Fascism Thrives In The Form Of Democracy
By Sukumaran C. V.
18 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org
In 2015, the world is going to celebrate the 70 th anniversary of the victory of democratic forces over fascism in the Second World War. Two atomic bombs were dropped by the powerful ‘democracy' of the world on civilian targets to ‘ win ' the war. The bombs killed thousands of innocent people within a matter of a few seconds and created permanently radiation-hit generations. We think fascism was overpowered and democracy has been ruling the world ever since the World War II.
And we have hitherto believed that the fascist forces were ultimately overpowered by the atomic bombs. But the reality is that the so called greatest democracy of the world used atomic bombs on the hapless people of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) only for the sake of using atomic bombs and as the part of power politics.
Howard Zinn writes in A People's History of the United States :
“ New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war: ‘The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26. Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.'”
Zinn continues: “The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by War Department in 1944 to study the results of aerial attacks in the war, interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, and reported just after the war: ‘Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.'”
“But could American leaders have known this in August 1945? The answer is, clearly, yes. The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: ‘Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace…' Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: ‘Having broken the Japanese code, American intelligence was able to—and did—relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion.'”
“If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender—that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place—the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.”
“Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in atomic bomb not to drop it? Or was it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett suggested ( Fear, War, and the Bomb ), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?”
“The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan. But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was ‘the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia…'”
“Truman had said, ‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid the killing of civilians.' It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians.”
“The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?”
“The fascist powers were destroyed,” says Howard Zinn, and asks, “but what about fascism—as idea, as reality? Were its essential elements—militarism, racism, imperialism—now gone? Or were they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors?”
“In Jackson, Mississippi, last June, a group of white teenagers targeted a 49-year-old African-American man. First they savagely beat him. Then they ran over their victim with a pick-up truck and killed him.” These are the first two sentences of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay's article titled “Racism a scar on our conscience” ( The Hindu , Sept. 17, 2011).
The opening of the article made me wonder whether I am reading an excerpt from Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin , published in 1852. Compare the following incident in the novel with the heinous deed of the white teenagers:
“It was only yesterday,” said George, “as I was busy loading stones into a cart, that young Master stood there, slashing his whip so near the horse that the creature was frightened. I asked him to stop, as pleasant as I could,—he just kept right on. I begged him again and then he turned on me and began striking me. I held his hand and then he screamed and kicked and ran to his father, and told him that I was fighting him. He came in a rage and said he would teach me who was my master; and he tied me to a tree and cut switches for young master, and told him that he might whip me till he was tired;—and he did do it!”
America's famous Declaration of Independence , signed on July 4, 1776, begins as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Uncle Tom's Cabin was published seventy six years later and the author herself says that none of the incidents in the novel was fictitious! We can't go through the novel's chapters like ‘The Slave Warehouse' (30), from which I quote the following, without shuddering: “Susan is sold! She goes down from the block, stops, looks wistfully back,—her daughter stretches her hands towards her. Susan looks with agony in the face of the man who has bought her, “Oh, Mas'r, please do buy my daughter!”
“I'd like to, but I am afraid I can't afford it!” said the gentleman...”
Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs. Stowe, said: “So this is the little lady who made the big war.” Yes, a big war had to be waged to abolish slavery in the United States nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence which states that all men are created equal! A bitter Civil War was fought between the Southern States who favoured slavery and the Northern States who opposed it; and in Sept.22, 1862 Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Emancipation which declared all the slaves should be free on and after January 1 st , 1863. And Lincoln was shot dead in 1864 by a white man!
Slavery was abolished, but the racial segregation of, and discrimination against, the Negroes continued. If we enquire the beginning of organized terrorism, it will lead us not to some jihadi outfits in Afghanistan or West Asia, but to the Ku Klux Klan, the semi-secret organization formed in the Southern States of the USA, after the abolition of slavery, to terrorize the Negroes and prevent them from even voting at the elections. The KKK members indulged in lynching, whipping, rape and murder against the innocent and hapless Negroes!
A law passed by the Virginia State as recently as 1926 prohibited white people and Negroes sitting on the same floor! And two hundred and eighty seven years after the Declaration of Independence and hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, in August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King said in his famous I Have a Dream speech: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”
Martin Luther King was shot dead by a racist white man. All men are created equal, but the African-Americans are still not.
Harper Lee's one and only novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a powerful delineation of the fascist traits of the American democracy and the ill treatment meted out to the African-Americans in the United States.
To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and it is an autobiographical narrative. The novel recounts the real-life incidents of Harper Lee's father who was a lawyer and once defended two black men. The hero of the novel, Atticus Finch, defends a black man who was spuriously accused of raping a white girl. The story unravels through the eyes of nine year old Scout (Jean Louise Finch), the lawyer's daughter and his thirteen year old son Jem (Jeremy Atticus Finch). It is narrated by Scout with sublime humour and aesthetics.
