[HCCN] Globalized Injustice, Jose Saramago, please read

[Judith Robbins]

Friends: Having just returned from a trip to Cuba, we are especially  
tuned in to alternative (non-US) media voices. Jose Saramago sadly  
died several days after this piece was posted in Granma. We recommend  
this article and hope that you will find the time to read it. A link  
to one of many obituaries follows the article.
-- Judy and Peter



''Globalized injustice

José Saramago

JUNE 4, 2010. I will begin by telling you in extremely brief words  
about a notable event in rural life that occurred in a village on the  
outskirts of Florence more than 400 years ago. Allow me to ask for  
your full attention on this significant historic event because, in  
contrast to the norm, you will not have to wait for the end of the  
story to extract the moral; it won’t be long before it jumps out at you.

The inhabitants were in their homes or cultivating their crops, each  
one of them devoted to their daily doings and cares when suddenly,  
they heard the church bell ringing. In those pious time (we are  
talking about something that happened in the 16th century), the bells  
rang various times throughout the day and, from that point of view,  
there was no motive for surprise, but that bell sounded  
melancholically to death, and that was certainly surprising, given  
that there were no reports of anyone in the village being on their  
deathbeds. So the women went out onto the streets, their children  
joined them, the men left their work and other activities and, in a  
very short time, they were all congregated in the vestibule of the  
church, awaiting to be told for whom they should weep. The bell  
continued to sound for a few minutes more and finally fell silent. A  
few minutes later, the door opened and a campesino appeared on the  
threshold.

But, as this man was not the one normally in charge of ringing the  
bell, the neighbors asked him where was the bell ringer and who was  
the dead person. "The bell ringer isn’t here, I’m the one who made  
the bell sound," was the campesino’s reply. "But then, is nobody  
dead?" retorted the villagers, and the campesino responded: "No one  
who has the name and shape of a person has died; I tolled the bell  
for the death of Justice, because Justice is dead."

What had happened? It so happened that, for some time, the rich lord  
of the place (some unscrupulous count or marquis) had been moving the  
boundary stones on the edges of his land and putting them in the  
campesino’s small parcel of land which, with every advance, grew  
smaller and smaller. The victim began by protesting and complaining,  
then implored compassion, and finally resolved to make a complaint to  
the authorities and avail himself of the protection of justice.

All to no avail; the plundering continued. So, in desperation, he  
decided to announce urbi et orbi (a village is the same size as the  
world for those who have lived there all their lives), the death of  
Justice. Perhaps he believed that his gesture of impassioned  
indignation would succeed in inducing pity and make all the bells in  
the universe sound, without difference of race, creed and customs;  
that all of them, without exception, would accompany him in the knell  
for the death of Justice and would not fall silent until it was  
resurrected. Such a clamor that it would fly from home to home, city  
to city, leaping over borders, casting sonorous bridges across rivers  
and oceans, perforce would waken the sleeping world… I don’t know  
what happened next; I don’t know if the people came to the aid of the  
campesino and helped him to put the boundary stones back in their  
rightful place or if, once Justice had been pronounced dead, they  
returned resigned, their heads bowed and their souls surrendered, to  
the sad life of every day.

It is definitely true that History never tells us everything.

I suppose that this has been the only time, in any part of the world,  
in which a bell, a lifeless bronze bell, after having been tolled so  
many times for the death of human beings, wept for the death of  
Justice. Never again was that funereal sound heard again in that  
village in Florence, but Justice went on and is still dying every  
day. Right now, in this instant in which we are speaking, far away or  
right here, next to the door of our home, someone is killing it.

Every time that it dies it is as if, at the end, it had never existed  
for those who had trusted in it, for those who expected of it what  
all of us have the right to expect from Justice: justice, simply  
justice. Not the kind that envelopes itself in theatrical attire and  
confuses us with flowers of vain, judicial rhetoric; not that which  
allows its eyes to be blindfolded and the weights of the scales to be  
corrupted; not that of the sword which always cuts one side deeper  
than the other; but a prosaic justice, a justice that is the day-to- 
day partner of human beings, a justice for which the just would be  
most exactly and rigorously synonymous with the ethical; a justice  
that would become so indispensable for the happiness of the spirit as  
the nourishment of the body is indispensable for life.

A justice exercised by the courts, without doubt, whenever they  
decide on the law, but also and above all, a justice that is the  
spontaneous emanation of society itself in action, a justice in which  
is manifested, as an inescapable moral imperative, respect for the  
right to be that of every human being. But fortunately, the bells did  
not only toll to weep for those who were dying. They also tolled to  
note the hours of the day and night, to call believers to celebrate  
or to devotion, and there was a time, in this case not so distant,  
when they sounded the alarm in order to call the people to come  
running in the face of catastrophe, floods and fires, disasters, or  
any kind of danger threatening the community.

Today, the social role of the bells is limited to fulfilling ritual  
obligations and the enlightened gesture of the campesino in Florence  
would be viewed as the work of a raving lunatic or, worse still, as a  
simple police case.

Other and different are the bells that today are defending and  
affirming, at last, the possibility of implanting in the world that  
comradely justice of humanity, that justice which is the condition  
for the happiness of the spirit and even, as surprising as it may  
seem to us, the condition for the very nourishing of the body. If  
that justice existed, not one more human being would die of hunger or  
of the many diseases that are curable for some but not for others. If  
that justice existed, for more than half of humanity, existence would  
not be the terrible condemnation that objectively it has been.

