Daily Times

“Is religion,” Herbert Marcuse inquired, “still possible after Auschwitz?” “Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” added Adorno. Incidentally, both religion and poetry not only survived the catastrophe but shared their place with Auschwitz. In the infernal society in which humanity has to live every day, poetry alone became the voice of subversion. The dark, frozen shadows of the Holocaust have again spread their grisly wings from Palestine to Kashmir and from Latin America to Afghanistan. Every state has built its own Auschwitz, its own “Manus Islands,” where humanity crawls in cavernous camps and breathes in the air, putrefied with hate and contempt. When Nietzsche said, “God too has its hell and it is the love of man; He is dead: He died of his pity for man,” no wonder he was saying it on authority.

The apocalypse that happens in the everyday world, leaves an existential question behind, despite the ballooning human population, does humanity still exist? The number of humans living together may form a society but humanity is an entirely different concept. Based on love and tolerance, humanity gives the actual identity to human species; the self-consciousness gives the power to conquer oneself and nature for the pacification or destruction of life on the planet. Philosophy considered a human being as a thoughtful rational being capable of deciding his affairs with reason. However, the power accumulated in few changed the complexion of society; the reason became unreason, real became rational, albeit what was rational could not transform itself into reality.

The precondition of success attached to the validity of the truth is false, since success or failure, popularity and acceptability by the masses can only determine the reality but not the rationality of a given truth.

Galileo was condemned yet the rationality of his truth not only proved him right but forced his opponents to also seek a posthumous apology. Despite its popularity, fascism was wrong. The common factor between Galileo’s condemnation and fascism was the balance of force. In either case, it tilted in favour of few, the dominating interests of a few over the majority compromised the rationality of the given fact, it became irrational. Not only in Auschwitz but Gaza, MyLai, Santiago and in all other massacres happening in the glittering names of nationalism, religion and/or democracy have the same imprints of a handful of hegemons.

The ruling class of every state creates its ghettos to imprison the exploited masses in economic impotence and intellectual powerlessness. Despite coercion, if a dissenting voice disturbing the status-quo survives the sudden disappearance of the dissenter and not the reason for disquiet is a favourite ploy. The Pinochet’s ways, which even the SS, could not dare to implement are winning the day. The ghettoes do not necessarily need the dark, slimy concentration camps for its vulnerable population; a human can be exiled while living in a market place teeming with people where he is always alone, or even when he is in his home; exiling from the world is most convenient.

A story in Matthew narrates, that to thwart any threat to the crown Herod the king of Judea, ordered the execution of all male children two years old and under. To give a tinge of dark humour to the story, a prominent Indian poet, Akbar, Illahbadi added, had he thought of building a college, the Pharaoh could have avoided the ignominy of killing the children. Once the academic institutions were famous for creating critical thinkers, and the ruling classes of the world eyed them with suspicion. After the French upsurge of 1968, students emerged as a power against the forces of status-quo; they became dangerous for the established reality, nipping their power into bud became a global pastime for the rulers.

“In the volatile region of Balochistan in Pakistan, the vice-chancellor of a university has temporarily stepped down from his role following the launch of an investigation into allegations of harassment and blackmail on campus.” (Guardian, 22 October). By sounding controversial, the VP has made his credibility debatable. He “refuted the allegations, telling the Guardian of having no involvement in this scandal.”

But claiming elsewhere that the “allegations were based on lies.” “The university campus is used as a base by the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force deployed in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to help keep order and patrol the border areas… Soldiers are active on campus, and students have to undergo security checks when they enter their hostel accommodation. Harassment is understood to have been occurring on campus for over four years, and only came to light because of an investigation into an unrelated matter at the university.”

The CCTV cameras installed around campus for security reasons have become a source The Guardian stated, “to extort money and sexually harass female students.”

Their function is not “the moral policing” alone as Human Right Pakistan’s fact-finding mission to Quetta stated, but “to disrupt any potential or suspected political activism among students, allegedly at the behest of the Frontier Corps personnel who are permanently deployed at the university.” (HRCP, 16 October).

Where people under siege can go and scream in Pakistan, the existential question or predicament remains unaddressed. According to Jackson and Richard (Terrorism: A Critical Introduction, 2011), “FC, ISI, and other groups have been accused of a decade-long campaign of pick up and dump,” in which “Bloch nationalists, militants and even by standards are picked up, disappeared, tortured, mutilated and then killed.” (Rashid, Ahmed, 2014)

“In Pakistan,” they claim to, “have incontrovertible evidence about India’s involvement in destabilising Baluchistan. They won’t share the evidence with you because they insist when evidence is already too evident why one should make the evident, evident.” (A Betrayal in Baluchistan, 2015)

Where people under siege can go and scream in Pakistan, the existential question or predicament remains unaddressed

No one can deny the evil designs of the Indian ruling class, which would do anything to divert the international community’s attention away from the atrocities it has perpetrated against the people of Kashmir. The problem, however, lies in the conditions that create the nihilistic mindset. No one commits suicide unless the horrors of life outweigh the horrors of death. A general disquiet prevails in Pakistan. It’s time for the generalissimos to listen to the voice of people. History’s revenge is swift but certain; Bengal is just one example.

In decadent societies, justice becomes an overt mockery obvious for everyone to see. Not that the advanced capitalist societies are any exception, once they were too sensitive about it but with the advent of people like Trump and Netanyahu, on the political theatre, the hypocrisy has gone berserk it wants to call itself by its name, once a veiled reality has become a professed ideology.

“It is in love in hate, in anger, in fear, in joy, indignation and admiration, in hope and in despair the man and world reveal themselves in their truth”(Sartre). People of Balochistan have endured all these seasons each wounded them deeply, akin to the Brecht’s character they asked the gods, “the gracious ones,” for “a slight alleviation of the bundle of precepts,” but there was none.

“Justice,” Sartre said, “is a human issue and I do not need a God to teach it to me,” beware when people begin to teach them to the gods. Brecht warned, “when crimes pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard,” but “because the things are the way they are, the things will not stay the way they are. ”

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani based in Sydney. He has authored several books on Marxism (Gramscian and Frankfurt School) and History