Boston bombings and the U.S. culture of violence

                                Sukumaran C. V.

   

                                               A Boston blast victim
If and when we hear the news of a bomb blast in Bangalore or Hyderabad or Delhi or Mumbai; we are not shocked, because we know that it happens in India quite often. Bomb blast in Karachi or Islamabad; we are not shocked. We know it happens in Pakistan. Bomb blast in Kabul; there is nothing to be shocked. If a bomb explodes in Baghdad and kills many, nobody is shocked. If a psychopath enters into a school in the U. S. and shoots and kills many students and teachers, we are not surprised; because we know that it happens in the U. S. intermittently. But on hearing the news of the bomb blasts in the Boston Marathon; we are shocked. We are shocked because the scourge called terrorist blast has shattered the immunity of the strongest nation also! That means terrorism can’t be contained by military power or police force, however impregnable it may be. We are shocked not because that we love the U. S. 

Nobody who knows the true history of the U. S. can love that nation. The nation has been built by slaughtering the Native Americans en masse. The nation has been built on the sweat and blood of the Native Africans. The nation has enriched itself by looting the resources of the people all over the world. The nation has killed more people in the world than any other nation has ever had been able to kill in the whole history of the humankind.

The Native Americans ‘were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality and their belief in sharing.’ This is how the ancestors of the U. S. dealt with them:
“Among the Arawak Indians, mass suicides began with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250, 000 Indians on Haiti were dead…The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes: deliberate attacks on noncombatants…Captain John Mason proposed to avoid attacking the Indian warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”  

This is how the U. S. has transported the Negroes: “They were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”

                                             Chained Negro slaves
This is how the U. S. has devastated Vietnam: “By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II—almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam. It was estimated that there were 20 million bomb craters in the country. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth….On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Nagai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death…It was estimated that between 450 and 500 people—most of them women, children and old people—had been slain and buried there….Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings told reporters in early 1971: ‘Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.’” (All the quoted passages are from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States).

                                                  Vietnam
And we know what the U. S. has done to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Boston bombings are gruesome, but gruesome is a milder word to describe the U. S. cruelties on the Native Americans, the Negroes, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, of Chile, of Iraq and Afghanistan.

                                                 Hiroshima
It is high time the U. S. and the world learnt that violence breeds violence and we can’t reap love and co-operation by sowing violence and injustice.

We should not allow WikiLeaks to be stifled out

                                                  Sukumaran C. V

WikiLeaks has exposed a range of suppressed facts and unethical practices in a manner and scale never before seen. It has changed the rules of the game for newspapers.—The Hindu. 

                                                           Julian Assange

When I finished reading the U. S government’s concerted efforts to stifle out WikiLeaks after the not-for-profit media organization revealed ‘rare insider accounts of U.S. diplomacy across the world, angering and embarrassing Washington’ in The Hindu on October 25, 2011 (WikiLeaks fights back in the face of financial blockade and arm-twisting) I searched in my collection of books for a long forgotten work—The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels.

In the book Engels writes: “In most of the historical states, the rights of citizens are, besides, apportioned according to their wealth, thus directly expressing the fact that the state is an organization of the possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class.” 

WikiLeaks revealed the terrible manipulations and anti-people activities of the possessing class of the world’s greatest democracy to the people all over the world. It has also revealed an incredible number of skeletons in the cupboards of other countries—both the democratic and non-democratic.

Until Julian Assange started WikiLeaks, the states could conceal their nefarious and ugly business from the people. WikiLeaks made it impossible. It helped people to view the un-democratic ways of the democracies. When its ugly side is fully shown to the people, the State stands embarrassed and sheds all the pretexts of democracy and the rule of law.  The witch-hunt starts. First it was fabricating a sexual harassment case against Assange, then arm-twisting and unlawful and arbitrary financial blockade! 

Let’s return to Engels: “The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split… Society which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”

The activities of the State again and again prove what Engels said by analyzing the states of his time, but his prophecy of  the State being  put into the museum still remains as a beautiful dream. The states don’t show any willingness to be seated by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe. They become stronger and stronger and the non-possessing class becomes more and more hapless and disoriented. Against this bleak scenario, the media organizations like WikiLeaks are a necessity to strengthen and orient the dispossessed millions. The state knows the role and commitment of such organizations more clearly than anybody else and wants to crush them.

The U.S which imports democracy to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other ‘uncivilized’ countries and wax eloquent on freedom of expression has savagely been stifling WikiLeaks ever since it started publishing the confidential cables exchanged among American diplomats worldwide, and it is now forced to suspend work! The most ‘liberal’ and the most ‘perfect’ democracy of the world arm-twists Julian Assange just like the Medieval Roman Catholic Church arm-twisted John Wycliffe and John Huss.

We the people should not allow WikiLeaks to be stifled out. It represents the interests of us the non-possessing class. We are in desperate need of whistle-blowers. We want someone to speak out that violations of people’s rights are rampant in the name of democracy. Even if we may not be able to put the State in the museum, we want at least to make it something which looks after the interests of the non-possessing class too. Therefore, let’s contribute as we can to save WikiLeaks from being stifled out. Let’s twist our weak arms together on behalf of the not-for-profit media organization. Many weak arms twisted together will make a strong arm and it will help the organization to fight back and to continue its praiseworthy work. 

The witch-hunt of the ‘democratic’ U.S with the help of ‘liberal’ Europe against WikiLeaks reminds me of the intolerance of the ancient democratic Athens towards Socrates. Addressing his accusers and judges who told him that if he promised to give up his discussions with people and changed his ways they would let him go, Socrates said: “If you propose to acquit me on condition that I abandon my search for truth, I will say: I thank you, O Athenians, but so long as I have breath and strength I will never cease from my occupation with philosophy.”

Socrates still lives in the hearts of the people worldwide, but nobody knows the names of his accusers and judges who trialed and condemned him to death for the ‘crime’ of his discussions with people. It will be better for those who try to smother WikiLeaks to keep this truth in their minds. 

Astonishing - The Hindu

Astonishing - The Hindu

Kodumpaapikal (great sinners)

Sukumaran C. V.

Farmers depended solely on the rain, 

And the rains deserted the village,
The summer seemed to be endless.


People prayed to the rain god,
But He refused to be propitiated.
It was the fiercest drought the village has ever had,
But even then the drought failed,
To dry up the wells and ponds and rivers.

‘Drag the effigy of Kodumpaavi’,
The elder people told the youth.
An effigy was made with hay,
And dragged through the whole village.



Between the dragging and the rain,
The ‘educated’ could see no relation .
I belonged to the 'educated' and
It took years for me to ‘uneducate’-
Myself and see the relation:

The rustic people respected the ways of Nature
And Nature heard their call in distress.

Today the summer dries up the ponds and wells,
And the fiercest drought of yesteryear
Seems benevolent now.

It is the result of man’s great sin
Of killing the trees and filling the wetlands.
Nobody is there to drag the great sinners, as
Everybody has sinned greatly by waging the
War of 'development' against Mother Earth.

Water, the elixir of life

Sukumaran C. V.

Man has through ages sought in vain for an imaginary elixir of life, the divine Amrita, a draught of which was thought to confer immortality. But the true elixir of life lies near to our hands. For it is the commonest of all liquids, plain water! —C. V. Raman.

In the past when there were hundreds of acres of paddy fields in my village, whenever I have been in the fields, I used to remember the title of an essay written by India’s greatest scientist C. V. Raman—Water, the  Elixir of Life—which was the first lesson in the English textbook of my Pre-Degree class. It is from that essay I learnt the meaning of the word elixir and whenever I watched the pure waters gurgling through the kazhaya from one field to the other, I used to tell myself— the elixir of life. 

In our mythology there is a word called amritu and I thought it was only a mythical imagination until I learnt the essay. Then I could see water is really the amritu and our paddy fields, the wetlands, were doing great service to the humans and other animals by preserving the elixir of life. There was a little creek alongside the paddy fields and even in the summer months pure water used to flow through it. Along the banks of the creek, screw-pines grew in abundance and water could be seen trickling down from their roots.  And summers have never been as scorching as they are now.

