NAOMI KLEIN •> The New Yorker

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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen I was first asked to speak at a Vatican press conference on Pope Francis’s recently published climate-change encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” I was convinced that the invitation would soon be rescinded. Now the press conference and, after it, a two-day symposium to explore the encyclical is just two days away. This is actually happening.

As usual ahead of stressful trips, I displace all of my anxiety onto wardrobe. The forecast for Rome in the first week of July is punishingly hot, up to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Women visiting the Vatican are supposed to dress modestly, no exposed legs or upper arms. Long, loose cottons are the obvious choice, the only problem being that I have a deep-seated sartorial aversion to anything with the whiff of hippie.

Surely the Vatican press room has air-conditioning. Then again, “Laudato Si’ ” makes a point of singling it out as one of many “harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more.” Will the powers that be make a point of ditching the climate control just for this press conference? Or will they keep it on and embrace contradiction, as I am doing by supporting the Pope’s bold writings on how responding to the climate crisis requires deep changes to our growth-driven economic model—while disagreeing with him about a whole lot else?

To remind myself why this is worth all the trouble, I reread a few passages from the encyclical. In addition to laying out the reality of climate change, it spends considerable time exploring how the culture of late capitalism makes it uniquely difficult to address, or even focus upon, this civilizational challenge. “Nature is filled with words of love,” Francis writes, “but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances?”

I glance shamefully around at the strewn contents of my closet. (Look: some of us don’t get to wear the same white getup everywhere…)

JULY 1ST—THE F-WORD

“The Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”

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[dropcap]F[/dropcap]our of us are scheduled to speak at the Vatican press conference, including one of the chairs of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All except me are Catholic. In his introduction, Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Holy See press office, describes me as a “secular Jewish feminist”—a term I used in my prepared remarks but never expected him to repeat. Everything else Father Lombardi says is in Italian, but these three words are spoken slowly and in English, as if to emphasize their foreignness.

The first question directed my way is from Rosie Scammell, with the Religion News Service: “I was wondering how you would respond to Catholics who are concerned by your involvement here, and other people who don’t agree with certain Catholic teachings?”

This is a reference to the fact that some traditionalists have been griping about all the heathens, including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and a roster of climate scientists, who were spotted inside these ancient walls in the run-up to the encyclical’s publication. The fear is that discussion of planetary overburden will lead to a weakening of the Church’s position on birth control and abortion. As the editor of a popular Italian Catholic Web site put it recently, “The road the church is heading down is precisely this: To quietly approve population control while talking about something else.”

I respond that I am not here to broker a merger between the secular climate movement and the Vatican. However, if Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.

After the press conference, a journalist from the U.S. tells me that she has “been covering the Vatican for twenty years, and I never thought I would hear the word ‘feminist’ from that stage.”

The air-conditioning, for the record, was left on.

The British and Dutch ambassadors to the Holy See host a dinner for the conference’s organizers and speakers. Over wine and grilled salmon, discussion turns to the political ramifications of the Pope’s trip to the United States this September. One of the guests most preoccupied with this subject is from an influential American Catholic organization. “The Holy Father isn’t making it easy for us by going to Cuba first,” he says.

I ask him how spreading the message of “Laudato Si’ ” is going back home. “The timing was bad,” he says. “It came out around the same time as the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, and that kind of sucked all the oxygen out of the room.” That’s certainly true. Many U.S. bishops welcomed the encyclical—but not with anything like the Catholic firepower expended to denounce the Supreme Court decision a week later.
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The contrast is a vivid reminder of just how far Pope Francis has to go in realizing his vision of a Church that spends less time condemning people over abortion, contraception, and who they marry, and more time fighting for the trampled victims of a highly unequal and unjust economic system. When climate justice had to fight for airtime [in the US] with denunciations of gay marriage, it didn’t stand a chance.

On the way back to the hotel, looking up at the illuminated columns and dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, it strikes me that this battle of wills may be the real reason such eclectic outsiders are being invited inside this cloistered world. We’re here because many powerful Church insiders simply cannot be counted upon to champion Francis’s transformative climate message—and some would clearly be happy to see it buried alongside the many other secrets entombed in this walled enclave.

Before bed, I spend a little more time with “Laudato Si’ ” and something jumps out at me. In the opening paragraph, Pope Francis writes that “our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.” He quotes Saint Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Creatures,” which states, “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”

Several paragraphs down, the encyclical notes that Saint Francis had “communed with all creation, even preaching to the flowers, inviting them ‘to praise the Lord, just as if they were endowed with reason.’ ” According to Saint Bonaventure, the encyclical says, the thirteenth-century friar “would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister.’ ”

Later in the text, pointing to various biblical directives to care for animals that provide food and labor, Pope Francis comes to the conclusion that “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hallenging anthropocentrism is ho-hum stuff for ecologists, but it’s something else for the pinnacle of the Catholic Church. You don’t get much more human-centered than the persistent Judeo-Christian interpretation that God created the entire world specifically to serve Adam’s every need. As for the idea that we are part of a family with all other living beings, with the earth as our life-giving mother, that too is familiar to eco-ears. But from the Church? Replacing a maternal Earth with a Father God, and draining the natural world of its sacred power, were what stamping out paganism and animism were all about.

By asserting that nature has a value in and of itself, Francis is overturning centuries of theological interpretation that regarded the natural world with outright hostility—as a misery to be transcended and an “allurement” to be resisted. Of course, there have been parts of Christianity that stressed that nature was something valuable to steward and protect—some even celebrated it—but mostly as a set of resources to sustain humans.

Francis is not the first Pope to express deep environmental concern—John Paul II and Benedict XVI did as well. But those Popes didn’t tend to call the earth our “sister, mother” or assert that chipmunks and trout are our siblings.

JULY 2ND—BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS

In St. Peter’s Square, the souvenir shops are selling Pope Francis mugs, calendars, aprons—and stacks and stacks of bound copies of “Laudato Si’,” available in multiple languages. Window banners advertise its presence. At a glance, it looks like just another piece of papal schlock, not a document that could transform Church doctrine.

