Writer Paul Cudenec has given an interview
to a newspaper in England
about his latest book, The Stifled Soul of Humankind.
Paul told the West Sussex County Times,
which covers the area where he used to live, why he had chosen to go to France to
write.
“I could
feel a real negative pressure building up around me in West
Sussex,” he recalled. “Not only the threat from fracking, but also
from massive house-building schemes, the possible expansion of Gatwick and so
on.
“I really needed to go away somewhere to try
and make sense of it all and place it all in some kind of historical context.”
Paul insisted that despite the downbeat
title of the book, and the rather scary cover art depicting damned souls, it
contains an essentially positive message.
He explained: “On the one hand I try to
describe all the factors that have blocked the freedom and the potential of
humankind – from the megalomania of the Roman Catholic Church through the theft
of common land and the suppression of folk culture, to the lie of ‘progress’
that is still being imposed on us today and which threatens our very existence.
“On the other hand, I also show that there
is an underground stream of opposition to all of this. It takes different forms
at different moments in history, but it is obviously the same stream.”
Paul said it was important to realise that
this idea of resistance was spiritual in origin – an aspect which he said had
been neglected by many contemporary radicals who were still attached to a
“scientific” or economic analysis of society.
“One of my favouriter thinkers, the
German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer, was warning of this 100 years ago – he
saw dogmatic Marxist thinking as the biggest enemy of any authentic human
renaissance because it denied the very idea of a human spirit.
“Now that state communism is fading into
history, I think dissidents today have to go back to the original rebellions
against the machineries of power and profit to seek inspiration in ideas that
have been mostly neglected since orthodox Marxism became so dominant.”
In his book, Paul traces a thread of ideas
back to the 13th century and the Brethren of the Free Spirit – rebel Christians
viciously persecuted by the Inquisition. Their anti-authoritarian heresy spread
across Europe, helping to fuel centuries of
peasant uprisings, and later inspired the radical Ranters and Diggers of the
17th century English Revolution.
Also woven into the story are the likes of
William Blake, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, Franz Kafka, René Guénon,
Herbert Read, Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley.
Paul said: “Some of the writers speaking
out against industrial civilization in the 19th century have been described as
‘anti-capitalist Romantics’. For me, that is what we have got to reclaim, that
sense of spirit, of life, against the dead hand of money which seems to rule
everything these days. And while there is life there is always hope, no matter
how bad things are looking.”
To arrange an interview with Paul Cudenec,
or to invite him to speak, he can be contacted directly via cudenec@riseup.net
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