Word: paz
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...Paz, as in many other cities, it was carnival time last week. Masked dancers cavorted through the streets, children dressed up in demons' costumes and whole plazas were carpeted with confetti. In the midst of this celebration, a stocky, thick-necked German named Klaus Altmann sat glumly in a cell of the high-walled San Pedro jail. Newly arrested after nearly 30 years as a fugitive, he confronts the prospect of a French murder trial...
There is "irrefutable evidence," according to the La Paz district attorney, that Altmann is really Klaus Barbie, the SS captain who ran the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944. Among Barbie's crimes were the deportation of thousands of Jews and the torturing to death of several hundred Maquis, including Resistance Leader Jean Moulin. A French military court sentenced him to death in absentia in 1954. Four years earlier, however, Klaus Altmann had migrated from Berlin to Italy to Bolivia, where he went into business and acquired Bolivian citizenship...
...Paz, the Third World is not simply a political or economic concept but a psychological state, consisting of "madmen," "lovers" and, of course, poets as well as "colored peoples" and ex-colonials. Essayist Paz regards "revolt" as "the form of our age," above all for the Third World. But his notion of revolt, being cultural rather than political, broadly defines itself as the impulse "to give otherness a place in historical life...
...Paz's Third World comes close to being a metaphysical entity: that element in humanity which has not yet been machined down by technology and bureaucracy, though it may very well want to be. The Third World, he writes, "wavers between Buddha and Marx, Siva and Darwin, Allah and cybernetics." It is "a reflection of a past that antedates Christ and machines; it is also a determination to be modern." Paz concedes the course of events. "The Third World is condemned to modernity and the task confronting us is not so much to escape this fate as to discover...
...Imagination" and "soul" are words that occur again and again in these essays. They are still alive, if not always well, in the Third World, Paz believes, and his primary concern is to save them. In his quest for allies he ranges far and wide. He examines fellow Latin American artists like Pablo Neruda (whom he calls "a poetic continent") and the film maker Luis Bunuel (whom he compares to Goya). He looks to Marshall McLuhan, then looks away from him -as a "prophet," alas, only of Madison Avenue...