Daily Times

‘T he armed forces and order itself today have responded, drivenpurely by patriotic duty and nothing else to save the country from the unyielding chaos’. The past few generations of Pakistan are familiar if not accustomed to these words. Repeated frequently, whenever the extra-constitutional forces took over the rein of the state, they have leftdeep scars upon the collective unconscious of the people.The words for Sartre are pistols and were uttered in the literal sense by Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who overthrew the elected Marxistpresident, Salvador Allende.

The similarity in the words is not coincidental.Behind the pious words stood the executioner.”There are no beautiful surfaces without terrible depths”, Nietzsche knew it;”the redeemers put the people into fetters of false values and delusive words”. Their locks were different, but they had no keys, as Nietzsche hoped, for the locks which they tied around the people’s feet.Under the market economy, words do not remain neutral;for the sweeping distortion of the language,they shape themselves differently.Freedom becomes the freedom ofthe market. Itlimits the people to the terrible choices of choosing between insanity or madness with a method, between a life of constant struggle for existence or unproductive exclusion, between conformity or condemnation.

Patriotic duty viewed from the position of power and that of powerlessness, from the standpoint of capital and labor and oppressor and oppressed,carries different meanings.Money, the expression of all value, contains no intrinsic value. The process of labor produces commodities.Their exchange for money gives the latter its value, strength,and a fetish power over its creator, the labor.Patriotic duty is the other fetish that gives totalitarian power to the state. The coercive power of the state, keeping money at one end and misery on the other, maintains themagic ofeitherfetish.

Adolf Hitler, a born-againfigure, was the biggest patriot the world has ever seen whose slogan of ‘Blutund Boden’ pulled and galvanized the disillusioned Germans behind him.On the ballot, he could never command the decisivepublic support, but once in power he bludgeoned and liquidated his opponents and mollified the Germans into conformity, conformity through the violence embedded in the psyche of the masses. He was not only”the masterly salesman of his pathological defects” but also knew the extent of the paranoia of patriotismafflictingthe Germansliving in scarcity and uncertainty.”Nations in confusion and disorder”, Laing says, “recognizes the patriots”.Under the apocalypse, both German and Hitlerfound each other.

For Adorno, “Hitler was perhaps a pathological case in itself, but not for itself. The assertion that he destroyed German culture is nothing but an advertisement trick… what Hitler extirpated in art and culture had long led an apocryphal and cut-off existence, whose last hiding-spaces were swept away by Fascism. Whoever did not play along had to go into inner emigration years before the outbreak of the Third Reich”.

If Hitler was not the creative destructionist, then who else was?It leads to another fundamental question: who makes history – an individual or social relations?”Men”, Marx says,”make history”but not in the ideal conditions but those given to them. If it is true why people like Allende, Lumumba, and several otherswho fought and were killed for their conviction could not make a successful history?”No society comes to an end”, Marx responds,”before it has expressed all its potential content. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been fully developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society”.

To build an invincible German empire, Hitler demandedpeopletosuffer in silence, and history is witness that people especially the youth followed his dictates religiously. He offered guns before butter, floated the absurd idea of the superiority of race, and demanded Lebensraum, more space to accommodate the chosen ones, and in the process by imposing a war on his people took the world to another war. Nazis used the art toreconcile humanwith the world as it was.Art mingled with state-sanctioned repressivesexual gratification,lost its ability to protest, and induced conformity through consent.For Marcuse,it was an affirmativeorderthat organized the most aggressive and destructive form of imperialism.

Those who control the means of production control the forces that can guard their wealth. The property structure is inherently lethal. It can assimilate art, religion, and culture in its ideology

What was offered by Allende and the other nonconformists was entirely the opposite. They knew that every expropriation, local or foreign,began at home, andlifebased on a struggle for existence could not lead to a life devoid of alienated labor lived through misery.They knew to live a decent, dignified, and liberated life people needed to have freedom from the fear of living under the constant threat of economic uncertainty. Political freedom without economic liberation was a farce, hence they wanted to nationalize and socialize the means of production.

Their tragedy lay in the process that brought them into power. Unlike Lenin, Mao, and Castro, they attained power through the ballot and had their limitations. The dynamic of capitalism works opposite to the interests of the masses. To defend theireconomic control, the native and international capitalof the hegemonic empire joined their hands.Thetime-tested tools of religion and the army were used to liquidate those hindering the realization of capital. In the process of dispossession of the masses, the generals, the church, and the Chicago-boyswere together.

Fanon’s advice of not allowingthe army to become an autonomous body, which eventuallyfinding itself idle and without any mission goes into politics and comes to dream of manifestos,seems an improbability. Under neoliberal capitalism, no one can stay neutral, the law of capital stitches time with territory. Under the garb of globalization, capital for its realization moves freelyfrom one space to another. Without the help of local capitalists, the dispossession of the natives and their resources cannot be materialized,hence the expansion of international capital had always sought the collaboration ofthenative army, the religious element, and the ruling class.

Those who control the means of production control the forces that can guard their wealth. The property structure is inherently lethal. It can assimilate art, religion, and culture in its ideology. Art, Marcuse says, canbecome abrothel where people getexposure to regulated beauty. Santiago stadium saw the brutality of the army where redeemers broke the back of the people and the art with the potential of resistancealongside the artist. Victor Jara, the singing voice of Chile,was shot forty times but before committing the grisly act, in the blind instinct of imbecile tyranny,his fingers were smashed yet he sang,chatteredfrom the fingertips, his tune left horror in the hearts of the perpetrators of a hideous crime.They had to hide their shame behind the violence. They massacred the innocents; it wasthe castration fear that made them hate what they hated in themselves.

Baloch predicted that’failing a social revolution of heart, chimeral notions of blood and race would be triumphant’. The overaccumulation of capital and its necessity of realization will not let Baloch’s dream be fulfilled. A fractured world, with no single hegemonic power, is entering the era of a new fascism.The shadows of reincarnated Hitler are looming. People need to decide will they wake up to the new realities and revolt or continue to slumber to empower the reactionary forces that pulverize them.

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