‘The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all exertions and sacrifices of the hundreds of millions of people and the victories of the Righteous cause, we have still not found peace and security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils that those we have surmounted, ‘ said Winston Churchill.
The man died in 1965.
I wonder how he would have artistically penned down the Arab uprisings and their outcome. Churchill was no doubt, an inspiring writer for many.
He left behind him, several more reasons for ‘unnecessary wars’ which the world was yet to see.Wars which do not have ideologies. Or perhaps, have limited frameworks of integrity.
Its often said, ‘The very steps which you take to avoid a political disaster, eventually become the same steps that take you towards it.’
With the entire Arab Uprising taking a very horrendous turn, often lost anonymously into the perils of stigma and orientalism, I wonder why it is so difficult to have a strong political opinion to stick to. To fight for. To die for.
Ideologies do not work these days. For example. Communism failed, miserably. In party of India like Kerala, Bengal or even Andhra Pradesh. We do not need to even mention about Russia and other Eastern European countries. Though, China is struggling. But in short, the ideology in 1848 which the 29-year-old Karl Marx created in years of isolation has been ruined because it lacked the intellectual honesty of the creator. Stalin, Lenin or for that matter, Bela Kun perhaps would not have been termed as ‘communists’ by Marx.
Perhaps, the nearest any one could get to communism (through the strand of socialiam) was Ayn Rand in her novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ through the dynamic and audacious personality of John Galt. She fought the concept of ‘to each according to our needs’ and established the functioning of ‘to each according to our deeds’.
Alexis de Tocqueville reflects on the French revolution and states ‘In the long process of molding men’s minds to their ideal pattern their task was all easier since the French had no training in the fields of politics.Thus, they had a clear field.’
Unfortunately, the repercussions of globalisation and technology has created further more avenues for human mind. The more it grasps, the more is the confusion and eventually, the larger is the execution of the appropriate action. In this case, the formation of an ideology.
Coming to mind, Pierre Joseph Proudhoun writes in his book ‘What is property’, that ‘ we reason by eternal and absolute laws of our mind. Sometimes, the bias resulting from the prejudices is so strong that often, even when we are fighting against a principle which our mind thinks is false, which is repugnant to our reason, and which our conscience disapproves, we defend it without knowing it. We reason in accordance with it, and obey it while attacking it. Enclosed within a circle, our mind revolves about itself, until a new observation, creating within us new ideas, brings to the view an external principle which delivers us from the phantom by which our ideology is possessed.’
Sometimes, also termed as the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Not many know how Egyptians actually cried when Mubarak resigned. But we do know how the North Korean’s made a spectacle of Kim Jong Il death, often turning to be quite comical to the outside world which expects this nuclear state to be another ruthless instance of dictatorship and massive domination, poverty and impoverished.
Here comes the main battle. The battle of mind over matter. Of one person’s own ideology and his creation being imitated in the name of oppression.
shubhdachaudhary 