thank you Chris let me just say I
you words are perspicacious brilliant
true here we are small group of people
you know get the word the word with the immensity
media just drowning us how do you get that word
how do you demonstrate to more Americans that triumvirate
doing White House. The problem in wartime is that
can always begins with the destruction of culture
our own culture and most effective
way the state has to accomplish that is by
taking away our language and
it gives us the words and the cliches
by which we speak about the experience we're undergoing
so that it becomes very hard to think outside the box
and these I don't own a television
because I don't want those
phrases pounded into my brain
on 24-hour news cycles The War on Terror
countdown with Saddam showdown with Iraq
once you rob
language once they
give us the words by which we have to speak about what we're undergoing
becomes almost impossible to express the disquiet that we feel
and I think that many of us feel we saw this in Bosnia
and in a place like Mostar are you had
young men who had grown up together who
had gone to school together attended each other's weddings slept in each
others houses
sitting in trenches of in a few yards apart were night they could still speak
to each other killing each other
it they didn't have the words by which
they could express what it was there doing when you ask them why they were
fighting the spat back at you
those kind of cliches that had been
that were pounded into them day after day after day after day
and I'm not picking on the Bosnians because now we're the same
and what it does is turn the other into an object
denigrates the other turns the other into a caricature
and
when we go to war of course the other side is doing the same
so that until you can recreate an authentic language
and that has a lot to do with allowing
authentic culture which is always about self-examination and self-critical to
again
become ascending or at least have its proper place in a society
you are rendered mute I think we've all become
in wartime like a Othello who's so consumed by jealousy that at the final
one in the final moments before he turns to kill Desdemona
he says "goats and monkeys" "goats and monkeys"
the most poetic man in Venice
a man wooed not only is love
but the state with words and that's why in
Bosnia or in Cyprus you do not have peace
if the absence of war in Bosnia
or the Turks and Greeks in Cyprus people learn students
learned different histories both of which are a lie
and this is of course touches upon the brilliance
up the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa
where although the torturers and the killers of the apartheid regime were
given an amnesty
to do so they had to confess their crimes and what they were doing
is returning to South Africans language
narrative common narrative by which you can build
and maintain peace and its
always the same disease I woke up a few weeks after 9/11
and I looked around New York with people driving down the street waving big
obnoxious flags and I thought we've all become the Serbs
and that's what's so terrifying about war it doesn't matter whether I'm in
Argentina
Israel or Bosnia or El Salvador
it's the same disease and we have it