A Voice, Not An Echo
April 21, 2015
A Voice, Not An Echo
Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015
by MICHAEL K. SMITH
We are opinionated, yet we cannot offer our opinions. We have a right to the echo, not to the voice, and those who rule praise our talent to repeat parrot fashion. We refuse to accept this mediocrity as our destiny.
Eduardo Galeano, opening speech at Chile Creates, an international meeting in support of Chilean democracy, July 11, 1988
In school, he hated history and was a lousy history student. He wanted to be a soccer player, a saint, and a painter. He abandoned the first two ambitions, and achieved the third only by learning to use words in place of paint.
He always took the side of the doomed, despised, and damned. Even at the height of the Cold War, with shrieking anti-Communist hysteria the norm, he was not afraid to befriend those Washington denounced as satanic. He praised Che Guevara as a man who said what he thought and did what he said he was going to do, a rare example of moral and intellectual coherence in a world of near total hypocrisy, which in his view redounded to Guevaras perpetual glory. Galeano summed up just how rare an achievement this was by stating that, In this world, when words and deeds run into each other in the street, they dont say hello, because they dont recognize each other.
~ snip ~
Even horrible scenes, all too familiar in history and politics, could not deflate his good humor, or cause him to avert his gaze. He once paid tribute to the skill of the torturers who worked for former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by highlighting the precision of their work: Armed with pincers and spoons, these lads can tear out fingernails without breaking the roots and eyes without injuring the lids. Simple denunciation would not capture the horror nearly as well as Galeanos detached irony.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/21/eduardo-galeano-1940-2015/