Daily Times

What bigger proof that the kaptaan harbours intensely fascist ideals than the fact that his main political ideology is drawn from Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, which is: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”? And just like Hitler’s many followers, who really believed that they were laying the foundation of the Fuhrer’s “Thousand Year Reich”, Imran Khan’s supporters are also convinced that they are the founders of the modern “Riyasat e Medina.”

And in their madness, the Nazis created mayhem enough to force the rest of the world to unite and crush them, and their dream of the thousand-year empire along with them, to restore sanity. Similarly, Imran and his self-entitled followers who’ve made it a mission to spread his lies as the gospel truth have badmouthed and humiliated just about everybody, including the state’s most precious and important institutions, to the point that they too have decided to put their foot down and set the record straight once and for all.

The thing is, you can blow hot air and sell it like the holy grail for only so long. ‘Pakistan Default Risk Surges as Ousted Khan Plans Protests’ ran a headline on Bloomberg.com just the other day. And slowly but surely the people of Pakistan are beginning to realise, as the institutions have already, that they are being led horribly astray by the use of catchy and emotional slogans like sovereignty and integrity and also the oldest trick in the book – that he’s a victim of a grand American conspiracy.

In his desperation, he also attempted to become the icon of some sort of religious revivalist movement. Posters meant to draw crowds to his protests use religious slogans that surpass even Zia ul Haq’s engineering. And just as Hitler posed as the last and only hope for genuine German nationalism, he’s painted himself as the only man capable of protecting the country as well as the great religion of Islam.

In madness, the Nazis created mayhem enough to force the rest of the world to unite and crush them.

The thing about fascism is that it needs conflict to survive. Hitler’s national socialists first made it impossible for anybody from any other persuasion to so much as breathe freely, much less express themselves, and then went on a killing spree across the world.

It’s very disturbing that we’re beginning to see very similar vilification in Pakistan of individuals, groups as well as institutions that even slightly diverge from PTI’s one-track version. In an instant, they are dubbed traitors to the state and even the religion. In this way, they ensure that they employ just the right tools to keep everybody else attacked enough for conflicts to simmer. And then they fall back to the classic us-versus-them line to portray themselves as the only true defenders of everything that we hold dear.

There was a time when Hitler was one of the greatest leaders Germany ever saw; who united the nation as nobody could manage to before or since. But not much later a time came when nobody wanted to so much as take his name; such was the destruction and humiliation that he helped bring to his own people.

Such are the fruits of fascism and the lessons of history. Things have got to the point that Imran is using his henchmen, who’ve hopped almost all parties in the past and whom he blessed with senior ministries in his government, to openly call for the military to intervene on his behalf and taunting them as “animals” if they stay “neutral”. He’s also got them to attack the judiciary for standing with the constitution and rubbishing his attempts to undermine it. And he’s got his entire team to bend over backwards to subvert the political, legal and constitutional processes in Punjab.

The writing is on the wall. Institutions like the military and judiciary have already issued not-so-veiled warnings. But he’s not listening. And now he’s brought the economy to the brink of collapse. It seems his biggest contributions to Pakistan’s politics are causing unprecedented divisions, toxicity, breakup, and even a possible clash of civil society with state institutions.

In effect, though, he’s just set him up for the same fall that almost every fascist leader in the past has. And the outcome is not going to be any different.

The writer is a LUMS graduate and currently serves as PMLN MPA. She is a close aide of Maryam Nawaz and tweets at @hinaparvezbutt