-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4311912,00.html
}}}>Begin
A letter from America
The United States is in denial about why so many millions in the
world regard it as their enemy
Wallace Shawn
Monday December 3, 2001
The Guardian
November 30 2001
To: The Foreign Policy Therapist
From: The United States of America
Dear Foreign Policy Therapist,
I don't know what to do. I want to be safe. I want safety. But I have
a terrible problem.
It all began several weeks ago, when I lost several thousand loved
ones to a horrible terrorist crime. I feel an overwhelming need to
apprehend and punish those who committed this unbearably cruel act,
but they designed their crime in such a diabolical fashion that I
cannot do so, because they arranged to be killed themselves while
committing the crime, and they are now all dead.
I feel in my heart that none of these men, however, could possibly have planned this
crime themselves and that another man, who is living in a cave in Afghanistan, must
surely have done so. At any rate I know that some
people he knows knew some of the people who committed the crime and possibly gave them
some money.
I feel an overwhelming need to kill this man in the cave, but the location of the cave
is unknown to me, and so it's impossible to find him.
He's been allowed to stay in the cave, however, by the fanatical rulers of the country
where the cave is, Afghanistan, so I feel an overwhelming need to kill those rulers.
As they've moved from place to place, though, I haven't found them, but I've succeeded
in finding and killing many young soldiers who guarded them and shepherds who lived
near them.
None the less, I do not feel any of the expected "closure," and in fact I'm becoming
increasingly depressed and am obsessed with nameless fears. Can you help me?
To: The United States of America
From: The Foreign Policy Therapist
Dear United States,
In psychological circles, we call your problem "denial." You cannot face your real
problem, so you deny that it exists and create instead a different problem that you
try to solve.
Meanwhile, the real problem, denied and ignored, becomes more and more serious. In
your case, your real problem is simply the way that millions and millions of people
around the world feel about you.
Who are these people? They share the world with you - one single world, which works as
a unified mechanism. These people are the ones for whom the mechanism's current way of
working - call it the status quo - offers a lif
e of anguish and servitude. They're well aware that this status quo, which for them is
a prison, is for you (or for the privileged among you), on the contrary, so close to a
paradise that you will never allow their life t
o change.
These millions of people are in many cases uneducated - to you they seem
unsophisticated - and yet they still somehow know that you have played an enormous
role in keeping this status quo in place. And so they know you as
the enemy.
They feel they have to fight you. Some of them hate you. And some will gladly die in
order to hurt you - in order to stop you.
They know where the fruits of the planet, the oil and the spices, are going. And when
your actions cause grief in some new corner of the world, they know about it. And when
you kill people who are poor and desperate, no m
atter what explanation you give for what you've done, their anger against you grows.
You can't kill all these millions of people, but almost any one of them, in some way,
some place or some degree, can cause damage to y
ou.
But here's a strange fact about these people whom you consider unsophisticated: most
of the situations in the world in which they perceive "injustice" are actually ones in
which you yourself would see injustice if you you
rself weren't deeply involved. Even though they may dress differently and live
differently, their standards of justice seem oddly similar to yours.
Your problem, ultimately, can only be solved over decades, through a radical
readjustment of the way you think and behave. If the denial persists, you are sure
to continue killing more poor and desperate people, causing
the hatred against you to grow, until at a certain point there will be no hope for
you. But it's not too late.
Yes, there are some among your current enemies who can no longer be
reached by reason. Yes, there are some who are crazy. But most are
not. Most people are not insane. If you do change, it is inevitable
that over time people will know that you have changed, and their
feeling about you will also change, and the safety you seek will
become a possibility.
· Wallace Shawn is the author of The Designated Mourner and Four
Plays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
This article first appeared in The Nation.
www.thenation.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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