Protests around the world are often for contradictory things. The answer to the problem of one group of protesters is poison for another. (more…)
Héctor Abad Faciolince
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HECTOR ABAD FACIOLINCE. The Impossibility of Being a Child
Being a child means more than being under age. The State has a responsibility to ensure that all children have a childhood. Some politicians in power think that the solution to every problem is a hard hand, even if the victims are children. (more…)
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HÉCTOR ABAD FACIOLINCE. Gifts of Quebradona
The Colombian wilderness has been protected from mining by the 50 years civil war with the FARC guerrillas. No investor was prepared to take the risk of its infostructure being blown up and its personnel assassinated. Now that the civil war is over, mining companies are moving in to bribe local communities with false promises to gain popular support. [more] Simply because there are minerals in the ground does not mean they have to be dug up. Many other things have to be taken into account. (more…)
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Héctor Abad Faciolince : Against Submission
I am forever indebted to the Catholic Church and Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo. When I was a happy and irreverent twenty year old student at the Pontifical University, I published an article in which I openly insulted the Holy Father.
“The Meddling Pope”, it was called. I say that I am forever indebted to the Church because at that time, they restricted themselves to expelling me from the Universidad Pontificia Boliviariana (with three other iconoclast friends) when, according to the time honoured Catholic tradition, the correct thing to do would have been to burn us at the stake, make a public example of us, put us on trial for blasphemy, and deliver us over to the secular arm to put us on the rack until we died from the pain. But no, they did me the simple favour of expelling me, and as a result I went to a good university, the University of Antioquia, and ended up travelling to Italy to study literature.
I mention this incident because it illustrates very well the welcome change that has occurred within the Catholic Church and within Catholic countries after so many centuries of evolution. The Protestant Reformation and the smiling Enlightenment philosophers, in my opinion, tamed Catholicism. After the Protestant split there came the century of the Enlightenment. Voltaire and Diderot used the wonderful weapon of laughter to teach the Church (well, not counting the diehards like Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers) the difficult virtue of tolerance. The Church accepted that if religious wars were to be avoided, it would have to put up with other forms of Christian belief, and it would also have to put up with non-believers, satirists, atheists and anyone who makes fun of religion.
Much of Islam is still in the medieval phase of their beliefs. The timing coincides: Mohammed started preaching in 622CE. If we take this number from 2014, we can see that they are still at the year 1392 of their history: they are still living in the time of the Crusades, the fatwas and the jihads. The Renaissance had hardly stuck out its nose, the Americas had not been discovered, and they were still a century away from Luther and three centuries away from Voltaire and Diderot. They are riveted by their beliefs, and they have no qualms about imposing the death penalty for adultery, blasphemy, apostasy and atheism. And its most extreme factions commit barbarities like those that occurred in Paris this week. It is true that using historical transpositions and simple arithmetic is very simplistic. The medieval phenomenon, like the current Islamist one is more complex than a few simple dates. Despite there being a kernel of truth in this generalization it overlooks something very important: while Islamic terrorism is governed by a pre-modern ideology, it uses contemporary weapons that cause a lot of damage: rifles, planes, cars and mobile phones.
The Charlie Hebdo Weekly used (and it will continue using it against fanatics!) the best weapon against violence and fanaticism in the best tradition of the French Enlightenment: making people think by making them laugh. Using caricature and ferocious criticism, they laugh at Jews, Muslims, Catholics, capitalists etc. This publication is not in the least a weapon of the racist and colonial Right, as some ignorant local people think – they sacked an anti-Semite from the editorial staff. It was (and continues to be!) an iconoclast and libertarian publication. For them, the pope, the prophet, Israel and even freedom of expression are not sacred. They subject everything to critical scrutiny, and put it to the supreme test of scorn and mockery.
Charlie Hebdo’s last title page before the attack referred to a political fantasy – a kind of futurist novel – which is being published this week in France: Submission. In it they make fun of its author, Michel Houellebecq, predicting that he will lose his teeth this year, 2015, and what he will do at Ramadan in 2022.These predictions follow on from the catastrophic fantasy of the novel that narrates the nightmare of France governed by the Islamists, where the women are paid not to work, and where university professors have to convert to Islam (a word which in fact means “submission”) or resign. Terrorism teaches us that the time has come to struggle against submission. We cannot submit to its horrific blackmail. All of us, whether Muslims (“muslim” means, submitting to God), or non-believers, have to fight against submission using laughter and reason.
