Unafraid to swim against the grain: political novels for any season

Blitz Reviews—

Patrice Greanville

Progressives who have the rare talent to pen novels—captivating ones at that—are turning to that form to educate and entertain their fellows about the global corruption of all forms of representative government (which was never that representative to begin with) in what optimists still call “Western democracies.” Some are actually professional novelists, like our own Gaither Stewart. who has written extensively about such topics. His Europe Trilogy, comprising The Trojan Spy and Lily Pad Roll, (a third volume is in preparation), written as spy thrillers rivaling John le Carré’s best outings, explores issues of big power confrontation, Cold War politics, subterranean shenanigans, history, culture, and the century-old efforts of the global plutocracy to destroy, encircle, and eventually annihilate all attempts by humanity to create a non-capitalist model of governance. In general this has meant Russia and China, as the two most powerful nations with a history of socialism, but the military machinery and the engines of demonizing propaganda will promptly turn on any nation that runs afoul of the plutocrats and their shills in Washington.

Against this backdrop, events in the Ukraine are but the latest demonstration of this American modus operandi, a class-driven, criminal dynamic that seeks as its ultimate goal nothing less than the crippling and/or carving up of Russia itself. I presume Putin and his advisors are fully ware of this, because if they aren’t we are in worse shape than anyone could imagine. That such policy agenda may result in a global conflagration with horrid planetary outcomes seems of no consequence to the cliques at the helm of the US government, especially but not limited to its rabid neocon base.

As we write these lines, most of the “visible” State Department and foreign policy establishment, and numerous hangers on is comprised of such neocons — Condi Rice, Samantha Powers, William Kristol, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, Elliot Abrams, and Michael Ledeen (see below), to name just the most notorious. We could go on, as this malignant tribe is as common and fertile as toxic fungus in a dank basement. The neocon disease, after all, is a fully bipartisan plague.

Neocons-are-back

Last year we also saw another leading contributing editor to The Greanville Post, Dr Steven Jonas, issue a revised edition of his classic, The 15% Solution, How the Republican Right Took Control of the US Government, alerting us to the real and present danger (to use a phrase coined by the anticommunist mafia to signify “the Communist menace”) but in this case representing the Christofascists deep in our cultural fabric, people who will not relent or give up their belief in the necessity to install a “Christian nation” on US soil, by any means necessary. The book has been extremely well received, with one commenter summing up the consensus: “[this book] could be the needed antidote that prevents a coup establishing a fascist Christian nation.”

In the same vein we now have another worthy title, this one authored by John Rachel. In his own words, An Unlikely Truth “is my attempt to help remedy the political nightmare that America has become …”

Gerald Everett Jones has written a very good and concise review of this title, so I will simply yield the floor to him, while adding my endorsement:

“John Rachel gets five stars just for intellectual brashness and bravery, and a few more for helping to stimulate dialogue about the political process in America. In An Unlikely Truth, the author gives us a straightforward story of speculative fiction. Green Party candidate Martin Truth wages a grass-roots campaign for a Congressional seat from Ohio against a slick, media-sly incumbent. You may be reminded of the ascendancy of former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a past mayor of Cleveland, who ran for President twice and had a talent for stirring the pot. Although this is Mr. Truth’s third bid, he’s never held any political office. And even in the heat of the election battle, he still has a day-job as a driver for a package-delivery service. Unlikely, indeed – but still possible. No question, Rachel is an astute observer of the post-Web political process. He well knows the finer points of guerilla-style strategy, the pitfalls of attempting to manipulate public opinion, and the huge role played in almost every election by happenstance. This book should get you thinking about how polarized the national debate has become. Stark and simplistic pro-or-con arguments – of the sort that pull votes and avoid confusing complications – force us apart, prevent thoughtful consensus, and make responsible governance nearly impossible.” –

season, do consider these books as the gift that will surely keep on giving. Clarity. Maturity in the way you perceive politics. I can’t think of any task facing American activists, awakened USers—apart from joining the political process at all conceivable levels (and not falling for the trap that elections are the main or only track!) more urgent than helping to open the eyes of our compatriots as to the imposture they live under. The monstrous capitalist brainwash has to be overcome if humanity is to survive and the planet avoid collapse across all its vital dimensions. If this can be done while also engaging the public’s imagination, so much the better.

