"We know now that there is no way out; that the system that was the evil offspring of public neglect
and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre of our civilization.
Nothing is left but to make the best of a bad bargain. "If it shall
appear that the suffering and the sins of the "other half,"
and the evil they breed are but as a just punishment upon the community
that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth."
The quote above is from Jacob
A. Riis' book How the Other Half Lives, which I found by chance
in the summer of 1975 when I dropped into a bookstore in San Francisco.
I had never heard of Jacob Riis before. The book made such a strong impression
on me that I decided to steal it - which says a bit about my economic
situation at the time. (If any of you looking at this are just as down
and out, naturally I will understand if you decide to steal my book. Stealing
is not a good thing, but we all ought to try it once in our lives in order
to get a bit of understanding for and solidarity with those who are forced
into that way of life.)
Nobody is born a vagabond and it was a long series
of circumstances that led me to such a happy state. I was born in a little
country the size of Massachusetts. Together with Sweden, Denmark has for
many years had a reputation for being one of the most liberal countries
in the world. I grew up in the Western, more conservative, and formerly
very poor part of Denmark from which thousands emigrated to America at
the turn of the century. My father is a minister in a little village.
For generations the firstborn son in the family has been named Jacob Holdt
and has been a minister, so it was always in the air that that was to
be my destiny too. My grandmother was the spiritual head of the family,
who let no chance go by to tell me about the religious achievements of
the family and make me aware of my duty. Through all the years I vagabonded
in America I continually got letters from her about how I soon would have
gathered worldly experiences enough to be able to come home and begin
the study of theology.
A very great part of the reason I continued vagabonding
and imagined I would do it the rest of my life was the fear of returning
home to eight years of dry Latin and Greek. Let me just explain here for
American readers that the church in Denmark is nationalized and
ministers are employed by the state. Since very few people go to
church, the ministers' role tends to be more like that of a social worker
caring for the elderly, sick, and troubled. The rhetoric of "personal
salvation, which I found rampant in American churches, is to a large degree
unheard of in Danish churches. When I left church on Sundays in my childhood,
my eyes would usually fall on a great beautiful portrait of a black woman
across from the church. It was the only advertisement in the little village
- the trademark for Denmark's biggest business, the cooperative store
"Brugsen." When I have since thought of the enormous influence
white advertising in America has had on the white as well as the black
psyche, I can't avoid reflecting that this one-sided advertising must
have had some effect on my later involvement in black issues. In the village
elementary school we wrote reports on the apartheid system in South Africa
and the black struggle in America long before the height of the civil
rights movement. We were jubilant on the day South Africa's prime minister
was shot, but our teacher pointed out that this would not solve the problems
there, and in high school, when Martin Luther King became our hero, I,
at least, was strongly affected by his philosophy of nonviolence. From
my astonishment that the white church in both America and South Africa
was hostile to blacks, I was not far from rebellion against my father's
church. When the congregation at one point during the Biafra famine decided
to spend several hundred thousand kroner to build a tower on our village
church, I was so outraged that in the dead of night before Easter morning
I painted over the entire church with huge biblical quotations about how
you shouldn't build temples for God when your neighbor is suffering here
on earth. My father's reaction took me by surprise. He was so furious
that without a word he drove me out to the highway, where I was asked
to hitch-hike off. During the next half year we were not on speaking terms.
Perhaps this was the start of my career as a vagabond.
I had at any rate not much
of a choice. I had been kicked out after two years in high school and
had been fired from several jobs. I was considered the black sheep of
the family. Even the army had kicked me out. I had always wanted to join
the Royal Danish Palace Guard, being deep down inside very conservative
and even a member of the Conservative Party. But the very first day
my company had target practice I ran into problems. We were asked to shoot
at a target in the shape of a man, but it was absolutely
impossible for me to get myself to shoot at anything even resembling a
human being, so I refused point blank. To avoid. having to shoot again,
I pretended to be sick and limped around on one leg. I was sent to examinations
in various hospitals and walked with crutches for eight months before
they kicked me out. Great was my surprise when the mailman half a year
later knocked at my door with $2,000 in compensation for having suffered
in the army.
