In today's topsy-turvy world power negates common sense

Eduardo Galeano , Inter Press Service, Montevideo

Power feeds on fear. Without the demons that create it, it would lose its source of justification, impunity, and fortune. Its Satans -- Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and whichever appears next -- are in reality the geese that lay the golden egg: They create fear. What then do they deserve? Executioners to end their lives, or doctors to improve them?

Fear distracts and deflects attention. Were it not for the services it performs, the obvious would be plain for all to see: That power looks at itself in the mirror and incites fear by telling us what it sees. Danger, danger, shrieks the dangerous.

Patriotism is a privilege of those in power. When practiced by those who are ruled, is it reduced to mere terrorism? To take two examples, the suicide attacks by desperate Palestinians evicted from their country, or the national resistance to the foreign forces now occupying Iraq: Are these terrorism and nothing more?

A world upside down gives things names with an inverted logic. Power disguised negates common sense. If it weren't thus, could there be any doubt that the current government of Israel is practicing terrorism, state terrorism, and is spreading madness?

The more land this country devours and the more humiliation it inflicts on the Palestinian people, the more criminal responses it will generate. And these attacks, which kill innocent people, are used as an excuse to kill many more innocent people and commit as many atrocities as possible.

If there were any common sense left in the world, it would be unthinkable that Ariel Sharon could do what he is doing with complete impunity, as if it were absolutely normal to invade and attack other people's land, erect a wall to shield what it has usurped, announce publicly its intention of assassinating Yasser Arafat, a democratically-elected head of state, and bomb Syria knowing that the US will veto, as is its custom, any condemnation by the UN Security Council.

The way this world works, people and countries must list themselves on the stock markets, and their value depends on the geography of power. How many innocent people were blown to bits in the last war in Iraq? The victors haven't had time to count their civilian victims, who existed but no longer exist, because they have been so busy looking for weapons of mass destruction, which neither exist nor existed.

There are then no official figures. The most serious unofficial counts, however, indicate no fewer than 7,700 civilian deaths, many of them children, women, and the elderly. How much are these lives worth? As a percentage of the population, the number of Iraqis murdered is the equivalent of 94,000 Americans.

What would have happened if the invading country had been the country invaded? A similar number of US victims would be a perpetual focus of the media. The Iraqi victims, on the other hand, deserve nothing more than silence.

Up at the top, everyone knows that stealing was the only motive behind this premeditated, cold-blooded killing. But the assassins continue to say that they did what they did in self- defense, and they have neither repented nor been arrested. Crime does pay. From the summits of power, they threaten the world with new feats, minting dangers, inventing enemies, and sowing panic.

President Bush loves quoting references to the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelations, but he would do better to merely quote the news, which is more current but otherwise just about the same.

This hair-raising book of the Bible contains a prophecy from the distant past that is full of both exaggeration and incorrect numbers, but you have to admit that it resembles current events quite a bit. "At the great Euphrates River a third of the men were exterminated by fire, smoke, and sulphur." And then: "A third of the world was scorched, and a third of all trees, and all green grass, and a third of all the creatures of the sea perished. Many people died from the water of the rivers which had been made bitter."

The author of Revelations, Saint John or whoever it was, attributed these disasters to divine rage. He had never heard of smart bombs, carbon dioxide, acid rain, chemical pesticides, or radioactive waste. And he couldn't have imagined that consumer society or the technology of devastation would be more fearsome than God's wrath.

Bombs against people, bombs against nature. And money bombs? What would become of this model of the-world-as-its-own-worst- enemy if there were no financial wars?

In their more than half a century in existence, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have exterminated far more people than all terrorist organizations past and present. They have powerfully contributed to making the world the way it is today. And now this world, boiling with indignation, is scaring its authors.

"The World Bank, apostle of privatization, is undergoing a crisis of faith," writes the Wall Street Journal. In a recent report, the Bank discovered that the privatization of public services that its functionaries imposed and continue to impose on poor countries is not exactly manna from heaven, above all for countries abandoned to their fates.

Alarmed by the consequences of its actions, the Bank now says, "private investment must be supervised," though it fails to explain how. The poor also worry the IMF, which has spent its life strangling them: "It is necessary to reduce social inequalities," concludes the director of the Fund, Horst Koehler, after musing on the matter. The poor are at a loss how to say thank you for such kindness.

These organizations run a financial dictatorship within a democratic order; there is nothing democratic about them: Five countries make all the decisions in the IMF, seven in the World Bank. No one else can do a thing.

The trade dictatorship isn't democratic either. There are no votes in the World Trade Organization unless required by statute.

This colonial organization of the planet would be at grave risk if the poor countries, which comprise the overwhelming majority of its members, could vote. Instead, they are present at the banquet only to be eaten.

National dignity is a profitless activity condemned to disappear, like public property, in the underdeveloped world. But when such dignity exerts itself, another cock crows. This happened recently in Cancun at the WTO Ministerial. The scorned and lied to countries united in a common front for the first time after many years of solitude and fear. And they shipwrecked the meeting, which as usual was convened so the majority could exercise its right to obedience.

This is happening all over now, showing that power isn't as powerful as it says it is.

No one knows this better than Alice in Wonderland: "Off with her head!" the queen shrieked at the top of her lungs, but no one made the slightest move.

"Who's going to do what she says?" asked Alice,

"Why, they're only a deck of cards."

The writer, a Uruguayan writer and journalist, is the author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire.