For that is what human evil always is. Geographic names or political terminology provides not a telescope or a window but the reflection of ourselves: of human negative potential. The magnitude of what took place in our parts of the world, andover two-thirds of a century, cannot be reduced to "Communism." Catchwords, on the whole, lose more than they retain, and in the case of tens of millions killed and the lives of entire nations subverted, a catchword simply won't do. Although the ratio of executioners to victims favors the latter, the scale of what happened in our realm suggests, given its technological backwardness at the time, that the former, too, run in the millions, not to mention the complicity of millions more.
Homilies are not my forte, Mr. President; besides, you are a convert. It's not for me to tell you that what you call "Communism" was a breakdown of humanity and not a political problem. It was a human problem, a problem of our species, and thus of a lingering nature. Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil—terminology, I should add, invented by evil to obscure its own reality. Nor should one refer to it as a nightmare, since that breakdown of humanity wasn't a nocturnal affair, not in our hemisphere, to say the least.
To this day, the word "Communism" remains a convenience, for an -ism suggests a fait accompli. In Slavic languages especially, an -ism, as you know, suggests the foreignness of a phenomenon, and when a word containing an -ism denotes a political system, the system is perceived as an imposition. True, our particular -ism wasn't conceived on the banks of the Volga or the Vltava, and the fact that it blossomed there with a unique vigor doesn't bespeak our soil's exceptional fertility, for it blossomed in different latitudes and extremely diverse cultural zones with equal intensity. This suggests not so much an imposition as our -ism's rather organic, not to say universal, origins. One should think, therefore, that a bit of self-examination—on the part of the democratic world as well as our own—is in order, rather than ringing calls for mutual "understanding." (What does this word mean, anyway? What procedure do you propose for this understanding? Under the auspices of the UN, perhaps?)
And if self-examination is unlikely (why should what's been avoided under duress be done at leisure?), then at least the myth of imposition should be dispelled, since, for one thing, tank crews and fifth columns are biologically indistinguishable. Why don't we simply start by admitting that an extraordinary anthropological backslide has taken place in our world in this century, regardless of who or what triggered it? That it involved masses acting in their self-interest and, in the process of doing so, reducing their common denominator to the moral minimum? And that the masses' self-interest—stability of life and its standards, similarly reduced—has been attained at the expense of other masses, albeit numerically inferior? Hence the number of the dead.
It is convenient to treat these matters as an error, as a horrendous political aberration, perhaps imposed upon human beings from an anonymous elsewhere. It is even more convenient if that elsewhere bears a proper geographical or foreign-sounding name, whose spelling obscures its utterly human nature. It was convenient to build navies and defenses against that aberration—as it is convenient to dismantle those defenses and those navies now. It is convenient,
I must add, to refer to these matters in a civil manner, Mr. President, from a pulpit today, although I don't question for a minute the authenticity of your civility, which, I believe, is your very nature. It was convenient to have around this living example of how not to run things in this world and supply this example with an -ism, as it is convenient to supply it nowadays with "know-how" and a "post-." ( And one easily envisions our -ism, embellished with its post-, conveniently sailing on the lips of dimwits into the future.)
For it would be truly inconvenient—for the cowboys of the Western industrial democracies specifically—to recognize the catastrophe that occurred in Indian territory as the first cry of mass_society: a cry, as it were, from the world's future, and to recognize it not as an -ism but as a chasm suddenly gaping in the human heart, to swallow up honesty, compassion, civility, justice, and, thus satiated, presenting to the still democratic outside a reasonably perfect, monotonous surface.
Cowboys, however, loathe mirrors—if only because there they may recognize the backward Indians more readily than they would in the open. So they prefer to mount their high horses, scan the Indian-free horizons, deride the Indians' backwardness, and derive enormous moral comfort from being regarded as cowboys—first of all, by the Indians.
As one who has been likened often to a philosopher- king, you can, Mr. President, appreciate better than many how much all that happened to our "Indian nation" harks back to the Enlightenment, with its idea (from the Age of Discovery, actually) of a noble savage, of man being inherently good but habitually ruined by bad institutions; with its beliefthat improvement ofthose institutions will restore man to his initial goodness. So to the admission previously made or hoped for, one should add, I suppose, that it's precisely the accomplishment of the "Indian" in perfecting those institutions that brought them to that project's logical end: the police state. Perhaps the manifest bestiality of this achievement should suggest to the "Indians" that they must retreat some way into the interior, that they should render their institutions a bit less perfect. Otherwise they may not get the "cowboys' " subsidies for their reservations. And perhaps there is indeed a ratio between man's goodness and the badness of institutions. If there isn't, maybe somebody should admit that man isn't that good.
Isn't this the juncture at which we find ourselves, Mr. President—or at least you do? Should "Indians" embark on imitating "cowboys," or should they consult the spirits about other options? May it be that the magnitude of the tragedy that befell them is in itself a guarantee that it won't happen again? May their grief and their memory of what happened in their parts create a greater egalitarian bond than free enterprise and a bicameral legislature? And if they should draft a constitution anyway, maybe they should start by recognizing themselves and their history for the better part of this century as a reminder of Original Sin.
It's not such a heady concept, as you know. Translated into common parlance, it means that man is dangerous. Apart from being a footnote to our beloved Jean-Jacques, this principle may allow us to build—if not elsewhere, then at least in our realm, so steeped in Fourier, Proudhon, and Blanc at the expense of Burke and Tocqueville—a social order resting on a less self-flattering basis than was our habit, and perhaps with less disastrous consequences. This also may qualify as man's "new understanding of himself, of his limitations and his place in the world" you call for in your speech.
"We must discover a new relationship to our neighbors, and to the universe," you say toward the end of your speech, "and its metaphysical order, which is the source of the moral order." The metaphysical order, Mr. President, should it really exist, is pretty dark, and its structural idiom is its parts' mutual indifference. The notion that man is dangerous runs, therefore, closest to that order's implications for human morality. Every writer is a reader, and ifyou scan your library's shelves, you must realize that most of the books you've got there are about either betrayal or murder. At any rate, it seems more prudent to build society on the premise that man is evil rather than the premise of his goodness. This way at least there is the possibility of making it safe psychologically, if not physically (but perhaps that as well), for most of its members, not to mention that its surprises, which are inevitable, might be of a more pleasant nature.