Today our district (Palakkad) is parching and scorching under the summer sun. As all the indigenous trees which absorb the UV rays are felled and uprooted, the level of UV rays are unprecedentedly high. The older people say that they have never experienced such scorching heat in their life. Rivers have dried up and the still remaining ponds are drying up. As we have deserted paddy cultivation and converted almost all the paddy fields to plots and estates and felled and uprooted every big tree, there are now no wetlands to preserve the rainwater; and no trees to absorb the scorching heat and protect the birds, humans and other animals. 

Everybody complaints about the heat and drinking water shortage, but nobody notices the dried up water bodies and ponder over the reason of their drying up. Along the banks of our village creek there is not even a single tree or screw-pine bush now and there is not a drop of water in the creek either. Water used to ooze into the creek from the wetlands, the paddy fields, and the water was preserved by the roots of the screw-pine bushes and indigenous trees. 

Now the wetlands were gone, the screw-pine bushes gone, the trees gone and is it possible for the water alone to remain? All of these are inter-related, and the humans, blinded by their selfish greed, forgot the interconnection. They converted the wet lands into dry-lands, destroyed the thickets and trees, and discovered that water also disappeared together with the ecosystem they have destroyed. 

Now the humans are suffering, but the brunt of the suffering is borne by the poor who are not part of the onslaught on the ecosystem. And the birds and animals also suffer.
Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, and other birds need water in summer not only to drink, but to bathe also. It is my wont to put a tub of water in front of our home for the birds to drink and bathe. And it is always a wonderful experience to watch birds drink and bathe. They never quarrel while sharing the water. I have seen even woodpeckers drink and bathe from the tub! Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, orioles and magpie-robins come regularly. 

When the jungle babblers drink and bathe, if a bulbul comes, it will wait patiently until the jungle babblers finished quenching their thirst and taking bath. I have not seen any bird attacking others on the matter of sharing the water!! There is no fight over the water either between two birds of the same feathers or between different kinds of birds. They behave themselves and show wonderful manners. No policing is need!
Jungle babblers are the birds who repeatedly bath and they always come in large numbers. It seems that they are highly social birds. Mynahs, bulbuls, orioles magpie-robins and other birds come in pairs. 

In our district, there are people who have to walk miles to fetch drinking water. While even the humans have no drinking water what will the birds do? (Of course ours is an anthropocentric world!). The stupid humans still think that everything was created for them. They are still unable to learn the truth behind the scathing satire of Jonathan swift.

In his Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes Man as the most dangerous of all animals. In the second book of the satire (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” (Italics added)

 
As C. V. Raman says, “there is nothing which adds so much to the beauty of the countryside as water, be it just a little stream or a little pond by the wayside where the cattle quench their thirst…..The rainfed tanks that are so common in South India—alas often so sadly neglected in their maintenance—are a cheering sight….Water in a landscape may be compared to the eyes in a human face.”

In the name of ‘development’ we have blinded the eyes, and we are groping in the darkness of a drought-like situation. We are reaping what we have sown.

Imprisoned in the body

Sukumaran C. V.

I know no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate—whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves—for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silence, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.—Adrienne Rich

Karaikkal Ammaiyar was a staunch devotee of Lord Siva and one of the prominent Saivaite Saints (Nayanars) in the South Indian Bhakti Movement (circa 7th century to 11th century AC). The main thrust of the Movement was to help the agrarian development and the consolidation of Chola political power in South India. But if we look at the Movement  through a gender perspective, we can see that it also helped to consolidate the Patriarchal power over women. The story of Karaikkal Ammaiyar proves that even within the ideology of bhakti, the female is denied her agency and independent role.

Chekkilar’s hagiography (Periyapuranam) speaks about 63 Nayanars.  Of the 63, Karaikkal Ammaiyar is the only (prominent) female Nayanar. 

Before she metamorphosed into a ghoul, Ammaiyar was a beautiful lady called Punitavati. Chekkilar says that Punitavati was a staunch Sivabhakta and once when an old man, a Saivaite mendicant, visited her home for bhiksha, as she had not cooked the mid-day meal, she gave one of the two mangoes her husband brought home to the mendicant.   

