Voyage into the Mediterranean countries with Paul Theroux

It’s the second one of Paul Theroux that I am reading. It was back sometime in 2004 that I had the read through the Dark Safari – Paul’s journey from Cairo to Cape Town. Undoubtedly one of the most fascinating contemporary documentary about eastern Africa.

This time it was about the happenings in Mediterranean, as Paul sees it. Only that this was written in the early nineties, which means that I had to adjust my continuously time sensitive perspective of all worldly events to suit the decade gap.

But it seems most of the things might not have changed much. Except for the communication revolution through the net and the cheap mobile networks that make every one to be in touch with every thing, the base line is much the same.

I could make out that Palestine, Israel, Albania and many more are much the same today as it was a decade ago.

Paul’s jottings about people capture just that. Well, people are always people. Agreed. Nevertheless, the enormity of the attitude differences between various cultures if untouched by the increase of prosperity seems to have always been preserved. Well this is not just a materialistic statement. The point is that the basic living model in any society more or less begins to fit to a pattern amidst affluence. A society’s legitimate protection mechanism of its prosperity attained by legitimate means in a law abiding environment eventually seem to match with a similar one in a different culture. Such a mechanism in both the acquiring and as well as the protection activities have started defining life.

This was not a case a century ago or even a quarter century ago. Accumulation was undertaken and viewed in different ways in different societies. Except for the affluent western powers and in some democratic pockets like India, legitimacy in accumulation was a factor that was available only in minimum. Most of the big wealth and its trickle down had considerable illegitimacy embossed inside.

With the spread of universally acceptable and implemented trade and labor laws, export of universally specified goods with equivalent standards the whole process of gaining prosperity has become more credible. No longer individual wealth is dependent upon the states whims and shortages. The making of wealth by the individual has ceased to be the prerogative of the state.

With such being the situation, an individual’s life goals and hence the living pattern to achieve or at least travel toward that goal seems be falling into a similar pattern irrespective of the culture or the society they live in. This process, which already has started, is gaining momentum by the day and maybe in two decades from now, if at all there are no atomic wars, there will truly be a big assembly of global citizens. However at this point this had not happened and in the nineties it just started to flex.
Albania had always been an enigma of a country for me. Being a Muslim enclave of Europe and complemented only by Turkey in its faith or should I say race, as Albania was an officially atheist state, I used to wonder how this second sick man of Europe managed to survive with the likes of Enver Hoxa (pronounced as Hodja) in the helm. It was indeed in shambles, as one would have expected any communist state would have been. The skeletons tumbled out once the notorious Hoxa and his clan disappeared from the scene. If not for the same faith of the populace, Albania would have been another Yugoslavia, split into the Turkic Muslim and the Slavic Christian enclaves with hatred running very deep and never to be reconciled ever again.

Paul goes through the motions of a traveler in the blind and wounded state of Albania, as someone trying to see light in midst of an undeniable despair. It’s not only wounds but also a systematic brutality inflicted on a population by a clan of Psychopaths that had shut all avenues for the light to fall in. The more he digs into the Albanian mind, the more the depth of the damage he can see. A set of people, violated in total in all respects, in mind, in body and in spirit, never again able to find their feet, would be the definition for an Albanian.

I read long ago that Albania became a protectorate of China once Krushev and his cohort’s punctured Stalin’s halo and tried to re-define world communism. As every one now knows, starting from Mao, all the other monstrous incarnations of Stalin in various Soviet satellites could never digest their beloved getting trashed. The lovely Stalin, the leader of all mankind, an icon for Mao and Hoxa was suddenly a nobody. Not only that. The nobody was now a deviant from real Marxism and Leninism. This was blasphemy to Mao and Hoxa and probably many others. The very symbol of these dictators legitimacy in grinding the poor population of their respective countries was dissolved on a good day in 1956 by the Chairman’s outpourings. Now the whole affair, which every one knew was true, quite some time ago, came out in the open. The next day Mao and others knew what would follow if this were reconciled to. It would not take much time for Mao’s minions to form the same opinion. Hence it was the Chinese communism, which was touted as the real pallbearer to Marxist, Leninist and Stalinist ideological dialectic. Mao started defining the real communism to many a new communist movement whose leashes were not with Soviet Russia. This continued at least till Stalin was resurrected, albeit in a small way by Brezhnev and gang. Hoxa, a product of Stalinism became a will full compound in the hands of the Maoists. No doubt the country that this dangerous crackpot presided over could do no better than him. Poor Albanians.

Paul then peeks into Syria. Another wonderful place for freedom and human rights. In Albania the ruling Psychopaths were from the Hoxa’a clan. In Syria it was Azzad’s clan. Now that Hafiz Azzad is no more, the enterprise is run by his son, obviously in the same lines.

Egypt was another place. Inspite of its radical Islamic brotherhood groups, there seems to exist a good percentage of sensible and non-fanatical Arabs.

The journey continues…….