Magisk realism

 

Netflix har tydligen gjort en TV-serie av "Hundra år av ensamhet". Kultureliten är lyrisk. "Jag kan inte vara den ende som är entusiastisk" säger en kulturskribent på en viss kvällstidning. 

Eh?

Jag kan garantera att 99,99% av svenska folket aldrig har hört talas om Gabriel García Márquez. Jag har förstås gjort det. Gubben som tog emot nobelpriset i litteratur klädd i pyjamas. 

Har dock läst Miguel Asturias...

:P

King Cobra

Första gången Hübinette "outar" en kommunist. Fast det verkar finnas ett antal förklaringar!

"Skansen-Jonas" skryter återigen om hur han genomförde en illegal adoption

Among hippies and yippies

 

A former hippie talks about his experiences of cults, counter-culture and various New Age quests during the 1960´s, 70´s and 80´s. It seems Vajrayana Buddhism straightened him out (more or less). 

Actually quite interesting. I discovered this content mostly by chance. 

Revolutionaries are not normal people

"Che Guevara" is a book in Swedish by Dick Harrison, a professor of history. The title is self-explanatory. Yes, it´s a relatively short biography (about 200 pages in paperback format) of the Cuban revolutionary (who was originally from Argentina). 

For obvious reasons, it´s impossible to avoid politics when writing about Ernesto Guevara, but Harrison has tried to make the book as much as possible about Che the man, rather than Che the Guevarista. Harrison does manage to paint a compelling portrait of the Argentine radical, and follows Che from his childhood home in Argentina through Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba to the Congo, and the eventual defeat in Bolivia. Che comes across as an idealistic socialist of deep convictions, but also as a hard guerilla fighter, a brutal revolutionary, an impatient adventurist, and above all as a man who constantly pushed himself to the limits. I was surprised to learn that Che Guevara suffered heavily from asthma! He was also a womanizer of some standing. Another surprise was his intellectual side. He could probably have become a university teacher in another life. 

Che Guevara´s revolutionary career is too well known to be recounted here, yet there are still unresolved mysteries around him. Harrison retells the unconfirmed story that Guevara met former Argentine president Juan Perón in the latter´s Spanish exile. Perón supposedly warned him not to foment socialist revolutions in Latin America, since this was simply impossible! A strange tale *not* discussed in the book is Che´s supposed relations with the kook-Trotskyist "Posadistas" in Cuba. Harrison believes that it was Régis Debray rather than Ciro Bustos who revealed that Che was in Bolivia when Debray and Bustos had been captured and were interrogated by the Bolivian military. (Bustos subsequently moved to Sweden. I don´t know if the author ever met him.)  

Inevitably, "Che Guevara" also discusses the virtual cult of Che after his death by execution in Bolivia. One aspect I wasn´t aware of is that Che is literally worshipped as a saint by the peasants in the area where he was captured and killed. They call him San Ernesto de la Higuera and compare him to both Jesus and John the Baptist. San Ernesto is said to work miracles, and sometimes walks the mountain paths as an ordinary mortal. There are bizarre similarities between the famous or infamous picture of a dead Che in Vallegrande and old paintings of the dead Christ taken down from the cross. There is also a legend that could perhaps be called "the curse of Che", which claims (or points out) that many of the people responsible for his death met violent ends. 

It seems revolutionaries aren´t normal people, after all...

If Swedish is your first language, perhaps recommended. 

Fascistisk estetik?

Kanske inte riktigt kopplat till
innehållet i detta inlägg

I och för sig intressant (observera förresten källan - har de faktiskt *en* seriös skribent på den där vulgosajten?), men själv är jag rätt svag för högmodernismens skrytbyggen typ "världens största stålverk", "världens högsta skyskrapa", "världens största förgyllda staty av den befriade Prometheus" och sådant. 

"En ny europeisk stad - mitt i tredje världen"

Moderaterna river "kulturmarxism" på Lidingö

Kommun beställde vackra byggnader - arkitekter protesterar

Våra pengar, våra regler

Har länge tyckt att Anders Kompass borde bli Guatemalas president. Eller kanske prokonsul i en svensk kolonialadministration? Det här är efterträdaren...

Tycker alltså att han gjorde helt rätt här. 

