“Hegel remarks somewherethat all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Since humans make history Marx continues, they carry the tradition of dead generations with them.
The temptation to keep history akin to culture, a mistress of the masters, remains the irresistible desire for the ruling classes. Despite being unable to determine its course, they have invariably tried to influence the historical content to testify to their rationality. “Culture’ Adorno says ‘shares the guilt of society. It ekes out its existence only by virtue of injustice already perpetrated in the process of production’. History, written under domination, masquerades the injustices of past, glorifies certain events, mutilates the other to serve the existing needs of the hegemonic classes.
To justify its expansionism, the west has created history around the figure of Alexander, Zionists looking to control the resources of the world and the legitimacy of occupation have woven a magic around the tragedy of Holocaust and Muslims suffering the capitalistic horrors are putting their faith in the imaginary concept of ummah that helps to stimulate a spurious religious spirit. This spirit has nothing to do either with nature or with history, the ummah is not monolithic, its members if it exists belong to different conflicting social conditions and barring the exploitation of world market have little or nothing in common between them.
Happiness is longing for thepast for past is both enticing and subversive. Muslimshave discovered the happiness in their glorious past by weaving myths around it. The tragic incidence of Karbala is a source of inspiration that glorifies the oppressed while condemning the oppressor without taking the stock of social relations that led to the tragedy.
‘Jews were not nationalistic at all, [and]were suffering for the sake of all humanity. Israel, on the contrary, is a nation-state, at its base structured like all others. Thus, the original messianic thought had to vanish for the sake of national existence…The dream of Messiah, of eternal justice on earth, which had given community to the Jews in the diaspora, has come to an end…. the persecuted went to Zion without Messiah. They have established their nation and their nationalism is like all other people, whereas Judaism itself degraded to be a mere religion. (Horkheimer)”. The invention of nation required the other and by expropriating and liquidating the other Zionists have managed to keep the dissent and class conflict between different classes within them under control.
Antisemitism, once used to oppress Jews, under changed circumstances has become a tool of oppression in the hands of former victims who for the capitalistic logic are using it in reverse direction. Its rationality and insanity coincide for the purposes of masquerading domination on the means of production and expropriation of the other. For that, Holocaust a general term for all those exterminated by the Nazis became specific to Jews providing a justification for the existence of a Zionist state. “Many North American Jews tend to perceive it as Shoah…but at least half of the world’s Romanies, some 2.5 million Polish Catholics, millions of Soviet citizens and various other nationalities, were also victims of this genocide…Not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not the Jews but the handicapped were the first genocidal victims of Nazism”(Finkelstein) .
“Holocaust awareness is official propagandist indoctrination…a false view of the world, its real aim is not to understand the past but a manipulation of the present…the Nazi extermination came to serve—in Boas Evron’s words—as a powerful tool in the hands of the Israeli leadership and Jews abroad”. “The idea was to make Holocaust a unique historical event and to mark the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of Jews. Neither of these dogmas figured in public discourse before the June 1967 war…” (Ibid).
Antisemitism, once used to oppress Jews, under changed circumstances has become a tool of oppression in the hands of former victims who for the capitalistic logic are using it in reverse direction
No one in the sane mind can deny the tragic events of Holocaust but using them as a tool to justify the occupation of Israel and to perpetrate hideous crimes against the Palestinians is ghastly and contemptible. The debate or denial of holocaust is a punishable crime in the west. If real is rational it should be able to prove its authenticity in accordance with the laws of reason, making it a taboo is denial of reason. “Truths not subject to continual challenge eventually ceased to have the effect of truth by being exaggerated into falsehood” (Stuart Mill). The fact behind the facade is to attain the control of world resources by holding on to the oil wealth of the Middle East and expansion of capital, Israel’s legitimacy or lack is subject to the attainment of these goals.
By conjuring up the spirit of the past to their service, Muslims have recalled their icons to life, Hussain is one of them. Capitalist society. Marx says, is unheroic but, it needs its heroes so do all afflicted by its horrors to escape the bitter reality. The Muslim community found its Odysseus in Karbala, where Hussain valiantly contested the claim of a powerful caliph. Failing to break his resolve,caliph’s army massacred the men of a small group of nonconformists marching to the city of Kufa to join rank with the (supposedly) rebellious population. Before its culmination, why did the siege last for ten days is part of a mythology, and mythologies do not explain themselves, but by becoming an expression of a struggle they leave a memory behind, giving birth to customs with or without rationality.
The critique ofan event is not a critique of a person, but of the social relations that prevailed at the time of the happening. The Arabs by that time had conquered Persia and parts of Byzantine empire. The mercantile capitalism had garnered its root in the nomadic Arabian tribes, ‘the light infantry of capital’ (Marx) but having primitive relations of production metamorphosis of money capital into financial capital was not possible.
By staying out of circulation the only possibility of realization of mercantile capital was through waging wars that fetched further money. The money-capital was recklessly used by the nomadic tribes for the carnal pleasures. Philip Hitti in his scholarly work ‘The Arabs” has alluded to it. The nature of Imam’s struggle remains a conundrum, an imponderable of history, but for AJP Taylor, imponderable is what we get from history. Either side belonging to the aristocracy shared no common interests with the ordinary subjects engaged in the life of daily survival, and none was fighting to redeem them from their plight. If Imam claimed his right for his sublime lineage, he forgot that those who control the means of production dictate the social functions and market keeps no premium on such entitlements.
All wars are class wars, but the war in that case did not happen. Even numbers, in battles do not matter, Fidel Castro led a smaller group, but he had the intention of waging an armed struggle against the oppressor, the idea lacked in the above-mentioned case. Despite its vagueness the episode has become a historic epoch for two reasons. By their belief in sacrifice people’repeat upon themselves the injustice that was done to them, to make it bearable’ andtheyinvariably find an element of class struggle within power struggle to identify their sufferings with Imam’s grief. If people “bestow the economic forces with such an independent will and consciousness’, they in their inverted consciousness can turn some into gods and the other into villains.
The writer, an Australian Pakistani has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi @hotmail. com