Dehumanising Amnesia: Nicaragua 1979 & Iraq 2007

Posted by Meg on: 06.20.2007 /

“This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they’re American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It’s a helicopter from the US, guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into the town, Oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We’re defenseless from that direction, we aren’t meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, “Thank you, Holy Mother, it’s not my Alba.” But is was Alba. Later, when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba’s two younger sisters. They kept saying, “Alba braided our hair this morning. She can’t be dead. See, she fixed our hair.”“Codi, please tell me what you hear about this. I can’t stand to think it could be the same amnesiac thing, big news for one day and then forgotten. Nobody here can eat or talk. There are dark stains all over the cement floor of the church. It’s not a thing you forget.She signed it perversely, “The luckiest person alive.”

I heard nothing. I listened to the radio, but there wasn’t a word Two days, nothing. Then, finally, there was one brief report about the American in the helicopter who was taken prisoner by the Nicaraguan governement. He was an ex-mercenary running drugs, the radio said, no connection to us. He was shot down and taken prisoner, and that is all. No children had died in an orchard, no sisters, no mothers, no split skulls. And I’m sorry to say this, I knew it was a lie, but I was comforted.”

Barbara Kingsolver, 1990, Animal Dreams, p. 180

At the end of World War II, the United States of America’s international separationist policy ended. The more I learn of the USA’s actions towards the rest of the world since then, the more horrified I become. How is it that USA leaders are able to make choices which so devalue human life, and so dishonour the independence, freedom and autonomy of other countries and peoples? Americans seem very respectful and kindly towards humans they can actually see. How is a collective group of people able to so distance themselves from ‘other’ as to be able to hear reports of Afghan school children and Iraqi school children slaughtered by American helicopters and not respond as if that happened to real people, children just like their own? Certainly, the media have some responsibility here, but the information is available, even if not prominently featured in the news. What would it take to change people’s way of seeing so that the lives of others far away really matter? Is a grass-roots revolution of our hearts possible, where the populace want so strongly for the USA to stop hurting other people that leaders have to listen?