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The Mediators
One Life at Risk
(Maria POUMIER, Paris)
Lord Ahmed, a peer of England’s Crown, is now
being reproached for having invited Israel Shamir to express
himself recently in the House of Lords. This noble Muslim, as
the suspicion goes, might no longer be a proper Englishman.
Shamir points out that the fatwa unleashed upon him by the
Anti-Defamation League is more threatening than that which
weighs upon Salmon Rushdie. Here is a good occasion to measure
Shamir`s role, the progress of his ideas, and the forces at work
protecting him.
In a revolutionary idea’s career, three steps
follow each other. At first, detractors deny the idea has any
logical merit whatsoever. Then, your enemies paint you as a
malevolent monster to be eliminated as soon as possible because
you represent a mortal danger to the whole social fabric, and
finally your ideas are recognized as the sovereign truth. In
this invariable scheme, nature’s dialectic is in motion minus
the humane phase where antithesis gives shape to synthesis:
someone attempts to put to death the path-opener of the
innovative idea, the mediator. All the world’s political police
know that the slain prophet instantly rises, grows suddenly into
the eternal voice of the people. In order to avoid being
identified as the murderers, it is necessary to manipulate the
prophet’s own brothers so they might “throw Joseph in the
well”, to have the brightest thinker put to death by his own
camp. And so, believe they, policemen-politicians, that the
people will gobble it up and that, without prophets to look up
to, they’ll accept and resign themselves to the absolute reign
of policemen.
All political prisoners have experienced,
among torturers, that officer so different from the usual
jailers, coming in for an interrogation, and, offering sympathy
and a cigarette, saying they understand them, that they admire
them. At this decisive moment, political prisoners divide in two
groups. First, there are those who swallow the lure, and will
never tell of this episode when the enemy they fought rescued
their life. The second group is made up of those who prefer to
play the hero, who’ll perhaps become heroes. They will have so
many more battles to fight before they rejoin their dead, that
they’ll forget this episode, just a bad moment to get through
among so many others, like so many others have experienced.
.
A poet, an excellent poet, however took the time to phrase it
all for us, and doing so provides the recipe to defeat those who
want the revolutionary thinkers condemned by their own brothers.
Imprisoned for utterly subversive undertakings, he sustained
violent interrogations by a CIA agent. He recalls that, being
well impregnated with great Hollywood cinema, he imagined
himself on the dream screen, in those circumstances when
delirium is the sole compass, with this irony of an actor who
knows how to strike all the poses. And through the performer’s
modest professionalism, playing his bit parts, he chose
to show-off to the eventual camera of posterity, his noble
profile. He wasn’t any mightier or more heroic but just by a
professional’s twist, a bend, in, say, odd circumstances not
exactly foreseen in the original scenario.
This poet, an excellent poet, therefore
refused the pact with the devil, and returned to rot in his cell
and scratch at the walls with his nails, like prisoners all do.
He was condemned to death, but an earthquake caused the prison
wall to crumble. He freely stepped away into the street. And as
a good poet, he thought to himself: “Hmm. Just like in a
novel… He must be a celestial Dumas, he who writes my life! I
owe my masters, in turn, a tale.” He then laid on paper, with
all exquisite precision, the secret told to him by that officer,
the CIA agent. After praising his poems at length, his excellent
ideas, his courage and his good-heartedness, the policeman
noticed that the poet wouldn’t cave in. The poet would
disregard the CIA’s offer of an “honourable career”. Here is
what the policeman then said: “Well, so be it! You want to
remain among these folks of yours; but we are powerful, and
we’ll see to it that you be shot by these folks of yours,
because we will give them one thousand clues proving that you
are among us, that you are, yes, our agent ”.
Then time passed, and this poet, who
naturally was a conspirator, once again took up arms with his
comrades. War was lasting endlessly. In his youth he had been a
jolly fellow, had stormed all the bars between Moscow and
Santiago, leaving behind a steady stream of tears and murderous
desires among the loveliest ladies, and read a lot, too. He had
his drawbacks then, that some kept record of. In the matter of
political reflexion, he had come to the conclusion that his
band, the guerrilla he belonged to, armed with the most
revolutionary feelings in the world, was also armed by foreign
powers, so pleased to make mincemeat, in his poor little
miserable country, of revolutionaries and reactionaries. The
civil war was expanding without end. They were exhausting
themselves. He imagined solutions for his country to stop
shredding and shedding blood for the sole profit of foreign
weapons merchants, of foreign financers, of foreign secret
services so anxious that his poor little country be bled white,
cleansed of all its indigenous energy, of its indigenous
thinking. Then his comrades, or those who wanted to remain the
chiefs, among his comrades, told him: “You speak like an agent
of the CIA, you want us to give up our arms.” They set up a
military tribunal, and condemned him to the firing squad. His
comrades put the visionary poet to death, and his corpse was
buried without honours, like the despised body of an abject
person, a bought traitor.