This morning is the opening of “People and Planet First: The Imperative to Change Course,” a two-day gathering to shape an action plan around “Laudato Si,’” organized by the International Alliance of Catholic Development Organisations and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Speakers include Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and a current United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Change, as well as Enele Sopoaga, the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, an island nation whose existence is under threat from rising seas.

A soft-spoken bishop from Bangladesh leads an opening prayer, and Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson—a major force behind the encyclical—delivers the first keynote. At sixty-six, Turkson’s temples are gray, but his round cheeks are still youthful. Many speculate that this could be the man to succeed the seventy-eight-year-old Francis, becoming the first African pope.

Most of Turkson’s talk is devoted to citing earlier Papal encyclicals as precedents for “Laudato Si’.” His message is clear: this is not about one Pope; it’s part of a Catholic tradition of seeing the earth as a sacrament and recognizing a “covenant” (not a mere connection) between human beings and nature.

At the same time, the Cardinal points out that “the word ‘stewardship’ only appears twice” in the encyclical. The word “care,” on the other hand, appears dozens of times. This is no accident, we are told. While stewardship speaks to a relationship based on duty, “when one cares for something it is something one does with passion and love.”

This passion for the natural world is part of what has come to be called “the Francis factor,” and clearly flows from a shift in geographic power within the Catholic Church. Francis is from Argentina, and Turkson from Ghana. One of the most vivid passages in the encyclical—“Who turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of color and life?”—is a quotation from a statement of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.

This reflects the reality that, in large parts of the global south, the more anti-nature elements of Christian doctrine never entirely took hold. Particularly in Latin America, with its large indigenous populations, Catholicism wasn’t able to fully displace cosmologies that centered on a living and sacred Earth, and the result was often a Church that fused Christian and indigenous world views. With “Laudato Si’,” that fusion has finally reached the highest echelons of the Church.

Yet Turkson seems to gently warn the crowd here not to get carried away. Some African cultures “deified” nature, he says, but that is not the same as “care.” The earth may be a mother, but God is still the boss. Animals may be our relatives, but humans are not animals. (sic) Still, once an official Papal teaching challenges something as central as human dominion over the earth, is it really possible to control what will happen next?

This point is made forcefully by the Irish Catholic priest and theologian Seán McDonagh, who was part of the drafting process for the encyclical. His voice booming from the audience, he urges us not to hide from the fact that the love of nature embedded in the encyclical represents a profound and radical shift from traditional Catholicism. “We are moving to a new theology,” he declares.

To prove it, he translates a Latin prayer that was once commonly recited after communion during the season of advent. “Teach us to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven.” Overcoming centuries of loathing the corporeal world is no small task, and, McDonagh argues, it serves little purpose to downplay the work ahead.

It’s thrilling to witness such radical theological challenges being batted around inside the curved wooden walls of an auditorium named after St. Augustine, the theologian whose skepticism of things bodily and material so profoundly shaped the Church. But I would imagine that for the conspicuously silent men in black robes in the front row, who study and teach in this building, it is also a little terrifying.

This evening’s dinner is much more informal: a sidewalk trattoria with a handful of Franciscans from Brazil and the U.S., as well as McDonagh, who is treated by the others as an honorary member of the order.

My dinner companions have been some of biggest troublemakers within the Church for years, the ones taking Christ’s proto-socialist teachings seriously. Patrick Carolan, the Washington, D.C.-based executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, is one of them. Smiling broadly, he tells me that, at the end of his life, Vladimir Lenin supposedly said that what the Russian Revolution had really needed was not more Bolsheviks but ten St. Francises of Assisi.

Now, all of a sudden, these outsiders share many of their views with the most powerful Catholic in the world, the leader of a flock of 1.2 billion people. Not only did this Pope surprise everyone by calling himself Francis, as no Pope ever had before him, but he appears to be determined to revive the most radical Franciscan teachings. Moema de Miranda, a powerful Brazilian social leader, who was wearing a wooden Franciscan cross, says that it feels “as if we are finally being heard.”

For McDonagh, the changes at the Vatican are even more striking. “The last time I had a Papal audience was 1963,” he tells me over spaghetti vongole. “I let three Popes go by.” And yet here he is, back in Rome, having helped draft the most talked-about encyclical anyone can remember.

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McDonagh points out that it’s not just Latin Americans who figured out how to reconcile a Christian God with a mystical Earth. The Irish Celtic tradition also managed to maintain a sense of “divine in the natural world. Water sources had a divinity about them. Trees had a divinity to them.” But, in much of the rest of the Catholic world, all of this was wiped out. “We are presenting things as if there is continuity, but there wasn’t continuity. That theology was functionally lost.” (It’s a sleight of hand that many conservatives are noticing. “Pope Francis, The Earth Is Not My Sister,” reads a recent headline in The Federalist, a right-wing Web magazine.)
As for McDonagh, he is thrilled with the encyclical, although he wishes it had gone even further in challenging the idea that the earth was created as a gift to humans. How could that be so, when we know it was here billions of years before we arrived?

I ask how the Bible could survive this many fundamental challenges—doesn’t it all fall apart at some point? He shrugs, telling me that scripture is ever evolving, and should be interpreted in historical context. If Genesis needs a prequel, that’s not such a big deal. Indeed, I get the distinct sense that he’d be happy to be part of the drafting committee.

JULY 3RD—CHURCH, EVANGELIZE THYSELF

[dropcap]I [/dropcap]wake up thinking about stamina. Why did Franciscans like Patrick Carolan and Moema de Miranda stick it out for so long in an institution that didn’t reflect many of their deepest beliefs and values—only to live to see a sudden shift that many here can only explain with allusions to the supernatural? Carolan shared with me that he had been abused by a priest at age twelve. He is enraged by the cover-ups, and yet he did not let it drive him permanently from his faith. What kept them there?

I put this to Miranda when I see her at the end of Mary Robinson’s lecture. (Robinson had gently criticized the encyclical for failing to adequately emphasize the role of women and girls in human development.)

