Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Some of the best bits of their game viewing were driving between the Satara and Nwanetsi and from Satara to the Olifants Rivers and they stopped to spot prides of lion, cheetah and leopard in the Lion Country between the Sabi and Crocodile Rivers. Eva thrilled to the abundant lion prides and the great rhino populations along the rivers driving along the parkland tracks densely vegetated with Marula, Leadwood and Acacia trees, shifting to Sycamore and Jackalberry groves along the rivercourses.

One afternoon Eva and Robert, hot from the long dusty driving across the Highveldt of the Kruger National Park, took a long walk along a narrow riverine glade valley they found within the otherwise arid savanna expanses. Turning in the rock crevice Eva found herself face to face with the most glorious Baobab tree, surrounded by a rubble of abandoned termite mounds and low-lying flowered scrub. The trunk was immense close to the ground, about to head’s height about five meters thick, though just above this the trunk abruptly cut short and was replaced with a bifurcation of two main branch-trunks, the leftward thick and overgrown with leafage, and with fruit hanging, and the rightward, perhaps the victim of a lightning strike, having died and hollowed out.

Eva was ecstatic at finding the glorious, mysterious tree, seeming a living spirit of the land. She squealed with delight to Robert beneath the foliage. Then spotting the ripe fruit hanging on the left branch, she insisted in Robert giving her a boost up, so that she could scoot along the upper branch and pick the offerings. She had heard a wonderful soup could be made from the fruit and seeds of the Baobab and this might be her only chance.

Making it to the mid-level, she stretched to pluck handfuls of the abundant fruit, slipping them into her small backpack, shouting to Robert below in alternate squeals of delight at her takings, and of fear when she almost lost her balance, whipping herself as she grabbed for the neighboring branch to steady herself, exposing the whites of her breasts as she swung to safety.

Then just as she was ready to dismount the tree, scuttling down towards the main trunk, a hideous case-metal grey head reared itself from the hollowed-out right half of the twinned tree. Eva shrieked in shock, then in fear and horror as the hood of the snake waved before her, blocking her path downward.

Sartorius responded instinctively, without time to think, scrambling up the side of the thick main trunk, drawing out his long machete-like bush-knife to the ready. But it weas only when he had pushed Eva away and faced the danger square-on that he began to feel the rush of terror like an icicle thrust into his brain. A Black Mamba!----he had dealt with snakes before, but this was one of the deadliest on earth, and he shuddered as the meters long embodiment of instant death opened its mouth wide in warning, a black throat of pure death fanged with the most potent poison on earth.

As he inched backward he held the blade of the bush-knife before him at the ready. A foot or two to the rearwards he felthimself out of lunging range. He reached to his hip and felt for the 9mm pistol. He had been rated an Expert shot with a pistol in his military service, but in his terror he doubted he could keep himself steady, and the Mamba was one of the fastest and unpredictable snakes in the world. He backed Eva further along the right branch, trying to keep her from panicking as she hyperventilated. Then he told her to put one arm around his chest to keep him steady against the wood. He then used the two-handed aiming grip he had been taught in military training and leveled the Baretta at the wavering hood. Bam!----the snake’s body jumed upward and then fel downward, writhing on the ground below them. Eva burst out crying, hysterical, burying her face in the hair of his chest, as he tried to brace against the branch to keep them both from careening down onto the writhing snake below. He found himself shocked to feel he was almost as panicked as she was, only barely managing to prevent himself from breaking down.
Later that night, after Eva had managed to cook a soup out of the Baobab fruit from knapsack, they made frantic love in the pitched tent, almost insatiably, Eva almost as much out of control as when she had encountered the snake. Then they both passed out, exhausted from both the day’s events and the night’s lovemaking. In the pre-dawn blackness of the wee-hours, Sartorius found himself again awake and unable to return to whatever it was he had been dreaming.

His mind twisted over the improbability of his life as he found himself. Short months ago he had only just pulled himself out of a failed suicide attempt in Beijing. Now he he was convulsed with the most intense sex and lovemaking of his life, finding it too good to be true, perhaps fearing its loss. He was also fearful, fearful of how close he had gotten to fear getting the better of him this day. He was now past fifty, that fated age that had so long haunted his imagination. At fifty was he mature now? Sometimes with the younger ones, Pari and Jenny he felt he could be confident playing the role of the wise elder. Sometimes, especially beside Günter, he was ashamed of the childishness and awkwardness of his mind and ideas. Maturity for him had become a very relative concept…………………Perhaps maturity took a whole lifetime. Perhaps maturity was a chimera, approachable only as a ripeness for death.
At long last, much to their dismay however, the inevitable came to pass and their few weeks of freedom now came to a close with the approach of the convocation of the Pan-African Parliament in Midrand-Johannesburg. In intense pain they drove back along N4 towards Middleburg and the dejection of seeing their romantic world morph into the urban cityscape of the Joburg metropolis.

Arriving in Midrand, the site of the Pan-African Parliament, they checked into the Protea Midrand Wanderers Hotel, made gentle love amid their fond memories, and repleted each other’s warm and loving bodies. Eva inwardly struggled to keep the wildness of their love alive, to prevent it from drowning in the ordinariness of bourgeois couplehood as they reentered the familiar and tame pale of urban civilization. She was mindful that in the security of the many harmless marriages surrounding her normal life it had been so easily forgotten that love is no hothouse flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine and a night of dark passion; sprung from a wild seed, blown along by the road by a wild wind; a wild plant that when it blooms by chance within the hedges of our gardens, we call a flower; when it blooms outside we call it a weed; but flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild! And where this wild plant springs, where through its green fuse drives the flower, men and women are but moths around the flame-like blossoms, or but falling leafmeal. Thus Eva thought as she tried to cling to the wildness of her lovemaking to Robert in the improbable environ of the deluxe suite of the Protea Midrand Wanderers Hotel, upon which they promptly fell into a profound sleep of twelve hours until involuntarily reentering the common world the next morning.

They were awoken at nine that morning by a phone call from Christina Senghor, coordinator for Africa for the UNPA Committee, who apologetically queried if she were awakening them too early after their long trip. Sartorius reassured her that they were again prepared to face the world and agreed to meet her for lunch, when they would go over the plans and details for the coming Pan-African Parliament meeting of the African Union, which Sartorius would address. She said she would bring along a couple of members of the Parliament who were also members of the UNPA Steering Committee for Africa, Wole Obatala, the noted Nigerian author and Professor Pieter Verhoven of the local University of Witwatersrand, who would also serve as a local guide to the area during their stay. She also mentioned that she would bring along also another American, Garry Bonoir who was a progressive labor activist representing the AFL-CIO and Change to Win in addressing the Pan-African Parliament on some international labour issues and who had been doing some support work for the UNPA Committee in Washington, D.C.

By noon Sartorius and Eva had hopped a cab for the Ama-Cradle Country Lodge where Christina and her colleagues were waiting for them in the dining area on the open balcony overlooking the rolling green countryside on the outskirts of Midrand. The specialty of the lodge was dining on the cool balcony and lawn of its fine country estate, giving a pleasant respite from the hectic cityscape of Joburg. The Ama-Cradle had a fine buffet of African, Dutch, European and Fusion cuisines, washed down with complimentary local Champagne and juices for the brunch. As Sartorius and Eva found them across the balcony Christina waved them over and introduced Obatala, Verhoven and Bonoir.

“And how are you enjoying your vacation here in Africa?” Christina asked Eva, to kick off the conversation.
“Oh don’t ask!” moaned Eva, “…….I don’t want to face the fact that it is over and we have to face horrible reality! It was so, so beautiful!.......I am still in utter denial as far as coming back to the real world is concerned!”

“Well you don’t have to go home, you know!” chided Christina, “……if you are really in love with the place you can always stay right here in Africa!.......we are a card-carrying part of the real world, you know!”

“If I could continue living in the dream part of it I certainly would…” Eva responded, but I have to go back and pick up my life again in London, for better or for worse.”

“Is this your first visit to Africa?” asked Wole Obatala, pouring out a glass of Champagne for Eva.

“Yes, my very first time…..although Robert did some traveling in Morocco and Algeria when he was a student in Germany.”

“Yes, and I also had a week in Egypt on vacation one time, but I have always regretted not having had more opportunity to experience Africa to the extent that I have lived and traveled in the Americas, Asia and Europe. In fact this trip is really making up for my former neglect…...but unfortunately one can’t do everything one wishes with time, money and opportunities being limited in life.” responded Sartorius.

“And so how is the work with the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly progressing here in Africa” asked Garry Bonoir, jumping in to fill a momentary gap in the small talk.

“Well, I will have to defer to Christina on that, Mr. Bonoir, though I do understand we have been making remarkable progress, especially since the convening of the Pan-African Parliament and the creation of the African Union.” said Sartorius.

“Just call me Garry” Bonoir interjected in a friendly tone, “………we are Americans after all….........We Americans have the habit of getting down to informality pretty quickly” he smiled out around the table to all present.

“Yes, Garry” jumped in Christina, “I know you have been involved indirectly with the Committee work in the US but perhaps you hadn’t had a chance to follow it here too closely yet. Well, we have a very strong network in Africa which grows out of a variety of sources such as the recent innovation of the Pan-African Parliament in connection with the African Union and the legacy of the Band Aid, Live 8 and other global African relief efforts…..Through those efforts we have achieved many successes such as the G-8 debt relief measures.

We all know that Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations from Egypt has been the World Parliament’s most visible advocate at the global and regional levels. In fact you could say that Africans see more and more clearly that any sustainable solutions to the immense problems of the continent must be rooted in the realities of the global economy, global trade and investment, and global governance. Perhaps because Africans are so poor and powerless they are acutely aware of how difficult it is for their voices and concerns to be heard in the global arena. Therefore there is a strong interest in a World Parliament as a means of African peoples speaking for themselves directly to the peoples of the world, rather than merely being ventriloquized through crusading media celebrities.

The President of the Pan-African Parliament, Mrs. Gertrude Mongella has endorsed our concept very strongly, as has Rwandan Chamber Deputy, Alfred Mukezamfura, South African Parliamentarians such as Kogoshi Mokoena and Mr. Verhoven here, Ugandan MP Fred Jachan Omach and many others too numerous to recite, including of course Mr. Obatala here, who serves in the Nigerian as well as the Pan-African parliaments. As far as our practical work leading up to the Global Appeal and the worldwide telethon, I think we can envisage concerts and media marathon events leading up to and synchronized to the global broadcasts in Cape Town, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, and Lagos, and can coordinate local celebrities and leaders along with shuttling in international celebrities and speakers for the events. Of course local African musical groups want to utilize the big broadcasts to showcase African music and talent to the world audience and perform alongside the big international names, so I think we will get a lot of regional support both for reasons of humanistic idealism and from self-interest----most people think that even though a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly would initially be weak it would definitely serve to enhance the status and interests of Africa in the world.”

“And you Mr. Bonoir, oh I mean Garry, what is the nature of your participation here? I hear both you and Robert will be giving speeches over at the Gallagher Estate, so what are you here to talk about?” asked Eva, trying to help out Christina in being a good hostess and keeping the conversation flowing.

“Well, I’m here representing the American AFL-CIO and its sister progressive labor faction Change to Win in their Global New Deal Initiative (GNDI) including the Global Labour Organizing and Collective Bargaining Initiative (GLOCBI), and the main message I am trying to deliver is similar to your own with the UNPA Committee----that we need new institutions and strategies of rebalancing and adaptation to the overwhelming reality of Globalization, especially in the wake of the World Financial Crisis, which tells us that the wrong kind of imbalanced globalization is threatening the world with economic and social breakdown. The West has sold out its own people in this Crisis and not only mortgaged its soul but in a Faustian compact has sold credit default-swaps to the Devil!---it is financially, morally, politically and spiritually bankrupt!....And, without a globalized New Deal the peoples of the world face the grimmest consequences.

We are the vanguard of the Economic Democracy Movement, promoting and fighting for the concept of Economic Democracy, both at the national level and like Professor Sartorius’ work at the international and globalized level with the UNPA; that is, our goals include keeping many of the benefits of the free enterprise market-based system to allow the American people and the peoples of the world to set the game rules for the marketplace, financial and economic system to re-take control over their economic destiny-----ensuring a strong Social Safety Net, Social Contract and fair distribution of economic production and wealth, and to make sure that the abusive externalities of the financial system do not undermine the well-being of the people for the benefit of the unscrupulous elites. We are The Counterforce, part of the “People Power” movement sweeping the world, forming the counterforce to both corporate greed and exploitation, and to oppressions of undemocratic, despotic and illegitimate regimes and states, including displacement of dictators in Latin America, Asia, the Stalinistic one-party dictatorships of the former East Bloc, those of the Islamic World with the recent ‘Arab Spring’ and we are also part of the International Labor Movement and the resistance of the peoples of the West to the destruction of the American Dream and the European Social Contract resulting from the corporate and financial abuses leading to the World Financial Crisis, including our people power actions such as “Occupy Wall Street,” which our unions have supported and led. In short we are The Counterforce, Global Democrats, democratic and worker activists, fighting for a fuller and less corrupt political and economic democracy in our national homelands such as the USA and the European Union, for safeguarding of the livelihoods of the working and middle-classes, and fighting for a globalized democracy and a democratically based system of global political and economic governance to reflect the reality of the globalized economy to which all of our destinies are irrevocably tied.

