Daily Times

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” in one of Shakespearean tragedies Mark Anthony utters these words of grief to the Romans. Caesar was guilefully murdered by Brutus and Cassius his close aides; they considered his desire of assuming the reign as Roman emperor ambitious and impertinent.

“Not that I loved Caesar less, but I loved Rome more” was the argument Brutus presented in his defence. Does this scenario fit in one of Pakistani situations happening lately?  People who lost their loved ones were forced to bury their dead; their only ambition was to meet with Caesar, but his insistence of burying their dead before meeting meant burying their past, to give up their right to protest, to forget the suffering the domination produced.  Caesar was guilty of blackmailing the victims and not the vice-versa.

In Pakistan Caesar and not the Brutus claims to love the country more than the countrymen, a hackneyed slogan reminiscent of 1971 when the ruling class of Pakistan vouched for land and not the natives of Bengal.  Does someone smell the stench of fascism in the air? There is a blood on Macbeth’s hands.

Capitalism does not need an unskilled surplus population that cannot consume excessively. It cannot create bigger holocausts during peacetime, but it can arrange small scale massacres

Recent power struggle within the Pakistani state is not merely a clash between factions of the ruling class vying for power but it has gone deeper into the body politics of Pakistan. The hegemony of the ‘martial class’ holding arms is overtly challenged by the civil bourgeoisie alongside the urban middle class. The crisis of hegemony has become a general crisis of the state involving all communities, including minorities.  Pitting the classes and minorities against each other is the old time tested-trick. During crisis it becomes an important tool in cleaving people, Hazara massacre needs to be seen in this light.

The tragedy does not owe its genesis in mere Shiite Sunni conflict. It has to be analysed by looking into the objective historical conditions and partly in the geo-political context.  Holocausts do not happen in a void, they all are human made, and so is the slaughtering of eleven innocent workers that came to earn their livelihood in inhuman working conditions.  “Auschwitz” Adorno says “begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals”.

The workers were in fact slaughtered like animals, but who treated them as animals? Not their families or any ordinary human being suffering the wrath of an exchange system, they were treated as animals by those having monopoly over the means of violence. Those who control the means of production control the distribution of death.

For state signifies the irreconcilability of class antagonism, no state, no matter how people friendly it poses to be, can rule without coercion. In the doctrine of domination through consent and coercion, Gramsci presents this paradox in its dialectical relations. In the underdeveloped countries, especially the ones that are security states where large sum of national exchequer goes straight to the coffers of military, the dialectical relation of consent and coercion is altered completely, State becomes antithetical to individual.

The policy of Lebensraum followed by the Pakistani state has given birth to many non-state violent actors, who while serving the purpose of the state have developed a degree of autonomy.  Their autonomy in certain domains, with or without approval of the state becomes antagonistic to its policies especially when they begin to assert their ideology by inflicting violence upon their co-religious people thinking or believing differently.  This autonomy however has a dialectical relation with heteronomy as well.

By permitting or overlooking the autonomy of the auxiliary forces state kills two birds with one stone. It eliminates the dissenting voices within the country and reins in the violent actors by first acceding to and later exploiting the act of violence they commit by using it against them when necessary. In other words, if their autonomy begins to assert its independence, the violence perpetrated by them with state’s collusion or neutrality legitimizes state’s action against them. In these circumstances the dialectical relation of consent and coercion becomes vividly evident.

Under the external pressure, sometimes state has to take action against its collaborators even sacrificing few, but all such actions remain cosmetic. The history of banning many organizations and the judicial trial of their leaders usually Orwellian, prove such actions were favourable than inimical for them. They invariably reappear under different names.

In exchange society, the vulnerable segments remain a convenient prey of predators’ violence.  Communists, Jews, Gypsies in Nazi Germany, Palestinians under Zionism, Muslims in India, Bloch and Hazara in Pakistan are few of its flagrant examples. Not that the vulnerable of majority population are spared, their dispossession is masqueraded under the garb of unity in colonial supremacy. They are assimilated by the ruling class as brothers in plunder while there is nothing to plunder for them, for the job is reserved for the powerful.

In recent times,Hazara’s massacre dates back to the era when Taliban, the strategic assets of Pakistani establishment, were unleashed on Afghanistan. Once they captured Kabul, to fend them Hazara joined the Northern Alliance, a predominantly Sunni coalition, they were not the only Shiite faction in the Sunni alliance, Harkat-e-Islami comprising Tajik Shiites was also the part of the group led by the warlords. Equipped with the latest means of destruction predominantlyethnically Pashtun Taliban took over the major chunk of Afghanistan and started the massacres of Hazara population.  Taliban, however, did not spare the Sunnis ‘they slit the throat and skinned the people’ (Chicago Tribune, 2001) in fifteen different massacres.

In Quetta, a city devoid of industry Hazara surrounded by the Bloch and Pashtuns, have to compete with the other unskilled daily wage labourers in a Darwinian struggle of daily survival. With slim population, peculiarity of appearance, difference of creed, a tag of illegal migrants, living in sheer penury in the ghettoes are enough pointers to locate and stereotype them. For Adorno, stereotyping is not only an expression of the ‘chaotic nature of reality’ but also the depiction of ‘its clash with the omnipotent fantasies of earliest infancy’.  Fantasies contain fears that appear to be real.

Capitalism does not need an unskilled surplus population that cannot consume excessively. It cannot create bigger holocausts during peacetime, but it can arrange small scale massacres. All minorities living among the majoritiesseek refuge under the wings of established power, and Hazara are no exceptions, but a spineless comprador state can only trade its citizens instead of protecting them.

Hazara have met the fate of gypsies under the Nazis. State has found its refuge behind a manufactured enemy, by putting all its incompetence and ineptness at his door it has not only reiterated its impotence but insulted the people too. In reality, it is striving to masquerade the real issues such as the missing persons, genocide of Bloch, and fencing of Gwadar behind the curtains of its chicanery.

Expropriation and suppression of the Bloch and Hazara is a decade old phenomenon, the ruling class will continue to make merry till the blaze of people’s wrath does not scorch them. Balance of force does not tilt in the favour of people automatically; the subjective force has to turn the table on the dominant class, and for that people have to stop behaving like sleeping beauties.

In their privacy the rulers laugh, and every laugh Adorno says carries an air of extortion, but they have not heard the bad news Brecht warns about that follows the last laugh.

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