Those new bells, whose voice is extending, constantly more strongly,  
throughout the world, are the multiple movements of resistance and  
social action that are striving for the establishment of a new  
distributive and commutative justice which all human beings can come  
to recognize as intrinsically theirs; a justice protected by freedom  
and the law, not by any of their negations.

I have said that for that justice, we already have at our disposal a  
code of practical application within the reach of any comprehension,  
and that that code was laid down 62 years ago in the Universal  
Declaration of Human Rights, containing those 30 basic and essential  
rights, which are only mentioned vaguely today, when they are not  
systematically silenced, more discredited and besmirched today than  
were the property and liberty of the Florentine campesino 400 years ago.

And I have also said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  
exactly as it was drafted and without the need to alter even one  
single comma, could substitute with flying colors – insofar as it  
respects the rectitude of principles and the clarity of objectives –  
the programs of all the political parties in the world, expressly  
those of the so-called left, stagnated in outdated formulas, distant  
from or impotent in terms of facing up to the brutal reality of the  
current world, who are closing their eyes to the already evident and  
fearful threats that the future is preparing against that rational  
and sentient dignity that we imagined was the supreme aspiration of  
human beings.

I will add that the same reasons that lead me to refer in these terms  
to political parties in general, I equally apply to national trade  
unions and, consequently, to the international trade union movement  
as a whole. Either consciously or unconsciously, the meek and  
bureaucratized trade unionism that we are left with today is, to a  
large extent, responsible for the resultant social drowsiness of the  
economic globalization process underway. It pains me to say it, but I  
cannot remain silent. And also, if you permit me to add something  
from my own particular harvest to the fables of La Fontaine, I will  
then say that, if we do not intervene in time – that is to say, now –  
the mouse of human rights will end up implacably devoured by the cat  
of economic globalization.

And democracy, that millenary invention of certain ingenuous  
Athenians for whom it meant, in the concrete social and political  
circumstances of the time, and according to the sacred expression: "A  
government of the people, by the people and for the people?" I often  
hear sincere people, of proven good faith, reasoning, as well as  
those whose interests lie in simulating that appearance of goodness  
who, despite the irrefutable evidence of the disastrous situation  
faced by the majority of people on the planet, that it will be  
precisely within the framework of a general democratic system that we  
will have the most prospects for reaching the full or at least  
satisfactory attainment of human rights. Nothing closer to the truth,  
but on the condition that the system of government and the conduct of  
society in what we currently call democracy, is effectively  
democratic. And it is not.

It is true that we can vote; it is true that we can, by delegation of  
the speck of sovereignty that acknowledges us as citizens with a vote  
– normally via a party – choose our representatives to Parliament; it  
is true, all in all, that the numeric relevance of such  
representations and the political combinations imposed by the need  
for a majority, will always result in a government. All of this is  
true, but it is equally true that the possibility of democratic  
action begins and ends there. Electors can remove from power a  
government that they do not like and vote in another in its place,  
but their votes have not, do not and will never have any visible  
effect on the sole real force that governs the world and, thus, their  
country and their person. I am referring, obviously, to economic  
power – in particular to that part of it, always on the rise, ruled  
by multinational companies in line with strategies of domination that  
have nothing to do with that common good to which, by definition,  
democracy aspires.

We all know that, even so, via a species of verbal and mental  
automatism which does not allow us to see the crude nakedness of  
facts, we continue to speak of democracy as if it were something  
alive and functioning, when all that remains of it is little more  
than a combination of ritualized forms, innocuous steps and gestures  
of a kind of secular mass. And we do not realize – as if we did not  
have eyes to see – that our governments, those which, for better or  
worse, we have elected, and thus for whom we are primarily  
responsible, are increasingly being transformed into mere political  
commissioners of economic power, with the objective mission of  
producing the laws that suit that power, in order to subsequently,  
sweetly enveloped in pertinent official and private publicity,  
introduce them into the social market without raising too many  
protests, save those of certain well-known and eternally discontented  
minorities.

What to do? From literature to ecology, from Star Wars to the  
greenhouse effect, from waste disposal to traffic congestion, we  
argue over everything in this world of ours.

But the democratic system, as if it were a definitively acquired  
fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, is something that  
cannot be argued over. But if I am not mistaken, if I am not  
incapable of adding two and two together, then, among so many other  
necessary or indispensable arguments, it is a matter of urgency,  
before it is too late for us, to promote a global debate on democracy  
and the causes of its decadence, on citizens’ intervention in  
political and social life, on the relations between states and global  
economic and financial power, on that which affirms and that which  
denies democracy, on the right to happiness and a dignified  
existence, on the poverty and hopes of humanity or, speaking with  
less rhetoric, of the simple human beings who comprise it, one by one  
and all together.

There is no worse deception than that of self-deception. And that is  
how we are living. I have nothing more to say. Or yes, just one word  
to ask for a moment of silence. The Florentine campesino has just  
climbed up the church tower once again, the bell is going to sound.  
Let us hear it, please. ''

http://www.granma.cu...injusticia.html


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/books/19saramago.html
José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Writer, Dies at 87
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