Currently, there is only one E-zine from which my always acerbic comments are not banned. It is 'Open' magazine, which is owned by the Sanjiv Goenka group and edited by P.R Ramesh. It is considered pro-Modi.
Recently, I was surprised to see that Open had left 'pending' my comment on an illiterate article by Makarand P Paranjape- a politically connected former Professor of Literature- and so I will give it the full Socioproctological evisceration its ignorant author so richly deserves.
Paranjape's article concerned Walter Benjamin's famous comment on Paul Klee's mono-print 'Angelus Novus' (new angel) which Benjamin owned and which inspired a passage in his 1940 essay 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'.
First I give you the text of my comment-
'(Walter) Benjamin was criticising a crude Marxist historicism which regarded Hitler as the instrument Capitalism had created for its own destruction accompanied by the annihilation of all forms of legality. This would make it easy for Communism to take over Germany. As a matter of fact, this strategy succeeded for Walter Ulbricht who did get to rule East Germany for over a decade.'Benjamin had an interest in Jewish mysticism as well as a concern with various Jewish Socialist or Marxist associations. In that context, his text was meaningful enough. However, it isn't meaningful for Hindus. Why? If we got conquered or became and remained poor, it was because our leaders did stupid stuff. The Brits were kind enough to protect us for a fee but as Japan grew stronger, that fee simply wasn't enough.
'Paranjape mentions the guillotine which was merely a slight improvement over a machine which had existed since Roman times. It was used in Scotland but not England because the English- like the ancien regime in France- preferred something more elaborate in the way of spectacle. The French 'Terror' wasn't particularly terrible. As a proportion of the population, the St. Bartholomew massacre was bigger.
Terror does not subdue populations- small or large. Money, manpower and military skill are required. Why terrorize when you can tax? A Gandhi might defy you for a bit, but if tax revenue falls it is a simple matter to cut back on the provision of public goods. This means that Gandhi's financiers are robbed, raped or ethnically cleansed unless- as in fact they did- they cheerfully pay more in tax themselves so as to hold on to their wealth.
'All cultures incorporate the 'rasa' of horror or terror into their artistic repertoire. Hindus weren't an outlier in that respect. By and large, they are a sensible people who understand that taxes are the price of civilization- that is physical security. If you don't pay tax, you will be subject to all sorts of avoidable terrors. True, if your rulers are stupid or corrupt, paying taxes won't make any difference. That's why you should emigrate to somewhere still ruled by White Christians. Kamala Harris's parents understood this well enough. Trump is hinting that not all the immigrants flooding into the US are Professors or Research Scientists. Rather, they are criminals who will catch and eat your pussy cat or puppy dog. The angel of history, however badly constructed its wings, can have a good laugh every now and then as it is swept ever forward.
'We too can indulge in a titter at the author of the notion that dead people are called upon to overcome their fear of dying in the same way that the stupid author of this piece is called upon to overcome the fear of being thought stupid by his readers.'
The Angel of History
Judaism distinguishes between olam- the totality of time which could be called 'aeon', and which corresponds to the Islamic al-Dahr, or Hindu Kala. However the passage of time is 'zaman' which is the same word as Urdu zamana. So, Klee's picture is of the new angel of our times- except it isn't. History was greatly changed by the defeat of Hitler and Tojo. Our zamana is different from that of Walter Benjamin's. As for 'tikkun olam'- repair of the universe- that's just piece-meal social engineering or mechanism design. This is because- as Benjamin would have known from his attendance of Godel's lecture on his incompleteness result- Olam, precisely because it is a totality- i.e. complete- can't have a representation or a constructive conception. It is an 'intension' with an unknowable 'extension'. All that we can do, by way of 'tikkun' is to tinker with such mechanisms as it is in our power to redesign.
How did Hindus overcome the terror of terror?
The terror of terror is just terror. People can overcome terror by removing its cause or ignoring or becoming indifferent to the effect the terrorist threatens to produces. Hindus are no different from anyone else in that respect. Some overcome the fear of death or disgrace by positing a future life of greater felicity. Others may think bad outcomes aren't really that bad.
“TERROR IS nothing more than justice”—this is how Ridley Scott’s biopic on Napoleon, released in 2023, begins.