•••

Political economist and media critic Patrice Greanville is founding editor of The Greanville Post.

BOOKS: The Grotesqueries of Iraq

Hassan Blasim’s “The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq”

by CHARLES R. LARSON

A typical display of unrepentant arrogant imperialist ignorance.

We came, we saw, we destroyed. Then left the country a bloody stinking mess. A typical display of unrepentant chauvinist arrogance, the venom that intoxicates so many US soldiers and facilitates their exploitation by the ruling elites.

Of the fourteen violent, brutal, and bloody short stories in Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, only one (the last one in the collection) has a bit of levity, and even it ends consistently with the events and the tone of the other thirteen. The description of the book on the jacket refers to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, which—if you recall—was an emblematic moment, revealing the true attitudes of American soldiers about Iraqis. By contrast, Blasim’s stories illustrate the other side—not how Iraqis regarded Americans but the relentless violence born of the American invasion of the country. But just as those disgusting photos taken at Abu Ghraib are difficult to look at, reading Blasim’s stories is a relentless assault on the American reader. Certainly, they must have been a challenge for Jonathan Wright to translate but the result is nothing less than impressive.

That final story (“The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”) provides a few minutes of relief, just before the coup de grace. It’s one of only two that I could say I truly enjoyed reading simply because of the bleakness of all the others. This one begins with a paragraph the states that “In Iraq his name was Salim Abdul Husain, [but] he died in Holland in 2009 under another name: Carlos Fuentes.” That ought to grab any informed reader. In Iraq, during the war, Salim was a sweeper, charged with cleaning up the body parts after explosions on the streets. He and the others he worked with always hoped they would discover an “intact wallet” and get rich. “He needed money to buy a visa to go to Holland and escape this hell of fire and death.”

One day, Salim discovers a severed finger with an expensive ring still attached to it. Obviously, he keeps the ring which he then sells, and he acquires the visa after explaining to “the official in the immigration department…that he was frightened of the fanatical Islamist groups, because his request for asylum was based on his [earlier] work as a translator for the U.S. forces, and his fear that someone might assassinate him as a traitor to his country.” Sound familiar? Last thing I read there are hundreds of such translators in both Iraq and Afghanistan who have been denied visas to escape to the West. They are frightened to death.

The inspired part of the story is revealed when Salim talks to his cousin in France who advises him that when he gets his visa he needs to change his name so that he will no longer be recognizable as an Iraqi. “It’s a hundred times better to be from Senegal or China than it is to have an Arab name in Europe.” His cousin tells Salim to “choose a brown name—a Cuban or Argentine name” that will suit his complexion, and since the cousin is reading a literary article that he doesn’t understand he proposes “Carlos Fuentes.” Done. Mission accomplished.

Carlos Fuentes becomes very happy living in Amsterdam. He takes classes to learn Dutch. He won’t mix with Arabs. Soon, he’s totally transformed, denigrating his own past. “Look how clean the streets are! Look at the toilet seat; it’s sparkling clean. Why can’t we eat like them? We gobble down our food as though it’s about to disappear.” And he adds, “Why can’t we be peaceful like them? We live in houses like pigsties while their homes are warm, safe, and colorful. Why do they respect dogs as much as humans? Why do we masturbate twenty-four hours a day?” No more masturbation for Carlos Fuentes; he marries his Dutch girlfriend, a rather hefty young woman who loves him. And, soon, he tells people that he’s a Mexican.

Finally, he becomes “a Dutch national,” erasing his Arab origins totally—or so he believes. But the story concludes with a rather imaginative psychological twist, beginning with Carlos Fuentes’ dreams of the past, dreams he cannot suppress. Pretty soon it’s a matter of PTS caused by the war, with scenes he cannot escape and the earlier humor is drained from the story—intentionally, of course.

The other story that I enjoyed, even found fascinating, is called “An Army Newspaper.” The unnamed narrator, who is one of the editors, receives a number of short stories based on the war, written by a soldier who is still fighting. He believes they are so impressive that he should publish them, but under his own name. Who’s going to find out—perhaps the soldier who wrote them will be killed in the war. Thus, one story is published to great acclaim. Then he learns that the soldier has been killed so it’s obvious that he should publish the others, also under his own name. But the short stories keep arriving—every day, so the editor checks. Perhaps it was an error. The soldier must not have been killed. But there’s a grave and a body. Yet the stories keep arriving, even though he starts burning them. Dozens of them, and soon the stories become a metaphor for unending war. Even guilt. Did the editor extend the war by publishing the stories? Is there no way for this situation ever to end?

