Dear Gambia-lers,
Greetings!
Below is a very recent piece on the Bush Administration's current policies, written by the South African writer, Breyten Breytenbach. I thought you might find it interesting.
All the best,
Ebrima Sall
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From: "breyten" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "Aidoo, Akwasi" <[log in to unmask]>,
Subject: Re: Bush-speak
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2002 21:56:38 -0400
Dear Akwasi & friends
I hope you are all well... as we wait for this war (in all its guises) thatAmerica seems to want to wage against the rest of the world to be launched. Please find attached a piece I recently wrote on commission for 'TheNation', due to be published this coming week. In retrospect it's clumsy and crude, too angry and one-sided. But the form does not lend itself to much subtlety. In any event, I stand by the substance. Best regards Breyten Breytenbach
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LETTER TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND
Dear Jack
This is an extraordinarily difficult letter to write, and it may even be a perilous exercise. Dangerous because your present administration and its specialized agencies by all accounts know no restraint in hitting out at any perceived “enemy of America” and nobody or nothing can protect one from their vindictiveness. Not even American courts are any longer a bulwark against arbitrary exactions. Take the people being kept in that concentration camp in Guantanamo: they are literally extra-territorial, by force made anonymous and stateless so that no law, domestic or international, is habilitated to protect them. It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances -- but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal.
The predominant yardstick of your government is not ‘human rights’ but ‘national interests’. (Your president keeps repeating the mantra.) In what way is this order of priorities any different from that of the defunct Soviet Union or other totalitarian regimes?
The ‘war against terror’ is an all-purpose fig leaf for violating or ignoring local laws and international agreements and treaties. So, talking to America is like dealing with a very aggressive beast: one must do so softly, not make any brusque moves or run off at the mouth if you wish to survive. In dancing with the enemy one follows his steps even as one counts under one’s breath. And be sure to keep far away from Afghan containers intended for transporting war prisoners: they have a way of prematurely blackening one’s face with death.
Why is it difficult? Because the United States is a complex entity despite the gung-ho slogans and simplistic posturing in moments of national hysteria. Your political system is resilient and well tested, it has always harbored counter-forces, it allows quite effectively for alternation, for a swing-back of the pendulum whenever policies have strayed too far from middle class interests, with the result that you have a large middle ground of acceptable political practices. Why, through the role of elected representatives the people who vote even have a rudimentary democratic control over public affairs! Except maybe in Florida. Better still -- your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War. And all along there was no dearth of strong voices speaking firm convictions and enunciating sure ethical standards.
Where are they now? What happened to the influential intellectuals and the trustworthy journalists explaining the ineluctable consequences of your present policies? Where are the clergy calling for humility and some compassion for the rest of the world? Are there no ordinary folk pointing out that the president and his cronies are naked, cynical, morally reprehensible and very very dangerous, including for American interests -- and by now probably out of control? Are these voices stifled? Has the public arena of freely debated expressions of concern been sapped of all influence? Are people indifferent to the havoc wreaked all over the world by America’s diktat policies, destroying the underpinnings of decent international co-existence? Or are they perhaps secretly and shamefully gleeful, as closet supporters of this showdown at OK Corral approach? They (and you and I) are most likely hunkered down, waiting for the storm of imbecility to pass. How deadened we have become!
In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear. Who really makes the policy decisions? Sure, the respective functions are well identified: the elected representatives bluster and raise money, the lobbyists buy and sell favors, the media spin and purr patriotically, the intellectuals wring their soft hands, the minorities duck and dive and hang out flags. But who and what are the forces shaping America’s role in the world?
The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to American power for the sake of America’s interests. That is, to the benefit of America’s rich. It’s as simple as that. Oh, there was a moment of high camp when it was suggested that the aim was to “make the world safe for democracy!” That particular fig leaf went up in cigar smoke and now all the other excuses are just so much bullshit, even the charlatan pretence of being “a nation under siege.” This last one, I further submit, was a sustained Orson Welleslian campaign to stampede the nation in order to better facilitate what was in effect a right-wing coup carried out by cracker fundamentalists, ideologues proposing that ‘failed’ states ought to be ‘terminated’, warmed up Dr Strangeloves and oil-greedy conservative capitalists.
I do not want to equate your glorious nation with the deplorable image of a president who, at best, appears to be a bar-room braggart smirking and winking to his mates as he holds forth his hand-me-down platitudes and ‘insights’ and naïve solutions. Because I know you have many faces and I realize how rich you are in diversity. Would I be writing this way if I had in mind a Black or Hispanic or Asian American, members of those vastly silent components of your society? It would be a tragic mistake for us out here to imagine that Bush commands the hearts and the minds of the majority of your countrymen. Many of your Black citizens must be just as anguished as we are.
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