Struggle Makes Us Human by Vijay Prashad

Author:Vijay Prashad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

THEIR VIOLENCE AND OURS

FRANK BARAT: You wrote a piece titled, “Violence: Theirs and Ours.” It was published in Jadaliyya not so long ago, where you highlight something crucial, in my opinion: precious life versus disposable life. We hear this all the time: the East, the Indians, the Palestinians, they do not care about life as much as we do in the West. How can we live in an equal world while a lot of people are going to still think along these lines?

VIJAY PRASHAD: When I wrote that piece, I was motivated by the way in which the media—particularly the corporate media of the West—portrayed certain leaders of countries as tyrants. The tyrant is always someone from over there—the leader of North Korea, the president of Syria, the leader of Libya, always Kim Jong-un or Bashar al-Assad or Muammar Gaddafi. They are always the tyrants. It is okay for the United States to bomb Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps near a million people when it was all said and done. In 1996, during the long US war on Iraq, US secretary of state Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes, where the journalist asked her what she thought about a UN report that said that half a million children had died due to the US sanctions imposed on Iraq. She could have given one of three answers. She could easily have said, Well, the report of the death of these children is false or that the numbers are exaggerated. She didn’t say that. She could have said, I haven’t yet studied the report. She could also have said Yes, the children died, but it is the fault of Saddam Hussein, Saddam is blocking the entry of medicines, or He is only distributing the supplies to his supporters. But she did not say any of these things—she did not deny the deaths, she did not say that she had not studied the report, and she did not blame Saddam. Instead, the US secretary of state said that “It was a price worth paying.” To her credit she said later that she regretted what she had said on national television. But what did she regret? Did she regret that she said this or the fact that half a million children had died due to a US sanctions policy? I think she regretted how she said it because she came out sounding callous. Her boss, Bill Clinton, gets away with not being cast as a tyrant or as genocidal. In 1998, two years later, to cover up scandals in Washington having to do with his sex life, Clinton authorized the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory, the al-Shifa factory, in Khartoum, Sudan; as a consequence of this action, Sudan lost its main source of medicines. This is not considered a tyrannical action or a genocidal action. Clinton is not the tyrant. Tony Blair is not a tyrant, nor is Sarkozy, who—with Obama—is responsible for destroying Libya. The tyrant is Gaddafi. That is something to consider.

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