Pablo Neruda's importance was as much political as poetic

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/apr/10/pablo-neruda-importance-political-poetic

Posted by

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Wednesday 10 April 2013 

On 22 September 1973, Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda – whom Gabriel García Márquez dubbed "the greatest poet of the 20th century" – received some visitors at the Santa María hospital in Chile's capital Santiago. Among them were Sweden's ambassador Harald Edelstam and the Mexican ambassador Gonzalo Martínez Corbala, offering a plane to fly Neruda and his wife Matilde into exile.

We know about their conversation thanks to as yet unpublished documents at the National Archive in Sweden. Edelstam asserts he found the poet "very ill" though still willing to travel to Mexico. In a memo sent to his superiors, Edelstam observes: "In his last hours [Neruda] either didn't know or didn't recognise he suffered a terminal illness. He complained that rheumatism made it impossible to move his arms and legs. When we visited him, Neruda was preparing as best he could to travel … to Mexico. There, he would make a public declaration against the military regime."

That made the poet dangerous to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another voice, that of popular singer Víctor Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too dangerous.

Members of the junta are on record expressing the view on the morning of September 22 that if Neruda flew into exile, his plane would fall into the sea. In the afternoon, radio stations under military control announced the poet would probably die in the next few hours, at a time when he was still awake in the hospital. The following day he was dead.

That historical mystery alone explains why his body was exhumed this week. But there are more pressing reasons too, at a time when the destiny of the left hangs in the balance in Latin America. The death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, one of many leftist leaders in the region to have fallen ill to cancer, has combined with the 700 documented assassination attempts against Cuba's Fidel Castro to fuel all manner of conspiracy theories.

More important still is the fact that, faced with an economic crisis without foreseeable end and few alternatives, a new generation of world activists needs to reconnect with the vibrant political imagination embodied by Neruda. The question is not merely whether the commitment he exemplified is possible now, but whether technology, and the institutions we use to manage it, can allow the kind of freedom Neruda called for in his poetry.

In this context, Neruda's life, as well as the shadows cast by his death, are Google-bombs waiting to be set off by a new generation of networked freedom fighters at the heart of our austerity-obsessed, repressive, and frankly boring narratives.

Neruda wasn't surprised by the 1973 coup – most people knew that the consequences of restoring "economic order" would be vicious, and many accepted it as necessary – but it wasn't inevitable: under a deal accepted by the government coalition as well as the opposition, President Allende was going to call for a referendum and would have resigned if the result went against him. This made any show of force by the smaller but influential sector within the Chilean armed forces unnecessary. But the conspirators were bent on regime change, so they brought forward the date of the coup, subjecting Chilean society to a trial by fire in order to cure it of a supposedly menacing communist "cancer".

The invocation of "cancer" to provide yesterday's rulers with a pretext to unleash war abroad and repression at home is mirrored by the questions being asked about Neruda's cancer today.

Neruda and the other individuals behind the Chilean revolution of the early 1970s made mistakes and were at least partially responsible for the consequences. But the real story behind their defeat and deaths hasn't been told yet. This is one of the reasons why people are looking to unearth new truths, hoping to shed some light on the origins of our problems today.

Through histories, testimonies, and documents declassified in the US or revealed as recently as last year by Wikileaks, we now know that the fate of Neruda and others like him had been decided long before they had any hand in mismanaging the economy or dividing political opinion. Persecution of the left had begun in Chile as early as 1948, at the behest of a US government awash with anti-communist paranoia.

That year, a controversial measure known as "the Damned Law" ("la ley maldita") outlawed the Chilean Communist Party, sent the communist leadership into exile and imprisoned hundreds of militants at the Pisagua camp under the orders of a young lieutenant named Augusto Pinochet – the concentration camp's director who would become Chile's dictator, and a friend and inspiration to Margaret Thatcher.

Neruda, radicalised like many others by the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 40s, chose to flee the country. Fearing for his life he crossed the Andes on a horse, carrying with him the manuscript of his epic poem Canto General, before resurfacing in Mexico thanks to the help of his friends Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera.

His second exile would have been in 1973. Edelstam's conversation with Neruda took place a mere two hours before the poet went to sleep, never to wake up again. When the Swedish diplomat went to Neruda's house to offer his condolences, he found it destroyed. Pinochet's men were bent on erasing every trace of his existence. They would do the same with thousands of people during a reign of terror that would last for nearly two decades.

[...]

