The Notebook. José Saramago

for without one there would not be even a remote possibility of an alliance . . . As there is no reason to fear that the Chinese, Japanese, or Indians, for example, might be finalizing their own plans to take over the world, spreading their various beliefs (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) by peaceful or violent means, it should be more than obvious that when I speak of an alliance of civilizations I am thinking particularly of Christians and Muslims, the enemy brothers who across history have alternated—now one, now the other—in their tragic and apparently eternal roles of executioner and victim.

      Hence, whether you like it or not, we have God as a problem, God as a rock in the middle of the road, God as a pretext for hatred, God as an agent of disunity. But no one dares mention this most prima facie evidence in any of the many analyses of the question, be they political, economic, sociological, psychological, or strategically utilitarian in nature. It is as if a kind of reverential fear, or a resignation to what is established as politically correct, has prevented the analyst from seeing what is present in the threads of the net, the labyrinthine weave from which there has been no escape—that is to say, God. If I were to tell a Christian or a Muslim that the universe is made up of more than four hundred thousand million galaxies, and that each one of them contains more than four hundred thousand million stars, and that God, whether Allah or some other, could not have made this, and even better would have had no reason to make this, they would reply indignantly that for God, whether Allah or some other, nothing is impossible. Except apparently—I would argue—making peace between Islam and Christianity, by way of reconciling the most wretched of the animal species said to have been born from his will, the one made in his image, that is, the human species.

      In the physical universe there is neither love nor justice. Nor is there cruelty. No power presides over the four hundred thousand million galaxies and the four hundred thousand million stars that exist in each one. No one makes the sun rise each day and the moon every night, even when it is not visible in the sky. Since we were put here without knowing why or what for, we have had to invent everything. We have invented God too, but he didn’t go beyond our thoughts; rather, he stayed inside our heads, at times as a fact of life, almost always as an instrument of death. We’re able to say, “Here is the plough we have invented,” but we cannot say, “Here is the God that invented man who invented the plough.” We cannot eliminate this God from our minds—even an atheist such as myself cannot. But let us at least discuss it. It is no use saying that killing in God’s name makes God a killer. To those who kill in God’s name God is not only the judge who will absolve them, he is also the powerful Father who in their minds used to provide the firewood for the autos-da-fé and now prepares and orders the planting of bombs. Let’s discuss this invention, let’s solve this problem, let’s recognize at least that the problem does exist. Before we all go crazy. And from there on, who knows? Maybe that will be how we’ll manage not to go on killing one another.

       October 20: A (Financial) Crime against Humanity

      I was thinking of writing in the blog about the economic crisis that is upon us, but had to devote myself instead to fulfilling an obligation to another medium of communication. I offer you here my thoughts, which have already been published in Spain in the newspaper Público, and in Portugal in the weekly Expresso.

      A (FINANCIAL) CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

      The story is well known, and in the old days when schools considered themselves the ideal instruments of education, it was taught to children as an example of the modesty and discretion that should remain in us when the devil tempts us to hold an opinion on a matter about which we know nothing or little. Apelles would allow a cobbler to point out a mistake in the shoes of the figure he had painted, because shoes are the cobbler’s business, but the same cobbler ought never dare to give an opinion on, for example, the anatomy of the knee. In short, a place for everyone and everyone in his place. At first glance, Apelles was right: he was the master, he was the painter, he was the authority, and as for the cobbler, he would be called for at the appropriate time when it was a matter of putting half-soles on a pair of boots. And really, where would we be if any person, including the most universally ignorant, could allow himself to offer an opinion on things he didn’t know? If someone hasn’t completed the necessary studies, he should keep silent and leave the responsibility of making the most suitable decisions (suitable for whom?) to those who know.

      Yes, at first glance Apelles was right, but only at first glance. The painter of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, considered a genius in his day, forgot one important aspect of the matter: the cobbler has knees, so by definition he is competent in these joints, even if it is only to complain about the pains he feels in them (if he does). By now an attentive reader will have understood that these lines are not really about Apelles nor about the cobbler. What they are about is the extremely serious economic and financial crisis that is convulsing the world, to the extent that we cannot escape the distressed feeling that we have come to the end of an era without being able to glimpse what the next will be, or bring, nor how after an intermediate period, a span of time impossible to predict, we are going to restore the ruins and open up new paths.

      How so? How can an ancient legend explain today’s disasters? Well, why not? The cobbler is us, those of us who sit impotently by as the great economic and financial powers approach, crushing, mad to conquer more and more money, more and more power, by any legal or illegal means within their grasp, however clean or dirty, commonplace or criminal. And Apelles? Apelles is precisely those bankers, those politicians, those insurers, those big speculators, who with the complicity of the media have for the past thirty years responded to our timid protests with the arrogance of those who consider themselves the possessors of ultimate wisdom. That is, even if our knee hurts we are not allowed to speak of it, denounce it, hold its injury up to public condemnation. Those three decades were the era of the absolute empire of the Market, that supposedly self-balancing and self-correcting entity charged by immutable destiny to arrange and defend for all time our personal and collective happiness, even if in reality it was constantly denying it to us.

      So what now? Will fiscal paradises and numbered accounts come to an end at last? Will there be tireless investigations of the origins of enormous bank deposits, blatantly criminal financial machinations, opaque investments that frequently have been no more than mass laundering of dirty money, of drug-trafficking money? And since we’re talking about crimes. . . will ordinary citizens have the satisfaction of seeing those responsible for the earthquake that is shaking our homes, the lives of our families, and our jobs brought to judgment and condemned? Who will solve the problem of the unemployed (I have not counted them, but I don’t doubt there are already millions) who are victims of the crash and who will continue to be unemployed for months or years, struggling to live on wretched state subsidies while the big executives and administrators who deliberately brought their companies to the wall enjoy millions and millions of dollars, protected by cast-iron contracts that the fiscal authorities, paid from taxpayers’ money, pretend to know nothing about? And the active complicity of the governments, who will investigate that? Bush, that malignant product of Nature at one of her worst moments, will say that his plan has saved (will save?) the North American economy, but there are questions he will have to answer: Did you not know what was happening in those plush meeting rooms, which even cinema has allowed us into, and not just allowed us in but shown us the criminal decisions being taken, sanctioned by every penal code in the world? What good are the CIA and the FBI to you, or the dozens of other institutions of national security that have proliferated in the misnamed North American democracy, where a traveler coming into the country has to hand his computer over to an officer of the border police officer and allow him to copy his hard disk? Did Mr. Bush not realize that he had an enemy at home, or rather, did he realize but not care?

      In every respect what is happening is a crime against humanity, and it is in this light that it should be examined in every public forum and in every conscience. I am not exaggerating. Crimes against humanity are not limited to genocide, ethnocide, death camps, torture, targeted assassinations, deliberately provoked famines, massive pollution, the repressing of victims’ identities through humiliation. A crime against humanity is what the financial and economic