Daily Times

In comes the month of December loaded not only with the festivities of Christmas but heralding a winter of discontent for the majority— shoved in the pigeonhole of scarcity and domination— pretending to be living happily in the fake and superimposed contentment. However, some in the lot insist upon scaling the shell of regimented contentment and confront the pre-designed way of life. By discovering sickness within the normal, they choose their freedom of living with dignity or dying with grace. Their struggle brings suffering but in their suffering they ‘live to the point of tears’, their ‘rebellion’

Camus says expresses a nostalgia for innocence and appeals to the essence of being’.

Before getting despoiled and prostituted by the market and the seething irresistible buying urge of compulsive consumers, Xmas was a seasonal event, a hope and a celebration for the resurrection of sun from the cold web of long inclement nights and small sullen days devoid of bright light.

The pagans’ festival embraced by the doctors of the church for Christians’ leaning was remodelled from the rebirth of sun into birth of Jesus.

To prove or disprove the existence of Jesus beyond the biblical mythology is the task of the historians, but his legacy carried a spirit of salvaging humanity through sacrifice and self-abnegation. Whatever the ‘salvaging’ meant in the dark ages has different interpretations today, but the purpose and the act of kissing the gallows in the name of humanity made him a
messiah, the Christ.

Dying in style has become the trademark of the revolutionaries. Scary of their ideas, the ruling class abhors their dead bodies and buries them incognito at anonymous places

Before Santa Claus was thrown to the market wolves, the religion stood for the noble causes of equality, social justice and brotherhood, in other words it was the flag barrier of a peaceful French revolution. To the biblical Jesus, ‘the kingdom of this world was the devil (John 8:44)’. Therefore Ernest Bloch says, ‘he never suggested allowing it to go on; he did not conclude a non-aggression pact with it.’

Jesus, in the spirit of social justice, threw the money launderers out of the synagogue. He knew, albeit unconsciously, that money, the expression of value was antagonist to the creator of value, the human labour power. The public revealing of the secret threatened the money- lending class of Jews, the rebellion had to be crushed, the Shylocks of the time hanged him and Pontius Pilate washed his hands from the crime.

Later the liberation theology of faith and the conviction of the faithful forced the king to kneel, no sooner did Constantine enter the church than the have-nots were excommunicated. The religion was crowned and subsumed by capital. The resurrected Christ was finally interred. However, the tradition of rebellion continued, from the witches burnt on the stakes to the modern day’s non-conformists, lynched or hanged on the gallows, the rebels of every age have striven to denounce the distorted reason of the established reality at their peril.

It is interesting to note that the tradition of sacrifice found its ardent followers among the Godless Marxists. From Rosa Luxemburg to Che Guevara and from Bhagat Singh to Hassan Nasir, there was no dearth of rebels who went to the gallows with a smile on their faces. Before facing the firing squad, in his final speech to the tribunal thirty-six-year old Eugen Leviné expressed his ambivalence towards death stating ‘we communists are dead men on leave…I do not know if you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg…for I know whatever is your verdict events
cannot be stopped’.

The message sent the wave of consternation in the opposing camp. Death was immaterial, but events were real and beyond the control of the ruling class. While unleashing a scourge upon its opponents the ruling classes barely think about the outcomes the events can wreck upon them for so far they have escaped them, the King Louis XIV of France and Russian bourgeoisie of 1917 thought the same way, guillotine and dustbin of history became their destiny.

In the recent past, a couple of events have caught the eye of the oppressed Bloch and the dissident community in Pakistan. The disappearance and death of Sajid Hussain in mysterious circumstances in Uppsala, whose body was found lying near a canal and the recent repetition of the incident in Toronto where the body of Karima Mehrab, a Baloch activist was found in identical circumstance have left a chilling wave in the spine of every thinking individual refusing to tow the official line. Has the state adopted the identical repressive tactics to stifle all dissenting voices even those living abroad with brute force? Has the internal policy of oppression and harassment been extended to the external policy?

From the historians’ point of view, there is hardly anything new in these incidents. History is witness that nearly a century ago ‘a body was thrown from the Liechtenstein Bridge into the Landwehr Canal, where it was not washed up until 31 May 1919’. On January 11, 1968 another feminine body was found under the foot of a bridge near Escuintla, Guatemala, she was kidnapped, tortured and sexually assaulted and finally killed. The first was the body of Rosa Luxemburg, a Marxist theorist, one the greatest revolutionaries and a renowned critic of capitalism while the other was that of Rogelia Cruz Martinez, a beauty queen, the Miss Guatemala, who after joining the Democratic Youth Alliance became a Marxist guerrilla fighter. The respective states had killed the two legends in cold blood with impunity.

We the alienated human beings, Pope Francis has pointed out, live in the ‘globalization of indifference’. When people are thrown in Guantanamo Bay, or Belmarsh prison, when Julian caged in a glass-house is tried in inhuman conditions without being convicted of any crime and the Australian soldiers learning to kill assassinate several innocent Afghans in cold blood, we keep quiet with fingers crossed. It is time people, Fanon says, ‘need to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty’.

Dying in style has become the trademark of the revolutionaries. Scary of their ideas, the ruling class abhors their dead bodies and buries them incognito at anonymous places. Whereas their ideas spread to become mechanical force, people find their graves and paying homage to them becomes a ritual death in other words becomes a festival.

The Trojan War, fought for the freedom at the battlefield and away from it has its casualties and collaterals. The chance of a peaceful resolution in this war is slim, for the contradictions are irreconcilable. To preserve life and to stave off decadence embracing death will remain a vivid possibility for the nonconformists. Not everyone is fortunate enough to choose his death but Nietzsche’s complaint about death not becoming a festival has been refuted by the rebels who by fighting for a cause with hope latent in it have consummated their lives and are dying victoriously.

The modern Pontius Pilate has washed his hands with a sardonic smile but history does not repeat itself, it moves spirally upwards and whereas it carries its heroes to the grave so does its villains. It neither forgets the victims nor forgives the perpetrator. The blood-soaked water Pontius Pilate washed his hands with will find its way to its destination. ‘It is impossible to suffer’ Nietzsche says ‘without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge’ and people have too many complaints.

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