Intolerance: The Minion

The Minion

India is home to many opinions. Many speak of continuity, creation and clarity of the old world, while many doubt if they relish or despise the new world. Human nature is contradictory. It yearns for action but languishes in inaction. People go too far in political rhetoric, often to the points of no return, usually for nothing more than imaginary contests. Everybody wants everybody else to play by their rules. Some believe their rules are the best, while others dislike such self-satisfaction. The political spectrum is wide as well. Some call fascism an extreme form of capitalism while some equate all communist regimes to Juche. It is these clashes of ideas that give birth to poverty, prosperity and politics.

Post-WWI, the Austrian parliament voted to join Germany with an overwhelming majority. Hitler, a nationalist socialist who killed German democracy, was praised for implementing the democratic will of the Austrian people when he annexed Austria. Similarly, the separation of Sudetenland from the Czech was applauded by the vast majority of the population concerned. These actions of the Führer were deemed ‘self-determination of nations’ because victors of World War I wanted to create large buffer states around Germany. This was as late as in October 1938. Hitler was recommended for the Nobel peace prize as late as in January 1939 by Swedish Social Democratic MP Erik Brandt. Today, fascism has become a slur reserved for all, used by the self-claimed superior few. It seems history and integrity are the first victims in intellectual intolerance waged wars.

In ancient times, the boundaries of such contradictory behaviour were best measured at Roman Colosseums where caesars (Roman emperors) delegated the decision of life and death of the gladiators to blood-thirsty spectators by merely branding the poor victims as criminals, by merely reflecting the popular opinion by concentrating a god-like power in his thumb, up or down. Today, this inhuman hunger for blood can be best measured in both offline and online mobs which are indicative that our societies are becoming gladiatorial where all sides claim victimhood and injustice. Sin and death have become a part of life so they do not bar a human from having a ‘good heart’. Merit is long dead and rebel is the perpetual new cool since the late 1960s, in a politics so muddy that no group is truly distinguishable. George Orwell, being an anti-fascist, noted in an essay published as early as in 1944 that the word Fascism 'has lost the last vestige of meaning' because of internal politics¹⁠.

We know now that both rage and forgiveness is embedded in humans. The author of this blog is a strong believer in Darwin. The author knows for a fact that far future may look promising but near-future is unforgiving. Only gods know why humans can’t tame ourselves. This blog series talks about many such contradictions that we must delve in if we wish to help our polity and more so, our country. The author firmly believes that young Indians must unlearn the idea of cosmically mandated social hierarchies and learn how merit-based hierarchies function.

Humans were beset with violence since long before they switched green jungles for concrete ones. For example, terrorism is not a modern scourge yet there are no feasible solutions in sight. Humans know how terrorism makes people kill other people in the name of vague ideas and entities. People know no conscientious gods or prophets can allow such crimes without being contradictory. They know how terrorism justifies lop-sided distribution of resources, human rights and justice but they appear helpless to prejudices. A 2014 terrorist attack on a Peshawar school in Pakistan killed 134 children. Last week terrorists killed 24 women, children and babies in maternity wards of a Kabul hospital. Some cold reactions to the plane-crash in Karachi were unusual. Since the world looked up to the USA and it was the USA which reshaped much of the world according to its convenience, we must crunch some data to get a fair idea of a popular American idea of violence - terrorism.

Terrorists murdered 3,342 people on US soil from 1992 through mid-2017. Islamists were responsible for 92%, killing about 89% in 9/11 attacks alone. Right-Wing terrorists were the second deadliest group by ideology, accounting for 6.6%. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people, accounting for 77% of all murders committed by Right Wing terrorists in the USA. Left-Wing terrorists killed 23 people during this period (0.7%), 13 since the beginning of 2016. Since 2009, at least 177 of America’s schools experienced shootings and killings, totalling to a body count of 180. The net result is American schools arming themselves with M16s, grenade launchers, and armoured vehicle²⁠. Is this what the Americans set out to create? No. This are some probabilities of death in the USA.

Death in school shooting – 1 in 2 million kids per year.

Death by Islamic terrorism – 1 in 2.5 million humans per year.

Death by Right-wing terrorism – 1 in 33 million humans per year.

Death by Left-wing terrorism – 1 in 330 million humans per year.

An American kid is more likely to die in school attack than a terrorist attack. In 1999, 31% of Afghan children were victims of land mines. On 04/08/2019, a 24-year-old alcohol and drug-fueled terrorist, Connor Betts (aka the Dayton (Ohio) killer) fired 41 rounds under 30 seconds into a crowdy bar after decrying his political opponents as Nazis on Twitter³⁠. We must face the fact that children, teenagers and barely young adults are used and abused in wars. Nearly 10 lakh Jewish kids were killed by Nazis while 76,000 German kids died in British air-raids^4⁠. Hitler and Churchill remain two of the greatest child-slaughterers in human history but one is a villain and the other is a hero. Why? 

Youth changes national fates, but it is lives in herds led by the internet. Learners worship masters but they forget that they study in schools built for an 'education' that resembles indoctrination. Sadly, intolerance and intellectual minionship is rising among the global restless youth. A popular persuasion works like appeasement. It makes you look good in your peer groups but it is a mindless activity. It requires no convictions or thoughts because it takes courage to go against the popular current and beyond popular acceptance. After the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the German army began propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. This satiated the general restlessness with anti-capitalist and anti-semitic ideas. The officer in charge, Karl Mayr, eventually defected to the right from the left, ending up dead in Buchenwald camp in 1945. Mayr described his protege Adolf Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master⁵⁠”..

1. George Orwell: What is Fascism? https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc.

2. Which Ideology Has Inspired the Most Murders in Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil? | Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/which-ideology-has-inspired-most-murders-terrorist-attacks-us-soil.

3. Gunman in Dayton mass shooting had cocaine and other substances in his system. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/gunman-dayton-mass-shooting-had-cocaine-other-substances-his-system-n1042906.

4. Germany’s forgotten victims | World news | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/22/worlddispatch.germany.

5. Karl Mayr. https://spartacus-educational.com/Karl_Mayr.htm.