On Sep. 11, 1973, General Pinochet, backed by the US military, overthrew the democratic
government of Chile, and installed a dictatorship where military repression assured
"economic freedom ". On Sep. 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the USA in the name of
freedom, resulting in the "War on Terror", a war on no particular enemy or country,
a war undertaken to "defend democracy" while creating ever tighter webs of surveillance
and state control. They say September 11 changed everything. But what does it mean
to wage war on a metaphor; to wage war on "terror "? And how will we know when it's over?
Welcome to Paradise: A Requiem looks at how the terror attacks of September 11, 2001
have influenced events in the post 9/11 world. It asks whether the changes that have
been enacted in the name of democracy and security - particularly infringements on
civil liberties such as unlimited surveillance, indefinite detentions and renditions
to secret prisons Ð are justifiable. And it asks whether in this current political
climate, actions, words and laws have become so disassociated from one another that
they have lost all relative meaning. Examining the rhetoric used to justify violence,
the double speak used to obscure it, and the manipulation used to ensure silent
acceptance of it, Welcome to Paradise: A Requiem dissects the propaganda of both
individual and state-sponsored terrorism, and highlights tactics used to create
compliance to Orwellian absurdities.
The participants in this piece are citizens of Norway, Sweden, USA, Germany and
Iceland. Our personal experiences of loss of friends and family members, loss of personal
freedoms, and the parallel rise of unethical and often illegal conduct justified by
rhetoric within each of our respective countries, means that these issues lie very
close to us. The performance text will include portions in English, Norwegian, Swedish,
German, and Arabic.
Personal conversations between the core artist/creators were the starting point for
this exploration. Questions about who becomes a terrorist and why, whether there is
a difference between terrorism and war in our time, what leads people to torture or
commit extreme acts of violence, and whether cycles of violence can be changed, or
whether the same conflict points recur again and again, were themes we set out to
explore in our intensive research on issues related to terrorism and the 'war on terror'.
Over time we also became fascinated by the structures that create conditions likely to
lead to abuse and cycles of violence, particularly the functions of propaganda and
rhetoric.
We spent the fall and winter of 2006 reading numerous articles and books by war
correspondents, historians and terrorism experts; wading through the over 1200
page report "The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib " and researching the personal
words of terrorists, those accused of terrorism, and victims of individual or government
sponsored terror. We looked at various ACLU documents on the use of torture around
the world, including documents on the El-Masri v. Tenet case the lawsuit brought
by German citizen Khaled El-Masri challenging the CIA policy of illegal abduction
and detention known as extraordinary rendition. (The lawsuit charges that former
CIA director George Tenet authorized agents to abduct El-Masri, beat him, drug him
and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. The corporations that owned
and operated the planes are also named in the case.) We read documents on the similar
case of the rendition of Canadian Maher Arar, and media reports as well as first hand
accounts from other "enemy combatants" such as British Moazzam Begg and German Murat
Kurnatz, both former prisoners at Guantanamo.
We read accounts by former members of the cult Aum Shinrikyo, the group responsible
for the sarin poison gas attacks in Tokyo in 1994 and 1995, as well as accounts by
victims of those attacks. And we read the personal testaments of Mohamed Atta,
the leader of the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sep 11, 2001.
We were struck in all of this material by how the initial intent of an action often
became entirely divorced from the interpretation of its' 'meaning' , - the meaning
or motive attached to that action by the world at large, (media, government, various groups).
In a time when so many "well-meaning " or "noble " actions result in horrible consequences,
and when distortion of language is used to obscure, justify or explain away horrific abuses,
we pose the question "what remains possible to do or say without it becoming distorted? "
Is war correspondent Chris Hedges correct when he observes that in wartime the only
seeds of hope seem to be "What appear to be small acts of love."?