Héctor Abad Faciolince, is a Colombian author and columnist for the Colombian daily, El Espectador. This is his column of 11 January 2015, translated by Kieran Tapsell and published with their permission:
http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/contra-sumision-columna-537248
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Héctor Abad Faciolince: An Idea of Europe
After centuries of war, European unity has been one of the world’s greatest achievements in the second half of the 20th Century. But can it last? The recent European Parliamentary elections have given rise to Euro scepticism and hostility to immigration. It is a testing time for Europe. John Menadue
El Espectador, Colombia, 4 May 2014, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/una-idea-de-europa-columna-490295
I have just been at Berlin’s “House of the Cultures of the World”, as part of a discussion about Europe, and more specifically, about whether some ideas developed in that part of the word can be considered universally valid. One cannot deny that Europe is a special place. To start with, although it is called a continent, it is not even a continent. When we look at a map of the world in real dimensions, and not one designed from the point of view of the European geographers, we can see that Europe is just a small Asian peninsular. It is a corner of the world, squeezed between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and a crossroad in the paths connecting Africa and Asia. This does not detract from Europe, but on the contrary, makes it more extraordinary.
Tiny Europe was affected by all the plagues (which ensured that its peoples became immune from many diseases), and for millennia, it was basically a killing field: wars and invasions from the north, the east and the south. It was also a centre of commerce, and because the wisdom of the Egyptians, the Arabs, the Indians, Chinese, indigenous Americans etc, circulated and settled throughout its territory. The invaders and the invaded left great technical, artistic and scientific knowledge in Europe. Writing, numbers, algebra and Christianity were not European inventions, but it appropriated these ideas to itself.
And although Europe is very small in relation to the world, if we look at the map again, we can see that vast regions speak European languages: throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Obviously, that does not mean that English, French, Portuguese, Dutch or Spanish are better languages than the others. It simply means that those who spoke these Latin or Germanic dialects won more battles and imposed their own languages. They colonized almost the whole world with fire and sword.
Latin America still has the footprints of the Conquest, the rape and genocide of the indigenous Americans that can be seen in our looks and in our blood; and we bear the traces of a European and African business in slaves that lasted for centuries. Europe produced perhaps an involuntary, but real extermination of tens of millions of people from illnesses from which the indigenous people had no immunity. But the colonies also brought with them the seeds of Enlightenment thought, the scientific method and the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. It has always been said that the translation of “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen”, a French idea, was the beginning of our liberation.
After thousands of wars and suffering, Europe appears to have learned a lesson and today is it one of the least uncivilized regions on earth. Europe’s defeats civilized it: Spain lost its pride with the loss of its Armada and the American colonies; France lost its overweening grandeur at Waterloo; and Great Britain’s Empire disappeared into thin air, while Germany learned not to be so arrogant, and not to believe that it was “über alles” when Hitler took it to moral and material ruin. The European Union, the practical disappearance of borders and 70 years without war between the major powers has turned Europe into a reference point for many. For the Ukraine, Turkey, and in part for the Americas. Values like the freedom of the press, of thought, religion, universal education, and rules of hygiene seem almost universally accepted like certain postulates of physics, geometry and mathematics. The beauty of Bach’s music or Velazquez’s painting is almost as unarguable as Pythagoras’s theorem.
There will be elections on 25 May 2014 in Europe, the same day as Colombia’s elections. And the incredible thing is that in this place that seems to be an example in so many ways, a good percentage of the population will vote against a united Europe, and for nationalism, for racism, for closed borders, and for the call to war. A good part of Europe, it seems, does not believe in Europe.
Translated from the Spanish by Kieran Tapsell.
Héctor Abad Faciolince is one of Colombia’s best known authors. His book, El Olvido Que Seremos, about his father, a Professor of Public Health at the University of Antioquia, who was assassinated by the Right wing paramilitaries, became a best seller in Latin America. It has been translated and published under the name, Oblivion: A Memoir. http://www.amazon.com/Oblivion-Memoir-H%C3%A9ctor-Abad/dp/B00D05REJC