-oops-
Prague — I was recently reminded of an observation made in 1979 by the Czech writer Milan Kundera when he spoke at the National Autonomous University of Mexico: He said that Franz Kafka, another Czech and a defining figure of 20th-century literature , is unacceptable to the totalitarian world because his work is the very picture of that world.
The memory of this quote came to me in Prague, while I was attending an international symposium on Kafka and Latin American literature. Kundera cited a number of prohibitions placed on Kafka’s work in authoritarian regimes, where the individual must submit to arbitrary instructions whose sources are, quite literally, mysteries.
The German thinker Max Weber said much the same about the early 20th century when dictatorships flourished, emphasizing that the ideal for any bureaucracy is to become invisible. The bureaucracies of totalitarian and authoritarian states develop this trait to levels of pure stupidity.
The air of anxiety
Kafka may be the novelist who revealed the darkest recesses of the human mind, regardless of the system in which they may have lived. He died in 1924 and most of his works were published posthumously.
In Prague, I found the air filled with anxiety caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Each of the symposium organizers said they or their relatives were personally hosting Ukrainian refugees. These refugees were mostly women and children, as many of the men had stayed to fight the Russians.
It was all reminiscent of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, with its lingering images of Soviet tanks on the streets of this beautiful European city. However, no one boasted of their generosity, rather considered it more of a duty.
Activists and writers gather at a rally in support of Salman Rushdie at the New York Public Library on August 19, 2022, a week after he was stabbed.
Lev Radin/ZUMA
Ethical conscience
While the Czech Republic does not border Ukraine, it would move to the front line in the increasingly remote event that Putin can achieve his goal of annexing Ukraine. Here it can be noted that Kiev was a cultural and historical center several centuries before the rise of Moscow. The religious and historical pretexts that Putin has given to justify an old-style invasion with old standards have proven most convincing in countries that believe that the only imperialism is from Europe and America.
He has effectively challenged the fatwa by exercising his freedom of speech.
As it happens, the author Salman Rushdie was attacked in New York in the United States. Like the terrorist attack a few years ago on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, Latin American colleagues could barely be heard to condemn the outrage. For more than 33 years, the author of Midnight’s Children and autobiographical Joseph Anton: A Memoir has been the target of a fatwa by Iran’s late clerical ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini. Europe had not seen such a “decision” since the Middle Ages and the age of the Inquisition.
After all, Rushdie could never be forgiven for continuing to write and publicly defend his positions despite the fatwa. He actually defied the fatwa by exercising his freedom of speech and refusing to be paralyzed by the fear of death. He has become one of that rare breed these days: a manifestation of our ethical conscience.
The price to pay
One of our poets, Antonio Porchia, wrote “what is paid with our lives is never costly”. Iran’s clerical regime may seek to hide its direct responsibility for this terrorist act by conjecture, but there can be no justification for its refusal to rescind the fatwa. Her executioner, an American citizen of Lebanese descent, is a moron who never read a line of Rushdie but claimed to be “outraged” by his blasphemies against religion.
In 1965, another Argentine artist, León Ferrari, exhibited his sculpture Western and Christian Civilization (Western and Christian civilization), showing the crucified Christ in a jet plane commonly used to bomb villages in Vietnam. Just imagine if Pope Paul VI had sentenced him and his workshop to death for blasphemy.
Argentina is still nursing its wounds from acts of international terrorism rooted in Tehran. Beyond the evidence, it is fair to assume that the regime engineered the murderous bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed 85 people. And the Iranians did a much more professional job with the bomb’s chief investigator, state prosecutor Alberto Nisman, than they did with Rushdie. Before his sudden death, Nisman was about to present evidence that President Cristina Kirchner’s government had been in talks with Iran to help free him from ties to AMIA.
From your site articles
Similar articles about the web