Our initiative grew out of our participation in the International Forum on Economic Globalization and Trade Unions under the sponsorship of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and coordinated with our brother organizations across the world such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU),the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU) and the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Specifically, the message I am here to deliver is that just as in 1929 we have suffered a massive failure of the Circulatory System of the Global Economy, a massive stroke and heart attack whereby the circulation of purchasing power to the middle and working classes has been blocked because of a chronic inordinate and dangerous maldistribution of income and over-concentration of ownership and wealth in the capital owning classes that prevents the consuming classes—the middle, lower-middle and working classes---from being able to sustainably continue their consumer participation in the economy. The critical difference this time however is that in 1929 the Circulatory Failure of aggregate demand was within national economies, whereas in the much more globalized world of today the Circulatory Failure is within the circulatory system of an internationalized and globalized economy that functions across the world as a whole and not within any one nation. Even the well intentioned efforts at expanding the money supply—Quantitative Expansion or QE Initiatives are unlikely to have the effect intended in a globalized economy since the aggregate demand stimulated will flow in purchasing power to the low-wage developing economies like China rather than to US or EU-based production and employment, and our cross-border capital markets will channel the newly created money-supply again to the low-wage/high-profit developing economies rather than to investment in the US, EU and the developing world. Meanwhile sovereign debt crises in the EU and Federal and State budget crises in the US states will keep eroding aggregate demand.

The key to restoring circulation of aggregate demand and sustainable effective purchasing power to the middle and lower classes despite the real estate bubble is to have Global Collective Bargaining, along with parallel means to raise worker and middle class incomes, including bolstering the Global Social Safety Net rather than de-funding it in the face of deficits. Most needed are Global Unions and globalized labour organizing, collective bargaining and industrial action capable of confronting and negotiating with Multi-national corporations on a unified collective global front across all their global subsidiaries, including the “Big Stick” of last resort of effective global strikes against all global units and subsidiaries of any multinational enterprise that remains unresponsive, to redress the outrageous loss of net income to the working and middle classes and redress the loss of the effective balance of power of employees against multinational employers of the last fifty years. In the first New Deal a national solution to this collapse of the economic circulatory system was found in the construction of national labour unions and collective bargaining coupled with the social welfare safety net of the nation-state—the NLRB and labor laws, Social Security, Unemployment insurance, Workers Compensation and so forth. The trouble after 2008 is that the nation-state is no longer capable of providing the same solution because the economy is no longer national but global. National labour unions have no bargaining power in a globalized economy and a generous social safety net of the nation-state has proven unsustainable in competition with cheap-labour in developing countries often without such benefits and safety nets, allowing multinationals to export jobs and eliminate the social safety net in the nations they have turned their backs on.

Because there is no system of effective global governance, and certainly no global state to balance the abuses of global capital there is, of course, no “Global Social Safety Net” to replace the failing national social safety nets. To remedy all of this we need a newer “Global New Deal” to restore the viable circulation of purchasing power between the social classes and enable the evolution of a global social safety net, or the whole system will break down, as it just did in the World Financial Crisis exploding out of the Sub-Prime Crisis. This is similar to the idea of the ‘Social Contract’ in the European Union which also needs to be part of a Globalized New Deal. With regard to the dislocations in the industrialized economies which are the natural and unavoidable result of the process of Globalization, we need a “No Worker Left Behind Policy,” analogous to the phrase utilized in education. We are making an Exodus from the old industrial economy and moving towards a Post-Industrial economy, a “Trek” as you South Africans would put it---------the migration of a whole people. We must make sure that no worker or person is left behind in that transformation, just as we resolved that in education there shall be “No Child Left Behind,” or left to the wolves.

That means we need just as much of a Globalization Safety Net as we needed the Social Security Safety Net that was part of the New Deal during the previous crisis of the 30’s. No person should ever be “unemployed.” Any jobless person should be in a mandatory re-training and re-education program funded by the government with a minimum subsistence stipend for participation at all times as a condition or aid, and the nation should thus be incessantly re-investing in its “Human Capital” at all times. If we can’t find an analogous solution at the global level for what the US New Deal and the European counterparts did following the 1929 crisis at the primarily nation-state level the whole global economy will implode—and explode!----just remember the result of the melt-down after 1929 was not simply the Great Depression but also the rise of Hitler and a World War between the Fascist, Communist and bourgeois nations. The race is on to find a Global New Deal before all of that blows up. Without it people are sure to go into the streets with a powerful ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or ‘Fight Back’ populist countermeasures, good in themselves, but which may become either ineffective, mindlessly destructive or the occasion of unjust brutal repression if they are not channeled into realistic constructive change. Indeed, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Movement needs to extend its scope of action up Manhattan Island at least as far as the United Nations to demonstrate in the streets for Robert’s United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as a first step to getting a global handle on the abuses and failures of global financial governance. Unless they realize that the Global Financial Crisis and the abuses of Wall Street are rooted in globalization and can only be cured through global governance they are sure to remain impotent and ineffective.

The failure in global economic circulation is also reflected in the imbalance of the manufacturing economy and the service economy and in the imbalance of the financial economy and the real economy. The sale of goods is highly globalized, but the manufacturing sector is shrinking rapidly in the “post-industrial” developed west. The advanced economies on the other hand are expanding in the much less globalized service sector, but services are much less portable and exportable. Hence the need for a Global New Deal which opens the service sectors globally to balance the loss of jobs in the advanced countries, and the growth of unions in both manufacturing and service sectors globally to bring wages up. Without this the result will be the gutting out of the middle classes by the labor-rate arbitrage of globalization. Ultimately the deficits are unsustainable, and without a Global New Deal advanced nations will either turn back to protectionism or demand-failure depression.

And in the absence of the Global New Deal the only “service sector” America is consistently succeeding in exporting is War! Contrary to the empty dream of the unrepentant Neo-Liberals or Tea Party fantasists, going back to the pre-crisis status quo ante is not an option---just as going back to the pre-1929 status quo ante was not an alternative at the nation-state level as Roosevelt proved against the Coolidge-Hoover right who disastrously attempted it in the first stage of national recovery. And I repeat at the top of my lungs----This is not because it is morally or idealistically right, which may have its appeal to a sensitive minority, but is the result of the hard-headed conclusion that the alternative simply will not work!---which is ultimately the stronger argument for the majority and for the recalcitrant vested interests who have to be dragged in the right direction by the heels.

“That all sounds very good and humane Garry, but won’t all those New Dealesque measures cost a lot of money? What with this “Quantitive Loosening” of the money supply to finance these things by a monetary hat trick aren’t we in danger of undermining the value of the currency by inflation and devaluation?” asked Christina.

“Money is the Supreme Fiction of our times. Sometimes obsession with it makes us forget that Life and Death are the Supreme Realities. Some of the monetary Neanderthals want to go back to the gold standard to keep our money real and to head off so-called populist tampering with its value. But really we should just accept that money is just an invented tool that should be used in the service of life and not an absolute in itself. We can’t go back to the age of treating the Chairman of the Federal Reserve as a plutocrat’s tin God, and Oz-like defending the Pluto-cryptocratic Elite by shouting to the people “disregard that man behind the curtain!”

Yes, money is a fiction, but we must still choose and use our fictions carefully, flexibly and pragmatically in the service of life. To insist on balanced budgets and hard money in a time of systemic crisis is to bow to the narrow vested interests of the wealth holders of the present rather than the wealth creators of the future. That’s a Hooveresque recipe that will only prolong this depression or crisis or whatever you want to call it. Fetishing a balanced budget and a strong dollar, yen or euro will only cultivate a monetary and fiscal “Upas Tree of Java” which will poison and devastate all life around it. Sure we need to keep from going overboard with hyperinflation in managing this fiction of money and use some self-restraint to adjust its healthy relationship to reality and life, but let’s not forget the fundamental principle that money is an invented tool in the service of humanity and life and not an idol or fetishized Golden Calf that we should set up for false worship.

Money is simply a flexible tool and catalyst enabling social economic interaction and measured exchanges of the fruits of human productivity. William Jennings Bryan, though no perfect man, is well remembered for his ringing phrase: “Thou shalt not crucify my people upon a cross of gold!” When the market economy of its own contradictions, vulnerability and intrinsic instability goes off the track and is derailed in systemic crisis passive wealth holders have to, as they say, “take a haircut” for the good of the whole economy and its future health and we can’t let the dead hand of propertied wealth and their obsession with fetishizing money strangle the recovery and the full re-mobilization of human productivity. We have to focus on the big picture and the long-term enlightened interest of the whole community and the community of nations of the world.”

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only



Let me give you a little background to explain what I mean, if I can tax your patience for a few minutes………….It is no accident that the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States that set up the basic framework for national industry-wide collective bargaining occurred as a response to the last general economic crisis of this magnitude---the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. That showed that the free market by itself, contrary to false-idealizing Free Market ideologues then and now, would not respond to any quasi-divine “Invisible Hand” and achieve a magical balance of interests in the distribution of income and benefits from industrial enterprise. That “invisible hand” was “invisible’ for the very good reason that it was not there and in large part did not exist!------Or the working and middle classes discovered that the only occupation of such an invisible hand was in invisibly picking their pockets for the benefit of the capital controlling classes.

The New Deal in America and socialist reforms across Europe and the world recognized that the power of overly-concentrated industrial and financial capital would not only result in abuse of power but in positive self-destruction unless constrained by the balancing power of both a regulating strengthened democratic state and, equally importantly, through the balancing power of legally protected and flourishing labour unions which would ultimately utilize their enhanced bargaining power within that marketplace to win a fairer distribution of the benefits of productive enterprise vis-à-vis exploitative ownership and capital, and a strengthened social safety net, both within and emanating from the enterprise, and as part of the state.

Thus it was only with the New Deal in the US that unions won national legal protection and sponsorship and were able to organize nationally and collectively organize and confront the new national-scale industrial enterprises like General Motors, US Steel and Ford, threatening them with effective strikes and shutdowns if they failed to reach equitable settlements. The result of all this is what we now call the “Social Contract.” Corporations made good profits, yes, but were also forced to provide their workers through collective bargaining union contracts with health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits and severance pay, and they were forced to pay taxes, including new progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes, and corporate taxes to support Social Security, welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, universal primary and higher education and other public benefits of the social safety net underpinning and making possible the sustainable free marketplace. Thus the New Deal and analogous socialist reforms in Europe in the last crisis resulted in a workable tri-partite balance of power and benefits between capital, labour and the state.

Where did all this break down? It ended with the progressive Globalization of the world economy after the Sixties. What we call “union density” or the prevalence of unions in the labour marketplace plummeted from that time. In the Fifties around 30% of American workers were unionized, including strong national unions with strong bargaining power in key industry sectors such as steel, automobiles, transportation, and other industries where a strike could bring things to a general halt. Now after fifty years of globalization only 12% of American workers are unionized, and only 8% in the private sector. The bankruptcy of General Motors and other firms in the new World Financial Crisis saw the final dismantling of the union pension plans and health plans and a rolling back of wages----in short a complete gutting out of everything that was won by the ordinary worker since 1929. But likewise 2008 also proved incontrovertibly that if aggregate workers’ wage benefits are cut back over and over, shrinking as a percentage of GDP, and thereby their ability to service their inflating mortgage loans and maintain their consumption disintegrates into default, then the whole financial system will come tumbling down Humpty-Dumpty after them.

Why? Well we’d need an encyclopedia to include all the contributing causes but we’d find the asymmetrical and unbalanced Globalization of the economy is at the root of most of them. Ownership and capital moved with freedom across national boundaries in a globalizing world and new industrial capacity was relocated readily to developing countries where wage and benefit rates were miniscule. On the other hand, what happened to labour unions? Labour unions did not go international with their companies. General Motors workers in Shanghai should by law or practice be part of the same union and collective bargaining as those in Detroit, and if the company fails to deliver higher benefits in all its subsidiaries a global strike should effectively shut down the enterprise worldwide until it changes its mind. Rather than eliminating health and pension benefits of UAW workers in American in bankruptcy proceedings, the real solution is to make those same benefits mandatory for the GM workers in Shanghai and Brazil, or at least relative to their proportionate compensation. And any company like Wal-Mart that engages in union busting should be broken up and banned from international trade or the international sourcing of supplies and operations by the collective action of national governments secured by international treaties and labour organizations to that effect—and likewise the same fate should be given to phony communist unions and company unions that are in bed with or in the pocket of the state and employers and don’t have the freedom or incentive to organize and fight for their members rights and interests.

