The revenger's tragedy

IN the aftermath of catastrophe, it becomes so imperative to discover any culprit and retaliate against him within the next few minutes, or hours, or at most days, that the chances of success in getting at the truth about the real criminal become limited in proportion with the hurry. If the glare of the media on such calamity is relentless and unblinking, the flurry of the authorities trying to get at the facts degenerates into policeman's panic and a crisis of state. From this social chaos it begins to seem that, for the very survival of a nation's public self-esteem, individual scapegoats simply have to emerge in order to appease the mob's desire for a retribution that is swift, never mind if misplaced and misguided.

When Indira Gandhi was murdered, Hindu mobs killing Sikhs would equally have killed anyone arguing that she, as the architect of her Party's dirty politics in Punjab, was ultimately the creator of her own Sikh assassins. The country's innocent Sikh communities were then forced into the role of sacrificial lambs, much as the Afghans and Iraqis and Libyans and Palestinians seem likely to become over the next few months. With the World Trade Center demolished and the barbarians seemingly at the gate, no Bible-belting mob wants to hear that the Kamikaze terrorist is neither a megalomanic Muslim version of Delhi's Jagmohan, nor the Afghan nation, nor the community of Islam, but rather their own dirty foreign policy and the fundamentalism of their own market system which has long displaced New Testament Christianity as their national religion. As Mahatma Gandhi adroitly pointed out to the rampaging imperialism of the West - the equivalent in the 19th Century of America's global takeover today - the strongest case for the virtue of poverty and turning the other cheek was made, ironically, by Jesus, so that to practice what they were preaching they needed to forsake Christianity a little less comprehensively than they had already done.

A version of this argument has been made in the present crisis, implicitly and courageously, by two American women - Madonna (this being, oddly enough, a synonym for the Virgin Mary), and a lone woman senator from California who has opposed the retaliatory measures proposed by Bush. They represent a strong tradition of minority dissent in the United States which may have been enfeebled by the horrifying scale of the present atrocity, but they bring to mind many instances of outspoken opposition to mob hysteria by liberal Americans. Osama bin Laden is not the first to have made America see Red: their history shows periodic convulsions which, though not triggered by cataclysm, have extended all the same over long stretches of time. I have in mind three specific cases, two from the era between 1947 and 1956, when the entire U.S. was hugely agitated by a "Red Scare" and when retaliation to it was organised on a large scale by the infamous Joe McCarthy. The third is from an even earlier time, between 1920 and 1927, years which show the U.S. engulfed by the dread that crypto-anarchist immigrants in their midst were on the verge of undermining the American way of life.

There were many opponents of McCarthyism, but the two whose writings opposing witch-hunts have become American classics are Arthur Miller and Howard Fast. In the early 1950s, Miller powerfully dramatised the hysteria which manifests itself as the desire to punish someone, anyone. In The Crucible (1953), Senator McCarthy's inquisitorial manhunt of liberal Americans is disguised as a Puritan witch-hunt of 1692, showing the continuity into modern times of this pre-modern form of Christian barbarity. The insanity of a lynch mob here gets the full-scale treatment only hinted at in Shakespeare's famous short Act III.Sc.iii of "Julius Caesar", where a poet called Cinna is strung up merely because he bears the same name as a conspirator.

Retaliation in slow motion is a witch hunt, and Miller's play shows the completeness with which Torquemada trials prejudge the issue and pinpoint the guilty well in advance of the facts being known. Those facts that do struggle to appear are so obscured by clouds of conflicting opinions and controversies that the only truth that remains in the end is the futility of harbouring the notion that there is ever such a thing as "the truth". In such a scenario, any dog with an already bad name has to be speedily unearthed and hanged. If we are lucky, the man hanged merely happens to be the right one. Or if, like Osama bin Laden, the man being cornered has been on the run a long time, it does not really matter whether he is guilty of this particular crime or not, he is due for hanging anyway, specially if he looks like the nation's image of a hirsute villain with a turbanned head.

Like Che Guevara, remembered now by that single poster-image of a wickedly dashing lone-ranger revolutionary - Clark Gable with beret in "Bolivia" - Osama bin Laden seems to have been iconised by the single image of him which appears in all the newspapers. But, unlike Che, who was also in the business of exporting anti- capitalist revolution and was equally loathed by the average American in the days when Marx rather than Mohammed was target- practice in that country, Osama bin Laden does not even resemble the Hollywood notion of an adventurous radical whose path is likely to be strewn by swooning women. To the American vision, he is the image of almost every barbarian living East of Suez, training suicide pilots. He could be hanged just for his looks: in fact a Sikh called Balbir Singh Sodhi has been murdered in the U.S. just for looking like bin Laden.

The other name worth remembering from America's era of Red victims is Howard Fast (born 1914), most famous for his poignant novel Spartacus (1951). He was a Communist who wrote a large corpus of fiction which valourises radical, egalitarian values. One of these, Silas Timberman (1954), has a protagonist who, like Fast himself, suffers all the slings and arrows of McCarthyite venom. Fast himself was imprisoned for three months for refusing to divulge the names of his associates in the Spanish Civil War, in which he had been an anti-Fascist participant. Howard Fast also provides a link between 1950s McCarthyite repression and the 1920s, sometimes remembered in American history as the age of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are forgotten names now, but they were the cause celebre of their day. In 1920, they were accused of bank robbery and murder merely because they, like many thousand others, were illegal armed Italian immigrants in the U.S. who happened to be near the scene of crime. What further condemned them in American eyes was the subsequently unearthed fact that they had links with labour unions and militant anarchist anti-war groups that had opposed the American state. One of their associates was suspected of having suicidally blown himself up in an attempt to kill the country's Attorney General. According to one historian, this act "led Congress to vote funds for anti-radical investigations and launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover ... the Sacco-Vanzetti case would become one of his first major responsibilities."

Over the next seven years, the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti developed into 20th Century America's most momentous and notorious political trial, and their eventual judicial murder took place partly because they and their witnesses were "foreigners" who spoke English poorly. Though innocent, they were executed on August 23, 1927, a date that became a watershed in 20th Century American history. According to the same historian, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was "the last of a long train of events that had driven any sense of utopian vision out of American life. The workings of American democracy now seemed to many Americans as flawed and unjust as many of the older societies of the world, no longer embodying any bright ideal, but once again serving the interests of the rich and the powerful."

There are many books to read on this momentous time in the American history of retaliation. One of them, authored by Howard Fast, is called The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1953). The media, owned by capitalist barons, bombarding us with images of devastation which seem to cry out for a retribution that is swift and massive, is not unwittingly in collusion with the immediate jingoist needs of a people in the throes of mob fury. At such a time, it makes sense also to read a little of the literature and history which have demonstrated the equally devastating consequences of being guided by unreason.

RUKUN ADVANI

Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing company in New Delhi.

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