Claude Lanzman’s Shoah

 
    Ontario’s PBS television showed Claude Lanzman's 9-hour film of the holocaust in four episodes on successive nights.  Interleaved with each episode, were excerpts from a lengthy interview with the director. As often happens on these occasions, the interviewer, a young man with a clear gaze and earnest demeanor, was too overawed and reverent to ask any penetrating questions. After all, Lanzman had spent 11 years of his life on this film, imbibing the most unimaginable horrors of human suffering. He had the mark upon him of a man who, like Jacob, had wrestled with God.  That kind of daring and dedication can make a person unapproachable.
    Towards the end of this interview, however, on the final evening, a question popped up that carried more than passing interest, though it came innocently enough. What, inquired the interviewer, had Lanzman learned from making Shoah?
    Lanzman frowned. What he was supposed to say? A long pause ensued - an eternity in the febrile universe of television. Then he mumbled simply: "Rien". Nothing. He had learned nothing at all. He made an attempt to follow up, murmuring something about the human condition. His words were barely coherent. "I'm not," he confessed, "in very good shape." Finally, the interviewer moved onto something less conspicuously difficult. There were a few obsequious phrases, some further mumblings, and the interview was at an end.
    Whether or not Lanzman truly learned nothing is a matter for his own conscience. We can’t see into his mind. What seems certain, though, is that he learned very little. For though his protagonists were not actors but authentic survivors of what is certainly the greatest documented crime in human history, Lanzman seemed to have scant interest in the figures who people his film and still less recollection of what the film shows. His stated aim was faithfully to set down the experience of those who lived through the Holocaust. His subterranean agenda, one that erupts through the surface of formal documentary, was to accuse and even, in a refined fashion, to exact revenge.  Hence why his treatment of the Polish peasants seems so savage. For he was not filming people, in the accepted sense, but symbols; symbols of Jewish suffering and grace on the one hand, and of gentile indifference, cruelty, and avarice on the other. He mocks the peasants for living in houses formerly owned by Jews. In a village scene, apparently filmed near Treblinka, Lanzman asks the occupants of one such house, an elderly couple, if they remembered the name of the Jewish family that lived there before the War. They hesitate for a moment. Forty years have passed.
    "You see," Lanzman cries during the post-film interview, "They couldn't even remember the family in whose house they were living."
    My own recollection of the scene was different. I thought that the old woman had indeed recalled the name. I bought a copy of the published script and checked the text. I was right. She remembered well. But Lanzman was not all that interested in truths that failed to connect with his purpose. For if those Polish peasants were to acquire any recognisable humanity their symbolic value would be much reduced. He therefore portrayed them as stupid, thoughtless, evil beneficiaries of the Jewish tragedy; creatures who were, at best, less than totally human. So it was that the Nazis dehumanised their victims, those who perished at Treblinka and Auschwitz, Chelmno, Sobibor, Madjanek, Mauthausen, and those survivors whose fragile claim to existence had been a number tattooed on a patch of skin. If you wish to destroy your enemies,  rid them first of their humanity.
    The urge to cast blame is understandable; but it is probably at the root of our most bestial instincts. Christians have been taught for 2000 years to despise Jews because of the idea that "the Jews killed Jesus Christ". Historians have often interpreted this piece of historical silliness - fostered in times past by "Christian" Churches - as the origin of anti-semitism in the western world.  In fact, anti-semitism long predates the birth of Christianity; it is to be found in Egyptian and Greek writings of the pre-Christian era. But Christian anti-semitism, though it may have drawn on more ancient foundations, emerged in its modern form from the theological polemics of Judaic sectarian literature - of which the gospels are descendants. The Christian New Testament is shot through with dark accusations and curses directed at rival sects, of which the Sadducees and the Pharisees - themselves implacable theological enemies - are the most frequent targets. In the history of "Christian" anti-semitism, there is no greater irony than that one of its mosts significant sources - like Christianity itself - is Jewish.
    It seems hardly worth repeating that the Jews did not kill Jesus Christ, any more than the Romans killed Julius Caesar, or the "Americans" killed Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Most Jews who were alive at the time of Jesus of Nazareth probably had no knowledge of his existence. The idea that they were collectively responsible for his death could not possibly stand up to serious historical scrutiny.  Nevertheless, anti-semitism, and the seemingly endless cycle of pogroms that have savaged the Jews of the diaspora, and that culminated in the Holocaust itself is, at least partially, based on this palpably false idea;  an idea nurtured in the tranquil confines of cloistered seminaries and in the cells of learned monks, and given voice from the pulpits of cathedrals and churches.
    A second idea, equally obsessive and perhaps even more offensive and damaging, has provided a fitting accompaniment. It is to be found in the Gospel According to St Matthew and occurs when, after Pontius Pilate washes his hands of Jesus' fate, the people exclaim: "His blood be upon us and on our children."  Responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus thus lies on Jewish heads.  In the rigourous casuistry of doctrinaire Christian theology, this simple but deadly concept turned every Jew into a common criminal - theoretically until the end of time. So it is that these twin prejudices have furnished a platform on which anyone who so wished could build a philosophy of hatred towards the Jews.
    Isaiah Berlin, paraphrasing the German poet Heine, has pointed out that ideas, unleashed upon fertile ground, can destroy a civilisation. Under the Nazi regime, the densely-layered Jewish societies of Eastern Europe were wiped out with the aid of ideas that, for all their repellent madness when reviewed in the cold light of Nuremberg, nevertheless held sway over the multitudes of men and women who participated, either actively or by their silence, in the mass slaughter of innocent Jews and others the regime didn’t like.
    By another unpleasant irony, Claude Lanzman's lens swings in the reverse direction and points accusingly wherever a gentile can be caught in focus. He’s in good company. A number of popular Jewish writers have sought relief from their anguish by charging the non-Jewish world in general with a common, if unspecific, criminal responsibility for the Holocaust. Even Martin Gilbert, in his agonising history of that period, can’t resist an unsavoury suggestion that the Holocaust "depended upon collaborators from countries far beyond the German border and depended, most of all........upon the indifference of bystanders in every land." Yet his own painstakingly gathered evidence shows that it was disbelief as much as indifference that caused the lack of response from elsewhere. As late as 1944, a Hungarian Jew, Fulop Freudiger, wrote as follows: "I do not believe that we shall suffer the same fate that befell Polish Jews. We shall have to give up our wealth, we must be prepared for many struggles and deprivations, but I am not worried for our lives." No one, not even Jews of Eastern Europe, thought it possible that any "civilised" people could engage in a program of mass racial extermination. New York's wartime Jewish community must have felt much the same way judging by its quiescence, its lack of publicly-voiced outrage at the news that seeped through from Europe. The strength of Nazi criminality lay in its impossibility. Human beings could not, cannot behave in that way.
    There is a sense in which we are indeed all guilty. However much the Nazi atrocities may repel us, they were committed by people; the same people who write poetry and music, who can speak to us in language of sumptuous beauty; the same people as we ourselves are. Somehow, along the road of human development, we reached a fork and were led in a direction of unspeakable criminality, of which the Holocaust is simply a terrible example. We have all been forced along that road; and the experience has left an indelible stain on our skin.  No serious definition of what it means to be human can avoid that stain. Our free will, of which we are so proud, has been shown to be a freedom to dehumanize and even to butcher people of whom we disapprove. Nazis made one such hell; but they are not alone. Wherever the diseases of blind prejudice, xenophobia, or just petty racial arrogance lead us to see other people as essentially different from ourselves, inferior, less intelligent, alien, evil perhaps and threatening, then we offer ourselves a licence to treat them as disposable items, creatures to be coerced or, if necessary, extinguished. It would be easy and comfortable to blame circumstances, or the evil play of chance, for the violence of our collective history. But it is not life or circumstances that are evil, only humans who make them so. And we will continue to do so as long as we believe that we alone are righteous in the sight of God; as long as we visit hatred and contempt upon the children of others; as long as we cannot see that all of us are Nazis just as much as we are Jews.
    Lanzman has not found this truth, and that is why he learned nothing from his years of filming and study. But for humanity it may be the only truth that really matters.

