‘The dream of Gordon Brown is the same dream as the Webbs’ – a Socialist Britain, with the means of production and distribution in government hands. They are managerial elitists who believe in governing by Soviet-style targets imposed by government and executed by a central bureaucracy; in essence, the way Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and Blair ruled is exactly the same. Blair has had an easier ride because he did not restore the prosyndicalist Trade Union legislation Mrs Thatcher got rid of which curbed wage inflation, and he has acquiesced in un-unionized legal and illegal immigration, which has further undermined collective wage bargaining. As you will know, under Mrs Thatcher, England – not Britain mind you, just England – accounted for 80% of all the external investment in the whole of the EU. Few as her reforms were, short as her time in power was, she made England the only attractive place in Europe for foreigners to invest in. A singular achievement, unmatched by any other Tory leader ever. Mrs Thatcher was, in effect, the St Teresa of Avila of modern Britain. An unpopular but immensely influential saint, hated by many but admired even by many of her enemies. Without her, Britain would be in a similar situation to Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe has taken Leninism as far as it is possible to go. Lenin and Stalin didn’t manage to reduce a whole nation to starvation, only some parts of it. Another singular achievement. The social and religious control the Jesuits managed to effect over their Indian charges was a direct result of the protection they were able to give them against their enemies, the Portuguese slave traders and the secular Spanish capitalists, both of whom wished to capture the Reducciones Indians as serfs or slaves. The Socialists in Britain failed either to control or provide for the British working class, which still votes them out when things get too bad. This is because the Socialist economic model cannot produce the goods and service people want, only those the ruling elite think the people ought to have – quite a different thing – and even then, as with the NHS, they cannot deliver.’
I could now see just why Dr Wilberforce’s sojourn in Oxford would have been an uncomfortable one, for himself as well as his hosts.
‘Surely, though, that is the long-term dream of all the Socialists in Europe – the EU hopes to achieve that by centralized control, eventually,’ I chucked in.
‘Go back a bit,’ he countered. ‘The Jesuits’ economic model was successful because the Indians retained nothing from their labours except their food, and the settlements only received 10% of the gross profit from their economic activity – the Catholic Church in Rome retained 90%. The Socialists in charge of the EU project are rather a parasitic bureaucratic class who are forced to disburse subventions, subsidies and economic aid to powerful yet unproductive groups in the European states on quite irrational grounds. The vast bulk of EU tax revenue funds, for example, go to subsidize an inefficient and archaic agricultural system, because the French voter demands it. The Germans pay – they lost the war, after all – as a form of permanent reparations. The British pay, too, as the price of their entry into the market. All quite unlike the Jesuits in Paraguay, who received no subsidies, but rather massively subsidized the Church in Europe. The Reducciones were a more efficient form of colonial exploitation than any until the Russian Soviet exploitation of the Ukraine and Central Asia. The communists who ran the mines, farms and factories in Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan did not profit from their exploitation. The profits were remitted to Moscow. The first thing Dr Francia did when he came to power was expropriate from the Catholic Church in Paraguay – no more money was to be sent back to Rome – just as the first thing the Central Asians and Ukrainians did after the fall of the Soviet empire was to expel the Russian apparatchiks, take over their enterprises, and send no more goods to Moscow.’
Dr Wilberforce spoke with both fluency and confidence, raising a solitary finger from time to time to illustrate a point. He had obviously studied the Jesuits and their operations from the broadest possible historical perpective. I was impressed. ‘Why, if it was so efficient, did the Jesuit experiment fail, then?’ I demanded. I was well into my last beer, and I could hear my bed calling for me.
