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Our Faces have Gone to the Walls

by Mohdrrirudd Bddrul Ahsan
***When Pompey the Great organised a particularly revolting slaughter of elephants, the populace rose up and cursed him for his ruthlessness. What is our reaction to the ruthlessness writ on the walls? We stop in front of them and read the posters with the careful aloofness of museum-goers. And then saunter, perhaps with a sense of ersatz security that it did not happen to us.***
WALK down Just any street of Old Dhaka, aiid you will be gripped by this ecology* of loss. Colourful posters sticking on the walls show the smiling faces or fallen bodies of victims recently cut down by assassin's bullets or lacerated by assailant’s knife. Those Imageries on the walls belong to young men who perished in the consummate violence of the streets they once ruled.
In a way how they died is more grievous than why Urey died There is no causality of their deaths other than the fact that all of them were casualties of some insanity called politics.
which we fail to understand. Recall some of their photographs you must have seen in the newspapers, how their bodies were mangled by rage of the killers. Some of them were shot and stabbed, others slaughtered *or chopped One of the. recent victims had n^ils,xiriven in^ his body as if the killers wanted to seal every single pore in his body lest he tried to resuscitate!
Between martyrdom and mayhem, these murders mark a macabre madness to characterise our political wilderness. Why do they die in the prime of their lives hunted like quarries in their flights? Why do they end up zapped in a ditch, or zipped in a sack? Between 193 1 and 1936. the French poet and theorist Antonin Artaud formulated a theory for what he called a Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud believed that civilisation had turned man into a sick and repressed creature and that the true function of the theatre was to rid man of this repression and liberate his instinctual energy. Is our politics being some kind of a theatre of cruelty that prompts killers to liberate instinctual energy at the cost of their victims' fate?
Albert Camus argued that although the ultimate aim of most ideologies was to diminish human sufferings, the systematic violence of ideology in the modern world had added enormously to it. A somewhat similar plea for what he called
"piecemeal social engineering" was put forward by Karl Popper who argued that ideology rests on a logical mistake, because it tries to transform history into science. Popper saw in the enterprise of ideology* an attempt to find certainty in history* and produce predictions.
The question Is whether ail those faces on the walls are the measures of anything except the certainty that those lives have been lost? Is there an ideology behind their deaths, any sublime cause for which their existence must have been laminated in the gloom on those posters? The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stated in some of his writings that "dirty hands" are necessary* in politics and that a man with so-called bourgeois inhibitions about bloodshed cannot usefully serve a revolutionary cause. Marat was a French revolutionary who exclaimed how one could not see that he wanted to cut off a few heads to save many. Killing was necessary in order to create, he concluded.
But what does sporadic
killing create when parochial intentions dominate political will? And that is where cruelty undermines conviction. Saint -Just reasoned that even virtue "unites with crime in times of anarchy.'" Then he despaired. "The exercise of terror has blunted crime as strong drink blunts the palate." If you look closely at the pictures on the walls of Old Dhaka, you cannot tell whether they depict terrorised faces or faces of terror. If anything, they indicate a growing sclerosis of our moral senses when one cannot draw the line between crime and consecration.
The Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli was the first to link these two when he suggested that it could be achieved only by means of a revolution that had the strength of will to liquidate its enemies. On a similar belief. General Juan Peron of Argentina had set up the Monten-eros before his exile to Paraguay in 1955. During his 18-year absence, the Monteneros undertook violent urban
terrorist actions such as political kidnappings and assassinations. When Peron returned to Argentina in 1973. he lost control of the Monteneros and condemned thym whjO in response resorted to even PjOre^lejjc;^ From Peron's return uh til his widow's overthrow in 1976. the Monteneros staged an unprecedented series of kidnappings and assassinations in Argentina.
Hence, the biggest danger of political violence is that it feeds on its own terror. Saint-Just cautioned that "If Brutus does not kill others, he must kill himself." When killing is promoted as a vehicle of political cause and that cause is withdrawn. killing becomes its own cause. Albert Camus warned that a day should come when Ideology* would conflict with psychology*. A small-time politician in Dhaka, whose party* is in power, has been re-* cently arrested as a suspect for the murder of his niece. This man may have wanted to kill so that he could grab a piece of property* now that he had no better cause. Instinct, like ev-erything else, has a break-even point to stay in business.
Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas (modern Agrigento) in Sicily was nptorious for his cruelty. He is alleged to have roasted his victims alive in a bronze bull, their shucks representing the
animals bellowing. The first victim of his cruelty was Peri-laus. the supposed designer of the bull. Are those faces, which ended up on the walls, architects of their own destiny? Many of them may have killed others before others killed them, turning the walls of their own neighbourhoods into neat panels of who is who in killing. That brings us to the conventional wisdom that every homicide is a suicide, because he who kills plants the seed of । Ms.own ^nnihi!atio,n _ • j
' More than being a displayArt that moral iessdnrthe’xAlls of" Old Dhaka is the museum of our moral vacuum. When Pompey the Great organised a particularly revolting slaughter of elephants. the populace rose up and cursed him for his ruthlessness. What is our reaction to the ruthlessness writ on the walls? We stop in front of them and read the posters with the careful aloofness of museumgoers. And then saunter perhaps with a sense of ersatz security that it did not happen to us.
Even then 1 would ask you to take time to look at the walls whenever you are in Old Dhaka. If you compare these walls to gravesites, the posters on them are tombstones, which commemorate not the dead but the direness of their consequences. Never mind the posters change rapidly like the tombstones bi a recyclable graveyard. Come stare at them anyway and feel how death tumbles through the faces, which keep changing on those walls. You will be convinced you are not better off than they are. The walls have taken their faces, while our faces have gone to the walls.