The other stories are filled with strange juxtapositions of life in Iraq ever since the American invasion: car bomb explosions, Facebook, weapons everywhere, a collapsed economy, booze, hashish, corpses and headless bodies. Hard to take in one sitting but probably just the medicine that we need.

Hassan Blasim: The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

Trans. by Jonathan Wright

Penguin, 196 pp., $15

Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. Email: clarson@american.edu.

BOOKS: Forging a Socialist-Islamist Alliance

By William T. Hathaway

Review of Eric Walberg, From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization, Clarity Press, 2013

From Postmodernism to Postsecularism- Re-emerging Islamic Civilization Most western Middle East experts see Islam as a problem for the West — a source of terrorism, religious fanaticism, unwanted immigrants — and they see their job as helping to change the Middle East so it’s no longer a problem for us. Eric Walberg, however, recognizes that this is another instance of the Big Lie.

The actual problem is the multifaceted aggression the West has been inflicting on the Middle East for decades and is determined to continue, no matter what the cost to them and us will be. His books and articles present the empirical evidence for this with scholarly precision and compassionate concern for the human damage done by our imperialism.

His latest book, From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our ongoing war on the Muslim world — from Libya to the Philippines, from growing beleaguered communities scattered across North America and Europe to South Africa and Australia — from the perspective of those on the receiving end of America’s violence today. It is a compelling representation of both the breathtaking sweep of fourteen centuries of Islamic civilization and the current state of the Muslim world.

In this sequel to his impressive Postmodern Imperialism (2011), Walberg attempts to bridge the East-West gap, “not through a reconciliatory discourse, but through a critical reading of history,” according to the Palestinian-American writer Ramzy Baroud. Walberg looks at Islam as both religion and ideology, tracing it both via a methodological and an epistemological critique, and takes it seriously as a civilizational alternative to our present bankrupt secular imperialist order.

Our politicians and media have created an image of fiendish Muslim terrorists who “hate us for our freedom.” But they really hate us for subjugating them, for overthrowing their governments, dominating their economies, and undermining their way of life. Since we started the aggression, the attacks won’t end until we leave their countries.

Walberg asks the logical question: What can replace the neocolonial order so ruthlessly and cleverly put in place by the imperial powers in the Middle East over the past century? He explores many alternative answers ranging from “more of the same” to radical transformation.

What does Islam have to say about economics, politics, community, relations with Nature? Walberg charts a wealth of experience from the past fourteen centuries. Islam was the first world order to unite people on the basis of genuine equality, in a truly multicultural way. It never created empires like the Romans, the Christian heirs to the Romans, and most recently the British and Americans. Why?

Who are the great Muslim thinkers, and how do they differ from western thinkers of the time? How do the Prophet Muhammad’s efforts to enact the revelations of the Quran in the seventh century compare with the teachings of Marx about how to create a world order without the depredations of capitalism?

These are some of the questions Walberg addresses, trying to bring together the two main opponents of imperialism today: Islamists and socialists. Our foe is the entire Western corporate juggernaut, of which Israel is only a part. To survive, we must set aside our religious and political differences and form a united front. Shias, Sunnis, secularists, and socialists need to work together to defeat our common enemy. As Samir Amin wrote, “To bring the militarist project of the United States to defeat has become the primary task, the major responsibility, for everyone.” If we join in solidarity, we can win. Otherwise the imperialists will continue to divide and rule.

But it is essential for socialists to take Islamists seriously, and vice versa, for both sides to understand the various currents in the common resistance to imperialism, and to forge alliances that will be lasting. So far, Islam has been at best tolerated by socialists, at worst, dismissed and opposed. At the same time, Islamists have been suspicious of the socialist reaction to imperialism, in a sense, wishing a pox on both houses.

Leftists are quick to condemn Islamists as strategically obtuse, or worse craven, willing to collaborate with imperialists (Saudis from the start, Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s–60s against Nasserists), and to take CIA money (Afghanistan). There are those who denounce Hamas as an Israeli creation. Walberg looks closely at these arguments, based on his analysis of imperialist strategies during the past two centuries.