Svensk ambassadör blandar sig i Guatemalas inre angelägenheter

Galaxy Brain

"I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism" is a intriguing book by New York-based writer A. M. Gittlitz, published last year. It tells the story of the Argentinian Trotskyist revolutionary Homero Cristalli (1912-1981), better known under his mysterious pen name J Posadas (sometimes interpreted as Juan Posadas, sometimes as José Posadas). The movement around Posadas was notorious on the far left for decades, first because of its bizarre theory that a nuclear war would trigger a future socialist reconstruction of society, and later because of Posadas´ belief in UFOs, space aliens and the possibility of human-dolphin communication. I first heard of the Posadists in the 1980´s as "the Trots who believe that socialism will come from the Moon". Later, I wrote to the British "Revolutionary Workers Party" asking for Posadas´ notorious UFO article, but instead, I was sent a pamphlet about Charlie Chaplin (thank you). I also corresponded with ultra-Posadist Paul Schulz and tried to read his German-language material. Yes, it did mention Star Trek ("Raumschiff Enterprise" in German), Erich von Däniken and the lost continent of Mu... I have previously reviewed some of Posadas´ own works on this blog (click on the label "Posadism" below this post to access it). After reading "I Want to Believe", I can only say that I didn´t know half of it! 

What makes the Posadist current so fascinating is that it started out as a "real" Trotskyist tendency, and even had a modicum of support in the unions and the working class. Posadas (or Homero Cristalli, to use his given name) was an Italian-Argentine left-wing radical of a working class background. He only attented school for two years, and tried his luck at a wide variety of odd jobs, including minstrel singer and soccer player. Eventually, he became a union organizer and joined the Trotskyist movement. To make a long story much shorter, Posadas eventually split with the "official" Fourth International, creating his own "Fourth International (Posadist)" in the 1960´s. At the time, the Posadists had a real presence in several Latin American nations: Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala and Cuba. They attempted to organize workers and landless peasants. In Cuba and Guatemala, they tried to influence left-leaning guerilla movements with varying degrees of success. Eventually, both Castro and Guatemalan guerilla leader Yon Sosa disavowed the Posadistas. In Cuba, the Posadists were rounded up and imprisoned after Castro had allied himself with the "Stalinist" Communist Party. Che Guevara negotiated a deal which permitted the Posadistas to leave prison and return to civilian life, on condition that they would dissolve their party and never again partake in political activity. In many other Latin American nations, the followers of Posadas were murdered outright by pro-American military or right-wing death squads. More succesful, perhaps, was a clandestine arms factory in Morocco, smuggling weapons to the FLN in Algeria. The factory had been set up by Fourth International leader Michel Pablo, and several Posadist militants worked there. 

Or so the story goes. Gittlitz admits that it´s difficult to know what *really* happened in many cases, so his story of the Posadist international should perhaps be taken as a first approximation of the truth, rather than as a story about "what actually happened". But yes, I´ve heard the Guatemalan part of the story from a reputable source (who believed that the Posadists really did embezzle MR-13 funds. Curiously, my source referred to the man as "Posades"). Other claims sound more fantastic. Did the Posadist International really have sections in far-away places such as South Yemen, Somalia and Madagascar? I doubt it. I heard too many examples of small left-wing tendencies claiming "sections" that on closer inspection turn out to be fictitious (or consist of one guy in a Paris student café). 

An interesting fact is that the crazy perspective of hoping for a nuclear war wasn´t entirely Posadas´ own invention. It actually comes from Michel Pablo, the leader of the Fourth International in the immidiate post-World War II period. Pablo´s belief in War-Revolution - that a Third World War is imminent and will trigger a world socialist revolution - is only one step removed from Posadas´ more dramatic demand for the Soviet Union or China to actually launch such a war by a preemptive nuclear strike on the United States. And yet, Pablo is seldom painted as barking mad. Perhaps he was a more erudite theoretician than the autodidactic Posadas? Gittlitz also notes the shift in Posadist politics circa 1968 (which seems to have co-incided with a similar shift in Castro´s policy, something not noticed by the author) from ultra-leftish guerillism towards a more pro-Soviet "popular frontism". Posadas even supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia! When Posadas was forced to leave Latin America, he went to Italy where his group entered the Communist Party and even sent a representative to Moscow for talks. The Soviet host wasn´t impressed and would later publish a polemic against the Posadists. 

Had this been all, Posadism would simply be regarded as a kind of ultra-Pabloism, and nobody would give a damn. What made the tendency memorable (and meme-able) is that somewhere along the line, J Posadas *did* go barking mad...

Juan Posadas did have authoritarian, puritanical and slightly megalomaniacal tendencies already from the beginning of his Trotskyist career. It´s interesting to note that he originally slavishly followed the decrees of the Fourth International leadership, Pablo in particular. I suspect this dogmatism was Posadas´ way of compensating for his lack of education. At some point, the Argentine autodidact decided to replace his guru Pablo with...himself. It was pretty much downhill from there. During the 1970´s, if not earlier, the Posadist international became a kind of "Jehovah´s Witnesses of the left", or a cult by any other name. The internal life of the organization strikingly resembled other cults, both political and religious: all power was in the hands of Posadas and his immidiate family, morality was puritanical, members were not permitted to have children, critics of the leadership were invariably denounced as "police agents" and expelled, all meetings were closed with shouts of "Viva Posadas", and the party magazines were filled with the rambling, incoherent and incomprehensible speeches of the great leader, presented as infallible wisdom. The political line also resembled the message of apocalyptic cults. After an event known as "the repression" (compare the Great Tribulation of Christian fundamentalism) during which many militants would be rounded up and killed, a nuclear war would follow (compare Armaggedon) and after the war, almost miraculously, the survivors would establish socialism on a world scale (compare the Millennium). 

In one of these speeches, Posadas mentions UFOs, claims that they are extraterrestrial craft, and that the aliens must be socialist. Perhaps they can even help humanity to fight for socialism? The speech was dutifully printed in the magazines of the Posadist "sections" and quickly made them the laughing stock of the entire left. Ironically, Gittlitz believes that Posadas himself wasn´t *that* obsessed with UFOs. It was simply one of many topics on which he had all-knowing opinions, but it´s hardly surprising that Posadas´ opponents jumped to the occasion. 

During the 1970´s, Posadas purged most of his old guard, was involved in several sex scandals (again like any cultish guru) and seems to have gone completely and utterly mad. For instance, he treated the birth of his daughter Homerita as an event of world-historic significance, and wanted to raise her to become the first enlightened socialist human (or something to that effect). Party members in Italy were instructed to visit the maternity ward where Homerita was born, stand around the bed of the mother and the infant, sing revolutionary songs, etc. The staff of the ward eventually had to silence them! Posadas´ message became more and more New Age-like. He believed that humans could and should communicate with dolphins. Indeed, all animals and plants would become tame and live in peace with humans under socialism, and some animals (if I understand his ramblings correctly) would even become as intelligent as humans (including the almost iconic dolphins). At this point, the Posadistas had no working class base left, the experienced militants were all gone, and most of the "sections" consisted of confused young people of the kind that might just as well join a religious cult. 

After the death of Posadas, two ex-Posadistas developed the UFO strain of his thought even further. One of them was Dante Minazzoli, who had been expelled by Posadas for whatever reason, but still continued to believe in the alien-socialism interface. He spent years as a kind of one-man entryist in ufological circles, trying to gently win them over to a revolutionary socialist perspective. The other was Paul Schulz, who told me that he had been expelled after the death of Posadas by the new leadership of the International. Judging by "I Want to Believe", Schulz was far crazier than I had previously thought. Apparently, Schulz became a trance medium, believed that he was in direct communication with aliens, and tried to win Swiss contactee Billy Meier for a socialist perspective. Meier never responded to Schulz´ letters... 

When J Posadas died, many assumed that his movement would die with him. However, it seems that the Posadist Fourth International still exists, led by Posadas´ son Léon Cristalli. Or perhaps there are now two Posadist internationals, the "European bureau" having split from the "Latin American bureau". Léon Cristalli´s wing of the movement (the Latin American one) supports Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the populist spring in general. They believe that Russia is a "workers´ state". However, the most well-known revival of Posadism is in the form of jocular and ironic Internet memes. This "Neo-Posadism" rose to prominence circa 2016-17, at about the same time that Trump-supporting trolls filled Twitter and other social media forums with curious memes featuring Pepe, Kek, Harambe, Trump as the restorer of German Idealism, and what not. There is a fake Posadist group known as "the Intergalactic Workers League" and an equally fake "DSA Posadist Caucus". In this era of postmodern irony, J Posadas have been turned into a LARP...

While I consider "I Want to Believe" an interesting and indispensable read for those of us who give a damn about the 57 varieties of Trotskyism, I must say that the author comes across as something of a quasi-intellectual. I only skimmed the last chapter, where he discusses "the function of the joke and irony in history" (sounds like something Posadas himself could have written). Gittlitz is also somewhat sloppy, as when he refers to the Russian capital in 1917 as "Saint Petersburg" (it´s Petrograd), or claims that the Popular Front government in Spain had a conflict with Franco in 1935 (it wasn´t elected until 1936), or uses English words in weird ways ("principal" instead of "principle", etc). The author accepts a kind of mythologized Trotskyist history, in which Lenin wanted to see Trotsky as his successor, hundreds of thousand Trotskyists were sent to the Gulags, and Hitler feared a world revolution led by Trotsky. Nah, none of that happened, except in the fevered imagination of...well...Posadas, perhaps? It´s almost as if the author has gone native!

