The phrase ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ has come to mean an ambitious (and even unnatural) creation which not only becomes a threat to society, and to itself, but also to those who created it.
The term is derived from an 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In it, a brilliant scientist Dr Frankenstein discovers a way to infuse life into lifeless matter. He creates a humanoid, expecting him to be pure in emotion and thought. The creation tries to fit into society, but fails. After realising his failure, his immense yearning to be accepted mutates and turns into rage. He violently turns against society, and against his creator who abandons him.
Modern political commentators have often used the phrase ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ to describe powerful elites sculpting forces or individuals who could execute their political agendas. But the creations often mutate and turn against their creators. Their rage can also damage whole societies.
The intentions of Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein were ‘noble’. The scientist wanted to create the ‘perfect man’ who could be taught morality through reason and whose core emotion was to be compassion. But the creation’s core emotion became an intense desire to be loved by society. Once the creation failed to conjure this, the desire to be loved became an uncontrollable urge to hate those who refused to love him.
In his 1987 book Frankenstein’s Shadow, Chris Baldick writes that one of the things Shelly’s monster represented was the mob during the 1789 French Revolution. The principles of the Age of Enlightenment — reason, logic, science — had noble intentions i.e. to rid society of superstition and the totalitarian hold of the Church and the monarchy. But when these principles were manifested through revolutionary action, they became monstrous.
They took the shape of mobs going on a killing spree, negating everything that the Enlightenment stood for. If Enlightenment philosophers created the Revolution, the uprising dismembered their philosophies. The philosophers wanted to create rational individuals, but ended up giving birth to irrational mobs, mindlessly demolishing institutions and individuals.
Some historians have explained Marxism as a noble idea (seeking to create economic equality), but one which gave birth to totalitarian figures such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot. They turned into ‘monsters’.
Same is the case with Hitler. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot’s creation was shaped by Marxism’s idea of establishing a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Hitler’s monstrosity on the other hand, was shaped by an assortment of 19th century racist theories and myths circulating in Europe.
It is easier to find noble intentions in Enlightenment philosophies and in Marxism, but not so in racist ideas. However, Nazism explained itself as a struggle to revive a noble Germanic past that was full of purity and honour, but was disfigured by ‘non-Aryan’ races and ideologies. After realising that the world at large was refusing to recognise this, Hitler sought to destroy the world. He ended up destroying Germany and himself.
Of course, a multitude of economic and political factors also contributed to creating these ‘monsters’. The rise of Ruhollah Khomeini was shaped by the manner in which the economic interests of Iran’s ‘petit bourgeois’ and Iran’s heterogeneous commercial class (the ‘bazaaris’) were impacted by the Shah of Iran’s ‘modernisation’ programmes.
Khomeini was moulded by this class as a messiah. Other anti-Shah forces, such as the Marxists and secular democrats, went along. Liberals and many Marxists invested a lot of their revolutionary energy in propping up Khomeini.
After the Revolution, Khomeini expected them to ‘understand’ his Islamist route to vanquish American capitalism as well as Soviet communism. When the understanding wasn’t forthcoming, he launched a ferocious attack on his former non-Islamist allies. In 1988 alone, over 20,000 Marxists and liberals were executed by the Khomeini dictatorship.
In the 1980s, the Afghan Mujahideen were engineered as ‘freedom fighters’ by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. US President Ronald Reagan said that, to the Afghan Muslims, the Mujahideen were what the heroes of the 18th century American Revolution were to the Americans. The anti-Soviet Islamist militants were bolstered by billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to fight a ‘just war’ against Soviet atheism in Afghanistan.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the same leaders who were invited to the White House and glorified as forces who were ‘saving Islam’ (and the world) from communism, began to be seen as nihilists. In turn, the leaders who had romanced the US as a ‘Christian brother’ helping them fight atheism, became their enemy number one.
Like Shelly’s monster who couldn’t find acceptance, former pro-US Islamists went on a rampage, killing thousands in their compulsion to hunt down their creator.
In 2011, Pakistan’s military establishment began to create a politician who they believed would vanquish the country’s old mainstream political parties, and become the establishment’s civilian vessel. This wasn’t the first time the establishment did this. However, this time, a lot more resources were invested.
Imran Khan, who had been leading an insignificant little party since 1995, was provided enough resources to suddenly manage to gather thousands of people at his rallies, and gain constant air time on popular TV news channels as well as a sympathetic ear by the judiciary.
This despite the fact that he was a political novice. His understanding of history and politics was a curious potpourri of contemporary Islamist ideas, illiberal nationalism, a drawing-room-view of Pakistani society, and a muddled postmodernist understanding of imperialism. Yet, he was diligently propped up by at least three generals, various ISI chiefs and TV channels. Then in 2018, an election was manipulated to put him in power.
But as PM, he was an abject failure. He was only interested in being admired and accepted as a legitimate saviour of the nation and the ummah. Everything else was to wait.
Dismayed by his performance and utter lack of political tact, his creators withdrew their support. Within months after this, he was ousted by a no-confidence vote. Feeling betrayed, he is now on the streets claiming that sinister anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan forces engineered his ouster. In his obsession to denounce those who created him, and plunge the country into political chaos, it is likely that he just might be damaging his chances of ever being a viable political option again.
Representational image | A church in Tamenglong, Manipur | Simrin Sirur | ThePrint
The purpose of this article is not to go into the tragic circumstances around the recent death of Father Stan Swamy. While many columns have been written about the tribal rights activist, including one by retired IPS officer Julio Ribeiro in ThePrint, I believe an attempt should be made to look at the larger issues surrounding the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit order in the context of their extensive and intensive engagement with Adivasi communities in India.
Christian missionaries and schools are generally viewed positively by Indian society. In most Bollywood movies, the Christian (usually Catholic) padre is portrayed as a benign, helpful and healing figure. I certainly hope the image stays that way, and is not altered or tarnished. For that, it is important to examine the political ideology of Christian/Catholic Marxism.
It is a common belief in India that the Roman Catholic Church in general and the Jesuit order in particular are anti-Marxist. This belief is quite wrong. The so-called ‘liberation theology’ is very much a Roman Catholic product, absent from most Protestant Christian theological outpourings. Liberation theology is profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-markets and justifies violence, using selective quotations from the gospels. They like to talk about the reference in the gospels to Jesus throwing out money-changers from the temple; there is little if any reference to the parable of talents. The leading lights of liberation theology have been Latin American Jesuits who are completely opposed to a conservative strain in philosophical, theological and political matters. The influence of the Marxist Latin American liberation theologists has deeply permeated the Roman Church in India and has impacted the Jesuit order quite profoundly over the last few decades.
It is this ideological orientation among Jesuits that leads to many of them being well-disposed to Maoist insurgents, while publicly donning the robes of supporters, helpers and padrones of the supposedly helpless tribal people. This is pretty much what Catholic Marxists have endorsed in Central and South America also and is a classic “practice” of liberation theology.
In contrast with peaceful theology
My father and I both have been products of a leading Jesuit college in south India. I am personally a significant supporter of my alma mater. Every time I interact with older, kinder, more sober, more sensible Jesuits, they find it difficult to let their guard down. But directly or indirectly, they admit to me their frustration with the fact that the loudest and most active elements in their order today are Marxists. These Marxist Jesuits reject the earlier accommodative position of the Church and the order. They have also enthusiastically embraced ‘cultural Marxism,’ which in the West attacks white male dominance and in India has chosen to attack Hindu male dominance.
It is a part of liberation theology that such dominance cannot be addressed within peaceful, constitutional, parliamentary channels. A violent, revolutionary change is, therefore, considered necessary and desirable. They want to overthrow Indian society and specifically Hindu society, which, in the vocabulary of cultural Marxism, is seen as hegemonic, patriarchal, misogynistic, and casteist — a society that the Marxist Jesuits cannot and will not come to a peaceful engagement with. This is in complete contrast with the Jesuits of my college days who respected Hindu traditions and were votaries of an empathetic society.
Unfortunately, too many of today’s Roman Catholic and Jesuit priests take their inspiration not from Roberto de Nobili (a Sanskrit and Tamil scholar), Thomas Stephens (a Marathi scholar), Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (a Tamil scholar) and Anthony de Mello (a scholar of Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism) but from Gustavo Gutierrez and Jon Sobrino (radical, even revolutionary Latin American Catholic scholars).
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served as Pope Benedict XVI, was usually stuck between a rock and a hard place while heading the Vatican’s doctrinal office. He had to condemn de Mello’s fondness for Vedanta, Buddhism and Sufism as theologically not quite proper. At the same time, he had to emphatically oppose Gutierrez’ attempt to plant revolutionary Marxism into Catholic dogma. As early as 1984, Ratzinger’s office published a critical analysis where it was specifically mentioned that “Marxism and Catholic Theology are incompatible.” From my perspective, Ratzinger would have been better off supporting de Mello, who, after all, was engaging with traditions infused with the sacred and the spiritual, something that the founder of Christianity would have approved of.
