By Joanne Laurier, wsws.org 

Directed by Brian Percival; screenplay by Michael Petroni, based on the novel by Markus Zusak

On November 9, 1938, the Nazi regime organized the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom in Germany and Austria, initiating open, state-sanctioned mass violence against Jews, which escalated thereafter rapidly and culminated in the Holocaust. The nationwide pogrom in November 1938 involved the mass destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Some 30,000 German Jews were thrown into concentration camps and hundreds were murdered. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the tragic event.

British director Brian Percival’s movie The Book Thief deals in part with the horrors of the Kristallnacht period and is an effective reminder of the impact of Nazi atrocities on everyday life. In general, it focuses its attention on the Hitlerite attempt to destroy culture.

Based on Australian author Markus Zusak’s international bestseller, the movie—like the novel—is narrated by Death (the voice of Roger Allam), who admits, smacking his lips, in the film’s opening sequence that Germany of the 1930s and 1940s was a busy time for him: “I make it a policy to avoid the living … well, except sometimes I can’t help myself … I get interested … Liesel Meminger caught me … and I cared.”

Liesel (Sophie Nélisse), on the verge of adolescence, is traveling with her mother and younger brother on a train when her sibling takes ill and dies. The purpose of the journey is to finalize the adoption of the children before their mother is sent away to an unknown fate, as a Communist. At her brother’s gravesite, Liesel absconds with a book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook (literally that), a treasure for the illiterate girl.

[pullquote]Clearly, the movie The Book Thief is arguing that culture is the antidote to fascist barbarism. But how was it possible in a country such as Germany with one of the richest cultural histories in the world that a crowd of gangsters took power and carried out unparalleled crimes? Artists and filmmakers have a hard time, especially at present, explaining concretely the conduct of various social and political tendencies and their consequences.[/pullquote]

Liesel’s foster parents prove to be the poverty-stricken Hubermanns—Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson), residing in a small working class town. The kindly Hans, a housepainter economically punished for refusing to join the Nazi party, has an immediate affinity for the traumatized girl, while Rosa at first only appears to be interested in the stipend that comes with Liesel’s care.

Taunted by a school bully for her inability to read, Liesel quickly overcomes her handicap with Hans as her tutor and the dank basement walls of the Hubermann house as a dictionary blackboard. The Gravedigger’s Handbookis the only available reading material. Nonetheless, mastering the book generates in Liesel an insatiable passion for reading. Meanwhile, she develops a close friendship with a young neighbor and classmate, Rudy Steiner (Nico Liersch), a sweet, bony-legged athlete whose idol is African American track star Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Rudy’s enthusiasm for Owens has him applying black paint to his body, which opens him up to racialist ridicule and abuse.

A horrified Liesel is forced to participate in a local Nazi-organized book burning ceremony (“The end of communism and Jews”). As the fire dies down and the crowd disperses, Liesel rescues a half-burned book, an act witnessed by the burgomaster’s wife, Ilsa Hermann (Barbara Auer), who employs Rosa to launder. The Hermann mansion has a huge library assembled by Ilsa’s now-deceased son, for whom she is still grieving. One day when Liesel is delivering laundry, Ilsa invites her into the library. The girl spends many magical afternoons thereafter devouring the room’s contents. Ilsa sees something of her dead son in Liesel, but her intolerant husband, the village’s leading Nazi, throws Liesel out, cutting off a source of much-needed income for the Hubermanns.

As the attacks on the Jews escalate, an ailing Jewish teenage fugitive, Max (Ben Schnetzer), seeks shelter with the Hubermanns. The boy’s father saved Hans’ life in World War I, bequeathing to him an old accordion, which Hans frequently plays for solace. Hans, despite the enormous dangers involved and the hardship of having another mouth to feed, takes Max in. Liesel and Max form an intense bond, the former nursing the latter back from near death by reading books she surreptitiously “borrows” from the Hermann’s library. (Max: “The only difference between us and a lump of clay is life—words are life.”) When Rudy learns the truth about Liesel’s book-thieving escapades, they form a juvenile anti-Hitler pact. The onset of World War II brings much tragedy and suffering to the Hubermann’s community, but books for Liesel retain their transcendental powers.

As a tale about the crimes of Nazi Germany, The Book Thief is well served by the moving performances of Rush and Watson. Nélisse as Liesel is extraordinarily convincing as the young protagonist, bolstered by her energetic side-kick Rudy and her dignified mentor Max. A sentimental score by John Williams accompanies a storyline that is a somewhat lacking in dimension. However, the film’s striking, clear images speak to an important level of care and commitment on the part of its makers. This makes itself felt, for example, in the jarring contrast between Liesel’s and Rudy’s innocent, almost angelic visages and the reprehensible Hitler Youth uniforms they must sport.

Laudably, The Book Thief ‘s main theme is the need to defend culture, a subject of the greatest urgency in the present political situation. As a whole, however, the movie’s value in sensitizing the population to the dangers of authoritarianism and fascism is limited to encouraging a general humanity and sympathy. And it provides only vague answers to the question as to why the Nazis burned books.