Scout is a girl who ‘would fight anyone tooth and nail.' Her father had promised her that he would wear her out if he ever heard of her fighting anymore. But her classmate Cecil Jacob made her forgot. “My fists were clenched…He had announced in the school that Scout Finch's daddy defended niggers.”
That night she asked her father whether he defended niggers.
“Of course I do,” her father replied and added, “Don't say niggers, Scout. That's common.”
“That's what everybody at school says.”
“From now on it'll be everybody less one—”
It should be remembered that this was happening in the U.S. in the 1930s! 160 years after the Declaration of Independence which holds ‘these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' And 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the United States.
Even if Atticus Finch brilliantly proved in the court that the Black man Tom Robinson was falsely accused of raping the white girl (who was actually being raped by her father), the racial prejudice was so strong that the all white jury convicted Tom.
After ripping apart the spurious case, Atticus addresses the jury and says: “The witnesses for the state, with the exception of the Sheriff of Maycomb County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption—the evil assumption—that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, which, gentlemen, we know in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”
Scout and Jem were witnessing the whole court proceedings sitting in the front row of the coloured balcony ‘which ran along three walls of the court-room like a second-storey veranda'. Jem cried when he heard the judgment and he kept saying, ‘It ain't right'.
Sitting beside his son's bed at night, the lawyer tells him: “In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They are ugly, but those are the facts of life. As you grow older you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is a trash.”
We can see the scathing attack on the so called U. S. values of democracy and equality in the innocent question the nine year old girl asks her brother in one of the last chapters of the novel:
“Hitler is the government,' said Miss Gates, and seizing an opportunity to make education dynamic, she went to the blackboard. She printed DEMOCRACY in large letters. ‘Democracy,' she said. ‘Does anybody have a definition?'
I raised my hand, remembering an old campaign slogan my father had once told me about.
What do you think it means, Jean Louise?
‘Equal rights for all, special privileges for none' I quoted.
‘Very good, Jean Louise, very good,' Miss Gates smiled. In front of DEMOCRACY, she printed WE ARE A. ‘Now class, say it all together: “We are a democracy”.
We said it. Then Miss Gates said, ‘That is the difference between America and Germany. We are a democracy and Germany is a dictatorship. Dictator-ship,' she said. ‘Over here we don't believe in persecuting anybody. Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced. Pre-ju-dice,' she enunciated carefully.”
At night the little girl tells her brother (and asks): “Coming out of the court-house that night Miss Gates was—she was going down the steps in front of us, you musta not seen her—she was talking with Miss Stephanie Crawford. I heard her say it's time somebody taught them a lesson, they were getting way above themselves, and the next thing they think they can do is marry us. Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad and then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home?”
To have a more vivid picture of the ‘democratic nature' of American democracy, we have to see what happened to Native Americans, the real inhabitants of the two continents—North America and South America —after the hordes of white settlers reached the continents following Columbus .
As Richard Drinnon says, “A sense of place is critical. For people who live with the land, the land becomes the centre of their universe. It's a marriage. We are in a symbiotic relationship with the land where we live, and the notion that this relationship should or even can be transcended is central to many of our problems, and to many of the problems we've created for others. Land is something to be respected, and this respect for land makes respect for self and others possible .”
In his extremely poignant book Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American Indian , Dale Van Every says: “The Indian was peculiarly susceptible to every sensory attribute of every natural feature of his surroundings. He lived in the open. He knew every marsh, glade, hill top, rock, spring, creek...He had never fully grasped the principle establishing private ownership of land as any more rational than private ownership of air but he loved the land with a deeper emotion than could any proprietor. He felt himself as much a part of it as the rocks and trees, the animals and birds. His homeland was holy ground, sanctified for him as the resting place of the bones of his ancestors and the natural shrine of his religion. It was from this rain-washed land of forests, streams and lakes, to which he was held by the traditions of his forefathers and his own spiritual aspirations, that he was to be driven to the arid, treeless plains of the far west, a desolate region then universally known as the Great American Desert.”
The Native Americans, whom Columbus called Red Indians, suffered not only the trauma of mass displacement from their place , an entire hemisphere, which was sacred to them, but were eliminated en masse too by the proponents of industrial civilization or ‘progress and development' .
“So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. …Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property.” (Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States ).
In the words of Chiksika, a Native American warrior who died in 1792 fighting against the American expansion, we can see the cruelty of the so called ‘ civilsed ' race and the ‘ civilsation ' they represent, and the misery of those who were displaced and disinherited. Chiksika says:
“When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight it is called honorable, but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called murder. When a white army battles Indians and wins it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre and bigger armies are raised. If the Indian flees before the advance of such armies, when he tries to return he finds that white men are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off such armies, he is killed and the land is taken away. When an Indian is killed, it is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and sorrow in our heart; when a white is killed three or four others step up to take his place and there is no end to it. The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”
If we, the real Indians, look back, we can also see the waste our ‘progress and development' left behind. It is said that more than 50 million people in India have been displaced in the 50 years since independence by the big dams and other development projects. In The Greater Common Good , Arundhati Roy writes about the thousands of tribal people displaced by the Narmada Sarovar Dam: “Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest... Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometers to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and women) offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale.”
“Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed—food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing materials—they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day... In their old villages, they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they're a heartbeat away from destitution.” ( The Greater Common Good)
“In Vadaj, a resettlement site I visited near Baroda, the man who was talking to me rocked his sick baby in his arms... Children collected around us, taking care not to burn their bare skin on the scorching tin walls of the shed they call a home. The man's mind was far away from the troubles of his sick baby. He was making me a list of fruits he used to pick in the forest. He counted forty-eight kinds. He told me that he didn't think he or his children would ever be able to afford to eat any fruit again…I asked him what was wrong with his baby. He said it would be better for the baby to die than live like this.” ( The Greater Common Good)
We, the proponents of developmental fundamentalism, who are still ‘looking for new places to take' and to leave the waste behind, must listen to, and should feel the agony expressed in, the words of this hapless man who was rooted out of his place. We are going to raise the height of the same dam that uprooted thousands of people like this man from their lands and livelihood, by 17 metres!
Narmada Control Authority's approval (immediately after May 16, 2014) to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam seems to be a fresh and invigorated start of the juggernaut of our developmental fundamentalism. All of us are the proponents of industrial civilization that brings ‘progress and development', but most of us are ignorant of the misery and agony our so called progress causes to the less privileged people by depriving them of their land and livelihood which are the centre of their universe, and destructing the environment which is a prerequisite for the humans, including the proponents of industrial civilization, to survive.
We build cyber cities and techno parks and IITs at the cost of the welfare of the downtrodden and the Environment. We don't think how our farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life, and believe it is development.
Our Constitution begins with “WE, the people of India…”
But many marginalised sections of the people, especially the tribals and the dalits (and the females too?) are still not included in it. They are kept in the periphery of the democratic space by the privileged ‘WE' and WE plunder their hills and vales as the colonial masters have plundered Us!
Arbitrariness is anathema to democracy. To show how arbitrarily Indian democracy behaves with its own people, I am quoting from the paper Dams, Displacement, Policy and Law in India prepared by Harsh Mander, Ravi Hemadri and Vijay Nagaraj:
“Nanhe Ram did not know then that a gigantic thermal power complex was being planned in the neighbourhood of his village, at Korba, for which the two rivers of his ancestral habitat, the Hasdeo and Bango, were to be dammed. Fifty-nine tribal villages like his were to be submerged, 20 completely and the rest partially, along with 102 square kilometres of dense sal forest, to create a vast new reservoir of 213 square kilometres. No one consulted with or even informed the 2721 families of these 59 villages, who had been condemned to be internal refugees to the cause of `national development', about the project and how it would alter their lives so profoundly and irrevocably. Some 2318 of these families, or an overwhelming 85 per cent, were tribals or dalits, who like Nanhe Ram were the least equipped by experience, temperament or culture to negotiate their new lives amidst the ruins of their overturned existence.”
A democracy should not push its own (less privileged) people who don't follow the lifestyle of the mainstream or the privileged society into the woes described below:
“When I am on a boat in the middle of the reservoir, and I know that hundreds of feet below me, directly below me, at that very point, lie my village and my home and my fields, all of which are lost forever, it is then that my chest rips apart, and I cannot bear the pain….[A record of Nanhe's story as told to the paper writer in resettlement village Aitma in 1997]”
Natural resources should be used democratically and in a sustainable manner. But ‘WE' deprive the tribals of their natural resources for the 'progress' of our consumerist economy and WE don't mind whether the vulnerable people survive or not. After having submerged thousands of tribal villages by building big dams, now WE let the corporate mining giants like the Essar, the Posco and the Vedanta to devastate the still remaining rivers and hills and forests of these hapless people. WE are least bothered when the manifold flora and fauna and the different tribal cultures which see the hills and forests as living deities are bulldozed by the corporate mining greed. The world's largest democracy makes a huge number of tribals refugees on their own land and these people who do have a sustainable life style are being shot at, looted and raped by the biggest democracy which worships the Free Market as its Supreme Deity.
Ram Bai, who was displaced from her village that was submerged when the Bargi dam was built on the Narmada and forced to live in a slum in Jabalpur, says: “Why didn't they just poison us? Then we wouldn't have to live in this shit-hole and the Government could have survived along with its precious dam all to itself.” ( The Greater Common Good)
When a democracy doesn't listen to the words of the people like Ram Bai and doesn't stop creating large number of hapless people like the tribal man who says that it would be better for his baby to die, it ceases to be a democracy. And it seems that fascism thrives both in the ‘strongest' democracy in the world and in the ‘largest' democracy of the world too.
Sukumaran C. V., a former JNU student, is a writer based in Kerala. His writings deal with the communalisation of our polity, the inbuilt gender bias of the patriarchal world and the human onslaught against the Environment. He can be reached at : [email protected]
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