Paul Thelakat

The US-based digital forensics firm Arsenal Consulting claims that Fr. Stan Lourduswamy S.J was framed using ‘planted files’ on his computer. The Massachusetts-based company had earlier said he was also framed in the BhimaKoregaon case using planted Word documents and PDF files containing emails and encrypted messages. Father Swamy was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on October 8, 2020, for his alleged connection to the BhimaKoregaon violence. Father Swamy passed away on July 4th at the age of eighty-four. He was an under trial prisoner in the case at the time of his death and was undergoing treatment at the Holy Family Hospital in Mumbai. Father Swamy lived in the mineral-rich but largely impoverished state of Jharkhand in eastern India. For half a century, he was an advocate for Jharkhand’s tribal people, pitting himself against big mining companies and the government officials who were hand-in-hand with them, and also for other marginalised groups, including the Dalits, the lowest in Hinduism’s caste hierarchy. As industrialisation reached Jharkhand in the 1980s, Father Swamy set up a centre dedicated to social activism, particularly the protection of legal rights of tribals to land and water. “He was a champion of the poor and the voiceless,” said Stany D’Souza, a fellow Jesuit during a memorial service conducted online. In a recorded a video that was uploaded on YouTube Fr Stan Swamy had said, “Because of my age, I have certain ailments. This is something that I am communicating to them and let us hope that some human sense will prevail.” Father Swamy’s trembling hands — characteristic of many with Parkinson’s — made it difficult for him to eat and drink, and he formally requested the court to give him a sippy cup and straw. It took a month long public hue and cry for the court to grant his request. Father Stan Swamy also said that he was pleased to not be a silent spectator in the face of injustice and was willing to pay the price for dissent. Even when India’s criminal justice system failed him; Swamy was resolute in his belief in the Constitution, truth and justice.

Fr Stan Swamy’s case was a clear case of fascist tendency of investigating agencies to frame citizens at the behest of government by hacking into their computers and planting incriminating material in them. In a hearing at NIA court, the court had mentioned that there were 140 email exchanges between Swamy and others accused in the case. The court had concluded even without going through the contents of the emails he was in touch with others accused of violence in the case. In fact, the defence had tried to cite the Arsenal report in the court during a bail plea, but the court had rejected it. The court said: “such extraneous material is not required to be considered while deciding the application for bail.” The judicial system also failed him.

Eric Voegelin, a German American philosopher of politics, referred to Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life in order to convey how his approach to the Nazi experience differed from current historiography. Nietzsche had classified history as monumental, antiquarian, or critical. Monumental history aimed at inspiration from the past and antiquarian history at restoring it. According to Nietzsche, this perversion has taken place — and history, rather than promoting life, has become deadly. This, then, is the dilemma Nietzsche faced: History is necessary, but as it is practiced it is deadly. The present work is an attempt to extricate himself, and us, from this dilemma. But, for Nietzsche, “only one who in a present emergency is in imminent danger of being crushed, and who seeks relief at any cost, has the need for critical, that is, evaluative and judgmental history.” “We require history,” wrote Nietzsche, “for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it: but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating of life”.

“Without this rabble of educated Germans the phenomenon of Hitler would have been impossible.”

Voegelin is concerned “about by foraging in the horrors of the past; rather, on the contrary, it is the revolution of the spirit which is the precondition for being able to judge the past critically.” Voegelin’s historical reflections on Hitler and the Germans yield some relevant historiographical insights. He understood the major historiographies of ancient Israel, classical Greece, and ancient China as emerging from such a revolution of the spirit in answer to the cultural destruction wreaked by world-empires. From the Greek classical experience equivalents are suggested in The Red Wheel of Solzhenitsyn in Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides. Homer diagnosed the source of the disaster as the vices of its aristocratic antiheroes. We can see these antiheroes as radically disordered through, for example, Achilles’ anger, Paris’ lust, and the stupidity of the Achaean King Agamemnon and the Trojan King Priam. The Iliad opens with the phrase “The Wrath of Achilles,” as if to underline just how much Achilles’ vice is central to the near destruction of the Achaean army. Only when his best friend, Patroclus, is killed due to his inaction does Achilles admit how much he has enjoyed being angry. The obvious equivalent for Achilles’ anger is Lenin’s massively self-indulgent and self-righteous hatred—not only of the Tsarist regime but also of anyone who in any way stands in the way of his own will. Another profoundly destabilising vice is conveyed by Paris’ lust for Helen. As with Achilles, Paris refuses to consider that this lust will lead to the continuance of the civil war; nothing can stand between him and his desire for sexual fulfilment. Disastrous was the priority the Tsar gave to family relationships over his responsibility both to the seven million soldiers at war and to all the Russian people. Stupidity in an ordinary citizen or soldier is not too serious a matter. But as Solzhenitsyn has remarked, it can destroy a society when it occurs at the level of leadership. On the tragic import of his work, Solzhenitsyn has said that: “I wanted to be a memory; the memory of a people doomed to tragedy. It all fitted into the collective epic which I carried in my head…. The immense advantage of all these key-moments is that everything mysteriously coalesces: the things that are brewing in darkness or broad daylight, and those that are to flow from them. Central figures suddenly materialise, act, dominate an event or are dominated by it. Take Lenin: he is my principal protagonist, really.” Voegelin writes that “the disintegration of Athenian democracy was faithfully reflected in the work of the great tragedians.” Aeschylus for the first time in Greek culture focuses on the drama of personal responsibility. King Pelasgus has to dive into the depths of his soul to bring up the correct decision in accordance with justice. He must consider whether “to act or not to act.” The decision “to act” will be the morally correct one, while the decision “not to act” will be unjust. In the world of Aeschylus, such a decision is not taken alone; the king says he can decide “nothing without the people.”

