"How and why do men in power get away with the presumption
that their lives are worthy and others’ lives are worthless?"
Once I knew a man, an engineer he called himself working for the military industrial complex. He and his wife drove color-coordinated SUV and Mercedes-Benz, lived in a mega mansion among manicured lawns in the County outside the city of a southern state. For reasons known only to elves or leprechauns this man whose language begged the question of his college preparation had been appointed to assume executive leadership of an old and historic liberal arts college. He had the strut of an emperor, was crony-connected, and clueless about the management and operations of a college. One day I asked this man in the presence of his wife, “What question do you ask most often in your life and work? He was silent for a moment then spouted something about Jesus. I pushed a bit. But what question do you ask yourself? I asked. The silence lengthened until his wife chimed in and explained to the man what I was asking. This engineer, this vacuum sent to head a college ofyoung minds and scholars possessed little capacity for thought deeper than his mega mansion’s décor.
The question we must ask repeatedly is why coupled with how. Why are we here in this pathology, this madness, of leadership and how did we get here?
[Imagine] how a citizen of the United States or Great Britain would feel if the army rolled up in full battle gear to attack the White House or Buckingham Palace, and in the process caused the deaths of thousands of citizens, among them the president of the United States or the queen and the prime minister of Great Britain, then indefinitely suspended Congress or Parliament, disbanded the Supreme Court, abrogated individual liberties and political parties, declared absolute censorship of the media, and finally, over time, strove mercilessly to extinguish every dissident voice. Now imagine that these same military men, possessed with messianic fanaticism, installed themselves in power for years, prepared to root out every last ideological adversary. …
[Soldiers’] savagery was so extreme that it’s believed they were drugged, just as the men who took the Arica promontory [land originally in Peru] were intoxicated with…an explosive mix of liquor and gunpowder.…[The] army surrounded the … seat of government and symbol of our democracy, with tanks, and then its planes bombed it from the air. [The president] died inside the palace; the official version is that he committed suicide. There were hundreds of dead and so many thousands of prisoners that the sports stadiums and even some schools were turned into jails, torture centers, and concentration camps. Using the pretext of liberating the country from a hypothetical… dictatorship that might occur in the future, democracy was replaced by a regimen of terror that was to last sixteen years, and leave its consequences for a quarter of a century.
Author Isabel Allende writing in her memoir My Invented Country: a Nostalgic Journey through Chile (translated from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden (HarperCollins 2003). She was discussing the September 11, 1973, cabal comprised of the U.S. government’s Richard Nixon/Henry Kissinger/CIA (1969-1974) and Chile’s military junta leader Augusto Pinochet that overthrew and destroyed the democratically elected government (1970-1973) of Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens, and killed him.
By 1975, Isabal Allende writes, “half of Latin America’s citizens lived under some kind of repressive government, most of which were backed by the United States, which has a shameful record of overthrowing legally elected governments and of supporting tyrannies that would never be tolerated in its own territory: Papa Doc in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, and many others.” And consider today’s U.S. government in the Middle East and South Asia: Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and Afghanistan, Palestine and India (arms); on the borders of Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Consider the millions murdered, wounded and made stateless, homeless, driven out of their homes and off their lands, their children traumatized.
I saw a bumper sticker today that said “When they return home, help them heal”; then followed the capitalist’s offer of “help”: Call 555…This is another dimension to profiteering on violence―added to arms sales, landmines, boots on the ground, planes in the air―that is tantamount to its commission.
Ever the “savage capitalist” brought home: A dentist’s advert running on radio directs its message to women victims of domestic violence saying we’ll cover up the violence your partner committed against you. A nightclub radio advert directed at men says come to the Cat where women will serve your every need Like truth, women are the first casualties of violence.
Coupled with how, why must be the previous question, the first and most basic question.
The past couple of weeks’ media have aired Zimbabwe’s men and women struggling with life and democracy. Former colonizers fuming over that government’s lockout of the British press decried “Mugabe’s corruption” while conveniently losing memory of British colonialism in what is now the Republic of Zimbabwe―what used to be Southern Rhodesia under Prime Minister Ian Smith who, before John McCain, declared exclusive white rule for a thousand years. It didn’t happen. But the colonial years and after effects denying indigenous people equal rights and opportunities enjoyed by colonialists and other exploiters crippled the indigenous people. So I posed to my English correspondent a couple of corruption/oppression parallels made but not exclusively in the USA, land that I love.
A USA mob boss says, “We’ll just count these ballots over and over until the vote count comes out our way.” It has happened. Church men and justices and the mobsters and politicians today try sneakily to rig America’s vote like they rig Boeing’s U.S. defense bids. There is corruption and there is corruption; there are dictators and there are dictators.
Man’s world weakened woman. Made women “slaves/servants” to men; then branded them: “the weaker sex.” So when the world needed women to lead and to govern, women had lost their sense of calling and confidence; the world was uneasy conceiving women’s present competence and future promise. Behaviors and exploitations and weakening measures down the annals of time have brought us here, today. Concerning Women or Africa or Palestine the world powers are complicit in violence, flawed governance, and disastrous leadership.
The older generations fail to teach; the younger do not learn to ask and demand reasoned, history-deep responses to why.
No one persists tirelessly in asking why the U.S. government sent thousands of Americans to their deaths and into mental and physical breakdown; why they sent millions of Iraqis and Afghans and Somalis and Pakistanis and Syrians and Palestinians to death and lives of endless misery. Why have western powers over scores of years persisted in destroying indigenous peoples across the world?
How and why do men in power get away with the presumption that their lives are worthy and others’ lives are worthless? Why is democracy whatever men in power want it to be whenever they want it to be at whatever price they place on it? The U.S. president and his cabinet assert their “democratic” rights to torture, to commit crimes against humanity, to violate domestic law and international law―government-careered lawyers go around the country teaching this stuff to students. How is this possible and why is it happening?
Why have massacres at Haditha and Fallujah gone unpunished and how is excessive force among New York, Louisiana and California’s “finest” part of a pattern of behavior operating from Iraq to Guantanamo Bay and wherever the U.S. government has influence? Why do “liberal” government officials, among them California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer, champion the cause of Polar Bears while supporting the death penalty for human beings? How is this akin to a government official’s order that Guantanamo Bay inmates must be convicted, regardless to the evidence or lack of it? Inmates must be kept in prison, executed like Saddam Hussein, or certified as suffering mental breakdowns―thus reassuring a lawless government that inmates’ stories will never see the light of day nor their torturers ever be brought to justice. How and Why is “torture legal except when done to us” or our cronies, kin or kind?
Why are talking-heads talking minutiae when disastrous leadership from Washington, a pathology or kind of madness, is throwing the world into mental, physical and emotional breakdown? Asking why is more than rhetorical flair. I believe if we routinely ponder it together―as the previous, most basic question―we enter an activist, cooperative movement infusing world leadership with a universally recognized human essence.
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April 6, 2008 By Carolyn Bennett HTTP://JOURNALS.AOL.COM/CWRITER85/TODAYSMISSINGNEWS/. Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett, Writer, Independent journalist, Educator. Author of Women's Work and Words Altering World Order published 2008 by iUniverse. Hardback ISBN 978-0-595-70449-1; paperback ISBN 978-0-595-46712-9. To order call 1-800-authors or go to http://www.iuniverse.com.