Miranda corrects me, saying that she is not actually one of those who stuck it out for much of their lifetimes. “I was an atheist for years and years, a Communist, a Maoist. Until I was thirty-three. And then I was converted.” She described it as a moment of pure realization: “Wow, God exists. And everything changed.”

I asked her what precipitated this, and she hesitates, and laughs a little. She tells me she had been going through a very difficult period in her life, when she came across a group of women “who had something different, even in their suffering. And they started talking about the presence of God in their lives in such a way that made me listen. And then it was, suddenly, God just is there. In one moment, it was something impossible for me to think. In the other moment, it was there.”

Conversion—I had forgotten about that. And yet it may be the key to understanding the power and potential of “Laudato Si’.” Pope Francis devotes an entire chapter of the encyclical to the need for an “ecological conversion” among Christians, “whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

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An evangelism of ecology, I realize, is what I have been witnessing take shape during the past three days in Rome—in the talk of “spreading the good news of the encyclical,” of “taking the Church on the road,” of a “people’s pilgrimage” for the planet, in Miranda laying out plans to spread the encyclical in Brazil through radio ads, online videos, and pamphlets for use in parish study groups.

A millennia-old engine designed to proselytize and convert non-Christians is now preparing to direct its missionary zeal inward, challenging and changing foundational beliefs about humanity’s place in the world among the already faithful. In the closing session, Father McDonagh proposes “a three-year synod on the encyclical,” to educate Church members about this new theology of interconnection and “integral ecology.”

Many have puzzled over how “Laudato Si’ ” can simultaneously be so sweepingly critical of the present and yet so hopeful about the future. The Church’s faith in the power of ideas—and its fearsome capacity to spread information globally—goes a long way toward explaining this tension. People of faith, particularly missionary faiths, believe deeply in something that a lot of secular people aren’t so sure about: that all human beings are capable of profound change. They remain convinced that the right combination of argument, emotion and experience can lead to life-altering transformations. That, after all, is the essence of conversion.

The most powerful example of this capacity for change may well be Pope Francis’s Vatican. And it is a model not for the Church alone. Because if one of the oldest and most tradition-bound institutions in the world can change its teachings and practices as radically, and as rapidly, as Francis is attempting, then surely all kinds of newer and more elastic institutions can change as well.

And if that happens—if transformation is as contagious as it seems to be here—well, we might just stand a chance of tackling climate change.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box type=”bio”] Naomi Klein is the author of “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” which comes out in paperback this August. A documentary based on the book, directed by Avi Lewis, will be released in September.[/box]

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD,  HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO.  EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS. 

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Gaither Stewart } Senior Editor,  The Greanville Post

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he international media reported recently that the conservative government of Hungary has projected a wall along the country’s southern border with Serbia to keep out clandestine Serbs who cross into Hungary in search of work. Some readers will recall that in 1999 the U.S. used Hungary as a base for the Serbian opposition organization, OTPOR (resistance), hailed in the West as the representative of democratic Serbia against the evil Communist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic, which however was financed and to some extent run by the West in an early color revolution, similar to the support for the Nazi anti-Russian group on the Maidan in Ukraine this year.
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Roger Cohen of the NY TIMES revealed that between 1998 and 2000 OTPOR received funds from three U.S. organizations including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which met with OTPOR  leaders also in Budapest, Hungary. The planned Hungarian wall today prompted me to revive and refresh my previous article and a translation of a story by Jorge Borges, both about walls.
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[dropcap]A[/dropcap] few years ago an amusing satirical article in the Buenos Aires leftwing daily, Pagina 12, made me want to cry. In some five thousand words the Argentinean journalist José Pablo Feinmann ridiculed, among other things, the whole concept of the great wall the U.S. Bush government projected along the border with Mexico.

“What? Raise a wall. The gringos must be very afraid,” the journalist writes. “Just suppose the Wall then becomes a Goal, a Goal that attracts people from all parts, just to see if they can reach the Goal. What would be the Goal? The Goal would be to jump over the wall. Let’s just suppose that a crazy German comes with an enormous hook and says, ‘I can jump over the Wall of the Gringos.’ And suppose the Wall then retains this name: The Wall of the Gringos.”

(The journalist goes on to recall that the word Gringo calls to mind the rancor of Latin Americans, things like the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro and “Gringos de mierda, imperialist pigs go home,” and the Wall then becomes the symbol of burgeoning North American Fascism. There are many legends about the origin of the word Gringo—perhaps from the Green Coats of American soldiers in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, “green coats go home” becomes “greens-go.” Argentineans called all immigrants, especially Italians, gringos. But as a rule today Gringo means Yankee, and is generally pejorative, even if North Americans in Mexico and southwards call themselves Gringos … but maybe that’s like whistling in the dark graveyard.)

   

MEN AND WALLS

Israel’s “Apartheid Wall”. segregating Palestinians. 

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Walls usually express fear and have never enjoyed much success. Like the walled cities of Jericho or of Old Europe, walls have usually been defensive. They aim at keeping out the enemy. But many centuries ago barbarians easily overran the 19-kilometer Aurelian walls around Rome, today crumbling, and that I once walked in one day. These however were small walls, insignificant walls, and even though the walls of Troy resisted for ten years, most walls fell quite easily to hooks and rams and ladders. Instead the 155-kilometer Berlin Wall was intended to keep people in (or was it only that?)—and who can say what could happen in Bush’s Republic?—but anyway the Berlin Wall fell too. Even the 6,700 mile Wall of China has gradually crumbled and become a tourist attraction. And what about the Israeli Wall? For the whole Arab world, for Berliners, for many Europeans, it is forty kilometers of evil. The reality is, walls just don’t work. 

The mere idea of a 700-mile wall between the USA and its neighbor Mexico is mind-boggling. The image of a globalized world in which contradictorily walls are built and bridges crumble recalls the feudal system when the lords only left their walled castles escorted by armed guards. The drama of illegal immigration was predicted to become the major issue of the XXI century. Now it is here. And political leaders have decided to look to the distant past for solutions: the Israeli wall and now the Wall of the Gringos are what they come up with.