The context was Napoleon's rise to power as a reaction to a type of Revolutionary Terror which quickly ran its course and whose perpetrators soon met a grisly end. Scott's 'biopic' is shit.
A line so hauntingly resonant on the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11.
Fuck off! 9/11 was stooopid. So was the War on Terror. The plain fact is, anything terrorists can do, Governments can do better. This has nothing to do with Justice. It has everything to do with Stupidity.
Napoleon starts with the terror of the French Revolution and the guillotine. Which claimed not only the French Emperor Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, but wiped out the ancien régime.
Paranjape has an American PhD in English lit. Yet, he is wholly ignorant of English grammar not to mention French history. The ancien regime had been abolished two years before the execution of the King.
In less than a year, between September 5, 1793 and July 27, 1794, over 20,000 were slaughtered.
The St. Bartholomew massacre, 250 years previously, had higher proportionate fatalities and more lasting effects. France only curbed the power of the Catholic Church circa 1905.
16,594 were executed after summary trials; another 10,000 rotted away and perished in prisons. Many more thousands were massacred. Thanks to the guillotine, decapitation took place with unceremonious, extraordinary, and unprecedented efficiency.
The guillotine was meant to be humane. The English continued to hang, draw and quarter those convicted of treason into the nineteenth century. The most efficient way of killing people was tying them to each other and pushing them off a cliff or into a fast flowing river.
Walter Benjamin, in ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, his famous, last essay that I cited in the previous column, highlights how time itself came to a standstill.
No. There was a notion of resetting the calendar- i.e. establishing a new epoch. Time was being 're-booted'.
The rebels who overthrew the French monarchy shot at all the clock towers in Paris at the same time. But to what end?
To establish a new epoch and a Republican regime.
The Republic was soon replaced by a new despotism,
It was replaced by an Emperor who made his brothers and sisters Kings and Queens of European territories he conquered.
led by a man mistakenly dismissed by France’s enemies across the channel, as ‘that Corsican bandit’.
He was described as the Corsican ogre. Still, there were contemporary tales of noble Corsican bandit chiefs.
Napoleon not only crowned himself Emperor, but marched across much of Europe redrawing its boundaries. The lines that Benjamin quoted when the clocks stopped take on a new, far grimmer, more ironic meaning: time had not stopped but Napoleon’s time had arrived.
It departed quickly enough. The question was whether the first Republic could be revived. It was briefly but the Second Republic was displaced by Napoleon's nephew who crowned himself Emperor. The Third Republic was ended by Hitler. From 1946 to 1958 there was a Fourth Republic which shared some of the problems of the Third. Let us see whether the Fifth Republic can muddle through under Macron. Will Barnier survive a vote of confidence?
It was a tumultuous period that came to an end nearly 20 years later on June 18, 1815, in a small village in what is now Belgium, which gave a new word to the English language. Waterloo. There Napoleon was defeated by the joint forces of the British and the Germans under the command of the Duke of Wellington.
The Prussians, under Blucher.
Arthur Wellesley, whom we knew too well in India as Tipu Sultan’s nemesis. The younger brother of the Governor General Richard Wellesley, Arthur routed Tipu in the Siege of Seringapatam in 1799. Elevated to a dukedom, he went on to become Britain’s prime minister twice over.
How is this relevant?
We remember the French Revolution for the slogan that reverberated across the world: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was invoked closer home by none other than the architect of our Constitution, ‘Babasaheb’ Bhim Rao Ambedkar, after the Mahad Satyagraha.
Ambedkar was not the architect of the Constitution. Two thirds of it was taken from the British Government of India Act and the remainder was dictated by Nehru. It was he who made it unitary. Ambedkar dismissed his own contribution as 'hack work'.
Where ‘untouchables’ fought for their right to water from the common pond.
Why can't this fellow write grammatically? Is it because he is in a constant state of terror?
Those three words are still blazoned on every government edifice in contemporary France.
So what?
Lest we forget, not only did it fail to bring in long-lasting democratic rule in France but the French Revolution led to a new monarchy, with a new upper-class elite.
The Bourbons were restored. Then, they were replaced by the House of Orleans which, too, fell. This means that, currently, there are three different pretenders to the non-existent French Throne- viz. Duke of Anjou, the Count of Paris and a bloke who styles himself Prince Napoleon. They all work in private equity or merchant banking.