I always had many travelers
from all over the world staying in my apartment in Copenhagen. Several
were American Vietnam deserters, who came to make a strong impression
on me with their rejection of many of the values I had been brought up
to believe in. One day I took in a 17-year-old Canadian runaway who stayed
with me for a long time. Her parents were so grateful that they invited
me to Canada to work on their farm. I wanted to flee the straitjacket
of society, and the greatest and most decisive step you can take in that
process is the one across the border of your own country. I sent my friends
a furious 150 page letter when I got to Canada in 1970. Oddly enough,
I had no strong feelings about the United States, but an excerpt from
that letter shows some of the feelings I had about Denmark:
"We are all guilty! You
too, Kaj, could have smashed a few more windows at the Embassy, at Pan
Am, at Berlingske Tidende (a conservative newspaper), at the Folketing
(Parliament) ... as long as one pane of glass remains intact in the entire
country, then we are all guilty of the crimes of the West in Indochina...
but when that pane has been smashed... then perhaps the government will
be able to feel which way the wind is blowing. Smash all of Denmark's
windows so that even the coldest conservatives can smell the stench of
napalmed flesh - so that Hartling himself leaps up in the night with sweat
on his forehead hearing the death-screams of children bored through by
fragmentation bombs! What is violence against glass compared to the violence
we commit in Vietnam? Smash all the windows in the country! Smash the
four bloody panes in the Danish flag, smash everything - as long as that
is the only help we can give the Vietnamese. The day after our My Lai
anniversary protest I left the country, depressed and disillusioned. Disappointed
that 25 years of massacre against another people still does not penetrate
the population's consciousness, disappointed that it still doesn't know
a damn thing about what happens in Indochina, disappointed that our work
to change these conditions was fruitless, disappointed that I belong to
a population of evil, corrupt, brainwashed, pestilential, inhuman "human
beings" - but at the same time, relieved at my escape from five million
blind murderers; happy at my resurrection from the Kingdom of Death...
Denmark."
When I think back to the feelings
I had then, I find it interesting that it was a young American I had staying
with me who opened my eyes to the injustices of the Vietnam war and got
me involved in opposing it, although during the whole time I was involved
it was mainly out of a deep moral indignation. I did not see the Vietnam
war as a product of any system, but merely as an unfortunate digression
for democracy. Thus I remained a member of Conservative Youth and did
not see anything inconsistent in that, just as I always felt irritated
about the red banners in the demonstrations "because it would make
people think we were communists."
I worked on the Canadian farm
for a year along with a young leftist Argentinean who got me interested
in Latin America. I therefore decided to travel down there just for adventure.
To get to Latin America I had to pass through the USA. Canadians had told
me many frightening stories about how dangerous it was to hitch-hike in
the US, but I nevertheless decided to make the attempt. I took my savings
from my work on the farm and hitched down to the border, crossing at Port
Huron, a little town in Michigan. I was terrified. I saw a man walk down
the street with a hunting rifle and perceived violent vibrations everywhere.
The young people in town said that the police would beat me up if I hitch-hiked.
I have since returned to this town and see it today as one of the most
peaceful in America, but I have met many other young foreign visitors
who have had the same terrifying first meeting with the violent American
society until they got used to it and in the end no longer perceived "the
violence in people's eyes" as a sensitive Frenchman expressed it
to me. I was so shocked that I took the bus to Detroit in the belief that
it would be easier to hitch-hike from there. But that was only going from
the frying pan into the fire. I got off the bus at night thinking I was
in a great metropolitan city of millions with just as much nightlife as
in European cities and when I couldn't see a soul around I asked for directions
"to downtown." A news vendor answered with surprise, "You
are downtown," and then told me that people simply didn't dare to
walk outside at night. I was again so terrified that I ended up buying
a ticket all the way to Chicago. The first young long-haired guy I talked
to in the bus station in the morning told me that he had just gotten out
of jail for hitch-hiking and that Chicago's cops had the reputation of
being the worst to hitch-hikers. And had I been thinking of hitching through
the South? I must be kidding. This up here was nothing compared to the
South. I was now so despairing that after a day in the city I went to
a church to get help. I hadn't enough money for a bus all the way through
the US, and Chicago seemed such a terrible, inhuman, cold city that it
gave me no desire to see more of America.
But later in the evening a young
black writer, Waltdenia Lewis, started chatting with me in a coffee shop.
