My Log 469 Ap 16 2015: Death of Eduardo Galeano is a loss to everyone who believes that a world of justice and equality is not only possible but achievable: read his Memory of Fire

Writer Eduardo Galeano during a conference at the Librarsi bookshop in Vicenza, Italy. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Open Veins of Latin America (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

EDUARDO GALEANO (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 That Eduardo Galeano has died must be simply a fact of life. I believe it, since I am told it is so. What can also be said of him, however, is that he will never die, that his books, especially his masterpiece, the  trilogy  Memory of Fire, a history book unlike any other ever written, will live on for centuries. What more could a man want?

I count myself extremely lucky to have heard Galeano speak in person, during one of his visits to Ottawa a few years ago. He was an amused and amusing man, it seems, good humoured, insightful, and still, although getting on in years, full of fire. The book of his that is most spoken and written about is called Open Veins of Latin America  which reached its greatest notoriety when Hugo Chavez formally presented a copy of it to Barack Obama at an international conference.  Sales of the book soared overnight, and it is still recognized as one of the most influential books ever written on the politics of Latin America, although Galeano, who apparently wrote it at white heat, later said he found it rather stodgy, looking back at it.  I have not read that book, but I believe his trilogy is the greatest book I have ever read.  It deals with the history of Latin America (although it dips, from time to time, into North America as well).  The form of the book is unusual, to say the least. It is comprised of short, 500-word pieces, each of them inspired by some passage he has read in someone else’s work, identified by a number at the end of the piece that can be checked against the inspirational source at the back of the book.

These pieces are certainly not taken from these cited works: they are wonderful little essays by Galeano about some incident or person, some triumph or tragedy, some heroism or villainy,  drawn from history.  The form is wonderfully suited to someone with his prodigious memory and knowledge, which enables his history book to be both searingly intense and intensely amusing. All sorts of characters, most of whom his readers have never heard of, wander in and out of his pages,  either inspiring or horrifying his readers, depending on what we bring to them. History books were never like this.

The first volume begins in pre-history, deals with pre-Columbian years, and takes us up to 1700 or so. By the end of the first chapter one is not only dazzled, but infuriated by such inhumanity to man (and nature). The second volume takes the story through the nineteenth century, and leaves the reader limp with anger, and by the end of the third volume, which covers  the twentieth century,  one is awakened to the fact that these terrible things that have been visited on Latin America through history, mostly by American and European capital, but also by their local compradors, are still going on as we sit reading about them.

It was these compradors who ensured that even the winning of freedom by Latin American countries from the yoke of Spanish and Portuguese domination hardly improved matters: American and European, mostly British, capital was waiting in the wings, ready to swoop on these newly-liberated nations, and they did swoop so successfully, using their local satraps, as to make the change in ultimate control more or less meaningless: the massive rape of the continent went on, uninterrupted.

Galeano was born in 1940, had to leave high school after two years, became a journalist, and thus was self-educated, his education including about 12 years in exile from military dictators who wanted to kill him. When he returned to his home country of Uruguay and plunged into writing a form of writing that was more demanding than the journalism in which he learned his trade, his work mellowed, became gentler, less angry, but no less relevant to his continent and its woes. He always had a great interest in people who never made it into the history books, people, as he once described them with that touch of irony that was typical of him, “who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

A few years ago he wrote a book called Mirrors, celebrating people who had been forgotten by history, but should not have been. I remember particularly his tale of a man who, when involved in negotiating the U.S. Declaration of Independence, tried mightily to have included in it a declaration forbidding slavery. He failed, of course, and thereafter his name was written out of all history of the period.

For some time now my current partner in life has enlivened each day by sending to my computer a little item from Galeano’s throw-away book Children of the Days in which he records some piquant item from historical or contemporary life for each day of the year. As a book it reads rather as if composed of items he didn’t have room to include in Memory of Fire  but that he didn’t want to lose entirely. Here is a typical one, under the heading, The Discovery:

In 1492 the natives discovered they were Indians,

they discovered they lived in America,

they discovered they were naked,

they discovered there was sin,

they discovered they owed obedience to a king and a queen from another world and a god from some other heaven,

and this god had invented guilt and clothing,

and had ordered burned alive all who worshipped the sun and the moon and the earth and the rain that moistens it.

That’s Eduardo Galeano, encapsulating in a few words a great message we all should learn.

