by Gouda » Tue Sep 19, 2006 5:43 am
Thanks km, I did not know that. I can just see him typing it out in an old hotel room with a neon sign blinking on and off outside his window, a pack of Camels and a bottle of Jack Daniels on the desk...no, wrong guy, sorry. <br><br>Marcos is an admirer of the (late) leftist Spanish Catalan metaphysical gumshoe writer, Manuel Vasquez Montalban, whose first novel was "I've Killed kennedy" (<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Yo Mate a Kenndy</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->) in which his private eye, Pepe Carvalho, is called by the CIA to murder John F Kennedy. <br><br>***<br><br>This is something I like to read now and then - selected comments from a short interview with Marcos. He touches on ends and means, vanguardism, words, and literature. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS - THE PUNCH CARD AND THE HOURGLASS <br><br>Interview by García Márquez and Roberto Pombo <br><br>New Left Review 9, May–June 2001<br><br>Interviewed by García Márquez and Roberto Pombo just after the EZLN’s entry into Mexico City, Marcos explains the strategy of Zapatista patience and the literary origins of a revolutionary militant. <br>...<br><br>You cannot reconstruct the world or society, nor rebuild national states now in ruins, on the basis of a quarrel over who will impose their hegemony on society. The world in general, and Mexican society in particular, is composed of different kinds of people, and the relations between them have to be founded on respect and tolerance, things which appear in none of the discourses of the politico-military organizations of the sixties and seventies. Reality, as always, presented a bill to the armed national liberation movements of those days, and the cost of settling it has been very high.<br>....<br><br>The EZLN, in renouncing any claim to be a vanguard, is recognizing its real horizon. To believe that we can speak on behalf of those beyond ourselves is political masturbation. In some cases it is not even that, because there is no pleasure in this onanism—at most, that of pamphlets read only by those who produce them.<br>...<br><br>In every town square, we told people: ‘We have not come to lead you, we have not come to tell you what to do, but to ask for your help.’<br>...<br><br>As a struggle between a clock operated by a punch card, which is Fox’s time, and an hourglass, which is ours. The dispute is over whether we bend to the discipline of the factory clock or Fox bends to the slipping of the sand. It will be neither the one nor the other. Both of us need to understand, we and he, that we have to assemble another clock by common agreement, that will time the rhythm of dialogue and finally of peace.<br>...<br><br>There is no table at which to sit in dialogue with the government. We have to construct it. The challenge now is to convince the government that we need to make that table, that it should sit down and that it stands to gain by doing so. And that if it doesn’t, it will lose.<br><br>Dialogue means simply agreeing rules for the dispute between us to shift to another terrain. The economic system is not on the table for discussion. It’s the way we’re going to discuss it that is at issue. This is something Vicente Fox needs to understand. We are not going to become ‘Foxistas’ at that table. What the table has to achieve is to allow us to emerge with dignity, so that neither I nor anyone else has to go back and don all that military paraphernalia again. The challenge before us is to construct not only the table, but also our interlocutor. We need to make a statesman, not a marketing product designed by image consultants, out of him. It won’t be easy. War was easier. But in war much more becomes irremediable. In politics, remedies can always be found.<br>...<br><br>We do not believe that the end justifies the means. Ultimately, we believe that the means are the end. We define our goal by the way we choose the means of struggling for it.<br>...<br><br>One way or another, we became conscious of language—not as a way of communicating, but of constructing something. As if it were a pleasure more than a duty. In the underground, unlike the world of bourgeois intellectuals, the word is not what is most valued. It is relegated to a secondary position. It was when we got to the indigenous communities that language hit us, like a catapult. Then you realize that you lack the words to express many things, and that obliges you to work on language.<br><br>We went out into the world in the same way that we went out into literature. I think this marked us. We didn’t look out at the world through a news-wire but through a novel, an essay or a poem. That made us very different. That was the prism through which my parents wanted me to view the world, as others might choose the prism of the media, or a dark prism to stop you seeing what’s happening.<br>...<br><br>So that when we got into Marx and Engels we were thoroughly spoilt by literature; its irony and humour.<br>...<br><br>Don Quixote is always at my side, and as a rule I carry García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano with me. Don Quixote is the best book of political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the Mexican political system, in its tragic and comic aspects: Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. Better than any political columnist.<br>...<br><br>What we have to relate is the paradox that we are. Why a revolutionary army is not aiming to seize power, why an army doesn’t fight, if that’s its job. All the paradoxes we faced: the way we grew and became strong in a community so far removed from the established culture.<br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR24304.shtml">www.newleftreview.org/NLR24304.shtml</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>