The famous author died two days ago, I have just learned. He has been mentioned in this space at least three times, most importantly to me because he wrote about the place where I grew up and a friend of my family. He wrote about them at a difficult moment, and was fair in his treatment. That is far more than most people were who spoke of that place at that time, and I have always appreciated it.
He also appeared here when he condemned the Islamic State. In addition to my own writings, Gringo mentioned his work in a series of comments on Communism and Catholicism in Latin America.
The obituary in the first link, above, celebrates him as savagely devoted to the truth, unsentimental and yet capable of great tenderness. This allowed him to think and to say powerful things. He lived and died an honest man, and few indeed can say that.
5 comments:
Interesting connection with Naipaul.His Turn in the South was definitely not the standard view at the time. Neither "Southern Man" nor "Dixie," one might say. When I worked in Trinidad, I read most of his fiction related to the island. His humor impressed me.
From 1972 to 1992, Naipaul wrote a number of articles in the New York Review of Books about Argentina. His first article appeared in 1972:The Corpse at the Iron Gate. This was written four years before the military deposed Isabel Perón and intensified the Dirty War. When Naipaul wrote the article in 1972 the Dirty War- and guerrilla action in Argentina- was just simmering . By 1976 the Dirty War, when Isabel Perón was deposed, the Dirty War was in full boil. What Naipaul wrote in 1972 was prescient.
These lawyers had been represented to me as a group working for “civil rights.” They were young, stylishly dressed, and they were meeting that morning to draft a petition against torture. The top-floor flat was scruffy and bare; visitors were scrutinized through the peep-hole; everybody whispered; and there was a lot of cigarette smoke. Intrigue, danger. But one of the lawyers was diverted by my invitation to lunch, and at lunch—he was a hearty and expensive eater—he made it clear that the torture they were protesting against wasn’t to be confused with the torture in Perón’s time.
He said: “When justice is the justice of the people men sometimes commit excesses. But in the final analysis the important thing is that justice should be done in the name of the people.” ……
“There are no internal enemies,” the trade union leader said, with a smile. But at the same time he thought that torture would continue in Argentina. “A world without torture is an ideal world.” And there was torture and torture. “Depende de quién sea torturado. It depends on who is tortured. An evildoer, that’s all right. But a man who’s trying to save the country—that’s something else.
The leftists that Naipaul interviewed had a very plastic attitude towards torture: Depende de quién sea torturado. (It depends on who is being tortured.) According to those two leftists Naipaul interviewed, torture was good if our guys do it, bad if the police do it against us. Which doesn’t sound very different from the military gorilas’ point of view. Sounds to me as if a lot of the guerrillas and guerilla supporters were brothers under the skin to the right wing torturing military gorilas.
Naipaul’s prescient article also leads one to make a different conclusion about the Dirty War, about the the 1970s- that low down dirty decade in Argentina’s history.There was a madness that pervaded the military that decade- torturing and killing people for no better reason than being in a detainee’s address book. From Naipaul’s article, I conclude that madness affected not just the military, but a wide swath of Argentine society. For example, you could find torture advocates both among the “right” and the “left.”
[At the same time, Naipaul made some comments about Argentina which were utter nonsense- such as claiming that Argentine women were uneducated. As long as Naipaul let his interviewees talk, and drew conclusions from what they said, he did fine. When he made sweeping generalizations not backed by conversations, he often fell flat on his feet.]
That previous comment was mine.
Naipaul uncovered a further example of lunacy,or at least of irrational thinking, in an aristocrat-born Third World Peronista Priest Naipaul met.
“But the man with me was uneasy. He said we should at least wait and tell the father I wasn’t an American. We did so. And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the liberation of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on consumer society…….
He said Peronism wasn’t concerned with economic growth; they rejected the consumer society, But hadn’t he just been complaining about unemployment in the interior, the result of government folly, that was sending two Indians into his shantytown for every one that left? He wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano;some people were concerned only with GNP.”
A priest who sees “liberation of the human spirit” in totalitarian regimes- that is sheer madness. Nor is his view of economics- eschewing economic growth while protesting poverty- any more rational.
In a New York Review article two decades later, Naipaul converses with a former leftist who had been one of this particular Third World Peronista Priest’s followers. The priest turns out to be Father Mujica, who became a guerrilla and was later killed in a clash with police. It turns out that this muddle-headed thinking had consequences, as it led the priest to become first a fan of totalitarianism, and then a guerrilla, and later a dead guerilla.
The madness in Argentina in the 1970s, that low-down and dirty decade in the country, was by no means confined to the military. It was a society-wide breakdown, in many ways.
(Family friends were friends with another guerilla priest, the Colombian Camilo Torres. He was also of aristocratic origin and also met a similar fate.]
I am not very observant, as I didn't notice your mentioning me before I posted my comments.
Heh. :) Well, I did.
Honesty is indeed rare. Especially with ourselves.
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