Climate of Fear by Wole Soyinka Read Free Book Online Page A

party had succeeded in forming a government? Once righteousness replaces rights in the exercise of power, the way is paved for a permanent contest based on the primacy of the
holier-than-thou.
    However, this is mere speculation. What we do know, as fact, is that since the undemocratic choice was made in Algeria, over 150,000 lives have been lost, several of these in a most grisly manner. And not just writers, cinéastes, painters, journalists, intellectuals—those purveyors of impure thoughts who are always the primary targets of fundamentalist reformers and thinkers— though these, as usual, have also been at the forefront of carnage. We are speaking here of entire villages and sectors of urban society that were considered guilty of flouting, at one level or another, the purist laws of the opposition, now transformed into a quasi-state, or simply of failing to show sufficient dedication to spiritual expectations. A resistance movement that began as a legitimate reaction to the thwarting of popular will, expressed along democratic lines, has degenerated into an orgy of competitive bestiality. State and quasi-state are locked in a deadly struggle, marked by a complete abandonment of the final vestiges of the norms of civilized society.
    Such extremism could not stay localized for long. We have only to recollect that some of the leaders of this new insurgency cut their teeth in the struggle for the liberation of Afghanistan, a struggle that triumphed with the expulsion of Soviet forces of occupation from that nation, then recollect that such mujahideen are pitted against a regime whose leaders are also veterans in the bruising war of liberation against French colonialism. And the consequence of these antecedents for global politics? The end of the notion of a nationalist war that would remain strictly within national confines. Perhaps such a notion had long since dissipated—only not much notice was paid at the time—dispelled by the Vietnam War, a war that sought no more than the liberation of its land from the domination of foreigners.
    Regarding that war, I must express a puzzle. Vietnam, then known as Indochina, fought two wars of liberation, first from France, which she defeated at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu, then from the United States, which felt that she knew a thing or two that France did not. No one can forget the saturation bombing carried out by the United States in the latter stages of the war—a brutal assault that was actually described by the president, Richard Nixon, as an exercise to bomb North Vietnam to the negotiating table—nor the earlier barrage of defoliants whose effects have yet to wear off completely in that nation, the deadly chemical weapon napalm, with horrendous images of inhuman disfiguration permanently seared on world memory. Now, the puzzle is this. I find it curious that the North Vietnamese, victims of two world powers in rapid succession, did not ever consider designating the entire world a war arena where innocents and guilty alike would be legitimately targeted. Not one incident of hijacking took place during those wars, neither did the taking of hostages, or the random detonation of bombs in places of tourist attraction or religious worship. United Nations agencies, as well as humanitarian organizations, appear to have enjoyed the respect due to neutrals in conflict. Most unbelievable of all, however, was the aftermath of that war, the now ritual encounters between U.S. veterans and their former enemies in an embrace of reconciliation.
    Certainly, during the entire Vietnam wars, it would have been an excessive claim to suggest that the world was trapped in a climate of fear. While we may dispute in the end what lessons must be drawn from this contrast, what remains certain is that it is one that needs to be closely studied. In the fifth lecture of this series, “ ‘I Am Right; You Are Dead,’ ” we shall take this up again. Certainly we