AFTER the Second Great War. .the world was divided into two camps — the Western nations, championing the cause of capitalism as the guiding principle of the world's’moral and economic spirit, on one hand and Soviet Russia and the Eastern bloc nations espousing the cause of communism as the basic human dodtrine that could establish equality and justice in social and economic terms among peoples of all na- -tions. on the other.

Throughout the US and western Europe, a collective paranoia prevailed and fears of an imminent attack from the "Reds" were overemphasised. In the United States, the concept of an imaginary enemy waiting at the doorsteps of or-dlnary citizens and threatening the very bedrock of American life was hyped up in every possible way by the media. Ine art and culture that glorified the simple, folksy, god-fearing American ethos had declared an unwritten war wrfth the alternative Left, ridiculing Its ■ "mass" image and labelling It as "anti national, traitorous and heretic " A systematic campaign to weed out leftist sympathisers among the intelligentsia and art and culture activists was carried out.

The spread of communism in eastern Europe and the Far East created a growing aware ness among many Americans of a possible communist danger at home The trial and convtc-

tion for espionage of Judith Copion. employee of the Justice Department, the revelations made in connection with the trial of Alger Hiss, formerly of the State Department, and the trial of the leaders of the American Communist Party were only the more prominent among a large number of Investigations and restrictive measures conducted by federal, state and local authorities to uncover or prevent communist infiltration, espionage and sabotage.

Buoyed by the success of .the New Deal Act of President ’Franklin D. Roosevelt which saved the US from the Great, Depression of the 30s and later, the Truman Doctrine of military and economic aid to nations threatened by communism. the right-wing bigots and propagandists unleashed oft-vtolent and unprincipled character assassinations and libelous attacks on persona, organisations and even government agencies they thought professed liberal Ideology Senator Joseph McCarthy literally carried a massive witchhunt into individuals' and agencies' private and confidential records to 'eke out the red scums'. The senators careless accusations brought great hardships io a number ol people. The Korean War had jusi liegan and the Congress, over the President a veto, adopted The Internal Security BUI. which called fot the registration of communists and

communist "front" organisations. Beginning from 1950 and climaxing in May-June 1953. Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his campaign against communism with 35 days of televised hearings before his sub-commitlee on "investigations of government operations. He called and" harassed many government officials and individuals In the name of his so-called "investigations" Many promt-neift US citizens were incarcerated or kept under a torturous surveillance. Prominent among them were Charlie Chaplin, Howard Fast Paul Robeson, Norman Mailer and* Howard Hughes. J. Robert Oppenheimer. the father of the "H" bomb and former director of Los Alamos Laboratory, was barred from access to class! fled material in the continuing McCarthy-led campaign against communism.

. Thus began the age of anti-herolsm The Industrial-mill tary complex and the right wing political muckrakers took advantage of a war-phobic na tions delirium and Instilled Into Its psyche a "fear" of a perennial "enemy who is foreign, dark and Antichrist" and perhaps as a post-script We should add. to liven their dampened existence ' James O Freedman in his article "The Concept of Heroism

published in the M.n 1991 issue of Dartmouth Alumni Mhgazine. wrote. "My own college years were during the Eisenhower administration. A pervasive grayness hung over us — a fine silt of ennui that filtered Into our dreams and dimmed our inchoate aspirations. We thought of ourselvep as living in a post-heroic age.m time not of heroes but of anti-heroes — diminished Ka fka -esque figure whose brooding alienation and misunderstood Sensitivities expressed the shrinking limits of the human conditions. We saw our world reflected in T S Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men. Our novelists were Albert Camus and JD Salinger our film-makers. Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut; our playwrights. Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee, our philosophers. Reinhold Niebeur ana Jean-Paul Sartre. Looming over us as a popular Icon was the tormented figure of James Dean, the Rebel Without a Cause . The gang ho conservatism started taking its tolls Everyday television portrayed the real life pastiches of Western World's favourite anti-heroes ( astro, the yellow gooks of Vietnam . the black hooded Palestinian terrorists Gaddafi

Saddam Hussein, the Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman. The wider kaleidoscope remained blurred in the back-Eiund — the U2 spy plane.

y of Pigs. Peace March My Lai. Massacres of Sabra and Shatila. Reverend Jim Jones. CIA bombings of Nicaraguan ports. Col. Ollie North with his prep school chauvinism and misplaced adventurism became a national 'hero' because he took on the Sandinistas, the anti-heroes and helped the Contras — the vanguards of the free work!. Such an easy equa . tion!