My Log 468 April 14 2015: A major battle of the oligarchs to snuffle out any left-wing politics in Europe --- or elsewhere

International Monetary Fund (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Board of Governors - International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: The European Central Bank. Notice a sculpture of the euro sign. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t know anything about economics --- to put it another way, I agree with the Amory Lovins perception that “economics is a brain disease” --- but I find the current crisis confronting the left-wing government of Greece endlessly fascinating, and I have been reading up on everything I can get my hands on, to try to keep on top of what is happening.  However much the guardians of economic orthodoxy in the Western world chunter on about the sacred duty to repay loans, nothing can disguise the fact that what they really have in mind is to crush any credible uprising of left-wing politics within the European Economic Community, and they have no hesitation about using bully-boy methods to carry out this aim.

From my point of view, these arguments about international finance are all about funny money. It is well-known that for all the aid poured into Africa and Latin America from Western sources, still those continents repay more every year than they receive in aid, and they repay it to banks of one kind or another.  In other words, the set-up is a monstrous hypocrisy. This system has been entrenched over the years by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both controlled and mostly funded by the United States (which today is the world’s leading oligarchy, whose government seems to be completely in the control of Big Money),  and whose primary purpose seems to have been to ensure that capitalism governs the affairs of the whole world. In other words, they don’t lend money unless the receiving countries agree to do away with such nonsense as nationalized industries, high wages and liveable pensions.  In one country after another, they have not only tied receiving countries into knots but have in the process ruined indigenous industry and agriculture and made it simple for Western companies to flood their markets with lower-priced goods. This is the basic understanding from which I approach this Greek crisis because it seems to fit the same parameters as those described.

Any whisper of opposition, as in Greece, and the country is fast brought to its knees by massive withdrawals of funds heralding the likelihood of a banking crisis from which the local government could probably never recover. The terms of the loans granted to Greece have been that they should follow a rigid programme of economic austerity, which has immeasurably worsened the condition of the Greek people, plunging them into  massive unemployment and forcing what is widely described as “a humanitarian crisis.”  The troika --- sixty per cent of Greece’s debt is owed to European Union governments, 10% to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and 6% to the European Central Bank (ECB), which are collectively known as the troika --- have insisted Greece privatize everything that is publicly owned, reduce wages and pensions, and so on until the populace is literally on its knees.

“(Since the election) we’ve seen that these European institutions are not receptive to the kind of political or democratic argument, which says ‘we’re an elected government with a mandate to carry out, and you’re our central bank, and we can expect you to do your work and let us do what we were elected to do,’ ” said Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of the central committee of Syriza, who  teaches political theory at King’s College, London, during a recent fascinating analysis of the whole crisis in conversation with a French philosopher Alan Badiou. The conversation is published in Jacobinmag.com, which describes itself as “a leading voice of the American left.”

He added: “All left-wing governments in the world who were determined to change things ended up faced with this kind of obstacle. At the heart of this question, is (the) decision (of Syriza’s leadership) to break with austerity within the framework of the European institutions, and, more particularly, within the terms of the eurozone. This was the basis Syriza was elected on, and this has been its line throughout the last three years in particular.

“Now we can say that we’ve seen the limits of this strategy. This is not at all what it is about. These institutions are there in order to lock in extremely harsh neoliberal policies, to lock in the troika supervision of entire countries. And that’s exactly what they’ve set out to do, forcing the Greek government into making very serious retreats …. Indeed… at this very moment the teams of troika experts are in Athens scrutinizing Greece’s accounts.”

If this is what it is about, one would have expected the European leftists to have taken to the streets. For a time the French unions obliged, with a huge march of support. But the French so-called Socialist government leader, President Hollande, launched a ferocious attack on Syriza and its pretensions. This did no more than confirm that the European leftist parties have become paper tigers, totally overcome by the neoliberalist cant coming from the big battalions.

A great deal depends on what kind of an outfit Syriza is. Until fairly recently it was a small party, and even today, its ministers mostly are drawn from intellectuals, many of them being professors who have been working away in universities in various countries until drawn back to their homeland to serve in its hour of need. In the months before the election, however, a mobilization of the population occurred that gave the party its momentum to carry it into office, and soon thereafter the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for more mobilization, more street action, more study of the situation as a means of building support.  The participants in this round table agreed that the party’s support within Greece today is now higher than it was before and at the time of their election.  So much will depend on which strain of the party’s membership gains the upper hand. Faced with similar situations in the recent past, socialist movements within Europe have come to power talking a good game, but have collapsed at the first whiff of powder from the bosses in the citadels of economic power.