That being said, "I Want to Believe" is nevertheless recommended. Four stars out of five. 

Even better than 2012

Is this true? If so, my ancestors were even better than I expected! The remains of an ancient lost civilizations have also been found in the Brazilian jungle, btw. It also struck me that perhaps we can use this lidar technology to find Bigfoot...?   

Apocalypse not

“Training for the Apocalypse” is a well produced but ultimately confusing documentary featuring a number of survivalists in the United States, some of whom are religious believers. A shorter portion of the documentary was shot in Guatemala, the homeland of the Mayans. Yes, it's the Mayan Apocalypse 2012 scare all over again!

It's a pity that “Training” is so badly edited, since some of the people interviewed are pretty interesting (in a way). Parowan Prophet is a Mormon-derived polygamist-apocalyptic sect based in the small town of Parowan, Utah. Its leader, unrepentant White supremacist Leland Freeborn, got his prophetic messages during a near-death experience and believes that the Bible mentions “the Obama-nation of desolation standing in the holy place” (i.e. the White House). We also get to meet a defector from the sect, who is still a survivalist and gives weapons training to his young kids.

A more metaphysical guy, Ivan Stein (Park City, UT), also got his information on the impending doom and future paradise from an NDE. A quick search on the web reveals that Stein has moved to Florida and no longer talks about the Mayan apocalypse, opting instead for spiritual self-realization and organic food. “Training” also includes secular survivalists who (unusually for people in this milieu) teach organic gardening to people in poorer urban neighborhoods. Finally, we are forced to endure the faux macho antics of a guy with a black mask and a voice distorter. The documentary ends with everyone celebrating Christmas, rather than fighting the Antichrist!

Frankly, “Training for the Apocalypse” only deserves two stars, but since I happen to find some of the characters intriguing, I will gracefully give it three.

Walk over

Maryknoll Fathers 

"Marxism and Christianity: Are they compatible?" is a pamphlet published in 1970 by the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party. It contains the full text of a public debate between SWP spokesperson Theodore Edwards and Reverend Blase Bonpane, a member of the Maryknoll Fathers (a Catholic missionary organization).

Unfortunately, there is not much of a debate. Bonpane turns out to be an admirer of Bonhoeffer and Harvey Cox. He expresses support for Camilo Torres, an early liberation theologian who became a Marxist guerrilla fighter in Colombia. Bonpane also supports the Marxist FAR in Guatemala, and was apparently extradited from that country accused of plotting the overthrow of its right-wing military regime. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but since the Reverend is almost as left-wing as the SWP, the expected confrontation between Marx and Christ never gets off the ground. Essentially, Bonpane simply admits that Edwards' criticism of Christianity and the Catholic Church is largely correct. The only difference between the two contestants, is that Bonpane is more positive about "united fronts" between Marxists and Catholics, and believes that a section of the hierarchy might support the coming revolution. Edwards doesn't.

As for compatibility, Edwards (correctly) believes that Marxism and Christianity are philosophically incompatible, and expounds at length on the materialist theory of history. The fact that Christianity has changed together with the economic system, is to Edwards the best evidence for its wholly earthly origins. Primitive Christianity expressed the interests of slaves and Roman proletarians, medieval Catholicism was feudal, while Protestantism expressed the interests of capitalism and the nascent nation-states. Christianity is destined to wither with the advance of science and diffusion of scientific knowledge. Another important factor is the wholly "materialist" character of modern revolutionary struggles. No spiritual dimension is needed to explain the contradictions of capitalism, the movement of the working class, etc. Quite the contrary, these things can only be grasped in a materialist way, making religion a reactionary hindrance to a struggle for socialism.

Edwards also says that any attempt to reconcile Christianity and Marxism would force Christians to look upon the Gospels as historical documents filled with distortions, rather than divine revelation. Like many during this period, Edwards believes that Jesus might have been an anti-Roman revolutionary, a kind of socialistic Zealot. But once you admit that the Gospels contain errors, you can no longer claim that Christianity is supra-historical and supernatural. You have to admit that the historical-critical view (really the materialist view) is correct.