Later, her husband Paramadatan, having eaten the tasty mango served to him, asked for the second one. Punitavati couldn’t reveal the truth. She went inside as if to fetch the mango and prayed to Lord Siva and there appeared a ripe mango in her hand! She served the mango, but noticing the unique taste, the husband asked the reason. Punitavati could not but reveal the truth. Paramadatan could not believe it. He mocked her and asked to pray again. Then, to his surprise, he saw a ripe mango appearing in the hands of his wife. Terrified, he left Punitavati to find an ordinary wife!

                             Punitavati gives one of the mangoes to the mendicant

As she was deserted by her husband, Punitavati asked Lord Siva to take away her female beauty and make her one of his ghouls—the bhuthaganas—and in that terrible form (Pey) she wandered in the forests of Karaikkal praising the Lord, and came to be known as Karaikkal Ammaiyar.

In this regard, it will be interesting to examine the attitude of some prominent male Nayanars towards their wives. Iyarpagai Nayanar was so great a devotee of Siva that he gave his own wife to a mendicant, when the mendicant asked. Another one, Tiruneelakanda Nayanar, deserted his wife because she had committed, according to him, a sacrilege by blowing off a spider which fell on a Sivalinga.  Yet another one, Kaliyar Nayanar, tried to sell his wife in open market in order to buy oil lamps for a Siva temple. Siruttondar Nayanar, a temple supervisor, cut off a queen’s nose for smelling a flower from the garland which was meant for the deity—Lord Siva. When the king, Kalar Singer, knew this; he proceeded to cut of the hand of, not the culprit Siruttondar but, the queen for taking the flower to smell! 

As Vijaya Ramaswamy says, “In all these instances the devotional fervour of the male Nayanars has been highlighted at the expense of the women who have been depicted as objects rather than as persons.” (Walking Naked: Women, Spirituality, Society in South India)

While we see so many instances of men’s devotional fervour highlighted at the expense of women, it is difficult to point out even a single instance in which the role is reversed. Let’s come back to Punitavati. She was a beautiful woman and wife before she became the Pey of Karaikkal. The role of a wife and that of a staunch devotee were not allowed to go together. That was why Punitavati, the beautiful wife of Paramadatan, had been deserted by her husband. We see many an instance of men being devout Saivaites or Vaishnavaites and at the same time husbands also.

The famous example is Sundarar (Sundaramoorthy Nayanar). He even marries two women and his deity himself helps him to accomplish his desire of having both Paravai and Sangili as wives. But in the case of Punitavati, when her husband discovers that her devotion to Siva gives her divine power, he deserts her, because, he was ‘deeply perturbed by his wife’s supernatural powers and convinced that she was no ordinary woman’. But Sundarar, with his Siva bhakti, produces bricks of gold, a large quantity of paddy etc.; and yet his wives never thought he was too divine to be a husband.

In the legend of Karaikkal Ammaiyar, what we see is that even the ideology of bhakti is deftly used by patriarchy to constrain the female in her body. A female bhakta, however devout she may be, is not free to use the public space with her female beauty. But the males are allowed to do it. Sundaramoorthy is called so because he was so handsome. He never finds it cumbersome to wander through the world. But Punitavati has to uglify herself to wander through the world!  

It may be interesting to compare this act of Punitavati with the more or less identical act of Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Tess really makes her ugly for two reasons. As her husband deserted her, she no longer wants her beauty and she desperately wants to escape the lustful attack of the outer world—the public space.  

Karaikkal Ammaiyar lived nearly 1000 years ago and she realized that the public space was exclusively meant for the males.

Still public space is not meant for woman and girls. Still our culture is not ready to let woman grow beyond her body. We find manifold ways to make woman believe that she is only her body and that body is meant for man—to harass, to molest, to throw acid and to pass lewd comments at, to violate, to rape and to kill with virtual impunity.

It is high time we let woman grow out of and beyond the body. It is high time we made our private and public space gender egalitarian. It will be possible only if we get rid our culture of its deep rooted patriarchal, misogynistic traits.

130 years after Marx, is Marxism still relevant?

Sukumaran C. V.

