“The Axe forgets, but not the tree.”
- African proverb.

What are they thinking?

In their practical silence. Inside the closed space of their strategic multi-ethnic inscrutability. The faceless billions who scratch for survival on an endangered planet they played no role in jeopardizing. The traditional indigenous people who for thousands of years have accorded their arcadian labors and likes with host mother earth’s most elemental needs. The hopelessly poor masked in the mannerism of their false docility. The economically exploited who win no notice for their injuries; the tortured who suspect a westerly identity of their torturers’ absentee sponsors; the defenseless and displaced whose homes have been flooded by ancient waters loosed from new and needless western-financed dams, or destroyed by child soldiers brandishing modern western arms. The heirs to storied occupied lands where the descendants of those who taught the world to read and write are groped at checkpoint after checkpoint by heedless western hands; the sullen dangerous shadows that overpopulate our domestic prisons. Yestertime’s humanity. Slavery’s final harvest.

And, of course, the shackled and violated devout of Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.

Victims all, they are, and by the millions. Infinite. Farflung. Misleadingly dissimilar. Joined only in the fog of a common humiliating experience occasioned by a common opponent, consistently indifferent to their unpublicized suffering.

What is the inevitable consequence to us all of their combusting, all-consuming and predictably pan-destructive rage.

The question never posed by Americans, perhaps not even to themselves, is the question that obsesses the most resilient of the world’s cultural, political, and economic victims – Do we Americans see ourselves as we are seen by the eyes of the world?

- When our soldiers abduct, at gunpoint, a popular, democratically elected President of Haiti together with his wife in the ink of night and dragoon them 5000 miles across the Atlantic to an unrevealed destination.

- When Lawrence Summers (then a World Bank Vice President and currently the President of Harvard University) urges the World Bank in a memorandum to incentivize American industries to dump their toxic waste in poor countries:

“I have always thought that (these countries) are vastly underpolluted……
From this point of view, a given amount of health impairing pollution
should be done in the country with the lowest costs, which will be the
country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind
dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is
impeccable and we should face up to that….”

- When banana farmers on the tiny democratic Caribbean island of St. Vincent commit suicide after an American administration blocks access to their sole export market – Europe - for the fruit of their sweat.

- When officials in Washington decree unilaterally (against a rising tide of global opinion) that no American can be brought to book before the International Criminal Court, no matter the egregiousness of the crime known to have been committed.

- When Curt Weldon, a member of the United States Congress, proposes blithely to the prime minister of a tiny Caribbean democracy that the prime minister allow his vegetal island to be used as an American practice bombing range.

- When President Dwight David Eisenhower approves plans to assassinate Congo’s estimable Patrice Lumumba, and ensuing American Presidents successively prop up the US-client, corrupt dictator, Joseph Mobutu, who ultimately rises to power and ushers his country toward the warring hell that, until recently, claimed up to a thousand Congolese lives a day.

- When American society makes one out of every eight prisoners in the world an African American.

- When American officials force weak African governments to cut back spending for the education of their people, the inoculation of their children, and the productivity of their farmers.

- When massive American-approved, World Bank dam projects in India dispossess the poor of their land and water, and place these long-held natural resources at the disposal of the rich.

- When visionless western industricrats cook the earth, thaw the icecaps, raise the oceans and submerge the littoral homelands of millions of defenseless innocents worldwide.

- When our nation tells brown nations that they cannot have the Weapon that America has and, alone among nations, twice deployed to incinerate hundreds of thousands of unwitting, defenseless civilians.

- When we, invincible within the impenetrable and unfaltering extolment of our own virtue, rain a blistering and concussive death upon 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children who never ventured from their country and posed no threat to a single one of us.

- When our country, in a post-colonial world comprised of young nations freshly jealous of their hard-won, but fragile, self-determination, can, it would appear, only relate to the world, friend and foe alike, through might or muscle of one stripe or another.

What do they think of us? The common people of the world? The anonymous poor, the near-poor, and those of moderate means. The laboring hard grinders who dream of little more than a small, but better, future for their children. In Africa? Across the Middle East? Asia? On the islands of the Pacific and Atlantic? What do they think of us as we consume 40% of the world’s energy and account for half of its military expenditures. An America that topples and erects governments, here and there, willy-nilly, with near-oblivious caprice; an America that strides indifferently across the globe with demonstrable disdain for human rights; an America that shoves and bullies and listens only to those it has marginal cause to fear; an America whose public policies and private ventures have contributed, more than those of any other nation, to the destruction of the living earth on which we all must depend to survive as a species?

- What could they possibly think of us, this jury of the faceless billions of whose very existence Americans are but dimly (if distortedly) aware? In the now-lengthening remissions during which they are not paralyzed by our glittering materialism or drawn self-destructively into the vortex of our compelling self-absorption?

- What possibly could the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have demonstrated, unnoticed, for the restoration of a democracy that our country dashed with handsomely fitted-out local thugs, think? Or, what could their Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune, muster strength enough to think, jailed and hovering, as he is, near death in the last days of his pro-democracy hunger strike that has received disquietingly less attention in the United States than the successful breast cancer surgery of an Australian pop-singer?

I would suppose that were we able, (or inclined), to poll the planet, we would discover that America is now more intensely disliked than ever before in its history. After all, the distance between what we are, and what we, ever-fulsomely, claim to be, makes us out to be something of a rather monumental fraud. The truth is, we have never cared much about what others thought of us, largely because there never before existed any meaningful prospect for exacted consequence until now.

Owing to hubris, we have been maneuvered into a murderous insurgency in Iraq. And so, a small fraction of those who dislike America now has American soldiers precisely where they want them.

My fear is that the Iraq war, which American leaders tragically misunderstood from the very beginning, may mark the opening of a horrific chapter in human history with painful implications for the entire planet.

Terrorism, put simply, is war, privatized. It is vastly more mobile, and easier to mount and prosecute successfully, than state-mounted war.

We must face the fact that our country has done hurtful things in the world that the vast majority of Americans know little to nothing about. The victims remember, however, even if we cannot.

We are now entering, I fear, Einstein’s doomsday nightmare.

In the beginning, only America had nuclear weapons. Then, Britain. Now North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Soon, if not already, (according to the writer Arundhati Roy), Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, South Korea, Cuba, Nepal, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Denmark, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Singapore, Burma, Uzbekistan. Even Afghanistan, and then, sooner or later, and probably sooner, much sooner, private religious, ethnic, and racial armies, where all wounds are fresh and well-remembered.

A little humility and a measure of foresight might have spared us all the monstrous forthcoming grief.

Randall Robinson (rr@rosro.com)
author of The Debt – What America
Owes to Blacks”