestinians and even Arab citizens--all of which exacerbate hostility and suicide bombings.
The US is one of only two countries--along with Afghanistan!--that has failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the only country that hasn't ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is the most vocal opponent of the statute establishing an International Criminal Court as well as the treaties banning land mines and germ warfare; a principal subverter of a new multilateral treaty to combat illegal small arms trafficking; and the sole country in the world to threaten an unprecedented space-based defense system and imminent violation of the ABM treaty. So who is the "outlaw, " the "rogue state"?
The US is the only major industrialized country to refuse to sign the final Kyoto Protocol on Global Climate Change, despite compromises in that document designed to meet US objections. Meanwhile, a new global scientific study shows that the countries whose overall productivity will benefit most from climate change are Canada, Russia and the US, while the biggest losers will be the countries that have contributed least to global climate change--meaning most of Africa.
As even the World Bank and the UNDP attest, two decades of globalization have enlarged rather than diminished the gaps between rich and poor, both within countries and among countries. The benefits of global market liberalization and integration have accrued disproportionately to wealthy Americans and Europeans (as well as small elites in the Third World). Despite the presumed democratizing effects of the Internet, the New York Times recently reported that a middle-class American "needs to save a month's salary to buy a computer; a Bangladeshi must save all his wages for eight years to do so." And despite its constant trumpeting of "free-trade" rhetoric, the US remains a persistent defender of protectionist policies for its farmers. Meanwhile small producers throughout Asia, Africa and the Caribbean--a great many of whom are women--are squeezed out by US imports and relegated to the informal economy or sweatshop labor for multinationals.
The G-8 countries, of which the US is the senior partner, dominate decision-making in the IMF and the World Bank, whose structural adjustments and conditionalities for loans and debt relief help to keep many poor countries and their citizens locked in poverty.
US-based corporations can cough up billions overnight to "aid" their counterparts whose offices and personnel were destroyed in the WTC attacks, and Congress can vote instantly to hand over fifteen billion dollars to the beleaguered airline industry. Yet our foreign assistance appropriations (except for military aid) have shrunk; we, the world's richest country, don't even meet the UN standard of .7 percent of GNP. A recent WHO report tells us the total cost of providing safe water and sanitation to everyone in the world who needs it would be only ten billion dollars, only no one can figure out where the money will come from; and the UN is still a long way off from raising a similar amount for its proclaimed World HIV/AIDS Fund. What kind of meanness is this? And what does it say about forms of racism, or "global apartheid," that value some lives--those in the US and Europe--far more than others in other parts of the globe?
And the list goes on, with McDonald's, Coca-Cola, CNN and MTV and all the uninvited commercial detritus that proliferates everywhere on the face of the earth and offends the cultural and spiritual sensibilities of so many--including transnational feminist travelers like me, when we find pieces of our local shopping mall transplanted to downtown Kampala or Kuala Lumpur, Cairo or Bangalore. But worse than the triviality and bad taste of these cultural and commercial barrages is the arrogant presumption that our "way of life" is the best on earth and ought to be welcome everywhere; or that our power and supposed advancement entitle us to dictate policies and strategies to the rest of the world. This is the face of imperialism in the twenty-first century.
Continue to Page 3 of Rosalind P. Petchesky's Phantom Towers
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