Jean Ziegler, a prolific Swiss author, sociologist and politician who infuriated his compatriots by calling consideration to the darkish underside of their cuckoo-clock paradise, incomes him lawsuits, dying threats and fierce reprobation, died on Wednesday in Geneva. He was 92.
His dying, in a retirement house, was confirmed by his son, Dominique.
Mr. Ziegler was a uncommon determine in a rustic that sees itself as a tranquil oasis of contented prosperity and enterprise advantage.
He didn’t associate with that imaginative and prescient. Police had been stationed close to his home to guard him from his quite a few critics. Greater than half a dozen defamation lawsuits through the years bankrupted him with fines and authorized charges; his wage from the College of Geneva was garnished. Mr. Ziegler persevered and didn’t depart Switzerland.
He was its “nationwide troublemaker,” in line with a profile of him in Le Monde in 1997.
After practically 30 books — a lot of them sharp critiques of world capitalism and, particularly, its Swiss variant — that made him a hero of the European left, The Guardian referred to as him “Switzerland’s most infamous public mental,” in an article final 12 months.
A former Socialist Occasion deputy in Switzerland’s parliament and a former sociology professor on the College of Geneva, Mr. Ziegler attained that notoriety by taking direct intention at his nation’s satisfaction: the vaunted banking tradition.
In his view, removed from being a mannequin of probity, Swiss banks had been deeply mercenary, tainted particularly by the earnings they made coping with Nazi Germany. That concept, which had largely been accepted by historians, was on the coronary heart of the ebook that introduced Mr. Ziegler essentially the most thunderous opprobrium, “The Swiss, the Gold and the Lifeless” (1997, translation 1998).
“I avow myself a member of the nation of responsible innocents, and harmless responsible,” he wrote within the ebook. “I belong to that nation, however the story of the Nazis’ looted gold and the proceeds of the Holocaust have tainted it to a level I can not abdomen.”
The overwhelming majority of the gold stolen by the Nazis, all the way down to the gold fillings within the tooth of Holocaust victims, moved by way of Switzerland throughout World Battle II. There it was laundered as international foreign money, in any other case unobtainable by the Germans, or as industrial items for the German conflict effort.
“The gold looted by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, a lot of which continues to be in Switzerland, doesn’t differ in essence from the blood cash held by main Swiss banks within the personal accounts of the Zairian ex-dictator Joseph Désiré Mobutu,” Mr. Ziegler wrote.
Exterior Switzerland, the ebook was largely handled with respect, although some criticized a prosecutorial tone and sloppiness. Contained in the nation, the response was sharp.
“Ziegler’s newest broadside has provoked anguish among the many Swiss,” the veteran New York Instances correspondent Peter Grose wrote in a evaluation of the ebook. “At greatest they’re astonished; extra typically they’re outraged.”
A lot so {that a} group of residents formally requested the Swiss federal prosecutor to pursue Mr. Ziegler on treason fees, a request permitted below Swiss legislation.
Including to their anger was Mr. Ziegler’s testimony in opposition to the banks, in July 1998, in entrance of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee led by Alfonse M. d’Amato, a Republican from New York. He was investigating the dormant accounts of Holocaust victims in Swiss monetary institutions, an effort that resulted in a $1.25 billion settlement with the World Jewish Congress.
Mr. Ziegler was not prosecuted on the treason cost, and he rejected the accusation of “calumny” his detractors had made.
The actual “calumny “ to Switzerland, he asserted in a 1998 interview with The New York Instances, got here from the conduct of the nation’s bankers. “The banking institution’s collaboration with the Nazis has given my nation a really unhealthy identify,” he stated.
Mr. Ziegler’s many critics, each out and in of Switzerland, accused him of being too arduous on capitalism and too naïve in regards to the crimes of the growing world in opposition to its personal folks.
Favorable remarks through the years about Fidel Castro, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and different dictators; his affiliation with the Gaddafi Worldwide Prize for Human Rights; and his unstinting criticism of Israel earned him a mix of derision and denunciation.
“In his agitator’s temperament there’s a mixture of Don Quixote and libertarian socialism, within the fashion of Bakunin, a rejection of energy in all its kinds, together with a gargantuan ego,” André Laurens of Le Monde wrote of him in 1993.
Hans Ziegler — it was Simone de Beauvoir who persuaded him to alter his first identify to Jean when she printed him in Les Temps Modernes, the month-to-month she edited with Jean-Paul Sartre — was born in Thun, Switzerland, close to Bern, on April 19, 1934.
He was certainly one of two youngsters of Hans Ziegler, a decide and artillery officer within the Swiss military, and Elisabeth Walther — conservative and bourgeois mother and father who embodied a “humanist Protestant tradition,” Dominique Ziegler stated in an interview.
Jean Ziegler obtained superior levels in legislation and sociology from the College of Bern in 1958 and 1967, and was admitted to the Geneva bar in 1960. In 1961 he was recruited by the U.N. in its precarious Congo mission, as that nation gained independence; seeing African poverty helped radicalize him, he later informed interviewers. He wrote about it in Les Temps Modernes; Ms. de Beauvoir and Mr. Sartre grew to become his buddies.
His dedication to socialism deepened with a 1964 encounter in Geneva, when he served briefly as a driver for the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. He taught sociology on the College of Geneva from 1972 to 2002, and was a Socialist member of the Swiss federal parliament from 1967 to 1983, and 1987 to 1999.
It was throughout these years that his most incendiary books appeared, starting with “Switzerland Uncovered” (1976; English translation 1978), the place he pointed the finger at Swiss banks and multinational firms, suggesting they had been behind a lot of world iniquity.
The defamation lawsuits and threats started, and continued forcefully with “Switzerland Washes Whiter” (1990), a polemic in opposition to the whitewashing function of the nation’s banks in accepting cash from the drug commerce and different illicit actions. The Swiss Bankers Affiliation was livid, and Mr. Ziegler misplaced his parliamentary immunity.
From 2000 to 2008 he was the U.N.’s Particular Rapporteur on the Proper to Meals, a place he used to assault multinational firms and multilateral establishments and Israel, calling Gaza “an immense focus camp.” He informed Le Monde that “each youngster who dies of starvation on this planet immediately is the sufferer of homicide.”
Apart from his son from his first marriage to Wedad Seinier, which led to divorce, Mr. Ziegler is survived by his spouse, Erica Deuber Ziegler.
Mr. Ziegler by no means expressed remorse for his personal pugnacity.
“I misplaced all of the lawsuits,” he stated in a 2022 interview. “However I assumed to myself that it was additionally a chance to combat utilizing the courts — the bankers needed to reply the questions that had been raised there.”
