The indestructible Jean Ziegler celebrates his 90th birthday
Published: Saturday, Apr 13th 2024, 10:51
Updated At: Friday, Apr 19th 2024, 06:50
Volver a Live Feed
Former UN Special Rapporteur and SP National Councillor Jean Ziegler turns 90 today. As a rebel and third world representative from the very beginning, he spent his life fighting against injustice and suffering caused by "predatory capitalism".
Born in Thun BE on April 19, the Geneva sociologist made a name for himself abroad, where his books such as "Die Schweiz wäscht weisser" (Switzerland washes whiter) were hugely successful. In Switzerland, however, his trenchantly left-wing positions earned him the long-standing enmity of the bourgeois establishment.
In his book "A Switzerland above suspicion", published in 1976, he attacked the country's elites head-on. The book pilloried the profits of Swiss multinationals at the expense of the poorest, banking secrecy and the political institutions hijacked by the financial industry.
Red rag for commoners
While bourgeois Switzerland tried by all means to suppress this major attack on a number of Swiss myths, the book hit like a bomb abroad. The international press picked up on the themes and provided a huge sounding board for the sociologist's theses.
In 1990, he put the financial center in the spotlight and pilloried it in his work "Switzerland washes whiter". This landed him in the worst kind of legal trouble. Ziegler had to face an avalanche of lawsuits and his parliamentary immunity as a National Councillor was lifted. In the end, he was sentenced to pay hundreds of thousands of francs in damages.
For Jean Ziegler, books are his weapons. He has written a total of around 20 publications, some of which have generated an immense response, such as "Switzerland, Gold and the Dead" in 1997, about the attitude of the Swiss Confederation during the Second World War.
Ziegler described what he saw as the extremely brutal capitalist world order as cannibalistic. He did not distance himself from violence as a means of changing conditions. Ziegler condemned Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022 in the strongest possible terms. For him, Putin is an unpredictable dictator.
As a member of the SP for decades, the perfectly bilingual Ziegler sat twice in the National Council for the canton of Geneva. He held his first mandate from 1967 to 1983 and his second from 1987 to 1999, but was not re-elected either time.
Study in Paris
Ziegler was born into a conservative Protestant family in Thun and went to Paris to study law after completing his A-levels. In the French metropolis, he became acquainted with Marxism and became a member of the French Communist Party. He associated with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the Catholic theologian Abbé Pierre.
At the age of 30, Ziegler met the Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, whose chauffeur he became. Guevara advised him to stay in Switzerland and fight the "monster" there. After returning from a trip to the Congo, Ziegler dedicated his first books to the Third World in the 1960s.
In 1977, the University of Geneva appointed him Professor of Sociology, where he taught until 2002. From 2000 to 2008, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. He attacked the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the "three horsemen of the apocalypse".
Ziegler has been criticized for his closeness to some heads of government in the global South. His contacts with long-time Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, for example, earned him serious accusations. The sociologist rejected this as slander. Ziegler had traveled to Libya when the entire European left was meeting with the ruler.
Geneva filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff portrayed Ziegler in his 2016 documentary "Jean Ziegler - the optimism of the will". The 90-minute film can be viewed on Playsuisse.
©Keystone/SDA
Spanish 
English 
German 
French 
Arabic