A case in point, illustrating the tragedy of the creative genius of globalized American capitalism is the saga of Apple Computer’s iPod, iPhone, iPad. Here we can be rightly proud of the creativity and innovation of Steve Jobs and Apple, creating products, like Edison’s light bulb, movie camera and phonograph, which have literally changed and re-shaped the world. Yet what is the result for the American worker? Almost no iPhones and iPads are manufactured in the United States, and the power of unions to bargain fairly with the colossus of capital is virtually non-existent in this sector at home and abroad. Instead, almost all iPads and iPhones, phenomenally dominating their markets, are made by subcontractors like Foxconn in China, which employs over one million workers in such dismal conditions that a national scandal has erupted in China over the mass suicides of Foxconn workers subjected to inhuman conditions on endless assembly lines that would make Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times look humane and utopian in comparison. Apple Computer was found recently to have more cash-on-hand than the Federal government! Yet most of that cash is idle and not even being reinvested in Apple so as to create new jobs in its own company or anywhere.

Where are the global unions that would represent Apple workers and Foxconn workers alike globally in a common union with common collective negotiations backed up by the power of global strikes backed by consumer support such as to force global improvement in their dismal wages and working conditions such that they get a fair share of the pie and that the global social safety net is sustainably maintained? When are Foxconn and Apple workers going to stop commiting suicide and begin going on global strikes for the better wages and working conditions they deserve, with supporting boycotts of Apple customers if they don’t comply? Here we see the market in capital and products being effectively globalized, but the necessary counterbalance of global union organization and redress of a vacuum of collective bargaining power being strangled in its cradle. The resulting severe imbalances from such unbalanced and one-sided globalization is now recognized as completely unsustainable, and threatens not just the well being of the workers and middle-classes themselves, but the viability through them of the entire financial system and economic system.

The main problem is that the “Social Contract” that gave us a workable balance of industrial power from 1929 to say 1970 has been broken by a globalization that only worked for one party of the three-legged balance---capital, and not for the other two legs----labour and the democratic regulatory state, which have been rendered globally ineffective and impotent in relative and absolute terms.

But just as the Climate Change and Global Warming Crises have demonstrated that there are feedback mechanisms which cannot be escaped however much anyone tries to ignore them, so also with the toxic economic feedback mechanisms causing the World Financial Crisis. How did the Crisis occur? In part from the inability of the average American or European to carry the weight of mortgage debt required to maintain their standard of living. Why？At root because the real wages and purchasing power of the average American and most European workers and working middle classes have not risen or even actually declined for thirty years, in real terms and as a proportion of GDP, under the influence of unbalanced globalization while the cost of living, particularly the cost of housing, rose constantly. With the failure of the bargaining power of labour the only means for maintaining that standard of living was through the appreciation in value of the one principal asset of the common worker, the house he or she owned, or perhaps a small portfolio of equities in their retirement plans.

Working and Middle-class homeowners were forced to use the their houses as ATM’s to finance their consumption out of the capital gains and equity accruing from the inflation of their house’s appreciating market value. Demagogues denounced this as irresponsibility and the result of irrational credit and credit card binges. It may have been a little of that, some irresponsible overspending certainly, but in large part it simply reflected the failure of the capital owning classes to fairly distribute the productivity gains of a globalized economy to the working and middle classes that had built that economy and made it possible. Their proportionately shrinking aggregate incomes could not keep up with the stretch and strain required.

The ignored cause of the Financial Crisis, beyond the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage lenders and the intricacies of credit default swaps, was the failure of wages and employment benefits to rise to keep up with necessary expenditures of the ordinary household, including most saliently their housing costs. In effect globalized industrial capital learned, or should have learned from the World Financial Crisis that strangling labour and denying it any participation in the economic benefits of globalization was in effect preventing the circulation of the necessary consumer power necessary to sustainably purchase their own industrial products and services and sustain the companies themselves. Their greed was cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. In the end the financial crisis was caused by the inordinate build-up of debt, particularly mortgage debt on the consumer side and over-leveraged corporate debt on the supply-side-----but the key factor on the consumer side is that the slide into consumer debt has not been caused by overspending but by imposed and exploitative underearning rendering existing consumption and rising debt service unsustainable, all in turn largely caused by imbalanced globalization and the unfair and unsustainable loss of bargaining power of labor; plus the cancerous growth of the hypersophisticated unproductive financial sector draining more and more from the real economy.

The same loss of labour’s earning power is ironically just as true in “Communist” China and other developing countries where the percentage of GDP received as personal income and benefits has shrunk even during the economic miracle of a dramatic rise of GDP. The Chinese worker is even more exploited than the American even though he may put the American out of his job as he creates more Chinese billionaires. Demagogues on both sides then foment the one side against the other—the Americans shrieking at the Chinese worker to spend more and save less, and the Chinese ranting at the American to spend less and save more, while the true villain in the piece is their common employers and their collusive states and political establishments that have reduced the percentage of GDP going to workers on both sides of the Pacific to an intolerable and unsustainable level. And similarly the so-called “National Debt Crisis” is another false construction-----not caused by “overspending” as in the mindless rant of the Tea Party, but the majority of the deficit caused by the Reagan-Bush tax cuts to the upper income and wealth-holding elite, inheritance tax gutting, and wastage on the Iraq and other wars in the service not of the American people but of the narrow oil, military-industrial complex, and Israeli interests, and from the ageing of the nation through demographic change.

And, an additional side effect of the imbalanced globalization leading to this shrinkage of personal income from wages is the smashing of the family, where now both husband and wife must work at reduced wage levels to keep the family afloat economically, destroying their ability to devote themselves or their resources to the family itself, causing increased divorce, delinquency, maleducation and social problems----a fortiori for the hyper-exploited migrant labor class in China-----and making the hypocritical protestations of the capital owning classes to champion “family values” and “Confucian values” an empty farce…………………”

“You may well be right on the matter of China” interjected Sartorius, “I lived many years there and watched the growth of their capital and labour markets. Their competitive advantage derived from low wages, high foreign investment and protection of state capital, multinational and private big capital making them into a manufacturing economic powerhouse, accounting for up to half of the US merchandise trade deficit. But the working class and most of the middle-class in China is effectively locked out of the benefits of this prosperity. The government outlaws free labour unions---incredibly in a Communist country!---and the Party controlled unions do nothing for the workers but are in service to the party and state, rented out to the highest bidder. There is no effective independent labour organization, collective bargaining and use of the strike to increase wages and benefits.

The result? China systematically exploits its working population in both the labour markets and the capital markets. Banned free unions keep wages low, but interest paid by banks is strictly controlled so that working people derive little profit from savings, ironically forcing them to save even more and exacerbate the trade deficit with the industrialized countries. Nowadays real interest rates are negative—subsidizing the state and state-owned and big capital sectors which receive artificially cheap loans while workers lose money on their savings----you get 2.3% interest on your saving accounts fixed by law, but inflation is 2.8% and rising towards 6% levels. Result? You lose money by putting it in the bank and the only effective alternative investment is speculation in the real estate, commodities or immature stock markets, which creates bubbles for future disasters. Yet to your chagrin you have to save even more to make up for the fact that your savings are falling in value relative to what you need to purchase in the future---housing inflated by the collusion of corrupt local government and Communist Party leaders and property developers bleeding working people white in the real estate markets, education for your children and your retirement without an effective social security system. The further result is that wage compensation in real terms as a percentage of GDP has steadily decreased during the boom of the last twenty years, though rising in absolute terms. Bearing the brunt of the exploitation are the hundreds of millions of migrant workers unable to unionize and used, abused and shipped back to their countryside villages.

Marx advocated a classless society but China exploits a new lower class---the hukouless migrant New-Proletariat. On the supply and capital side the over-profitability of capital leads to gross overinvestment in surplus capacity, causing further export surpluses and wastage of social resources. The simple fact is that in terms of a circulatory system the money is not circulating through China back into the outside world in any sustainable way—hence the two and three trillion dollar foreign exchange buildup------and significantly it is not even circulating back to the Chinese working and middle classes effectively. Because wages are artificially low Chinese workers and consumers do not buy American and European goods (or notably services) in sufficient quantity. Profits build up for the entrepreneurial and capital-owning classes, but strict government control of the capital account prevents even them from recirculating their excess profits even in the form of individual overseas portfolio investment or personal investment of the wealthy or middle-classes in stock and securities markets of the USA, Europe or elsewhere because they are prohibited from personally directly buying foreign stocks and bonds for investment or retirement accounts.

The surplus capital derived from China’s formidable export surpluses since she joined the WTO thus can’t recirculate back to the West and elsewhere in either the trade account through Chinese consumption or in the capital account through Chinese individual investment abroad. The result? The excess liquidity builds up in two places: in the excess foreign currency reserves of the Chinese treasury, and in the general economy it builds up in unsustainable bubbles in the real-estate and fixed investment sector and in the immature stock market and commodity runs and crashes unrelated to the underlying productivity of the listed companies but only a function of excess liquidity seeking somewhere to go, cut off from much more profitable and sustainable foreign investments.

The excess liquidity only recirculates back into US Treasury securities, unhealthily and unstably funding the US fiscal deficit. The funds should be recirculating in the trade and capital accounts through Chinese consumer import purchases and Chinese wealth-holders personal investments abroad but these channels are cut off by nationalist and mercantilist Chinese controls. The final result? As economists like Paul Krugman and others have aptly pointed out, you then have massive circulatory failure in the global economy, a stroke, with a liquidity embolism building up in China which is going to burst sooner or later if there is no change and quite possibly provoke another crash or deeper systemic crisis along these unstable fault lines.” Sartorius agreed.

“Exactly! That’s exactly the point I have been trying to make!” jumped back Garry, “What then are the lessons we take away from the World Financial Crisis? The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting and in fact in the adverse conditions of a financial panic are apt to melt-down under systemic risks, system failure and malfunctions. Therefore the Neo-Liberal illusory dream of the invisible hand of the market serving as the invisible hand of God’s justice is demagoguery. Governments must remain strong and vigilant in their regulation and balancing of power vis-a-vis industrial and financial interests and in the public interest, both national and international. Second, we must accept that the market system will periodically run amok and collapse and that therefore the state and the international collectivity of states and international organizations must use their powers to maintain an adequate Safety Net for times of recession, trade imbalance, depression and systemic breakdown. Third, we must come to grips with the gutting out of the New Deal safety net previously based on a long-term benefit-sharing relationship between labor and capital which no longer exists or functions.

It is clear that to the modern multinationals, apart from their highly paid managerial and technocratic elite core, workers are disposable in its struggle to survive in intensified global competition and that therefore they are unwilling to maintain the pension plans, job security, health plans and other social safety net expenses within the enterprise that formerly prevailed from the era of collective bargaining. General Motors’ gutting out of labor benefits is the exemplary case of erasing all that has been won for fifty years. Given this reality the safety net must be either taken up by an enlarged state in concert with new international “Social Contract treaties” which impose the same burdens on all enterprises globally, or concerted legislation must force the enterprises to do so without the escape route of offshoring to jurisdictions without such safety net burdens. It is both unacceptable and unsustainable for enterprises and financial intermediaries to privatize profits while socializing costs and risks at the expense of taxpayers and working people. We cannot be deterred by the right-wing red-herring of “socialism”----the benefits the New Deal secured for industrial workers must be secured from gutting out by unbalanced globalization and guaranteed to all workers and if the enterprise cannot accomplish this, then, just as in the case of the New Deal, there must be an acceptance of an increased responsibility of the state for being forced to take over the Safety Net resulting from the default of the capital-owning classes at the enterprise level from this obligation, and there must be a general acceptance of an increased responsibility of the capital owning classes to pay taxes for this burden which they are shunting off onto the state by disburdening their enterprises of equitable wages and fringe benefits and by international tax-flight.

Fourth, the bailout of the hypocritically “too big to fail” investment banks and the financial sector has egregiously transferred immense wealth from and imposed incalculable future burdens and liabilities upon the ordinary worker and taxpayer to the benefit of the financial sector. Never have so many given so much to so few, and so unjustly! The financial enterprises must be therefore be held to a standard of public trust---they can no longer operate as mere private enterprises for private gain, regardless of whether and when they pay back the short-term bail out loans---having underwritten their survival the taxpayers, workers and citizens have become irrevocable stakeholders in those enterprises and capital and management will ignore their interests at their own peril, including reasonable intervention by the state in their outrageous conduct to prevent predatory externalized risk creation if necessary to the public interest. Fifth, government regulation must end the abusive “externalities” of the present abusive system by which private profit and irrational risk taking by the financial elite imposes systemic risk on other institutions, the state and the taxpaying public at no cost to the perpetrators. In particular this means a firm regulation and control of such egregious instruments as credit default swaps and a firm re-imposition of their externalities and costs upon the capital owning classes which exploit them. Just as firms must be made to pay for the externality of the pollution they cause, so they must be made to pay for the externalized systemic risks their abusive risk creation imposes on others.

We have come full circle in 2008 back to 1929, and we now know that Keynsian economics still works and is vital for regulation and calibrating the market system and the corporate, financial and moneyed elite sectors must be harnessed to bear their share of the necessary burden, with “risk-adjusted” increases in the tax and penalty on speculative income, capital gains, inheritance and wealth taxes as needed to restore the circulation of spending power to the working and middle-classes on a globalized basis. We have to overturn the myopic and class-biased Reagan revolution of offensive tax-cuts and strict monetary policy only focused on preventing inflation and imposition of artificial deficits on the public sector via the bogus tactic of lowering taxes for the upper classes thus creating a false deficit. Sixth, we cannot trust the marketplace to discount risk by itself, and we need strict regulation of the derivatives market, including the infamous “credit default swaps.”---we can no longer accept that financial innovations are a good in and of themselves ignoring the horrific systemic externalities they impose on others and the general public for private gain. We need stronger regulation of such instruments, accounting standards and a rooting out of institutionalized financial fraud to stabilize markets globally…………………..