That Hamas possibly got support from Israeli sources is part of the age-old imperialist use of Islamists, but it has backfired. Hamas didn’t sell out. Fatah/PLO discredited themselves over decades and are now empty shells. The role of Hamas in exposing PLO hypocrisy and “holding the fort” against Israel has been proved decisively since it came to power in democratic elections in 2006.

From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization is a gripping and informative wake-up call to both sides of the anti-imperial equation, pulling together the many threads that can unite us, from Foucault’s “political spirituality,” to the Egyptian revolutionaries’ solidarity with America’s 99%, to the American Muslims’ support for the peace and ecology movements.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and a member of the Freedom Socialist Party (www.socialism.com). His latest book, Wellsprings, concerns the environmental crisis: http://www.cosmicegg-books.com/books/wellsprings. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

It’s the Other Oscars — and yet again the winner slips away

By John Pilger
Source: John Pilger Website

Do actors ever reflect upon their moral responsibility for the ideological trash they help disseminate?

Cumberbatch and Assange: a smear job, sold as great acting.

It’s celebrity time again. The Golden Globes have been, and the Oscars are coming. This is a “vintage year,” say Hollywood’s hagiographers on cue. It isn’t. Most movies are made to a formula for the highest return, money-fuelled by marketing and something called celebrity. This is different from fame, which can come with talent. True celebrities are spared that burden.

Occasionally, this column treads the red carpet, awarding its own Oscars to those whose ubiquitous promotion demands recognition. Some have been celebrities a long time, drawing the devoted to kiss their knees (more on that later). Others are mere flashes in the pan, so to speak.

In no particular order, the nominees for the Celebrity Oscars are:

Benedict Cumberbatch. This celebrity was heading hell-bent for an Oscar, but alas, his ultra-hyped movie, The Fifth Estate, produced the lowest box office return for years, making it one of Hollywood’s biggest ever turkeys. This does not diminish Cumberbatch’s impressive efforts to promote himself as Julian Assange — assisted by film critics, massive advertising, the US government and, not least, the former PR huckster, David Cameron, who declared, “Benedict Cumberbatch — brilliant, fantastic piece of acting. The twitchiness and everything of Julian Assange is brilliantly portrayed.” Neither Cameron nor Cumberatch has ever met Assange. The “twitchiness and everything” was an invention.

Assange had written Cumberbatch a personal letter, pointing out that the “true story” on which the film claimed to be based was from two books discredited as hatchet jobs. “Most of the events depicted never happened, or the people shown were not involved in them,” WikiLeaks posted. In his letter, Assange asked Cumberbatch to note that actors had moral responsibilities, too. “Consider the consequences of your cooperation with a project that vilifies and marginalises a living political refugee …”

Cumberbatch’s response was to reveal selected parts of Assange’s letter and so elicit further hype from the “agonising decision” he faced — which, as it turned out, was never in doubt. That the movie was a turkey was a rare salute to the public.

Robert De Niro is the celebrity’s celebrity. I was in India recently at a conference with De Niro, who was asked a good question about the malign influence of Hollywood on living history. The 1978 multi-Oscar winning movie The Deerhunter was cited, especially its celebrated Russian roulette scene; De Niro was the star.

“The Russian roulette scene might not have happened,” said De Niro, “but it must have happened somewhere. It was a metaphor.” He refused to say more; the celebrity star doesn’t like giving interviews.

When The Deerhunter was released, the Daily Mail described it as “the story they never dared to tell before … the film that could purge a nation’s guilt!” A purgative indeed — that was almost entirely untrue.

Following America’s expulsion from its criminal invasion of Vietnam, The Deerhunter was Hollywood’s post-war attempt to reincarnate the triumphant Batman-jawed white warrior and present a stoic, suffering and often heroic people as sub-human Oriental idiots and barbarians. The film’s dramatic pitch was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which De Niro and his fellow stars, imprisoned in rat-infested bamboo cages, were forced to play Russian roulette by resistance fighters of the National Liberation Front, whom the Americans called Vietcong.

The director, Michael Cimino, insisted this scene was authentic. It was fake. Cimino himself had claimed he had served in Vietnam as a Green Beret. He hadn’t. He told Linda Christmas of the Guardian he had “this insane feeling that I was there … somehow the fine wires have got really crossed and the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.” His brilliantly acted fakery has since become a YouTube “classic”: for many people, their only reference to that “forgotten” war.

