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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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CounterPunch
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
Justice and Democracy
Denied
For Whom the Bell Tolls
By José Saramago
In a village just outside Florence over 400 years
ago, the villagers were at home or working in their fields when
they heard the church bell. In those pious times the bells rang
several times a day, so the sound came as no surprise. But the
bell was tolling the death knell and no one knew of anyone dying
in the village. The villagers soon assembled in front of the
church, waiting to be told who was dead. The bell rang a while
longer, then was silent.
Then a peasant came out of the church,
not the usual bell-ringer. The villagers asked him where the
bell-ringer was and who was dead. The peasant replied: "I
rang the bell. I rang the death knell for Justice, because Justice
is no more."
The greedy local lord had been shifting
the boundary stones of his land, gradually encroaching on the
peasant's patch. Every time the lord moved the boundaries, the
peasant's land shrank. The victim protested; then he begged for
compassion and, finally, decided to seek the protection of the
law. To no avail -- his land was still plundered. And, desperate,
he decided to announce urbi et orbi (for if you have lived in
a village all your life, it is the whole world to you) that Justice
was no more.
Perhaps he thought his wild gesture would
swing all the bells in the universe. Perhaps he thought all the
bells would be silent only when Justice had been resurrected.
I do not know what happened next. I do not know whether the villagers
rose up to help the peasant, or whether, once Justice had been
declared dead, they returned, heads bowed, to their daily grind.
History never tells the whole story.
I imagine that was the only time, anywhere
in the world, that a bell mourned the death of Justice. That
knell was never sounded again, but Justice dies every day. Even
now someone somewhere is killing Justice. And whenever Justice
succumbs, it is as if it had never existed for those who trusted
in it, who expected what we are all entitled to expect: which
is justice, pure and true.
I am not talking about justice that dresses
up in theatrical costume and hoodwinks us with empty rhetoric.
Or justice that allows itself to be blindfolded and its scales
tilted. I am not talking about justice whose sword cuts sharper
on one side than the other. My justice is humble, and always
at humanity's side. Justice, in this context, is synonymous with
ethics, and is essential to spiritual well-being. I do not mean
only the justice administered by the courts, but, more importantly,
the justice that flows spontaneously from society's own actions.
The justice that respects every human being's right to exist
as a fundamental moral imperative.
Bells did not only toll the death-knell:
they also chimed the hours of the day and night, and they called
the faithful. Until recently, they warned people of catastrophe,
floods or fires, disasters and danger. Now their only social
functions are ritual tasks. Now the enlightened action of the
peasant would be thought mad or a matter for the police.
Today other bells sound to defend and
affirm the possibility that justice can, at last, be established
in the world; the kind of justice, always at humanity's side,
that is essential to spiritual well-being and even to physical
health. If we had that kind of justice, no one would ever die
of hunger or those diseases that are curable for some but not
for others. If we had that justice, existence would no longer
be the dreadful sentence it has always been for half of humanity.
New bells are sounding
The new bells that are sounding are the
many opposition and social mobilisation movements struggling
for a new justice. The justice they ring for accords each human
being a fair share, and has the power to transform; all human
beings can recognise it as inherently their own. This justice
protects freedom and the law, but never those who deny them.
We already have a practical code for
this justice that is within our understanding. For the last 50
years, it has been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the 30 fundamental principles that are mentioned
vaguely, if at all. They are more spurned today than was the
property of that medieval Italian peasant. In the integrity of
its principles and the clarity of aims, the Declaration as it
is worded, without altering a comma, could beneficially replace
the manifesto of every political party on earth.
I speak particularly to what we call
the left. Hidebound and obsolete in its approach, it appears
unconcerned with or unable to tackle the brutal realities of
the world. It closes its eyes to the already evident, formidable
menaces that threaten in future the rational and sensitive dignity
that we imagine to be the aspiration of humanity. The same is
true of national trade unions and the international trade union
movement. Consciously or unconsciously, the acquiescent and bureaucratised
trade unionism that remains to us is largely responsible for
the social torpor that has accompanied economic globalisation.
I don't like to say this, but I can't hide it. Unless we intervene
in time -- and that time is now -- the cat of economic globalisation
will inevitably devour the mouse of human rights.
And what of democracy -- "government
of the people, by the people and for the people?" I often
hear it claimed both by genuinely sincere people and others who
have an interest in feigning good will, that though most of the
planet is in a desperate state, it is within a democratic system
that we are most likely to achieve full or at least adequate
respect for human rights. No doubt about that, provided that
the system of government and social organisation that we call
democracy is actually democratic.
But it is not. True, we can vote. True,
the sovereignty delegated to us as voters means we can choose
who will represent us in parliament, usually through the political
parties. True, the number of representatives and political combinations
that the need for a majority dictates will always produce a government.
All that is true; but it is also true that the opportunity for
democratic action starts and ends there.
A voter can overthrow an unsympathetic
government and replace it with another, but his vote has never,
does not and never will have any perceptible effect on the only
real force that governs the world and therefore his country and
himself. That force is economic force, in particular that constantly
expanding sector administered by the multinationals in accordance
with strategies of domination inimical to the very common good
to which democracy, by definition, aspires. We all know that
is so, but we mechanically talk and think in a way that stop
us acting on that knowledge. So we continue to speak of democracy
as if it were vigorous and effective, when all we have left is
the ritual, innocuous moves and gestures of some secular mass.
And we fail to see, as if it were not
obvious, that our governments, the very governments we have elected
for better or worse -- and for whom we therefore bear prime responsibility
-- are increasingly assuming the role of political administrators
for those with real economic clout. Governments are left to draft
the kind of laws the big economic players want. Packaged with
the appropriate public or private spin, the legislation can then
be introduced into the social marketplace without provoking protest,
except from a few unsatisfiable minorities.
What can we do? We discuss everything:
literature, the environment, the drift of the galaxies, the greenhouse
effect, waste disposal and traffic jams. But we never discuss
the democratic system. It is as if it were by its nature untouchable
until the end of time.
Along with the many other issues we should
discuss, we need urgently, before it is too late, to encourage
an international debate on democracy and the reasons for decline.
We need to debate the intervention of citizens in political and
social life, and between states and global economic and financial
forces.
We need to think about what enhances
and what denies democracy; about the right to happiness and dignity;
about the woes and hopes of humanity -- about human beings, as
individuals or collectively. Self-deceit is the worst of errors.
But self-deceit is all around us.
José Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998.
This is an edited extract from a speech by Saramago to 6,000
people who met under the auspices of Attac in Paris in January;
the text was then read out at the closing session of the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre in February.
Translated by Julie Stoker
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