Non-Christian double-talk
Only the most convoluted arguments can stretch the message of the Christian gospels to support violent materialism. Theologians like Gutierrez and Sobrino are looking for an alternative to market capitalism and reject the position that this economic system has in fact done the best job with respect to poverty reduction. They call for a dismantling of the “bourgeois State,” an old Marxist demand. Their influence extends well beyond Latin America and has found fertile soil in India. Marxist Catholic priests in India are no longer happy looking to the spiritual needs of their kinfolk and focusing on old-fashioned parish work. Instead, they want to move away from their home states and turn up in Tribal tracts, in order to work on the political consciousness of the people there and guide them towards the new Christian theology that resembles revolutionary Marxism, while emphasising some sentences from the gospels and ignoring others.
The idea that the Indian bourgeois State is an oppressor of tribals and that it needs radical transformation is frequently interspersed with positive references to the Indian Constitution. This kind of double-talk is taken straight from the tenets of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and in its lack of respect for veracity, it is distinctly non-Christian. The ideas derived from more recent theories of cultural Marxism are even more aggressive and puzzling. These theories posit the existence of an endless irreconcilable set of contradictions between Hindu society and the tribals. Of course, these scholars do not bother to address that if there actually exists a chasm between Hindus and tribals, why would there not be a greater chasm between Indian tribals and Christianity, admittedly now channelled via a 19th century German philosopher?
Srisailam, Srikalahasti, Puri, Pandharpur, Jejuri, Dharmasthala, Dantewada, Sabarimala and so many other Hindu pilgrimage centres are intertwined with Adivasi traditions. Within the broad Indic tent, there seems to be more engagement, proximity and, may I suggest, unity in diversity. But, of course this narrative is anathema to cultural Marxists. They have to posit the existence of a wicked Hindu, male, hegemonic order that should be overthrown in the revolution that is just around the corner. In the meantime, at a minimum, it is important to keep the Adivasis worked up with real and imaginary grievances and challenging the Indian State as well as Hindu society.
Need for introspection
The Roman Catholic and Jesuit involvement with India’s tribal population is not a religious or spiritual one. It has, under the influence of Gutierrez and Sobrino, turned into a political one. Oddly enough, the tribals are denied subjective agency. They “require” the help of outside Marxist ideologues and we need to question if this so-called help is in fact a euphemism for manipulation. To manipulate tribals and set them up against a powerful State and against immediate neighbours may end up being the most cynical, sordid and dangerous of approaches.
As an external admirer of conservative traditions in the Catholic Church (the Latin Mass and Gregorian chants come to mind), I am deeply disturbed that a new generation of Marxist Catholics are willing to put at risk centuries of peaceful and cordial engagement between Indian society and Christianity of the Chaldean, Syriac, Roman or Anglican varieties. Opposing the Indian State and declaring war on Hindu society are, at a minimum, not smart. This of course certainly does not answer how Christianity, one of the most spiritually informed religious traditions of the world, can make friends with a violent, atheist, materialist cult.
I have already made a passing reference to my personal connections. Let me add. My brother is a product of a Christian Brothers school; my sister of Loretto and Presentation Convent schools. I am a strong supporter of my old Jesuit college. It is with great sadness and acute concern, therefore, that I view the unnecessary and destructive Marxist orientation of so many Roman Catholic priests, especially members of the Jesuit order.
I call for some serious introspection among my Indian Catholic friends. It is they who can best grapple with this thorny issue. Any non-Catholic speaking up will be accused of being non-secular and bigoted. Lay Catholics indulging in self-examination and confronting the imported Marxist rhetoric among their clergy are best placed to re-introduce spirituality and mutual accommodation into their faith and ensure that the forays into the political and materialistic spheres do not take a destructive turn.
AS a Dalit student from Maharashtra who became a Buddhist, my friend Chandan Kamble was curiously sceptical of Marxism. My Marxist friends on the leftist campus were equally sceptical of Chandan with his Afro hair and his perpetually smiling, piercing gaze.
He was sinfully prankish and was never bereft of a wild observation about anyone, perfect strangers included. He was at his acerbic best when within earshot of a dyed-in-the-wool communist. “In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it’s the other way around.” The kindergarten lines were deliberately parcelled and farmed out depending on the moment, and Chandan was a practitioner of precision timing, like a jester in a serious play.