Hitler once boasted: “I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes … That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication … That is how I will create the New Order.”

Clearly, the movie is arguing that culture is the antidote to this savage conception. But how was it possible in a country with one of the richest cultural histories in the world that a crowd of gangsters took power and carried out unparalleled crimes? Artists and filmmakers have a hard time, especially at present, explaining concretely the conduct of various social and political tendencies and their consequences.

How many filmmakers, in Germany or elsewhere, would be familiar with the revolutionary opportunities that existed in Germany between 1918 and 1933, whose betrayal and failure opened the door to Hitler’s movement? “Communism” is mentioned a few times in The Book Thief as the nemesis of fascism, but the filmmakers make no effort to associate the rise of fascism with the intractable crisis of German capitalism. The Nazi assault on books and culture was an element of their assault on socialist consciousness and the working class. Then as now, reaction correctly identified culture and knowledge with dangerous opposition to its operations.

In his brilliant 1933 article “What is National Socialism?” Trotsky, whose books were among those burned by the Nazis that same year, wrote: “The bonfires which burn the impious literature of Marxism light up brilliantly the class nature of National Socialism,” adding that the Nazis’ special political art “consisted in fusing the petty bourgeoisie into oneness through its common hostility to the proletariat.” And further: “Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.”

Five years later, Trotsky, André Breton and Diego Rivera collaborated on a manifesto that began, “We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous and comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology.”

It seems likely that by dramatizing the Nazis’ “holocaust of books” the makers of The Book Thief are responding, with whatever degree of consciousness, to present-day censorship and attacks on culture. At its best, the movie brings forward the heritage of the likes of poet John Milton, whose books were publicly incinerated in England and France, and who wrote in 1644 that “Anyone who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” The great German poet, and friend of Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine prophetically wrote in his 1821 play,Almansor: “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.”

More recently, in the introduction to the 1967 edition of his Fahrenheit 451, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury recalled about the time of the Nazi actions: “I ate, drank, and slept books … It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven, it is a sinful practice, and I carried that with me.”

By Gaither Stewart
(Rome)

Marx: Always insulted and slandered by his enemies but rarely read or understood.

I speak of myself as a Socialist but in my innermost self I think of myself as a Communist. I prefer the Communist name to the beautiful word “Socialist” because the latter has in many places been either altered, weakened, diluted, deformed, its real meaning betrayed by social democrats happy to do capitalism’s bidding, and it has become ambiguous and has been ostracized as in the capitalist homeland, USA. Moreover, as a rule the Socialist designation is qualified in one way or another that detracts from its real meaning: Democratic Socialist, National Socialist, Freedom Socialist, Progressive Socialist, ad absurdum. Anything you want it to mean.  Still, although very few Americans want to be known as Socialists, in recent times one hears it used more and more often, as in the organization, Socialists of America.

The term, Left, has also become insufficient since it falls into that same category of politically toxic ambiguity. In my native America many Democrats who behave and vote as rightists like to consider themselves of the Left. In my adopted country of Italy, Left or Center Left comprehends a varied assortment of ex-Christian Democrats, ex-Socialists (rightwing), rightwing labor leaders, populists, ex-Communists now of unidentifiable positions.

Communism is another story. In the West, though less ambiguous, it is simply a bad word. Now, I do not insist that to be genuinely of the Left one must be a Communist … although it helps clarify where you stand. Someone once suggested that maybe I am in reality a Communitarian. Perhaps. Most certainly. However, the majority of the mainline Left will think, “tsk tsk. Naïve! A Communist! And in these times. Another story of mistaken paths. And in these times, since the Fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Communist experiment in East Europe, he still believes that. Tsk, tsk, too bad!”

Not only right wingers like to point out Communism’s failures, especially the failures in Soviet Communism (many of them externally triggered), but also the professional anticommunist left, chiefly comprised of comfortable liberals and apostates.  The jeremiad is long and tiresome: the ironclad bureaucracy, the corruption inherent in state planning and state ownership, the invasion of the state into the private lives of its citizens, police controls, the supposed horror of the gulags (much amplified by uncorroborated, non-stop Western propaganda, as mentioned by Michael Parenti in his classic essay, The Overthrow of Communism), the one-party system representing only one class (which incidentally also happens in the United States, albeit in America it only represents the infinitesimally small plutocracy and uses two different masks to fool the masses), the dichotomy between privileged Party class and the people (the income inequality between top Soviet politicians and the workers rarely exceeded a factor of 20 or 30, whereas in the West it’s common to find magnates whose incomes represent thousands of times the earnings of average workers; the lack of “democracy” as the non-Communist West understands it. Critics chuckle and indulge themselves before arriving at the conclusion intended from the start: Communism in practice has never worked and will never work. The tragic irony is that many of the criticisms of Soviet Communism today apply to the USA and increasingly to the entire capitalist world.

