Joanna, you were born in the same Bulgaria as the widely respected author Tzvetan Todorov, who in his book written in French, La ConquĂȘte de l'AmĂ©rique. La question de l’autre told his readers:
"Le capitaine Alonzo Lopez de Avila s'Ă©tait emparĂ© pendant la guerre d'une jeune Indienne, une femme belle et gracieuse. Elle avait promis Ă son mari craignant qu'on ne le tuĂąt Ă la guerre de n'appartenir Ă aucun autre que lui, et ainsi nulle persuasion ne put l'empĂȘcher de quitter la vie plutĂŽt que de se laisser flĂ©trir par un autre homme ; c'est pourquoi on la livra aux chiens." (Diego de Landa, Relation des choses de Yucatan.)
J'Ă©cris ce livre pour essayer de faire en sorte qu'on n'oublie pas ce rĂ©cit, et mille autres pareils. A la question: comment se comporter Ă l'Ă©gard d'autrui? je ne trouve pas moyen de rĂ©pondre autrement qu'en racontant une histoire exemplaire, celle de la dĂ©couverte et de la conquĂȘte de l'AmĂ©rique. En mĂȘme temps, cette recherche Ă©thique est une rĂ©flexion sur les signes, l'interprĂ©tation et la communication: car le sĂ©miotique ne peut ĂȘtre pensĂ© hors du rapport Ă l’autre.”
For those who do not speak French, but do speak English, the world's most important lingua franca, with approximately 380 million native speakers and more than a billion people who use it as a second language, I provide the English translation:
The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other the following: “During the war, Captain Alonzo Lopez de Avila had captured a young Indian woman, a beautiful and graceful girl. She had promised her husband, fearing he would be killed in the war, that she would belong to no other man, and so no persuasion could prevent her from taking her own life rather than being defiled by another; therefore, she was thrown to the dogs." (Diego de Landa, Account of the Events of Yucatan.) This is the colonial attitude of the roman catholic and protestant culture the orthodox-christian Joanna M. wants to be part of.
Still the Joanna’s of Eastern Europe now want to join the superficial forms of our decaying materialistic culture. Why? Because they think that the western neoliberal system provides endless freedom, while educated western citizens know this is a lie. Still, the middle class of communist Eastern Europe, had learned one imperishable truth: the masses have to conform to the powers that be, the administrative oligarchy, the communist nomenklatura, whose totalitarianism decided what was true and especially what wasn’t. The famous Jewish Hungarian author Imre KertĂ©sz [1929 – 2016), who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and received in 2002 the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote in his in Dutch translated book “De verbannen taal, (2005)” [“The banned language”]:
Now that the fruits of forty years of struggle have ripened and the second totalitarian empire (the Soviet Union) has also fallen, a pervasive sense of collapse, resentment, and powerlessness dominates. It is as if a hangover-like atmosphere is haunting Europe; as if, upon waking on a grey morning, the continent realized that instead of two possible worlds, it is left with only one actual world — the triumphant world of economism, capitalism, and pragmatism devoid of ideals, transcendence, or alternatives, offering no passage to either the cursed land or the promised land (take your pick)... That silent collapse (also known as the Velvet Revolution) seems to have shattered something within people — though it is unclear exactly what: perhaps the ethics of resistance, which lent a certain solidity to one’s way of life, or a kind of hope — which may never have been true hope, yet undoubtedly provided a sense of stability. In any case, it put an end to the relativity of comparison. And here we stand now as victors: empty, weary, and disillusioned.”
Judging by her remarks, I think that Joanna M. from the capital Sofia and her contemporaries intuitively realize this. Born into a middle-class family in Bulgaria, a country that has played hardly any historical role for the Western European elite, she too wonders what role she can play in the chaos of the postmodern West. I noticed this in the way she clung to people, like me, who have enough contacts to boost her career. She certainly has ambition, but unfortunately, it is based on a reality that has not been lived through.
“Man is not born to disappear into history as a discarded part, but to understand his fate, to face his mortality and — now you will hear a rather old-fashioned turn of phrase from me — to save his soul. The happiness of man in the higher sense lies outside his historical existence — but not in the avoidance of historical experience; on the contrary, in living through, in taking possession of that experience and in the tragic identification with it. Man can be elevated above history exclusively through knowledge; during the demoralizing presence of total history, knowledge is the only worthy refuge, the only thing that is good. Only in the light of that lived knowledge can we ask the question whether everything we have committed and undergone can bring about something of value — to put it more precisely: whether we attribute value to our own lives or forget them like amnesia patients, or perhaps cast them off like suicides.” KertĂ©sz later warned: “Whoever has ever played with power or willingly allowed himself to be used as a plaything of power is never again capable of thinking, dreaming, talking, and preaching about anything other than power.” As a Hungarian Jew, this author knew what he was talking about. After all, he had endured three totalitarian systems: National Socialism, Communism, and Neoliberal Capitalism. Meanwhile, the average voter is subjected to the propaganda of the officially sanctioned mainstream version of reality, the reality as accepted by power. Central to its superficial assumption is the Ideology of Progress, the belief that in a finite world, material progress remains infinite. However, every serious observer knows that this ideology is ultimately based on nothing. The British author of ‘A Short History of Progress,’ Ronald Wright, pointed out the following after the start of the 2008 credit crisis:
See Also: http://home.planet.nl/~houck006/wright.html
Surviving Progress | Full Current Affairs Documentary
What is material progress, in fact? In the documentary film Surviving Progress, a former Wall Street consultant and American economics professor, Michael Hudson, states:
“Written records go back about 4000 years, and from 2000 B.C. to the time of Jesus it was normal for all of the countries in the world to periodically cancel the debts when they became too large to pay. So you have Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt and other regions all proclaiming these debt cancellations, and the effect was to make a clean slate so that society would begin all over again. This was easy to do in a society were most debts were owed to the state. It became much harder to do when enterprise and credit passed out of the hands of the state into private hands, and into the hands of an oligarchy,” exactly as is the case today. The result is that power has fallen into the hands of a wealthy elite that knows only one driving force: to become even richer and even more powerful, while the community has meanwhile lost the ability to curb this all-destroying selfishness. Michael Hudson on the oligarchy:
“The last thing they wanted was to have a king who would actually cancel the debts and restore equality. Rome was the first country of the world not to cancel the debts. It went to war with Sparta in Greece to overthrow the government and the king who wanted to cancel the debts.
The Roman wars of the first century B.C. ended up stripping the countries of everything they had. Not only that it stripped the tempels of gold, it stripped the public buildings, it stripped the economies of their reproductive capacities, it stripped them of their water-works, it made a desert out of the land, and it said: a debt is a debt.”
In Surviving Progress, Ronald Wright remarks about the collapse of the Roman Empire:
“The collapse seems to have been closely linked to ecological devastation which led to all sorts of social and economic and military problems. In the early stages of the Roman Republic you had a fairly egalitarian land owning system. The peasants had acces to public land, but as the Roman State became more powerful and the lords and the generals began to appropriate public land for their own private estates more and more peasants became landless. All the same time erosion was a serious problem, so bad that some of the Roman ports silted up with all the topsoil that got washed down from the fields into the rivers. And archeologists have been able to establish how badly degraded much of Italy was by the fall of the Roman Empire, and how it took a thousand years for the much reduced population during the Middle Ages to rebuild their fertility.”