The words may not be his, but they gained currency on the campus because of his love for political banter. At the same time, he got excellent grades from the MPhil tutor in international studies. “A politician is someone who knows which side his bread is buttered.” The banal words are suddenly making sense.
I have no idea where Chandan has disappeared. We were in the same hostel at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A common JNU friend in Princeton said he last saw him years ago in a US university campus, possibly Harvard. Why am I suddenly thinking of the missing Mahar friend whose cryptic homilies on politics and Marxism, in particular, I indulged but disagreed with? A possible answer lies in the question itself.
Why did the Marxists shun Dalits as Dalits? They worked hard to get the Dalit students priority in admission and so forth. Yet there was a pronounced aloofness at an intellectual level, a palpable snobbery. Or was it because B.R. Ambedkar had poured vitriol on Indian Marxists in his great work on the revival of the Dalit cause? If that was so, why didn’t any comrade woo the lowest in the caste heap to his or her side, ignoring or critiquing Ambedkar if they had a valid argument?
What puzzles me equally is the shocking ability of the BJP to woo Dalits — in Gujarat, in Uttar Pradesh and so forth. It is perhaps this worry that has sent me cartwheeling into the past. Here is a perfectly casteist party, one that Ambedkar would have loathed. He had described Hinduism in no uncertain terms as a “chamber of horrors”. And Ambedkar’s followers are today marching mindlessly, one should add, self-destructively into the Hindutva fold.
Of course, there is Chanakya’s wily wisdom at play. Divide and rule, Emperor Chandragupta’s Brahmin counsellor had decreed, way before the advent of colonialism of any stripe. It worked in Uttar Pradesh last month. Jatav versus non-Jatav Dalits; Yadav versus non-Yadavs among the other backward castes; something similar with Muslims is afoot. That’s BJP. What about the Marxists?
Indian Marxists, like their comrades elsewhere, are a threatened species. The BJP is out to swallow their two remaining hubs — one in the tiny tribal state of Tripura and the other, of course, Kerala, the redoubtable communist bastion. One should have thought that the BJP was a cause for serious worry. But the Marxists seem to have different priorities. They look keener to bring down the Mamata Banerjee government in Bengal, possibly in cahoots with the Congress. The BJP would be only too happy to let them do its dirty work.
The thought is horrifying for the sheer lack of sensitivity. The Marxists took a lead in fighting Indira Gandhi’s emergency, and they were a source of strength to the movement that ended in the Janata Party experiment. The experiment included the BJP then called the Jan Sangh. And the first thing that the Janata Party government did was to ban school textbooks on history that were authored by Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Bipan Chandra.
The ground was laid in 1978 for the assault on Wendy Doniger’s study of Hinduism and A.K. Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramanayas — a brilliant research of the diverse Rama legends. The Marxists didn’t give up here, as they again came together with the BJP to shore up an anti-Congress V.P. Singh government in 1989.
For better or worse, they then came up with the formula of supporting non-BJP, non-Congress parties and alliances. There are three that fit the bill. They are Mamata Banerjee in Bengal, the Lalu-Nitish coalition in Bihar and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi. All three are targeted by the BJP. The Congress too has joined the expedition in two, barring Bihar, where it is a junior partner in the state government. The Marxists set up candidates against all three.
The problem is that these three are the ones they count among the 59 per cent that didn’t vote for the BJP. The three are also those that stopped the BJP juggernaut. All three are accused of corruption by the BJP, a ruse that is seen as a first step towards their dismissal.
Any sane observer of the unfolding Indian scenario would have thought that it was time all opposition parties came together as they once came up against Mrs Gandhi. What is happening instead is that one by one the non-Congress and non-BJP governments, including the Left Front, are coming in the cross hairs of the Modi establishment. It’s almost like Germany in the 1930s to give an overused but relevant example. There the communists and the social democrats were taken out one by one.
Chandan Kamble is perhaps watching today’s denouement with concern. He had a habit of mixing up metaphors. “We are all sailing in the same soup,” he would say. Will the Marxists be able to untangle the jumbled aphorisms?
It is worrying that the main Marxist groups — and not to forget the Congress — seem to believe that the threat posed to India’s democracy by the BJP is comparable with Mamata Banerjee’s rule in Bengal and Arvind Kejriwal’s in Delhi. Could Chandan Kamble be right?
