[A much larger and politically challenging version has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, 14 July, 2018]
The Naked Ape
According to the primatologist Frans De Waal, bonobo—also misleadingly known as ‘pigmy
chimpanzee’—is a rare species of primates. Bonobos have a pacifist,
egalitarian, and non-dominating social structure under female patronage. They lead
remarkably peaceful lives organized around complex forms of cooperation and sex.
When conflicts on resources such as food arise, bonobos, irrespective of gender,
age and social identity, engage in sexual gratification before they settle down
to share the resource. However, bonobos are only distantly related to the
hominid section of the general primate line (De Waal 2005).
Chimpanzees are our nearest living
ancestors. As De Waal points out elsewhere, chimpanzee colonies are brutally
dominated by the largest, most muscular and aggressive male. Usually the rule
is enforced with the assistance of other, slightly less-endowed males who are
willing to co-operate with the leader with a combination of guile, servitude,
and mutual benefit. The chimpanzee society teems with violence, jealousy, conspiracies,
cunning, cheating, and subterfuge, with females and juniors the worst sufferers
(De Waal 2016, 218-22).
With such direct evolutionary
lineage, it is no wonder that, in recorded history, most human societies have
been structured around exploitation and undemocratic authority, often headed by
despotic figures. In their semi-fictional mode, misty-eyed historians sometimes
report some exceptions to this rule. But even these rare cases do not seem to
stand up to scrutiny. H. G. Wells wrote of the emperor Ashoka in his book The Outline of History ‘Amidst the tens
of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their
majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like,
the name of Ashoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star’ (cited in Das
1991).
Ashoka
is accorded such an elevated status because he marshaled a fine-tuned
propaganda machinery. According to the legends spread by powerful Buddhist pundits
and by Ashoka’s own carefully scripted edicts planted across the country,
Ashoka changed into a saintly emperor after he witnessed the massacre of
hundreds of thousands of people by his own army in the Kalinga war.
Incidentally, Ashoka killed his way to the throne itself by eliminating all his
competing relatives: the estimates of people so killed varies in number between
six and ninetynine. Before his alleged moral transformation, he was one of the
most ruthless, war-mongering rulers the ancient world ever witnessed.
In
any case, even after giving up direct warfare and adopting Buddhism as the
religion of his vast empire, he neither renounced his monarchy nor disbanded
the huge, ferocious army. Ashoka’s empire was in effect a vast police state
with a strict watch over other religious sects. The army was used to enforce
his absolute rule and unconditional compliance to Buddhism. For example, while
Ashoka’s father Bindusara was said to be a follower of Jainism, Ashoka himself
took stern steps to weed out Jaina sects, such as the Ajivikas. In one case, he
issued order to kill all the Ajivikas in
Pundravardhana. Around 18,000 followers of the Ajivika sect were executed as a
result of this order. Such narratives
abound. Needless to say, he retained his large and opulent harem, sometimes
ordering execution of an inconvenient inmate to find room for another one. (Strong 1989,
Popovski et al. 2009)
So
much for the lonely star among the tens of thousands of monarchs that crowd the
columns of history. The general scene didn’t seem to have changed significantly
even after the gradual disappearance of monarchies and emergence of various
forms of formal democracy, not to mention a wide array of dictatorships,
oligarchies and military rule. The brief history of formal democracy in the
West and the rise of communism across the world is replete with imposition of
extreme forms of autocracy, aggressive militarism, frequent mass slaughter of
people and brutal plunder of the planet. Since the history of the East and the
West converge on this count, Gandhi’s trenchant remark on the idea of
civilisation applies everywhere, including his own.
Keeping
to the post-war scene in US, Noam Chomsky concludes, after a careful survey of every US president from Truman to George
Bush I, ‘if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then
every post-war American president would have been hanged’ (Chomsky 1990). Chomsky
made these remarks in 1990. If asked to do so now, he will certainly include
Bill Clinton, George Bush II, and Barak Obama. To recall, Nuremberg trials were
conducted to bring Nazi war-criminals to justice, and many were hanged. For
now, it is important to note that Chomsky is treating all presidents of US on
par with Nazi operators in the context of war-crimes,
the subject of Nuremburg and Tokyo trials. He is not saying that US presidents are fascists. I return to Chomsky’s more
recent thoughts below in the context of this significant caveat.
(To be continued)
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