2025-03-07
31 分钟This is the Guardian.
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Here lives the Monster's Brain.
The man who Exposed Switzerland's Dirty Secrets by Atusa Araxia Abrahamian Read by Lana JOFFRE in early 1964, Jean Ziegler,
a young Swiss politician, received a phone call from a man claiming to represent Ernesto Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary and Minister of Industry.
Che would be in Geneva in March for a UN conference on trade policy
and some comrades had suggested Jean might be his chauffeur during his stay.
Was Siegler available for the gig today?
In his 10th decade of life, Ziegler is Switzerland's most notorious public intellectual.
That's because over the course of writing about 30 books, serving for close to three decades in the Swiss parliament and relentlessly crusading for left wing causes in his free time,
Siegler has made a career of unsparing criticism of his home country and its outsize influence on the rest of the world.
In the 1960s though,
he was just another eager young leftist waiting for his chance to change the world.
Ziegler, like Che, was born into a family of upper middle class professionals and and like Chase,
his travels around the world had radicalized him against what he perceived to be a capitalist, imperialist and racist system.
Everywhere he went he saw its ravages.
In the Belgian Congo,
whose hungry children haunted him long after he went home in Algeria's bloody wars of independence against the colonial French.