Badiou made reference to the Mitterand government as an example. When the name of Mario Draghi, now the leader of the European Central Bank was mentioned, with a hint that he might be considering himself as an internationalist in this situation, Kouvelakis responded very sharply, saying, “I would say that the European Central Bank has nothing to do with internationalism, I don’t see the slightest hint of internationalism in Mr. Draghi, and I think internationalism is on the side of those who are now opposed to (him), his politics, and everything he embodies — including him personally, physically.”  He might well say so: Mr. Draghi is just another one of the army of banking operatives trained and employed by the infamous U.S. firm Goldman Sachs, who have been sent out around the world to make sure that global financial management remains in the safe hands of the bankers. The ubiquity of these Goldman Sachs guys really has to be seen to be believed --- they are everywhere, hundreds of them, making decisions for more governments than anyone would have believed possible, and when their bank and others got the world into the crisis of 2008, one of them was appointed as the U.S. government’s point man to steer the way out of the crisis while preventing the banks from paying for their mistakes and greed.

On the BBC today, the former leader of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, told his interviewer, Stephen Sackur, that the argument was not about repayment of loans. That was subsidiary to the Greek government agreeing to “a credible recovery programme.” He repeated this numerous times, as if no one could argue with its irrefutable logic.  But Sackur, though he did try to press the man on a number of issues --- particularly on Greece’s inability to repay any sum of money, however large or small--- never asked him what was his definition of “credible.”  If he had he might conceivably have gotten the answer that to be credible a recovery package would have to bow to the austerity programme insisted on by the troika, as if it were the Bible.

Syriza was a small party until a few years ago, and would never have come to power  if not for the emergence of popular mobilization and social movements before the election, which Badiou described as without a doubt greater in scope than anything  seen in Europe since the 1970s.

As against the dictates of this  “masters of the universe” troika, Tsipras in his appeal to the Greek people following his election asked them to uphold the constitution, and invoked its final article which specifies that the constitution resides in the people and their patriotic  right to rise up.  When the negotiations showed the determination of the European elites to be inflexible, Tsipras gave an interview to a Greek paper, and when asked if he had an alternative, he replied: “Of course, we have an alternative plan. Greece does not do blackmail, but nor will we accept blackmail from others. The country has a lot of possible options; of course we don’t want to reach such an impasse, but . . .”

Kouvelakis added: “So that’s where we are at the moment, in sum. In my view, there’s no other way…. For Europe’s political elites, and the economic forces they represent, it’s vital not only to force Syriza into a retreat, but to humiliate it politically. Such a political humiliation would also be a shot across the bows of Podemos and all the social and political forces in Europe that challenge austerity policies: ‘See what happened to the Greeks? That’s what’s in store for you if you try and do the same.’ ”

Confirmation that the issue is politics, rather than economics, seems to come from an article in the Wall Street Journal on April 8, entitled  “The case for letting Greece go.”  The writer points out that the problem is not “financial contagion”, since more than 80 per cent of the country’s debt is held by governments or “official creditors” who “could absorb default-related losses.”  Private Eurozone banks last September were owed just over $18 billion dollars, one-third of the level in 2012, and much of it in short-term or speculative loans, so that the total today is probably even lower. If that is so what is the problem?

The Wall Street Journal confirms the answer in straight language: “If creditors allow Athens to increase government spending while reversing labor-market liberalization and privatizations, they’ll encourage anti-reform movements elsewhere. Spain’s left-wing Podemos party has polled well since Syriza’s Greek victory in January as Spaniards consider whether it might offer an alternative to painful reforms, and the party won 15 seats in the regional parliament in Andalusia last month. Ireland’s Sinn Fein is gaining support for its anti-reform platform…A serious Greek government would offer to press ahead with privatization and deregulation in exchange for some leeway to cut tax rates along with government spending cuts. But Syriza has insisted on a return to something like the status quo ante, with higher spending, anti-growth tax policies and delays or halts in deregulation….Accommodating Syriza’s agenda now would be a severe blow to a eurozone that urgently needs faster growth….”

This is what M. Trichet meant in his BBC interview, no doubt, by “a credible recovery package”. A veritable gallery of right-wing economic mantras: Privatizations. Deregulations. Lower taxes. Government spending cuts. The very policies that landed the world economy in the mess of 2008.

Some choice!

My Log 467 April 7 2015: I am pulled up short from denouncing Australia by the example of a Yugoslavia, virtually destroyed by ferocious competing nationalisms

The government building in the centre of Sarajevo burns after being hit by tank fire during the siege in 1992  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Slobodan Milošević, Alija Izetbegović and Franjo Tuđman signing the Dayton Agreement in Paris on December 14, 1995. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Animated map of the Yugoslav Wars. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Territories of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Croatia controlled by Serb forces 1992-1995. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 A week or so ago I was thinking of writing a piece to describe the differences between Australia and New Zealand, a piece that would probably have started by telling a fact that surprises anyone who comes from outside the region, that Melbourne, in Australia, and Christchurch, in New Zealand, are almost exactly as far apart as London and Moscow. So much for foreign knowledge of the subject.