She invited me to come and stay in her mother's house in a black middle
class area of South Chicago. Here I spent a fantastic week with her and
her friends - a week which meant a decisive turn for my relationship to
America, which in spite of my early school teachings I had perceived as
a boring white middle class country. That my first American home was a
black home, which gave me warmth and encouragement in the midst of my
freezing despair, was no doubt a great part of the reason I didn't immediately
turn my back on America. Waltdenia and her friends introduced me to black
culture in such an infectious way that I had to come back. They drove
me everywhere and told me about the conditions of blacks in that most
segregated of all American cities. They communicated in a language which
I could hardly understand then, but which, with its almost singing, constantly
joking soprano tone, I found fantastically rich.
Without knowing it they
also gave me a gift which was to be my admission card not only
to black homes, but everywhere in society. One day when braiding
their hair they insisted on braiding my beard, which had gotten fairly
long. They made a bet that I wouldn't dare to walk around a whole day
in Chicago with a braided beard. I was terribly shy and ashamed of myself
looking so foolish, but soon I discovered that this city which I had perceived
as cold and misanthropic suddenly began to open up. People would smile
at me or sometimes react negatively, but at any rate open up whereby contact
is possible - the contact which is essential for the vagabond. Therefore
the beard stayed braided, and without it this book would not have been
made - if only because it several times helped save my life.
I decided
to find another way to Latin America and went back to Canada, where I
hitch-hiked to Vancouver and down to San Francisco. It was as far as I
got. As soon as I met the American youth there I fell in love with them
and let them carry me away. Some Vietnam veterans invited me to go with
them to the big anti-war demonstrations in Washington. That was in April
1971. There were one million demonstrators and a solidarity and atmosphere
which made a deep impression on me. I saw hundreds of Vietnam veterans,
many of them crippled, throwing their military medals up against Congress.
It was then, moved to tears, that I realized this was no time for adventuring
in Latin America, but that I had to give support to these people in some
way. And for the next year I had little time for anything but rushing
from demonstration to demonstration all over the country. I quickly overcame
my fear of hitch-hiking, which seemed so ridiculous compared to what these
Vietnam veterans had gone through, although I did take the precaution
of wearing a shorthair wig at first, as it was then still common to shoot
down people with long hair. I had seven such deaths confirmed personally
- two of them sons of families I stayed with. (I myself only had beer
bottles thrown at me from car windows, in addition to numerous fines and
warnings from police who in several states consistently throw hitch-hikers
in jail.) Gradually as I began to meet the ordinary population, I discovered
how few of them actually supported the Vietnam war. I therefore began
to ask myself what it was that allowed this war to rage on. Everywhere
I met an openness to my point of view about Vietnam which I had never
experienced among the fossilized Danes, as I began to think of them. I
started to feel that while the disaster for the Americans was that they
had not been informed about Vietnam by their one-sided
press, which had in turn been misled by the government; the disaster in
Europe was that the Europeans simply did not want to listen to other views
than those they already had. Whether this impression was reasonable or
not, it was nevertheless what made me love the Americans.
Working with the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War helped to politicize me and I came to strongly
oppose what we called the "system." I got into circles, both
black and white, which did not shrink from using violent methods and for
a while I went through a period of questioning whether the use of such
counter-violence was justified. I mention later in the book how Wounded
Knee was a turning point which made me a strong advocate of non-violence
- not least for practical reasons, since I have never been able to kill
a fly. Yet after Wounded Knee I made a more serious attempt at going to
Latin America and when I saw conditions in Guatemala - the hunger, the
child funerals, and the brutal American installed military dictatorship's
repression of the Indians - I was so embittered that I hitch-hiked around
in the mountains hoping to join the guerrillas. I didn't manage to find
them. Instead I was constantly stopped by machinegun-toting soldiers and
interrogated. One time a branch tore my wig off and all my hair fell out
right next to them - luckily without their noticing it.
Somewhere in the
jungle I read an issue of Time which said that big demonstrations were
anticipated at the upcoming Republican convention, particularly by the
Vietnam veterans. As I had become enormously bitter toward Nixon for his
support of Guatemala's bloody regime, I decided that I had to support
my friends in Miami. I tried to get there on a banana boat, but in vain.
There were only six days till the convention. Hitch-hiking back to Guatemala
City, up through Mexico and across Texas and the South, I arrived just
in time. This was one of the biggest psychic leaps I ever made, for a
few days after having left the Indians' straw huts I managed to get to
live in the headquarters of Nixon himself, the Fontainebleau, by disguising
myself as a Republican delegate, with shorthair wig, tie, etc. A delegate
let me share her room. Here I spent a couple of days in the company of
the Nixon family and notorious Republicans such as John Wayne and Ronald
Reagan. I felt strongly drawn to their warm personalities and I couldn't
help asking John Wayne his opinion of the time we stopped his film "The
Green Berets" from showing in Denmark. Reagan I was much less interested
in. I perceived him as an extremist demagogue and outsider without any
chances. When he claimed that America had the best medical care in the
world I knew he was lying. I had already seen plenty of suffering and
unhealthy people in America.
Still, I tried to the best of my ability
to live myself into the Republican thought-world and my view became affected
to such a degree that when I stood at the window of my room on the 12th
floor I could not help looking at the thousands of demonstrators below
as dirty hippies and lazy bums. I had no desire to sleep outside with
them in the Flamingo Park. But entirely Republican I must not have looked,
for I ended up being arrested and interrogated four times by the Secret
Service. One time they sent a bomb squad up to my room to dismantle a
gadget which turned out to be my ancient flash being recharged. Another
time when I had been out with the demonstrators, and afterwards hid behind
a bush to change to my shorthair wig and Republican outfit again, an agent
hiding behind another bush called for reinforcements on his radio and
a whole squad of agents came running and seized me. Their leader thought
I was a "Bolshevik." The fourth time I was seized I had managed
to slip inside the convention center itself through waves of teargas during
Nixon's speech. It was the plan that an Australian journalist and I should
unfold an enormous banner with something like "Nixon napalms babies"
in front of Nixon, the world press, and the thousands of delegates. In
my bitterness after the experience of Guatemala I felt this would be a
worthy way to get at Nixon and wind up my USA journey. But as soon as
the Australian reached under his shirt to fish out the banner - shakingly
nervous as we both were - he was attacked by a whole flock of Secret Service
men. I hurried as discreetly as I could away from the spot and up on the
viewing stands under the huge American flags. But several delegates pointed
me out to the agents. I ran behind the flags where there was a fairly
free passage all the way down to the exit at the other end of the convention
hall. I thought I had a great lead, but in running I started a several
hundred yards long wave in the gigantic flags which the agents could follow
with their eyes and walky-talkies, with the result that a great reception
committee greeted me warmly when I emerged from behind the Stars and Stripes
at the other end. However, nobody could prove that I had been with the
Australian, so after a long interrogation I was released and avoided deportation.
I was, however, deported from Nixon's headquarters, but I considered it
a great moral victory that I first managed to make good friends with one
of the agents who said that he "understood" me. Such good friends
that when months later I stood on the viewing stands on Pennsylvania Avenue
in Washington to see Nixon's second inauguration and the grey flannel
suited agents with their paranoid eyes advanced in front of the motorcade,
one of them suddenly jumped up and waved when he saw me in the crowd.
I had succeeded in penetrating the secret police's grey anonymity.
In the beginning I had such
negative feelings about Denmark that I had completely broken off all communication,
but when I again started relating to my father I urged him to use many
of the experiences I wrote about in his church, and a good dialogue emerged
in which he sent me tapes of his sermons. My parents sent over a camera
for my birthday so that I could "prove" the many shocking things
I wrote about. It was a cheap half-frame camera that didn't demand much
skill from one who had never photographed before. In Wounded Knee the
camera was damaged and it was almost a year before I could afford the
money to get it repaired. So I got hold of a used Canon Dial, with which
almost all the pictures in this book were taken. The first couple of years
I traveled rather at random. It was during these years I learned how many
lonely and lost souls there are in our society, as it was almost always
them I ended up with. They needed someone who would listen to them. I
felt like some kind of wandering social worker and the photography was
only a secondary preoccupation for me - a kind of diary to remember the
people who came to mean something to me.
Often I spent days with a
lonesome person listening, and the more I learned about their frustrations,
the more I began to think about the society which had brought them into
this situation. Many of these relationships were sexual in origin. It
was often as if you had to pass such a threshold to reach the intimacy
that lets you open up to each other. Americans are very sexually aggressive,
both men and women, but I love them for that aggressiveness, because whatever
else, it creates possibilities for human contact, whereas in Europe, for
example, a man can easily travel without getting to know a single person.
