Trump is the logical apotheosis of humanised capitalism, where the winners take all, where executive decisions are sacrosanct, where we feel it right to sponsor deaths and tortures and waterboarding and drones and assassinations and weaponisation of regions that we consider inferior, says Saswat Pattanayak.
By Saswat Pattanayak “Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.” (Naomi Klein) Fear-based politics reaches disproportionate heights when coupled with nationalistic frenzies. As a first sign of fascism, it assumes a normalized state, masquerading as an agency to dispel fear itself. To rejuvenate the political climate with a fresh lease by resorting to masculine rhetorics becomes its core strategy. It predictably attacks the progressives as conspiratorial and traitors, while it paints the secularists as impotent and pseudo. Fear-based politics mocks constitutional frameworks, not out of concern, but from disdain. It revises historical narratives not out of an interest to engage scholastically, but because anti-intellectualism becomes its mainstay. It obsesses with geographical, cultural and religious borders. It is constantly wary of those outside as enemies, unless they acquiesce; it thrives in a climate of hatred towards those it treats as fringe elements, within its territory. Fear-based politics aims at reawakening the traditionally privileged, lest their inherited spoils are subjected to redistribution. It resorts to reaffirming the …
While the defense of “sluttiness” remains the primary – and, valid – agenda for white feminists in the US, the demand for police protection of nightlife in Delhi remains a legitimate concern of savarna feminists in India.
Illusions in the Google Land
By Saswat Pattanayak “Fashion determines, in each case, the acceptable limit of empathy.” – Walter Benjamin. Benjamin belonged to the interwar period that witnessed rise of fascism, actively aided by European intellectuals who were hostile to the masses. The bourgeois was disdainful of the “mass society”, and the ways in which new electronic media were displaying potentials for mass liberations. Its high-brow standards were being threatened by the low-brow tastes of American consumer capitalism. Its exclusive access to the sophisticated art forms was being undermined by the new medium of photography. “Socialist realism” was connecting the masses to what was historically being denied to them in the name of “art”. Writers and intellectuals were becoming the “engineers of the soul” in communist societies that thwarted elitism.