The point of Voegelin’s title to his lectures was that Hitler could never have gained and maintained his position without the cooperation of many others. He draws on Hesiod’s and Aristotle’s categorisation of three types of persons: (i) those who are wise, (ii) those who while not wise themselves have the sense to follow the advice of the wise, and (iii) those who are neither wise themselves nor are prepared to follow the wise. When this third group achieves a critical mass in a society, that society is ruined. Noting that while Aristotle referred to the third type as “slaves by nature,” Voegelin points out that in Germany, this third type “exists at all levels of society up to its highest ranks, including pastors, prelates, generals, industrialists, and so on.” Instead of Aristotle’s class-bound name for this third category, Voegelin uses the word “rabble”… “in the sense that they neither have the authority of spirit or of reason, nor are they able to respond to reason or spirit, if it emerges advising them or reminding them.” Without this rabble of educated Germans (by no means the majority), the phenomenon of Hitler would have been impossible.

Harking back to primitive myths, propagating that of the subhuman the Nazis in the twentieth century evolved with great efficiency a political dispensation so innovative and so cruel that it still exerts a horrid fascination. The modern mythology of Nazi occultism, however scurrilous and absurd, exercised a fascination beyond mere entertainment. The story of Hitler’s alleged private astrologer, and veneration of the swastika in childhood, are evidence of the eagerness with which these crypto-historians seek to establish links with the occult in the life of the future Fuhrer. Modern mythology of Nazi occultism, however scurrilous and absurd, exercised a fascination beyond mere entertainment. Serious authors were tempted into an exciting field of intellectual history. It may still continue to tempt leaders and ideologies with increasing number of rabbles to support

For Solzhenitsyn, “God does not intervene so simply in human affairs. He acts through us and means us to find a way out for ourselves.” And Voegelin warns against a demonising of Hitler that would avoid the real mystery of evil —that famous line between good and evil we are told about in The Gulag Archipelago that every human heart can wander across. Instead of portraying Lenin as a satanic figure, The Red Wheel allows him to speak and think for himself in a way that approaches Voegelin’s preferred characterisation of Hitler, drawing on these words of English historian Alan Bullock: “To achieve what he did Hitler needed talents out of the ordinary which in sum amounted to political genius, however evil its fruits… mastery and an astonishing power of will in pursuing his aims… But these remarkable powers were combined with an ugly and strident egotism, a moral and intellectual cretinism.”

Hannah Arendt questions the theory devil and monsters to explain monstrosities amidst us. Banality of evil makes any one being capable of monstrosities provided ordinary men and women become thoughtless. She wrote, “It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality”

Voegelin addresses a further symptom of the loss of reality – the eclipse of the primary virtues (those which constitute morality) by “bourgeois propriety,” in the sense of the German notion of decency and good manners. From bourgeois propriety, however, morality may easily be excluded: one may “appear punctually for service in the priest’s house or in the Gestapo cellar… I can wash my hands after an honest day’s work in the cornfield or after my activities in the crematorium of the concentration camp.”

History is us—and there is no alternative but to shoulder the burden of what we so passionately desire and bear it out of the depths. Nietzsche who thought of being the ideologue of Nazism concluded his thought on history thus: “Already at the beginning of a journey to that goal the Delphic god calls his motto to you: ‘Know thyself’. It is a hard motto: for that god “does not conceal and does not reveal, but only indicates” 11 as Heraclitus has said. What does he point out to you? What does he point out to you?… This is a parable for each one of us: he must organize the chaos within himself by reflecting on his genuine needs. His honesty, his sound and truthful character must at some time rebel against second hand thought, second hand learning and imitation; then he will begin to comprehend that culture can be something other still than decoration of life, that is, fundamentally always only dissimulation and disguise; for all adornment hides what it adorns.” Like King Pelasgus, faced with the life-imperilling decision “to act or not to act,” he has indeed performed his own De Profundis—where at times it seems as if Solzhenitsyn alone expressed Russia’s “One Word of Truth.” He exemplified in himself the same revolution of the spirit he asked of his fellow Russians: “deliberate, voluntary sacrifice… We shall have to ‘rediscover our cultural treasures and values’ not by erudition, not by scientific accomplishment, but by our form of spiritual conduct, by laying aside our material well-being and, if the worst comes to the worst, our lives.” Solzhenitsyn fulfilled Alex’s hope in Candle in the Wind: “I would like to help pass on to the next century one particular baton—the flickering candle of our soul.”