Friday, January 29, 2010

Passage of the Week Jan.29.2010

"Everything that happens on the planet gets translated in the centers of power, translated into the language of the Universal System of the Lie, and then returned to the world converted into sounds and images for mass consumption. Objectivity? We distrust an objectivity that reduces us to objects. The misery of the Third World is turned into a commodity. The wealthy nations consume it from time to time as a way of congratulating themselves on how well life has treated them. The universal system of the lie practices amnesia. The North behaves as if it had won the lottery. Its wealth, however, is not the result of good fortune, but of a long, very long historical process of usurpation, which goes back to colonial times and has been greatly intensified by today's modern and sophisticated techniques of pillage. The more resonant the speeches in international forums extolling justice and equality, the more prices of Southern products fall on the world market, and the higher the interest climbs on Northern money, which loans with one hand and steals with the other. These techniques of pillage force the South to pay the bill for what the North squanders, including the broken dishes at the end of every party: the crises of the system's centers are unloaded onto the backs of the outskirts." - Eduardo Galeano.

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