TO CREATE AN ENEMY
Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.Dip into the unconscious well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.
Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect.Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares—devils,
demons, myrmidons of evil.When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.
In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.
Politicians of both the left and the right keep getting things backward. They assume the enemy will vanish if only we manage our weapons differently. . . .
But it isn’t working. The problem seems to lie not in our reason or our technology, but in the hardness of our hearts. Generation after generation, we find excuses to hate and dehumanize each other, and we always justify ourselves with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric. And we refuse to admit the obvious. We human beings are Homo hostilis, the hostile species, the enemy-making animal. We are driven to fabricate an enemy as a scapegoat to bear the burden of our denied enmity. From the unconscious residue of our hostility, we create a target; from our private demons, we conjure a public enemy. And, perhaps, more than anything else, the wars we engage in are compulsive rituals, shadow dramas in which we continually try to kill those parts of ourselves we deny and despise.
Our best hope for survival is to change the way we think about enemies and warfare.
—Sam Keen, “The Enemy Maker”, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, ed. C. Zweig and J. Abrams (1991), pp. 197-8.