Monday 10 February 2003

To Say No

by Eduardo Galeano

[Translated by Francisco González]

The President of our planet announces his next killing campaign in the name of God and Democracy. Thus he defames God, and he also defames Democracy, which has barely managed to survive despite the dictatorships that the United States have been establishing all over the world for over a century.

Bush’s Government--which resembles an oil pipeline more than a government--needs to seize the world’s second largest oil reserves that happen to lie under the soil of Iraq. It also needs to justify its huge military spending and display the latest models of its arms industry on the battlefield.

And that’s what this is all about. Everything else is an excuse. And the excuses for this coming slaughter insult our intelligence. The only country that has used nuclear weapons against civilians--the country that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--is trying to convince us that Iraq is a danger to humanity. If President Bush loves humanity so, and if he truly wants to avert the most dangerous threat that humanity is now facing, why doesn’t he bomb himself, instead of planning a new extermination campaign on innocent people?

Huge demonstrations will fill the streets of the world February 15. Humanity has had enough of being used as an excuse by its own killers; and it is also fed up with mourning its dead at the end of every war: this time, humanity wants to stop the war that is about to kill its own people.

Original Article