Thus the necessity to revisit the old question soon arises again: how true is Western criticism of the Soviet experience in Communism? As a rule such outright condemnation of Communism is based on prejudice. Knee-jerk prejudices inculcated into the populace, anti-Socialist/ anti- Communist propaganda infecting the entire lives of most people of the West. Actually more than mere propaganda but hostility deeply engrained in the Western DNA from birth. Prejudices rarely reflect the truth. So what convinced me?

Well, I found in Marxist Socialism an inkling of what I desired: the intention of the deliverance of man from dependence on a rigged system of economics and his eventual victory over inhuman Capitalism which we see now from day to day on its last legs.

Here a few words about Soviet Communism are in order: Communism in twentieth century Russia first of all must be compared with the horrors of the Tsarism it overthrew and replaced. Pre-revolutionary Russia was a country in which the masses consisted chiefly of poor, uneducated and dumbed-down peasants, a society in which inequality and injustice ruled. Communism in Russia had a savage pre-history. Soviet Communism was a very Russian system, the reasons for which date far back into the Russian nineteenth century: the enduring sense of guilt on the part of the educated upper classes and the nobility toward the suffering peoples. Their sense of guilt was, by way of example,  much more powerful than white America’s sense of guilt toward its black slaves and ex-slaves, a guilt which affected the real powers in the USA in a minor way as compared to Russia.

Russian revolutionaries had in common a trait absent in the West: a sense of deterministic guilt toward labouring people, especially the peasantry. Communism appealed to the deeply religious Russian masses also because of its common traits with Christianity: the people were deeply linked both to the land and to Russian Orthodoxy. Centuries before the arrival of the Bolsheviks, the world outlook—the famous mirovozreniye—of the masses was already collective—not individual—; they were mentally prepared for the message of Communism.

The educated upper classes felt guilty also because of their divorce from the land and a realization that their lives were based on the exploitation of the people’s labor on the land. The consciousness of the sin of their social position created a great sense of repentance in the upper classes. Greed and selfishness never played the role in Russia as in the USA. Many of the upper classes and nobility felt the loneliness of their guilty position and wanted to reunite with the land and the people.

If the upper classes were moved by guilt, the lower classes were moved by honor. All Russians had always felt an aversion to the crass and greedy bourgeoisie and as the 19^th century ended revolutionaries felt a dread of the bourgeois stage of Capitalism predicted by Marx, which they hoped to avoid. Insurrection and immediate revolution was the only possibility for such an achievement, contrary to earlier 19^th century Socialist theories. So it was not surprising that Tsardom was overthrown so quickly when the Communist-led revolt occurred and the Revolution began.

And no wonder the capitalist world was terrified. Horrified by the words “Socialism” and “Communism”, the combined military forces of the capitalist world first attacked the Russian Revolution while it was underway, then for seventy years it attacked, isolated, embargoed the Soviet Union and still today anything that smacks of Communism.

Yet Russia had enough time—those seventy years—to offer a successful and appealing alternative to Capitalism, as predicted by Socialist theorists. Such background in the birth of Russian Communism and the example it set for much of the world derived from the sacred Russian conviction that Russia was destined to save the world: the dream of the Third Rome of devout pre-revolutionary Orthodox easily mutated into Communist messianism.

Such factors were missing (and historically and socially impossible in Western Communism). When I began maturing socially and politically, the narrative of my more romantic self—my religious upbringing, my working class family, and also my farmer grandfather’s close link to the land—inclined me toward the messianic vision of Russian Communism. However, my Western world outlook and personal experience dictated Western-style Socialism/Communism as the model to be followed. Though models in Russian style revolution are spiritually inspiring, they are largely inapplicable in the West because of a total absence of the above socio-political factors of pre-revolutionary Russia that made that revolution possible. Neither the (penitent) nobility-upper classes nor a communitarian peasantry existed in the West capable of creating the necessary revolutionary energy to hurtle the West toward another revolution, while at the same time the spirit of the English, French and American revolutions had extinguished long ago.

Socialism/Communism is the only force that has thus far been capable of defeating Capitalism in many countries at once and of building new societies on its ashes, the ironic result of a century long battle for social justice, that Christian concept around which the Russian Revolutionary revolved.

Social justice is the aspect of Communism that has appealed most to me personally and that came to appeal to billions of peoples of the world. That appeal has never died. Today many peoples of former Communist East Europe testify that they miss their lifestyle under the social state offered by Socialism/Communism. More and more peoples of East Europe today confirm their belief in the validity of Socialist tenets by voting back into power Communist or Socialist parties chiefly because Socialism has a soul—a social soul—lacking in Capitalism. A secularized soul, yes, originally a rejection of pure religious-inspired spiritualism, but a soul based on the relation of man to man and not of man’s relation with industry or its economic embodiment in institutionalized selfishness. There is a growing realization that behind economic activity stand real people, people who can dissipate the ghostly world of totalitarian capitalist economics. This aspect of Marxism is no longer connected with materialism, but with socialist spirituality.

