Gelman and Good Dictatorships

Juan Gelman is a poet, is widely regarded as being a human rights campaigner and when he was younger he was an active participant in revolutionary Peronism. Regular readers of this increasingly neglected blog will know that I don’t have a high opinion of Gelman.

However, even I was surprised by the depths he stoops to in a piece published in Pagina/12 today. It’s an acceptance speech for some bauble awarded to him under the auspices of the Chinese government. Here are some choice quotes:

On the 13th of April last the Chinese government published a national action plan for human rights which guarantees the basic civil rights of the entire population including women, children, the disabled and ethnic minorities…

In the introduction to the action plan the government recognizes that “China has a long way to go with its efforts to improve human rights.” As it proceeds along this path the death penalty will undoubtedly be abolished, the independence of the judiciary will be strengthened, censorship of publishers and the media will be softened, political prisoners who have not committed acts against the security of the state will be released, those responsible for disappearances, especially those of children, will be caught and punished and other relaveant measures will also be adopted…

The USA and western powers support terrorist groups and separitists who are trying to break China up into weak feudal domains and satrapies, the better to dominate them. Tibet and Taiwan form part of China since time immemorial.

Can Gelman possibly believe that the Chinese government is going to abolish the death penalty? And note that he only hopes for a softening of censorship and thinks its fine to hold political prisoners if they have committed acts  against state security. Guess who will be deciding whether they have or not? Yup, the judiciary whose non-existent autonomy he’d like to see augmented.

As anybody who has read a tiny bit of history knows, some of the most infernal regimes have had constitutions bursting with good intentions and have claimed to be passionate defenders of human rights. The Soviet Union was one such and Cuba today is another. Rather than judge the government of China on its decades of repression, torture and mass murder, the sainted Gelman decides to judge it on yet another blast of hot air  from the regime.

So, if you’re Taiwanese and you’d like to continue to enjoy the benefits of living in a liberal democracy, well, screw you. The great panjandrum of the human rights movement in Argentina thinks you should forget about all that nonsense and rejoin the motherland, where you’ll do well to keep your opinions to yourself if you don’t want to end up in a “reeducation” camp.

And if you are a Tibetan or an Uighur who doesn’t regard yourself as part of the Chinese nation,  who doesn’t want your culture and people to be turned into theme park amusements for tourists  and would like to assert your national rights, you are in even worse luck. As  far as Gelman is concerned you can quite literally fuck off and die. All you are is tool of imperialism.

Gelman is a hypocrite and fraud who never saw an anti-American dictatorship – no matter how monstrous – he didn’t like. This article also gives us a fair insight into what Argentina would look like today if he and his comrades and triumphed in the struggles of their  youth.

An Poc Ar Buile

Quintín is starting to show signs of having lost the run of himself altogther. In an interview here he says,

I’m going to make a joke, Martel is something of a Kirchnerite artist.

In the second part of the same interview he says that Pola is,

… functionally Kirchnerite, although she’s a natural born gorila.

What next? Functionally Kirchernite breakfast cereals perhaps, or a way of playing the banjo that signals sympathy for the government or serves its ends. It’s only a matter of time.

Bolaño Ever Bigger

“2666″ is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. “The Savage Detectives” looks positively hermetic beside it.

From a rave review of 2666, here.  I wonder how an 1100 page novel in Spanish gets to have 900 pages when it’s translated into English. It seems like rather a lot to lose.

Civilisation and Barbarism

1.

I see that Glavin is in Afghanistan. Good for him.

2.

I’ve just read the chapter on Sarmiento and Alberdi in Oscar Terán’s enormously instructive Historia de las ideas en la Argentina. Can anyone doubt what course of action Sarmiento would have recommended in Afghanistan? Can anyone doubt whether he’d have been willing to get his own hands dirty if necessary?

3.

Terán died in March this year and I found out from a mail that a friend forwarded to me. When I received it I was in the newsroom of a national newspaper. Nobody there had heard of him.

Bolaño Cercano

I became aware of Roberto Bolaño the day after he died when I read this obituary of him by Rodrigo Fresán and was sufficiently taken by it to buy La Literatura Nazi En América that same day. I liked it enough to immediately set about reading everything he had published and  later the posthumous publications too. Don’t come to me to carp about about Bolaño being overvalued.

At a loose end on Saturday afternoon I wandered into the Librería de la Mancha, picked up this book, about which I some vague idea from some Sunday supplement  and decided to buy it. As the guy behind the counter was ringing up the sale he opened the book and said that he was checking to see if the DVD was there.

What DVD?

It comes with a documentary film, there are interviews with the family and all sorts of other stuff.

When I got home I stuck the DVD in the computer and watched the documentary. There’s his widow showing us Bolaño’s books and notebooks, family photograph and the like. There’s his widow talking with Enrique Vila-Matas and Antoni García Porta about him and his work. His son says a few words, there are contributions from Juan Villoro and Rodrigo Fresán too and some moody street and port shots of Blanes and Mexico city.

Watching the film moved me enough to dampen my eyes. You can see the trailer here