Inside its smoke-filled HQ, the far-left party is making plans to defy the EU over Greece’s debt and abolish draconian austerity measures imposed to shore up the euro. But first it must win next Sunday’s general election
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras, second right, celebrates success in May’s European parliament elections with Athens governor Rena Dourou, left, and mayoral candidate Gabriel Sakellaridis Photograph: Corbis/Panayiotis Tzamaros
An air of excitement pervades the headquarters of Greece’s far-left Syriza party. In small, smoke-filled rooms, off corridors plastered with posters advertising Marxist seminars and cluttered with coffee cups and leftover meals, staff pore over computers. Most are women, young and intense, cigarettes dangling from lips as they tap into keyboards. The hubbub of chatter is loud. Up narrow staircases people zoom this way and that. For the visitor there is no mistaking that the seven-storey building, overlooking one of Athens’s more rundown squares, is as much a place of workable chaos as it is a well of expectancy.
“Hope is coming,” proclaims a poster pinned to the noticeboards of almost every floor. “Greece is progressing, Europe is changing.”
“Welcome to Syriza,” says Panos Skourletis, the party’s grey-haired spokesman, proffering a guided tour of the offices’ newly renovated media room, “and please forgive the smoke.”
Barely a week before critical elections in a country once again caught up in the eurozone storm, Skourletis is buoyant. It is easy to see why. With every poll giving Syriza an indisputable lead, the radicals are on a roll. For Europe’s growing class of anti-austerians, victory is in sight. “We are going to win,” he enthuses somewhat triumphantly. “There is only one question, and that is by how much.”
If bookies in Athens are to be believed, the odds on the party securing an outright majority are still slim. But, says Skourletis, as the election campaign enters its final stretch things are looking up. “On the basis of data and empirical evidence, we believe we are going to get more and more votes from the undecided, because that is how it has worked for parties in the lead in the past.”
The leftwingers are not alone in taking note of the Greek electorate’s ballot-box intentions. From Westminster to Washington, Madrid to Rome, the 25 January poll is being seen as a potential watershed in the eurozone crisis. If the radicals are catapulted to power, their victory will resonate beyond Greece, reviving fears of Athens being led to the euro exit door.David Cameron and his prime ministerial counterparts in Spain and Portugal, who face electorates themselves later this year, are watching closely. So, too, are mandarins in Brussels and Berlin.
Syriza supporters paint a banner outside anelection rally in central Athens.Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA
From maverick marginals, the leftwingers have moved to centre stage, riding high on opposition to the austerity Athens has been forced to apply in return for €240bn in emergency bailout funds from the EU and International Monetary Fund. Their ascent poses the biggest threat to consensus politics in decades. Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s firebrand leader, has promised to take an axe to the nexus of interests that have kept Greece’s rotten establishment alive – starting with the media-owning oligarchs who control so much of the country’s internal debate.
Shock, anger and fear have marked Greece’s financial meltdown. But five years on, Syriza’s meteoric rise – and imminent electoral victory – also presages the passage of despair. Many Greeks will be inclined to vote for the insurgents as much out of hopelessness as helplessness.
“With our country’s economic crisis, our big opening has been to the decimated middle class,” Skourletis says. “In us they have found a voice.”
The radicals have come a long way from the time I would visit their headquarters back in the early 1990s.Then, conversation inevitably focused on intra-party disputes between Eurocommunists and the Stalinist KKE. Over tiny cups of Turkish coffee – gleefully provided as guests were so rare – Leonidas Kyrkos, the late Eurocommunist leader, would speak of the scandal-ridden nation’s need for “catharsis, ” amid warnings of its tendency to overspend, but bemoan the fact that his utopian views were shared by so few. That he would have a successor, who would emerge from school sit-ins and the anti-globalisation movement to be embraced not only by Greeks but the entire spectrum of Europe’s left, would undoubtedly have mystified him.
In many ways Skourletis personifies the tectonic shift. The son of a public-sector doctor, and owner of a successful company importing tools before the crisis hit, he has seen many of his friends destroyed by the fate that has befallen Greece.
“Like Greeks all over, they availed themselves of the loans that the banks were giving out so freely to buy houses and cars and, then, suddenly found themselves unemployed,” he says, wincing. “Because they are in their 50s, they are unlikely to ever work again, which means they have no prospect of getting a pension either. It’s tragic.”
Activists watch an interview with Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras newspaper at the party’s election centre in Athens last week.Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
Precisely because it has been untested by power, Syriza has also been able to count on the support of a younger generation disproportionately hit by job losses.
In the absence of open revolt, the anti-establishment party is regarded as the best form of resistance to policies that have caused a Depression-era recession, worse, analysts say, even than that suffered by the United States in the 1930s.