After having grown up in a fanatically religious environment, I personally am haunted by the missing element in Western society: a deeply engrained sense of social justice. I am personally bewildered, offended, horrified by the inequality in my native America, and now in my adopted Europe. I am outraged by the philosophy that greed is good. That everyone is encouraged to take all of everything one can. Not only the injustice of economic inequality but also the objective lack of equal opportunity. It is untrue that the poor choose to be poor. It is untrue that the riches in the hands of a few and little in the hands of the poor are the proof that the poor deserve their situation and would be forever satisfied with home, car and TV. Nor do I accept that anyone really wants to be dumb, even if many act as if they prefer ignorance.

Universal surveys show that a great majority of Earth’s population believe the major world problem is Capitalism—the ruthless exploitation of human beings, defenseless animals and nature by capital.

For that reason I strongly favor investment of state funds and energies in public schools, free or easily affordable university study, free health care and free public urban transportation. That is, I favor a huge injection of the state into the everyday lives of peoples. Such vital matters in favor of peoples are what Socialism is about.

Still, it would be foolish  to deny the influence  of Russian Communism—the influence of the Socialist system, not the entire Soviet model—on my socio-political mindset of today. Russian Communism’s messianism and its vision of a future society no longer a slave of economics reflected my Christian religious/spiritual upbringing. It seemed to me—as it did to billions of people of the other world—that the lever to turn the world upside down had been found.

Nor can I deny the strong influence of the Socialism/Communism projected in West Europe where I began to mature intellectually. Europe’s absorption of many aspects of Socialism/Communism is reflected in the European welfare state constructed throughout the twentieth century—Europe’s great modern contribution to mankind—today being undermined and viciously unraveled by the same greedy Capitalism. But the Russian model also plays a role in my case  because of my love for that land and for the accomplishments for the rest of the world of its Communism which was born and developed in a manner vastly different from that of the West. Yet Western Communism after all was also born from many aspects of the Russian experience.

So what Russian Communist influences do I have in mind? It has been said that the entire history of the Russian intelligentsia beginning in the early nineteenth century was a preparation for Communism. The model developed in Russia included above all “the thirst for social righteousness and equality, recognition of the working class as the highest type of humanity, aversion to Capitalism and the bourgeoisie, the striving for an integrated world outlook and an integrated relation to life, sectarian intolerance, a suspicious and hostile attitude to the class of the cultured elite, an exclusive this-worldliness, a denial of spirit and of spiritual values, a well nigh religious devotion to materialism.” However I do not accept that my disagreement with the latter two traits, which place me in the Western camp of Communism, distance me from Communism as such.” (This paragraph is in reference to Nicolas Berdyaev)

So again: why do I think of myself a Communist and not simply Leftist? Not even a radical Leftist which people tend to read simply as anarchist or “terrorist” (always a slippery, invidious word, as Churchill himself recognized, your terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter). I think of myself as Communist to avoid such confusion. I began thinking in this manner because of two principal aspects of Marxism: on the one hand, the fundamental nature of economics which determines a man’s social class that in turn determines his actions and thoughts. On the other hand, the spiritual side of Marxism that at first seems to contradict its economic determinism: the messianic role it assigns to working people—corresponding to the Christian doctrine of the primacy of the role of the meek and the poor—destined to free humanity from slavery. I find sufficient the idealism of Karl Marx to counter the dehumanization in Capitalism which makes man dependent on his own production.

In the USA someone comments, “Oh, then you’re a Democrat.”

“Of course not,” I reply.

In Italy the question is the same: then you’re for the Partito Democratico? My answer is the same: Of course not. Here you don’t know whether you’re voting for ex-Christian Democrats, rightwing Liberals or Republicans, or in the best of cases for an ex-Communist who changed his mind and abandoned core principles. No, I would not feel at home in any of those places.

Not that my non-support for such parties includes my vote for leftist parties in national elections. Not at all. I have never voted anywhere. Unbelievable to people who still believe in ballots and urns and election campaigns and its promises and financing and all that blather. No, I have never voted in any election. Anywhere. Ever. And I don’t plan to begin voting now. I’m glad Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York City and I would send congratulations to him. But I have no idea of who financed him to get there and what price he must now pay for his funding. According to his PR and also rabid rightists, he ìs of the extreme Left. Very good … if he can change the entire complexion of Manhattan.

So my position is more or less ideological.  But Communist? one still wonders. Old-fashioned? Outdated? Tried and failed? Old Marxist stuff you heard about in school? Well, I say, fuck such conditioned reactions and fuck those who do the conditioning. Especially them.

Meanwhile, fuck the Center, too. Above all, fuck the Center. The sense of marketing hype and political spin is only heightened by the fact that we’re told that the Center is allegedly “persuadable”. For, at the same time, it is already the majority. That’s right: we’re told that the “New American Center” constitutes 51% of the electorate. That sounds like a corporate-funded centrist’s dream. So fuck the Center as well as the tamed Left. I’m talking here about the liberaloid left.

Less inspirational are voices that reluctantly acknowledge the status quo because of resistance against big change, certainly against revolution. Desperate jeremiads in America, in times when even our brightest leaders fear ‘apocalypse now’, are commonplace. How the world escaped the global nuclear war calamity that bedeviled my childhood still seems miraculous. Or the equal horror that sprawling Communism would bury us. Reality outsmarts nearly all predictions, dire or otherwise.

