OPED | Tuesday, November 24, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Of saints and sinners
Premen Addy
Barack Obama’s appeal to China to play peacemaker between India and Pakistan is a continuing paradox, where democracies assert their rectitude in octaves and trebles to friend and foe alike, yet bed down with regimes whose claim to our attention is their criminal performance and intent
The first anniversary of 26/11 beckons, the nightmare few Indians are likely ever to forget. But the Pakistani masterminds and their jihadi compatriots proclaim a chilling message through their state of truculent denial. The preacher Zaid Hamid, whose following within Pakistan swells by the day, claims on CD and television, that the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year were the handiwork of India and Zionists, aided and abetted by the Mossad. A kindred spirit, Israr Ahmed, an Urdu columnist, interprets the Holocaust as “divine punishment,” and argues for the extermination of the Jews.
A senior Obama Administration official, in a conversation with US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, referred to the Hizb ur-Tahrir penetration of the Pakistani military in fulfillment of its goal to establish the universal Caliphate. Exclaimed the exasperated official: “Where do these (Pakistani) guys get socialised and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?” he asked. He answered his own question: “In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics.”
‘At sixes and sevens’ is how a recent Financial Times editorial described Washington’s Afghan policy. On India, it would appear, it is a witches brew, with US President Barack Obama, in Beijing, appealing to China to play peacemaker between India and Pakistan! The strain of being the world’s ‘most powerful man’ presiding over the destiny of the ‘sole superpower’ is clearly telling. Disordered fantasy is driving a fevered mind.
A continuing paradox, you might say without putting too fine a point on it, where democracies assert their rectitude in octaves and trebles to friend and foe alike, yet bed down with regimes whose claim to our attention is their criminal performance and intent.
Taking the argument a step further, I see in this Pakistan-inspired terror against India a primordial impulse to maim and destroy an object of the purest hate: A continuing response to Mahatma Gandhi’s praxis of reconciliation and compassion bred in love for all humankind. It in no way diminishes Gandhi’s towering greatness to recognise that his encounter with the pre-partition All India Muslim League and its Qaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a dialogue of the deaf, that the more desperate the Mahatma’s pleas for Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, the more virulent was the response. Truth is that his message was and is relevant for societies with a capacity for introspection whence comes the seeds of redemption. Thus Gandhian self-discovery and achievement occurred in South Africa and India, which became the inspiration for Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the US.
Pakistan and everything that went into its creation was Gandhi’s failure. He was economical with the truth when he placed responsibility for the Moplah violence in Kerala, arising from the Khilafat movement, on the British; he compromised his own high moral principles when he advised the Jews in Palestine to accept the overlordship of their Arab neighbours rather than struggle for an independent state of their own; and he was foolish in the extreme when he recommended that the Jewish community resist Adolf Hitler’s Nazi hordes with non-violence even if meant their eventual extermination.
It is conceivable that Gandhi’s failure lay in his incomprehension of evil, of a nihilism so profoundly understood by Dostoyevsky. Hitler’s partner in crimes against humanity, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, said: “War is to men what motherhood is to women.” It encapsulates Fascism’s first principle, one shared by Islamism. Hitler told Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary and leading appeaser, that he would have shot Gandhi were he in the shoes of the British Viceroy of India. Jihadis would surely have done likewise if the Mahatma had come among them.
This being the case, a just war has an honourable place in human history, never more so than in the blighted 20th century when the Nazi scourge threatened for a while to extinguish all civilization. Western Europe was subjugated by the Wehrmacht in weeks; France surrendered and then turned collaborator with its Vichy regime.
That left the Eurasian landmass of the Soviet Union, Europe’s only real hope, remarked David Lloyd George, one of the greatest of British Prime Ministers, who had presided over his country’s fortunes in the decisive stage of World War first. The USSR came through its terrifying experience scarred but unbowed. Here speaketh Winston Churchill to the UK Parliament in 1944, every line razor sharp: “The advance of their (Soviet) Armies from Stalingrad to the Dneister river, with vanguards reaching towards the Pruth, a distance of 900 miles, accomplished in a single year, constitutes the greatest cause of Hitler’s undoing....not only have the Hun invaders been driven from the lands they had ravaged, but the guts of the German army have been largely torn out by Russian valour and generalship. The people of all the Russias have been fortunate in finding in their supreme ordeal of agony a warrior leader, Marshal Stalin, whose authority enabled him to combine and control the movements of armies numbered by many millions upon a front of nearly 2,000 miles.”
Warts and all, including gulags and repression, the Stalin revival in Russia is in full swing. His wrongs were undoubtedly great, but his leadership in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was greater still; and for this much can, and has, been forgiven. When Joseph Stalin started off in the Kremlin, it was a Russia of the plough; he left the country a nuclear superpower, said Churchill.
The late Nahum Goldman, patriarch and President of the World Jewish Congress for decades, in one of his last statements, told how in response to an appeal by him and Chaim Weizmann, carried to Moscow by Czech President Benes, Stalin answered: “ We know what the Jews suffered during the war and we will do our best to repair it.” Against expectations, the USSR voted for the creation of the State of Israel and supplied it with badly needed arms and equipment in its War of Independence in 1948.
The Stalinist state serves no purpose today in Russia or anywhere else. However, it was the Russia bequeathed by Stalin that nurtured Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, the same who withdrew Soviet troops from East Germany and its Communist-ruled neighbours without a shot being fired. A grateful German Chancellor, Ms Angela Merkel, acknowledged warmly that without him German unification would have remained a pipedream.
It was the iconic democrat Margaret Thatcher who fought steadfastly to keep Germany divided in the interests of British statecraft. She refused to receive the Dalai Lama in London even as her Government conferred an honourary knighthood on the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu. Allowing for circumstance and context moral relativism is a safer measure in assessing human achievement or failure than a moral absolute.
Email | Print | Rate:
|