It would have been interesting to hear a Christian response to this, but Bonpane simply cedes ground and lets Edwards win on walk over. At one point, the Maryknoll Father says: "I don't look back to Marxism any more than I look back to Jesus. I see them both as going forward, and both in a process of constant change. I could be called personally an eclectic, a person who does pick and choose from people who have gone before." More sensationally, he also says: "I'd say that nondogmatic Marxism is very compatible with revolutionary Christianity, because revolutionary Christianity is not more associated to capitalism than it is to Jesus".

Although "Marxism and Christianity" is clear and easy to read, I will nevertheless only give it two stars, due to its non-debate between Theodore Edwards and Blase Bonpane.

What is Spartacist?

The Spartacist League is a small but notorious (and frequently erratic) left-wing group in the United States. They claim to be Trotskyists. I was an avid left-watcher in my youth, and often bought copies of their magazines Workers Vanguard and Spartacist at a "Mandelite" bookstore in Stockholm. I read them with about equal fascination and horror. This would have been around 1990.

During the 1960's, by contrast, the Spartacist League must have been complete bores. No Yuri Andropov Brigade, no defence of porn star Nina Hartley (she was only a child back then), and very few invectives against Tim Wohlforth or Lyn Marcus (although they are mentioned).

This issue of Spartacist was published in 1967. It contains an article on the elections in California won by Ronald Reagan, articles about student and union protests, a bizarre article claiming that Germany in on the brink of dictatorship, and a polemic against the Posadists. The latter were a competing Trotskyist current in Latin America, and had some influence in the left-wing guerrilla MR-13 in Guatemala (later, the Posadists became even crazier than the Sparts). Unless I'm mistaken, this issue of Spartacist also contain a weird "open letter" to a Soviet diplomat, demanding that the Soviet Union "extends its nuclear shield" to cover Hanoi. The magazine also reprints an article by Trotsky on "centrism".

The abstract sectarianism and polemic-mongering against equally insignificant left-wing groups (such as the ACFI) are already visible, but otherwise early Spartacist sound surprisingly undistinct. Even more surprisingly, the Freedom Socialist Party is listed as a "fraternal group" in the directory. Was Jim Robertson on a first name basis with Ms. Seattle Six-Gun? Somehow, I find that very hard to believe. Her husband, maybe.

The Sparts used to sell bound volumes of all early issues of their magazine, but unfortunately these are out of print. I'm not sure if anyone would be willing to pay 50 bucks for a single issue from 1967. I wouldn't, and I'm a cult-watcher, OK?

For old times sake, I give "Spartacist No. 9, Jan-Feb. 1967" three stars.

Nina Hartley's adult body might be more interesting.

An odd job

This is the revised edition of "Seabirds - an identification guide" by Peter Harrison. The author, who actually looks like an old fashioned sea captain, and his wife Carol spent seven years on the world's oceans to gather information for this field guide to end all field guides. Gee, don't these guys have day jobs? Maybe they do, after a fashion: Harrison worked as a deckhand aboard trawlers and crayfishing boats to more easily study and sketch seabirds. I wonder what his crew mates made of that!

As you might have guessed, "Seabirds" is illustrated by deckhand Harrison himself. Personally, I'm a bird book-watcher rather than a birdwatcher, so I tend to buy bird books for aesthetic reasons. I admit that Harrisonian aesthetics weren't really to my liking, but then, I'm a Jonsson aficionado. The selection of species is also somewhat arbitrary: very few shorebirds, but a whole lot of pelicans, cormorants, loons and grebes. Even grebes that don't live anywhere near the sea have been included. The exceedingly rare Atitlan Grebe can be found only in one lake in Guatemala (if you're lucky). That's a seabird? As for ducks, a representative selection has been included, but only in an appendix with illustrations in black-and-white. Do crayfishers have a secret conflict with eiders?

Otherwise, "Seabirds" looks like most field guides are supposed to look like. There's an extensive colour plate section, and in the main text section we get information on distribution, juveniles, various plumages, similar species and some special tips concerning identification. A problem is that the maps are tucked away in a third section at the back of the book. The colour plates don't indicate distribution. I was somewhat surprised to learn that both the Northern and the Southern Giant Petrels are confined to the South Atlantic, and that the "southern" species have a more northern range! Any explanation? Or just one of those "odd jobs"?

Still, I don't doubt that this is the field guide if your favourite haunts include South Georgia, Kerguelen, Antarctica or...Lake Atitlan. Four stars!