Certainly it could be a little irritating and exhausting, with my inability
to say no, when I would get three rides with homosexuals in a row (the
25 miles between Winston-Salem and Greensboro thus once took a whole day)
or even worse three religious lifts with three different sermons. I have
sat praying with people all over America, but it could be a bit comical
when in the course of one day I would have to pray to Jehovah in one home
in the morning, later chant "Nam myo ho rengay kyo" in a Buddhist
home, and in the evening kneel to Allah in a Black Muslim home. I always
did what people told me to do and am therefore certain that I am in good
standing with all the Gods. But when I was in a rush I often made a big
detour around the thick Bible belt in eastern Tennessee, which almost
always sent me to the "Kingdom of Heaven" instead of my destination.
Occasionally I experienced the most surprising combinations of aggressiveness.
In Texas I stayed with a Catholic priest whom I first had to pray with
and who afterwards turned out to be gay. Critics will find a lot to accuse
this book of, but it will certainly not be possible to criticize me for
not having been completely open to Americans. I tried always to immerse
myself completely into people's ways of thinking, though one night I had
a narrow escape. I had been sitting and praying for hours in a church
in Mississippi with two women, both of them holding my hands. As always
I tried the best I could to open myself up completely. They were convinced
that I could be "saved" and that I would be able to "accept
Jesus," and they had a love and intensity in their eyes stronger
than any I had ever seen, so suddenly my head started swimming and I really
began to feel that I might see Jesus. Then I started
to resist tooth and nail. I sat and whispered to
myself, "No, you must not flee it all now.
You must believe in people. You must believe in
people. You must... " I succeeded in rescuing
myself from being saved, but the dilemma I had found
myself in was constantly a burning actuality for me. If I was to believe
in people then I also had to have faith in what these two women were telling
me. From then on I was more aware that to believe in people I always had
to believe in the totality of the people I met. The argument I used that
night was: "They don't let blacks into their church." Without
that they would perhaps have "saved" me, but I did not have
the heart to tell them that, as I liked them very much.
Although eleven
o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, I constantly
came to these white churches as I loved to see these racists from their
best side which usually flourishes toward guests right after the service.
From the moment when I began to see the sum of human suffering, the term
"the system" which I had learned from the demonstrators, became
practical for me, for as a vagabond you cannot survive without seeing
people themselves as without sin. Otherwise you would soon be eaten up
inside by hatred and thereby close yourself off from the world around
you. It was nevertheless hard to avoid identifying myself more strongly
with certain social groups than with others. Especially with the underclass
whom in my wanderings for food and housing I constantly encountered. Without
money and education I was myself a social loser and therefore naturally
got in touch with these street and night people. Since I always tried
to believe that what comes out of people's mouths is the truth - especially
with angry desperate people - I could not help being startled at hearing
apparently absurd utterances from people in the black underclass, like
"Hey, man, this ain't nothing but slavery."
A great deal of
my journey was therefore guided by my increasing curiosity to find out
whether there could reasonably be said to exist a kind of slavery in the
midst of the apparently free and mobile American system. Some of the conclusions
I came to I have gathered in this book. Almost everything in the book
is based on personal experiences. Therefore there will probably be many
misinterpretations in the book, which experts and scholars will be able
to pounce on. The book with its emotional statements ought to be experienced
for what it is: a travel book. It is a book for the broad masses I met
as a traveler and its truth does not go deeper than the verbal utterances
you hear in the underclass - which nevertheless are true for those pushed
out of the system. As I could almost never concentrate on reading as a
vagabond, only a very little derives from books. Even the statistics
are picked up from garbage cans (from which I usually fished the
excellent New York Times). I have, however, in this updated version written
especially for Americans, checked some of my sources on the topic. Furthermore,
I have learned from the audiences of the original slideshow (which the
book is based on) in both Europe and America, and I have included photos
and experiences from my later vagabondings in the States.
However, I want
to stress that this book can in no way stand alone. To obtain a complete
impression of the Afro-American situation you must do other reading. If
you do not intend to do that, blacks will be better off if you don't touch
this book. It is, and can only be, a vagabond's impressions, and must
on no account be considered the statement of an expert. The only thing
one may call me an expert on is vagabonding, which is something you can't
learn from books. In the last few years I have seen a severe deterioration
of conditions for the black underclass and the late 1980's will most likely
look even worse than the picture the book gives. It is worth mentioning
that the shock I convey here at my meeting with American poverty is based
on the underclass in its best years ever - the time right after the gains
of the Civil Rights movement had been instituted and before Reagan's cutbacks
had taken effect.