March 14^th, 2013 is the 130^th death anniversary day of Karl Marx. As the unabated greed of corporate capitalism destroys all the sustainable ways of living and ruins Mother Earth by making climate change fiercer and fiercer, we have to seek alternate ways to stop the further degradation in order to sustain life on Planet earth. To save the Earth and the flora and fauna including the humans from eternal doom, the corporate greed for the natural resources is to be strictly stopped. We have to stem the devastation of the Environment and the subaltern people. Can Marxism provide the theoretical framework to usher in the much needed paradigm shift? 

Marx shaped his theory and methodology at a time when science and its laws were seen as the only proper means to understand all phenomena—natural or social. Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy (1830) reflected the first strong influence of the laws of natural sciences in the study of society. Like Comte, Marx was strongly influenced by science and throughout his writings, especially after the epistemological break which is said to have happened in 1845, we can see his stress on scientific socialism. Just like the bourgeois social and economic theories, Marxism too established universal laws on social relations and tried to predict the future course of the human ‘progress’.
But in the pre-1845 Marx, especially in the 1844 Manuscripts, strong Romantic components are discernible. The pre-1845 Marx is called ‘the immature Marx, the philosophical anthropologist who is still an ideologist rather than a true scientist’ by the scientific Marxist school. 

The lack of a certain kind of methodology of its own is one of the salient features of Romanticism. In literature it can be seen as a revolt against methods—the rules and laws of classicism. As a social movement it expressed the disillusionment of a class whose dominance and privileges were being eroded by the emerging bourgeois ethics. In this sense Romanticism is a reactionary tendency which looked backwards. But by focusing its attention on the elements which were sidelined or marginalized by the homogenizing structural methodologies of the post-Enlightenment era, Romanticism gave birth to democratic pluralism and helped the people to see beyond the structural methods like classicism, positivism, empiricism and even Marxism.

Marxist methodology was and is predominantly structural and therefore, like positivism, Marxism also neglected the heterodox nature of human life and societies. Marx was trying to change the bourgeois society which was a creation of the Enlightenment, not by negating the Enlightenment, but by using the emancipatory potentials of the Enlightenment itself. The Romantics were on the contrary rejecting the Enlightenment by preferring the pre-Enlightenment communitarian ethos. Marx criticized the bourgeois social order because the bourgeoisie, which had played a ‘progressive role’ in history, became a hindrance to the further progress of humankind towards an egalitarian and 'class-less' social system. Marx’s quarrel was not with the Enlightenment, but with the bourgeois class which exclusively appropriated the fruits of the Enlightenment.

Both the bourgeois social order and Marxism which opposed it drew their strength from the same source—the positivism of Enlightenment. This grievous fault led to the sidelining of the subaltern communities, the females and the Environment by both the liberal democracy and Marxism. Sustainable development was not a concern of the Enlightenment ethics of ‘progress’ and such progress (of both capitalism and 'Communism') ultimately led us to climate change. 

In the age of the reification and alienation of human beings, which happened as a result of the bourgeois appropriation of the Enlightenment possibilities of human welfare to entrench its own hegemony over nature and society, Romanticism provided leverage for a break-through into a subject-sensitive modernism as distinct from the objective modernity of the bourgeoisie.  

Marxism inherited much of the positivist-objective tendency of bourgeois modernity by rejecting romanticism as feminine and ineffectual. It is the Frankfort School of thought—the Critical Theory—which tried to infuse the romantic urge into Marxism for having a subject-sensitive modernity as distinct from that of the objective modernity of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie and classical Marxism. Even if Romanticism originated as a (reactionary) revolt against the universalizing objective methodologies of post-Enlightenment era, it stressed the need to give attention to the heterodox nature of human life which can’t be fully explained and grasped only through objective structural methodologies. 

But Marxism, just like the bourgeois democracy, refused to enrich itself by its inability to be receptive towards the issues of gender, environment and the subalterns; and therefore, 130 years after Marx, when the world faces the imminent collapse of industrial civilization due to its byproduct called climate change, Marxism fails to offer an alternate methodology to save the world. Marxism can only do it by creatively negotiating the issues of sustainable development and gender.