Commentary
By Leonardo Boff

One would have to be inhuman and bereft of a sense of solidarity and compassion not to condemn the attack in Boston with two dead and hundreds of injured people.

But that does not excuse us from being critical.

There are many such terrorist attacks in the world, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, in plain site of U.S. and allied troops. This includes many dead and hundreds injured.

But almost no one minds this. In fact it seems natural.

Many think, well, these are terrorists, or people close to them. They can die. But let’s face it, they are human beings just like those in Boston. It’s just that measuring stick is different.

We need to be aware of how the Boston bombing has become a kind of political and ideological theater, a way to divert world attention from more fundamental problems.

The first is the state of terror that the U.S. State imposes on both its citizens and the world. It is a betrayal of the best that the U.S. has to offer—the defense of fundamental human rights.

The U.S. has not closed Guantanamo, nor has it ratified important international accords, such as the Treaty of Rome, the International Penal Code, nor the American Convention on Human Rights (the so called Costa Rica Pact).

The U.S. does not want its violations of human rights and the attacks its agents perpetuate throughout the whole world to maintain its empire brought before these tribunals.

By means of the constant drumbeat of the world media on the Boston bombings, the masters of the world want to divert attention from the main issue—that they can do away with everyone and everything and bring about the end of the human species.

These gentlemen have devastated the planet for centuries to the point that it cannot even recover its own sustainability. Then, in an effort to accumulate unlimited resources and completely dominate humanity, they have built a death machine, along with ecological calamities that threaten life on Earth and may end up the terminating the human race.

Noted scientists and theorists have drawn attention to this threat. Nobody knows exactly when it may occur, but if the current logic continues, the outcome will be fatal.

Michel Serres, a renowned French philosopher of ecology, said after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and now Fukushima, that mankind has discovered a new kind of death: the death of the species.

Just as Gorbachev never tires of repeating, we can destroy all mankind without leaving any witnesses, with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that we have already built and stored.

Security? It is never absolute. Remember Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Therefore, our species has shown itself to be the Satan of the Earth: it has learned to be a murderer (killing fellow human beings), ethnocide (how many peoples have been exterminated?) Ecocide (it has devastated entire ecosystems) and next it will be speciescide (leading to the suicide of the species).

The imperial system thrives on looking for scapegoats (previously it was the communists, afterwards the rebels, now the terrorists, immigrants, and who else?) A sense of collective revenge hangs over all these people.

And so there is a sense of self-exemption from all blame, faults and errors. But mostly this system does everything it can to prevent this lethal threat to the human species from being perceived as a conscious collective danger.

Nobody passively accepts a verdict of death. We will fight to protect our lives and our common future. This should be the goal of global governance that requires the renunciation of the imperial will that thinks only of its perpetuation, rather than the common good of Mother Earth and Humanity.

In so far as the Boston bombings are manipulated by the media, how long will the powerful hide the dramatic cloud that hangs over us all?

Let’s all wake up, because we do not want to die, but to live and radiate joy and happiness.

Leonardo Boff, of Brazil, is one of Latin America’s leading liberation theologians, known for his support of the poor and the excluded. This column is used with permission of Servicios Koinonia. Translated by Mark Day.