[Paleopsych] The Times: (Bobby Fisher) A parting sting as the paranoid wasp flies to freedom at last

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A parting sting as the paranoid wasp flies to freedom at last
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-1541234-3,00.html
March 25, 2005
    From Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo

    NO ONE expected him to go quietly but, even by his own standards,
    Bobby Fischer's farewell to Japan yesterday was especially scabrous
    and hate-filled.

    After nine months of captivity and bitter legal struggle the former
    world chess champion flew to freedom in Iceland, spraying his vitriol
    far and wide. Japanese politicians, he declared, were "gangsters". The
    US was "Jew-controlled". "This was not an arrest," he said, in the few
    minutes that he was audible to reporters between his arrival at Narita
    airport in Tokyo and his departure for Reykjavik. "It was a kidnapping
    cooked up by Bush and (the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro) Koizumi.
    They are war criminals and should be hanged."

    To underline his point, he unzipped his trousers as he approached the
    airport, and made as if to urinate on the wall. This is the man who on
    the night of September 11, 2001, applauded the attacks on the United
    States as "wonderful news", expressing the hope that Americans as a
    consequence "will imprison the Jews, they will execute several hundred
    thousand of them at least".

    Fischer is politely described as an eccentric -- more outspoken
    observers call him a paranoid anti-Semite, and a fugitive from
    justice. His paranoia and anti-Semitism were again in evidence as he
    flew out of Japan. "The United States is an illegitimate country . . .
    just like the bandit state of Israel -- the Jews have no right to be
    there, it belongs to the Palestinians," he told an interviewer aboard
    the flight. "It's actually a shame to be a so-called American because
    everybody living there is . . . an invader."

    And yet there are plenty of people who share none of his extreme
    views, but for whom his release yesterday was a moment of sweet
    triumph and blessed relief.

    In Japan, a team of local lawyers and John Bosnitch, an expatriate
    Canadian journalist and a one-man Bobby Fischer defence league, have
    battled unflaggingly on his behalf. In Iceland, politicians of all
    parties voted unanimously to give him the citizenship that brought
    about his release.

    And then there is Miyoko Watai, 54, the head of the Japanese chess
    federation and Fischer's fiancée, a woman of quiet gentleness and
    dignity. What is it that united all these people in defence of a man
    of such indefensible views as Bobby Fischer? To find the answer one
    must go back to seven weeks in Reykjavik in the summer of 1972, and
    one of the great proxy confrontations of the 20th century. The world
    championship chess match between the American Fischer and the Soviet
    champion, Boris Spassky, was one of the defining events of the Cold
    War.

    "It's really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical
    Russians," is how Fischer put it, in characteristically robust style.
    "It's a microcosm of the whole world political situation. They always
    suggest that world leaders should battle it out hand to hand. And this
    is the kind of thing we are doing -- not with bombs, but battling it
    out over the board."

    The match was characterised by the American's demands and behaviour.
    After nerve-wrenching brinkmanship, Fischer finally condescended to
    sit at the board, persuaded by a telephone appeal from Henry Kissinger
    and the injection of considerable extra funds by the British
    millionaire Jim Slater. Events then took a miraculous course. Fischer
    began to play magnificent chess, which he backed up with an
    extraordinary battery of off-the-board protests that must have put
    great psychological pressures on both players.

    Fischer did not turn up for the second game, which was awarded to
    Spassky; for the third game, Fischer insisted on the exclusion of all
    cameras and won -- his first ever win against Spassky -- taking a lead
    in the match.

    And so the abrasive and poorly educated American defeated the suave
    Russian; chess was transformed from a hobby pursued by bespectacled
    nerds to a contest of heroes. Fischer's name and face would be
    remembered around the world, and above all in Iceland, the tiny
    country of 270,000 people made famous by the match.

    Thirty-three years later, enough Icelanders still feel grateful to
    Fischer for them to put aside reservations about his hateful views,
    and to welcome him as one of their own. But the groundswell of support
    for Fischer also has much to do with the cack-handed way that the
    Japanese and, above all, the US authorities have gone after him,
    creating sympathy where previously there was none and justifying
    Fischer's otherwise absurd paranoid fantasies.

    Why, for example, was last year chosen as the moment to go after the
    former champion? The crimes of which he is accused were perpetrated
    years ago. It was in 1992 that Fischer allegedly broke US sanctions
    against the former Yugoslavia by playing a return match against
    Spassky, the offence for which the American Government is officially
    seeking his return to the US.

    Charges are also reportedly being prepared for tax evasion --
    something that Fischer has been boasting about for years.

    Despite the arrest warrants issued against him, the US Government
    willingly renewed his passport at foreign embassies in 1997 and 2003.
    Yet 13 years after his sanction-busting offence -- and without telling
    him -- the US had revoked his passport.

    Similarly clumsy was the stubbornness of the Japanese who refused to
    free Fischer after he had been granted residence in Iceland. Only when
    he was made a full citizen, his passport delivered in person by
    Iceland's Ambassador to Tokyo, was he freed from detention.

    It is this sloppiness that has allowed his supporters to draw a veil
    over his racism and cast him as the heroic victim of state
    persecution.

    "Bobby Fischer has proven that the individual can withstand the
    combined forces of the world's mightiest governments, whenever he has
    justice on his side," Mr Bosnitch wrote on the freebobbyfischer.net
    website yesterday.

    The more accurate view might be to see the international effort to
    nail him as merely undignified and Fischer as a paranoid wasp pursued
    by a tank.

    Spassky wrote in a letter to President Bush last year from his home in
    France: "I would not like to defend or justify Bobby Fischer. I am
    asking only for one thing. For mercy, charity.

    "Bobby and myself committed the same crime. Put sanctions against me
    also. Arrest me. And put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And
    give us a chess set."