I was a little hesitant about writing such a piece because the trigger for it was the appallingly bad behaviour of the Aussie cricket team after defeating New Zealand in the final of the Cricket World Cup. This was a victory that I had taken to be inevitable and it occurred because of the superior skills of the Australians. But still, beginning on such a basis, a piece along those lines could hardly help but degenerate into arguments that, frankly, must be nationalistic. While I was still mulling over this idea I picked up a book that was lying around in the Croatian household in which I am currently staying, called Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War.  Published in 1994, the book was written by Ed  Vulliamy, a Guardian reporter who covered what is known to the outside world as the Yugoslav war, that raged through most of the 1990s, and was brought to an end in 1995 with the Dayton Agreement, cobbled together by the international community that can now be said to have signally failed to rise to the grave circumstances with which the war confronted them.

This was a war in which nationalisms raged even among people who had lived peaceably side by side for decades, even for hundreds of years, but who began, under the influence of these nationalisms, to perpetrate almost indescribable barbarities on each other. I had only to read Vulliamy’s first chapter, entitled War of Maps, to abandon any idea of writing anything that might carry even a whiff of nationalism, which  has never before --- at least not in modern times --- demonstrated so clearly its poisonous qualities.

Vulliamy writes that the commonly-held idea that the war was too complicated to understand was a complete fallacy. “Bosnia’s war is cruelly simple,” he writes. “It is the result of the resurrection in our time of the dreams and aggrieved historical quests of two great Balkan powers of medieval origin, Serbia and Croatia, and the attempt to re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.”

Caught between them was a third people, who historically speaking did not belong anywhere, and these were the Slavic Muslims, converted during the longish Ottoman occupation of the area, and mostly resident in the third entity, Bosnia, which was about equally shared between Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

The war was between what he called two narods that being a Slavonic word that means “a people” and  “a nation” at the same time. Once the demons of these nationalisms were released --- the main agitator being  Slobodan Milosovic, a rising Serbian politician who rode his horse right into the presidency of what was still called Yugoslavia --- civilization as we think of it virtually collapsed. “You hear it everywhere in Yugoslavia nowadays,” Vulliamy writes, “the Hrvatski narod, the Croatian people; the Serpski narod, the Serbian people; and also the Bosanski narod, the Bosnian people,….and, of late, the Mussulmanski narod, the Muslim people, too.”

At an early stage of his coverage of the war, Vulliamy found that if he asked a question about yesterday’s artillery attack, the answer was quite likely to begin in the year 925, “invariably illustrated with maps.”  That is why he called it “the War of Maps.” Historically, wave after wave of outside conquerers had swept through the entire territory, Christians of Charlemagne’s Roman Catholic empire coming from the west, eastwards, and the Orthodox Byzantine emperors coming from the east, sweeping westwards. The principality of Serbia “emerged under the tutelage of Byzantium”, and evolved into a powerful independent kingdom under its own Emperor up to 1346, but in the following century was “buried under the Turkish advance,” leaving behind in Serbia’s former empire “a vigorous cultural nationalism which has since refused to die.”

For their part, the Croatians had first accepted the suzerainity of the Christian Charlemagne, but were later overcome by the advancing forces of Byzantium. In 924, however, a Croatian king, Tomislav, freed himself from the two dominating influences and established himself over a vast area reaching as far north as the Hungarian border, and east towards what has become Serbia. Some of the maps that were revived on both sides when the modern war was breaking out, show his borders reaching even further. But his empire lasted only three years and was quickly absorbed into the Hungarian rule.

The result of this plethora of maps is that Serbia and Croatia, both obsessed with their past, both of them stewing over indignities visited on them in history, each claimed borders that overflowed their neighbours’ claims.

The context of the war, he writes, was the surge of popular revolutions against communist tyranny that followed the falling of the Berlin wall in 1989, the Yugoslav narod being only two or three of about a dozen from Russia, Slovakia, and other modern nations (Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, all of which have rebelled from overlord rule,  being among them.)

