The Notebook. José Saramago

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       October 20: A (Financial) Crime against Humanity

      I was thinking of writing in the blog about the economic crisis that is upon us, but had to devote myself instead to fulfilling an obligation to another medium of communication. I offer you here my thoughts, which have already been published in Spain in the newspaper Público, and in Portugal in the weekly Expresso.

      A (FINANCIAL) CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

      The story is well known, and in the old days when schools considered themselves the ideal instruments of education, it was taught to children as an example of the modesty and discretion that should remain in us when the devil tempts us to hold an opinion on a matter about which we know nothing or little. Apelles would allow a cobbler to point out a mistake in the shoes of the figure he had painted, because shoes are the cobbler’s business, but the same cobbler ought never dare to give an opinion on, for example, the anatomy of the knee. In short, a place for everyone and everyone in his place. At first glance, Apelles was right: he was the master, he was the painter, he was the authority, and as for the cobbler, he would be called for at the appropriate time when it was a matter of putting half-soles on a pair of boots. And really, where would we be if any person, including the most universally ignorant, could allow himself to offer an opinion on things he didn’t know? If someone hasn’t completed the necessary studies, he should keep silent and leave the responsibility of making the most suitable decisions (suitable for whom?) to those who know.

      Yes, at first glance Apelles was right, but only at first glance. The painter of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, considered a genius in his day, forgot one important aspect of the matter: the cobbler has knees, so by definition he is competent in these joints, even if it is only to complain about the pains he feels in them (if he does). By now an attentive reader will have understood that these lines are not really about Apelles nor about the cobbler. What they are about is the extremely serious economic and financial crisis that is convulsing the world, to the extent that we cannot escape the distressed feeling that we have come to the end of an era without being able to glimpse what the next will be, or bring, nor how after an intermediate period, a span of time impossible to predict, we are going to restore the ruins and open up new paths.

      How so? How can an ancient legend explain today’s disasters? Well, why not? The cobbler is us, those of us who sit impotently by as the great economic and financial powers approach, crushing, mad to conquer more and more money, more and more power, by any legal or illegal means within their grasp, however clean or dirty, commonplace or criminal. And Apelles? Apelles is precisely those bankers, those politicians, those insurers, those big speculators, who with the complicity of the media have for the past thirty years responded to our timid protests with the arrogance of those who consider themselves the possessors of ultimate wisdom. That is, even if our knee hurts we are not allowed to speak of it, denounce it, hold its injury up to public condemnation. Those three decades were the era of the absolute empire of the Market, that supposedly self-balancing and self-correcting entity charged by immutable destiny to arrange and defend for all time our personal and collective happiness, even if in reality it was constantly denying it to us.

      So what now? Will fiscal paradises and numbered accounts come to an end at last? Will there be tireless investigations of the origins of enormous bank deposits, blatantly criminal financial machinations, opaque investments that frequently have been no more than mass laundering of dirty money, of drug-trafficking money? And since we’re talking about crimes. . . will ordinary citizens have the satisfaction of seeing those responsible for the earthquake that is shaking our homes, the lives of our families, and our jobs brought to judgment and condemned? Who will solve the problem of the unemployed (I have not counted them, but I don’t doubt there are already millions) who are victims of the crash and who will continue to be unemployed for months or years, struggling to live on wretched state subsidies while the big executives and administrators who deliberately brought their companies to the wall enjoy millions and millions of dollars, protected by cast-iron contracts that the fiscal authorities, paid from taxpayers’ money, pretend to know nothing about? And the active complicity of the governments, who will investigate that? Bush, that malignant product of Nature at one of her worst moments, will say that his plan has saved (will save?) the North American economy, but there are questions he will have to answer: Did you not know what was happening in those plush meeting rooms, which even cinema has allowed us into, and not just allowed us in but shown us the criminal decisions being taken, sanctioned by every penal code in the world? What good are the CIA and the FBI to you, or the dozens of other institutions of national security that have proliferated in the misnamed North American democracy, where a traveler coming into the country has to hand his computer over to an officer of the border police officer and allow him to copy his hard disk? Did Mr. Bush not realize that he had an enemy at home, or rather, did he realize but not care?

      In every respect what is happening is a crime against humanity, and it is in this light that it should be examined in every public forum and in every conscience. I am not exaggerating. Crimes against humanity are not limited to genocide, ethnocide, death camps, torture, targeted assassinations, deliberately provoked famines, massive pollution, the repressing of victims’ identities through humiliation. A crime against humanity is what the financial and economic powers of the United States, with the actual or tacit complicity of their government, have been perpetrating in cold blood against millions of people all over the world, who are threatened СКАЧАТЬ