- Signora Ida (I disguise her name), my Italian neighbor
in Trieste, Italy, where I just spent a week, is 82 years old. She has
made me barley soup, and now I sit in the very modest little kitchen of
her two-room apartment where she winters every year. She is not an intellectual.
Single and retired, she worked as a hospital aide. While I thank her, she
cradles her head between her hands and asks, "So many dead! Why is
Bush killing so many people?"
-
- It feels very new to be staring at political grief in
anyone's face. I live in a country where what I read on people's faces,
at best, is a puzzling, impenetrable blandness or a studied, bored, blase
detachment. They don't seem to be hounded by such raw and unpleasant thoughts
that torment Signora Ida. The energy they might expend on a passionate
engagement with the issues of the world they use to escape or deny it.
It is like living among the damned - or the condemned. Finally I say, lying
in part, "I know. But you must know that there are many Americans
who feel as you do." She is thinking of the Iraqi dead, but, obviously,
she has been reading and viewing reports of the improbable versions given
by Washington of the shooting at the airport at Baghdad, following the
rescue of Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena - the fifth version, and
most absurd, is about protecting the car of ambassador John Negroponte,
just released on Thursday this week. No one believes these versions - not
even the government, from right to left.
-
- I come home and read a string of hate emails from enraged
readers, calling for my arrest, informing me they are sending my name to
the FBI, State Department, Fox News, asking me in clumsy sardonic tones
to make my way out of this country tout suite. These patriots have obviously
googled for information on Giuliana Sgrena and have come across my articles,
written before my departure. These are the "quiet Americans"
of Graham-Greene fame, well-meaning idiots, to whom I want to say - as
the European cynic, Fowler, said to the bomb-throwing "idealist"
in the American crew cut, Pyle - I want to say as they cheer a war that
continues to be fought long after the reasons for it have grown obscure:
"Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are... I wish sometimes
you had a few bad motives; you might understand a little about human beings.
And that goes for your country, too, Pyle."
-
- I'm practically no one - a college professor. I'm surprised
that so much irrational venom should be wasted on so insignificant a person
- that it should be so crucial to scream at nobody in particular: "what
CAN'T be true ISN'T true." After all, I get my news from Italian,
French, Spanish, English and other papers across the world - mostly in
their original language - not from some arcane or professional source.
I think in my kitchen, too - like Signora Ida does. I find that if I read
the American press, I'm shocked by its hypocritical servility and by the
verification of the feverishly sick and putridly immoral miasma which most
people breathe by reading this media's unconscionable rot. Television is
beyond redemption. Out of self defense, I read the world press, so it is
ironic that when emailers accuse me of spreading lies it is world opinion
they accuse. Does the fear emanate from knowing at a subterranean level
that they are alone?
-
- And I wonder, what makes Signora Ida so different from
them. Who drove the fatal stake of ignorance through their hearts or contaminated
them with the cult of death, turning them into insatiable vampires chanting,
"Cogito ergo boom!" ("I think, therefore I shoot"),
as they ghoulishly roam the earth in search of people's blood? Why do they
find so much pleasure in banishing compassion from their hearts? Why must
so many people die in order for them to proclaim their right to be alive?
What nightmares of a loveless life haunt their endless nights? Why do they
blindly love the thing that hates them, abuses them, lies to them, and
will see them in rags - their own government? How have they come to mistake
the love of country for the love of a mere bureaucrat, say, a mere president?
Who is driving them mad, perverting their natural love of country into
a celebration of its opposite - the worship of a "leader"?
-
- I think, wryly, that the Germans, too, were thus driven
mad by Hitler's propaganda lies. At Nuremberg, not the least of the Nazi
crimes under indictment were the crimes perpetrated against the German
people's conscience by driving them insane with lies - crimes that in the
view of the American prosecutors were perhaps the most serious of all.
Hans Fritzsche, a senior official in Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and
Folk Enlightenment, answered thus when interrogated at Nuremberg on whether
his office had manufactured hatred against the people of the USSR in order
to make the Soviet Union a German colony: "Yes. I organized German
propaganda in such a way as to inflame hatred of the German people... for
the people of the USSR."
-
- And how could it be different here, where the government
produces 50 percent of the weapons that are being exported around the world,
where the military budget is approaching half a trillion dollars, where
the US government spends on the military more money than the 15 largest
countries combined? Who but a people driven mad with fear would stand for
this waste of wealth on war? The media are a handful of corporations. Five
corporations control it allódown from 50 in 1983.
-
- In Edward Herman's words the media "manufacture
consent for imperialist wars of aggression." He cites an example:
"The New York Times, this great liberal newspaper, had 70 editorials
between September 11, 2001, and the attack on Iraq in 2003. In not one
of these editorials was the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Tribunal, or any
aspect of international law ever mentioned. Now, these guys know these
things exist, and that's a perfect example of censorship by omission."
There is direct propaganda, too. "There are instances, we know of,"
says Herman, "where the Pentagon generated video news reports and
then gave them to various TV stations. This is spoon-fed propaganda, coming
straight from the Pentagon and being broadcast as news."