Although the Greek economy has begun to show the first signs of recovery – the result of rigorous efforts to balance the books by prime minister Antonis Samaras’s outgoing coalition – the effects of such momentous fiscal adjustment have been catastrophic.
GDP has contracted by more than a quarter, around 26% of the population remains out of work, and more than three million live on, or below, the poverty line. Tsipras, last week, likened the measures to “fiscal waterboarding”.
The appetite of Greeks for yet more drama is limited. Almost six years after the country was forced to come clean on the scale of its public spending, they are worn out by relentless cuts and tax rises and are visibly fatigued. Greece itself has been hollowed out. Athens, home to almost half of its 12 million-strong population, has become a casebook study of what happens to capitals when they go broke, its smashed pavements, unkempt parks, boarded up shops and ever multiplying beggars and homeless the tell-tale signs of its financial collapse.
In such a climate, Tsipras’s promise of a public spending spree has gone down well. Across the board, Greeks have welcomed his pledge to tackle the country’s “silent humanitarian crisis” by increasing the minimum wage, reducing taxes and hiring in the public sector. But the euphoria that accompanied past political sea-changes is unlikely to be evident. Many say they will be rooting for Syriza out of protest against the centre-right New Democracy and the centre-left Pasok, the two mainstream parties that,alternating in power for the past 40 years, have been blamed for Greece’s near economic death.
Aware that the vast majority want to remain in the eurozone, Tsipras, who turned 40 last year, has toned down his anti-European rhetoric. Gone are the references to “tearing up” the memoranda of conditions attached to the country’s rescue programmes. Last week he went out of his way to placate German taxpayers, saying that they had “nothing to fear from a Syriza government”.
“Our aim is not for a confrontation with our partners, to get more credits or a licence for new deficits,” he wrote in the economic daily Handelsblatt. “It is to stabilise the country, reach a balanced primary budget and end the bloodletting from German and Greek taxpayers.”
But the charismatic politician still says he has “Merkelism” in his sights. Ending austerity and writing off Athens’s monumental debt – at 177% of GDP the largest in Europe – remain priorities. And with creditors ruling out both, analysts say it will require a major kolotumba, or U-turn, on the part of the leader to avert a head-on collision. Earlier this month the European Central Bank added to the pressure with a stark warning that Greek lenders would be unable to tap funds if bailout conditions were dropped, raising the spectre of a bank run in the months ahead.
A free meal organised by the Athens municipality for elderly, homeless and needy people last Easter.Photograph: Panayiotis Tzamaros/Demotix/Corbis
“Tsipras is entrapped in his own rhetoric,” says Dr Eleni Panagiotarea, a research fellow at Eliamep, Greece’s leading thinktank. “To move from where he is now to pulling off the kolotumba will not only mean a loss of prestige but control over the various far-left factions in his party and, if that happens, it is going to be very difficult for him to get his own MPs to vote through legislation in the future.”
Maoists, Trotskyists, anti-capitalist activists and champagne-swilling ex-trade unionists, who once belonged to the socialist Pasok party, are among the 11 groups that are part of Syriza. At least 30% are militants who openly advocate dumping the euro in favour of the drachma. Tsipras moved up the ranks through Synaspismos, the Eurocommunist party that forms the alliance’s central plank. If he controls 60% of the MPs who are likely to be elected next Sunday, insiders say it would be a “huge achievement”.
“He is faced with a huge dilemma,” says Spyros Lykoudis, who spent more than 20 years in Synaspismos before abandoning the party in disagreement over the need to press ahead with reforms. “If he placates creditors abroad, he stands to lose his own constituency and if he doesn’t he risks bankruptcy.”
Lykoudis, who is now running with To Potami, a centrist party established last year, believes the best solution would lie in the formation of a coalition government.
“And our hope is that it is us who emerges as the country’s third biggest force and not the neo-Nazis in Golden Dawn,” he adds. “If reformers are in his government, it will act as a restraint and make it easier to take measures. As things stand, he is a populist who promises all things to all men.”
The charge that Syriza is composed of dangerous ideologues bent on turning Greece into a Marxist paradise is heartedly rebuffed by cadres.
Instead the leftwingers argue that the centre of gravity in politics has shifted so much to the right since the advent of Thatcherism that the party’s proposals now seem radical. “All the things that sound radical now were standard fare in the golden age of capitalism in the 50s and 60s,” says the economics professor Euclid Tsakalotos, Syriza’s shadow finance minister for the last two years.