Communism came down with the tumbling of the Berlin Wali symbolic of the Cold War Iron Curtain Now was the turn of the Islamic fanatics — the bad guys who bombed the World Trade Centre — and be fore anyone knew it the perpetrators of the heinous act of bombing of the Oklahoma Citv building. The media hate vit riolic was spewing. One elderly lady of a New Jersey suburb on the eve of the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman said. These people should be kicked out Hate for hate, violence for vio lence. an eye for an eve The emphasis here is on ihe "people" Not the terrorist Not the fanatic It's so easy when

you have your larger than life anti-heroes lurking around your premises for your Rambo. John Wayne or Lieutenant Mc-Cane (role played by Bruce Willis in Die Hard") to knock them off in one swipe.

Even the Communist news media did not relent in their digs at the "decadent malicious Western propaganda." They had only one official news agency through which they doled out bland, rhetorical panegyrics of the State and the Party reminiscent of the "Newspeak" of George Orwell's "1984'. The fearful panoply the Soviet and their allied news media adorned to Intimidate their dissidents and critics, especially during the Stalin. Khruschev and Brezhnev era. unmistakably gave birth to cacophonous diatribes and hate words like "enemy of the state", enemy of the people", "capitalist parasite" and "revisionist worm" etc. Thus. Andrei Sakharov. Alexei Solzhenitsyn. Zhores Medvedev and Joseph Brodsky were among the countless multitude who were condemned to hard labour in Subhuman conditions in Siberian penal camps. Their "thought crime" and "double think" led to their undoing. They were the modern Soviet anti-heroes.

Perhaps no other people are greater anti-heroes than

the defector spies. It is more so because "they have to give up all they know" — country, political beliefs, family, relatives. friends and entire position in life. And in the matters of British defectors Burgess. McLean and Philby who were the emblems of model British society — diplomats, pedigreed.'Cambridge educated —. trained by no other than the master spy Anthony Blunt, one felt the inculcated beliefs of "heroism" going "awfully wrong" in the ideological conveyer belt. The cream of the establishment inducted into the service of the Queen and the country, after going through the rituals of a foolproof egalitarian system and thorougn-bred public school indoctrination, became a source of consternation and embarrassment to both their native and adopted countries. They became media celebrities because they chose to be "anti-heroes" in spite of what their system had granted them — wealth, class and position.

But then everybody is poised for some anti-heroism these days. Kennedy womanised. Nixon lied. Prince Charles and Lady Diana were unfaithful to each other, godman Rev. Jim Bakker was Suilty of "moral turpitude".

like Tyson raped. Ben Johnson cheated. Saddam Hossain became a pet peeve by his "megalomaniac visions'", rock stars Jim Morrison. Janis .Joplin and Kurt Cobain died ol

"drug overdose*’. Our role models have all been relegated to "classic soap opera stars".

Amitabh Bachchan steals in order to stay alive. Anil Kapoor kills to avenge the death of his mother. Shanrukh Khan takes away love that he cannot give. The teenagers of Harlem commit murder and arson because It is a tough neighbourhood. Tony D. of Detroit inner-city admonishes his arresting officer, after being charged with a crack possession rap. "We are both busted, man." In Colombia, the world moves according to the dictates of the Cali and Medellin drug cartels. Even soccer star Escobar was bumped off when he accidentally put* the ball into his own net and sealed the fate of the Colombian soccer team from qualifying for the quarterfinals in the World Cup. Everywhere it is symptomatic of the moral sludge that spills over from schizophrenic societies due to breakdown of family values and spiritual degradation all over the world. From hero worshippers. we have all become devil worshippers simply because we care about daredevils.

Yet then, our cherished goal is to find among us genuine heroes, leaders with unifying visions, who would energise our Imaginations and imbue our individual lives with a larger purpose. As Bernard Malamud wrote in The Natural "Without heroes, we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go “