The news reached the officer, who had explained to him the
secret plan of the CIA. He was satisfied, and the crime was
perfect. But the history of peoples relies more on poetry than
on the shortsighted views of the string-pullers who, by the way,
more often than not in detective stories, end up unmasked. The
poet’s works spread like fire, and all have heard the secret
conversation, all have understood the manoeuvre, and the
commandant of ERP Joaquìn Villalobos, that same one who had the
poet executed, excused himself. He has admitted his ‘mistake’.
He is now close to the Columbian government, a pack of puppets
in Bush’s hands who’d rather have the Columbians kill each
other, who finance paramilitary groups (often Israeli) in this
faraway land too, yes, to increase the killing, to prevent the
peasantry from defending their land and their being, and the
life of their country.
Roque Dalton, the visionary poet who made the
stones laugh, such was his own joy, such was his ability to make
fountains of light spring forth in the darkness (“and his soul
was a great fountain”), was a Salvadorian, a combination of
good-for-nothing and Saviour. The smallest country in Central
America, that bears its name like one bears a destiny, that can
save other bigger countries. This year we commemorate the
thirtieth anniversary of Roque Dalton’s death, on May 10th
1975[1]. He has become the national poet, the father of his
nation, all is well, and all the country draws its strength from
him, including the best among the most conservative, who have
understood him [2].
In Palestine, a poet has taken up the torch;
he is gathering unto himself reasons to be stricken down. A
foreigner, polyglot, cultured, seasoned in verbal, intellectual,
political jousting, and frowning upon death, as the military man
he once was. One used to find him moving and entertaining, now
the Mossad wants his skin. But the Mossad is wise, and knows how
to have others do the dirty work. And part of the Left,
interested in the administration of official antizionism, who
would love above anything else to own complete power, in the
aftermath of Bush, wants the immediate death of the poet. “Yes,
he has gifts, but he has two names, they say; yes he tells
truths, but he favours the good life; yes he’s a hard worker,
but he certainly must be working for others! A
Christ-worshipper and a Marie-worshipper ! Like a mere inferior
papist, a false Jew that’s sure, he’s an extremist antisemistic,
he’s a collaborationist! ” As the cacophony inflates, there only
remains for his declared enemies the accusation of criminal
proximity… “He’s got friends who..” The lack of rational
arguments against his highly rational masterpieces appears like
an empty hole, a murky bottom showing his gathered enemies,
zionists, crypto-zionists, mere jealous, mean minds, calculators
lacking faith in political imagination.
Admirers of Israel Adam Shamir, stunned by his tranquil
audacity, sometimes ask him how could the Mossad not have had
him assassinated already. Obviously, aspirants in the left
police establishment are doing their level best to help satisfy
this natural wish of those supporting the racist State of
Israel. They accomplish low jobs of rampant censorship,
preface to an acceptable physical elimination, but haven’t
discovered yet for who, exactly, this poet works, and they get
lost in conjectures. For want of better theories, as he is
hampering their summations, they spray the easy rumor: as long
as the Mossad lets him live, he must be part of it.
But Israel Adam Shamir is working for us, having taught us
already to recognize the enemy’s weaknesses and in particular
its incoherence. Thanks to him we have learnt about its
manoeuvres to cower us, and armed with the slave’s science, we
know the master is bluffing, that he hasn’t any authority other
that the one we used to grant him, and now refuse. In effect,
the State of Israel has lost the moral battle. Signs of the
meltdown are numerous; let us pick, in the field of ideas, the
adherence of Israeli intellectuals to post-zionism; a spare
theory that presents itself as an authorized revisionism of
definitively discredited Zionism. Post-zionism acknowledges
crimes committed by Israel to usurpate sovereignty of the whole
of historical Palestine, and renounces to justify them with a
privileged religion: it therefore joins together with universal
rationality. This doctrinal step-back casts light on the
kidnappers of the population of Israel, held hostage: cynics
residing in foreign lands, money punchers thinking themselves
safe from turmoil, salaried intellectuals. Posturing as Jews,
Christians or atheists will not change the matter: Zionism is
starting to retreat on the land of Palestine. The international
campaign for a boycott of the racist state is progressing. It’s
a good sign!
And we are here to let it be known. Here are
our weapons: the web-tam-tam, the Arab telephone. Those who
still cling to the new wall of shame, to Jewish supremacism, to
the comfortable observance of “two weights and two measures”,
those who, by conformism, let down those who choose risk and
further liberty of reflection won’t be able to have Shamir shot
down in darkness.
(Translated from French by L’Omnivore
Sobriquet and Roger Lagassé)
[1] The civil war went on until 1992, and
killed some 80 000 people. Paramilitary troops killed Bishop
Oscar Romero in 1980. It caused a terrible scandal, but the
sleeping partners were not discovered. It was not enough for
them: in 1986, six Jesuit priests were killed together with
their housekeeper, at dawn, inside their dormitory. Among them
was the academic and philosopher Ignacio Ellacuria. But only
local beasts were accused for that main crime.
[2] Some books by Roque Dalton are available
in english : “Clandestine Poems”, 1990; “Small Hours of the
Night”, Paperback, 1996; “Miguel Marmol” (biography), 1998;
“Roque Dalton Redux”, by Maggie Jaffe and Esther Rodriguez, is
now available (Cedar Hill Books).
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