“I am such a complete atheist that I am afraid God will punish me.” Such is the pithy wisdom of Jára Cimrman, the man overwhelmingly voted the “Greatest Czech of All Time” in a nationwide poll earlier this month. (A state TV station in the Czech Republic sponsored the survey, inspired by a hit BBC show that birthed similar “Greatest” polls across the continent.)

Who is Jára Cimrman? A philosopher? An inventor? An explorer? All of these things, yes, and much more. After a few days of investigation here in Prague, this is what I have uncovered:

Born in the middle of the 19th century to a Czech tailor and Austrian actress, Cimrman studied in Vienna and Prague, before starting off on his journeys around the world — traversing the Atlantic by steamboat, scaling mountains in Peru, trekking across the Arctic tundra. Astounding feats soon followed. Cimrman was the first to come within seven meters of the North Pole. He was the first to invent the light bulb (unfortunately, Edison beat him to the patent office by five minutes). It was he who suggested to the Americans the idea for a Panama Canal, though, as usual, he was never credited. Indeed, Cimrman surreptitiously advised many of the world’s greats — Eiffel on his tower, Einstein on his theories of relativity, Chekhov on his plays (you can’t just have two sisters, Cimrman is said to have said — how about three?). In 1886, long before the world knew of Sartre or Camus, Cimrman was writing tracts like, “The Essence of the Existence,” which would become the foundation for his philosophy of “Cimrmanism,” also known as “Non-Existentialism.” (Its central premise: “Existence cannot not exist.”)

This man of unmatched genius would have been bestowed the honor of “Greatest Czech of All Time” if not for the bureaucratic narrow-mindedness of the poll’s sponsors, whose single objection to Cimrman’s candidacy was that “he’s not real.” (Jára Cimrman is the brainchild of two Czech humorists — Zdenek Sverak and Jiri Sebanek — who brought their patriotic Renaissance man to life in 1967 in a satirical radio play.) Thus, although Cimrman handily won the initial balloting in January, Czech TV officials refused to let him into the final rounds of the competition, blatantly biased against his non-existentialism.

How should we interpret the fact that Czechs would rather choose a fictitious character as their greatest countryman over any of their flesh-and-blood national heroes — Charles IV (the 14th-century Holy Roman Emperor who established Prague as the cultural and intellectual capital of Europe), Comenius (the 17th-century educator and writer considered one of the fathers of modern education), Jan  Hus (the 15th-century religious reformer who challenged Catholic orthodoxy), or Martina Navrátilová (someone who plays a sport with bright green balls)? The more cynically inclined — many Czechs among them — might point out that the Czech people have largely stayed behind their mountains for the past millennia, with little interest in, or influence on, happenings elsewhere in the world. Cimrman is so beloved because he is that most prickly of ironies: a Czech who was greater than all the world’s greats, but who for some hiccup of chance has never been recognized for his achievements.

Personally, I like to think that the vote for Cimrman says something about the country’s rousing enthusiasm for blowing raspberries in the face of authority. Throughout its history — from the times of the Czech kings who kept the German menace at bay through crafty diplomacy, to the days of Jan Hus and his questioning of the very legitimacy of the Catholic Church’s power, to the flashes of anti-communist revolt that at last came crashing down in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution — the Czechs have maintained a healthy disrespect for those who would tell them what is best or how to live their lives. Other countries soberly choose their “Greatest” from musty tomes of history, but the Czechs won’t play this silly game. Their vote for a fictional personage, says Cimrman’s co-creator Sverak, says two things about the Czech nation: “that it is skeptical about those who are major figures and those who are supposedly ‘the greatest.’ And that the only certainty that has saved the nation many times throughout history is its humour.”

Cimrman — if he were with us today — would agree. A man of greatness, he was always a bit skeptical of those who saw themselves as great, or who marched forward under the banner of greatness. As Cimrman liked to say, “There are moments when optimists should be shot.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

But at the end of the film, after Balian has surrendered Jerusalem, Saladin enters the city and finds a crucifix lying on the floor of a church, knocked off the altar during the three-day siege. And he carefully picks up the cross and places it reverently back on the altar. And at this point the audience rose to their feet and clapped and shouted their appreciation. They loved that gesture of honour. They wanted Islam to be merciful as well as strong. And they roared their approval above the soundtrack of the film.