How things are done and not done

 1

Dennis looked like an aging minor league footballer: six feet, dark-eyed, black moustache flecked with grey, a mop of hair to match, and a taste for whisky and women younger than himself. Gregarious, trusting, full of robust energy, he pounded life with a heavy stick and life paid him back with interest. Women loved him and left him, business deals fell through, money that flowed into his hands leaked like water through his fingers. His longed-for payload was ever just round the corner, the next contract, the next cheque, the next subsidy.
    Togo was the strangest payload of all.  He came to see me in Toronto, bringing with him an American friend whom he introduced as Roger Falsetta. Roger turned out to  be vice-president of a real estate development company with the improbable name of Hunter Raven Corporation.
    “We’re going to develop and build the first privately-operated free zone south of the Sahara,” Dennis announced.
    I asked who would be paying for the work.
    “USAID[1] is financing the up-front costs, preliniary studies and so on.” Dennis said, “Then it’s up to us. Or rather, up to Roger.”
    Roger nodded.
    “Hunter Raven is a big noise in the States,” Dennis said.
    My job was to put a team together to study alternative sites for an industrial park, to examine the human and physical infrastructure, and to estimate the start-up costs.
    I was sceptical. “USAID is going to pay us to so that?”
    “Hunter Raven is a US company,” said Roger.
    “Yeah. But Dennis and I are Canadian.”
    “They don’t care about that,” Dennis said.
    We flew to Washington for a meeting with William “call me Bill” Weinstein, a middle-ranking USAID official. His office, sequestered in the stoney labyrinth of the US State Department, was tiny. Folders, reports and loose papers were piled on the desk, wedged on shelves over books and file boxes, stacked on the floor. Dennis, Roger and I sat on upright chairs in a corridor between desk and twin filing cabinets, while Weinstein’s assistant, introduced simply as Melanie, occupied a stool in the doorway.   Weinstein apologised for the lack of space. He wore a permanent frown and spoke with clipped upstate authority. Melanie took notes.
    I guess you fellas need to know about the financial arrangments,” Weinstein said.
    “You bet,” Roger answered.
    I have always gaped - figuratively - at the unabashed pleasure Americans take at the propect of money. Roger, I figured,  wasn’t going to weep tears for the poor of Togo. Several hundred grand were on offer and he needed them for his company bonus. After a brief discussion, Weinstein assented to the release of fifty percent of the funds up front “so that you boys can get going”, then he left it to his assistant to deal with what he called the details..
    Melanie took up the reins. “We’re glad to have Canadian participants in this important project. But we think maybe the Canadian government could make a financial contribution. We’ve already invested upwars of a couple of million bucks on the Togo project.”
     “We thought USAID…” Dennis began, but I stopped him.
    “CIDA[2] will play ball, I promised.
    Before leaving Washington, we dropped in on the World Bank to ask if there was funding for Togo.  An official told us that several million dollars had been set aside for the country several years before, but had remained unspent. If we could come up with something, they would take a look at it.
    Back in Canada, Dennis and I did the rounds in Ottowa and Hull, the twin city hosts of the federal government. An expensive dinner with the Togolese ambassador yielded a letter of approval signed on behalf of General Eyadéma, the country’s president.
    “Do you know anything about him,” I asked Dennis afterwards.
    “He’s a bad boy.”
    “?”
    “Dicatator. He feeds enemies to his pet crocodiles.”
    “Sounds great.”

