Good Songs To Run Out To

My turn of the century alone

THE LONG MARCH OF Roger Garaudy

Grodent MICHEL

Wednesday, May 3, 1989

With" My turn of the century alone "(1), Roger Garaudy has given us ... a very autobiography that inspired parade, from Stalin to Gaddafi, Bachelard Sartre, de Castro Rafsanjani, Iranian Parliament Speaker, personalities of all sizes known and least-known. Garaudy, Christian, Marxist and Muslim, some see a weather vane. The philosopher, for his part, believes his "conversion" as "the steps of deconditioning" In this sense, his life is "a long walk from many to one part of the universal."

Garaudy was in Brussels these days. We asked him how he came to write his memoirs ...
- I always told myself that I did not write it. And then pressed me so many sides ... I let myself take the game of course, there was no question of multiplying the anecdotes: I'd come to blacken three thousand pages! I had to make a severe selection in my memories, rediscover the thread of my life, identify the events that made sense to me to reveal myself as a participant in a divine plan: the discovery of a secret maternal love, meeting my first wife, the direct experience of death at twenty-eight years, the exclusion of the party, etc.. I saw a lot of people, I had many friends, Picasso, Dom Helder Camara. Some meetings were made under the sign of the angel, as if the caller told me: "I am your eternity."

- Can you say with Sartre - that you have known - that you don 't have any regrets?
- No, I regret nothing. I have not had an exemplary life. But each of my mistakes was a lesson. If anyone is perfect in this world, he cast the first stone! What is important is that I believe have remained faithful to the dream of my twenty years was to unite and Prometheus Abraham, Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx. Today, the tower Calhorra Cordova, who was once a center of influence of culture, I try to build a bridge between East and West. I remain faithful to the vocation of my life, that of Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland, "Charrier, like an artery, all the life forces from one to the other side. "

The Bible and Capital
- Think your adherence to Islam is a logical?
- I told a Saudi journalist that I came to Islam with the Bible under one arm, and Capital, Marx, on the other, determined to abandon any of them. Islam is for me to deepen and fulfillment. This is not a new religion. Mohammed admits: "I am not an innovator among the prophets." For a Muslim faithful, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, bring the same message of submission to God. I do not see anything that reflects my faith forever. Christianity does not give me an effective way to transform society. Marx, I have not found a metaphysical but a project based on an analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society, to achieve this transformation. Islam gives me the community spirit: he says that only God has the knowledge that only God has control and ...

- What do you think the contradictions of neo-capitalism?
- Since Hiroshima, it has an arsenal of bombs capable of destroying 75 billion human beings: a contradiction in technical progress! The Commission voted a credit of one hundred billion crowns to expand cold storage of meat and butter from Europe. During that time, millions of people die of malnutrition. Five times more than during the Second World War: a contradiction in economic management! On TV might be a great educational tool, the release of films glorifying violence, the law of the jungle. It pollutes the minds of children by not showing them the ugliness: a contradiction in communication!

- The Satanic Verses?
- Mediocre and boring!
- A boat question: what feelings you feel about the Rushdie affair?
- I think first we have great wrong to use statements of Khomeini in condemning all Islam, and create an atmosphere of a crusade, just as hypocritically, for financial reasons, it took up due to the princes of Saud and the Gulf princes of black gold. The imam cited a tradition contrary to the Koran, not according to Revelation, a tradition based on the law of Leviticus, calling for Rushdie's assassination. It's in the Torah we read that "the blasphemer is punished by death." In the Gospel it is written God curses the blasphemers in this world and in the other, implying that the decision belongs to God alone. The Qur'an has repeated the formula. On Satanic Verses, I will tell you one thing: a book mediocre and boring, manufactured through a method obsolete, borrowed from Joyce and Faulkner, and totally ignores the message of Islam, dimension of the man he reveals. Fanaticism today is to insult the publishers refuse to publish. What do we want? Of anti-Muslim pogroms? Bagatelle pour un massacre, Céline, who defamed the Jews, is prohibited. We do not complain.

Interview by MG (extracts)

(1) Roger Garaudy, My turn of the century alone Robert Laffont