Raised in Britain and educated at St Paul’s, the leading London private school, before going to Oxford, Tsakalotos, 54, insists that after years of being subjected to the brutal vagaries of the market, there are growing numbers across Europe who feel excluded from decision-making and the centres of power.
“We are only more radical in the sense that we have been influenced by the anti-global movement and believe in concepts of participatory democracy,” he adds. “The angst Syriza has caused is down to us challenging a system that can’t actually represent the interests of ordinary people.”
In the party’s smoke-filled headquarters, the leftwingers say they are gearing up for a fight. This is the closest they have come to power since the formation, almost 200 years ago, of the modern Greek state, and they are not going to surrender easily.
“Unlike the left elsewhere, we stopped arguing about Trotsky and Stalin and managed to bury our differences,” says the soft-spoken Christoforos Papadopoulos, a member of the party’s political secretariat. “That has been the secret of our success, and you can be sure that when we reach office we are not going to betray what we believe in.”
When the going gets tough, it is likely that Syriza will focus on clamping down on oligarchs and other vested interests to get by. One US cable, revealed by WikiLeaks, described the tycoons as “a small group of people who have made or inherited fortunes … and who are related by blood, marriage or adultery to political and government officials and/or other media and business magnates.”
“What we will not be doing is making any kolotumbes,” says Papadopoulos, taking a mighty draw on his umpteenth cigarette.
A homeless man eats in the doorway of a closed shop in Athens.Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP
SYRIZA’S PROMISES
The party aims to end austerity by: ■ Giving free electricity to Greeks whose supplies have been cut off; ■ Providing food stamps to children; ■ Giving health care to the uninsured; ■ Providing a roof for the homeless; ■ Raising the minimum wage to €750 a month from under €500; ■ Introducing a moratorium on private debt repayments to banks above 30% of disposable income.
In addition, Syriza says it will call for Greece’s “unsustainable” €320bn euro debt load to be drastically reduced and interest repayments cut. It wants an international conference to be held on the issue in an echo of the treatment given Germany after the second world war.
It also wants to abolish the economic privileges enjoyed by the Greek Orthodox church and shipping industry, reduce military spending, raise taxes on big companies and set a 75% tax on incomes over €500,000.
Pope Francis has been denounced as a Marxist by rightwingers for criticising 'unfettered capitalism'. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis
Some of his best friends are Marxists, Pope Francis announced last week. Well, not quite, but he has insisted that he knows some "Marxists who are good people". While making it clear that "Marxist ideology is wrong", the pontiff claimed he wasn't offended by being denounced as a Marxist by the US shock-jock, Rush Limbaugh. The conservative radio host and other rabid free-market ideologues have taken umbrage at the recent "apostolic exhortation" which criticised "unfettered capitalism" and the "globalisation of indifference" it has created.
The use of "Marxist" as a slur – along with kindred terms such as "socialist" and "communist" – is not a uniquely American phenomenon but is most familiar to us from the era of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, established in 1938 and, later, Joseph McCarthy's committee.
In that context, and during the "red scares" which followed it during the cold war, these were appellations used to identify and punish any criticism of capitalism, however sympathetic or merely reformist. Indeed, any dissent from mainstream dogma was "un-American".
America's first "red scare" took place in the wake of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution. To be a dissident from capitalism in any degree was to be a socialist or a "commie" and, therefore, "anti-American": the net of denunciation was cast wide enough to include immigrants, conscientious objectors, blacks and Jews.
American public culture is saturated with stories of "commie plots" and conspiracies and many, like the Hollywood Ten, the playwright Lillian Hellman, the actor Paul Robeson, and the writer Richard Wright were famously blacklisted for alleged communist connections. Even Martin Luther King has been accused of Marxism, as has John Kerry and, more recently, President Barack Obama was denounced as a "socialist" for bringing less well-off Americans into the ambit of corporate, very much capitalist, healthcare provision.
In Britain, while many Victorian liberals and radicals were careful to distance themselves from socialism, engagement with both Marxism and socialism has been historically less hostile than in the US. Nevertheless, the use of Marxist as an insult also indicating a treasonous lack of patriotism has been stepped up in recent years, featuring most prominently in the attacks on Ralph Miliband as "the man who hated Britain".
It is no accident that such terms are deliberately deployed as pejoratives at a time when an unregulated, rampant capitalism and its ideologues are in the dominant position but also fear growing unpopularity and subsequent challenge. In this context, "Marxism" refers not merely to thinking influenced by Karl Marx's magisterial three volumes laying bare the unavoidable exploitation at the heart of capitalism – it becomes a random, ill-conceived slur to stave off any and all criticism of its operations.
