The
"Hitler reacts..." subtitled videos of the clip in Der Untergang, which now virally infest cyberspace, have had the pernicious side effect of diluting in the popular imagination the seriousness of the historical warning to citizens of democracies settling for autocracy under the pretext of choosing decisive leadership that restores civilizational pride.
India's great eastern neighbour, whose recent prosperity causes much lament in India about 'democracy slowing us down', is one of the recent historical instances of prosperity secured at the cost of surrendering political liberties like in the
post-Tiananmen deal as described in the
BBC Documentary China's Capitalist Revolution, and decried
here as a tenuous 'economic nationalism' and betrayal of the slain student activists of 1989. Such a naive utilitarianism subsuming all national commitments including citizens' human rights to an uncompromising priority of swelling the notional national treasury has characterized all such '
bread-and-circuses' deals in history. How such naive utilitarianism is incompatible with minority rights is
explained here from a fundamental Ethics perspective. The question in India, however, is much more concrete, for the much-vaunted 'Gujarat model of development' is fraught with the same risks of many citizens eventually losing their say and their share in the process that is ostensibly for their own development. These risks are spelled out in this essay "
All resemblances are not coincidental" by Ahmedabad-based sociologist Shiv Visvanathan.
The perils of 'growth worship', the notion that drastic expenses in social capital and human costs are acceptable to secure national prosperity, which was a hallmark of the Third Reich, are all too real even in our contemporary democracy and perpetrated not by a megalomaniac dictator but more insidiously and implemented not by industrial slaughter but rather by displacement in the name of industry. Arundhati Roy's essay 2004 essay "
The Road to Harsud" about the casual attitude of the State (and indirectly the electorate and commentariat) is a reminder that human sacrifice still persists in India, this time at the altar of Development. "The Road to Harsud" by Roy ought to be required reading in History and Civics classes along with Kurt Vonnegut's essay "
Wailing shall be in all the streets" for one recounts the submergence of a 700-year old town and the other the fire-bombing of a 700-year old city, both with callous disregard for the inhabitants and both in the name of a Free People.
This is a historical warning which needs to be ceaselessly and unremittingly reiterated, and for this we cannot afford at this juncture to dismiss any voice that lends itself in protest against supremacist rhetoric. To insist that anyone who speaks out against majoritarian excesses,
supremacist stances and human rights violation should have earned apostolic credibility or should have an unchequered past, is something we do at our own peril. Whether these voices come from the 'East' or 'West', from a former empire or a former colony, from political leftists or committed partisans are questions we don't have the luxury of expending time over; at a time when we most urgently to unite the voices of all those, who
like Martin Niemoller, but preferably in a more timely way than him, realize that it is us and our humanity that are at stake.