Nelson Mandela, 1964

Pope Francis

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/15/atheists-pope-francis-obama-liberal-voice-change

by Jonathan Freedland

That Obama poster on the wall, promising hope and change, is looking a little faded now. The disappointments, whether over drone warfare or a botched rollout of healthcare reform, have left the world's liberals and progressives searching for a new pin-up to take the US president's place. As it happens, there's an obvious candidate: the head of an organisation those same liberals and progressives have long regarded as sexist, homophobic and, thanks to a series of child abuse scandals, chillingly cruel. The obvious new hero of the left is the pope.

Only installed in March, Pope Francis has already become a phenomenon. His is the most talked-about name on the internet in 2013, ranking ahead of "Obamacare" and "NSA". In fourth place comes Francis's Twitter handle, @Pontifex. In Italy, Francesco has fast become the most popular name for new baby boys. Rome reports a surge in tourist numbers, while church attendance is said to be up – both trends attributed to "the Francis effect".

His popularity is not hard to fathom. The stories of his personal modesty have become the stuff of instant legend. He carries his own suitcase. He refused the grandeur of the papal palace, preferring to live in a simple hostel. When presented with the traditional red shoes of the pontiff, he declined; instead he telephoned his 81-year-old cobbler in Buenos Aires and asked him to repair his old ones. On Thursday, Francis visited the Italian president – arriving in a blue Ford Focus, with not a blaring siren to be heard.

Some will dismiss these acts as mere gestures, even publicity stunts. But they convey a powerful message, one of almost elemental egalitarianism. He is in the business of scraping away the trappings, the edifice of Vatican wealth accreted over centuries, and returning the church to its core purpose, one Jesus himself might have recognised. He says he wants to preside over "a poor church, for the poor". It's not the institution that counts, it's the mission.

All this would warm the heart of even the most fervent atheist, except Francis has gone much further. It seems he wants to do more than simply stroke the brow of the weak. He is taking on the system that has made them weak and keeps them that way.

"My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost," he tweeted in May. A day earlier he denounced as "slave labour" the conditions endured by Bangladeshi workers killed in a building collapse. In September he said that God wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world and yet we live in a global economic order that worships "an idol called money".

There is no denying the radicalism of this message, a frontal and sustained attack on what he calls "unbridled capitalism", with its "throwaway" attitude to everything from unwanted food to unwanted old people. His enemies have certainly not missed it. If a man is to be judged by his opponents, note that this week Sarah Palin denounced him as "kind of liberal" while the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs has lamented that this pope lacks the "sophisticated" approach to such matters of his predecessors. Meanwhile, an Italian prosecutor has warned that Francis's campaign against corruption could put him in the crosshairs of that country's second most powerful institution: the mafia.

As if this weren't enough to have Francis's 76-year-old face on the walls of the world's student bedrooms, he also seems set to lead a church campaign on the environment. He was photographed this week with anti-fracking activists, while his biographer, Paul Vallely, has revealed that the pope has made contact with Leonardo Boff, an eco-theologian previously shunned by Rome and sentenced to "obsequious silence" by the office formerly known as the "Inquisition". An encyclical on care for the planet is said to be on the way.

Many on the left will say that's all very welcome, but meaningless until the pope puts his own house in order. But here, too, the signs are encouraging. Or, more accurately, stunning. 

Recently, Francis told an interviewer the church had become "obsessed" with abortion, gay marriage and contraception. He no longer wanted the Catholic hierarchy to be preoccupied with "small-minded rules". Talking to reporters on a flight – an occurrence remarkable in itself – he said: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?" His latest move is to send the world's Catholics a questionnaire, seeking their attitude to those vexed questions of modern life. It's bound to reveal a flock whose practices are, shall we say, at variance with Catholic teaching. In politics, you'd say Francis was preparing the ground for reform.

Witness his reaction to a letter – sent to "His Holiness Francis, Vatican City" – from a single woman, pregnant by a married man who had since abandoned her. To her astonishment, the pope telephoned her directly and told her that if, as she feared, priests refused to baptise her baby,he would perform the ceremony himself. (Telephoning individuals who write to him is a Francis habit.) Now contrast that with the past Catholic approach to such "fallen women", dramatised so powerfully in the current film Philomena. He is replacing brutality with empathy.

Of course, he is not perfect. His record in Argentina during the era of dictatorship and "dirty war" is far from clean. "He started off as a strict authoritarian, reactionary figure," says Vallely. 

