Daily Times

In June 1940, the French army capitulated to the Nazis. The German Frankenstein, prepared and pampered to annihilate Soviet Union, came back to haunt its mentors. Fascism, familiar with the inherent weakness of its liberal version, decided to conquer its own kind before unleashing a blitzkrieg against Socialism. After pulverizing the Allied forces Erich von Manstein – later embraced in 1956 as NATO adviser by his former enemies probably due to his successful counteroffensive against the Soviet army – walked in France to establish an infamous Vichy government.

A disgruntled yet sanguine Sartre had redefined the concept of freedom. “Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. The insulted us to our faces. … They deported us en masse. … And because of all this we were free.”

The people of Pakistan are facing the same dilemma. They too are suffering the violence of an imposed one-dimensional freedom that offers a single option of living in poverty, of dying with hunger, of electing an already elected master and to be subservient to those who in the name of God live by the sword and maintain their domination through blatant violence. For the overtly pulverized people, “existence has become an imperfect tense that never becomes a present” (Nietzsche), a weltanschauung of their everyday lives.

Laing is of the opinion that to be alive one needs to be emotionally dead since emotions have the power to kill but the question remains what kind of emotions are deadly for an individual. Some of the basic emotions like anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, if stretched to the limit can prove lethal. Incidentally love which means lack of anxiety is considered least emotive; it is scarce in capitalistic and religious societies since both rely on innate human aggression. Contrarily it’s only through liberation of love and Eros that human beings can master the impulsive sadistic destructiveness.

There is no prohibition to the instinctive drives in capitalism as-long-as they are sublimated and repressed, and refrain from causing any interference to the ‘reality principle’. In developing societies their overt expression is deemed sinful – hence tabooed. Either sublimated or tabooed, no society has managed to curb or mitigate the inherent aggression which in a more equal society can be creatively used. Unhappy consciousness is readily prepared to give into anarchy which is common place in either world.

Happiness akin to truth is something innate; the human being has to walk out of either condition to realize his/her existence. For Horkheimer and Adorno, market economy has made happiness uneconomic, hence obsolete, left confined to mother’s womb alone. In an antagonist society, truth is desired to accomplish a purpose even if it ceases to be a truth. In the end it becomes an instrument to achieve success. The same holds true for the concept of happiness – a mirage preplanned, premeditated and fetishized.

After the demise of truth and happiness, the only idea left to fill the void is faithless-faith, promoted and drilled in human mind by the capital. Faith in religion, in blut and boden, in commodity fetishism, is all what matters. “Faith” for Nietzsche “ is not wanting to know what is right”. He says, “the Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad”. Why has he rescued himself from narrating about other faiths reveling in faithful’s schadenfreude are any body’s guess?

The faithless-faith has revived the cave-man hostility against not only those who are strangers, immigrants, aboriginals or having different skin color but against all those who think differently especially when the thought tends to go beyond the boundaries of a social order. Apart from the Reds who by an inscrutable divine decree are others hence pariahs, Asia bibi and JunaidHafeez are the ones who have to face the wrath of the system since they are “guilty innocents”; the blameless who have to carry the burden of others while representing the collective guilt of civilization.

In market economy, the vulnerable are lazy; they either belong to the concentration camp or deserve immediate liquidation – economic impotence stands higher than mortal sins. Such people can be easily isolated and convicted of inadequacy. Those who have power over the means of production have power over the distribution of death. They choose the victim and the moment to slaughter the sacrificial lamb. It has to be a lamb since faith does not honour the sacrifice of the predator especially when it is fed by the hands that can rock the society.

Predators are precious and meant to be unleashed in times of need on those who have doubtful political credentials. Those with “a lean and hungry look”, who “think too much, such men are dangerous” (Shakespeare), since they are radicals, non-conformists and desire a change in the status quo beneficial for the powers

The faithless-faith has revived the cave-man hostility against not only those who are strangers, immigrants, aboriginals or having different skin color but against all those who think differently especially when the thought tends to go beyond the boundaries of a social order.

nce there was a party of the radicals which demanded equality and social justice. The thought had a stench of treason hence the party was declared defunct. The ablest of intellectuals were thrown in the death cell. It was 1951 – since then the country has never been left unguarded. In a show of guiltless chivalry the Big Brother, previously controlling from behind, opted to hold the reins directly in his hands.

In politics the idea of keeping pets is not very new. The American presidents have always found it pretty exciting hence they always protected their Somozas and Trujillos, the proverbial ‘sons of their own bitches’, who gleefully accepted the title. For their petty interests they played havoc with the people of their own countries. Suharto opened the country to Berkeley Mafia and Pinochet to Chicago boys who plundered all possible resources, leaving their respective states in utter economic chaos. In either case the religious hierarchy and its stooges were used effectively to annihilate the progressive stratum of the state.

From Al-Shamas and Al-Badar to present day religious diehard Pakistani establishment too has taken a leaf out of the gory history of coercion and applied it liberally to curb the dissenting voices. Religion once itself a product of irreconcilability of class antagonism is used to keep the people under ruthless suppression through totalitarian state structure. The end of Cold War and the recession in capitalism required a new enemy which brought religious fundamentalism, backed by imperialism, to the fore and the rest is history.

In Pakistan, the Barelvi brand of ‘SS’ launched by the establishment has allowed to wear a façade of a Frankenstein which is threatening to subvert the state institutions. It will be interesting to note if it is a Frankenstein or a mere Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon but for now the crippled spirit suffering from self-hatred is demonstrating its spiritual essence, through physical violence, the tabooed Eros.

One can understand the position of a weak government that owes it legitimacy to the establishment and the rogue element but the meekness shown by a hyperactive juridical apparatus and the Pretorian guards whose writ is openly challenged gives only one message: “daggers in men’s smiles” matter little, they are “near in blood”.

The writer has authored books on socialism and history. He blogs at saulatnagi.wordpress.com and can be reached atsaulatnagi@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, November  8^th 2018.