One Life at Risk

(Maria POUMIER, Paris)

Lord Ahmed, a peer of England’s Crown, is now being reproached for having invited Israel Shamir to express himself recently in the House of Lords. This noble Muslim, as the suspicion goes, might no longer be a proper Englishman. Shamir points out that the fatwa unleashed upon him by the Anti-Defamation League is more threatening than that which weighs upon Salmon Rushdie. Here is a good occasion to measure Shamir`s role, the progress of his ideas, and the forces at work protecting him.

In a revolutionary idea’s career, three steps follow each other. At first, detractors deny the idea has any logical merit whatsoever. Then, your enemies paint you as a malevolent monster to be eliminated as soon as possible because you represent a mortal danger to the whole social fabric, and finally your ideas are recognized as the sovereign truth. In this invariable scheme, nature’s dialectic is in motion minus the humane phase where antithesis gives shape to synthesis: someone attempts to put to death the path-opener of the innovative idea, the mediator. All the world’s political police know that the slain prophet instantly rises, grows suddenly into the eternal voice of the people. In order to avoid being identified as the murderers, it is necessary to manipulate the prophet’s own brothers so they might “throw Joseph in the well”, to have the brightest thinker put to death by his own camp. And so, believe they, policemen-politicians, that the people will gobble it up and that, without prophets to look up to, they’ll accept and resign themselves to the absolute reign of policemen.

All political prisoners have experienced, among torturers, that officer so different from the usual jailers, coming in for an interrogation, and, offering sympathy and a cigarette, saying they understand them, that they admire them. At this decisive moment, political prisoners divide in two groups. First, there are those who swallow the lure, and will never tell of this episode when the enemy they fought rescued their life. The second group is made up of those who prefer to play the hero, who’ll perhaps become heroes. They will have so many more battles to fight before they rejoin their dead, that they’ll forget this episode, just a bad moment to get through among so many others, like so many others have experienced.

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A poet, an excellent poet, however took the time to phrase it all for us, and doing so provides the recipe to defeat those who want the revolutionary thinkers condemned by their own brothers. Imprisoned for utterly subversive undertakings, he sustained violent interrogations by a CIA agent. He recalls that, being well impregnated with great Hollywood cinema, he imagined himself on the dream screen, in those circumstances when delirium is the sole compass, with this irony of an actor who knows how to strike all the poses. And through the performer’s modest professionalism, playing his bit parts, he chose to show-off to the eventual camera of posterity, his noble profile. He wasn’t any mightier or more heroic but just by a professional’s twist, a bend, in, say, odd circumstances not exactly foreseen in the original scenario.

This poet, an excellent poet, therefore refused the pact with the devil, and returned to rot in his cell and scratch at the walls with his nails, like prisoners all do. He was condemned to death, but an earthquake caused the prison wall to crumble. He freely stepped away into the street. And as a good poet, he thought to himself: “Hmm. Just like in a novel… He must be a celestial Dumas, he who writes my life! I owe my masters, in turn, a tale.” He then laid on paper, with all exquisite precision, the secret told to him by that officer, the CIA agent. After praising his poems at length, his excellent ideas, his courage and his good-heartedness, the policeman noticed that the poet wouldn’t cave in. The poet would disregard the CIA’s offer of an “honourable career”. Here is what the policeman then said: “Well, so be it! You want to remain among these folks of yours; but we are powerful, and we’ll see to it that you be shot by these folks of yours, because we will give them one thousand clues proving that you are among us, that you are, yes, our agent ”.

Then time passed, and this poet, who naturally was a conspirator, once again took up arms with his comrades. War was lasting endlessly. In his youth he had been a jolly fellow, had stormed all the bars between Moscow and Santiago, leaving behind a steady stream of tears and murderous desires among the loveliest ladies, and read a lot, too. He had his drawbacks then, that some kept record of. In the matter of political reflexion, he had come to the conclusion that his band, the guerrilla he belonged to, armed with the most revolutionary feelings in the world, was also armed by foreign powers, so pleased to make mincemeat, in his poor little miserable country, of revolutionaries and reactionaries. The civil war was expanding without end. They were exhausting themselves. He imagined solutions for his country to stop shredding and shedding blood for the sole profit of foreign weapons merchants, of foreign financers, of foreign secret services so anxious that his poor little country be bled white, cleansed of all its indigenous energy, of its indigenous thinking. Then his comrades, or those who wanted to remain the chiefs, among his comrades, told him: “You speak like an agent of the CIA, you want us to give up our arms.” They set up a military tribunal, and condemned him to the firing squad. His comrades put the visionary poet to death, and his corpse was buried without honours, like the despised body of an abject person, a bought traitor.