………………….The amount of individual freedom a people, or all the peoples of the world may keep depends on its collective political maturity. The maturity of the masses of the people depends on their ability to recognize their own interests. In history a pendulum swings back and forth between relative liberation and repression. The swing towards the loss of freedom begins with the panic and delusion of a headless people driven to stampede by a demagogic and reactionary elite and the tools and mignons which serve them. Every quantum leap of technological and economic progress leaves the intellectual development of the people or the masses of peoples a step behind. It takes a considerable time for their values and understandings to adjust and adapt to the novel circumstances.

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

The demagogic manipulators of the right are far quicker in identifying and defending the narrow self-interests of their own and those they serve. In the present era the universal phenomenon of Globalization as accelerated at breakneck speed has left the consciousness of the “People of Peoples” of the world, not to speak of the outmoded institutions of the nation-state, far behind, causing their political maturity to regress in the unfamiliar new global landscape. A mistake of the idealists of democratic and socialist consciousness has been to assume that mass-consciousness by benign historical laws could only rise and rise constantly and never regress. Many pessimists and cynics would cite Pareto’s Iron Law of Oligarchy, whereby every economic and political system is subject to perversion and corruption by a small minority who seek to forcibly monopolize the control of resources and power---an Iron Law of Predatory Leverage, whereby under any and all social and economic systems a tiny oligarchic elite ineradicably seeks to secure and monopolize illegitimate advantages to the harm and detriment of the majority and institutionalize them as rentier class privileges. They would have us believe that the predatory stateless financial elite, the “hot money,” and its economic oppression and its stranglehold on the newly globalized economic system is unopposable and unreformable. They would label futile our attempts to build a system of global governance to balance the abusive excesses of that stateless kleptocratic financial elite, constituting itself into a new rentier class of unproductive stateless usurious exploiters---our investment banks and their ilk and hangers on, hitherto unrestrainable by any state, combinations of states, or supra-national institutions of governance.

They would label as hopeless the gullible mass movements such as the Tea Party, who as the unthinking and unteachably manipulated dupes of the financially controlled media buy into the mindless rant of neo-liberal ideology and end up both destroying their own interests and serving the interests of predatory capital rather than the people or any fair and sustainable system of global governance------a peculiarly though not exclusively American mental disease. Hence our latest conundrum before the latest swing of the pendulum following the World Financial Crisis……….Is our situation hopeless then? By no means!----I am still moved by the native optimism of being an American and a child of the Enlightenment-----As our former HEW Secretary John W. Gardner was wont to say: “We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems!”---I believe there are the makings of a quantum leap forward in our present morass……….

………………What then is the way out? Am I or the labour movement against globalization per se? Absolutely not. We are internationalists and in particular labour internationalists in a long tradition. We could never turn back the clock of history even if we weren’t. Is a communist revolution and command economy the answer? The history of China and Eastern Europe also show the pitfalls of that path in terms of both economic stagnation and inefficiency and loss of individual and entrepreneurial liberty, to the extent that even the Chinese Communists have largely abandoned it. They endorse a “Socialist-market Economy,” or a mixed economy in which a vibrant and innovative marketplace plays a vital role alongside and including a state sector which provides a social safety net and regulatory framework. We need that at a minimum, though striking the proper balance may well come down differently, preserving many more of the strengths of the free market system while reining in and eliminating its weaknesses and abuses.

Despite the opium dreams of the Tea Party there is no way to unglobalize the world economy and go back to a faux-ideal of self-sufficiency, hard work and an imagined ‘invisible hand’ of a fictitiously idealized marketplace, unless we take the path of hermit countries like North Korea and accept their levels of poverty---and we would probably then later need to confront a world war with whoever did dominate the global economy in our stead. What we need is more globalization not less globalization----that is globalization of the labour movement and collective bargaining as well as globalization of the New Deal institutions of the regulatory state and social safety net to balance the runaway abuses of globalized and globally irresponsible capital. We don’t need an EU bailout of Greece-----we need an EU assumption of the Europe-wide costs of the international social safety net based on an expanded and balanced international tax-base including taxes on international financial transactions. And we need a rebalancing of the maldistribution of the fruits of the increases of productivity of the new globalized economy, conferring higher wages and benefits and sustainably restoring purchasing power to the working and middle classes across the globe to prevent purchasing power circulatory meltdown.

To correct the imbalances of the overgrowth of the financial sector vis-à-vis the real economy, much but not all of it viscious, irresponsible and predatory, we need strong and international financial regulation and a firm shifting of tax burdens onto unearned financial profits, unearned gains from financial speculation and short-term speculative securities trading. To counter this Neo-Disraeli-like growth of two-nations, Rich and Poor, we need a firm shifting of the tax burden onto the Neo-rich, with Excise taxes on luxury items during time of severe recession, claw-back of higher tax-rates on the rich recovering from the pseudo-deficits of the Reagan-Bush tax cuts for the rich, and we even need to shift from mere Income Tax to a Wealth Tax, administered on financial assets on an ongoing basis as well as through inheritance taxes on death. The sheer demagoguery of the right, calling this “class war” seeks to ignore that the class war, if there is one, was started by the conscienceless upper class offensive of faux-deficits brought on by the Reagan-Bush tax cuts for the rich, the imbalanced globalization of capital while gutting out national social safety nets, social security and collective bargaining, and the excess military spending of the neo-Imperialist wars and the overgrowth of the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ which Eisenhower warned so much against. Keynes demanded this at the national level in the 30’s and would demand the same at the international, EU-wide and globalized level after 2008 were he alive today. And this rebalancing of international trade and of the benefits of globalization needs to be equally effective in the service sector that is increasingly the dominant sector of most advanced economies, as well as in the traditional areas of industry and agriculture.

China and the emerging market countries need to liberalize access to services, the dominant part of developed economies, including financial services for individual Chinese from the West to balance their freer access to the developed world under the old WTO in their dominant sector of manufactured products such as textiles so that the structural trade gap can be controlled and growth in both the developed and developing world can be sustainable. That is also why I am on your side in fighting for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as a means of strengthening the international public sector functions necessary to preserve a “Globalized Social Contract” or “International Social Contract” as one might say in the European Union, or an “International New Deal” as we might put it in plain old American. Two crucial keys needed to restored balance would be globalized labour unions and effective globalized collective bargaining through them and a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly to give strength, effectiveness and democratic legitimacy to globally operating public institutions commensurate with the now globalized economy and generally globalized society and environment. So I would say that I and Robert are here for the same essential purpose.

“Well Garry, I am now in the camp of reform, but in my hotter days I was on the workers’ revolutionary side. Do you think the crisis after 2008 requires that we revive the idea of revolution----go back to an ideal of a socialist revolution overthrowing an oppressive and exploitative class system and replacing capitalism with something new altogether?-----I often muse----ambivalent-----that we are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and that we need to be more radical and bold altogether.” Sartorius asked.

“Robert, if we could enter paradise, Shambhala, Utopia or the infinitely creative society with a revolution I would personally be willing to try. The communist and socialist revolutions were betrayed by their founding parties and powerholders who cared more for their own power than the principles of the revolution, but even those principles were perhaps flawed with contradictions or unworkability. I would join or lead the revolution if it would work. It remains more a myth than a reality. But if the reality deteriorates to a nightmare and the alternative is more clearly workable I would not exclude the possibility of returning to that route. Now I am in the reform camp but a return to revolution is conceivable. How to combine the social idealism and safety net of socialism with the energy, enterprise, innovation and creativity of free enterprise and a free people are a conundrum. Consider also the costs against the benefits of revolution. But some choices are more fundamental than gain or loss.

At this point in history I would say let us try the path of peaceful, albeit forceful reform. If the vested interests, selfish elites, plutocratic and autocratic power holders and the Establishment are enlightened enough to work peacefully for and accept effective reform on behalf of the working class and majority of the peoples of the world I am willing to cooperate. But as John F. Kennedy was want so say in my youth: “If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.” So I would try to make common cause with the existing establishment to bring about the needed peaceful evolution and revolution while there is a modicum of good faith and good cause for hope. But, consistent with Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum to “talk softly but carry a big stick”

I would advise the workers, unions, workers movements and the majority of the populace to try to empower themselves peacefully through global common action and enabling legal reforms, but if the state is hijacked and use of corrupt police, money-dominated faux-democratic politics and unrepresentative laws are used, as they so often are, by the narrow interests of capital or autocratic selfishness, then I would advise that the labour and people’s movements take preventative measures such as formation of worker’s militias, self-defense corps and aggressive strikes capable of resisting the predictable repressions of repressive capital or their allied de-legitimatized state or states. Even as Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence maintains, along with the French, when the government or its controlling elite breaks the Social Contract, then the People retain a right of revolution, even violent revolution, until a legitimate government is created or restored. But we should be responsible and try the path of peaceful revolution first, such as attempting a more balanced globalization, globalization of the social safety net and the creation of your United Nations Parliamentary Assembly with its re-imagined United Nations, which I sometimes nickname the “Imagine Nations!”

“I am completely with you….” added Wole Obatala, “…..and if American and European workers have suffered from this imbalance of bargaining power vis-à-vis the multinational corporations, how much more so have the African workers suffered because of their even greater deficit of bargaining power in a distorted marketplace.”

“So what do you think of the global campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, Mr. Obatala?” asked Eva.

“To tell you the truth, when I first encountered another “Global Campaign” with the likes of Isis and Osiris and Sir Bob and all I was skeptical, even a little hostile. You see, these rock stars are mythomaniacs, in the negative sense of pandering to their own personal myths to convince the world of their own extraordinary worth. The impression that they give in some efforts like Live 8 and the like is that Africa is fatally troubled and can only be “saved” by outside help----not to mention celebrities, celebrities adopting black children, and charity concerts. This is a destructive and misleading conceit. They seem to be taking up “The Rock Star’s Burden” with its implicit egotism, though I want to be fair to their generous motives as well and recognize that they do do quite a bit of good that we in Africa sorely need, so we shouldn’t make our complaint the top priority in this thing. But really, it is only a “Band-Aid” on a wound, to make a pun, and we have to start from the basic reality that Africa will be saved, if there is any meaning at all in that word, by the self-reliant hard work, dreams and enterprise of African people, if their parasitical elites and persecutors will let them alone to build their lives for themselves---and a little help from their friends, which we need and appreciate. So when I heard about another “Global Campaign” I was a bit skeptical, but when I came to learn more, and how it was for the benefit of all of the peoples of the world and necessary in this era of intense globalization, and especially how it would let Africans speak more directly to the world without being ventriloquized through these rock star campaigns, then I jumped on the bandwagon wholeheartedly.”

“Yes, I recall that you said something very similar in your latest novel published in Nigeria, ‘The Soul of the Soil’” added Christina, “………….are you working on another now?”

Obatala laughed and replied, “Well I am taking an “R＆R” from that effort at the moment----it took me six years to finish the last one and I am not in too much of a hurry to rush into another. I need to recover my life! It is amazing how a major book takes over your life, just like a pregnancy does to a woman, and some of them take nine years rather than a mere nine months to bring to birth into the light of day!”

“That is very true” replied Sartorius, “And even after the books are born they too also keep you up at night for a couple of years with their constant feeding and diapers until they finally make their way into the world by themselves! I am just working on a joint book with my friend on the global committee Günter Gross on the rise of World Literature in the sense of Goethe’s ‘Weltliteratur’ and just our preliminary research has stretched out over four years----of course it is an enormous project touching on the literary contributions of all the cultures of the world to a canon evolving over several millennia. Luckily, however, the work on the UNPA Committee takes me all around the world and I am able to pick the brains of the global best and brightest as to their culture or region’s contribution to the canon of World Literature. Without such input we would be hard pressed to deal with the enormity of the task. ”

“Well if I can be of any assistance in your efforts do not hesitate to ask, if my meager store of knowledge might prove of any value, that is.” offered Obatala with a gentlemanly show of modesty.

“Gladly! Well let’s see…….How should I get the ball rolling?........Wait, let me get my notebook and take down a few notes----I’ll never remember anything unless I get my legal tablets out…….All Right, how about starting off with a broad question?----------------What would you consider to be Africa’s greatest potential contribution to World Literature?”

“Well, not to be purposefully cryptic or paradoxical, I would say that the greatest contribution African writers and artists can make to World Literature is by remaining African, that is in vital contact with the African World and its particular genius, which, deeply rooted, is also part of the universal archetypal genius of humanity as a whole. As Leopold Senghor was wont to say drawing analogy to a flourishing plant or tree, Africans and African writers----if I or anyone can presume to speak for so diverse a myriad of peoples and traditions and individuals----should be both rooted in their own unique milieu, rooted in their own African soil, yet send forth their branches and vines in all directions to draw nourishment from the sun and light of all the world in all directions, and from all the peoples and cultures and traditions of the world.

