Dear Friends,
I was recently at Omega doing a weekend seminar and had the good fortune to meet Sam Keen who is the author of Fire in the Belly and Faces of the Enemy amongst other works. In my opinion, he is one of the most important philosophers in our time. We were discussing the dismal situation of warfare in the world and whether enemy-making and warfare are social institutions rather than biological imperatives. Sam Keen is going to be a keynote speaker at the Alliance for the New Humanity conference scheduled December 8-11, 2005. Here is an excerpt from his book, Faces of the Enemy:
Start with an empty canvasSketch in broad outline the forms ofmen, women, and children.
Dip into the unconsciousness well of your owndisowned darknesswith a wide brush andstrain the strangers with the sinister hueof the shadow.
Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,hatred, carelessness you dare not claim asyour own.
Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.
Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,fears that play through the kaleidoscope of every infinite heart.
Twist the smile until it forms the downwardarc of cruelty.
Strip flesh from bone until only the abstract skeleton of death remains.
Exaggerate each feature until man ismetamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.
Fill in the background with malignantfigures from ancient nightmares – devils,demons, myrmidons of evil.
When your icon of the enemy is completeyou will be able to kill without guilt,slaughter without shame.
The thing you destroy will have becomemerely an enemy of God, an impedimentto the sacred dialectic of history.
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