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October 3,
2001
America
Suffers the World's Pain
Unique No More
By Ariel Dorfman
During the past 28 years, 11 September has been
a date of mourning, for me and millions of others, ever since
that Tuesday in 1973 when Chile lost its democracy in a military
coup, that day when death irrevocably entered our lives and changed
us forever. And now, almost three decades later, the malignant
gods of random history have wanted to impose upon the same country
that we blamed for the coup that dreadful date, again a Tuesday,
again an 11 September filled with death.
The differences and distances that separate
the Chilean date from the American are, one must admit, considerable.
The depraved terrorist attack against the most powerful nation
on Earth has and will have consequences which affect all humanity.
Whereas very few of the six billion people alive today could
remember or would be able to identify what happened in Chile.
The resemblance I am evoking goes well
beyond a facile and superficial comparison - for instance, that
both in Chile in 1973 and in the United States today, terror
descended from the sky to destroy the symbols of national identity:
the Palace of the Presidents in Santiago, the icons of financial
and military power in New York and Washington.
No, what I recognise is something deeper,
a parallel suffering, a similar pain, a commensurate disorientation
echoing what we lived through in Chile as of that 11 September.
It's most extraordinary incarnation -
I still cannot believe what I have been witnessing - is that
on the screen in the weeks past I have seen hundreds of relatives
wandering the streets of New York, clutching the photos of their
sons, fathers, wives, lovers, daughters, begging for information,
asking if they are alive or dead. The whole United States has
been forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido,
with no certainty or funeral possible for those beloved men and
women who are missing.
Over and over again I have heard phrases
that remind me of what people like me would mutter to themselves
during the 1973 military coup and the days that followed: "This
cannot be happening to us. This sort of excessive violence happens
to other people and not to us, we have only known this form of
destruction through movies and books and remote photographs."
And words reiterated unceasingly, 28 years ago and now again
in the year 2001: "We have lost our innocence. The world
will never be the same."
What has come to an explosive conclusion,
of course, is (North) America's famous exceptionalism, that attitude
which allowed the citizens of this country to imagine themselves
as beyond the sorrows and calamities that have plagued less fortunate
peoples around the world.
In spite of the tremendous pain, the
intolerable losses that this apocalyptic crime has visited upon
the American public, I wonder if this trial does not constitute
one of those opportunities for regeneration and self-knowledge
that, from time to time, is given to certain nations. A crisis
of this magnitude can lead to renewal or destruction, it can
be used for good or for evil, for peace or for war, for aggression
or for reconciliation, for vengeance or for justice, for the
militarisation of a society or its humanisation.
One of the ways for Americans to overcome
their trauma and survive the fear and continue to live and thrive
in the midst of the insecurity which has suddenly swallowed them
is to admit that their suffering is neither unique nor exclusive,
that they are connected - as long as they are willing to look
at themselves in the vast mirror of our common humanity - with
so many other human beings who, in faraway zones, have suffered
similar situations of unanticipated and often protracted injury
and fury.
The terrorists have wanted to single
out and isolate the United States as a satanic state. The rest
of the planet, including many nations and men and women who have
been the object of American arrogance and intervention reject
- as I categorically do - this demonisation.
It is enough to see the almost unanimous
outpouring of grief of most of the world, the offers of help,
the expressions of solidarity, the determination to claim the
dead of this mass murder as our dead. It remains to be seen if
this compassion shown to the mightiest power on this planet will
be reciprocated.
It is still far from certain that the
men and women of this nation, so full of hope and tolerance,
will be able to feel that same empathy towards the other, outcast,
members of our species.
We will find out in the years to come
if the new Americans forged in pain and resurrection are ready
and open and willing to participate in the arduous process of
repairing our shared, our damaged humanity. Creating, all of
us together, a world in which we need never again lament not
one more, not even one more terrifying 11 September. CP
Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer, is the author of
the newly published novel, Blake's
Therapy.
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