While he was in India, De Niro visited Bollywood, where his celebrity is god-like. Fawning actors sat at his feet and kissed his knees. Bollywood’s asinine depiction of modern India is not dissimilar to The Deerhunter‘s distortion of America and Asia.

Nelson Mandela was a great human being who became a celebrity. “Sainthood,” he told me drily, “is not the job I applied for.” The western media appropriated Mandela and made him into a one-dimensional cartoon celebrity tailored for bourgeois applause: a kind of political Santa Claus. That his dignity served as a facade behind which his beloved ANC oversaw the further impoverishment and division of his people was unmentionable. And in death, his celebrity-sainthood was assured.

For those outside Britain, the name Keith Vaz is not associated with celebrity. And yet this Labour Party politician has had a long and distinguished career of self-promotion, while slipping serenely away from scandals and near-scandals, a parliamentary inquiry and a suspension, having acquired the soubriquet Keith Vaseline. In 2009, he was revealed to have claimed 75,500 pounds in expenses for an apartment in Westminster despite having a family home just 12 miles from parliament.

Last year, Vaz’s parliamentary home affairs committee summoned Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to Parliament to discuss the leaks of Edward Snowden. Vaz’s opening question to Rusbridger was: “Do you love this country?”

Once again, Vaz was an instant celebrity, though, once again, not the one he longed to be. He was compared with the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy. Still, the sheer stamina of his endeavours proves that Keith Vaseline is no flash in the pan; and is the Oscar Celebrity of the Year! Congratulations Keith, and commiserations, Benedict; you were only just behind.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and documentary film-maker. He is one of only two to win British journalism’s highest award twice, for his work all over the world. On 1 November, he was awarded Britain’s highest honor for documentary film-making by the Grierson Trustees, in memory of the documentary pioneer John Grierson. He has been International reporter of the Year and a recipient of the United Nations Association Peace Prize and Gold Medal. In 2003, he received the prestigious Sophie Prize for “thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights.” In 2009, he was awarded Australia’s international human rights award, the Sydney Peace Prize, “for his courage as a film-maker and journalist in enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard “

BOOKS: FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY: THE CHALLENGE OF BEING HUMAN

By Paul Carline, Senior Contributing Editor

“The Fifth Sun” – an unusual title for this unusual, enthralling and deeply moving novel by Gaither Stewart, set in Italy and Mexico, two of the several countries in which Stewart has spent significant periods of time.Stewart’s four main characters in “The Fifth Sun” are each, in their different ways, dissatisfied with modern life. Each of them searches for greater meaning and purpose in their lives – a search which leads them to make changes, reject their former lives and seek some kind of ‘salvation’, including also through sacrifice. Each person is of different origin and their quests take place against the backgrounds of Catholicism, traditional Mexican indigenous beliefs, agnosticism and atheism. Their individual searches begin in Italy and arrive at vastly different and unexpected outcomes in Mexico.

Mexican Diego, gay and at the beginning of the novel in the process of being confirmed – in St. Peter’s in Rome – as a priest in the Catholic church, comes from a rich and large aristocratic family, the de la Vega Salinas. His future has been mapped out for him by his grandfather: “Diego Fernando would be the family priest. The others were lawyers, doctors, bankers, industrialists. But Diego would be the guarantor of salvation for the entire family … a priest in the family would be redemptive for all”. Diego is confused, not only by his sexuality, but because from childhood he had been immersed in pre-Hispanic history and culture, the passion of his anthropologist grandfather – and yet it appears he is destined to serve the god of the Roman church: “The world of trinities still confused his mind and his spirit —on one side, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl and on the other, the Church’s God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He read of the peregrinations of Saint Francis and simultaneously the stories of the Méxica heroes— the death of the last Aztec leader Cuauhtemoc and the man-god of light, Quetzalcoatl, for whose return they waited”.

Diego’s father was pro-Yankee, rejected traditional Mexican culture and for a time even admired Hitler. But lying on the cold marble of St. Peter’s, Diego “perceives in his groin the existence of another self. Under his Church habit lives a rebel”. Diego’s rebellion eventually takes him back to Mexico and to work in a slum, where he finds peace and fulfillment at last.

