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A Message from Julio Olalla
September 18, 2001
Like all of you, I have been living these days with profound
sadness, anger and sorrow. My deepest condolences to those who have
lost relatives and loved ones and to all Americans for the tragedy
this country is enduring. My deepest love to all of you.
I would love to take this opportunity to share with you some of my
initial thoughts about all of this.
On September 11, 2001, I was in Washington, D. C. and I witnessed,
in horror, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.
On September 11, 1973, I was in Santiago, Chile, and I also
witnessed, in horror, the fighter planes firing missiles into the
Government buildings.
In these two events, exactly 28 years apart, I had the strong and
profoundly uncomfortable sense that our way of seeing the world had
taken us to that nightmare…and that way of seeing would be
insufficient to move us away from it. In both cases I had the sense of
being "at the end of the road", the road we had been on since the
Industrial Revolution… the world as we have known it.
The biggest difference between these two events (besides the fact
that the first one was a sign of the ending of the Cold War, and the
later is being seen, so far, as the beginning of another war) is
obviously their magnitude: one affected a marginal country and the
recent terrorist attack affects the leading nation of the Western
world and therefore the whole world.
The similarity between them for me, having been a part of both, is
the opportunity they have provided to open new questions, to reflect,
to be bigger than our tendency to react, based on the logic of
"business as usual".
The tragedy is immense. The death toll is huge. The fear and anger
triggered by the attackers is beyond belief. Our responsibility
therefore is equally large. Whatever we do now is going to define, in
many ways, the kind of world in which our children are going to live.
Our actions cannot be chosen only to get even with terrorism today,
but to build a world in which there is no emotional "soup" out of
which terrorism can grow.
Every time in history that a country, a group of people, a
community of any sort, has been immersed in resentment, hellish
leaders have grown out of that and violence has spread like fire. One
example of this is what happened to Germans after the First World War,
when they saw themselves deprived of their dignity by the conditions
imposed on them by the winners of the war. That resentment was the
fertile territory out of which Hitler and the Nazi party grew.
What have we done in our times, as Western Civilization, to
generate such an enormous resentment toward us as expressed by the
terrorist attack on the USA? Have we created, willingly or blindly,
the conditions out of which people like Osama bin Laden can find
listeners? If we eliminate the leader(s), without eliminating the
resentment out of which they feed, a little later we will have more of
the same.
Independently of our obligations to bring those responsible for the
attack to justice, to improve our security systems and to generate
political alliances to isolate terrorists, we also have a greater
obligation: to ask ourselves new and probably difficult questions, to
challenge our presuppositions, to inspire each other, to cultivate
respect, to avoid falling into the logic of terror. We cannot generate
a war with the Islamic world, not only because that´s what people like
bin Laden want, but because that is immoral, unfair and does not take
into account that most people on Earth simply want peace.
Well, as you can tell, I'm very moved by what is happening to all
of us. I find myself in deep reflection about what our future holds
and by what learning needs to happen. I am grateful to you who make up
our Newfield Network community and ask that you too have the courage
to ask the tough questions of yourselves and others, so we can all
move toward peace.
With love and gratitude,
Julio Olalla
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