The Task of Man Is Man

Abstract

It is not easy for a European to take a dispassionate stance toward the USA. The waves of idiotic anti-Americanism and the (smaller) waves of undiscriminating glorification have distorted the face of the America seen by many Europeans. My remarks are those of a. European, more particularly of an Austrian from Vienna, a city that decisively stamped the character of a Sigmund Freud and of an Adolf Hitler. Mine is a stance rooted in the experience of critical love which feels itself co-responsible for both the super-strength and the super-weakness of this American dinosaur, this giant baby that, in its relatively brief history, has contributed notably and bloodily to the world's genocide and ecocide; first and foremost in exterminating the Indians and the buffalo. A look into Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York, 1970) brings into view abysses, abysses in man, in the beast man (the animal is never bestial). America has added its contribution to the genocidal destruction of peoples and to the desolation of landscapes, just as practiced in Europe for over 2,500 years, ever since the days of the Roman Empire.