Liesl. o. SchApker B E unwusei um
Of all the words in modern vocabularies one dominates and that is enemy. I am
going to adapt something Freud said about phobia: the-wonderissn't-that weare enemy-
fixated but that we are ever anything else!
The enemy is the one who always stands in our light. Get him out of the
way and the light shines on us. Actually, we invent him. After all, no creature is born
with this name. But fiction or no fiction we must get rid ofl him in order to see the light.
The enemy idea was brought to sophistication in medieval speculations
about the devil (diabolos, from the Greek)---he being the principal one, Satan (from the
Hebrew, meaning enemy) or Beelzebub (Hebrew for the fallen "god of the flies" but
more exactly a fallen angel) plus all kinds of subsidiary demons (daemon, Greek,
meaning half-god) and fallen angels who peeped out ofthe habitat in animal form and
would devour you without SO much as a thank you. The enemy was the infidel, the
heretic, the pagan, the sinner, the witch, even a pot of ripe plums and your lust for them.
Good things could become enemies. Cleverness was a snare of pride. Charity was
changeable for vanity. Ardor in prayer could address itself equally to Old Nick, who was
all too pleased to satisfy self-seeking penitents.
Life was based on the enemy. The enemy kept you from becoming bent.
Thus it was that killing became essential for the uncovering of the light. In crusades,
persecutions, witch burnings, the rasings of heresy-infected villages the enemy was dealt
a series of Last Blows which would secure the true, clean dispensation everyone was
waiting for. But the offending victim always popped up again even from the headless, the
charred, the quartered, the disembowelled, the racked-to-death--just as he does from the
radiated, the bombarded, the fire-bombed today.
If enemy hovers SO ubiquitously in the human mind, and is SO much at the
edge of every half-thought, it is because it means "that which is preventing me from
getting forward". So enmity can't be switched off. You must be prépared for it not only in
the wars that make your cities shudder and fall and necessitate less formal funerals than
are normal (bulldoze them into holes) but also when arms have been laid down and the
soldiers gone home. Then the trivial murders begin---the group rapes, the random
atrocities, the domestic outrages. The enemy is now parents, males, females, lesbians,
homosexuals, heterosexuals, whites, blacks, Muslims, Jews, Christians, children,
orientals, westerners, there being no category of human, no thought, beyond the haunted
brain's capacity to demonize. It is a double process. The self which demonizes another
into enemy has already turned itself into that enemy's victim, which adds to the smarting
wound, then the smart adds to the anger: fist-fights, strangulations, the cutting of throats
begin to crowd the imagination, though the enemy may be a neighbor tranquilly cooking
borscht and unaware of any enmity whatever.
Nearly all cries for freedom are for freedom from brain ghosts, those
persistent ones which can't walk away because they aren'treal.
If the Jews and Bolsheviks and gypsies didn't look like fellow humans to
the guards of the Nazi death camps it was because their perception of them already
contained the Final Solution, namely they saw them as the last obstacle to a good clean
life. Just a little effort to overcome the first squeamishness was necessary, in the
knowledge that after the clean-up the death chambers would no longer have to figure in
life. Hitler even told them in his usual unhesitating words to be brave in their utter lack of
mercy.
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PÔA
Kari
KARI otininnt.fom