For a mainstream and still fundamentally conservative figure, Pope Francis has indeed gone further than many by poking the sacred cow that is trickle-down economics and querying "the absolute autonomy of the marketplace". These are not radical critiques of capitalism and have been made before by many, including Keynesian economists who would not consider themselves at all anti-capitalist but are more concerned with saving the system from its own ravages.
While Francis now appears to boldly advocate a church that is poor and "for the poor", he isn't about to tear up the Vatican's vast investment portfolio. We can welcoming the opening that his exhortation has provided for a discussion of the economic regime under which we labour and from which a few profit much more than others. Yet, it is also important to recognise that such criticism is of the sort which ultimately seeks to inoculate capitalism from disastrous meltdown by feeding it measured doses of healthy caution.
Perhaps it is time to properly revisit Marx's own insights into the workings of capitalism and ask how these remain relevant to understanding how the global economy functions. The pope's denunciation of the way in which "human beings are themselves considered consumer goods" was much more thoroughly anticipated in Marx's brilliant analysis of the commodity form which saw this process as central to capitalism, not merely an unhappy side effect of poor regulation.
"Exclusion" and "inequality" are similarly not happenstance spin-offs from a "new tyranny"; they are fundamental to a now old economic dynamic which seeks to concentrate the wealth in a few palms by extracting the labour from many hands. Of course capitalism is rife with "moral corruption", but we would also do well to look at how inequality is central to its very material workings.
There can be no moral regeneration that is not also a complete rejection of capitalism's essential immorality. It is futile to keep talking of "including the poor" within the ambit of capitalist opportunity: any good capitalist like our chancellor, George Osborne, understands very well that inequality and impoverishment (codename "austerity") is absolutely central to the creation and concentration of wealth. Anything less is simply to further the politics of illusion.
Report on Allende's death was part of inquiry into hundreds of murders committed by Pinochet regime in Chile
By Guy Adams Thursday, 21 July 2011
Salvador Allende, the Chilean president who was widely considered to be the world's first democratically elected Marxist, committed suicide 37 years ago, and was not murdered by right-wing revolutionaries, according to the results of a post-mortem unveiled yesterday.
A forensic team in Santiago, which has been examining Allende's exhumed body for the past two months, concluded that he died from injuries consistent with having turned an AK47 assault rifle on himself. They found no evidence to support theories that a third party was involved.
The detailed report was welcomed by Allende's family, who have always maintained that the 65-year-old politician took his own life as troops stormed La Mondea, the country's Presidential Palace, during a US-backed coup on 11 September 1973.
"The conclusions are consistent with what we already believed," his daughter, Senator Isabel Allende, told reporters. "When faced with extreme circumstances, he made the decision of taking his own life, instead of being humiliated or having to go through with some other situation."
On the day of the coup, Allende, who had voiced hostility to the US and formed diplomatic alliances with Cuba and Russia, is reported to have promised supporters that he would not be taken alive, even as La Mondea was bombed by fighter jets and filled with smoke and tear gas.
Yet for years, left-wing conspiracy theorists, including Allende's old friend and comrade Fidel Castro, have maintained that he was murdered by bloodthirsty revolutionaries. They claimed his corpse, which was never shown to his family, was riddled with bullets, and argued that an "official" autopsy carried out on the night of the coup was rigged.
Adding to the sense of mystery about the death was the fact that neither the weapon (which had been a gift to Allende from Castro) nor one of the two fatal bullets, were ever recovered. The incoming administration never carried out a criminal investigation, and for years the Allende family had refused to sanction another autopsy.
In May, however, a team of coroners and forensic experts were finally authorised by Isabel to examine the former president's corpse. They were unable to uncover any evidence to support murder allegations, and said his injuries were consistent with a self-inflicted wound from a rifle held between his legs.
"There were two bullets fired at the scene; two shells were recovered, but only one bullet," said David Pryor, a former Scotland Yard expert in forensic ballistics who worked as a consultant on the case. "The gun, an AKA rifle, was on automatic. There was one wound in his skull, caused by two bullets."
The 20-page report on Allende's death was commissioned by a judge investigating hundreds of murders and other human rights abuses committed by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet, whose right-wing military dictatorship presided over the country for almost two decades after the 1973 coup.
Pinochet, who seized power with the tacit support of the US, and held onto it with the backing of Lady Thatcher's Conservative administration, is accused of being responsible for the murder or "disappearance" of more than three thousand political opponents.
Illustration by Abro