-
- Signora Ida says, "But it won't work, you know.
Their lies. They won't work here. We have many political parties. If one
party lies, the other sets it straight."
-
- Italians complain of the shrinking political pluralism
since the '90s, but they have no idea what a seriously reduced political
spectrum really feels like. Compared to the average American citizen, and
in spite of Berlusconi's grip on the media, the Italian citizen is well
informed.
-
- I ask, "In the war, your family was anti-fascist,
no?" She nods with pride. "My father spent 37 months in a Mussolini
prison in 1937."
-
- That must be it, in part. The Italian republic (of which
the present is the second) is anti-fascist, born of the resistance. It
was forged by just such forces as are now ravaging Iraq - occupation, struggle,
resistance. Although the present Italian government is an alliance of right-wing
parties, which are busy defaming the resistance and supporting the Bush
agenda, it cannot prevail over the historical memory of the people. They
remember what it was like - every family has a story. And these stories
ring bells.
-
- Before Giuliana Sgrena's release, 500,000 Italians marched
in Rome, demanding her release and the withdrawal of the troops from Iraq.
It hardly mattered to Italians that Sgrena was "on the left."
Being "on the left" anywhere other than in the United States
is not a disease or a satanic possession: freedom of thought and conscience
is a citizen's serious right. What they saw in the Sgrena ordeal was a
gallant reporter imperiled by a war their constitution forbade.
-
- As they had marched for Sgrena a short while ago, they
filed past slain secret agent Nicola Calipari's casket this weekó100,00
mourners during the night before his funeral. His brother, a priest, pronounced
the last words at the service: "Nicola died for the highest calling
to which a human being can aspire: he gave his life for someone else."
Mrs. Calipari is calling for peace in Iraq. Sgrena vows to support her
in her quest for truth.
-
- Everywhere in Italy, people on the left or the right
are acting as though they are still motivated by the universal principles
of conscience, truth, justice. They seem capable of critical thought.
-
- Signora Ida betrays so touching a streak of honest expectations
in her trust that truth will win out that it is clear she lives in a parallel
(but saner) universe to the one I occupy. She cannot imagine what it is
like to live with our conscience groaning in mute and helpless despair,
crushed by the mounting load of assembly-line produced, grotesque lies,
daily seeking to pollute and cloud our minds on this side of the Atlantic.
She thinks the investigation into the Sgrena-rescue killing requested by
the Italian government will shake the foundations of justice. She doesn't
know and would not believe it if I told her it will lead nowhere beyond
a confusing whitewash.
-
- But it feels good to hear such faith. It is very hard
to live among people who have learned to do without it - who talk about
sports and the weather; about shopping and celebrities; about God and family
values - nattering on and on trying to fill the gaping hole of their enormous
alienation from reality, trying to ignore the fear that what is being done
in their name is murder, trying to assuage the gnawing pain at the center
of their consciousness that they are not loved, admired, or esteemed -
learning, at last, that money or power cannot buy them humanity. Loudly
may they sing the chorus to Bush's Nuclear Posture Review (2001) and National
Security Strategy (2002) - the policy of "proactive counter proliferation"
which in Hitler's time was known as aggressive war. Long may they dwell
on dreams of striking against powers striving to attain nuclear-weapon
capability. A day will come when this crazed war music will stop, and the
American people will hear the judgment that the Germans heard at Nuremberg
- that, in Justice Robert Jackson's words, they had supported a regime
which had committed "acts which have been regarded as criminal since
the time of Cain." They will also be astonished to hear that, although
they thought they were free, they had in fact been terrorized and enslaved
by their own government in order to follow in Cain's footsteps - as the
German people heard.
-
- This rage to march in lockstep to the war music is a
fundamentalism of thought that enslaves America, and it differs in essence
from "Christian" fundamentalism, which is a mere tool of the
oligarchy and will disappear when it is no longer useful. This fundamentalism
is of a tautological kind. It believes that there must be belief, that
this belief is more necessary than peace, more vital and imperative than
people, more immortal than ideas, more significant than truth. Let us call
it by the name with which it has been condemned in the past - the name
that was interchangeable with the murderous patriotism of citizens of shamed
and defeated dictatorships.
-
- The name is fanaticism.
-
- I left Signora Ida a melon, a primrose, two potatoes,
and an onion. I set them down at her doorstep, so she would find them when
she went out into her still human, still warm and friendly world, where
courtesy and respect abide in spite of the often mean and lying government
that rules - where, in spite of its government, people know the difference
between truth and belief, between loyalty and mental slavery, between love
and fear; where people are still free to hear each other's opinions without
shouting them down; where a bedrock of social harmony endures from a pluralistic
political symphony in which dissent is its recurring, its sweet and tolerance-inducing
leit-motif.
-
- - Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro
University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.
-
- Copyright © 1998-2005 Online Journalô. All
rights reserved.
-
- http://onlinejournal.com/Commentary/031505Bohne/031505bohne.html
|