‘“How many regiments does the Pope have?” asked Stalin rhetorically, knowing he had none. Yet with the Jesuits and the militarized Guarani, the Pope had many. He did not know how to use them, though. The Papacy had been dependent upon Catholic European monarchs for so long that it could not imagine defying them. When the Kings of Spain and Portugal became alarmed at the growth in power of the Jesuit colonies in greater Paraguay, they put pressure on the Pope to acquiesce in expelling the Fathers. He should have refused – even to the point of abandoning the Papacy and Europe himself, and taking refuge with the Jesuits in Paraguay with his Curia. You are surprised, I see, yet this is what the King of Portugal did, when faced with Napoleon’s invasion of his country – he took his Court to Brazil and ruled from there. The French could have done the same in 1940, ruling from Algiers, but Reynaud’s mistress talked him out of it. Churchill flew to France expressly to persuade the French leader to take his whole Cabinet to North Africa and continue the fight from there. The Jesuits in South America were the last chance the Papacy ever had of throttling modern capitalism – and Protestantism. If the Pope had instructed the multiracial Jesuits who owed alliegance only to the Pope, to defy Spain and fight the secular arm, the Spanish colonial authorities, excommunicated and denied burial by the Pope, would have crumbled spiritually and militarily. An entirely different version of history was put down when the black-robes were sent back to Europe under the hatches of Spanish ships as prisoners. Did the Pope entirely trust the Jesuits? Did Hitler entirely trust Himmler and the SS? Probably not. Elite shock troops have a habit of revolting – look at the Janissaries in Ottoman Turkey. It is said that in China, when instructing the mandarins in Christianity, the Jesuits suppressed the Crucifixion. A Divinity who allowed Himself to be executed by foreign soldiers was not likely to appeal to the rulers of the Middle Kingdom.’ The doctor of divinity in front of me chuckled softly. ‘You have seen today the ruins of a world order that was aborted just as it was poised for world domination.’
The bus had taken me out to Trinidad, largest of the Jesuit Reducciones in Paraguay. We passed through a landscape of sugar cane and ploughed fields showing the ochre earth underneath. For the first time I saw the famous orange groves of Paraguay, and other fruit orchards, too. There were cattle grazing in neat fields and wooden barns with shingle roofs. We stopped in Colonia Hohenau: there was a Lutheran church and many pine trees. This is where Alfredo Stroessner was born, and where Dr Mengele, the torturer and sadist of Auschwitz found refuge, before he moved on to Brazil. I was not tempted to get down from the bus.
‘It’s just up the hill,’ said the driver as he dropped me off near my destination. ‘There’s nothing to see – just ruins,’ he added helpfully.
I walked up the hill in sharp sunlight. It was quiet, peaceful. On the brow of the hill, in a natural defensive position, stood a group of red stone buildings, massive still, built to last for ever, all that remains of a lost dream. There was a ticket office, tickets on the counter, but no one selling them; it was the siesta and I suspected a hammock was being occupied somewhere nearby. There was no one else visiting the ruins. I walked in undisturbed and wandered around.
Close to, the buildings, roofless and surrounded by old palm trees rustling in the breeze, seemed to be made of sandstone. All the Indians’ houses surrounding the plaza were identical. There were the ruins of what had once been workshops, bakeries, prisons, granaries, asylums, armouries and the Fathers’ houses. In the centre, around which all were grouped was the basilica, vast by comparison, large enough to accommodate 4,000 Indians as a congregation. The Jesuits had been expelled in 1768, and the settlement had been completely abandoned then: the roof of the church collapsed in 1800. Cunninghame Graham claimed he saw Indians in old mission-style clothes, saying prayers in Latin in the basilica in 1874, but this may just have been his romanticism at work. No money was used in the Reducciones, no secular Spanish or
Portuguese settlers, not even the governors themselves – were allowed into Jesuit-controlled territory. It was the first ever state-within-a-state in Western history, self-financing, self-regulating, surplus-producing, excluding all outsiders, with its own effective system of armed defence. At the highest point of their development the Reducciones could put 20,000 trained Guarani soldiers into battle, officered by Jesuit priests. In the first Jesuit War against the Portuguese Brazilian slave traders, the invaders were soundly trounced by cannon and musket fire, and sent home after an abject defeat, a victory the Spanish in Asunción were at first delighted with, then began to have doubts about. European philosophers wrote about the Jesuit experiment in social engineering, as a later age would dub it. Montesquieu was a fan, and advised all Western states to adopt the Jesuit system: he saw in it the fulfilment of Plato’s ‘Republic’, a polity governed by moral philosophers. Voltaire was openly mocking. In Candide Cacambo tells the eponymous hero: ‘It is a wonderful system they have. There are thirty provinces in their kingdom and it is more than three hundred leagues across. The reverend fathers own the whole lot, and the people own nothing: that’s what I call a masterpiece of reason and justice.’
The Indians were recruited directly from the forests and fields by the Fathers: being inside the missions made them safe from the Brazilian slave traders, the bandierantes, who were ravaging the land and taking people off after every raid – this was once permission had been given to arm and train the Indians, which was not for many years. During this earlier period, the Jesuits found they were conveniently gathering together natives for the slave traders to collect by force and take back to Brazil to be sold to labour on the plantations. The Reducciones Indians were subject to discipline: incest, bestiality, slaughtering livestock without permission and other crimes were punished with a whipping and imprisonment. The sinners had to kiss the sleeve of the Jesuit who had whipped them after their punishment.
The elaborate carvings on the basilica still visible were evidence of the high artistic levels to which the Guarani were trained by their mentors. All the musical instruments of Europe – harp and viol, harpsichord and organ, flute and drum – were reproduced in these settlements, and whole baroque operas and oratorios were staged with choirs of hundreds, in the middle of the jungle, at this very spot, at a time when there was not one opera house or choir anywhere outside Europe. At Trinidad there was a fully operating printing press, 100 years before Buenos Aires was to get one. Books, illuminated manuscripts, superb musical instruments, firearms, clothes, carvings, paintings, statues, all that the finest craftsmen of Italy, France or Spain could boast was produced here, a thousand miles up the river from the Atlantic. The scale and quality of the Jesuits’ achievement was perhaps unparalleled in human history. There was no capital punishment. The Indians were protected from their enemies, Christianized, and civilized. At a time when everywhere else in the Americas the natives were being ruthlessly enslaved, murdered and tortured, these 30 settlements were a haven of relative security and sanctuary. And yet. No Guarani ever became a priest, never rose higher than a sacristan in the hierarchy. They were treated like children, unable to look after themselves. And when, suddenly, on the orders of the Pope, the Jesuits abandoned the Indians, the whole system collapsed immediately. It had been built on the sands of total dependence. The slave traders moved in and the Indians scattered back into the forests, many to be hunted down and captured.
Dr Wilberforce had sent a Parthian shot after me in the Hotel El Morocco when I went to bed. ‘If the Socialists and the administrators, social workers and benefit grant officers suddenly abandoned the British lower class, whom at present they administer and sustain, what do you think would happen in your inner cities? If the dole stopped and the housing benefit ceased, and all the rest of it? What would happen, do you think the dependent classes could sustain themselves? There are no forests to run to in Britain any more. There would be anarchy, chaos and mass starvation. Perhaps a few thousand of the strongest would survive by cannibalism. Sleep well, and God preserve you, for your Socialists will soon not be able to, I rather fear.’
The Fathers had not taught their charges either Spanish or Portuguese – just enough Latin to pray. For the rest the communities used Guarani: dictionaries and a grammar were produced, another reason why in Paraguay alone in Latin America, the native language survives as an official tongue along with Spanish. It was smart for the rich white girls in Asunción to be able to sing traditional songs in Guarani, quite unlike places like Peru, where Quechua was the language only of the poor and oppressed.
The finest of the Mission churches was to have been at Jesus, ten kilometres or so from Trinidad. I started to walk, but a small truck soon stopped and gave me a lift. The driver was a Paraguayan of German descent, with grey eyes and brown hair. He owned a small farm nearby. He had a sick calf in the back of the truck, roped down, and was taking it to the vet. He was amused to learn I was English.
‘We used to have tourists but now, they don’t come any more for some reason. They say it’s very dangerous up in the capital now, but down here we don’t worry – tranquilo, tranquilo. There are Mennonites here, you know, as well as the Chaco – good farmers, very traditional, hard working. And Japanese, and Koreans. Poco de todos – a little of everyone. This is the best part of Paraguay, the most fertile, the richest and the calmest. The further north you go the madder it becomes. I went up to San Juan Caballero once – never again. I was frightened out of my skin – bandits and cowboys! Have you been to Germany, then, on your travels?’ I told him I had. He told me he hadn’t. ‘Pretty much like here, I should imagine – rich, well-ordered, calm.’ ‘Less sugar cane in the fields, and not so many orange trees,’ I said. He laughed. ‘The English always had a sense of humour, that’s what I heard. Give my regards to the Queen!’ he said, as he set me down, and waved me on my way.
There were a few wooden shacks and clumps of pine trees. Up on the top of a hill stood the incomplete cathedral, roofless, massive, framed by quebrachos and palms. This was to be the St Peter’s of the Jesuit dominions, the largest religious building in the Americas. There was a Moorish-style arch through which you entered. The walls had never been completed, no roof had ever been installed; the cloisters had not been started, and the surrounding Indians’ houses had not got beyond a rudimentary stage of construction. Here was a whole civilization that had suddenly stopped on that day in August 1768. I sat down in the shade and contemplated the scene. There was no one else around. A whole world had come to an end here, a worthwhile, civilized world. Individualists have problems with collectivist dreams of perfection. I could no more have lived in a Jesuit Reducción than I could have in a Soviet kolkhoz, but wishing the Jesuit project ill seemed like wishing the Old Age Pension or the National Health Service into oblivion in Britain. Given the alternatives available at the time the Reducciones were the most civilized option. But doomed. Could bureaucratic, uneconomic modern Europe survive any more than the Reducciones? In the end people, nations, cultures, have to earn their livings on their own, without subsidies and paternalism.