I have often been criticized in America for not mentioning
these gains. That I do not is partly because I take it for granted that
everybody has heard about this now historical period in school and partly
because I had not myself seen conditions before that time enabling me
to compare. But it is difficult for me to imagine that conditions can
have been much worse before my arrival. When conditions are as hopelessly
desperate as I experienced them, dwelling on the big gains of the past
can easily serve as an excuse for not doing anything about the problems
today. Dostoyevsky once said that you can get an impression of a society's
character by entering its prisons. Whether you can also judge a social
system by entering its ghettos must be up to the reader to decide. I just
don't think one can claim to be "objective" if one does not
continuously see a society from the viewpoint of those worst off. Those
journalists who try to balance the viewpoint of the rich with that of
the poor have already accepted this lopsided distribution of wealth and
justified it and are therefore themselves a part of the oppression. They
can therefore not claim to be historically objective. History has almost
always proven the worst-off right; there are not many today who will not
admit that it was right of the radicals of years
ago (the abolitionists) not to try to balance the point of view of the
slave master with that of the slave - even when a majority of the slaves
in the eyes of whites looked "happy." This worm's eye view is
however not only a vagabond perspective, but also to some extent a traditional
Scandinavian perspective. In Denmark, which has given support to many
liberation movements in the Third World, the traditional social ideal
is a country where "few have too much and fewer too little."
The photos in this book of broken and apathetic people generate in the
average Dane a strong feeling of sympathy and in many an automatic indignation
against that society which has caused such human oppression.
When they
see the faces in this book they intuitively know that they are not the
faces of a free society. Most Americans to whom I showed the book, however,
leafed through it quickly with a feeling of distaste and automatically
put the blame on the victims themselves. The same difference in attitude
is behind the criticism I often get in America, that I present the black
underclass as "powerless victims." When that underclass generation
after generation has constituted a permanent component of society - even
in the boom of the 60's - then they are, as a matter of fact "powerless
victims" of a system not designed to give the weakest a chance. The
lack of social understanding of which Scandinavians often accuse Americans
is most clearly shown in their eternal pointing to some individual who
worked his way up from poverty as proof that there is possibility of opportunity
for the group, while they are blind to how the group as a whole is shut
out from opportunity. Knowing how differently Americans will see these
photos I can't help having uneasy feelings about publishing them in America.
They could simply serve to reinforce racist attitudes toward the underclass
there, since the feeling that it is "society's fault" if a group
of people can't fit in (and that therefore society ought to change continually
to be in harmony with human beings) seems to be on a decline in the conservative
wave in the States.
There is naturally also racism
in Denmark - first and foremost towards foreign workers and Greenlanders,
especially now, as a result of the current economic crisis. Though I have
gradually learned that I, like all other people, am a product of my environment,
this of course doesn't mean that all Danes share the opinions of this
book. In fact the original edition was meant as a very strong attack on
parts of Danish policy, where I used the bogey
of America to point out where certain tendencies in Denmark could lead
if we don't change our political course in time. But even with this strong
critique of Danish conditions, many elementary schools there have bought
the book as a classroom text and the four-hour multi-media show has become
a yearly recurrent event in Danish high schools.
The difference between
the Danish and the American points of view comes out most clearly in a
couple of key sentences I hear again and again in the two countries. In
the early 70's I felt myself extremely drawn to the American hippies,
but when I constantly heard them fall back on a sentence I heard throughout
the rest of the population - "I just want to have a good time"
- I knew how far I stood from them. For the corresponding Danish sentence
is "Hvor har vi det dog godt herhjemme" - a strong conscience-stricken
expression ("How good we (unfairly) have it here at home (in Denmark).")
Such collective guilt about having it too good in comparison with the
poor countries hardly exists in the States, while you sometimes get the
impression that Scandinavians feel personally guilty for all the crimes
in the world. The two expressions are directly reflected in our differing
foreign policies, as Scandinavia has often given support to liberation
movements in the same countries where America for purely egoistic and
commercial reasons supports repressive regimes.