Daily Times

In Pakistan, centuries have happened in decades. The process of retrogression has slumped into the abyss of history with the speed of a photon. In the last few decades, a state with the reasonable potential of attaining a high trajectory leap through a chequered course, has dwindled to the lowest ebb, now sliding into an abyss. A recovery from this black hole of history, as everyone knows, is only remotely possible.
Only a couple of decades ago — now it seems like a fantasy, a far-fetched dream — Pakistani society had a different rationality, which was far less irrational than what we see today. Gradual conformity to an inflexible doctrine (a neo-faith), absolute reliance on superstitious beliefs, absolutism with complete lack of tolerance, resurgence of unhistoric ideas of blood ties, the uncanny pride of conforming to a faith considered immutable and providing the panacea for all ills including those still challenging the scientific community, and denial of every lesser god except the one economic necessity forces them to create, are the few issues proving to be detrimental to any future possibility of emancipation. Has fascism rocked the boat of this state prematurely since the process of industrialisation and capitalist relations of production are far behind the stage where the system of emerging markets can feel threatened?
From the war on the USSR in the 1980s to the ongoing war on self-inflicted terror, the Pakistani middle class has undergone a drastic transformation that has both physical and psychological implications. A moderate, gradually enlightening society has swiftly regressed into the dark ages. A debate-oriented, thoughtful reasoning in the process of blooming has been nipped in the bud. Tolerance has been replaced with paranoia or, better phrased, an infantile neurosis. Blasphemy has become the crater of this socio-economic volcano. Even on the slightest caress this, the softest of the bellies, spills the lava of hate, indifference and apathy. “These socially shared hallucinations,” as Laing suggests, “have become the only reality while the collusive madness of society is identified with sanity. We, a half crazed creature adjusted to this more or less mad world, are as deeply afraid to live and love as we are to die” (Laing).
Taking up arms to eliminate injustice is one thing, but taking them up to exterminate the thought process and to annihilate those who refuse to conform is something altogether different. By choosing the latter, the clergy seems to have forgotten its own claim of having His religion protected by Himself. Is it narcissism or some kind of a disbelief in the Almighty’s justice — unless they believe it can be carried out here more artfully, hence why wait till the hereafter? Nietzsche has a remarkable sense of summing up these economic and psychological upheavals in an epigram as he states: “Everywhere the voice of those who preach death is heard and the earth is full of those to whom one must preach death. Or ‘eternal life’ – that is the same to me, if only they pass quickly. The entire counterfeit of transcendence and of the hereafter has grown up on the basis of an impoverished life.”
This outcome is quite logical. Economic deterioration breeds anarchy. In Pakistan, the cliché of the ‘war on terror’ gifted to us by the west and embraced by the ruling class that, not coincidentally, had an army dictator as the head of state, brought legitimacy for the latter but destruction for the masses. Both war and uncertainty contributed to religious fascism. Not that the army had an absolute field day. The fire one ignites is the fire that is likely to burn the very hand. Hence, through the Frankenstein it created, it had its own casualties. Akin to political fascism, its religious counterpart is not averse to gory crimes but it tends to turn institutionalised coercion into an unorganised crime. “Dominant economic and social organisations do not maintain their powers by force; they do it by identifying themselves with the faith and loyalties of people and the people have been trained to identify their faith and loyalties with them” (Marcuse).
Contrarily, when hegemony has to be maintained through coercion alone, dark powers have to be let loose and set free. In such conditions, killing sprees become the norm: terrorists decapitating children, a governor being cut down through the barrel of his own bodyguard, uneducated, mentally challenged ‘infidels’ bludgeoned to death on allegations of blasphemy, the ‘lost Baloch generations — just like victims of Pinochet’s totalitarian regime — accidentally discovered as mutilated corpses, muscular Pretorian guards with a gory past and equally grisly present, a herd of hideous politicians, well-guarded fully fed fanatic fiends familiar as defenders or hounds of the faith, a corrupt, powerful bureaucracy (an illegitimate child of history as stated by Trotsky) addicted to the same filth of power, privilege and pelf, and a public resigned to its destiny become the only, stark reality. This gives a detailed account of the recipe for disaster the country is treading upon.
Here, in this psychological context, one can find a lot overlapping between 21st century Pakistan and the Germans of the 20th century in the mid-1930s. For a comparison one needs to borrow a treasure from Herbert Marcuse’s artful, sagacious analysis of the German mentality under national socialism. While expressing the rise of Nazism, he not only takes complete account of objective conditions prevalent in Germany, he also alludes to few very unique similarities that reflect the scenario of present day Pakistan.
“Germany,” he says, had the strongest “anti-bourgeois mentality prevalent in a large strata of the German population.” The reason was the strong presence of communists who, until early 1933, remained the second biggest force behind the social democrats; the latter themselves were the apostles of Marxian philosophy. “Under the Weimer Republic, Marxism had become an integral part of German culture: it was not only a faith but was also institutionalised in social and political organisations, and operated in the home, family, youth movements, in the schools and even in the churches.” One wonders why it could not be materialised into a revolution. Objective tendencies have their own limits. They can only push for a revolution if the subjective forces striving for it succeed in bending the latter in this direction. A historian of Isaac Deutcher’s stature blames the Soviet Union for this (purposeful) fiasco while for Marcuse its role in this failure is “overemphasised” though self-preservation — even at the cost of complete annihilation of revolutions all through the developed world — was the latter’s only objective.
National socialism seized upon this anti-capitalist mentality during this remarkable balance of forces. Necessity demanded it to embrace the slogan of socialism unwillingly. But, as AJP Taylor narrates: “Its socialism was meant for the gutter” though it helped mask the real face of fascism. The communists had already triggered a wave of German protest against the Christian faith while retaining its values and civilisation. The Nazis overcame anti-capitalist mentality by “mobilising the mythological layer of the German mind by the constant interplay between mythology and technology, nature and mechanisation, metaphysics and matter of factness, soul and efficiency.”

(To be continued)

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