A declaration of several years ago signed by 28 of 34 nations of the Organization of American States—of course NOT by the United States—expressed “deep concern” for such a “unilateral measure” contrary to the spirit of international understanding. Walls, it said, do not solve the problem of illegal immigration, and it urged the United States to recognize this position. Latin American leaders gathered in a summit in Uruguay condemned the idea of the Wall. Former Mexican President, Vicente Fox, a conservative, defined the idea of a wall on the Mexican border “stupid.” For Chilean President Michelle Bachelet a wall facing Mexico “damages the links of friendship in the hemisphere.”

At this point, as a change of pace: I am adding an exercise I have permitted myself, the translation of a story about walls by Jorge Luis Borges, which however had absolutely nothing to do with the Wall of the Gringos, to whose story I have added a few of my own comments.

[box type=”download”] The Wall and the Books (La Muralla y los Libros)

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By Jorge Luis Borges (translation from Spanish and comments by Gaither Stewart)

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He, whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds … Dunciad, II, 76. (1)

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I read, in past days, that the man who ordered the construction of the nearly infinite Wall of China was that First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who likewise ordered the burning of all the books before him. That the two gigantic operations—the five or six hundred leagues of stone to oppose the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is of the past—issued from one person and were in a certain sense his attributes, inexplicably satisfied me and, at the same time, disturbed me. The object of this note is to investigate the reasons for that emotion.

Historically there is no mystery in the two measures. A contemporary of the wars of Hannibal, Shih Huang Ti, King of Ch’in, conquered the Six Kingdoms and eliminated the feudal system; he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors. Burning books and building fortifications is common task to emperors; the only thing singular about Shih Huang Ti was the scale on which he operated. So some Sinologists would have us understand, but I feel that the facts to which I referred are something more than an exaggeration or a hyperbole of trivial inclinations. To enclose an orchard or a garden is common; not to enclose an empire. That the most traditional of races renounced the memory of its past, mythical or true, is no small matter. The Chinese had three thousand years of chronology (in those years, the Yellow Emperor and Chuang Tzu and Confucius and Lao Tzu) when Shih Huang Ti ordered that history began with him.
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Shih Huang Ti had banished his mother as a libertine; the orthodox saw only impiety in his severe justice; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, wanted to erase canonic books because they accused him; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, wanted to abolish the entire past in order to abolish one memory: the infamy of his mother. (Not unlike another king, in Judea, had all the children killed in order to kill one.) This conjecture is worth considering, but it tells us nothing about the wall, about the second facet of the myth. Shih Huang Ti, according to historians, forbade all mention of the word death and searched for the elixir of immortality and secluded himself in a figurative palace, which had as many rooms as the year has days; the data suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers intended to halt the advance of death.

Everything persists in his being, wrote Baruch Spinoza; perhaps the Emperor and his sages believed that immortality was intrinsic and that corruption could not penetrate a closed sphere. Perhaps the Emperor hoped to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First, in order to be truly the first, and he named himself Huang Ti in order to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing and the compass. The latter, according to the Book of Rites, gave things their true names; equally Shih Huang Ti boasted, in enduring inscriptions, that all things in his empire had the name they merited. He dreamed of founding an immortal dynasty; he ordered that his heirs should be named Second Emperor, Third Emperor, Fourth Emperor, and so on to infinity … I spoke of a magic design; it would also be possible to suppose that constructing a wall and burning the books were not simultaneous acts. This (according to the order we choose) would give us the image of a king who began by destroying and afterwards resigned himself to conserving, or that of a disabused king who destroyed what he defended earlier. Both conjectures are dramatic but lack, as far as I know, in historical basis. Herbert Allen Giles (2) relates that those who concealed books were branded by a red-hot iron and condemned to build the outrageous wall until the day of their death. This information favors or tolerates another interpretation. Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but sometime there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it. Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man. Maybe the burning of the libraries and the construction of the wall are operations that in a secret way cancel each other. 

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The tenacious wall that in this moment, and in all moments, projects its system of shadows across lands I will not see, is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered that the most reverent of nations burn its past; it is likely that the idea itself touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows. (Its virtue can be in the opposition to building and destroying, on an enormous scale.) Generalizing the earlier matter, we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves and not in some conjectural “content.” This would be in agreement with the thesis of Benedetto Croce (3); as already Pater (4), in 1877, contended that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form. Music, state of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have lost, or want to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not happen, is, perhaps, the esthetic act. [/box]

• Dunciad by Alexander Pope in which the poet referred to his many enemies as dunces. This satirical poem of 920 lines, in three books, describes the king of dunces and a nightmare world of universal darkness in Pope’s gigantic lampoon of writers, books and booksellers, attacking those who write for pay. At one point there is a sacrifice bonfire of the books. This sort of literary reference and source is used by Anglophile Borges throughout his work.

• Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), renowned British diplomat and Sinologist.

• Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), Italian literary historian, critic, philosopher, wrote: “Art is not the addition of form to content, but expression, which does not mean communication but is a spiritual fact, and ethics is conceived as the expression of the universal will, of the spirit.”

• Walter Pater (1839-94), English writer, essayist, aesthete and art historian, famous precisely because his life is so shrouded in mystery, whom Henry James called “the mask without the face” and the kind of literary source Borges plants in his strange tales. Here Borges quotes Pater that “all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music.” I found on line this anecdote which is revealing of the nature of Pater, and thus of one side of Borges:  In 1894, the last year of his life, Pater was invited to meet Mallarmé, who was then lecturing at Oxford. Mallarmé taught English in a lycée; Pater’s French was excellent; but the two connoisseurs of intimation apparently thought it too vulgar actually to speak. According to one account, they “regarded each other in silence, and were satisfied.”

