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08/10/2004:

"Bluebeard's CastleDisappearing the Right to Development"

by Toni Solo counterpunch.org
An unconvincing but resonant tale, Bluebeard's Castle: A beautiful young woman marries a strange but captivating aristocrat: Before leaving on a journey, her new husband entrusts her with a magic key to a locked room. Curiosity overcomes her. Inside, she discovers the horrifying remains of her murdered predecessors. Relocking the door, she stains the key with blood. Nothing she does can clean it. Bluebeard returns, discovers the truth from the bloodied key. He is about to cut her to pieces. Her brothers arrive at the last minute and save her.

Writing in 1971, the cultural critic Geroge Steiner used the story as a symbol for the irreparable gap between the high moral claims for Western culture and its practice of torture, pogrom and massacre. He wrote:

"We come immediately after a stage of history in which millions of men, women, and children were made to ash. Currently, in different parts of the earth, communities are again being incinerated, tortured, deported. There is hardly a methodology of abjection and of pain which is not being applied somewhere, at this moment, to individuals and groups of human beings. Asked why he was seeking to arouse the whole of Europe over the judicial torture of one man, Voltaire answered, in March 1762, "c'est que je suis homme. " By that token, he would, today, be in constant and vain cry." full article