What contribution shall Africa best make? What defines its potential unique contribution? I would say this by way of general observation, with the inherent qualifications of all very broad generalizations: Africa, like the ancient Greeks, remains in her constituent cultures, rooted in the more immanent experience of the soil, the Earth, and of palpable material experience. What I mean is not a naïve romantic primitivism, but rather the notion that the African World embodied in the millennia old cultures of the peoples of Africa and their experience of their gods and communities that are more firmly rooted both in the soil of their origin, and in the cosmic totality, perhaps in an age in which that umbilical connection has been attenuated or lost by other civilizations focused more on metaphysical abstraction, science, consumer market materialism and institutionalized or ideologized religion. This is not to deny that all peoples in their origins have been similarly rooted and in interaction with the cosmic totality, perhaps in a universal collective unconsciousness that is the common heritage of all mankind, but that perhaps this vital connection has been more vitally preserved in the communal, perhaps tribal cultures of the diverse African peoples. Within this communal culture, ritual tradition has perhaps preserved this link, and as Nietzsche has often observed in his work with relation to the very similar origins of Greek tragedy, myth, music, dance, the plastic visual arts, and ultimately literature and the collective conscious and unconscious are all rooted in the Ritual Heritage of mankind-drawing the whole community together in ritually enacted dream under the totality of the cosmic sky and upon the broad fertile Earth, as in the rites of Dionysos, which gave birth to Greek tragedy.

But modern civilization in its industrial and post-industrial uprootedness, social- and self-alienations, severing individuals in vast metropolises and conurbations from their communities, families, communal roots, rituals and traditions, has posed a stark spiritual challenge to the peoples of the world, African and other. In the West perhaps the transition from the classical Greek and Roman gods to the Platonic-Christian tradition heightened this alienation from the cosmic totality rooted in the earth, confining the world of the spirit to the world of the mind, excluding the world of the earth, governed by science and reason, and excluding the chthonic, unconscious underworld realm, attenuated but never wholly lost anywhere. In the West D.H. Lawrence is associated with the counter-movement back into the sensual and subconscious realms, particularly through a re-spiritualization of sexuality, but also including a regeneration and re-spiritualization of the communal culture and its immanent immersion in the cosmos.

In the Asiatic realm, perhaps Buddhism, that twin-brother of Christianity likewise oriented towards an individual salvation, similarly alienated those peoples from their cosmic, chthonic, communal and earthly roots, confining their spirituality to a more mental realm. Perhaps in the modern world, the relative contribution of the African World to the spirituality of global humanity might be to be, relatively speaking, good brothers to the spirit of the Greeks and in making a bridge of themselves to the realms of the Dionysian, Apollinian and the Promethean universal spirits of mankind, while adding their own communal heritage, their accommodating and balancing of the realms of the human and of the divine in a cosmic social harmony, of the sense of the common life of the living, the dead and the yet unborn in a common community of the spirit communicated via vital communal ritual, and a celebration of the transit of the realm of transition, dismemberment, transformation, and regeneration in the hero or god’s middle passage between those diverse cosmic realms.

The archetypal protagonists of the chthonic realm, Orpheus, Xbalanque and Huanahpu, Gilgamesh, and Ulysses did penetrate into the chthonic netherworld in concrete and elemental terms. And in Asia, Lord Shiva drove his ecstatic course through the very earth, uniting all of the elements of the cosmos with his powerful erection, which burst through to the Earth’s surface, split in three, and spurted sperm into the upper cosmos like a vast cosmic geyser from the chthonic depths! If the African writer and artist is only a fraction better situated from his communal heritage to follow the thread of Ariadne, collective Mnemosyne perhaps,-----to guide humanity from its lost wanderings in the Labyrinth of Alienation of modern civilization back to the organic light of the cosmic sun; to help it overcome its schizophrenic compartmentalization of world and self and refigure globalization to include a greater completing of the cosmic circle, human consciousness and collective unconsciousness circumnavigating each other in reconstitution of a lost organic unity------it is only because, perhaps they have kept the silken thread of the universal human collective unconscious more firmly between their communal fingers.

As you know, I am from Nigeria, and my study of World Literature and of the Greek tragedy, with its struggles of humanity and the gods, its Dionysian, Apollinian and Promethean spirits, leads me ever back to my own Yoruba heritage, and the stories of our African gods, Ogun, Obatala and Sango. Our ritual enactment of the drama of our ancient gods correlates well with the common heritage of mankind reflected in the better-known Greek tragedy, and there are many parallels, though of course many divergences, between Ogun and Dionysos and the Dionysian and perhaps Promethean universal human spirits and sensibilities and Obatala, and the Apollinian.

Not that one or the other tradition is better or worse, but perhaps because we still have authentic communal enactments of their tragic stories within our extant tribal communities, and the “choric voice” of the tribe still, in a weakened state or transformed state, preserves a link to the masked archetypal voice of the collective unconscious common heritage of mankind, so perhaps we can make a unique contribution at the present moment, perhaps in aid of such Western artists as Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats and innumerable others, struggling to recover the endangered common archetypal and cosmic imagination and so dialate the consciousness of all mankind. With them we may find again everything sacred and nothing profane. T.S. Eliot, in his famous Tradition and the Individual Talent elaborates on the plastic nature of the collective wisdom of mankind, and how each new master work takes its place in “the tradition” and adds to and modifies it by its presence.

Despite in colonial days being revolutionary, Africans are also deep traditionalists, attached to the traditions of their tribes and ancestors as much as Eliot to his own great tradition. The best African writers are also Protagonists of Continuity, especially with relationship to their communal heritages, along with Eliot, as well as persistent reformers and even revolutionaries with regard to social exploitation, corruption and disintegration which the evils of modern life too often inflict on that continuity. Much of their effort is directed at a retrieval of this common heritage of all mankind, alongside their own communal or tribal heritage, even though some may yield to the inferior temptation of ressentiment in attempting a retributive and spurious racial retrieval—Rastifarian nonsense, based not on the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the race, one with the human race as a whole, but a pseudo-tribalist war-totem of pigment and hate alien to their own heritage. The task is not to overthrow tradition, as the early Modernists would have done, but first of all to widen it to include the millennia of contributions of all civilizations and their ancient written and oral heritages, and then form a new living relationship with that “globalized tradition” including the heritage of conscious literature and myth alongside the eternal presence of the collective unconscious, yet not allowing the tradition to ossify and strangle new and creative innovation, but rather to lend energy and resource to such innovation in the constant evolution of the ever-transforming collective wisdom of humanity.

In some ways the sagas and myths of the African gods such as the suffering and struggling god Ogun and the archetypally saintly Obatala draw renewed modern vitality because these gods are, like struggling modern man, struggling with their own destinies, limitations and errors in an uncertain cosmos; they are journeying gods, exploring gods, making their way through a cosmic wilderness——a realm of uncertain meaning and destiny----- much in common with modern and classical Western human heroes-------in the struggle to work out their own destiny in a universe where, brother with modern man, the fate of the gods may be as uncertain or as absurd even, as the fates of their cosmic brothers, modern man and mankind, with whom they are common members of a more comprehensive spiritual cosmic community---including gods and men, female and male, man and nature, and the spirits of the living, the dead and the yet unborn-----which they must struggle against odds to restore, revitalize and rebalance to sustain the process of cosmic life.

The transformation of uncivil urges into the woof and web of human society----family and community---is one of the great mysteries and miracles of human civilization. Sexuality, profound, savage, perverse and life-giving, the fear of death and the craving for life, the fear of the dead and the dream of the immortality of the flesh as well as the spirit---these are all part of the sexual dialectic within us. Mastery and submission, sadism and masochism, the desire to hurt those whom we love and be hurt by them for our desires, the conflict within us between knowledge formed into a civilizing power and the sustaining and solely sustainable power of unknowable and profoundly uncivil urges of primordial vitality, balanced precariously between the desire for eternal peace and rest and the equal and opposite desire for ever renewed and endlessly vibrant life, these contradictions and involutions of the human spirit, they have always been and will always be within us. Its terror, its horror and orgasmic beauties will always threaten and convulse the fragile vial of mere individuality, and dissolve and re-dissolve its essence into the greater colloidal solution, the great suspension of living energy, life and life force, out of which it is forever precipitating and returning to its mothering solution. The fusion of the male and female nucleus, and the male and female psyches, one into another, necessitating the mutual obliteration of both into a greater whole, is the horror and beauty to which we are born. All this gives ever renewing life energy and force to our myths, our religions, our art and to our world literature, both here in Africa and universally across the living world of man.

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


The very environmental movement calls out for a new and creative reconciliation of man and nature, hitherto implacable tormenters of each other. Thus Ogun, with Osiris and Dionysos-Zagreus, and by extension Christ, shares the experience of modern man in his psychic disintegration, and they must face the psychic abyss of dismemberment, death, greater reintegration and resurrection to a greater life---they must negotiate the Passage of Terror---the middle passage between the realms of life, and death and greater life. African myth may thus make some vital contribution to the psychic and social sanity of modern man and modern civilization—the strengthening of the communal psyche of global humanity, rendering it more fit for global life. In the end, what is the social and cosmic role of myth, literature and the imaginative arts—African literature and World Literature included?----we can only say that they are in service to life, and their role and their measure of success is the extent to which they strengthen the individual and the collective communal strength and capacity for life—and to marshal, mobilize and enhance their maximum common energies--------to endure life’s horrors, contradictions, transitions and trials—inevitable death, transformation and re-birth included, and to more completely partake of life’s beauties, ecstasies and joys---to live most wholly and most vitally.” concluded Obatala.

“Well, I am afraid my brother here is much too much of a romantic for me…….” enjoined Pieter Verhoven, Professor of the University of Witwatersrand while draining the first glass of his second bottle of Scotch, “I am a scientist, an anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist and I have seen too much of the veldt and the jungle to believe in the benign face of nature and the all harmonizing power of mankind’s myths and religions. For me a Darwinian approach offers the key to understanding myth, ritual and religion-----in other words, as an evolutionary biologist I side with those who think man’s propensity for religion has some adaptive function---some survival function. Faith would not have persisted over thousands of generations if it had not helped the human race to survive. Oh, yes, I know what you are thinking----that a true materialist scientist of the Enlightenment would conclude that faith is a useless or retrograde by-product of other human characteristics, best superseded by reason and science. Does Darwinian selection take place at the level only of individuals, or of groups as well? You can denounce me as a “Social Darwinist” but I firmly believe that groups which practised religion effectively and enjoyed its benefits were likely to prevail over those which lacked these advantages. Of course, the picture is muddied by the vast changes that religion went through in the journey from tribal dancing to Anglican hymns and as the opium of social class exploitation denounced by Marx. The advent of settled, agricultural societies, at least 10,000 years ago, led to a new division of labour, in which priestly castes tried to monopolise access to the divine, and the authorities sought to control sacred ecstasy, both in pursuit of their own class interests.

Still, the modifications that religion has undergone should not distract from focusing of faith’s basic functions. In what way, then, does religion enhance a group’s survival? Above all, by promoting moral rules and cementing cohesion and an inner dedication of the evolving powers of the individual to a collective mission, in a way that makes people ready to subordinate, regiment and sacrifice themselves for the group and to deal ruthlessly with outsiders. Faith survives against all odds and all evidence because of the collective instinct for survival bred in the bones. At root all religions are “churches militant” and all gods are war totems---even when we make a religion of a people or a state---“Das Volk---über alles!”---“Ein fester Schloss ist unser Gott!”……Believe me the believing heart is a savage heart, but a heart with a sacred respect for the holiness of the life force itself! The great proselytizing religions have the further advantage of widening the previously tribal cults to a civilizational basis and allowing a ever wider population to struggle for survival together, united in supertribal quasi-war totems and enhancing their probability of survival against the smaller cults. Can any religion become universal, then, uniting the entire human community for the purpose of all of humanity’s common survival? Ethically this would be a logical culmination of the process of evolution, but would probably degenerate into schism and struggle of competing power elites within such a universal religion for power and control----unmasking the rootedness of all religion in the will to power and the survival instinct.

All religion is concerned in varying degrees with metaphysical ideas, moral norms and mystical experience. But in the great religions, the moral and the mystical have often been in tension. The more a religion stresses ecstasy, the less it seems hidebound by rules—especially rules of public behaviour, as opposed to purely religious norms. And religious movements from the Deuteronomists and Pharisees of ancient Israel to the English Puritans that emphasise moral norms tend to eschew the ecstatic. Max Weber, one of the fathers of religious sociology, contrasted the transcendental feelings enjoyed by Catholic mass-goers with the Protestant obsession with behaviour. In Imperial Russia, Peter the Great tried to pull the Russian Orthodox church from the former extreme to the latter: to curb its love of rite and mystery and make it more of a moral agency like the Lutheran churches of northern Europe. He failed. Russians liked things mystical, and they didn’t like being told what to do and how they must do it---------especially being told to abandon their instincts.

We must distinguish the truth value of religion from its social, civilizational and moral and survival value. I have always been underimpressed with the truth value of Islam: I consider it a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion extending to the fabrication of a few non-events, qualities it shares with the other great religions. But nonetheless I respect Islam as the taproot of a great civilization which at times in history has even eclipsed the West in its accomplishments and manifestations, and which has played a profound role in raising tribal societies to the level of civilization, no doubt enabling their further survival in Darwinian terms. I demystify these things and put them on a scientific basis.” he said.

“Science may explain people, but it cannot understand them.” offered Eva.

“You may say so, my dear lady, but nevertheless the roots of religion are blood red and savage, like the Aztec gods Huitzilapochtli and Quetzalquatl and those roots are firmly rooted in the urge to survival of the blood----survival of the tribe and the Volk even above the claims of the survival of the individual. But there is where mankind runs into its contradictions---for every tribe or race or Volk is a small part of humanity and so the totems have to be rationalized and moralized into ethical forms and norms that can broaden and unite the billions and not just the savage ten-thousand or one million of one’s own tribe and race. But then they get farther from the blood and enervate into plaster saints and pastel images that fail to grip the individual heart or the communal common heart. So every millennium or so demands a cathartic religious revolution or reformation that pours the living blood back into the ennervate chalices, and it’s usually a religious war that does the trick nicely, bringing back the atavistic heart and blood to the sacrificial alter.

No, I am not optimistic about the spirit of man----yes, religions and myths unite our metatribes with ethical and spiritual metanorms and metavalues---but they demand an Anti-Christ, an apostate, an enemy of the true faith, an inimical tribe of unbelievers, a realm of darkness, an Infidel barbarian “Evil Empire” to hate and crush as the price of that unity---believe me the holy altars are covered with homicidal war totems and the unwashable stains of blood—and it is the very effectiveness of these war totems which has led to the survival of their peoples---assuredly each one the “chosen people” of their totem god like the fierce Yaweh dismembering the Canaanites and Amelekites for his chosen lovelies! Believe me---if you have any candid honesty to look upon humanity without cheerful optimistic delusions you will see that Hate is older than Love in the human heart and in its tabernacles, and its roots have sunk in and set themselves down far deeper!

If you rent the veil of the Temple and every human heart within it you will find two inimical Giants eternally struggling with each other---Eros and Thanatos---powerfully muscled limb to limb, tooth to fang and blood to blood---- Love yes---but a love rooted in the hate and aggression of the human heart fighting for survival in the jungle into which Adam and Eve found themselves cast—from an Eden which was surely but a myth covering the fact that the true god was not of any Paradise but always of the Jungle with a savage face conceived by man’s fevered brain out of his struggle with that jungle to which he had to unite his whole frightened will through the collective strength and will of his tribesmen and their totems and protecting gods to survive! Shiva the Destroyer has always been part of the pantheon even beside Shiva the Sustainer.

And where does all of this leave a civilized man of enlightenment and science? God only knows! Probably man will strangle and choke himself to extinction on his own hate and aggression and short-sightedness while praying to his God while his enemy prays to his own God by a hated name in another language! I think Huntington’s Clash of so-called Civilizations will be nearer the truth in the end than Naipaul’s “Universal Civilization.”----don’t get me wrong---I hope to God that I am wrong, but I don’t think I am. I don’t think we are going to root out the Savage God in the savage human heart by denying he exists. Rationality and the light of the Enlightenment click off in the human brain when the red light of threat, survival, instinct and do-or-die sacrifice goes on! Or maybe hidden in that savage heart so savagely struggling for survival is the secret wish of Thanatos for the Dark Nirvana of death and peace---as in Swinburne’s Garden of Proserpine—“Only the sleep eternal, in eternal night.” Civilization---civilization is eternally struggling with the caged ape within----struggling with its deepest rooted collective unconscious and most savage instincts. Civilization may survive---I give it a fighting chance—I am one of its discontents but also its loyal prodigal son-----but if it does it will be by the skin of its teeth!

“Pieter, Pieter…..lighten up! You’ll have to cut Pieter a little slack----with him mankind’s quest for collective ecstasy takes myriad forms---in his case melodramatic melancholy flowing out of an excess of Schnapps!” chirped in Obatala jokingly.


“What would you consider the strongest candidates of African Literature for inclusion in a body of World Literature?” continued Sartorius, scratching in the question on his yellow legal pad behind another Roman Numeral.

“Well, of course, in terms of the instantly recognizable “names” of African literature in the global public imagination, there are of course the Nobel Prize winners such as Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, and Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee of South Africa, and the North African-Arabic contingent such as Naguib Mahfouz and perhaps Camus, as well as many African writers who have attained considerable global currency such as Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart, Alan Paton, Ben Okri, Leopold Senghor, Mariama Ba and many, many others.

If we move beyond the obvious, however, then we get into perhaps theoretical difficulties in conceiving what exactly this presupposed “African Literature” might be, what its contributions to a corpus or canon of World Literature might be over the ages, and hence what “Masters” or “Masterpieces,” whatever they might be, could or ought to be included, by any reasonable criteria

What then, is African Literature? Presumably, we would want the most inclusive definitions possible, though by so doing we might well step on others’ toes. First of all, it is inescapable to recognize that Africa in an incredibly diverse continent, with thousands of tribes and languages, each with their own culture and history, not to speak of the many modern nation-states, with somewhat the heritage of European colonialism superimposed upon them. Here we get into the complexities that bedevil African literature as a concept that are not so problematic to many European literatures, focusing on more compact peoples united in language, geographical territory and political or ethnic unity, though even there we often encounter many of the same problems if we scratch but a little beneath the surface. Should we include or exclude, for instance, white or colonial writers writing in or about Africa?---Arabic writers?---Writers of African hereditary, racial, and cultural origin, but displaced to other geographical regions such as Derek Walcott or Toni Morrison?----African Writers in English or French or other non-African languages? Non-African writers writing of or about Africa---such as Conrad in the Heart of Darkness or Rider Hagard, of Isaak Dinisen? Afrikaans writers such as Ernst van Heerden? All these are threshold problems of large proportions.

At the base of these questions lies a deeper question: What is “Africa?” It is a large chunk of land, of course, a continent—but is “Africa” also a particular people, a particular race or a particular culture, one or more “civilization?” or a “world,”------or is it a chaos of disconnected tribes—a primordial wilderness jungle of human and pre-human heritage---an absence of civilization as some might imagine in derogation?---does it have any particular source of indigenous cohesion exclusive of its external influences from other civilizations? Is the unity of Africa only an alien illusion imposed upon it by alien cartographers looking at it from the outside, or is it a psychic unity somehow present in all its inhabitants ready to be rediscovered for the looking? Is Africa black? ---or is it also white, and Khoisan, and Pygmy and going back to its roots from the ‘Out of Africa Theory” did Africa include all the races in their origins, even to the whites and Asians, some remaining in part and others departing in part, some returning but all of the same mother? But if we assume that Mother Africa would not disown any of her children that sought her, and seek for a definition that would be most inclusive we might find African Literature would include at least four broad divisions:

1) The Westerner or other non-African writer who utilizes the subject matter of Africa in a language not native to the African continent----E.g. Conrad, Greene; and Castro Soromenho.

2) The African writer, black or white, who utilizes the subject matter of Africa, or other subject matter, in a language native to the African continent—Eg. Mofolo and Thiong’o;

3) The African writer who utilizes the subject matter of Africa, but who writes in a non-African language that has, by custom, become part of the African means of communication----English, French, Arabic----Achebe, Soyinka, Mahfouz, Senghor, Ba, Gordimer;

4) The Non-African writer of significant African heritage writing in any language incorporating major elements of that heritage or the subject matter of Africa---Walcott, Morrison, Aimee Cesaire, etc.

In addition to these categorical problems, we also have the complication of the interface and relationship of the signal forms of language itself---namely the relationship of written Literature to, what we might term Oral Literature or, for want of a better term, “Orature.” For here the special problem of Africa, really a universal problem rather than a merely African problem, however, raises its head------namely, how can we take account of “Literature” amoung the thousands of African languages which had no writing or system of writing prior to colonization, and if, as we assume, their cultural genius and wisdom in the absence of a written language was transmitted by oral forms in an oral cultural tradition, then how do we integrate that reality into our concept of “World Literature,” whatever that brave new concept might prove to be? We might think of this as a special African problem, but it is really a universal one, since, by anthropological conjecture, all branches of the human family were without writing during most of their evolution and history, minimally for at least sixty-four or five of the last seventy-thousand years, and almost assuredly such works as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Chinese Book of Songs and parts of the Bible began as oral compositions before being recorded in written form in later centuries.” Obatala continued as his voice hoarsened.

“Would you like another glass of cognac or some fruit juice” asked Christina, sensing his discomfort after talking at so extended a length.

“Yes, both if you would” he replied, taking up a tall beaker-glass of fruit punch.

But if we set aside those deeper questions for a short moment, and just take a panoramic tour-de-horizon around the continent of the recent era to get a broad overview of some of the strong writers who, either now or in the oncoming generation may rise to the level of global interest then we could say, first, in the broad area of East and Central African Literature we have strong candidates in Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, novelist, short-story and essayist---author of such works as Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat, The River Between and Devil on the Cross; then we could include Nuruddin Farah of Somalia----From a Crooked Rib and Sweet and Sour Milk and Okot p’Bitek of Uganda and Shaaban Robert of Tanzania—Maisha Yanga and A Conceivable World. David Rubadir of Malawi and Tchicaya u Tam’si of Congo could also be mentioned.

Then if we survey Southern African Literature, we would need to include Thomas Mofolo of Basutoland, novelist and prose writer, including such works as The Pilgrim of the East and Chaka the Zulu. Solomon T Plaatze, author of Mhudi and Native Life in South Africa; of course the greats Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, and many others such as Alan Paton, Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo, Ezekiel Mphahlele—Down Second Avenue and The African Image and a healthy host of South African writers such as A.C. Jordan, H.I.E. Dhlomo, B.W. Vilakazi, Alex la Guma, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi and Noni Jabavu---a woman writer of the Xhosha people---Drawn in Colour and The Ocre People, as well as Dennis Brutus and Alfred Hutchinson.

If we then turn to West African Literature, we have a rich offering led off by the Nigerian greats Wole Soyinka—Death and the King’s Horseman, The Swamp Dwellers, A Dance in the Forest, Idanre and Mandela’s Earth and Chinua Achebe—Things Fall Apart, but are also blessed with a host of near-great and to-be-great such as Amos Tutola of Nigeria---The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; and also Cyprian Ekwensi, Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, Buchi Emecheta, and Ben Okri—Flowers and Shadows, The Landscapes Within; and some of the younger writers, Okigbo, Aig-Imoukhuede, Ekwere, Sagun and Echeruo.

Outside Nigeria there would also be Ba, Lenrie Peters of Gambia, George Awoonor-Willians, Efua Theodora Sutherland, Kweel Brew and Ellis Ayftey Komey, William Conton, Syl-Cheney Coker of Sierra Leone, Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana, and Mariama Ba, Ousame Sembene and Cheik Allou Ndao of Senegal.

In the widest definition, African Literature would include works in the most diverse languages: in English---Achebe, Soyinka, etc; French—Birago Diop, Gide, Kessel, Malonga, Oyono; in German—Kurt Heuser; in Danish---Buchholz and Dinesen; multiple African native languages---Mofolo and Thiong’o; in the English of South Africans---Gordimer, Paton; and in Afrikaans---Nuthall Fula and Ernst van Heerden.” he continued, first stubbing out a Cuban cigar butt and feeling in his sports coat pocket for another.

Garry Bonoir observing his embarrassment then reached into his own breast pocket and took out two of his own in silver metal containers, and unscrewing them lit one for Obatala and one for himself.

“Do you smoke them also?” he said, motioning towards Sartorius with a third.

“I have sinned in the past but Eva is trying to get me to quit.” grinned back Sartorius.

“Related to this phenomenon,” continued Obatala, “…….is the controversy over whether African writers should continue to write in their former colonial languages---English, French, Portugese, Arabic, or whether they should call quits and launch out into writing in the language of the local indigenous vernaculars. This problem was acute at the time of independence some fifty years ago, yet continues as a question in the “Post-colonial” era, a problem shared by writers of other areas, such as those of India and Pakistan in relation to Anglo-Indian literature. In Africa different sides of the question were championed by writers such as Molly Mahood, the Nigerian professor after independence at University College, Ibidan who famously called for the development of a new African-Nigerian literature in English, with the other side represented by Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, calling for a transition from colonial English to the local indigenous vernaculars, such as his own Kikuyu.

Outsiders might harp that Africans now had independence, so why not quit complaining in the colonial language and build a literature in the native vernacular. This, however, would ignore many unfortunate realities, such as the fact that the nations of Africa were often artificial amalgamations of hundreds of different tribes, languages and traditions unified only by the colonial language and bureaucracy. Many of those “local vernaculars’ were without writing, or if one had been adapted, there was very little literature in it, and hardly any practical works necessary to deal with life in the modern world. So fragmented were they that local literatures were simply unviable, or if viable, were divisive with regard to the larger nation, often making the colonial language the only practical glue to hold the country together.

Nonetheless, the inevitable result of adherence to education in the colonial language would be the development of sharp class divisions between the native speaking uneducated working and peasant classes and the English- and French-educated, wealthier urban elite. Thiong’o, argued for the necessity of solidarity with the majority of one’s own people in the language of that people, just as Europeans since the Renaissance and the Gutenberg Revolution and the democratic bourgeois revolutions, gradually shifted from a Latin based elite education and classical colonial-language literature (Latin), to writing their literatures in the vernacular of the people: English, French, German, Italian, etc.
Beyond the controversy of that era, however, lay the more recent controversy, based on the further dilemmas of Globalization. African nations, peoples and intellectuals, after liberation from imperial conquest and national independence, still had to find their way in a more and more globalized world of which their home countries and cultures were but a small part.

Thus, globalization placed further pressure on national elites to carry on their educations and their cultures and literatures in English or French, so as to avoid being fatally isolated or marginalized in a global world, either economically or culturally. A writer writing in a world language such as English, or to a lesser extent French or Arabic, could have a good hope of finding support and even financial success across the globe. A writer in Kikuyu would find little global currency, especially in the absence of translation into English, and his career might be snuffed out by censorship by the local political tyrant or establishment. Thus many African writers found writing in English or French to be the only viable pathway to be “citizens of the world” as well as “citizens of the Republic of Letters” and they of course always had the option of writing in both the native vernacular and the world lingua franca, as did their predecessors of an earlier age, such as Petrarch, Dante, Bacon and More. Many concluded that if African writers wanted to serve the cause of Africa being healthily accepted as part of the modern world and its thinkers and artists empowered to make their contributions to that wider world, then they must cultivate the world languages, particularly of English and French, and continue to make use of them as the most effective bridges between their own cultures and the wider modern world and humanity as a whole globally.

As I said before, the problem of the oral origin of much of the “Orature” of Africa complicates how to integrate African Literature into the common heritage of World Literature, and to integrate it historically into periods, etc. But if we look to its inclusion in the historical canon of World Literature, then of course the African oral tradition would give a rich contribution to the myths, fables, riddles, histories, songs, proverbs, dramas and stories of origin of the pre-literate ages of all peoples, and provide material for the uncovering of the archetypes of the collective unconscious shared by all human kind. Looking back historically, we have the rediscovery of some of the oral epics dating back over the last thousand years, such as the Mali Legend of Sundiata, The Ozidi, and The Mwindo. These often reflect the influence of Arabic culture or other exogenous influences at the time of origin or in their time of recording in imported script. In more modern times the oral tradition has been strongly present in modern literature---as in the Kikuyu songs incorporated in the Kenyan plays of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Acholi oral poem structure incorporated in the Song of Iowino, by p’Bitek and in the speech and oral proverbs present in Achebe’s great novel, Things Fall Apart.
Some of the first writings by Africans to come to the attention of Westerners were the slave narratives and other “testimonial literature” of the 19th Century, such as the Life and Adventures of Olauda Equiano, and similar narratives such as that of Frederick Douglass in America, written in the global colonial languages. While often criticized, undoubtedly true in part, as not being of intrinsic high literary quality or deep works of art, these works are often included in anthologies as “Windows on the World” and of significant sociological and historical interest, particularly in giving Westerners a chance to see their own history through other people’s eyes. As Africans became literate in their own languages, they increasingly stood up to tell the forgotten stories of their own people’s struggles against colonial conquest and dominance as in Mofolo’s story of the Zulu leader: Chaka.

In the 19th Century and early 20th Century African writers developed newspapers in colonial and native languages and began to contribute to the development of a body of literature. In Francophone West Africa writers such a Leopold Senghor were active in the “negritude” movement, along with Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire, French speakers from Guiana and Martinique. Their poetry and literature not only denounced imperialism, but asserted the vitality of the cultures that colonialism sought to suppress.

After World War II, Africans began demanding and then achieving independence, and the growth of African national literatures, as well as a Pan-African literature began to take shape, led by figures such as Soyinka, Achebe, Sembene, Okri, Thiong’o, p’Bitek, and Jacques Rabemannanjara. Important contributions were made by such writers as Duro Lapido, Cheeikh Hamidou Kane and the L’Aventure Ambigue, Yambo Oulougem’s Le Devoir de Violence, and Ayi Kwie Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons. They were largely writing in the global colonial languages and on themes such as the clash of the colonial and indigenous cultures, condemnation of racialism and imperial subjugation, pride in African heritage and hope for the future under independence and social transformation.

In the apartheid era, a strong literature reflected the trials and contradictions of life under that regime with the rise of writers such as Gordimer, Coetzee, Paton, Brutus, Bessie Head and Miriam Tlali, all addressing, along with universal themes, the problems of life across the racial divide.

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Ironically, after so much transformation, much of more contemporary African literature seemed to reveal disillusionment, loss of hope, and dissent from current events. For example, V.Y. Mudimbe in Before the Birth of the Moon, seemed typical in exploring a doomed love affair in a society rife with deceit and corruption at all levels. And in Kenya Ngugi wa Thiong’o was arrested for producing plays in Kikuyu highly critical of the nation’s corrupt and arbitrary government.” concluded Obatala as he grew silent and thoughtful over his last glass of cognac.

At length after a long afternoon of refilled buffet plates, Champagne, cocktails and a long and significant chain of conversation and renewed small talk the small group broke up and summoned the maitre d' to call for taxis to take them back to their hotels and they departed with an elaborate ritual of thanks, leavetaking and friendship. Over the next three days Sartorius and Bonoir attended each other’s speeches at the relevant committees and special assemblies of the Pan-African Parliament held in the meeting halls and function rooms of the Gallagher Estate in Midrand, situated astride the theoretical mid-point between the commercial capital Johannesburg and the political capital of Pretoria. Each treated the other to dinner after their speeches and both treated Wole Obatala and Pieter Verhoven to another dinner at the Ama-Cradle on the day before Obatala was to return to Lagos. Sartorius continued to pick Obatala’s brain regarding African Literature, and used up three yellow legal pads taking down his notes. They all thanked Pieter Verhoven for the many sidetrips he took them on to show them the highlights of South African culture and history in and about JoBurg and a quick jaunt to take them for a drive-by of the national capital in Pretoria, and it was with a personal regret that Eva and Sartorius waved goodbye to Verhoven and Christina at the Johannesburg International Airport as they mounted the steps to board the British Airways flight to Heathrow in the UK.






2






Committee for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly NewsFEED
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UNPA-Campaign Representatives visit Pan-African Parliament

From 5th to 9th a delegation of the Secretariat of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly visited the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) in Midrand, South Africa, at the occasion of its most recent session. At its prior session in October 2007 the parliamentary body of the African Union had adopted a resolution urging its administration to take “the initiative to achieve the establishment of a consultative United Nations Parliamentary Assembly within the UN system”. In its consultations with PAP officials and PAP members from over 10 countries the UNPA-Campaign delegation has raised the question of how it could assist in this process. The visit was concluded on 9th with a meeting with PAP President Dr. Gertrude Mongella, with UNPA-Campaign Secretariat leader Professor Robert Sartorius and Hon. Mokshanand Dowarkasing MP.

Former commander of Rwandan UN Peacekeeping Force Supports Appeal for UN Parliamentary Assembly

The Canadian Senator Roméo Dallaire supports the call for the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA). "So many of my current causes, projects and interventions in the Parliament of Canada have a single common denominator - the urgent need to transform the United Nations System, to make it more accountable and more responsive to the collective needs, and rights, of the world's citizens. A UN Parliamentary Assembly would be an important step in the right direction,” Dallaire noted. From 1993 to 1994 Dallaire served as force commander of UNAMIR, the United Nations peacekeeping mission for Rwanda. At the time of his command, the ill-equipped mission was faced with the massive genocide lasting for a total of 100 days and leading to the murder of between 800,000 and 1,171,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates. Dallaire’s efforts to constrain and stop the atrocities have been widely recognized. Proponents of a UNPA argue that if the body had been in place at that time, it could have helped to alert the international community to the urgent need to intervene.

After Copenhagen: Delegation Leaders of European and Pan-African Parliaments call for Renovation of Decision-making Process
According to a joint statement issued by the leaders of the delegations of the Pan-African Parliament and the European Parliament to the Copenhagen Climate Conference, "the failure of the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen was caused as well by the non-transparent and ineffective mechanisms of the United Nations working methods." As a consequence, the statement expresses the need to renovate the UN's decision-making structures through a Parliamentary Assembly. The document notes that "a Parliamentary Assembly at UN level with parliamentary working methods linked with open discussion and majority votes could be helpful for the global decision-making process."

The statement which was issued on the occasion of a meeting between the delegations of the Pan-African Parliament and the European Parliament during the COP15 Climate Conference emphasizes "the common position of the European Parliament and the Pan-African Parliament that a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) should be established within the UN system." According to the delegation leaders, Hon. Mary Mugenyi, Second Vice-President of the Pan-African Parliament from Uganda, and Jo Leinen, Chair of the Environment Committee of the European Parliament from Germany, "the creation of a UNPA can and should be initiated and pursued independently from other issues of UN reform currently on the international agenda."

Both, the Pan-African Parliament and the European Parliament, have adopted resolutions supporting the creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly. In October 2007 the Pan-African Parliament noted, among other things, that "a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly eventually should have participation and oversight rights, in particular, to send fully participating parliamentary delegations or representatives to international governmental fora and negotiations."
Mr Leinen said that the agreement of Copenhagen is a "huge disappointment" as it "postpones climate protection to a later date." The European Parliament's delegation deplored the fact that the "Copenhagen Accord" is not a legally binding agreement, and only "recognises" the need to keep temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius. Mr Leinen stressed that a "world parliament" would be able to represent "the interest of humanity as a whole." According to Mr Leinen, this view was "underrepresented in the negotiations in Copenhagen."

The joint statement was welcomed by the Committee for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, a global network of parliamentarians, non-governmental organizations and activists working for strengthened citizen's participation in global institutions. The Campaign's Secretary-General, Andreas Sarkozy, noted that "the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference illustrates the inability of traditional international diplomacy and the United Nations to cope with global challenges. A UN Parliamentary Assembly could be the decisive political catalyst for an overhaul of the international system and its permanent forum and constituent committees would greatly accelerate the now obsolescent and glacially slow intermittent treaty convention negotiating system. In the future, urgently needed international treaties must be continuosly negotiated in the permanent and continuous sessions and specialized committees of the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly and General Assembly rather than the unworkable present system of ad hoc Conventions meeting every three, five or ten years which are mere invitations to systemic failure. "









Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Introducing Spiritus Mundi, a Novel by Robert Sheppard
Author’s E-mail: rsheppard99_2000@yahoo.com
Related Links and Websites: Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard
For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/
For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/
For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com//
To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/
To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/
To Read Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundifantasymythandmagicalrealism.wordpress.com//
To Read Sexual Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: The Varieties of Sexul Experience: https://spiritusmundivarietiesofsexualexperience.wordpress.com//
To Read Spy, Espionage and Counter-terrorism Thriller Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: http://spiritusmundispyespionagecounterterrorism.wordpress.com//
To Read Geopolitical and World War Three Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundigeopoliticalworldwar3.wordpress.com/
To Read Spiritual and Religious Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundionspiritualityandreligion.wordpress.com//
To Read about the Global Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundiunitednationsparliamentaryassembly.wordpress.com//
To Read Poetry from Spiritus Mundi：https://spiritusmundipoetry.wordpress.com/
For Discussions on World Literature and Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycriticism.wordpress.com/
For Discussions of World History and World Civilization in Spiritus Mundi: https://worldhistoryandcivilizationspiritusmundi.wordpress.com//
To Read the Blog of Eva Strong from Spiritus Mundi: https://evasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Andreas Sarkozy from Spiritus Mundi: http://andreasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Yoriko Oe from Spiritus Mundi: http://yorikosblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Robert Sartorius from Spiritus Mundi: http://sartoriusblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/



I write to introduce to your attention my double novel Spiritus Mundi, consisting of Spiritus Mundi, the Novel—Book I, and Spiritus Mundi, the Romance—Book II. Book I’s espionage-terror-political-religious thriller-action criss-crosses the globe from Beijing to London to Washington, Mexico City and Jerusalem presenting a vast panorama of the contemporary international world, including compelling action, deep and realistic characters and surreal adventures, while Book II dialates the setting and scope into a fantasy (though still rooted in the real) adventure where the protagonists embark on a quest to the realms of Middle Earth and its Crystal Bead Game and through a wormhole to the Council of the Immortals in the Amphitheater in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy in search of the crucial Silmaril Crystal, and to plead for the continuance of the human race in the face of threatened extinction from a nuclear World War III, all followed by a triple-somersault thriller ending in which a common garden-variety terrorist attack is first uncovered by MI6 and the CIA as the opening gambit a Greatpower Game of States threatening World War III and then, incredibly, as the nexus of a Time Travel conspiracy involving an attempt by fascist forces of the 23rd Century to alter a benign World History by a time-travelling raid on their past and our present to provoke that World War III, foiled by the heroic efforts of the democratic 23rd Century world government, the Senate of the United States of Earth, to hunt down the fascist interlopers before their history is irrevocably altered for evil.

