To Create An Enemy - Sam Keen

[Larry Robinson]

To Create An Enemy 


Start with an empty canvas 
Sketch in broad outline the forms of 
men, women, and children. 

Dip into the 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 
metamorphasized 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 G-D, an impediment 
to the sacred dialectic of history.

	
	- Sam Keen