The Hoopla Around Boston Makes Us Forget the Possible End of the Species

Leonardo Boff

12/05/2013

Opinión

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One would have to be inhumane and lacking compassion and solidarity not to become indignant and condemn the attack perpetrated in Boston, leaving two dead and hundreds wounded. But that does not excuse us from being critical. The incident was dramatized world-wide, with hidden objectives that must be unmasked. Many such incidents occur around the world, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the presence of North American and allied troops. These incidents always result in many dead and hundreds of wounded. Almost no one pays attention to those facts, which are already viewed as natural, and are trivialized. Many think: they are terrorists or persons close to them, an inconvenience to the system of Western domination. They can be killed. But, let's admit it: they are human beings like those in Boston. However, the standards are different.

We must be conscious of the political-ideologic importance of making a spectacle of the events in Boston. It is a way of diverting world attention from much more fundamental problems: the first being the state of terror the North-American State imposes upon its citizens and the whole world. With that it betrays its highest quality: the defense of fundamental rights. The government of the United States has neither closed Guantanamo nor ratified important international instruments, such as the Treaty of Rome on the International Criminal Court, or the American Convention on Human Rights (the Pact of San Jose, Costa Rica). The United States does not want the violations and attacks its agents perpetrate throughout the world in order to ensure its empire to be brought before those tribunals.

But through the uninterrupted preoccupation the world mass media lavished on the incident, the «masters of the world» try to divert attention from the second question, one which, of course, has grave consequences and could eliminate us all: the threatened end of the human species. In the first place, for centuries these "masters" have devastated the planet to the point that, by itself, the planet cannot regain sustainability. Through extreme events, the planet is demonstrating that its limits have been surpassed. Then, in their urge to accumulate without limit and to dominate the process of the globalization of humanity, lethal machinery has been set up that, together with the ecological crisis, threatens life on Earth, and could mean the end of the human species.

Noted world scientists and the most serious theorists of ecology have called attention to this very real threat. The fact is that no-one knows exactly when it could occur, but if the present path is maintained, the result will be fatal. Michel Serres, a renown French philosopher of ecology has said: after Hiroshima, Nagasaki,and now, Fukushima, humanity has discovered a new type of death: the death of the species. If, as Mikhail Gorbachev endlessly repeats, with the chemical, biological and nuclear arms we already have built and stored, we can destroy all of humanity without leaving a single witness: ¿Security? It is never absolute. Let us remember Three Mile Island, Chernobil and Fukushima.

Thus, our species has revealed itself as the Satan of the Earth: it has learned to be homicidal (killing its own kind), ethno-cidal (how many original, Native Nations have not yet been exterminated?), eco-cidal (it has devastated entire ecosystems). And now the human race could become specie-cidal (lead the whole species to suicide).

The imperial system lives by searching for scapegoats (previously, there were the communists, then the subversives, and now the terrorists, the immigrants... who will be next?) on whom the desire for collective vengeance falls. That way, the system divests itself of guilt or error. But, above all, it does everything possible so that this lethal threat to the human species is not acknowledged, and transformed into a dangerous collective consciousness.

No one will passively accept a death sentence, but will fight to protect life and the common future. This should be the objective of a global government that demands the renunciation of an imperial will that thinks only of perpetuating itself, instead of thinking of the common good of Mother Earth and of Humanity. No matter how much the bombing of Boston is manipulated, how long will the powerful be able to obscure the dramatic situation that looms over us? Let us all awaken, because we do not want to die; we want to live and shine.

- Leonardo Boff, Theologian-Philosopher / Earthcharter Commission

Free translation from the Spanish by Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org. Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/75994