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<div>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.</div><div>-- Judy and Peter</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-align: center; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="6" color="#1f2836" style="font: 21.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836"><b>''Globalized injustice</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Georgia; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><b></b><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-align: center; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="1" color="#326e90" style="font: 9.0px Georgia; color: #326e90"><b>José Saramago</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Georgia; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><b></b><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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."</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">It is definitely true that History never tells us everything.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Georgia" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Georgia; color: #1f2836">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. <b>''</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); "><font face="Arial" size="4" color="#1f2836" style="font: 13.0px Arial; color: #1f2836"><a href="http://www.granma.cu/ingles/news-i/1julio-26injusticia.html">http://www.granma.cu...injusticia.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/books/19saramago.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/books/19saramago.html</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 19px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; color: rgb(31, 40, 54); background-color: rgb(250, 251, 252); min-height: 15px; "><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 8.0px 0.0px; line-height: 26.0px"><font face="Georgia" size="6" style="font: 24.0px Georgia">José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Writer, Dies at 87</font></p></div></body></html>