Now we have terrorism to re-ignite current fear-thresholds; no mushroom clouds have outdone worldwide genocides since 9/11. The year 2001 sparked a mania. Excluding the Confederate rebellion, our American legacy is so-called evolutionary reforms, not the massive upheavals of revolution. We haven’t had a revolution in centuries. Reform is the Left’s model of change … but what reforms? Reforms for the “worse” —the brand that Barack Obama and corporatized Democrats seem to specialize on. And more such reforms are surely on the way.  Still, most of the rest of the world considers the home of global corporate totalitarian Capitalism, corporate democracy and corporate freedom, the good ol’ USA, the rogue super nation of the world. Rogue nation, the term once liberally applied by the USA to the “evil” empire of Communism, the USSR.

Filled with hubris from its inception, the exceptional USA still believes itself exempt from world rules of behavior. The USA, where not only public ethics hardly exist, personal morality is also vanishing at an astonishing pace and few voices remain to confront inequality. Europe too is in fact turning its back on America, despite the enduring European belief in American democracy and capitalistic Europe’s stubborn imitations of America.  So, for me, Europe and its dwindling welfare state, are no longer acceptable models either. The question then is, what remains?

Today many Italian Communists are Christians. A paradox. Italian Communists rediscovered the Catholic Church at the same time other Italians were moving away from it. The great majority of Italians today who are not agnostic are simply technical Catholics—baptized at birth, and go to church only for communions and funerals. The Church and the faith mark the beginning and the end of life. All the inbetween is life itself. Because of the powerful presence of the Vatican in Rome, because of the Church’s anathemas and judgments on and invasions into civil issues like divorce and abortion and the hard Marxist-Leninist positions on religion in general, the religious question has always been difficult for Italian Communists. I do not forget one Rome Communist’s summation of the religious question precisely during the time Italian Communists began returning to the Church: “The Pope, his infallibility and his dogmas, the rites, myths, saints, all those millennial customs, and bureaucratic structures are a lot of nonsense. In that sense, Catholicism is the queerest sect of our times. Yet we respect the institution since it is so quintessentially Italian.” Ambiguous, but clearly not in conformity with Lenin who preached that “religion was purely a question of revolutionary conflict” while he summoned men to the “assault of heaven” and opposed any attempt to combine Christianity with Socialism.

Pure materialism is thus a complex question for me. I have to take exception to Christianity’s claim that the human soul is of more value than all the kingdoms of the world, yet I agree that every human being is individual and never to be repeated, a biological individualism which is not to be compared with the personality which belongs to the spiritual world, and which, in the final analysis, is a stumbling block for my Communism. I am not at all hostile to the individual man, the personality, who is more than a member of a social class. I consider myself a member of a spiritual human society which I nonetheless perceive of as an aspired to classless society.

I think there is no reason to dwell on the affirmation that “Capitalism dehumanizes human life”, as per Nicolas Berdyaev. Sometimes seen as a Christian Existentialist, Berdyaev was an early Marxist, who was exiled from Communist Russia in 1922 because of his severe views on Bolshevism. Yet his summation underlines the evangelical truth that man does not live by bread alone and that Communists cannot be condemned for showing that though bread alone is not enough, man still does live by bread and there must be enough of it for all.

Though the individual is a revolutionary, Berdyaev concludes, the masses are conservative.

About the author
The Fifth Sun (Punto Press Publishing).

APPENDIX

When Bertrand Russell declared himself an anticommunist

A prefatory note by Patrice Greanville

Apparently, as the essay below indicates, even well-intentioned geniuses like Bertrand Russell can be alarmingly wrong when it comes to communism. Most likely the product of deeply held but unconscious class prejudices (the product of an eccentric aristocratic family, Russell after all was formally a Lord and a distinguished mathematician, and for most of his life he was accorded deferential treatment in Britain and elsewhere) his attacks on communism clearly proceed from a very shallow and invidious perspective, and his cavalier dismissal of Marxism is shameful and shoddy for a professional philosopher.  While in his later years Russell—commendably—became a prominent figure in the world struggle against US imperialism and constant war (he was a pivotal founding member of the International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, often called the Russell Tribunal)) a few decades before, from the 1930s to the late 1950s, as a hard-to-classify card-carrying anticommunist he was an acerbic critic of communism, even advocating on several occasions the nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union. How could Russell, who incarnated logic and the systematic, impartial acquisition and application of knowledge, square his opposition to American-led Western imperialism with hatred for socialism remains a mystery. The contradiction is perverse when we we realize that he was not oblivious to the ghastly flaws and crimes of the bourgeois order. It was him who memorably said,

“Why I am Not a Communist”
by Betrand Russell      I n relation to any political doctrine there are two questions to be asked: (1) Are its theoretical tenets true? (2) Is its practical policy likely to increase human happiness? For my part, I think the theoretical tenets of Communism are false, and I think its practical maxims are such as to produce an immeasurable increase of human misery.