Translator’s note: This typical Borges interpretative chronicle/ historical reflection (neither short story nor essay!) is included in Antología Personal (Personal Anthology), the version I have translated here, the first edition of which was published by Editorial Sur in 1961 and for which Borges wrote in the Prologue that his “preferences dictated this book.” It appeared again in English in Everything and Nothing, New Directions, 1999. I chose to translate this tale/account because it is shorter and, perhaps, less well-known than others; secondly because it is typical of Borges’ works in which he playfully drops unfamiliar names and references in his veiled recounting of people and place and times, which only at first appear obscure or meaningless; and thirdly because of the writer’s prologue to the volume.
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As fate would have it and in Borges style, I saw in a May issue of the best of the “NY Times in Italian,” the article “Walls Raised Against the Enemy, A Long History,” which cites the first such wall as Shih Huang Ti’s Wall of China, an article intended to demonstrate that they never work, not in Berlin nor in Israel nor in Baghdad. Nor will it work on the US-Mexican border, I would add.
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Tracing the references and my close reading of the Prologue is to elucidate to a limited degree the Borgesian world. If you try to pursue diligently all Borges’ literary pointers you have to be prepared to enter an infinite labyrinth in which one thing leads to another and then another, inexorably and without end, so that you do need the proverbial ball of string to find your way out. Though with contemporary web search engines this labyrinth is only a few clicks away, while I was clicking and longing to exit I imagined Borges instead in one of his libraries, finding, tracing and investigating such sources of inspiration by following his own instincts, pulling down tome after tome from the labyrinthine spaces filled with semi-illuminated shelves that he must have loved and hated.
…
Toward the end of this exercise, once the translation was finished and the names pinpointed, I returned to his Prologue to the book in which he refers to Benedetto Croce as he does in “The Wall and the Books.” Borges: “Croce opined that art is expression; from this exigency, or from the deformation of this exigency, derives the worst literature of our times…. I at times have also searched for expression; now I know that my gods no longer concede me anything but allusion or account.”

Creative writers can well understand him. On a similar tack Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) says that, “every work of art is a game played out at the worktable. Nothing is more harmful to creativity than the passion of inspiration. It’s the fable of bad romantics that fascinates bad poets and bad narrators. Art is a serious matter. Manzoni and Flaubert, Balzac and Stendhal wrote at the worktable. That means to construct, like an architect plans a building. Yet we prefer to believe that a novelist invents because he has a genius whispering into his ear.”

(Well, so much for walls, even if I have digressed from the subject, I think it is clear that to me walls do not sound like a good idea at all).

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[box] The Fifth Sun (Punto Press). He’s also the author of several other books, including the Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have been published by Punto Press, and its concluding volume, Time of Exile, is scheduled for later this Fall. These are “didactic” or philosophical thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Milena. Gaither can be contacted at gaithers@greanvillepost.com. His latest assignment is as Managing Editor with the Russia Desk. [/box]

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Sybille Fuchs, Wolfgang Weber and Peter Schwarz

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[dropcap]G[/dropcap]ünter Grass, who died April 13 at the age of 87, ranks as one of Germany’s most remarkable authors. He was a wonderful narrative writer, and this judgement also applies to his works that were less successful than his outstanding Danzig trilogy of novels (The Tin Drum, 1959, Cat and Mouse, 1961, Dog Years, 1963).

Amongst Grass’s role models were German writer Alfred Döblin, Irish novelist James Joyce and other leading storytellers of the 20th century. Along with Siegfried Lens, Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson, he was a decisive voice in German postwar literature and made a significant contribution to a literary engagement with the traumas of 20th century history.

Grass’s world reputation does not rest alone on his epic fiction works, above all his début novel The Tin Drum. The fact that he continuously expressed his opinions on contemporary political issues, posed awkward questions and provided answers to them, invariably encountering strong criticism from sections of the media and politicians, was closely bound up with his artistic work.

With his critical perspective on society and history, the novelist attempted to break through the vale of forgetting and cover-up propagated by the postwar political establishment in Germany. It is testament to Grass’s steadfastness that his list of opponents ranged from leading figures in the Adenauer era (Konrad Adenauer was chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963), when many old Nazis held high positions within the state and in business, to prominent politicians and media personalities in the present day.

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Oskar (David Bennent) greets his friend and protector, fellow dwarf entertainer Berba (Fritz Hakl) in Volker Schlondorff‘s classic rendering of the Tin Drum story (1979). 

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As both a storyteller and critical moralist, Grass was always concerned with drawing attention to the unresolved problems of the past. In doing so, he utilised piercing and grotesque comedy in his works, which often left the laughter stuck in one’s throat. Already in The Tin Drum, this artistic technique was clear, as was the frequently broken up narrative style.

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In Grass’s first novel, the “drummer” of the title, Oskar Matzerath, in his thirties, is in a mental hospital where he writes down his life story, in the early 1950s. This story begins in 1899 with the alarmingly comical conceiving of what turns out to be Oskar’s mother under the “four skirts” of Anna Bronski, a Kashubian (member of a West Slavic ethnic group), impregnated by the Polish freedom fighter and terrorist Josef Kolyaiczek, who is hiding from the police.

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The episodes, Oskar’s experiences and adventures, are recounted one after another. In the process, Oskar sometimes narrates from the author’s point of view, speaking of himself in the third person, and at other times in the first person. Repeatedly, a comment or reference appears giving some historical perspective to the story, even though it has nothing to do with the immediate action. For example, the chapter “Under the Raft” takes place in 1899 when in South Africa, “Ohm Kruger was brushing his bushy anti-British eyebrows.”

The hero is born a “clairaudient infant”, his “mental development [was] completed at birth and after that merely needs a certain amount of filling in.”

Shortly after birth, Oskar watches a moth circling around a light bulb. He perceives the noise it makes as a drumming on the light bulb. His mother promises to give him a drum for his third birthday, a promise she keeps. Oskar becomes a drummer. At the same time, he rejects further growth from his third birthday onward and distances himself from the “grown-ups.”

“Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. … men beat on basins, tin pans, bass drums, and kettle drums. We speak of drum fire, drumhead courts; we drum up, drum out, drum into. There are drummer boys and drum majors … but all this is nothing beside the orgy of drumming carried out by that moth in the hour of my birth.”

