MINISTER (cont.) Let me make myself quite clear. We need critical dissent because it keeps us on our toes. But we don’t want to see it in the marketplace or on the avenues and piazzas of our great cities. We don’t want to see it manifested in the houses of any of our great institutions. We are happy for it to remain at home, which means we can pop in at any time and read what is kept under the bed, discuss it with the writer, pat him on the head, shake him by his hand, give him perhaps a minor kick up the arse or in the balls, and set fire to the whole shebang. By this method we keep our society free from infection. There is of course, however, always room for confession, retraction, and redemption.

PRESS So you see your role as Minister of Culture as vital and fruitful?

MINISTER Immensely fruitful. We believe in the innate goodness of your ordinary Jack and your ordinary Jill. This is what we seek to protect. We seek to protect the essential goodness of your ordinary Jack and your ordinary Jill. We understand that as a moral obligation. We are determined to protect them from corruption and subversion with all the means at our disposal.

PRESS Minister, thank you for your frank words.

MINISTER It has been my pleasure. Can I say one thing more?

PRESS (various) Please. Yes. Yes please. Please do. Yes!

MINISTER Under our philosophy . . . he that is lost is found. Thank you!

Applause. The Minister waves and exits.

Blackout.

An Open Letter to the Prime Minister

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER

Dear Prime Minister,

We have been reminded often over the last few weeks of Saddam Hussein’s appalling record in the field of human rights. It is indeed appalling: brutal, pathological. But I thought you might be interested to scrutinize the record of your ally, the United States, in a somewhat wider context. I am not at all certain that your advisors will have kept you fully informed.

The United States has supported, subsidized, and, in a number of cases, engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world since 1945. I refer to Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, Greece, Uruguay, the Philippines, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, and El Salvador, for example. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered by these regimes, but the money, the resources, the equipment (all kinds), the advice, the moral support, as it were, has come from successive U.S. administrations.

The deaths really do mount up: 170,000 in Guatemala, 200,000 in East Timor, 80,000 in El Salvador, 30,000 in Nicaragua, 500,000 in Indonesia—and that’s just to be going on with. They are, every single one of them, attributable to your ally’s foreign policy.