      I have always disagreed with Marx. My first hostile criticism of him was published in 1896. But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous. A minority resting its powers upon the activities of secret police is bound to be cruel, oppressive and obscuarantist. The dangers of the irresponsible power cane to be generally recognized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but those who have forgotten all that was painfully learnt during the days of absolute monarchy, and have gone back to what was worst in the middle ages under the curious delusion that they were in the vanguard of progress.

      There are signs that in course of time the Russian régime will become more liberal. But, although this is possible, it is very far from certain. In the meantime, all those who value not only art and science but a sufficiency of bread and freedom from the fear that a careless word by their children to a schoolteacher may condemn them to forced labour in a Siberian wilderness, must do what lies in their power to preserve in their own countries a less servile and more prosperous manner of life.

      There are those who, oppressed by the evils of Communism, are led to the conclusion that the only effective way to combat these evils is by means of a world war. I think this a mistake. At one time such a policy might have been possible, but now war has become so terrible and Communism has become so powerful that no one can tell what would be left after a world war, and whatever might be left would probably be at least as bad as present -day Communism. This forecast does not depend upon the inevitable effects of mass destruction by means of hydrogen and cobalt bombs and perhaps of ingeniously propagated plagues. The way to combat Communism is not war. What is needed in addition to such armaments as will deter Communists from attacking the West, is a diminution of the grounds for discontent in the less prosperous parts of the non-communist world. In most of the countries of Asia, there is abject poverty which the West ought to alleviate as far as it lies in its power to do so. There is also a great bitterness which was caused by the centuries of European insolent domination in Asia. This ought to be dealt with by a combination of patient tact with dramatic announcements renouncing such relics of white domination as survive in Asia. Communism is a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by diminishing the area of poverty and hatred.

From Portraits from Memory published in 1956

Cyrano’s Journal

Even confused, often corrupt, bumbling Italy has a much better healthcare service than America, and a much less savage capitalism.

I just returned from my national health doctor and the next door pharmacy. The doctor graciously dressed an inflamed, very deep cut on my right hand and gave me a prescription for an antibiotic to avoid infection. Total time, five minutes. Cost: zero. 

An Italian health service card. That’s all you need. Italy ranks 2nd in the world in quality, right after France.

Then I went to the pharmacy where a beautiful pharmacist filled my National Health Service prescription. Total time: five minutes. Cost: euro 2.71, a little over $3.00, of patient participation which in my case will be reimbursed by a private journalist insurance.

I returned home after about 45 minutes in total, with the antibiotic and my hand well-dressed and re-bandaged and my spirits bolstered.

Now, I must go backwards a week to describe my accident that took me to the doctor and pharmacy today. Last week I had a tremendous fall in the semi-darkness in the parking lot of my usual supermarket. I stumbled over something and fell headlong among some cement blocks and other mysterious objects and woke up flat on my face with a brutal pain in my forehead.

The Italian National Health Service was instituted in 1978.

I finally managed to climb to my feet just as a lady stopped her car nearby, rushed toward me asking if I needed help and gave me a handful of Kleenex to wipe the blood off my forehead, at which point however I realized the blood was flowing from my hand. I supposed the wound came from a piece of broken glass; I was in a dark part of the parking lot where I shouldn’t have been in the first place in order to throw from a low wall to a trash bin a bag of trash from home that I had forgotten to dump in the proper place.

At that point I staggered into the supermarket where I know most of the employees. Several of them rushed toward me aghast. And what a sight I was! Dazed and covered in blood, the knob on my forehead already huge, and most likely a wild expression on my face. they rushed me into a room where the manager delicately washed my face and told me I had to get to a hospital. I adamantly refused that offer while the fish market manager began wrapping my hand with something and another person pressed an ice pack on the swelling and expanding bump on my forehead. As I gradually returned to the real world, I agreed that they could call a first aid ambulance which could then either medicate me on the spot or take me to an ER.

Meanwhile I staggered around the market, in my blood-stained head bandana and hand, still unaware of my damaged rib cage and right leg, stubbornly buying what I had come for, milk and bread, and especially the wine.

Within about five minutes the ambulance arrived just as I’d finished paying with a card at a check-out counter. The first aid people dressed in orange and black slickers rushed me and the wine out the door to the ambulance, sat me inside where a male nurse proceeded to medicate me. He cleaned and dressed my right hand, said I needed stitches—but maybe not—then wrapped a wide swath of gauze around my head so that I looked like a war bombing victim, while a second ambulance man continued to converse with me about this and that. I realized later his job was to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. While the nurse wrote up a long form with data from my national health card, the other continued talking and the female driver turned up the pop music and the service radio crackled and the people whose cars were blocked by the ambulance waited patiently and, to my surprise, uncomplaining. Total intervention time for the first-aid ambulance, I would guess, 45 minutes. Cost to me: zero.