When he receives the drum he decides: “I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less grocer, that I would stop right there, remain as I was—and so I did; for many years.” This was a clear rejection of Oskar’s petty bourgeois father and later Nazi Party member, Alfred Matzerath, who wanted him to inherit the shop, and an allusion to somebody who decided to become a politician (i.e. Adolf Hitler).

The young Oskar is highly subversive—for example, when he causes chaos at a Nazi Party rally by playing his drum under the speaker’s tribune and eventually getting everyone to dance. This scene is brilliantly portrayed in the film of the same name by Volker Schlöndorff (1979).

But Oskar can also raise his voice effectively to alter the course of events or people’s plans, e.g., when they want to take his drum away. He can produce frequencies with his voice sufficient to make glass break, a talent he uses not only as a weapon of self-defence, but also to entertain soldiers in the theatre at the front and earn his living. The Tin Drum is often described as a character study, a novel dealing with personal development, but in many respects it is quite the opposite, Oskar does not “develop” for over two decades, rather he is a sharp observer and seemingly childish and naive commentator on the life of adults, their petty bourgeois environment and the events into which they are drawn and become jointly responsible for, especially the crimes of National Socialism and the war—events they did not cause but did nothing to prevent.

For his part, Oskar continues to drum, but sees himself as partly responsible as well. For example, for the death of his uncle, or possible father, Jan Bronski, who takes part in the defence of the Polish post office in Danzig against the Nazis and is subsequently shot. Here Grass, as he acknowledged, is working through his own experience; as a 13-year-old he felt guilty because he had not asked about the fate of his uncle, who was shot during this episode like the novel’s character.

Grass’s language

Grass’s language is full of influences from the Baroque and classical periods, Grimm’s fairy tales and such. It is vivid and gripping. In his surreal narrative style he combines contemporary history, grotesquely depicted episodes, sharply drawn characters, coarse eroticism and all sorts of sensuous pleasures with improbable events to reveal a larger or concealed truth. In the process he makes use of a broad range of metaphor and allegory, often based on the animal world.

This is very evident in the third volume of his Danzig trilogy, Dog Years. In the book, dogs and birds become the symbols for human actions. The novel deals with Hitler’s dog and his famous bloodline, thereby parodying the Nazis’ racial policy.

In The Rats (1986) the subject is the apocalypse brought about by humanity’s wars and destruction of the environment, while at the same time alluding to the disgusting classification of Jews as rats by the Nazis.

Animals also play an important part in Grass’s pictorial art. Originally, he completed an apprenticeship as a stonemason, and studied sculpture and graphics. He created sculptures until his last years and has left behind an extensive graphical body of work. He often illustrated his own books. Most recently he was working on a newly illustrated version of Dog Years.

His origins as a visual artist certainly helped him develop an inquisitive and unobstructed view of social reality. This differentiated him from the misanthropic and pessimistic voices of contemporaries such as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno who declared one could no longer write poetry after Auschwitz, music could no longer sound beautiful and fine art could no longer be understood.

As a graphic artist and sculptor, Grass remained focused on the object. He rejected the modern abstract work propagated at the Düsseldorf Art Academy during his time there. Neither did he have any time for the work of his atelier neighbour in the Düsseldorf Art Academy Josef Beuys who emerged as the rising star of West German art.

In a highly readable interview with Die Zeit a year ago, Grass said of Beuys, “Yes, he was in the studio next door, went around in Jesus sandals and was anthroposophically inspired. I met him many years later, he was a friendly type, but when he began to talk about philosophy—what cretinism! I have seen some drawings by him. Honey pump and some sort of bath tub—not for my taste.”

The Flounder and The Meeting at Telgte

The Flounder (1977) takes the Grimm fairy tale of the Fisherman and his Wifeas its starting point to tell a story about humanity and its hubris, which targets the different roles of men and women, and their respective contributions to progress and the possible decline of humanity.

At the same time it is about cooking, as the first sentence indicates: “Ilsebill added more salt.” Cooking, eating and enjoying oneself play just as an important part in the works of Grass as eroticism, reflecting the culinary interests of the author. Nourishment, food and cooking were not only significant in the history of humanity for Grass, they also had communicative and symbolic significance.

Grass was a member of the Group 47, the influential literary association to which he read his as yet uncompleted Tin Drum in 1958. He produced an extraordinary tribute to this group with his key novel The Meeting at Telgte(1979). He set the “meeting” in the Baroque era, more precisely in the year 1647. The setting of the meeting was not accidental. The intended parallels to the 1950s were clear. The issue in the two eras, from Grass’s point of view, was to find an orientation and a grasp of events amidst the confusion and violence of the times through the means of poetic art, to make sense of what had happened and find a solution.

In the novel, travelling poets from across Europe and every corner of stricken Germany, torn apart by the brutal, destructive campaigns of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), meet with the deep desire of doing something for peace. The invitation has been extended by Simon Dach, the Chair of Poetry at the Albertina University in Königsberg. Dach represents the organiser of the Group 47, Hans Werner Richter, to whom the book was dedicated. Grass also clearly modelled other members of the Group 47 in creating the other characters, which he depicted at the same time with great knowledge of their historical and artistic significance.

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By temperament, Grass was a social democrat, skeptical about the potential for rapid social change. “Influencing people to change is a long road. But it must be traversed.”

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Grass seems to have modelled the figure of Gelnhausen (Grimmelshausen) on himself. The bustling author of Simplicius Simplicissimus, the picaresque novel written by Grimmelshausen in 1668, ensures that the group finds accommodation in the Westphalian town of Telgte. The guesthouse they originally booked in Oesede is occupied by Swedish troops. In Telgte, which has remained cut off from the worst excesses of the Thirty Years War, Gelnhausen’s love Libushka (the vagabond also dramatised in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children) makes her guesthouse available to them. Led by Simon Dach, the poets, some of whom have travelled with their publishers, present their manuscripts.

