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Here lives the monster's brain, the man who exposed Switzerland's dirty secrets,

by Etusa Araxia Abrahamian.

Read by Lana Joffrey.

In early 1964, Jean Ziegler, a young Swiss politician, received a phone call from a man

claiming to represent Ernesto Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary and minister of industry.

Che would be in Geneva in March for a UN conference on trade policy,

and some comrades had suggested Jean might be his chauffeur during his stay.

Was Siegler available for the gig?

Today, in his 10th decade of life, Siegler is Switzerland's most notorious public intellectual.

That's because over the course of writing about 30 books, serving for close to three decades in the Swiss Parliament,

and relentlessly crusading for left-wing causes in his free time, Siegler has made a career

of unsparing criticism of his home country and its outsized influence on the rest of the world.

In the 1960s, though, he was just another eager young leftist, waiting for his chance to change the

world.

Ziegler, like Che, was born into a family of upper-middle-class professionals, and like Che's, his travels around the world had radicalized him against what he perceived to be a

capitalist, imperialist, and racist system. Everywhere he went, he saw its ravages,

in the Belgian Congo,

whose hungry children haunted him long after he went home,

in Algeria's bloody wars of independence

...