When activist Robert Sartorius, leading a global campaign to create a European Parliament-style world-wide United Nations Parliamentary Assembly presses the proposal in New York on his old friend the UN Secretary-General and is rebuffed due to the hostile pressure of the conservative American administration, his Committee resolves to fight back by launching a celebrity-driven Bono-Geldof-Band Aid/Live 8-style “People Power” media campaign and telethon spearheaded by rock superstars Isis and Osiris and former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to mobilize global public support and pressure in alliance with the Occupy Wall Street Movements worldwide. The Blogs of Sartorius, activist Eva Strong and Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy reveal the campaign’s working struggle, their tangled love affairs, a loss of faith, attempted suicide, reconciliation of father and son after divorce, and recovery of personal love and faith.

Things fall apart as the idealists’ global crusade is infiltrated by a cell of jihadist terrorists using it as a cover, then counter-infiltrated by CIA agent Jack McKinsey and British MI6 agent Etienne Dearlove. A cat-and-mouse game of espionage and intrigue ensues pitting them against the Chinese MSS espionage network allied with the Iranian Quds Force crossing Beijing, London, Moscow, Washington and Jerusalem unleashing an uncontrollable series of events which sees the American Olympic Track and Field Team bombed on an airplane in London, uncovers a secret conspiracy of China, Russia and Iran to jointly seize the oil reserves of the Middle-East, and witnesses Presidents Clinton and Carter taken hostage with Sartorius, McKinsey, Eva and other activists at a Jerusalem telethon rally cut short by the explosion of a concealed atomic device in a loaned Chinese Terracotta Warrior, then flown by capturing terrorists to Qom, Iran as “human shields” to deter a retaliatory nuclear attack.


In Book II, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance they encounter Iran’s Supreme Leader in Qom as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear confrontation and World War III, while mysterious events unfold leading Sartorius and McKinsey from their captivity in the underground nuclear facilities of Qom into a hidden neo-mythic dimension that takes them to a vast ocean and land at the center of the world, Middle Earth, Inner Shambhala, and to involvement in a mysterious Castalian “Crystal Bead Game” linked to the destiny of the human race on earth. They then embark on a quest for the Silmaril, or Missing Seed Crystal to the central island of Omphalos in the Great Central Sea in the middle of the globe, aided by Goethe, the Chinese Monkey King, Captain Nemo, the African God-Hero Ogun, and a Sufi mystic they traverse a ‘wormhole’ at the center of the earth guarded by ‘The Mothers’ and the fallen angel tribe of the Grigori (Genesis 6:1-4) which leads the way to critical meeting of the “Council of the Immortals” at the Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy to determine the final fate of the human species.

The heroes battle and overcome the treacherous opposition of Mephisto and his satanic subaltern Mundus through their Underworld and Otherworld adventures and successfully plead the cause of the continuation of the human species before the Immortals, returning with the critical Silmaril Crystal. resolving the Crystal Bead Game and thereby inspiring through the Archangel Gabriel a dream in the mind of Iran’s Supreme Leader which brings a new Revelation causing him to release the hostages and an end the crisis. China and Russia stand down from aiding Iran in seizing the Mid-East oil reserves, but in a treacherous blow the Chinese instead utilize their forward-positioned armies to attack their former ally Russia and seize Siberia with its large oil and gas reserves instead. President Barret Osama, America’s newly-elected first black President then invites Russia, Japan and South Korea to join NATO and together they succeed in expelling the Chinese from Siberia and usher in a new Eurasian and global balance of power and a New World Order.

Rock Superstar Osiris meanwhile, after undertaking a narcissistic Messianic mission in the wake of the Jerusalem atomic blast is dramatically assassinated on live world-wide television on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa by a disillusioned follower. His wife and rock-star partner Isis then leads a spiritual movement to reconcile and unite the clashing religions and catalyze a common global spiritual Renaissance through a Global Progressive Spiritual Alliance which seeks to construct an Inter-faith Temple on the ruins of the atomic blast in Jerusalem. In counter-reaction to the cataclysmic events the world finally implements Sartorius’ crusade for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, but not before Sartorius has himself has died, Moses-like of a heart attack while helping to foil a metaconspiracy mediated by Time Travel in which a fascist agent from the 23rd Century who has time-transited back to our time to alter a benign history by causing WWIII and thus preventing the evolution of a democratic world government, the United States of Earth, which follows him through time and nabs him just in the “nick of time” to prevent Aramgeddon.

The book ends with the opening ceremony of the UN Parliamentary Assembly which is attended in Sartorius’ name by his widow Eva Strong, whom Sartorius had fallen in love with and married in the course of the novel, and by their son Euphy, newborn after Sartorius’ death. They are joined in cinematic climax at the ceremony by newly chosen UN Secretary-General Clinton, President Osama and UN Parliamentary Assembly Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy who have just received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in creation of the world’s first world parliamentary assembly within the United Nations, bringing together the representative voices of the peoples of the world in face-to-face assembly and dialogue for the first time in world history.

Highlights:

All the Highlights of the novel cannot be contained in such a short Introduction, but a few of them would include:

1. Spiritus Mundi is the first novel in world history to portray the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assemblyon the working model, inter alia, of the European Parliament and the first novel to portray the Occupy Wall Street Movement and related movements worldwide;

2. Spiritus Mundi is a prophetic geo-political WWIII novel of the near future forseeing a conflict and conspiratorial surprise attack by a resurgent “Axis” of China, Russia and Iran seeking by a decisive blow in jointly seizing the Middle-East oil fields to radically alter the global balance of power vis-a-vis the West in the world and Eurasia. Like Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon, it forsees the inclusion of Russia in NATO, and goes far beyond in forseeing the inclusion of South Korea and Japan, following a joint Chinese-Russian occupation of a collapsing North Korea and the Axis strike at the Middle-Eastern oil fields;

3. Spiritus Mundi is an exciting espionage thriller involving the American CIA. British MI6, the Chinese MSS, or Ministry of State Security and the Russian SVR contending in a deul of intrigue and espionage;

4. Spiritus Mundi is a Spellbinding Terrorism/Counterterrorism novel involving a global plot to conceal an atomic bomb in a Chinese Teracotta Warrior to be detonated in Jerusalem;

5. Features the romantic and sexual searching and encounters of dozens of idealist activists, rock-stars, CIA and MI6 agents, public-relations spinmeisters and billionaires with a detour into the bi-sexual and gay scenes of Beijing, New York, California, London and Tokyo:

6. Establishes and grounds the new genre of the Global Novel written in Global English, the international language of the world,

7. Spiritus Mundi is a novel of Spiritual Searching featuring the religious searching of Sufi mystic Mohammad ala Rushdie, as well as the loss of faith, depression, attempted suicide and recovery of faith in life of protagonist Sartorius. Follows bogus religious cult leaders and the Messiah-Complex megalomanic-narcissistic mission of rock superstar Osiris that leads to his dramatic assassination on worldwide television in Jerusalem, followed by the religious conversion of his wife and rock-star parner Isis;

8. Features the search for love and sexual fulfillment of Eva Strong, a deeply and realistically portrayed divorced single mother involved in the United Nations campaign, who reveals her tortured heart and soul in her Blog throughout several disastrous sexual affairs and ultimately through her final attainment of love and marriage to Sartorius;
9. Features Sartorius’ experience of a bitter divorce, alienation and reconciliation with his son, his loss of faith and attempted suicide, his battle against drugs and alcoholism, his surreal and sexual adventures in Mexico City, and his subsequent redeeming love and marriage to Eva Strong;

10. Contains the in–depth literary conversations of Sartorius and his best friend, Literature Nobel Laureate Günther Gross, as they conduct worldwide interviews and research for at book they are jointly writing on the emergence of the new institution of World Literature, building on Goethe’s original concept of “Weltliteratur” and its foundations and contributions from all the world’s traditions and cultures;

11. Predicts the emergence of the institution and quest of “The Great Global Novel” as a successor to the prior quest after “The Great American Novel” in the newer age of the globalization of literature in Global English and generally;
12. Features the cross-cultural experiences and search for roots, sexual and spiritual fulfillment and authenticity of Asian-American character Jennie Zheng, and Pari Kasiwar of India;

13. For the first time incorporates in the dramatic narrative flow of action the mythic traditions of all the cultures and literatures of the world, including such figures as Goethe, The Chinese Monkey King, the African God-Hero Ogun, surreal adventures in the ‘Theatro Magico’ in Mexico City bringing to life figures from the Mayan-Aztec Popul Vuh, Hanuman from the Indian classic the Ramayana, and many more;

14. Book Two, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance is a fantastic Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Rollercoaster Ride: The more mythic Book Two utilizes a Wellsian motif of Time Travel to explore the making of history and its attempted unmaking (a la Terminator) by a hositile raid from the future on the past, our present, and the foiling of the fascist attempt by an alliance of men and women of goodwill and courage from past, present and future generations united in a Commonwealth of Human Destiny; Like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Welles’ Journey to the Center of the Earth it involves a journey to an interior realm of the “Middle Earth;” it also contains a futuristic travel through a wormhole to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy for a meeting with the “Council of the Immortals” where the fate of the human race will be decided;

15. Is a fantastic read on a roller-coaster ride of high adventure and self-exploration!

C Copyright 2012 Robert Sheppard All Rights Reserved

Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard: Table of Contents

Spiritus Mundi
Contents

Book One Spiritus Mundi: The Novel Chapters 1-33

1. Departure (Beijing)
2. A Failing Quest (New York)
3. War Council & Counteroffensive (Geneva)
4. New Beginnings (London)
5. Republic of Letters (Berlin)
6. Fathers and Sons (Washington,D.C.)
7. Ulysses: Blogo Ergo Sum (Beijing)
8. Frequently Asked Questions (London)
9. In the Middle Kingdom (Beijing)
10. Past and Present (London-South Africa)
11. Telemachus (Washington, D.C.)
12. The Everlasting Nay (Beijing)
13. My Brother’s Keeper (London)
14. In the Global Village (Beijing-Tokyo)
15. Deceits and Revelations (London)
16. Be Ready for Anything (Beijing)
17. The Obscure Object of Desire (London-Pyongyang)
18. Sufferings (Beijing)
19. Of the Yearnings of the Caged Spirit (London)
20. Cyclops (Washington, D.C.)
21. The Engines of Illusion (Beijing)
22. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (London)
23. The Temptation of the Sirens (Beijing)
24. Truth or Consequences (London)
25. Lazarus Laughed (Beijing)
26. Neptune’s Fury & The Perils of the Sea (The Maldive Islands)
Naval Diaries and Ship’s Logs of Admiral Sir George Rose Sartorius (1780-1875)
27. Penelope (London)
28. The Volcano’s Underworld (Mexico City)
Teatro Magico
29. The Everlasting Yea (London)
30. Paradise Regained (Little Gidding)
31. To the South of Eden (Kenya-to Midrand-Johannesburg South Africa)
32. In a Glass Darkly (London)
33. Spiritus Mundi

Book Two Spiritus Mundi: The Romance Chapters 1-21

1. Gerusalemme Liberata & Orlando Furioso (Jerusalem)
2. In a Glass Darkly (London)
3. Great Expectations (Jerusalem)
4. The Parable of the Cave (Qom, Iran)
5. The Xth Day of the Crisis (London)
6. The Supreme Leader & The Three Messiahs (Qom)
7. Going for the Jugular (London)
8. The Night Journey, Goethe & The Monkey King (Qom)
9. The Central Sea, The Crystal Bead Game & The Quest
10. The Island of Omphalos & The Mothers
11. The Council of the Immortals & The Trial By Ordeal
12. Nemesis
13. Armageddon (London)
14. The Fever Breaks
15. High Noon & Showdown at the OK Corral (Washington, D.C.)
16. Ecce Homo (Jerusalem)
17. Deliverance (London/Lhasa)
18. For Every Action…. (Moscow/Beijing)
19. The Burial of the Dead (London/Little Gidding)
20. Spiritus Mundi (London/Jerusalem)
21. In My End is My Beginning
—-The Convening of the First Meeting of the
United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (New York)

Appendix 1: A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly: Frequently Asked Questions
Appendix 2: Spiritus Mundi: Index of Principal Characters

C Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

#Africa and the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, America and the UN Parliamentar一Assembly，Latin America , Andreas Sarkozy, Arab Spring, Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Archetypal Literature, Attar, Baroness Maddox, Beijing, #Best British Writers, #BestEmergingAmericanWriters, #BestEmergingEnglishWriters, #BestLoveNewWriting, #BestMovementWriters, #BestNewAmericanNovels, #BestNew AmericanWriters, #BestNewBritishNovels, #BestNewBritishWriters, #Best NewCrossCulturalWriting, #BestNewEnglishNovels, #BestNewEnglishWriters, #BestSexWriting,#BestRomanticWriting,#BestNewNovels, #BestNewOccupyWallStreetNovel, #BestNewOccupyWallStreetWriting, #BestNewPoliticalNovel, #BestNewSexualWriting, #BestSexOnline, #BestNewWorldWriters, #BestNewWriters, #BestOccupyWallStreetNovel, #BestOccupyWallStreetWriters, #bi-sexual, #bi-sexual sex, #Bono, #BoutrosBoutros-Ghali, British Joint Intelligence Committee, #CofMI6, #MI6,#BestMI6Novel,#CampaignForAUnitedNationsParliamentaryAssembly, Canon of World 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Note: This is Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only



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