Robert Fisk, a veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent, has a thoughtful piece on Ridley Scott’s Crusades epic, Kingdom of Heaven, and the reactions of the Muslim audience in the Beirut theater where he saw it. There are just enough historical parallels between that ancient, blood-drenched conflict and the fighting going on today in the Middle East to make one uncomfortable. (It probably doesn’t help that President Bush — in one of his lesser moments of eloquence — once described his war on terror as a “crusade.”) Just as before, the question to be decided is whether there is enough honor and mercy on both sides to quell the fundamentalist thinking and permit, someday, a peaceful resolution. Fisk suggests the answer is yes.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

From weakness emerges strength. That’s the paradox that seems to be at the heart of le mouvement altermondialiste (what’s known as the “global justice movement” across the Atlantic), as two leading French activists pointed out to me recently. Elisabeth Gauthier, general secretary of the left-wing, communist-affiliated organizing center known as Espace Marx, and Francine Bavay, a Green Party politician who worked for years with trade unions, have starkly different political pedigrees and perspectives on political change, but both come to the same conclusion about the recent rise of global activism. What brought about this loose coalition of environmentalists, trade unionists, Third World solidarity activists, anarchists, and other leftists — the legions who first strutted across the global stage during the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle — was the very weakness of the left in countries like France and the United States during the eighties and nineties, the two activists say.

In brief: As the political and economic foundations of the Soviet Union crumbled away, the United States emerged as the world’s single superpower, the superiority of its model seemingly unquestioned — that is, an economics of free market fundamentalism and a politics of center-right conformity. Beaten down by these prevailing political winds, the left — in France, in America, and throughout much of the world — was fragmented. The communists were discredited. The liberals and socialists were tempted to the “dark side” of a center-right, neoliberal consensus. Meanwhile, the wide variety of freelance activists on the left — no longer feeling bound (if they ever did) to a single ideology — had gone off to pursue largely single-issue activism on matters of the environment, the rights of immigrants, labor protections, and other parts of society affected by the unfettering of markets.

These circumstances created a new dynamic. Small groups had a need to band together or face irrelevance. No single group was strong enough to bark out marching orders or dictate strategy for the rank-and-file, like the communist or socialist parties of old. Space was opened up for a democratic culture to take root, one in which differences were (more or less) respected, and no one faction could hijack the decision-making process.

I meet Elisabeth Gauthier at her office at the French Communist Party’s headquarters in Paris, an imposing steel-and-glass structured designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. An immigrant from Austria, Gauthier has been a communist almost all her life — a path she decided upon, she says, while growing up in a country ravaged by the horrors of fascism. Yet Gauthier is frank about the shortcomings of the Soviet Union, which she feels forgot the will of the people in erecting the edifice of an all-powerful state. For her, it was a combination of factors — the end of the Cold War, the downfall of unions, political parties, and other traditional forms of left-wing politics, the new conditions faced by workers in the global economy and the urgent need to find alternatives — that opened up possibilities for cooperation between left-wing activists of varying political stripes. “All this was favorable to building new spaces — common spaces,” says Gauthier. “What we did in Porto Alegre [at the World Social Forums], and maybe in a more intense way in Europe [at the European Social Forums], was that we created an autonomous, open, public, and political space. The social forums are not political movements, but they are self-organized spaces, and they make [it] possible to collect and analyze these experiences and [make] proposals.”

Across the Seine, in an upscale Parisian neighborhood where France’s former prime ministers and billionaires live, I meet up with Francine Bavay at the offices of the regional government, where Bavay serves as a councilmember. Her politics, likewise, are a world apart from Gauthier’s — Bavay describes herself as a “radical reformist” — but she shares the same understanding of the origins of the movement’s democracy culture — and its potential. “The people that fight capitalism, [market] liberalism, are very weak in the world,” she says. “When you are weak, it is difficult to impose an organization to take the leadership.” While there are disagreements over strategy within the movement, there is also a prevailing belief, Bavay says, that the different factions need to tolerate those differences and work toward their common goal: overturning neoliberalism. “It’s a new concept of democracy, in a sense. You don’t have the same tools, but you have the same vision, the same objective.”

What “destroyed” the left-wing social movements that emerged in the late sixties around the world, Bavay says, was intolerance and infighting. “People wanted their solution to be the only one, and [they] fought between themselves. And I think we have understood the lesson.”

The question, of course, is whether these coalitions of activists can remain both democratic and united — both idealistic and effective — in the years ahead. If the rapid spread of the World Social Forum model is any indication, however, there seems to be much promise.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen