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“The Other”, a commentary for reflection
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
ramy@progresosemanal.com
In war, whether we are
right or wrong, or at least some reason to assume it, “the other” is the enemy
we must defeat. The dynamics of the conflict erases the essential dignity of the
human being in those others. We kill them or they kill us; that’s the personal
equation and the road to victory.
When wars are waged abroad,
or against an invader in our own territory, the other’s condition as a person is
easier to erase. That other speaks another language, has another culture, and
different values and lifestyle, and the difference that in peacetime we tolerate
(more or less) in public, but not as an intimate conviction, reaches satanic
levels, a necessary evil to eradicate. But the perception rebounds inside the
countries in conflicts and penetrates the fabric of society. In time, it becomes
an everyday conduct in important sectors
In the last century the
United States took part in two world wars and in another two of alleged local
character, although instigated by foreign powers (the U.S. in the case of Korea,
and France – later substituted by the United States – as a colonial power in
Viet Nam). On the other hand, the U.S. has also carried numerous open and covert
military interventions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in the
former Yugoslavia. Now it’s back in business in Afghanistan and Iraq.
U.S. military ventures in
the lands of others and against others have coined a castrated vision of the
world we live in. In that manner, for years we have witnessed of the conversion
by the media of the concept of the universe – which is unity in variety, the
others with their different characteristics – into sameness, which is an
integral part and a powerful tool of globalization imposed on the rest of the
world, e.g., values, lifestyles, behavior norms that we all should accept.
But it just so happens – as
occurs in all empires – that violence beyond the walls penetrates that society
were there are also many “others”. In the United States today, this rebound to
the interior of its society is promoted and increased by the economic and social
system that tends towards a greater reasoning to respect its own neighbor in
such a way that African-Americans and Latinos are “the others”. Beyond that, the
vision and the propaganda repeated over and over that the poor – whose numbers
have grown by more than one million and that the established system tends to
foster increase – are not products of the economic scheme, but of their innate
inability, reiterates a value that at least is translated into ignorance, if not
in contempt, of the humanity that is present in the other.
They are losers and
capitalism is based on winners. The latter will concentrate each day in a
minority. Since losers have no possible redemption, they must be kept in their
ghettos and in their “citadels of vice and disorder.”
Those others I speak of
have been the most affected by the tragedy of Katrina in New Orleans, where 67
percent of the population is African-American, and where 23 percent of its
citizens live under the poverty line. Most of the dead come from that sector,
and not because they are the majority, but due to their condition as leaders in
poverty. They hold first place among the others.
Between the excesses of
Nature on one part, and the lack of foresight, inefficiency, indolence of the
local, state and federal authorities on the other, some may think that an ethnic
and social cleansing has been made. I do not share such a radical view. I
discard that deplorable conclusion. But when I see and read the way that
authorities, at all levels, have responded to the tragedy of hundreds of
thousands of human beings, I can’t deny the evidence: it’s about “the others”,
the ever present losers that are only the final outcome of the violence
intrinsic to the system, of their war-waging beyond its borders, of the social
promotion based on a cruel competition – which is also violent in its own way.
As long as we don’t see the
others as possibly being each and every one of us, in the end, we’ll all be the
losers.
Manuel Alberto Ramy is the
Havana correspondent of Radio Progreso Alternativa and the Spanish edition
editor of Progreso Weekly.
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