Faceless Enemies

There were many thousands, the White House still does not dare say how many,those who died in the terrorist attack against the twin towers.  They wereoffice workers:  not the rich who live in their beautiful neighborhoods,butthe employees and workers of the rich, everyday men and women.  That is howthey appeared in the desolate photos on the streets of the financialdistrict after the attack.  Americans or not, their pain is ours today,those of us who live, work and are like them, as it has been before for allcivilian victims, the same as them, in all the cities bombarded by thearmies of these times.

Killing those who work in Wall Street in cold blood is as stupid andatrocious as it would be to blow up a Ford factory with all its workers inorder to punish the business, or to bombard Baghdad in order to punishSaddam Hussein.  All terrorism is appalling, as is today's nameless crimeofthe twin towers.

But, in order to understand it, it is not helpful to start by looking forthe guilty.  The first question is not:  "Who was it?", butrather:  "Whydid this happen?"  In cases like this, conspiracy theories do notexplainanything.  It does not seem sensible, in the current state of things, toimagine a domestic conspiracy of dark forces in the United States. 

Thedimension of the affront against national pride and the magnitude of thehumiliation suffered by its government excludes this shaky hypothesis fromthe very start.  The fact that President Bush goes and seeks out safety inamilitary base in Nebraska, instead of going to New York, where the peoplewere expecting him and calling out for him, is another indication of hisconfusion (and, incidentally, of the stature of those leaders who were borninto wealth and educated on golf courses).

The tragedy of the twin towers, and the suicide attack which knocked down apart of the Pentagon, did not come from a high level conspiracy.  They are,on the contrary, a product and an image of the present state of the world.The world policies dictated by international financial power - whose symbolis Wall Street, supported by the Pentagon and administered by the men andwomen in the White House - have sown human and material disasters throughoutthe world .  They have crushed rights, they have destroyed or dismantledpeoples' organizations, they have imposed the inhuman law of capital in thename of the "markets." 

How many times have we heard that this measure isnot possible, nor is that policy, because the "markets" will not allowthem?And, when we ask who they are, where they are, how we could talk with the"markets", we are presented with merely an invisible hand, a facelessghost,nothing, no one:  the governments don't know, the businessmen can't, thepoliticians don't dare, because this is the state of things, and nothing canbe done.

Many people, more and more throughout the world, have tried to have someinfluence on that state of things, to defend the rights of human beings, tohave dialogue with those governments and those technicians through whosevoices the dictatorship of the "markets" speaks.  Thatdictatorship whichprovokes famine, wipes out jobs, smashes salaries and destroys social rightseverywhere. 

The last mass attempt was in Genoa.  More than 200,000demonstrators gathered together in peace in order to have their voices heardby the big men of this world.  A few hundred desperate people, the BlackBlock, who were quickly isolated by the demonstrators, resorted to violence.Berlusconi's police beat, kicked, jailed and mistreated the demonstratorsand broke them up, thus leaving the arena free to the violent and desperate,turning them into the symbol of the protest.  The demonstrators had faces,and they belonged to organizations.  The Black Block were anonymous,violent, faceless.  They were not provocateurs (except for a few), theyweredesperate.

But the big men of the G-8 did not want to confront, nor to engage indialogue with, organized social forces, which are, by nature, opposed toterrorism.  In the same way as the anonymous "markets", thepolicies ofthose big men prefer to confront the violent faceless enemies which theinhuman brutality of their policies engender.  Those enemies, real andtrue,are useful for them for legitimizing their own atrocities against thoseforces and against those human beings throughout the world - those who arethe same in their joys, in their work and in their travail - to thosethousands and thousands which faceless terrorism assassinated in the twintowers.

It took a good part of the nineteenth century, and all of the twentieth, towin the rights, the regulations and the laws which protect work in all itsforms in many countries.  It took two world wars and many revolutions andrebellions to reach the balances expressed in the United Nations and theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights.  Those balances are a thing of thepast, and the Pentagon had a lot to do with their destruction.  They weredemolished in almost one fell swoop, like the twin towers.  In their placeis left this world in ruins and the faceless dictatorship of the markets.

This dictatorship, which does not know or recognize interlocutors, hasspawned a faceless enemy as its twin tower:  terrorism at unprecedentedlevels.  It, the same as the "markets", does not recognizeborders, nor canit be trapped.  It is reborn every day amid the rubble of old pacts andpastrights.  Organizations destroyed by the "markets" are fightingfor justiceand right, which are their living environment and their raison d'etre. But,when justice is denied and right is exchanged for private pacts, there isonly room for vengeance left.  That is terrorism, child and mirror of the"markets".

The United States government, humiliated, declares itself to be in a stateof war.  Against whom? Why?  Does the most powerful government in theworldhave the right to lose its peace of mind and to cry out for revenge?  Ifthose leaders are too blind and deaf to reflect on the state of the world,then it is our job to do so.  But not about them and their madness, butabout how to go about creating the forms of organization and defense ofsocial and political rights and of freedom from the two faceless enemies:the markets and their spawn:  terrorism.

Seven years ago, in the Mexican south, the zapatista rebellion leveled awarning.  They have not wanted to listen to it, they closed paths off tothem, they mocked their ability to make politics and their will to preserverights, peace, life.  More than once Marcos told them that, after andbeyondthem, would come those from society's cellar, the faceless and namelessstorm of the humiliated, the affronted, those who have always been treatedlike dirt by governments and officials, by the rich and the masters. 

Onemore time the Fox government manipulated, lied and mocked agreements andcommitments:  "No way, if they don't want to accept what we tell them,that's their problem, life goes on," say their officials.It is this same government which wants, without the least notion of thestate of the world, to tie Mexico - as partner and junior ally, confidanteand subordinate - to the world power which created that state of things, andwhich seems willing to drag all of us along in a faceless violence thatknows no borders.  Good sense and history points to the opposite policy:take care of the country, and keep at a respectful and reasonable distancethose who - whether from power or terror - want to replace reason with furyand justice with revenge.

(Professor Adolfo Gilly is a renowned scholar of Mexican politics atUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).  His recent publicationsinclude Chiapas: La Razón Ardiente, Ensayo sobre la Rebelión del MundoEncantado (1997) and México, el Poder, el Dinero, y la Sangre (1996). From1997 to 1999 he served as adviser to Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Healso wrote the introduction for Franz Fanon's A Dying Colonialism. Thispiece appeared  last week in the Mexican daily La Jornada, and hasbeen translated by Irlandesa)