It also introduced a terrifying new instrument of punishment, the guillotine. The guillotine was no ordinary killing machine, but a modern apparatus of mass murder. A mechanised contraption of extermination. From here, it was only a short, if jagged line less than 140 years long, which led to the genocidal extermination of the Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers.
Nonsense! The guillotine was copied from the 'Scottish maiden' and a similar contraption in Italy. Such things had been around since Roman times.
Of course, even if the guillotine was new, terror as an instrument of power, was not.
Of course, even if this illiterate shithead could tell us something interesting, his English would be too poor to permit him to do so.
Terror has been used throughout history to subdue huge populations with horrible, devastating efficiency.
No. Killing people and taking their cool shiny stuff can subdue them provided they are productive enough to pay for that killing. Terror is irrelevant.
An entire ideology, even theology of religious conquest, Christian and Islamic, but by no means confined to them, used terror repeatedly in pre-modern times, for rapine conquest and colonisation.
No. They used violence. Dressing up like ghosts and saying 'boo' would not have had any effect. Altering expected payoffs is merely a matter of mechanism design. True, if you want a portion of the population to flee because you don't have the resources to kill or enslave them, then you may use 'shock and horror' tactics. But, two can play at that game.
Those who resisted were slaughtered, their wives and children incorporated into the new order. It was a convenient way to manage demographic as well as political change.
Violence may be convenient. The question is, can it pay for itself? Economics matters.
Cut to our own times, the gulags of the Soviet Union, the killing fields of China and Cambodia, our own bloody Partition riots, genocides of Armenians, Kurds, Yazidis, the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, pogroms against Sikhs in Delhi and Hindu Pandits in Kashmir, massacres in Rwanda and elsewhere are some of the examples of terror deployed on a mass scale with tainted political ends.
They are examples of violence which led either to people fleeing from specific areas or to their changing their behavior. But similar results can be gained non-coercively by changing economic incentives.
Back to Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, especially what he is most famous for. The ‘Angel of History’ which he contrasted with the dwarf hidden inside the chess machine.
Benjamin was ignorant and stupid. The fact is Zermelo's 1913 theorem showed that Chess was decidable. This meant that if a draw is impossible, there must be some purely algorithmic manner for one party to force a win. In other words, no 'dwarf' is needed. This is like the axiom of decidability. Zermelo's theorem is considered pioneering of both Game Theory and backward induction. However, it relies on a notion of 'repetition' (hence my 'Zugzwang, to Zermelo, is the gift of Zorn') and can be infinitary (i.e. the Axiom of Choice applies).
Still, Benjamin is critiquing the crude Marxist determinism of Thalmann which paved the way for Hitler. He wrote- 'Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.'
This makes poetic but not logical sense. I can enlist theology but will still lose to Viswanathan Anand. I suppose, Benjamin means that if I believe theology will help me, I will believe I can win against Anand though I may not want to admit that it is theology which gives me this super-power. But we are now speaking of the delusional system of a low IQ nutter. Sadly, that's all Benjamin and Brecht et al were- in terms of political or economic science.
The machine always won the game of chess.
Unless a player superior to the midget turned up.
But only because a great chess player, the Turkish midget, was hidden inside it.
A hunchback midget. The puppet appeared Turkish.
The chess-playing thingamajig was only a pseudo machine, a puppet manipulated by human hands. But the guillotine was the real deal, a real machine.
The guillotine was manipulated by human beings. Paranjape has shit for brains.
Albeit somewhat of a simple, even crude, contrivance.
Why can't this nutter write complete sentences? Is it because guillotine is threatening to chop off his pecker?
Nevertheless, it is the guillotine, rather than the dwarf inside the pseudo-automaton, that presaged the victory of Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that famously defeated Bobby Fischer.
Nonsense! Chess Computers use backward induction. But if their own heuristics were known, or accurately guessed at, then this could itself be gamed.
Incidentally, Deep Blue played Kasparov not Bobby Fischer. Paranjape pulls his articles out of his arse.
I refer to the Humbler Monoprint by Paul Klee, the ‘Angelus Novus’ (1920) or the new angel, that Walter Benjamin rechristened as the ‘angel of history’. The angel of history has his back turned to the future
Because he is observing the 'zamana'- the times.
Benjamin, of course, had no way forward to either super computers or artificial intelligence.