The rest of Vulliamy’s book describes his horrendous experiences as he covered the war for more than two years. He did not follow the old rule that no story is worth dying for. Appalled by the brutality with which the Serbs carried out the “ethnic cleansing” of territories in which they were the majority population in Bosnia, this reporter attached himself to convoys of people who had been subjected to the ultimate indignity, not for anything they had done but just because they actually existed.  He describes the methods used by the bully boy army of Serbian-Bosnians led by the psychiatrist  Milovan Karadzic, and his leading general Ratko Mladic, neither of whom can be described as fully sane. These methods went something like this: a unit would lob a grenade into a house in which people were probably living an ordinary life, then they would enter the house, begin beating the inhabitants mercilessly, probably killing most of the able-bodied men, then they would turn those who were left --- usually women, children and the aged --- into the streets, tell them to head in a certain direction and never to turn back. Along the way, sometimes travelling in their own cars, sometimes in buses and trucks, often walking, they would be fired upon, spat on, beaten, and finally robbed, so that they became a walking mass, heading into the forests in an almost vain hope that they were heading towards people who might welcome and save them. Behind them the attackers would have driven trucks to the houses to strip them of their contents before setting fire to them, or blowing them up. Or, in certain houses too good to blow up, to move into them.

Needless to say, in this disgraceful human landscape, Vulliamy encountered some people who showed heroism in face of these brutalities, some younger people who exhibited undoubted qualities of leadership which emerged simply under the pressure of events, and he does full credit to them.  He also mentions that of 150,000 Serbs who were living in Sarajevo before the Serbs put that city under a four-year siege, some 90,000 never left, but stayed to defy the best efforts to displace or murder them, by their fellow-Serbs.

I had not realized before that there were actually two wars fought over Bosnia. The first by the Bosnian-Serbs (reinforced by the Yugoslav army, the fourth most powerful in Europe, which became a weapon in the Serbian armoury), a war fought  as they battled to expel all Croats and Muslims from the territories that they fully expected to absorb into a Greater Serbia (they actually formed a Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which, in the eventual settlement, was recognized by the international community as the Serpska Republic, a semi-autonomous area within the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.)  The second war was fought by a Fascistic army of Bosnian-Croats, most of them emanating from Montenegro in the south, who changed their minds in mid-battle and joined the Serbs in ethnically cleansing the Muslims from the territories that they, the Croats, fully expected to absorb into the state of Croatia. (In fact, these Croats, like the Bosnian Serbs, formed their own, never recognized republic which they called the Croatian Union of Herzeg-Bosna).  Each of these entities formed their own army, and the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina also managed to cobble together an army to try to defend their abandoned citizens. He records that each of these sides at various times committed unpardonable atrocities, but that most of these were committed by the Serbian and Croation ethnic cleansers.

If readers have formed the opinion that this was a dog’s breakfast, they may be pardoned for doing so. But Vulliamy shows that such emphasis on the past, on the blood of the narod, such concentration on the injustices worked years and even centuries before on your group, had their impact in the present day on the poor people who were rooted out of homes that were destroyed as soon as they left them, and who were left to wander aimlessly, until most of them wound up in existing cities, or in expanded villages, where (as in the infamous  case of the village of Srebrenica, which must have happened after Vulliamy ceased to be an active correspondent there, because he doesn’t mention it in the book, Muslims were promised shelter by the UN, whose soldiers then stood aside and watched as Mladic’s army massacred an alleged 8000 men).

I have visited Sarajevo, once a proudly racially-mixed city, now one that is racially-divided, as everywhere else in the former Yugoslavia is; I passed through Mostar, whose ancient and much-prized historical bridge over the river was wantonly destroyed by Croatian guns in their quest for a racially-cleansed city (which, needless to say, they have succeeded in creating, the Muslims now being confined to “across the river”, while the Catholic Croats occupy the rest of the former town).

The lessons of these wars, and of this book, is that nationalism is poison as a guide to action. And it is deeply ironical that in this age in which we know more about everything than human kind has ever known before, our populations everywhere seem to be breaking into smaller and smaller groups, each of them occupied by a narod of some kind, determined to defend its space against surrounding possible-enemies. I can count at least half a dozen units that have been established from breakaways in Europe, as many in the former Soviet Union, and as many again in Africa and the Middle East. (In this latter region, there seems to be some sense in the upheavals, because their borders were dictated by the colonial powers, and took no notice of ethnicities, cutting them in some cases --- the Kurds are an excellent example --- between three, four and even more states.

An example closer to our own backyard is the failure of the Federation of the West Indies, since broken into a plethora of tiny states that have proven vulnerable to drug-trading criminals and the like, and many of which cannot summon the strength even to defend their own indigenous cultures.

These nationalisms are a curse, and nowhere is that clearer than in the former Yugoslavia, whose people turned on each other ferociously, and for all their killings and betrayals appear to have received no benefits except national passports and borders, erected at the very moment that in the rest of Europe such impediments to free movement have come down.