The news reached the officer, who had explained to him the secret plan of the CIA. He was satisfied, and the crime was perfect. But the history of peoples relies more on poetry than on the shortsighted views of the string-pullers who, by the way, more often than not in detective stories, end up unmasked. The poet’s works spread like fire, and all have heard the secret conversation, all have understood the manoeuvre, and the commandant of ERP Joaquìn Villalobos, that same one who had the poet executed, excused himself. He has admitted his ‘mistake’. He is now close to the Columbian government, a pack of puppets in Bush’s hands who’d rather have the Columbians kill each other, who finance paramilitary groups (often Israeli) in this faraway land too, yes, to increase the killing, to prevent the peasantry from defending their land and their being, and the life of their country.

Roque Dalton, the visionary poet who made the stones laugh, such was his own joy, such was his ability to make fountains of light spring forth in the darkness (“and his soul was a great fountain”), was a Salvadorian, a combination of good-for-nothing and Saviour. The smallest country in Central America, that bears its name like one bears a destiny, that can save other bigger countries. This year we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Roque Dalton’s death, on May 10th 1975[1]. He has become the national poet, the father of his nation, all is well, and all the country draws its strength from him, including the best among the most conservative, who have understood him [2].

In Palestine, a poet has taken up the torch; he is gathering unto himself reasons to be stricken down. A foreigner, polyglot, cultured, seasoned in verbal, intellectual, political jousting, and frowning upon death, as the military man he once was. One used to find him moving and entertaining, now the Mossad wants his skin. But the Mossad is wise, and knows how to have others do the dirty work. And part of the Left, interested in the administration of official antizionism, who would love above anything else to own complete power, in the aftermath of Bush, wants the immediate death of the poet. “Yes, he has gifts, but he has two names, they say; yes he tells truths, but he favours the good life; yes he’s a hard worker, but he certainly must be working for others! A Christ-worshipper and a Marie-worshipper ! Like a mere inferior papist, a false Jew that’s sure, he’s an extremist antisemistic, he’s a collaborationist! ” As the cacophony inflates, there only remains for his declared enemies the accusation of criminal proximity… “He’s got friends who..” The lack of rational arguments against his highly rational masterpieces appears like an empty hole, a murky bottom showing his gathered enemies, zionists, crypto-zionists, mere jealous, mean minds, calculators lacking faith in political imagination.

Admirers of Israel Adam Shamir, stunned by his tranquil audacity, sometimes ask him how could the Mossad not have had him assassinated already. Obviously, aspirants in the left police establishment are doing their level best to help satisfy this natural wish of those supporting the racist State of Israel. They accomplish low jobs of rampant censorship, preface to an acceptable physical elimination, but haven’t discovered yet for who, exactly, this poet works, and they get lost in conjectures. For want of better theories, as he is hampering their summations, they spray the easy rumor: as long as the Mossad lets him live, he must be part of it.

But Israel Adam Shamir is working for us, having taught us already to recognize the enemy’s weaknesses and in particular its incoherence. Thanks to him we have learnt about its manoeuvres to cower us, and armed with the slave’s science, we know the master is bluffing, that he hasn’t any authority other that the one we used to grant him, and now refuse. In effect, the State of Israel has lost the moral battle. Signs of the meltdown are numerous; let us pick, in the field of ideas, the adherence of Israeli intellectuals to post-zionism; a spare theory that presents itself as an authorized revisionism of definitively discredited Zionism. Post-zionism acknowledges crimes committed by Israel to usurpate sovereignty of the whole of historical Palestine, and renounces to justify them with a privileged religion: it therefore joins together with universal rationality. This doctrinal step-back casts light on the kidnappers of the population of Israel, held hostage: cynics residing in foreign lands, money punchers thinking themselves safe from turmoil, salaried intellectuals. Posturing as Jews, Christians or atheists will not change the matter: Zionism is starting to retreat on the land of Palestine. The international campaign for a boycott of the racist state is progressing. It’s a good sign!

And we are here to let it be known. Here are our weapons: the web-tam-tam, the Arab telephone. Those who still cling to the new wall of shame, to Jewish supremacism, to the comfortable observance of “two weights and two measures”, those who, by conformism, let down those who choose risk and further liberty of reflection won’t be able to have Shamir shot down in darkness.

(Translated from French by L’Omnivore Sobriquet and Roger Lagassé)

[1] The civil war went on until 1992, and killed some 80 000 people. Paramilitary troops killed Bishop Oscar Romero in 1980. It caused a terrible scandal, but the sleeping partners were not discovered. It was not enough for them: in 1986, six Jesuit priests were killed together with their housekeeper, at dawn, inside their dormitory. Among them was the academic and philosopher Ignacio Ellacuria. But only local beasts were accused for that main crime.

[2] Some books by Roque Dalton are available in english : “Clandestine Poems”, 1990; “Small Hours of the Night”, Paperback, 1996; “Miguel Marmol” (biography), 1998; “Roque Dalton Redux”, by Maggie Jaffe and Esther Rodriguez, is now available (Cedar Hill Books).