: Jonas Cleary
: Brothers, Sisters.. Trilogy 2: The Advance
: Impression Publishing
: 9781908374561
: 1
: CHF 7.60
:
: Wirtschaft
: English
: 306
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Five years ago Jonas Cleary asked me to write a foreword for 'Brothers, sisters.. with a focus on the socio-economic aspects of the book. As 'Brothers, sisters.. is now republished as a trilogy, he has asked me for a new, revised foreword to the book or better, an updated one mirroring the prevailing socio-economic environment relative to what he has written. In that original foreword I had not only outlined how the then economic factors determining the world's financial system would inevitably lead to its collapse, but could do so in a frighteningly short space of time. I mentioned that seemingly bedrock behemoths from General Motors to the House of Saud would be swept away in the wake of such a breakdown. That the only beneficiaries of the AAA rated bonds, then flooding the financial markets, were bankers skimming fat fees from peddling them, but otherwise, they were worthless 'paper' puffed up with 'air money'. These years later, the world's financial system has narrowly escaped - yet again - from implosion. Those supposedly secure bonds have indeed been found to be worthless, and General Motors swept into insolvency, as have many financial institutions, whose gluttony for ever higher profits were largely responsible for bringing about this latest financial crisis. However, the prediction I made, and has not - as yet - materialised is fall of the House of Saud (although it too, is now being buffeted by the storms, unleashed by jobless graduates, sweeping through the Middle East). Finance ministers across the world believe that their immediate intervention in, and assistance to, the financial markets staved off this impending breakdown. In this they are deluded. It was money, more than $13 trillion of it - equal to the US's GDP - high-handedly taken from ordinary peoples' tax payments by those ministers' governments, and rushed to the outstretched hands of the then desperate, near as destitute banks, which prevented a worldwide economic collapse.

FOREWORD

I first met Jonas Cleary on a bus travelling to Canindé in Brazil. Few outsiders travel this far into the country’s Nordeste and so it was not surprising that we fell into conversation. During our discussions not only did I discover that Jonas had travelled far deeper into the backlands of the region than I but of the shocking social conditions he had witnessed.

As Jonas related yet more of the litany of the terribleness he had seen, I was struck how the bus we were in had been travelling for several tens of kilometres alongside the same white painted fencing posts of the extensive plantation of an obviously rich landowner. At the same time, however, I was not only also assailed by the smell of unwashed clothing of the weary, ragged plantation workers on the bus but at their wretchedly poor and malnourished state of health. To me this was a graphic depiction that this truly is a land of a few very wealthy‘haves’ and very many desperately poor‘have-nots’.

In“Brothers, sisters.. Jonas narrates the pitiless reality between rich and poor that lies hidden below the surface of samba and eternal carnival which is often thought of as being Brazil. He details that behind the façade of idyllic white beaches featured in its holiday brochures, there is a land where many tens of millions of people are condemned to a life of medieval oppressiveness.

The book further depicts, however, a world where the present unjust order is replaced by one in which not only are the poor, wretched people of Brazil freed from their oppression but so too are all of the‘Wretched of the Earth’.

However, as our bus journey continued I also discovered that we had more in common than our fascination for‘beleza’ Brazil. Uncommonly for a man, Jonas was most sympathetically interested in my [then] professional involvement in the pursuit of equality of opportunity for women. This I found to be most unusual. One of the hardest aspects of this job is getting men to be genuinely understanding in this matter at all. I also found Jonas to be fascinated by the relationship between men and women and how this would, over time, evolve.

The issues of women’s financial independence and enhanced career opportunities (read: better paid) and the entwinement of recent discoveries and possibilities on fertility and reproduction were also part of Jonas’s awareness. What is more, he had the perception to grasp that the evolution of biological sciences are destined to inevitably reduce men’s paramouncy within society. Included in his awareness was that parents can now decide the gender of their unborn child. Working on the premise that every mother wants nothing but the best for her child, Jonas asks:“Will the fact that girls live longer, their chances of prematurely dying as a result of violence or a stress related disease significantly less than boys increasingly affect a prospective mother’s gender decision?”

For those who have considered these particular matters in depth as well as those of inter-relationships between genders and also pondered the inevitable question:“What would happen if the roles were reversed?”“Brothers, sisters.. is indeed an extraordinary study. What it enfolds goes way beyond any rose-tinted, woolly conclusion that everything will be so much better were there to be such a role reversal. However, and as this book further explores, what would happen if women then decided to implement yet bigger changes and would the world be a better place as a consequence? Perhaps it is for the reader to find out and to discover that one should be careful what [s]he wishes for!

“Brothers, sisters.. is not only giftedly narrated but Jonas manages to catch new slants on political topics, socio-economic and technical developments, social issues in a most captivating non-fictional fictional piece of writing. And as a good story should - must! - our individual emotions are brought to a higher level. The result is a book which, while at times extremely coarse and shockingly violent, nevertheless offers unexpected optimistic outcomes for the angst facing many human beings in our contemporary society.

In conclusion, would the world Jonas Cleary portrays really be so out of the question? While I am writi