But, aged 50, Francis underwent a spiritual crisis from which, says his biographer, he emerged utterly transformed. He ditched the trappings of high church office, went into the slums and got his hands dirty.

Now inside the Vatican, he faces a different challenge – to face down the conservatives of the curia and lock in his reforms, so that they cannot be undone once he's gone. Given the guile of those courtiers, that's quite a task: he'll need all the support he can get.

Some will say the world's leftists and liberals shouldn't hanker for a pin-up, that the urge is infantile and bound to end in disappointment. But the need is human and hardly confined to the left: think of the Reagan and Thatcher posters that still adorn the metaphorical walls of conservatives, three decades on. The pope may have no army, no battalions or divisions, but he has a pulpit – and right now he is using it to be the world's loudest and clearest voice against the status quo. You don't have to be a believer to believe in that.

The Left needs to realize that the 20th century is over

Jim Rogers is an idiot

Meet the Worst Judge in America

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/meet_the_worst_judge_in_america_20131125

By Bill Blum

[...]

To some, the answer may seem a no-brainer. The worst judge has to be one whose last name is Scalia, Thomas or Alito—the three jurisprudential horsemen of the right-wing apocalypse unfolding term by term at the Supreme Court. 

To others, the search for the worst may extend beyond the nation’s highest tribunal to the lower rungs of the national judiciary.

Perhaps the worst is Judge Priscilla Owen of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who specialized in representing oil and gas industry interests as an attorney in Houston and was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2001. Owens authored the recent 5th Circuit opinion overturning a lower court ban on a provision of the new omnibus Texas abortion law that requires doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

Or perhaps the search should range even more widely and focus on federal District Court trial judges, such as Loretta A. Preska, the New York-based jurist who recently sentenced Anonymous-affiliated activist Jeremy Hammond to a 10-year prison term, possibly the harshest penalty ever imposed for the offense of computer hacking.

All of the above would be excellent choices. My nominee, however, is Judge Diane S. Sykes, who sits on the 7th Circuit, which covers the states of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, and is headquartered in Chicago.

In a 154-page split 2-1 decision handed down Nov. 8, Sykes authored the majority opinion in which she invoked the doctrine of corporate personhood—which she characterized as being “reinvigorated” by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on campaign finance law—to invalidate the contraception mandate of Obamacare. How she managed to do so was nothing short of an exercise in judicial fantasy rivaling the most unhinged of Antonin Scalia’s rants against gay marriage, albeit without his flare for vitriol. 

The Obamacare case came before Sykes as a consolidated appeal involving separate complaints filed against Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius by an Illinois construction company with 90 full-time employees and an Indiana manufacturer of safety and lighting systems operating both in this country and abroad with 464 full-time U.S. employees. 

The Catholic owners of both closely held businesses argued that Obamacare’s mandate requiring inclusion of contraception benefits in their employee health care plans violated both the individual owners’ and the companies’ constitutional and statutory rights to the free exercise of religion.

Despite the fact that both businesses engaged in for-profit activity, Sykes concluded, citing Citizens United, that the term “person” includes corporations and as such, the businesses were “persons” whose religious rights not to practice or promote birth control were protected under the Constitution and an obscure piece of legislation—the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, a Clinton-era statute designed to protect religious liberty. Never mind that nothing about Obamacare forces anyone to practice birth control. Still, under Sykes’ ruling, if the employees of either company wanted contraception services, they had better look elsewhere.

In a pointed dissent, Judge Ilana Rovner wrote that Sykes’ opinion represented “an unprecedented and unwarranted re-conception of … what the free exercise of religion entails,” transferring “a highly personal right to a secular corporation” via “a man-made legal fiction.”

If the Obamacare ruling had been Judge Sykes’ first foray through the right-wing judicial looking glass she would hardly have made the final cut in the contest for the nation’s worst judge. But the Obamacare case is only one of many.

A Bush appointee to the 7th Circuit, the 56-year-old Sykes is the former spouse of Milwaukee right-wing radio personality Charlie Sykes and a prominent member of the Federalist Society. 

As a state judge in Milwaukee County, she presided over a 1993 case in which two protesters with long rap sheets were found guilty of blocking access to a reproductive health facility. 

Compelled by law to impose brief jail terms, Sykes went out of her way during sentencing to praise the defendants for having “the courage of [their] convictions and for the ultimate [anti-abortion] goals” they sought to further.

[...]

http://www.mangago.com/read-manga/das_kapital/tr/112654/page/2/