In Rome Diego meets and befriends the other main characters: Sarah, (with her mother Dorothy playing a minor role), the artist Michele and the bon vivant Robert Jay. Sarah loves Diego, Diego loves Michele, Michele loves Sarah. Robert Jay loves whoever is available.

Originally titled Walks of Dreams, The Fifth Sun actually predates Stewart’s major work – his political spy thriller “The Europe Trilogy” – of which the first two parts:The Trojan Spy and Lily Pad Roll have already been published by Punto Press, while the third, Time of Exile, is about to appear. The earlier work differs from the trilogy in being essentially “apolitical”, being more akin to Stewart’s rich collection of short stories, in which character and place are predominant – with the story line seemingly emerging from the characters themselves and their interactions, with the author being ‘merely’ an observer (but what an eye he has).

In the creation myths which were preserved by the Aztec and other Nahua peoples, the central belief was that there had been four worlds, or “Suns”, before the present universe. These earlier worlds and their inhabitants had been created, then destroyed, by the catastrophic actions of leading deities of the Aztec pantheon. The present world is the fifth sun, and the Aztec saw themselves as “the People of the Sun”, whose duty was to wage cosmic war in order to provide the sun-god with his tlaxcaltiliztli (“nourishment”). Without it, the sun would disappear from the heavens. Thus the welfare and the very survival of the universe depended upon the offerings of blood and hearts to the sun. Should these sacrifices cease, or should mankind fail to please the gods for any other reason, this fifth sun would go black, the world would be shattered by a catastrophic earthquake, and the Tzitzimitl (the stars) would slay the current sun-god Huitzilopochtli and all of humanity.

Similar traditional beliefs in a succession of ‘ages’ are found widely across the world – the four ages of man of classical Greek mythology, with the first ‘Golden Age’ of peace, harmony and prosperity being succeeded by progressively less perfect ages (Silver, Bronze, Heroic, Iron), the last-named being a period of ultimate decline. Analogous myths from the Vedic and Hindu cultures of southern Asia saw history as cyclical, made up of successive ages known as ‘yugas’, and with an alternation of ‘dark’ and ‘golden’ ages. The Kali yuga (Iron Age), Dwapara (Bronze Age), Treta yuga (Silver Age) and Satya yuga (Golden Age) correspond to the four Greek ages. Similar beliefs occur in the ancient Middle East and throughout the ancient world. They were also reintroduced – with modifications – into European culture in the 20th century through the teachings of the theosophical and anthroposophical movements.

Two concepts are fundamental in all these belief systems, even if in some the cycle merely repeats itself endlessly: that of development, change or evolution (whether at the individual or societal level); and that of the necessity of sacrifice (again, either personal or societal, or both) to achieve that evolution. No growth without change; no gain without pain. But in our modern world, real change has become unwelcome – the desire is for a continuation of the status quo, at least for those who are already comfortable.

Lines from Joni Mitchell’s classic “California” come to mind: “Sitting in a park in Paris, France/ reading the news and it sure looks bad./ They won’t give peace a chance/ that was just a dream some of us had./Still a lot of lands to see/but I wouldn’t want to stay here/it’s too old and cold and settled in its ways here …”, ‘here’ being Europe. But hasn’t America, too, and most of the “developed” world, become “old and cold and settled in its ways” – in the ways of consumerism, of pseudo-democracy, and of neo-imperialistic warmongering? Didn’t the commitment to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” inevitably induce a focus on self-gratification, on the accumulation of possessions and wealth, and a forgetfulness of the goal of personal and spiritual development which gave meaning to earlier cultures and which saved them from crass materialism (at least until their decline)?

However barbaric the practices of the ancient sun-worshippers now seem, there was meaning and purpose in the people’s lives. Their societies were well-organised and socially integrated – perhaps because there was not the sense of individual freedom which has been an essential part of the European heritage at least since the classical Greek time (hence the birth of democracy there). But freedom is a two-edged sword – a blessing and a curse – because with it come conscience and moral responsibility (a experiential reality, despite the attempt by philosophical materialism to deny this, as it denies meaning and purpose in the universe altogether).

Freedom and responsibility. The awful tension between them is experienced by each of the characters in The Fifth Sun. For three of them, there is a resolution. Stewart leaves the reader to ponder the fate of the fourth.

—Paul Carline
Dunsyre, Scotland