This is the letter I sent to my local weekly paper. I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to see if they decided to print it. I was trying to encourage more people to think about the events of the past week in a global rather than simply a national context.
I’ve never posted anything here before even though I’ve been lurking for months; I just posted this on DKos (where I’m not exactly a regular either) and thought that people here might conceivably be interested too. I love this site, so thank you to anyone who has the time to have a look.
The Third World Comes Home
In _The Origins of Totalitarianism_, Hannah Arendt persuasively argued that mid-twentieth century European fascism was essentially an importation of the brutal and dehumanizing population control techniques that European governments had long used in their colonies back into their home countries. For over fifty years, successive U.S. governments have employed similar techniques in the so-called third world, usually by proxy, without ever formally proclaiming our own nation to be an empire. During the administration of George W. Bush, however, we have witnessed the direct application of imperial violence on a scale unprecedented since the Vietnam War, specifically in the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq. While no reasonable person has suggested that the administration has deliberately intended to kill Iraqi civilians, its criminally misguided, negligent and incompetent policies have nevertheless led to tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the primary reason for these needless deaths is that the lives of ordinary Iraqis are simply not a priority for the men and women currently running our government, relative to their various geopolitical and economic objectives. The massive death and destruction have simply been collateral damage.
While these words may sound harsh to some, what the events of the past week have shown us is that these same men and women appear to care as little about the lives of ordinary United States citizens as they do about the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens, at least if they are poor and black. From its unconscionable budget cuts to levee reinforcement projects, to its crippling of FEMA, to its criminally negligent and incompetent failure to rescue drowning and dehydrating human beings in a timely manner, the policies of this administration have caused massive but still uncounted numbers of needless deaths, especially in the city of New Orleans. I have been shocked and sick to my stomach since the day after Hurricane Katrina struck, knowing that more human beings were dying every minute that passed while our government failed to do everything in its power to save them. One of my best friend’s uncle remains missing. Every boat, bus and helicopter in the United States could and should have been deployed to a massive rescue operation from the moment the flooding began if not sooner. The President of the United States had the power to do this. Instead, the American Red Cross was prevented from delivering food, water and medical supplies to those trapped inside the city. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that to George W. Bush and his associates, the lives of poor black people in the United States are as expendable as the lives of poor black people in Haiti, or poor brown people in Iraq, or poor white people in Bosnia and Kosovo. Like the people of Fallujah, the people of New Orleans were not a priority.
And sadly, this has been the underlying logic of the disastrous trickle-down economic policies that have been pursued in this country for the past twenty-five years, which have hollowed out our republic from within and increasingly replaced it with something resembling a neo-feudal country club for the rich. While bodies remain unrecovered and survivors may yet be found, the legislative priority of the Republican Party this week is the permanent abolition of the estate tax for multimillionaires. In this emerging new society, the value of human life is determined by net worth, and beneath the rhetoric, those who lack net worth lack value. The third world has come home. Like the people of New Orleans, almost all of us in this country and elsewhere could ultimately become collateral damage, beginning but not ending with the most marginalized and vulnerable. For the sake of humanity, I pray that we are able to turn back this tide before it is too late.