Daily Times

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem” for Camus, and that is “suicide”. In reality, suicide neither pretends to be a philosophy nor poses such awkward questions, or else the world population would not have swelled to nearly seven billion.

Despite living in an unlivable world, where people taste death but not life, only a few are prepared to think like Camus. “Life” for Walter Benjamin “is not worth living but suicide is not worth the trouble” either. “Everybody”, Nietzsche says, “considers dying important, but it has not become a festival” or perhaps it has but without many rituals or fanfare. People watching their species dying in droves have lost the sense of celebrating it. Death as an instrument of repression has lost its horror.

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life.” Nietzsche suggests, “the living being is only a species of the dead and a very rare species”. Where can one find that rare species if not among a crowd of cadavers? The problem Nietzsche alluded to persists even today and there lies the rub, a contradiction, people refusing to commit suicide yet they are merely a crowd of cadavers, perished but in motion; discerning living from the dead has become the real philosophical problem. The conundrum presented by Laing has already been solved. There is no need to find a place to scream; cadavers do not scream they sleep. “People do not want freedom”, Freud concludes. Freedom “involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility”. Thinking is uneconomical; living has become a mere habit.

The ruling classes are aware of this vulnerability. They know that wisdom is dying out and people are only interested in judgments. As long as they can successfully identify their interests with people’s interests, the subjects find no cause to deny the reason offered to them, and the hegemony of dominant stratum prevails.

The ruling class is not monolithic. It realizes its unity in the form of state, yet the internal contradictions refuse to wilt. In the state of Pakistan, though it is not unique to it, these contradictions, leading to the internal strife of the ruling class, are getting imminent, where power structure, ever since the inception of the country, is dominated by an army that continues to besiege the civilian façade of democracy.

The repeated claim of the army of being an apolitical institution rings as hollow as its claim to be the guardian of peace since peace is its antithesis and stands for its negation. The mythical peace promoted by the Praetorian guards is nothing more than a gimmickry; an Orwellian peace based on a continuous threat of war. No one has ever heard about a peaceful war – it is an oxymoron. War is synonymous with the army, both words can be used interchangeably. In Dewey’s words, “a vague and mysterious feeling of uncertain terror that seizes the populace” keeps them under its control. Adorno’s apolitical becomes political. Guards with guns guide the polity.

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life.” Nietzsche suggests, “the living being is only a species of the dead and a very rare species”. Where can one find that rare species if not among a crowd of cadavers? The problem Nietzsche alluded to persists even today and there lies the rub, a contradiction, people refusing to commit suicide yet they are merely a crowd of cadavers, perished but in motion; discerning living from the dead has become the real philosophical problem

India, after shedding the Nehruvian semi-socialist tradition, is going through its own phase of transition. The fate of such a transition was made known by Rosa Luxemburg when she presented the alternatives of socialism or barbarism to the world and to the dismay of the majority, the world “preferred not to choose the former” (Hobsbawm). India is no exception. Its charismatic leader is drafting its fate to the abyss of fascism, and there is nothing perplexing about it. “Those who do not want to talk about capitalism”, Horkheimer says, “better keep quiet about fascism”.

“The peaceful production of means of destruction” has brought the world closer to its nemesis. “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism”, Adorno says, “but there is one leading from the slingshot to the Megaton bomb”. An ‘enlightened’ terrorism, unleashed by the Empire, which despite its lethality remains veiled under the garb of democratic freedom, the womb of all the horror and criminalities inflicted on humanity. “Human beings”, Laing says, “have so brutalized themselves, have become so banal, so stultified that they are unaware of their debasement”. Kashmir, Palestine and Middle East are a few examples that support his claim. Kashmir, an eternal inferno, finds itself back to the fore by the latest incident, similar incidents in the past have brought the hostile neighbors to the brink of a nuclear war; a clean bomb can erase the population/labor without hurting the property/ capital. A nightmare for the people but a dream come true for capital! A war will make Malthus more relevant than Marx.

Some sense must prevail since incidents such as Pulwama do not happen in a void. The historic objective realities are alluding to the collective crimes of all stakeholders. In the past seventy years, Pakistan’s policy on Kashmir has only contributed to the plight of the Kashmiri people who are at war with one of the biggest armies of the world. After each bout of coercion by the Indian state, the resurgence of the freedom movement is proof of its spontaneity. In the modern era, the struggle of Kashmir and Palestine reminds one of the spontaneity of the French revolution and Petrograd uprising, the latter culminated in a historic victory of workers.

Elections are knocking at Modi’s door, possibly to knock him down. For him, calamity is an opportunity to posture belligerently against Pakistan but with little room to outmaneuver the latter. An outright war seems near impossibility; a surgical strike will be of little or no consequence, and to subjugate Pakistan through international diplomatic pressure will be equally counterproductive – a country diplomatically as isolated as Pakistan is not likely to feel much hurt.

The farce of ‘international community’ is long exposed. This corpse is recalled to life only when American interests are threatened. United Nations has outlived its utility if it had any. Nearly all members of the European Union barring the Iranian issue follow the US suit. Venezuela is a case in point where material interests have dominated reason again. Denouncing Maduro, an elected president, as illegitimate while backing the totalitarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Brazil (where a fascist with a serious legitimacy crisis has grabbed power) is not a show of hypocrisy turning cynical but an act of naked terror.

Amid a chaotic economy and plagued by movements of separation, Pakistan probably has not played a direct role in Kashmir’s struggle for independence lately. Yet it needs to bring its anarchic house in order and act fast. Jaish-a-Mohammad is operating from Pakistan and Hafiz Saeed, needs no introduction, it is time to get rid of the military assets turned liabilities.

After attaining nukes, the need for a huge conventional army defies logic. Pakistan needs to reduce its military spending for both peace and for its people, instead of an institution that “lost all its battles hoping to win the last”, a starving multitude, needs to be fed.

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify” their deeds but it is time to think what cannot be justified must be shelved. “Every age”, Sartre says, “has its own poetry” and if one wants to listen to it “one needs more courage to live than to kill himself” and the others.

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, February 27^th 2019.