The Daily Grasshopper

"How can we be citizens if we do not know what happened before, if we don't know why political and economic decisions were made - if we don't understand anything?"

That sentence, which appears at the end of an article on page A3 in today's New York Times, pretty much sums up the entire raison d'etre of this little online newsletter. The story, "Mexico Digs at Last for Truth About 1968 Massacre," is about the Mexican people's struggle to come to grips with the Tlatelolco massacre - and the Mexican government's attempt to cover it up. Those of you who have been getting the Daily Grasshopper e-mails since the beginning may recall that I wrote about this incident in my essay "Striking Out in Caracas." (An aside - the Times has conceded defeat in the "strike" against Chavez. The article in today's paper is entitled "How Venezuelan Outlasted His Foes." In the spirit of today's essay, it should be pointed out that his foes included the Bush administration.)

You can read the article about Mexico here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/07/international/americas/07MEXI.html

This question, "how can we be citizens?" echoes George Santayana's oft-quoted maxim "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," and was asked by Claudia Sierra Campuzano, a professor at the National School of Anthropology and History in Cuernavaca. From the Times' report:

"The struggle for the control of history continues in Mexico. The biggest battleground today is what happened on the night of Oct. 2, 1968.

Every reputable historian, and almost every living eyewitness, says this:

Government troops massacred student protesters in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City that night, on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games, and then tried to wash away the blood, along with every trace of the killing.

For the next 30 years, Mexico's high-school students learned nothing about the event from their official history textbooks - nothing that was true, at any rate. The textbooks, approved by the secretary of public education, either made no mention of the Tlatelolco massacre or suggested, in passing, that the students were the attackers that night."

It's very possible, in the next couple of days, that we will read an editorial in the New York Times, encouraging Mexico to forge on in their effort to uncover the truth about the massacre. It has happened before - back in 1997, the Times ran an editorial entitled "History That Remains Hidden," about U.S. involvement in atrocities in Central America. You can read the editorial here:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/19971017.htm#nytimes

In a moment of rare candor, the Times' editors reveal that:

"The Central Intelligence Agency recently released a small batch of records on the 1954 military coup it organized in Guatemala, and promises more coup records in the months ahead. But it has declassified practically nothing on the security forces that have killed more than 110,000 Guatemalans since the coup. Washington trained and supported some of these forces. It also backed abusive internal security organizations in Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador. It owes the victims of these groups whatever information it has."

What's important for us, as U.S. citizens, to always bear in mind is that official lies and distortions aren't restricted to other countries. While it's reassuring to sit here in our comfortable homes and look down our noses at a corrupt Mexican regime willfully covering up a sordid incident from its past, we should be careful about doing so. Particularly when our track record in perpetrating (or assisting the perpetration of) similar crimes is arguably way worse than that of the Mexicans.

Our government and institutions of learning, as well as our media corporations, don't like to dwell on things like the U.S. government's support of the massacre of the East Timorese in 1975, for example. If you've never heard of it, that's not surprising. Just as the Mexican government felt that the Tlatelolco massacre didn't deserve to enter the history books, so has the U.S. government, as well as the dominant media, decided that the near-genocide that was perpetrated on the East Timorese, with U.S. backing and weapons, should be cast into Orwell's "memory hole."

There are numerous other examples. How many of you read details of our government's involvement in the assassination of a democratically-elected leader in Chile for the first time just last week? Do you know who Jacobo Arbenz and Patrice Lumumba are, and why their names should be known to every student of U.S. history?

I got started to thinking about these questions several years ago after reading a book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me." It was written by James Loewen, a history professor at the University of Vermont. You can read more about the book and the professor here:

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/

The reality is that our notions about this country are shaped at an early age. We get our heads pumped so full of rhetoric about the United States being like a "city on a hill," or "a light unto the nations," that we don't even think twice when President Bush stands up before us and claims "Our founders dedicated this country to the cause of human dignity, the rights of every person and the possibilities of every life. This conviction leads us into the world to help the afflicted and defend the peace and confound the designs of evil men." It doesn't merit a second thought. We've been conditioned, brainwashed, deceived, dumbed-down. Present company excluded, of course.

But you get the idea - a lot of people out there in the U.S. have adopted very uncritical attitudes about their government's intentions, and it's all based on a very loose foundation. A foundation that doesn't hold up well under scrutiny - the kind of scrutiny that the Mexican government is under from Professor Claudia Sierra Campuzano. The kind of scrutiny we should exercise when looking at our country's behavior in the past, and, more crucially, in the here and now.

There's a great essay out today by Norman Solomon, a veteran media critic, about how Colin Powell has managed to avoid answering any tough questions about the administration's drive to war. Here are a few of them:

• You cite Iraq's violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions to justify the U.S. launching an all-out war. But you're well aware that American allies like Turkey, Israel, and Morocco continue to violate dozens of Security Council resolutions. Why couldn't other nations claim the right to militarily "enforce" the Security Council's resolutions against countries that they'd prefer to bomb?
• You insist that Iraq is a grave threat to the other nations of the Middle East. But, with the exception of Israel, no country in the region has made such a claim or expressed any enthusiasm for a war on Iraq. If Iraq is a serious threat to the region, why doesn't the region feel threatened?
• You say that the Iraqi regime is committed to aggression. Yet Iraq hasn't attacked any country for more than 12 years. And just eight days before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the U.S. envoy to Baghdad gave what appeared to be a green light for the invasion when she met with Saddam Hussein. An Iraqi transcript of the meeting quotes Ambassador April Glaspie: "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction ... that Kuwait is not associated with America." Mr. Powell, why don't you ever mention such information?

You can read the whole essay here (I highly recommend this one):

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2993§ionID=21

I hope people will read this in the spirit that it was written - trying to get us all to think long and hard about our role as the world's only economic and military superpower, how much of the truth of what our government does in our name we actually know (or can know), and how others view the difference between our government's rhetoric and their reality. I believe the day is not far off where the U.S. will be called on to establish our own "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," to deal with the incidents I've listed above, as well as others. The longer we postpone our own attempts to "dig for the truth," as the Times headline says of Mexico's effort, the more painful our eventual day of reckoning becomes.

"How can we be citizens if we do not know what happened before?" It's a good question.