Author: Krzysztof Mętrak. Source: Twórczość, 1976, no. 6.

The concept of a “world civilisation,” which publicists invoke from time to time, is highly abstract and increasingly meaningless in the mouth of a European (or representative of Western culture). The processes taking place in the so-called Third World — encompassing a third of humanity, three vast continents, dozens of states, hundreds of languages — cannot be understood when European-centrist measures and categories are applied to them. The offer put forward by Western civilisation, which wished to introduce its models of life into the Third World — from monogamous marriage to universal suffrage, from department stores to savings banks — has been rejected. The leaders of that world do not wish to replicate anyone else’s civilisational models, invoking ever more frequently “authenticity,” “their own specific character,” “a sense of their own worth,” and “the uniqueness of their experience.” Meanwhile Europeans go blind, unwilling to surrender their self-assurance and abandon the “centre of the world,” and in translating that life into their own idiom they often commit cardinal errors.

The notion of the full untranslatability of cultures would be suicidal for humanity — not to mention its racist implications — but certain individual and collective political behaviours manifesting themselves in the Third World remain opaque to the European. To try to understand the mechanisms of politics there is to enter the realm of political exoticism, expressed in a violent need for movement and change. This hunger for change — taking the form either of national liberation struggles or of attempts to break apart anachronistic social structures — is a peculiar form of compensation for the experiences of underdevelopment, poverty, colonialism, and social and political imbalance. It sometimes takes on dimensions difficult for a European to comprehend, characterised for instance by a cavalier attitude towards death or a boastfulness about individual terror.

The age of peaceful coexistence gives us the chance of relative calm — not, however, so that we may close our eyes to other corners of the world where injustice is being done, so remote from us and so opaque, yet marked by a thread of blood. Such is the deepest meaning of Ryszard Kapuściński’s book, in which the author has for years been trying to explain to us the dilemmas of the Third World. The reporter writes not to arouse horror in us, nor to spread timid moods or leave us astonished, but to find that human perspective of community and solidarity. Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder is a collection of reportages by a credible witness who came into direct contact with the partisans of the Third World. The figure of Christ with a rifle — from a poster by Argentine painter Carlos Alonso — has become a kind of symbol for them.

In various corners of the earth, in Asia, South America, and Africa, things are happening that make the hair stand on end of our ordinary citizen watching television in slippers. He thinks he lives in a backwater, insulated from distant winds and storms. Yet the world of politics is a world of communicating vessels; politics shapes life — something gladly forgotten in times of stability. And only apparently does what happens there not concern us. Everywhere there are unhappy people, and everywhere flashpoints are forming. Our age is callous: the mass media immunise us against the suffering of others. Western civilisation thus protects the remnants of its sense of security — lulling our imagination to sleep. People have a nature that instinctively separates them from the misfortune of others: the humanist meaning of all writing lies in its capacity to enable the reader to feel the suffering of others.

Kapuściński writes, for instance, about the situation of the Palestinian fedayeen — perpetually evacuated, settled in camps scattered across Arab territories — people stripped of home, whose fate “is directly governed by politics,” who feel that politics at the distance of death. He writes about “jungle politics” in Central and South America, where politics is a spectacle abounding in violent and macabre situations verging now on a sensational film scenario (the kidnapping and murder of the West German ambassador in Guatemala, Karl von Spreti), now on an improvised tragic-grotesque (six presidents of Bolivia changed within three days). And all of it is drowned in a sea of blood.

In his latest book the author seems particularly fascinated by the problem of terrorism: how a few determined people, willing to go to any lengths, are capable of disorganising the entire machinery of a state. In the conditions of Guatemala, he observes, discussion of the rightness or wrongness of “individual terror” is pointless, because in that country it is the only possible method of struggle — and indeed the only form of self-defence. The life of a Guatemalan partisan lasts on average three years; his average age is twenty-two.

Kapuściński believes that a revolutionary attitude is in these countries the only possibility — the only manifestation of one’s own convictions. In a world where the future is the sole transcendence, only challenge and action count. And the awareness that death may come in the nearest hour — not from a heart attack.

source: kapuscinski.info