Sure he did. He could have read a couple of popular math books in the same manner that Borges did. Zermelo's work was taken forward during the Twenties and, in the next decade. Von Neumann and Turing made fundamental contributions. Apparently, Benjamin knew of Godel's incompleteness result. There can be no consistent conception of an Olam because the Olam, by definition, is complete. Tikkun can only be provisional or piecemeal. Benjamin showed the farcical side of a low IQ 'cultural Zionism'.
But the metaphor that he chose to counter the analogy of the dwarf inside the chess machine was also mechanically reproduced.
Nonsense! Angels aren't mechanically reproduced. The picture of an angel, or anything else, can be reproduced mechanically or otherwise. But it is only a picture. It isn't the thing itself. But the 'mechanical Turk' could not mechanically reproduce itself either just as my Chess playing computer can't make other Chess playing computers.
It reminds us, rather uncannily, of another of his famous essays, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
There is no connection between the two. Paranjape is an ignorant cretin. The 1940 essay is about the 'weak messianic claim' History has upon Jews. The 1935 essay is about the 'aura' of the original. Even with prints- which the Chinese and Japanese had had thousands of years previously- the first few will be better than subsequent print runs.
I refer to the humbler monoprint by Paul Klee, the ‘Angelus Novus’ (1920) or the new angel, that Benjamin rechristened as the ‘Angel of History’. The Angel of History has his back turned to the future,
so as to view 'zaman'
“as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at” (IX).
He, like us, will get distanced from the present as it becomes the past. So what?
What is he staring at, wide-eyed and open-mouthed? As Benjamin tells us, “His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past.”
He doesn't know the future anymore than we do.
What does the Angel of History see that we are unable to?
Nothing. Also the fucker doesn't actually exist.
“He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.”
No. He would like to pause for a moment to go to the toilet.
Alas, he cannot. Why? Because he too cannot stop the onrush of kaala, of time: “But a storm is blowing from Paradise,
Eden
it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”
A Rabbi or Priest might well say that. Benjamin, sadly, had fallen amongst thieves and lacked a Good Samaritan. Still, had some such gotten him to America, he'd have been happy enough with the progress he saw there.
Now comes the climax of the passage and Benjamin’s ‘Concept of History’: “History is the object of a construction
anything can be the object of a shitty construction or deconstruction or exercise in mental masturbation
whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in
the world of fairy tales
that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now.”
In other words, his concept of History is nonsense. That was cool because German history genuinely had turned to shit. Benjamin topped himself to escape his 'here-and-now' and thus his jetztzeit was merely a function of the morphine pills which killed him but which, loaned to Arthur Koestler, failed to kill that rapist.
Benjamin was a Schlemiel- that is his pathos. The other members of his party got through. Spanish officials need to be bribed or at least promised a bribe. I suppose Benjamin was already attracted to the idea of suicide. He understood that he was as stupid as shit. He lacked the chutzpah to make it in America.
Benjamin posited two kinds of time,
such had been the fashion prior to Einstein putting the boot into Bergson.
“homogenous, empty time” and “Jetztzeit,” here and now. The former is filled up with an endless progression of events, pedestrian, banal, “facts.” The onward march of history.
It is useful because it allows us to describe concurrency and capture dynamics.
But the latter is
useless
the very “hour of God,”
which is every hour and every second.
to use Sri Aurobindo’s phrase, when time itself stands still (Stillstellung):
Time is a frame of reference. It was is always at rest with respect to events.
“It is messianic zero-hour of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance….”
No. The Messianic moment is within Time as are 'revolutionary chances' or 'epoch making events'.
That is the time to act.
Because acting yesterday is not possible and promising to act tomorrow aint fooling nobody.
To explode out of history a new epoch: “He takes cognisance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.”
But it would be so blasted anyway. This angel is otiose.
The ordinary history of the world, Benjamin reminds us, is always written by victors.
Benjamin was being silly. Victors don't bother with writing shite. Some sycophant may make a little money doing so. But the fellow is a loser.
As our National Security Advisor Ajit Doval famously said in one of his speeches decades ago, “There is a Babar Road in Delhi, but no Rana Sangha Road.”
Not even Delhi has enough roads to name after every fucking Hindu loser.