    CIDA’s officials were sceptical. They didn’t fund speculative projects, they didn’t have a program in Togo, it wasn’t a Canadian priority and so on. I wrote a proposal replete with maps, diagrams and imaginative certainties. Togo would benefit hugely from the project; thousands of jobs would be created, lives would be transformed, women would benefti more than men (a requirement of the time). CIDA remained obdurate. Weeks went by. I addresed each of CIDA’s concerns - or so I thought - one by one; to no effect. USAID expressed anxiety. Why wouldn’t Canada cooperate? Roger grumbled; Dennis reassured him. A CIDA official told me sotto voce that nothing could be done without the approval of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He arranged for us to meet with the Assistant Deputy Minister for Africa - a Monsieur Jean-Luc Lemiel.
    In M. Lemiel’s office, more spacious by far than Bill Weinstein’s in Washington, Dennis and I laid out our case. M. Lemiel listened in silence. When we had finished, he asked why no Quebecers were involved. “Togo belongs to La Francophonie[3].As far as we’re concerened it belongs to Quebec. If you put the project in the hands of a Quebec firm, there’ll be no problem with finance.”
    “What about our role,” Dennis asked.
    “You can be sub-contractors. Or maybe we’ll give you a commission for bringing in the business.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    Dennis had a short fuse, but he granted me first charge. “You know what you can do with your Quebec company,”  I said. That was as far as I got before Dennis erupted.
    “You can go fuck,” he said. “We’ll do it without you.”

    Outside, in the icy gloom of an Ottawa late afternoon, our anger subsided giving way to awareness that we had drawn a blank. We shared a melancholy drink on the flight back to Toronto, parting on arrival in the certain knowledge that our Togo dream was over.
    Next day I telephoned Melanie with the news.
    “That’s too bad,”: she said.”Is there nothing we can do?”
    “I guess not.”
    “Well okay.” After a moment of silence she added, “Would it help if I contacted someone in the Canadian govenment?”
    I never claimed to know much about the workings of bureaucracy but experience had taught me that Canadian officials harbour a suspicion that their neighbours across the border might be their superiors in knowledge and expertise. They will seldom admit to this directly. Their prejudice lies buried in a feeling that Canada is a small place - small not in the geography of its landscape but in its timid sense of identity.
    Melanie, composed, articulate, the well-turned-out product of a confident nation, had no such doubts. Unlike Bill Weinstein, she didn’t have an office of her own, just a work station, boarded on three sides by accoustic panels, in a room shared with a dozen others. Next week, though, she could be Weinstein’s boss. In the US, where you started said little about where you would end up. She asked whom to call. I suggested the vice-president of CIDA’s Africa Division.
    Next day Melanie called me back. “I spoke to that vice-presient you told me about. He asked how much you needed. I told him around three hundred thousand to make a start.”
    “What did he say?|
    “He said that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d see to it.”
    “You sure?”
    “Sure I’m sure. He said it sounded like a real worth-while project. Only thing that puzzles me is why I had to call him in the first place.”
    “You mean why couldn’t we deal with it?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “They gave us the run-around.”
    “Beats me how you guys do things up there in Canada.”

