OPINION: The reasons for hatred

There are events in history that shake the social awareness. The impact sometimes depends on the place where they occur and the ability of their victims to make themselves visible. We already know that one dead person from the empire is “worth” as much as one hundred inhabitants of any “dark” corner of the world. I was in Washington—a North American university, in coordination with one of our institutions, paid for my scholarship to scrutinize the archives of the annexationist José Ignacio Rodríguez in the Library of Congress—when three hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington.

The Government of Cuba, one of the first to condemn the incident and send its condolences to its American counterparts and the families of the victims, knew, from its own experience, what a terrorist act meant: among hundreds of bomb attacks or stealthy machine gunning in coastal towns on the island, carried out from speedboats that sailed from Floridian ports and returned to them, with their consequences of dead and mutilated civilians (children, women, elderly), it is worth highlighting the bombing of the Cubana de Aviación plane in mid-flight and the death of its 73 passengers in 1976.

I experienced the jingoistic hysteria that the until then unpopular Bush Jr. government used in his favor. “America Strikes Back” was the advertisement that was repeated insistently on television, as if it were an upcoming intergalactic war film. “Why do they hate us?” the Emperor asked himself before the Senate. And all the subjects, barbarians and Romans, waited anxiously for an answer. 'Because we are free,' he said," I recalled, bewildered, in a chronicle from the "attacked" capital. The empire, in response, devastated in successive years, not one, but several Middle Eastern nations and secured their oil for itself. Those dead people out of revenge, of reconquest, which continue to add up today in an endless, sadly real saga, can never be counted. He decreed the infinite war against terrorism, but a few months later, he sentenced five Cubans who infiltrated terrorist groups in Miami to severe prison sentences, who were trying to prevent them from placing bombs in hotels and nightclubs in our country.

I once asked Andrés Pascal Allende, who assumed the General Secretariat of the clandestine Revolutionary Left Movement of Chile, after the coup d'état organized by the United States that overthrew the constitutional president Salvador Allende and imposed the dictator Augusto Pinochet, on a same date, September 11, almost forgotten, if his urban guerrillas were terrorists: “we were forced to use weapons to defend ourselves from repression, and to fight for what was the legitimate right of a people to oppose a dictatorship that had violated the Constitution, which had been imposed by violence, a regime of brutal domination. Actually, it was us who suffered the terrorism of a military state that tortured, murdered and disappeared thousands of people, that pushed tens of thousands of people to leave their homeland, dividing families, and destroyed what was a coexistence until that rational moment, a Chile that was still a community.” It is the history of our people.

The Israelites, like their American protectors, champion the Hamas attack (I don't know why events that are transformed into historical pretexts crowd into my mind: Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Twin Towers), to respond with a dreamed “ethnic cleansing” of the small territory still occupied by the Palestinians. At the recent Patria Colloquium, the presentation of the Pan-Arab television channel Al Mayadeen reached the maximum of communicative effectiveness: like in a game room, you could put on your glasses and walk into a disconcerting “virtual reality” and with the help of a wireless controller or cursor of minimal proportions, walking through the streets of a real Gaza, absolutely destroyed by Israeli bombs. No one told you, you “witnessed” the suffering of Palestinian children and mothers, listened to them in short videos that you could freely select, and then returned to the desolation of the ghostly city. At the end of the “tour”, with a tight chest and moist eyes, the commitment to the struggle of the Palestinian people had been sealed. But it is not enough to feel.

In the great power and communication centers, no one spoke, no one talks about the reasons for hatred, nor the double standards for judging human actions and reactions. The Western media systematically prepares its public, constructing false reputations with unworthy thoroughness and perseverance. It is the first stage of any war: making citizens believe that the culture of the enemy (unilaterally declared) is inferior, savage, anti-democratic, fundamentalist, on a religious or ideological level. There is an industry of hate, which reproduces and magnifies every defensive action and ignores the offensive ones, on social networks, in video games, on television, in movies. When the incident breaks out, usually provoked by the future aggressor, public opinion is ready to condemn the adversary, sometimes even to support its extermination.

The response of the oppressed, apparently disproportionate and irrational, has a prehistory, that of colonization, that of neo-colonization, that of low or high intensity wars thousands of kilometers away from the "American dream," that of the theft of national resources, that of induced and supported coups d'état, that of military or political interventionism and selective assassinations, all in the name of something non-existent, which is demanded in one place and ignored in another, all in the name of the "national" interests of the hegemonic power. The story does not begin on the fatal day: but the cruelty, the irrationality, the premeditated hatred of the powerful, precede it. Zionism has turned the exclusion suffered for centuries, as well as the death and humiliation of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, and the biblical text, incredible paradox, into excuses for the exclusion, death and humiliation for decades of millions of Palestinians, and the construction of a great Israel that expels “the others” from the “promised land,” in which they have lived for centuries. Anti-Semites are actually the Zionists who exterminate the Palestinians, themselves Semites, both peoples being children of the same tree.

It is not enough for us to reject barbarism, at which decent people on the right and the left can feel horrified. The eradication of imperialism, which is transnational, and the eradication of Zionism, constitute necessary premises for the liberation of the American and Jewish people: we are anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists because we love the people of the United States and the Jewish people, but also the Palestinian people, and the Sahrawi’s, and any other oppressed people. Because we love Humanity in its beautiful diversity, because we do not accept the pseudo-Darwinian thesis that there are superior peoples and inferior peoples. It is necessary that this episode definitively reveal the nature of imperialism, Zionism and the fascism that resides in each of them. It is the only way to start building love.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff