The edge of oblivion
The primitive mind is,
in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable:
Sigmund Freud, 1915
The choice today
is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or
nonexistence: Martin
Luther King, 1958
Do the tense thoughts of these influential
men have a bearing on the contemporary world? Their lives were linked with the
most cataclysmic forces of the century, Nazism and racism. In 1938 at the age
of 82, Freud had to flee his native Vienna
after the Nazi occupation. The preacher-activist King confronted racialist bigotry
in a non-violent struggle that cost him his life, but changed America .
Of what relevance are their ideas on war and violence? Is terror a fringe
phenomena or has it long been part of what we call the mainstream?
We would be foolish to ignore
these questions. The twentieth
century witnessed 175 to 250 million deaths on account of war and genocide. The
proportion of soldiers to civilians killed declined from 43% in the First World
War to 28% or less in the second (which cost some 60 million lives). The
distinction between soldiers and civilians evaporated - terror-bombings were committed
by all sides in the Second World War. After 1945, people believed in a new era
of peace. This belief was shattered by the Korean War and developments in Palestine Malaya , Indonesia Kenya Vietnam Biafra , Iraq Rwanda Yugoslavia
Lest we forget
Every so often an Indian businessman uses Hitler’s name to
attract commercial attention and is surprised at the reaction. Wasn’t Hitler a
famous fellow and an ally of Netaji Subhas? He was indeed. He also criminalized
the German state in its entirety. ‘The very first essential for success’, said Hitler
in Mein Kampf, ‘is a perpetually
constant and regular employment of violence.’ That some Indians see him as
a statesman is a pointer to our own psychic ailments. The most colossal
bloodletting in history carries no meaning for us.
However, the Hitler regime was not only the prime example of
state terror. It was also the first to base itself on the doctrine of racial
purity, an idea it radicalized to the point of annihilation. After the passage
of racial laws in 1933, it began transferring Jews, Romani and blacks to concentration
camps. During 1939-41 about 100,000 mentally sick and incurable Germans were
killed by state order. Thereafter the regime built death factories for Jews
from all over Europe to be sent for extermination. Over
5 million were gassed to death in camps such as Maidanek, Buchenwald
and Auschwitz . Firms such as IG Farben, Siemens and
Bayer were involved in the genocide.
Even today the Nazi genocide of the Romani (also known as
gypsies) remains largely unspoken. These nomads of Indian origin had always been
subject to racial hatred, forced settlement and enslavement. Some of this continued
into the modern era and even under communist regimes. Early in 1940, 250 Romani
children from Czechoslovakia
were murdered with the new Zyklon-B gas at Buchenwald . On
December 16, 1942 Himmler
ordered all Romani in Germany
deported to Auschwitz for extermination. There were
an estimated 3 million Romani in German-controlled territories at the height of
the Nazi regime, of whom a third to half were murdered.
Radiant people
The other marker of the age of extermination was the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in August 1945. Up to 150,000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death in these
two cities within minutes, and tens of thousand died of radiation later. The
bombing was sought to be justified in terms of lives ‘saved’ by avoiding an
invasion of Japan .
These arguments have been rebutted by many historians who point to America ’s
strategic goal of countering Soviet interests and testing the newly developed
weapon. Leaving that aside, the nuclear explosion was a horribly fitting
conclusion to the most destructive war in history, a war seen as ‘total’ because
it pitted entire populations against one another.
Have we learnt what exterminism signifies? The Pakistani
physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy recently described his conversations during the
1990’s with Indian and Pakistani generals. Senior officers on both sides expressed
delight at acquiring atomic weapons. Their passionate evocation of honour and
glory made Hoodbhoy describe their instincts as Neolithic. Perhaps this was what
Freud meant by the imperishable nature of the primitive mind. They saw
nuclearisation as a means to permanent peace. Gandhi had fielded similar
questions in 1946. Responding to people who believed that the bomb would end
war, he said, ‘The atom bomb has not stopped violence. People’s hearts are full
of it and preparations for a third world war may even be said to be going on.’ He
said, ‘the atom bomb is the last word in violence today… there used to be
so-called laws of war.. Now we know the naked truth. War knows no law except that
of might. The atom bomb… resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan .
What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see.’
When asked whether the bomb had made non-violence useless, he said, ‘No. It is
the only thing the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I
first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima .
On the contrary, I said to myself, unless now the world adopts non-violence it
will spell certain suicide for mankind.’
The birth of nations
The most fearsome precursor to India ’s
independence was the Calcutta
killing of August 1946. Between five to ten thousand people were killed under
the ministry of the Muslim League’s Hussain Suhrawardy. In October there were massacres
in Noakhali, followed by a pogrom in Bihar under a
Congress ministry. India and Pakistan were born amidst genocide. About fifteen million people were forced to migrate.
The communal ‘cleansing’ of Punjab ’s population was catastrophic.
Up to a million people were killed in 1947. After that there were massacres of Muslims in Hyderabad
(India ) in 1948
and of Hindus in East Pakistan in 1949 and 1950. The
cycle of violence continued for two years. Perhaps it never really ended.
Then there was the drama surrounding Gandhi’s murder. His last fast in January 1948 was not about payments to Pakistan ,
but for the restoration of the shrine of Bakhtiyar Kaki at Mehrauli and for communal
peace. Had this fast not succeeded there would have been a Babri Masjid-like
situation on the outskirts of Delhi .
His assassination was a sad rehearsal of the ghastly Indian tradition of
founding a new edifice upon a blood sacrifice. In 1965, fresh doubts about V.D.
Savarkar’s involvement led to the appointment of an inquiry commission headed
by Justice Jivanlal Kapur. His report (1969) noted the negligence of the police
and concluded that the facts undermined ‘any theory other than the conspiracy
to murder by Savarkar and his group.’ However, in 2003 the Indian government installed
his portrait in the Lok Sabha. Evidently our MP’s still revere Gandhi’s
assassins.
Has India India
The
doctrine of collective guilt has become common sense for many people. Entire communities
are held responsible for crimes committed by a few. Wounded sentiment has
become the most popular mask worn by hooligans. Democracy is being bypassed via
a parallel system of representation based on community. The repeated instigation
of retributive violence or the threat of it has become endemic. Along with other
factors, this accelerates the criminalization of India
The choice before us
Gandhi referred to the use of the atom bomb for ‘the
wholesale destruction of men, women and children as the most diabolical use of
science.’ ‘There are two kinds of shastras in the world’ he said, ‘one satvik
and the other rajasik, one conforming to dharma and the other not conforming to
dharma. The shastra of the atom bomb does not conform to dharma… It usurps the
place of God.” Those who demur at his language may remind themselves of Robert
Oppenheimer’s remark that physicists had come to know sin. Physics and metaphysics
are not that far apart. The use of science for destructive purposes has pushed
humanity to the brink. The contempt for life is the hallmark of modern
nihilism.
In one of the first reflections upon Nazism’s death
factories, Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘In their effort to prove that everything is
possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered… crimes which man can neither
punish nor forgive.’ About concentration camps, she noted the irrevocable rupture
that the discovery of these ‘holes of oblivion’ had wrought in history: ‘Modern
politics revolves around a question which, strictly speaking, should never
enter into politics, the question of all or nothing: of all, that is a human
society rich with infinite possibilities; or exactly nothing, that is, the end
of mankind.’ When the philosopher Karl Jaspers rejected the idea of casting
Hitlerism in the light of some satanic greatness, she agreed with him, but
insisted that what had happened in the camps was not a case of humans killing
other humans for human reasons, howsoever horrible. What had occurred said
Arendt, was ‘the organized attempt to
eradicate the concept of the human being.’ This is the closest we will ever
come towards understanding modern exterminism. The phenomenon was not
restricted to theatres of war – the whole world was enveloped in it, and we
live in its shadow.
The idea that only violence may inaugurate new beginnings,
that a just order may only be validated by blood is our deadliest illusion. Yet
this idea is celebrated in our favourite ideologies. Violence is productive of
nothing but more violence. Freud was insightful in his observation about the
stability of our primeval instincts. But we had better control them. Because,
as Gandhi and King warned us, the choice today is the one between violence and
annihilation.
See also:
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955
Rare First World War documents go online + Unseen photographs
Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary Scholar & critic
John Horgan on erasing war from the human condition
Book review: War Is Still a Racket
Book review - An Enduring Condition: On War Time
Eternal war (Chapter n+1) - Panetta’s Pacific Vision
The military spending map of the world
Annihilation as world religion
Banks in front line of nuclear arms campaign
Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'
'Military Inc' by Ayesha Siddiqa:
Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir by Arif Jamal
What war does to us: Afghanistan - a soldier's view
The End of the new world order