2

    Blink as you pass over a map of Africa and you could miss the Republic of Togo. Wedged like a stub of pencil between Ghana and Benin, it occupies a sliver of the West African coast known in nineteenth-century Europe as the white man’s grave.  Armed with vaccinations and anti-malarial prophylactics, Europeans fare better now, though locals are not necessarily so lucky. A century ago nobody thought to inquire about the longevity of the native population. Darwinian principles were assumed to prevail: adaptation worked, the people of West Africa lasted as long as they should. By the last decade of the twentieth century[4], life expectancy among the Togolese hovered around fifty years which was twenty-five fewer than your average Australian, Canadian or Western European. Ten per cent of youngsters died before the age of five. In the capital, malarial moquitos bred in fetid lagoons. Suffocating heat sapped energy and stifled movement. Poverty provided the coup de grâce.
    General Gnassingbé Eyadéma seized power in a military coup in 1967 and ruled until his death in 2005 when his son Faure Gnassingbé took over. The General imported lions from southern Africa to patrol the grounds of his mansion around which he constructed a moat to guard against the creatures wandering into the family home in search of a meal. Elsewhere, those who patrolled in greatest numbers were the unemployed and impoverished, testimony to the great leader’s success in maintaining Togo as one of the world’s poorest countries.
    Lomé, the capital city, stands  hard by the Ghanaian border and looks out across sand and palm trees to the Atlantic. Several elegant hotels line the shore built originally in the 1970s to accommodate delegates to the international conference that produced the first Lomé Convention.[5] By 1992, they catered mainly to airline staff, diplomats and the occasional aid official. Most travellers to Lomé were from neighbouring countries, traders mainly in search of cheap imports or contraband. Lomé’s fine white sands and sparkling sunlight might have attracted vacationers from further afield were it not for the absence of plumbing in large parts of the capital, one effect of which was that the beaches served as a communal washroom where people defecated beneath the palms and washed in the sea. An excremental odour hovered over the shoreline.
    As soon as I stepped outside on my first morning in Lomé, I realised tthat I had forgotten to bring a hat. Exposure to aggressive equatorial sunlight may be a trivial matter to those blessed with a dark compexion and a protective mop of hair, but I had neither. For a bald Anglo-Saxon to go abroad hatless in such a climate would be to confirm Noel Coward’s assessment of English madness. It would also be dangerous, a guarantee of sunburn, dehydration and maybe something worse.
    Retreating back to the hotel lobby, I asked the receptionist where I could buy a hat. She looked at me as if I had already spent too long in the sun.
    “Well,” she said after a pause,”there won’t be a store.You could try the market. They sell everything there. It’s the biggest in West Africa.” She ordered a taxi and told the driver to take me to the Grand Marché.
    “You can get lost in the market,” she said. “It’s special.”
    On the way I asked the driver if he knew of a stall that sold hats.
    “We don’t wear hats in Lomé, sir,” he said. “But someone will be selling them. There’s nothing you can’t buy in the market.”
    “Any idea which way I should walk?”
    “Every way is good,”
    I paid him in US dollars at his request, shook his hand, and plunged into the fray.
    Stalls lined the streets in all directions. One stretch specialised in fruits and vegetables - mounds of ruby tomatoes, gnarled red peppers, dusty cassavas, earth-brown yams, purple aubergines, lychees and spotted bananas, bundles of green leaves, guavas, passion fruit, heap upon heap of other fruits I had never seen before with names in Evhé and Kabiyé that I elicited but - to the delight of the traders - couldn’t pronounce. There were sections for meat, for poultry, for fish, for dry goods. Along some tributaries importers were selling toothpaste and batteries from China, cameras from Russia, radios from Korea, leather sandals and bags from Bangladesh and India. How could a little country like Togo sustain a market of this immense size? Later I learned that every smuggler in West Africa traded in the Lomé market, and that goods acquired there supplied markets in Lagos, Accra and Abidjan.
    Through street after street I wandered, turning right and left at random until I no longer retained any sense of where I was. A near impenetrable thicket of shoppers flowed back and forth, making progress slow and location uncertain. From time to time I asked stall holders if they knew where I could buy a hat. Most shook their heads. A few gave me directions in a local dialect of French I found hard to understand. Heat from the sun bored into my head and made me dizzy, though I remained aware of the beauty of the people around me, the men lean and muscular, the women slim, fine-featured, arrayed in particoloured African robes like arrays of flowers.
    An hour of wondering brought me at last to a stall with headgear. On display were piles of greyish peaked caps, all of them sweat-stained and dirty. I picked up one and looked inside the rim. Still legible through an overlay of grime was a lable that read in German “Made in Germany”. I examined several others; all were in like condition. They must have been standard German army issue from the early twentieth century. Until the First World War, the Kingdom of Togoland had been a German colony.[6] More than seventy years had passed since the wearers had departed, perhaps to die in Europe on the Western Front.
    “Do you have any new hats,” I asked the merchant, a grizzled man with white hair and a face creased like old parchment.
    “Désolé monsieur. Mais peut-être…un moment…”
    From beneath the display table he produced a half-dozen, wide-brimmed straw hats woven from coarse reeds.
    “These are for farmers, monsieur. For the land. Not suitable for town.”
    I took one from him and placed in on my head. It felt rough and unyielding, but it fitted.
    “Mil francs,” the merchant said. I sensed by his tone that he expected me to bargain him down to maybe half that amount. Gratitude won out. I would have paid him several times that sum with pleasure.
    While I fished for a banknote, he held up a mirror - and I froze. The creature that stared back at me looked like the figment of a nightmare: blotchy, pale skin, bloodshot eyes, cheeks swollen by a Western diet of flour and fat; the irredeemable ugliness of a colonial factotum. It was the face of an alien, an unsavoury intruder among children of the gods. For an hour I had wandered alone, part of the throng, part of Africa, subconsciously assuming that I resembled those among whom I walked - lean, smooth-skinned, black.  Nothing in anyone’s reaction gave cause for supposing myself to be any different from them. Eyes that looked into mine reflected no more than awareness of our common heritage. Only the mirror told me who I was and what I might represent in the trampled history of a race that still occupied, in a sclerotic corner of Euro-American culture, an inferior place on the scale of human value. I turned away from the mirror, paid the merchant for the hat and moved on, grateful that no one was paying attention to the sweaty, pink stranger in their midst.
    While searching for a way out f the market, I emerged  onto a square occupied by a large warhouse. Its double doors were wide open, so I peered inside. The interior consisted of aisles lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with roles of cloth. No one was in attendance. Entering the nearest aisle I pulled out one of the rolls - a cotton-polyester blend patterned in the intricate colours and design of West African batik. Printed along the edge were the words “Made in the Netherlands”. I withdrew a second roll; once again the colours and design were West African and the manufacture Dutch. Before climbing the stairs, I checked another half dozen rolls all with the same result. The second floor proved identical to the first and with similar merchandise. Dutch manufacturers seemed to have taken possession of the industry.
    On my way out, a man in dungarees stopped me. I apologised for intruding and asked if there were any cloths made in Togo or elsewhere in Africa.
    “In here everything comes from Netherlands,” he said.
    “How come?”
    “Cheaper to make over there.”
    I thought the warehouse overstocked for the needs of so small a nation.
    “We supply many countries - Ghana, Benin, Nigeria. Traders come form all over,”  the man told me. “Here the taxes are low and nobody asks how to pass things over the border.”
    “The Dutch own this warehouse,” I asked.
    “No monsieur. The Nana-Benz own the Togo cloth business.”
    “Nana-Benz?”
    “Rich ladies. We call them Nana-Benz because they go round in Mercedes-Benz cars. Very clever ladies the Nana-Benz. It’s we men who are not so smart. We do the work but the women are the bosses. We talk big monsieur, but in the end we have to do what the ladies say.”
    “What about the Dutch?”
    “Nana-Benz visit them every year and always come back smiling. Everybody knows the Nan-Benz don’t smile easy. But the Dutch make them smile.”
    “They’re clever.”
    “I think so monsieur.”
    He glanced at my hat. “May I ask you a question?”
    I nodded.
    “Your hat. Where…?”
    “In the market.”
    “It’s a Togolese hat. From the countryside. You seldom see them in town.”
    “Wasn’t easy to find. I had to search for it. At least it’s made in Togo.”
    “Yes monsieur. It’s almost a miracle to find something made here. We used to make many things. Not any more. Now we just make poverty.” 

3

    A middle-aged, bull-necked American - John Morgan - met us at our hotel. We had been told to expect him.
    Over a drink at the pool side, Morgan told us  how he came to be in Togo. He had been  running a steel plant in Panama when the Togolese authorities invited him to revive the country’s moribund steelworks. “I named my price and then doubled it when they blinked. That’s the way to deal with Africans.” He winked at Roger whom he had spotted as a fellow American, then glanced at each of the rest of us in turn. In addition to Dennis, Roger and myself, our team included Manuel, a doctor, who would examine the health situation in Togo, and Mark, an ecologist.
    None of us laughed.
    “You Canadians should lighten up a little,” Morgan said.
    Next morning, he had us chauffeur-driven to the US embassy where the ambassador informed us that our activities in Togo would enjoy his support so long as we made sure to pass everything through Mr Morgan. He was the most important business executive in the country.
    “Who is Morgan,” I wondered aloud afterwards.
    “CIA. That’s my take,” Roger said.

4

    Work began in earnest. There were meetings with governmetn officials, visits to potential sites for the free zone, interviews with owners of the few - the very few - companies with manufacturing capability. Most of the latter were cottage industries employing a handful of people in plants equipped with machinery old enough to pass elsewhere as antique. Best of these, a soap manufacturer, was in the hands of a businessman from India who confessed that he might with advantage have chosen a more dynamic country in which to spend his working life.
    Largest enterprise was the steeworks - John Mogan’s operation. A taxi dropped me outside the main gates. I had pictured it as humming with American-style energy and purpose, but what struck me at once was that nothing seemed to be going on. No trucks arrived or left, no noise came from the vast yard beyond the fence, no workers moved back and forth. I had visited steelworks before. They were noisy, bustling places. Not so here. Lomé’s version seemed encased in the tranquillity of a village library.
    I rang the bell at the sidegate and, after an interrogation from the guard, gained admission. Monsieur Alfonse Turbot, the company accountant, received me in his site office. I expressed disappointment that the boss was unavailable since I had taken care to make an appointment.
    “Mr Morgan seldom comes here,” my host said. “He has many other businesses.
    M. Turbot hailed from Belgium. I wondered how he had ended up in Togo. He told me he had answered a newspaper advertisement and the salary was more than satisfactory. I said the plant didn’t look very busy. M. Turbot agreed that this was so but that appearances were deceptive. Business was more than satisfactory.
    What did M. Turbot think of the proposed industrial free zone?
    He had no opinion on the subject. I would have to ask Mr Morgan.

5

        On Sunday, a day of rest in Lomé as in most places where Christians have ruled, Mark and I visited the fetish market about which we had heard enough to arouse our curiosity.[7] It stood on a patch of land in a nondescript suburb. About thirty stalls faced each other in an untidy elipse, each with its own collection of dried birds, reptiles and mammal. In one stall were serried ranks of bats; in another a jumble of chameleons; two held rows of monkey skulls; one specialized in animals from elsewhere in Africa: gorillas, antelopes, a solitary lion; several were stocked with lizards and snakeskins. There were collections of horns and jaw bones, mounds of small birds, mice and rats. Pelts arranged by size and species hung from poles on uprights like washing on a line. In one stall alone we counted 218 mammals, 204 birds, 21 reptiles, 79 amphibians and 77 snail shells. A neighbouring stall displayed heap upon heap of hides, crustaceans and dried fish.
    I wondered what it all meant.
    “Magic,” Mark said. “Pathways  to the spirit world. Animals have sacred properties. They cure sicknesses, protect from harm, bring luck upon oneself and evil on one’s enemy.”
    “You mean they work?”
     “Possibly. If you truly believe in them. The US president believes God fights on America’s side. It’s really no different.”
    The Gulf War of 1991 had erupted just before our departure from Canada. Flying over the Sahara we had crossed the flight paths of a B52 bomber on its way to Iraq. America seemed routinely to be at war somewhere, if not directly then through proxies, and always with God’s blessing.
    We had paused beside a row of skulls one of which Mark examined and identified as hyena. The stallholder approached anticipating a sale.“Pour vous dix mil. C’est bon marché.”
    “Merci mon ami. Pas aujourd’hui.” Mark returned the skull to its place.
    “People don’t understand each other,” he said as we moved on. “We can no longer imagine how anyone could have faith in a fetish. The Evhé and Kabiye people of Togo probably can’t imagine how anyone could live in a world like ours - so devoid of spirituality.”
    “Some in the West still believe in God.”
    “Yes; we shunt off the dimension of spirit to a single being. Here everything is spiritual, a fish, a chameleon, a tree. Africa lives and communes with the earth and everything in it. We, on the other hand, live outside the world and prey on it for what we need.”

    6

    Morgan gave a dinner party in the garden of a restaurant he had hired for the purpose. A single table stretched the length of an immaculate lawn. Servants in white livery attended with military precision. Flaming torches on poles bathed us in a warm flickering light. Morgan sat at the head, Julia his young English girlfrend on his left, Togo’s Minister of Industry on his right. Next came half a dozen Togolese trade officials with Roger, the lone Westerner among them, and then the Canadians. At the far end sat a group of clean-cut Americans to whom we weren’t introduced.
    Proceedings began stiffly. The Togolese were ill at ease, I sensed they didn’t much like Morgan and that he, in turn,  considered their presence tiresome but necessary. They spoke no English while Morgan made no attempt to speak French. Fueled with several glasses of wine, the host spoke volubly while his Togolese guests ate sparingly, drank iced water and said little. I was seated next to Madame Lenôtre, a trade official.  Her bright primrose dress, decolleté almost to the point of indiscretion, drew the eye to what it barely concealed, une gorge superbe as the the old French masters would have noted. The minister, seated obliquely on the other side of the table, would cast his eyes on her from time to time. She drew other glances too, snatched fleetingly like shoppers seized by an urge to steal what they lack means to possess. I tried to engage Madame Lenôtre in conversation but she responded solely with monosyllables. Mostly she remained silend, dignified, immune to the shiftly, prurient hommage of countrymen and strangers alike.
    Towards the end of the meal, Morgan proposed a toast to the future of what he decribed as “this great little country”. Dutifully we raised our glasses and murmured “Togo” while the Togolese sat unmoved and, I sensed, sceptical. Five minutes later, after the briefest of courtesies, the minister took his leave followed at once by his entourage.
    As she stood up, Madame Lenôte turned to me for the first time and shook my hand.
    “Mon mari m’attend.”
    “Ah oui, bien súr. Bon soir madame.”
    “Now we can relax,” Morgan told us when he returned to the table after seeing off his Togolese guests. He called for more wine. “We gotta enjoy life. That’s why I’m in this business. I’ll tell you all a secret. I’m making more money here than anyone else round this table. That’s not a boast. It’s a fact.” He stood up again, swaying slightly. “You’re all here because I want you here. don’t forget that.” He raised his wine glass and signaled to a a waiter who hurried to his side with a bottle.
    Unsteady on his feet, Morgan swayed as his glass was being replenished. Despite the waiter’s dexterity, several drops of the precious liquid dripped onto the tablecloth.
    “Idiot,” Morgan said
    The waiter darted out of Morgan’s visual range.
    “Nobody round here knows how to do anything. Biggest problem we have. Some folk can’t be trained.”
    Julia, smiling, put a hand on Morgan’s arm  and guided him back into his chair.
Pale with short blond hair, ice-blue eyes and the clipped accent of the English upper class, she seemed to have emerged intact from the previous century when English roses were shipped off to the colonies as prospective brides of colonial officers.
    “I think we’d do better to shoot them all, take over the place and run it ourselves,” she said.
    Her remark signaled the end of the meal. Taxis were summoned to take the Americans and most of our team away leaving Dennis and myself obliged by courtesy to accept Morgan’s offer of a lift to our hotel in his car. On the way, he changed his mind about our immediate destination and instead ordered his driver to take us for a nightcap. We came to a halt in front of a tw-storey wooden structure. Morgan led the way up a flight of stairs into a room furnished with a dozen tables and, at the far end, a bar behind which a bartender was polishing glasses. He greeted Morgan and Julia politely but without obvious pleasure.
    “Whisky all round,” Morgan ordered, adding as an afterthought, “that okay with you guys?”
    Julia wanted a gin and tonic.
    “What is it with English women,” Morgan said. He looked appreciatively at Julia who was wearing a white dress wih a dangerous slit along the length of one leg. He downed his whisky in one gulp and ordered another.
    “You know something?”
    He fixed Dennis and I with a stare of melodramatic malevolence.
    “You know something,” he repeated, slurring his worlds, “Your guys know nothing. Out here you’re just a couple of kids.
    Silence. Dennis and I exchanged glances. Julia stared at the floor.
    “If I wanted, I could take you two outside and waste you right now. You’d never be seen again. Nobody here gives a shit. You got that? So don’t mess with me.”
    “He gets like this when he’s had too much to drink,” Julia said.
    Morgan banged his fist on the bar. “You stay out of this goddamit.”
    Julia answered something but we didn’t stay to hear. Tumbling downstairs, we hurried past Morgan’s car where the driver sat waiting for his boss, and pressed on through the dark, tropical night.  We halted once to check for any sound or sign that Morgan might be in pursuit, He wasn’t. It took us more than an hour to thread our way through Lomé’s unlit streets to our hotel.
    “Who the hell is he,” I asked Dennis as we parted for the night.
    “The ugly American?”
    “Scenes like that only happen in moves, right?”
    Dennis grinned, “Also in Togo.”

7

    Morgan called to apologise for his behaviour of the previous evening and to invite the team to his home for what he described as a quiet drink. We sat in his living room on deep-piled sofas round a massive, rough-hewn mahogany table. An upright  piano stood against a wall at the far end of the room.
    “My profit doesn’t come only from steel, “Morgan informed us, “We run a shipping service along the coast - Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast. Sometimes further down. Julia manages the operation.”
    “Not an easy job,” Julia said.  “The crews are all halfwits, Even the captains are hopelesss. Dishonest too. If you ask me Africa would be better off without Africans.”
    “Why don’t you play something, Honey,” Morgan suggested.
    Julia sat at the piano, opened some sheet music and launched into a piece I recognized - Mozart’s Sonata in C Major[7]. Her fingers ran smoothly over the keys and with flawless accuracy. We sat silent, mesmerised, the music flooding the room. I wondered at the contrast between Julia’s hard-bitten persona and her artistry. No one can fake mastery of a musical instrument. I knew she would not have been out of place in London’s Wigmore Hall. What was she doing in Togo? How had she fastened onto Morgan, a man twice her age, a bully and hard drinker with an edge of spite to his temperament. Was it his evident wealth that attracted her? Or adventure? Or love? How could contempt for the people of Togo and of Africa sit alongside Mozart in her mind? What - in the end - do we understand of human motivation, of corruption, of greed, of our need of art, or of our will to survive? The culture that produced Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms also conceived Hitler and Dr Mengele.
    Shortly after this tranquil scene, General Eyadéma provoked a dispute with his prime minister, and Togo’s brief experiment in parliamentary governance collaped. Troops fired a few rounds at the Congress bulding, the Minister of Industry - local champion of our project - fled to Ghana; we returned in haste to Canada and wrote a report. Before we left Togo, Morgan had handed me his card.
    “Look us up if you’re ever in London. I have a house there.”
    Printed on the card beneath his name was an address in Grosvenor Square.
    “He gave me one of those,” Dennis told me when I showed it to him. “That a good place to live?”
    “You have to be mega rich to own a house in Grosevenor Square,” I told him..
    “Ok.”
    “Makes me wonder what the hell he’s doing in Togo.”.
    “Same as us, I guess,” said Dennis, “Making a buck.”

[1] United States Agency for International Development - an arm of the US State Department.

[2] Canadian International Development Agency. In 2013, CIDA was folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs which was subsequently renamed as Global Affairs Canada.

[3] The French-speaking world.

[4] The period of this scene. Longevity has since improved but still lags behind much of the rest of the world.

[5] A trade and aid agreement signed in February 1975 between the European Economic Community and 71 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. .

[6] After a subsequent spell under the Leage of Nations, Togoland splintered into two, one portion emerging as a French colony - Togo, the other joining the Gold Coast (Ghana) under British rule. Togo achieved independence in 1960.

[7] See: The Nigerian Field (1992) Vol 57 3-4, pp. 119—125 (https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-3436-1/dissemination/pdf/Vol_57/TNF_57_3-4_119-126_Fetish_Market.pdf)

Democratic Deficit - a Definition

 The degree to which a political or social system ignores or suppresses the will of its constituents. Usually applied to nations or unions of nations,  it serves equally for any collective established on principles of self-government.
    In his famous study of democracies published in 2041,[1] Dr Bambang Chamsyah of  Indonesia’s Biak Foundation identified a close correlation between “Democratic Deficit” and population size. According to Chamsyah’s findings, no country with a population of over 20 million is without serious democratic failings - and once a nation exceeds 70 million, the rate of democratic erosion tends to accelerate. Nor are politicians necessarily to blame for the deterioration. Administering democracy in heavily-populated countries presents problems of a different order to those facing governments of small nations. Despite the fact that the giants are invariably more heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and complex, they still have only one president or prime minister and one cabinet - in other words, the same number of senior political decision-makers. At around the 70 million mark, the complexities attendant upon size begin seriously to exceed the capacity of their leaders to understand still less to address them. Moreover, the value of each citizen’s vote decreases in proportion to the size of the electorate: so that in a country of 250 million voters, a ballot carries only one fiftieth of the weight of one where there are only 5 million voters. As populations grow, therefore, governments cease representing ever larger segments of their constituents.
    The most common result is increasing political disenchantment and abstentionism, culminating in some cases in attempts to change the system by non-democratic means. Once this process has begun, governments find means to respond with repressive legislation - hence the accelerated democratic erosion that Chamsyah observed.
    Drawing on the work of 20th Century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Chamsyah recognized the possibility of a variety of sociopolitical responses to excessive population such as the one developed in India where the caste system demands passive acceptance of inequality and disenfranchisement of one social group altogether - the Harijans.[2] Lévi-Strauss summarized the Indian solution - which he called a failure of human organization - as follows:
    “...a society that becomes too numerous, survives only by creating servitude. When men start feeling squeezed geographically, socially and mentally, a simple solution may occur to them, namely to refuse to recognize the humanity of a portion of the species.”[3]
    Nevertheless, Chamsyah claimed, by effectively setting India’s democratic deficit in concrete the caste system offered a clear demonstration of his central thesis.
    His conclusion? Forget world government, break up large countries into federations, disband the European Union, and make the United Nations a people’s forum from which political leaders are excluded.
    Dr Chamsyah was assassinated in 2048.

[1] Democracy and the End of Freedom, U. Bambang Chamsyah, Biak Foundation, 2041. 

[2] “Children of God”, Gandhi’s graceful term for the “Untouchables”. “Dalits”  (the “oppressed”) is now the more favoured term.

[3] “...en devenant trop nombreuse.....une société ne se perpétue qu’en sécrétant la servitude. Lorsque les hommes commencent à se sentir à l’étroit dans leurs espaces géographique, social et mental, une solution simple risque de les séduire: celle qui consiste à refuser la qualité humaine à une partie de l’espèce.” Tristes Tropiques, Librairie Plon, Paris 1955.

JULIAN ASSANGE - FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER OF WIKILEAKS - High Court Hearing February 20-21, 2024

The purpose of the hearing was to secure a ruling on the right of Julian Assange to appeal a government order for his extradition to the United States.
    Little doubt exists in the minds of Assange’s supporters that - through Wikileaks - he has performed a courageous and principled service in exposing criminal conduct by the United States and its allies in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.  That Wikileaks published classified information obtained from Chelsea Manning - a former US soldier - is not in dispute.  For her role in the affair, Ms Manning was court-martialed in 2013, found guilty of violating the Espionage Act (1917) and sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. Seven years later, President Obama commuted her sentence, but she was jailed for another year in 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury set up to investigate Assange and Wikileaks.
    Prior to the current hearing - the outcome of which will probably be announced in mid to late March - an order to extradite Assange had been approved by a previous British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, against which he has already lost an appeal in a district (lower) court. A victory now would achieve no more than afford him the opportunity to present a full appeal to a higher court. If he loses the hearing he will likely be extradited forthwith to the United States where he could face up to 175 years in jail - effectively a death sentence.
    In her opeing remarks, Victoria Sharp, the senior of the two judges presiding over the hearing, stated that Assange was not present in court either physically or online because he was ill. In reality - it is no secret - he is being kept in solitary confinement in a high security prison and allowed out for exercise solely for one hour in every twenty-four. It is a form of slow torture that has affected him physically and may also have temporarily impaired his mental alertness.
    Courtrooms in the Royal Courts of Justice have galleries open to the public, and where these are fully occupied, a side room with a screen is sometimes made available. Such was the case for Assange’s hearing which had been allocated one of the smallest courtrooms in the building despite widespread public concern for his fate and the many hundreds waiting in the street outside in the hope of gaining entry.. It was also possible to view the proceedings online. However, to attend in any of these ways involved negotiating obstacles designed to discourage all but the most distinguished or the most obstinate. I was one of the latter - granted online access along with eight others. Among those physically present were the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, more than a dozen EU parliamentarians, several members of foreign national parliaments, journalists from Reporter Without Borders, and members of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Assange’s wife, Stella, was also present.
    No matter how serious the issue, English courts operate to a ritual of dress and expressive courtesies derived from an earlier age.  Lawyers wear gowns and wigs in court, and barristers (advocates entitled to represent clients in the high court) address presiding judges as “my lady” or “my lord”,  while barristers refer to each other as “my learned friend”.  This veil of civility ensures that voices are seldom raised. Subtlety of argument supported by knowledge of precedent (previous judgements made on similar cases) and of prevailing statutes and treaties form the substance of what takes place. Submissions by the contending barristers are lengthy and weighted with textual references all of which are gathered in what is known as a”bundle” - the collection of evidential material assembled by opposing legal teams and available to both as well as to the judges

    During the hearing, the essence of the extradition case against Assange remained as it has always been. Lead counsel for the United States, Claire Dobbins, argued that he was neither a publisher nor a journalist - activities under which he might seek legitimate legal protection in England. Instead he had engaged in espionage of US state secrets of a kind that would be expected of an enemy agent. Wikileaks was, in fact “a non-state, hostile intelligence agency”. It had released the names of thousands of individuals, thereby endangering their lives, had conspired with Chelsea Manning to securer secret documents, and had hacked into CIA confidential files.  She spoke without pause - except to answer an  occasional query from the judges,  for the best part of two and a half hours.
Under the terms of the UK-US Extradition Treaty of 2003, no one could be extradited for expressing political opinions. Nevertheless, Ms Dobbins told the hearing, this was not an issue of political opinion but of spying. Moreover, as a foreigner, Assange could not enjoy the free-speech protection afforded by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. This last argument was also employed in Assange’s defence on the grounds that he was, in fact, a journalist and publisher and, if extradited, would not receive the protection available to a US citizen.
    The submission on behalf of the United States came sandwiched between opening submissions by Edward Fitzgerald  and Mark Summers - acting for Assange  - and the latters’ closing arguments in reply to the US case. Much of the argument revolved round the question of whether Assange’s activities via Wikileaks involved the expression of political opinion which is protected under both the Extradition Treaty and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to which the UK is a signatory.
    Even if Assange had engaged in spying (which he had  not), his team argued that espionage is a purely political offence and recognised as such by all legal authorities. Publication of state secrets obtained from a state official - Chelsea Manning - therefore constitutes protected speech. Soliciting such material - a fundamental element of the US case against Assange - was routine journalistic practice. Prosecution of journalists or publishers under the US Espionage Act had never occurred before, despite a long history of US media publishing classified information. The Wikileaks revelations, moreover, had uncovered serious criminal activity by the US government and its agencies. It was not credible to argue that Julian Assange was neither a journalist nor a publisher and then to complain about his journalistic and publishing activities.
    According to Assange’s team, this effectively disposed of seventeen of the eighteen charges against him cited by the United States in its extradition request. The sole remaining charge concerned the attempted hacking of a CIA computer for which the maximum sentence had already been exceeded by Assange’s incarceration in the UK.
        Much discussion on both sides centred on the wording and interpretation of Articles 5 and 10 of the ECHR. Article 5 sets out the rights of persons who have been arrested - which the long incarceration of Assange may suggest have already been breached.  Article 10 addresses freedom of expression. The first paragraph reads as follows:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
    It is possible that this article may prove to be the saviour - for now - not only of Julian Assange’s case - but of his life. Even if he wins this hearing, however, the organisation and scheduling of a subsequent appeal against extradition would certainly take months and probably more than a year. Meanwhile he will remain in solitary confinement in Belmarsh high security prison, bearing on his increasingly fragile shoulders the hopes of many that he will have the strength and health to sustain the ordeal, and that journalism will not effectively be muzzled from carrying out one of its most fundamental responsibilites - that of holding governments to account.