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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-10-14
© 2010 Peter Belmont
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”The Count of Monte Cristo” is a story of a single hideous incident of official misconduct (solitary imprisonment for life without trial after an anonymous denunciation), miraculous escape from prison, and an elaborate revenge against the denouncers and the judicial official.
US foreign policy seems intended, these days, to wrongly injure not just individuals but whole peoples and thus seems intended (or, as they say, “calculated”) to induce a desire for revenge against the US on a broad scale. We then call such revenge “terrorism”.
Made me wonder, and thus this essay,
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”The Count of Monte Cristo” (by Alexandre DUMAS, published 1844-45) has long been a favorite of mine. I have read it in English, often abridged, recently in an apparently full English translation (The Modern Library, paperback, introduction by Lorenzo Carcaterra, 2005, 1462 pages).
Its plot is a rich one. It begins with a single event from which all else follows, a single hideous incident of official misconduct which foreshadows many crimes of present day American officials.
The hero, one Edmund Dantès, a sailor of Marseilles, is denounced anonymously by his enemies as a Bonapartist to the Procureur du Roi of France (the attorney general, roughly, I suppose) whose deputy has him arrested and questions him. On learning that the hero possesses information which might endanger—not France, not the King, but merely—the political advancement of the deputy Procureur du Roi himself, that ambitious if minor official signs a paper which effectively consigns the hero to solitary confinement for the rest of his life in a French prison located in an impregnable fortress built on a rock in the sea off Marseilles, the Chateau d’If.
From arrest to confinement, the hero is never allowed to speak to his betrothed, to his aged father, or to any friend, never allowed a lawyer, never accorded a trial before a judge and jury. No. When he expresses a desire to speak to the Governor of the prison, he is refused. On a single all-powerful signature he is locked away forever, without appeal.
So much of the story is completely believable, and we see examples of similar behavior by American military and CIA officials and agents world-wide in the practices of capturing and detaining so-called enemy combatants in the equally so-called war on terror. A person, usually a Muslim, is arrested because someone, perhaps someone (another Muslim) who owes money to him, denounces him to the Americans, often in return for a monetary payment. The Americans then detain the prisoner upon the signature (or, who knows, perhaps without any signature) of a minor official and before he knows it, he is in Guantanamo or—worse—in a torture prison via the American (or un-American) system of “extraordinary rendition” or even in our own secret American oubliettes. No lawyers. No phone calls home. President George Bush (the son) appears to have approved of all this, even if it was invented by his Vice President and lesser officials. President Obama appears to have continued most of this. Although I don’t say that any particular minor American official has profited from knowingly false imprisonment of any one such prisoner, nevertheless this whole procedure—including notorious directives allowing torture of the prisoners—was chosen to advance the careers of high (or moderately high) US officials. And the fees paid for denunciations seem calculated to encourage what would be, in effect, perjury by the denouncers.
But back to Monte Cristo.
There would be no story to be told in 1462 pages unless Dantès escaped from prison, which he did by page 238. The story of his 14-year imprisonment and subsequent escape provides a vastly amusing, touching, and wholly improbable element of the story which results in his reappearance upon the European scene alive, in good health, in full possession of his faculties, and—importantly—the possessor of a vast treasure, the treasure of Monte Cristo. Possessed of this treasure, Dantès—now styling himself the Count of Monte Cristo—can contemplate and accomplish his revenge on his accusers and on the (former) deputy Procureur du Roi, now persons of great consequence in Paris.
What happens in the remaining 1224 pages is an elaborate and entertaining story of revenge which is realistic at least insofar as it identifies the feelings of a person falsely imprisoned (or imprisoned without what Americans sometimes call “due process”) and identifies, to some extent, the guilt of his anonymous accusers and his sole condemnor.
At p. 899, the author puts this in the mouth of that condemnor: ”Madame,” replied Villefort, “you know that I am no hypocrite, or, at least, that I never deceive without a reason. * * * But [since my youth] everything has changed in and about me; I am accustomed to brave difficulties, and, in the conflict, to crush those who, by their own free will or by chance, voluntarily or involuntarily, interfere with me in my career. It is generally the case, that what we most ardently desire is as ardently withheld from us by those who wish to obtain it, or from whom we attempt to snatch it. Thus, the greater number of a man’s errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.
Our dear former President Bush (the son), perhaps having been lied to by those who sought to lead him astray in the matter of war, began the American war against Iraq after 9/11, it having been planned before 9/11, on the basis of deceit.
I have no idea why the enormous power of the USA’s military is so regularly put to use with all appearances of no greater purpose than the enrichment of some corporation (such as United Fruit Company on whose behalf the American wars of imperial control were fought which gave us the salutary phrase, “Banana Republic”)—and, indeed, enrichment quite likely more costly in military expense to the USA than in war-acquired revenues to the corporation. Certainly, it is never claimed that the new tax-revenues to the USA as a result of these wars are sufficient to pay for the costs of the wars, to say nothing of the enormous costs of the USA’s military establishment, ready at the drop of a hat to go to war to protect some oil company or to enrich some Haliburton or Blackwater.
But back to Monte Cristo.
The essence of the story is that a single man, infamously wronged, may desire revenge. In our day, the USA’s vast military does not wrong single men: it wrongs whole countries, whole religious communities. And then it calls those who seek revenge “terrorists” and wrongs them all some more.
Read “The Count of Monte Cristo.” It is a fun read and may give a little perspective for our modern lives.
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