[pullquote]World Health Organization‘s ranking, as the 2nd best in the world after France,^[3] and according to the CIA World factbook, Italy has the world’s 10th highest life expectancy.^[4] Thanks to its good healthcare system, the life expectancy at birth in Italy was 80.9 years in 2004, which is two years above the OECD average.^{[2](Wikipedia)}[/pullquote]

After the nurse escorted me to me car and placed my shopping bag on a seat, reassured himself that I was in condition to drive, I went back into the supermarket to thank everyone and was met by waves and smiles and a left hand shake with the manager.

Now even though the Italian National Health Service might not be considered the best in Europe, today it is for me. Once back home this morning from doctor and pharmacy, I raced to the computer to record this experience. In Italy’s continual economic emergency the first places budgetary leaders look to make cuts are in the national health program and social security but it resists.

The National Health Services of Germany, France, Switzerland are considered among the best, though every European country offers excellent services, from Scandinavia to Malta, from Great Britain (despite recent cutbacks still among the best) to Russia and Bulgaria. The countries I have lived in, including Mexico and Argentina offer national health services, as do I’m certain all Latin American countries. The health service in Canada has long been considered among the best in the world. Rich Latin Americans even fly to Cuba for delicate heart surgery. The black hole in the world of national health services is the USA, reputedly the world’s richest country which spends proportionately much much more for far worse health protection than any other world country.

•

Italians as a rule are convinced that their national health service is the best, the elimination of which could literally cause a revolution. Most certainly no politician could ever be elected to any office in Italy based on a program of elimination of Italy’s single payer National Health Service. In fact, most political programs include protection and improvement of the national health service. The thing about a single payer (that is the state) health service is that once in place, it becomes the right it truly is and no people will ever willingly surrender that right.

Misinformed and ignorant people in the USA into whose DNA disastrous negative opinions about single payer national health services have been inculcated by crassly greedy and evil political leaders and pharmaceutical and insurance companies will raise the usual objections. But anyone who has lived a life in places where largely free health care is assured takes it for granted that the state guarantees the protection of the health of all its peoples.

Longtime Rome resident Gaither Stewart is TGP’s European correspondent. The author of many novels and essays, his latest is The Fifth Sun, with a plot spanning Italy and Mexico.  The book was published by Punto Press.

AN OPED BY RUTH EISENBUD
While major media in the United States and Britain are suddenly busy stoking up the fires against wildlife, in countries like India, where a non-Judeo-Christian tradition of respect for animals predominates, the treatment is often vastly different

In INDIA: A baby deer rescued by Karuna Society, now safe and sound, with nothing to fear!

Ramping UP for the Great Deer Crusade of 2014

New information indicates that CBS TV has joined the merry band of crusaders, poised to wage an ethnic cleansing campaign of epic proportions, on deer who harm no one, as they forage through the forest, adding beauty and grace as they go: 

“Earlier this week, CBS did a very biased and one-sided presentation of the up-coming deer slaughter… shame on CBS reporters for such poor investigative journalism, for listening only to the very voices that are backing the killing, and not checking “their” facts, or doing the proper reserach on alternatives. The USDA is in the wildlife killing business and has to keep thier “killers” busy, to justify their salaries. The bit about donating meat to pantires is a sham, since most of the that  meat will never be eaten…” —Zelda Penzel

• As reported by Jennifer McLogan in Federal Sharpshooters May Move In On Long Island Deer, the die seems to be already cast. 

To justify their rapacious hunger to dominate and destroy any living being, labeled as ‘trespasser’,  the enforcers of dominion have contrived statistics that fail to portray a realistic assessment of deer as an integral part of forest ecology. They raise hysterical claims of disease and pestilence, destruction of the forest, destruction of crops, as they label the deer a plague on mankind. Every holy war must have its plagues. This is the way of the semitic religions in their never ending quest for supremacy over animal kind and nature, over human trespassers  and over each other. These three religions have convinced themselves that survival depends on scapegoating enemies, especially when the number of followers is on the decline. What better way to rev up membership (i.e donations), than by rallying around a common enemy. This time the enemy is a friendly animal, that co-exists peacefully with its habitat and with mankind – the deer. Next time it might be another animal to justify increased funds for the morally bankrupt department of wilderness services or it might be the mosque down the street, the synagogue on the corner or a sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.Anyone who understands the vicious, duplicitous nature of this impending genocide, must look within, to decide if it is possible to remain in and provide moral or financial support to the animal phobic terrorist religions of dominion. These three religions combined: Judaism, Christianity and Islam are responsible for unspeakable, immeasurable animal suffering, since the mandate of dominion was first invoked five thousand years ago.

“Genesis 9:1-3 ‘The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.’”

This latest chapter in the never ending holy war against animalkind is fully backed by all the forces of dominion of a christian nation: hunters, wildlife services, government officials, the media, tyrannical religious doctrine and the sanctimonious religious leaders who raise a ruckus, when their tribe is threatened by verbal or real violence, yet show no empathy or compassion for the animals they condemn with the righteous fervor of a moral imperative. Some political leaders, such as Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, make light of the violence they support. While commenting on a goose call he ordered, he mocked it in a tone reminiscent of the sadism of nazi-speak:: 

 “There is not a lot of cost involved in rounding up a couple thousand geese and letting them go to sleep with nice dreams”  —Michael Bloomberg  

 

No doubt he considers himself above the animals, as he glibly dismisses the terror of the geese and their desire to live. As a staunch, proud dominionite, fully impressed with his power over the animals, he is unable to understand the nature of his cruelty. How easy it is to bemoan the suffering of one’s own, while similar atrocities towards others elicit pitiless humor.