As with the Group 47, the texts they have brought are discussed and the state of the German language after 30 years of war is discussed. In between they eat and drink, and some of the younger ones spend their nights with the maids in the attic. After several entanglements and controversies, they agree on a joint call for peace.

Simon Dach refers in his concluding speech to “the hand with the pen” extending from the rubble. The image expresses the idea of language as a unifying force beyond all the religious and political, as well as literary, differences that tear the country and its people apart. The high value placed on language and its ability to promote understanding of life links Grass to the Baroque.

Grass’s relationship with the SPD

Grass’s social engagement was incompatible with political abstention. Beginning in 1961, he backed the election campaigns of Social Democratic Party leader Willy Brandt, maintaining close ties with him when he became German chancellor. In 1970, he accompanied Brandt to Poland and was a witness when Brandt kneeled at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto—a gesture that acquired symbolic significance in relation to the German leader’s new Ostpolitik (orientation to the East). Grass understood this policy as a step towards reconciliation and gave it his firm support.

Grass was also drawn to the SPD due to his mistrust of revolutionary change. In his youth, he experienced indoctrination by the Nazis, and knew “communism” only in its “degenerate Stalinist” antithesis. This worldview was concretised when he spent several weeks working in a mining pit with petty Nazi officials, embittered Communist Party members and old Social Democrats.

He recounted, “In the potash works I learned to live without ideology. I still had the morning ceremonies of the Hitler youth in my ears, those Sunday attestations to the flag, swearing on blood and soil of course, and then there were the communists attempting to entice me with similar relics dragged out of the lumber room of their ideology. As a child who had already been burnt, I stuck carefully to my taciturn social democrats, who neither babbled of a thousand year Reich nor world revolution, who in 1946 had already hurled the remaining ideological ballast into the dustbin” (Works, vol. x, Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1987, p. 441).

Grass held firmly to the view throughout his life that society could only be changed gradually and in small steps. In May last year, he described himself in the previously cited interview with Die Zeit as a “life-affirming pessimist,” who knows that one must act carefully. “Influencing people to change is a long road. But it must be traversed.”

Despite this, his relationship with the SPD remained ambivalent. He only joined the party in 1982 and left 10 years later in protest when the SPD responded to a series of anti-immigrant clashes by restricting the right to asylum. In contrast to the SPD, which moved ever further to the right, Grass held firm to his democratic and anti-militarist convictions, even when he came under sustained attack.

This was evident in 1990 in his reaction to German reunification. In opposition to Brandt, who joined in and encouraged the nationalist fervour, Grass responded critically and with severe reservations.

Too Far Afield

Grass devoted his novel Too Far Afield (1995) to reunification, and it was among his best. It took place between the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, drawing on German history since 1848.

Grass did not consider reunification to be the result of a movement from below, driven by the people, but the result of a bureaucratic initiative by the GDR (East Germany) state apparatus. He placed German reunification in 1990 in continuity with the founding of the German Reich in 1871 under the leadership of Bismarck and his police-military bureaucracy. In this respect, he based himself on German writer Theodor Fontane (Effie Briest and others), who viewed the founding of the German Reich with increasing criticism in his novels.

Grass drew a parallel between the omnipresence and arrogance of the privileged, the old class of nobles and a rising layer of newly enriched businessmen, bankers, traders and speculators attacked by Fontane, and the bargain hunters, speculators and banks that made use of German unification to launch an aggressive campaign of enrichment, and with the help of the Treuhand (the agency that privatised East German enterprises from 1990 to 1994), strengthened their control over the land, property and businesses in the East.

The protagonists of the novel are the former GDR citizen Theo Wuttke, one-time lecturer for the GDR’s cultural league dedicated to Theodor Fontane, and now an administrator in the Treuhand. Wuttke still identifies with Fontane, responds to the nickname “Fonty,” and has a “round the clock shadow” and long-time spy, Hoftaller, also modelled on a historical figure—a Prussian secret police agent in the 19th century. They walk together through Berlin, the Brandenburg Mark, the coalfields of the Lausitz (a region in Germany and Poland), engaged in disputes over Fontane’s work, strongly disagreeing over the actors in the reunification process, their ideological weapons—and their victims, who Grass overwhelmingly identifies as the population of the former GDR.

A key scene in Too Far Afield is the wedding of Fonty’s daughter in the East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg shortly after the currency union, bringing together all the relatives from the East and West.

Fonty’s son Friedel, who stayed in the West after the wall was built and joined in the 1968 student movement with Mao’s handbook and distributed Che Guevara posters, before later rising to head a theological publishing house, delivers fiery speeches against “these criminals” in the East, who ruined the youth and about the guilt borne by GDR writers and intellectuals, because they had served the “unjust naton”. But then it turns out that Friedel, like many other predators in the West, is merely concerned with cashing in—in his case realising the property rights of his publishing house on the premises of the former head office of his publishing hourse in Magdeburg.

Fonty’s future son-in-law, an obnoxious construction businessman from the West, is of the opinion that “from beginning to end the people in the GDR lived as if in a concentration camp,” and comes to the conclusion that the market for land in Mecklenburg is totally underdeveloped due to the command-and-control economy.

As a result of his criticisms of reunification, Grass provoked a storm of protest from the mainstream media and their cultural pages. They attacked Grass like a pack of dogs, accusing him of trivialising the crimes of the GDR regime and the suffering of its victims. Disappointingly, well-known literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki savaged the book on the front page of Der Spiegel.

In reality, the novel—in keeping with its entire logic—contains a sharp critique of the police state methods used by the government in the GDR. At the same time, Grass provided a drastic and vivid portrayal of German society after reunification: society is not harmoniously united, but more deeply divided socially than ever before, the unity is only a straitjacket imposed by the state from above.

Looking back at the fierce disputes over his book, Günter Grass acknowledged in an interview with Die Zeit in 2009 that the “defeatism” of which he had been accused at the time had been outdone by reality. “What we are now experiencing as the great financial crisis had already begun to appear then as predatory capitalism.”