We are reminded of Benjamin’s famous quip, “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
We are reminded that Benjamin was as stupid as shit. The truth is 'barbarians' have their own documents in which we are the evil sods.
Each victorious generation builds itself on victories past, regardless of who the victors were.
None do.
As Jawaharlal Nehru himself tried to do in New Delhi, a capital that he inherited from the British after the transfer of power.
Nehru's party won the 1946 elections in Hindu India. His enemies were Indian, not British. His dynasty has changed the names of plenty of places in Delhi.
But it is only when history comes to a standstill that the oppressed can take capture power through the violent shock of revolution.
History has never come to a standstill. Those who 'capture power' may claim to have been previously oppressed. When the Janata party came to power, many members of the new Cabinet could claim to have been oppressed by Indira Gandhi because she had in fact jailed them. But they were shit at running things. Voters decided they ought to be repressed.
Such a time is almost akin to the moment of incarnation, the messianic or avataric irruption of the vertical timelessness into the endless horizontality of mundane time.
Subjectively, different moments in time are different for different people. My birthday is special to me. It isn't to you. So what?
Veer Savarkar, similarly, wanted to seize the moment, to turn victims into victors.
Because that was what his elder brother wanted. But he didn't see himself as an Avatar or a Mahatma.
Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, did not regard Indians as victims at all.
Yes he did. He said in 1922 that Indians were the victim of 'a foreign exploiter'. While admitting the justice of the charge against himself, he said ' My experience of political cases in India leads me to the conclusion, in nine out of every ten, the condemned men were totally innocent. Their crime consisted in the love of their country. In ninety-nine cases out of hundred, justice has been denied to Indians as against Europeans in the courts of India. This is not an exaggerated picture. It is the experience of almost every Indian who has had anything to do with such cases. In my opinion, the administration of the law is thus prostituted, consciously or unconsciously, for the benefit of the exploiter.'
In other words, patriotic Indians were the victims of British oppression and injustice.
He considered the so-called victors pitiable because of the unspeakable violence they unleashed not just upon their victims, but upon themselves.
No. Not even Gandhi was that stupid. He had lived in London and knew that the Brits weren't 'unleashing violence' on themselves. You could be sent to jail just for beating your wife or kicking your dog.
Both looked to the past to help refashion India’s future.
Both had shit for brains.
What is the theological answer to terror?
Heaven or re-birth on a paradisal planet
Is it Gandhi’s non-violence, which is another name for radical love?
No. On the other hand, non-violence may be a name for getting radically fucked in the ass by muscular dudes.
Or the counter-violence of Savarkar?
Savarkar was sensible enough to see that the Great War had doomed Empires of all descriptions. He also saw that the Muslims would not accept Hindu domination. The question was whether the Mahasabha could become a rival to Congress. The answer was- no. Its members were too stupid and, unlike Gandhi's Congress, could do little for wealthy industrialists who wanted to monopolize the Indian market.
Or something entirely different, which does not exclude either?
and which lives, very comfortably, up Paranjape's asshole?
Hindus had found the answer long back by discovering the Rasa of Terror, the Bhayanaka,
All human societies have horror stories if not a literary genre of that type.
even finding appropriate deities to worship it. The terrifying Kala Bhairava. Or Smashana Kali. And a host of other terrible deities who also migrated into contiguous faiths, such as Buddhism and beyond.
The Christians have gargoyles and Islam has ghouls. So what? The point about Kali is that she is Mummy and she won't just slaughter the bogeyman, she will fucking lick up every last drop of his blood. Kids are cool with such a Mummy be she 'Dakshina Kali' or 'Smahana Kali'.
Hindus found a way to turn terror into pleasure, to enjoy even the thrill of terror.
Just like everybody else.
Thus to overcome it.
By watching a horror movie? Fuck that. Terror is overcome by killing terrorists or otherwise dealing with existential threats.
Only the Hindus dared to celebrate the rasa of terror.
But Hindus are shit. Who cares what they celebrate?
They partook of it to overcome the terror of terror. And the fear of death itself. As all victims of terror, including 9/11, are called upon to.
Nonsense! Victims of terror- like those in Israel- are called upon to fuck over their terrorizers. If they can't, they should run away. Even Walter Benjamin understood this. He was trying to get to America when, fearing the Spanish would deport him back to France, he topped himself. Go thou, Paranjape, and do likewise.
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