When reason fails…
Eloquent, articulate and intelligent rebuttals have been issued by those who have seen beyond the cruelty of the judeo.christian tradition. Despite the best effort of the the holy warriors of dominion to inculcate in them the fear and dread so cherished by this tradition, these individuals understand the nature of compassion, that it is based on respect for the lives of both animals and men:
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2013/12/09/time-magazine-weighs-in-on-the-hunting-issue-disgracefully/

Responses to the news of the upcoming holocaust, from locals in the affected area have attempted to reason with the merry band of killers with pleas for common sense and compassion., as indicated by this sample of responses:

Lyme disease carriers come from & are spread by numerous feral & domestic sources particularly dogs, cats, mice, raccoons, ground hogs, squirrels, possums, skunks, birds, moles, rabbits etc… If Lyme disease was as much a problem as proponents of this wreckless proposal make it out to be, no one would be living here.

Allowing the notorious Wildlife Services to perform this task is outrageous. One of the most corrupt, venal, savage & incompetent government agencies in American history. They get laws repealed with a mere wink & a handshake to local politicians who allow our neighborhoods to be turned into a war zone. Apparently Wildlife Services is now spreading their sick carnage to the east where they can fleece the public even more. Remember, if they aren’t killing they’re not making any money. They’ve been slaughtering our wildlife in the west for decades & now see a great opportunity to increase their savagery by jumping on the now popular deer killing bandwagon. This ruthless rogue agency should be disbanded & held accountable for its crimes, not invading our neighborhoods with lethal weapons maiming, torturing, killing & leaving a bloody trail all over the eastern portion of Long Island.

In closing, before you complain about deer being a nuisance, remember, you destroyed their habitat, to build your own. Long Island politicians do not allow this to happen…

Though much of the local public is against this upcoming celebration of  the right to slaughter,  the inheritors of dominion, are incapable of the rational thought required to understand  any opposition to their quest. They are the good soldiers of dominion, marching onward in their latest adventure to establish once and for all their supremacy over nature and animal kind. Since the glory of such destruction fades quickly, after they have had their fill of deer slaughter, they will find a new victim, a new enemy, a new scapegoat: for they must fill the void in the spiritually impoverished existence, where the measure of a man is determined by the right to kill defenseless animals with gusto:

Hunters: What makes some men derive pleasure from killing a defenseless creature?

What if the measure of a man were instead based on protection, care and comfort for the weak
rather than the “divine right” to commit mayhem and violence against non-human beings?

WHAT IF…?
What if religion, political figures, government agencies such as wilderness services and religious leaders were on the side of the animals. What if it were against the law to order a cull of any animal? What if religion taught:

"For there is nothing inaccessible for death.
All beings are fond of life, hate pain, like pleasure,
shun destruction, like life, long to live. To all life
is dear." —Jain Acharanga Sutra.

 —Jain Acharanga Sutra
 
This is not a fantasy, but a realizable possibility where dominionist religious doctrine has not infiltrated the mainstream view of animals. How different it is in India, where  ahimsa informs the prevailing view of man and his relation to nature and animal kind; where Wilderness Services cooperates with animal organizations to protect, rescue  and rehabilitate wildlife  The following is an example of a deer rescued by wilderness services, then given medical care and respect at the Karuna Society Sanctuary, then released to the wilderness, when fully recovered: http://www.karunasociety.org/spotted-deer-recoverss

Spotted Deer Recovers from a Leg Injury and is Released Back into the Wild

In July, a young spotted deer was brought in by the forest department. Her leg was deeply infected, inflamed and paralyzed. The chances of recovery at this stage were minimal. We started immediate treatment, and the infection seemed to heal, but the left foot was still not functioning.

With further exploration we found two deeper wounds that went down to the bone. These wounds took five months to heal. After one year, fully recovered, this beautiful spotted deer was released back to its original habitat with the help of the forest department officials. The wildlife doctor from Wildlife Trust of India is still amazed that the deer survived.

What if those of us who care for protection, rescue and compassion over culls, hunting and slaughter were to take a stand against the religions that encourage the latter. What if we were to say no more – We will not tolerate your desecration of the sanctity of life for the sake of preserving archaic, violent doctrine. What if we were to finally break the ties with religions that are in direct opposition to the values of the compassion we hold dear. What if we were to say we will not support your cruelty, no matter how you try to get around it with slick phrases such as ‘the dominion of love’. There can be no love where slaughter is a holy right. The myth of the good shepherd must finally be laid to rest and with it the cruelty of dominion.

“It is the essential characteristic of a wise person that he/she does not kill any living being.
One should know that non-killing and equality of all living beings are the main principles of [a good] religion”—Jain sutra

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Eisenbud is a veteran animal rights activist. 

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