A timeless subject of Too Far Afield is the role and responsibility of writers, and intellectuals and other artists. Grass defends artists and writers like Christa Wolf, East German critic and novelist, in a very principled and humane manner against the destructive ideological offensive of the Western victors.

Against the stream

Grass drew closer to the SPD once again at the end of the 1990s. He supported Gerhard Schröder’s election campaigns in 1998, 2002 and 2005, and maintained close personal contact with him. In 1999, after winning the Nobel Prize, Grass even justified the Kosovo war, and later signed a statement defending the Hartz social welfare “reforms.” But this did not lead to any respite in his conflicts with the ruling elite and its turn towards militarism, which Grass vehemently opposed.

In 2003, for example, he gave an impassioned speech against the US-led Iraq war, which he branded as “violating international law,” “illegality of the most powerful” and a “remnant from a barbaric age.” “Scarred, powerless but full of wrath, we witness the moral decline of the once dominant world power, full in the knowledge that organised madness certainly has one consequence: the encouragement of the growth of terrorism, further violence and counter-violence,” Grass said at the time in a clear anticipation of the future course of developments.

He complained that the United States was becoming a caricature of itself, and protested “against the brutally applied lawlessness of the strongest, against the restriction of freedom of speech, against a policy of providing information that is comparable to totalitarian states, and against the cynical calculation that the deaths of many thousands of women and children is acceptable when the realisation of economic interests and power politics is involved.”

At the time, the Schröder government opposed German participation in the Iraq war, which Grass incorrectly interpreted as a principled opposition to war. But when in 2006 he reported in his memoirs Peeling the Onion that at the end of the Second World War, he joined the Waffen SS as a 17-year-old, he came under attack from the pack of press hounds, as well as the SPD.

We commented at the time, “The attacks on Grass are both demagogic and malicious. They bear no relation to the facts and are clearly politically and ideologically motivated. In his early novels, Grass confronted the complacent and conservative society of postwar Germany, which employed high-ranking Nazis in leading state posts, with a frank picture of the Third Reich. … There were those who never forgave Grass for what he wrote, and he made life-long enemies. It is no coincidence that the most virulent attacks on Grass now come from right-wing and conservative circles. All those whose complacency and self-righteousness was shaken by Grass are now howling triumphantly. Finally, the chorus brays, the world-famous writer has been toppled from his pedestal. He had no right to criticize us and depict our deficiencies.”

When the 84-year-old then published the prose poem “What Must Be Said” in 2012, accusing the nuclear power Israel of endangering the already shaky world peace with its threats against Iran, the attacks increased to an ear-splitting din. The flood of name-calling, slanders and insults flowing even from so-called serious media outlets directed against the world renowned author surpassed anything previously seen. He was denounced as an anti-Semite whose work belonged in the press of the neo-fascist German National Party (NPD) and was compared with Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.

Grass was not intimidated. In his last interview to the Spanish newspaper El Pais on March 21, he sharply attacked the Western powers’ policy on Ukraine. “We run the risk of committing the same mistakes as previously,” he warned. “Without being conscious of it, we could stumble straight into another world war, as if we were sleepwalking.”

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The authors are German sociocultural and political observers. The review was published on wsws.org.

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André Vltchek’s remarkable portrait of the enfant terrible of anti-imperialist politics and scourge of religious fanaticism, Milan Kohout.
The onetime anti-Soviet dissident speaks out on life under capitalism, and what it does to the human soul.

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http://youtu.be/CATJ9DMrEn0?list=PLBNTz781JIl-f1eBTq1q6ICd8bDQBe7VL

Filmed and written by Andre Vltchek 
Edited by Crista Priscilla

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]ery few people are capable of making others laugh, cry and think – to infuriate them and in the same time to convince them that the good fight for humanity should never be abandoned. All that in the same short time!

Milan Kohout, former Czech dissident turned US citizen, then rebel against his new homeland and the Empire, is one such person!

His performances touched and outraged people all over the world, from Croatia and the Czech Republic, to the United States, Israel, and China. He was throwing raw meat to the air inside the churches, to commemorate how the torn flesh of Iraqi people was falling from the sky, after the Western bombing of a market in Baghdad. He was throwing peas at the Israeli wall designed to imprison Palestinian people. And he almost single-handedly forced the authorities to take down yet another wall – that which was built in the city of Usti nad Labem in Czech Republic, in order to segregate the Roma (gypsy) minority.

What is the leitmotif of Milan’s work? That the greatest crimes against humanity were committed by the Europeans and North Americans, in the name of Christianity and capitalism (aka “Free Enterprise), and that these two ‘villains’ go almost always hand in hand against the interests of our human race. And that greed and fanatic religious beliefs, as well as pure ignorance, are some of the greatest dangers to our survival.

Milan Kohout and I met online, some time ago: he wrote to me after reading one of my essays on Counterpunch. We became good friends, as is common in these days, through the Internet, long distance. Soon after, Milan designed the cover of my latest non-fiction book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.

Then he invited me to come to Pilsen, in the Czech Republic: the city where both of us grew up. He asked me to deliver a 90-minute lecture on the state of the world, at the University of West Bohemia, the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. That is where he is presently teaching.

I accepted. We met, drank gallons of legendary Pilsener beer and realized that we actually see the world in fairly similar ways. But we only had 48 hours to forge some serious cooperation, before my driving back to Stuttgart and returning back to Beirut, Lebanon, just one day later!

We went straight to work. I spoke at his faculty and then Milan arranged an interview with me at the Czech National Radio. And I interviewed him for TGP and Counterpunch.

Then we drove to the historic city of Nepomuk and from there to the Christian pilgrimage site – Zelena Hora. There I encouraged Milan to release all the poison he has been holding against the Christian faith for ages! Which he did happily and diligently: in front of the most tasteless of Christian statues, and straight to my camera!

The result is right here: edited lightly, only to improve the flow. And here stands the artist – in front of the cross and 1.5L empty coca cola plastic bottle – in his full combative glory!

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Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

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Published on Nov 13, 2014