In Germany they had a word to describe the pointless, uneconomic, futile work of a people for the state – Pyramidenbau – pyramid-building. These ruins were Pyramidenbau of a sort, and more than half the populations of modern Europe worked for the state, too, producing their own little mountains and pyramids of paper. Travel gives you a new slant on your own world. The first thing I noticed when I got back to England was the thousands of government employees, in uniform and out, doing absolutely nothing at all, just sitting or standing, manning telephones, pushing paper, herding and cajoling, ordering, hectoring and advising. If the USA was an economy where people were selling hamburgers to each other, Britain seemed to be a state devoted to counselling itself into paralysis. I was trying to buy a slice of land from the local fire brigade for my garden. It took them three months to answer every letter I sent them. In the end, despite their endless prevarications and obfuscations,
I bought the strip of land: the whole process took me five years struggling all the way. The previous owner of my house had actually died while negotiating the sale, which process had collapsed on his death, and had to be begun again from scratch by me. No wonder the books of Franz Kafka speak so directly to the post-war British.
I thought of the Jesuit Reducciones often – a lost paradise, a paternalist closed system, a theocratic state: but most of all I saw it as a precursor of the modern world, where the state, through its administration, herds the population, treating them as cattle, to be organized and milked, kept in good health and prevented from hurting themselves, beasts too stupid to look after themselves and too placid to revolt. The highest virtue in the modern European state is blind obedience to government direction: the loss of initiative, enterprise and sheer verve for living, never mind existential freedom, were the results we all lived with. Which was why travel writers went to the Third World, where this process was imperfect, partial and largely ineffective – and why the people back in the state-ordered prison camp at home envied them so much.
Fifteen
Du Côté de Chez Voltaire Molesworth
I was going to get to sleep with Lolita Dellabedova. Let me put that another way. Señora Dolores ‘Lolita’ Dellabedova had invited me to stay with her on her estancia. For a fee, of course. After some prompting by Veronica of Sunny Vacaziones, who had been ringing round various estancieros to see if some hospitality for dollars could be arranged. It was going to cost me US$30 a day, plus about US$80 to have her choffer come and pick me up. Her estancia was in the east of the country, in fertile, rolling country, not the blistered wastes of the Chaco. This sounded fine to me. The estancia experience is a hardy perennial of the travel-writing genre. I had seen high-class fine-writing pieces dripping with nostalgia and silver-roundel spurs in Sunday broadsheets at home. There was always the old walnut grandfather clock ticking slowly on the wax-polished, aromatic terracotta-tiled hallway, brought out by an ancestor from Scotland in the 19th century. There was a paddock of full-blooded Arabian horses, which the writer rode with the style and aplomb of a Rotten Row habitué. The owners, sage and gracious, hair tinged with grey, hairy tweeds and golden labradors in attendance, offered old-time hospitality and vintage malt whisky in cut-glass tumblers. Deft, winsome maids in uniform, smiling shyly, turned down the sheets by candlelight. The estancia was ancient and feudal, with proud, devoted gauchos and vaqueros, whose families had been in the service of the family for centuries, prancing to and fro on thoroughbreds, in colourful costume, some of them even on horseback. The house itself was vast, antiquated and mellow, drenched in grapevines and bougainvillea. There was always an asado, an outdoor barbecue of roast meats, home-killed, and in the evenings the lilting, plangent twangle of the guitar and violin rent the soft, mote-laden air as the dusky Carmens and Conchitas in their spangled ankle-length dresses high-stepped it round the embers of the dying fire, and the watching gauchos, half-hidden in shadows and sombreros under the ancient umbo tree, furtively masturbated away their sexual frustrations into the red-and-white spotted handkerchiefs which normally they wore round their necks, or else sodomized each other with all the inbred skill of men born to ride in the saddle, gripping hold of their bumchums’ leather chaps with horny hands, cracked with years of wielding a stockwhip at quasinudist fancy dress parties where the kinky estancia owners got their own jollies. Actually, I’ve invented the last bit, which the Sunday broadsheets would never in a million years publish on their travel pages, even if it were true, which it probably isn’t. However, you get the picture: estancias were in, like tree hugging and wildlife cuddling, among those journalistic circles where the travel writers’ reputation is made.
Paradise With Serpents Page 29