The heart of darkness at snowy heights
By Dr Usha Bande

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.

—Matthew Arnold.

We see things happening in the civilised world today that recall the worst phases of the Dark Ages.

—S. Radhakrishnan.

A COUPLE of months now, and the world will be witnessing the dawn of a new year, a new century and a new millennium. While the world is hoping to usher in an era of peace, plenty and progress, the stark reality of events all over raises a pertinent question if we are not naive enough to hope against hope. Do we really have anything to celebrate in the present circumstances of barbarity, inhuman cruelty and shameful genocide? When in the so-called civilised world, mutilated bodies of tortured soldiers reach home, one is awe-struck, and gritting teeth like Shakespeare’s King Lear one curses: Thou marble-hearted fiend....more hideous than the sea-monster, and one transmits a sense of revulsion. Ours is the "twisted generation" that may put even the barbarous to shame. We tend to ask with the author of Psalm 7:9 : will the badness of the wicked ones come to an end? Perhaps it will, when like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in (The Heart of Darkness), the debased humans would see the visions of horror and would be able to whisper with fearsome intensity The horror! The horror! Or maybe, their acts would lead to the destruction of all that is intelligibly human.

It is given to man to constantly question and search, to find answers to his question and solutions for his problem, so that he forges ahead on the path of progress. Progress is not possible without looking back, to learn from one’s mistakes, and looking ahead to strengthen the future. When our present millennium commenced with Jesus’s crucification and resurrection, there was hope that love, peace and brotherhood would be the ruling principle of the world, which each passing century belied. And yet, there has always been the imperishable message of hope transmitted through his resurrection that all is not lost and that there always is the "Second Coming", as W.B. Yeats visualises. Our present century has been a period of great awakening but it has also been a period of frightful atrocities and genocide. An assessment of our century’s strength and weakness would help us learn from our mistakes, so that we embark on the new dawn with a fresh vision.

A holistic and dispassionate evaluation of the 20th century would show us that it was at once a period of progress and prosperity and of inhuman violence and bloodshed. What with artificial insemination, test-tube babies and now cloning, man assumed the role of the Creator, but his genocidal instinct made a mockery of his creative powers and reduced him to sub-human level. Great names in psychoanalysis — Freud, Jung, Adler and others — belong to our century. They tried to understand man inside out, but have they? People like Gandhi, Tilak, Marx and others showed us the light of freedom; there have been saintly souls to help us with our spiritual urges — Swami Vivekanand, Aurobindo, Mother Teressa, to name but a few. In the political arena, most of the countries of the world gained freedom; revolutionary changes were witnessed with regard to human welfare; and an intensive fight has been carried on against injustice, prejudices and exploitation. All this and much more makes the 20th century a period of unprecedented advancement and progress, but the macabre analogy persists — that man is making his own grave and becoming his own mortician. The most potent question to ask at this time is — should we forget the past or should we remember the past atrocities and traumas and keep rankling under the wound?

Says George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And man would certainly not like to repeat the savagery and the mental and emotional torture he underwent during the two global wars. "Can the Jews forget the Holocaust?" This question, raised by Virgil Elizondo, President of the Mexican - American Cultural Center, San Antonio, Texas, more than half the century after the end of World War II, reminds us that the atrocities have left an indelible mark on the consciousness of human race. The genocide in Algiers, Armenia and Cambodia can also be added to the list. Even so, the list can never be finalised for, every now and then terrorism, brutal massacres and barbarities are perpetuated.

In one of the issues of Modern
Fiction Studies Margot Norris wrote that the short-lived hope that with the end of the twentieth century, large-scale war might be over has been revealed as a dangerous delusion. He refers to the May, 1998, Pokhran explosions and the Pakistani retaliation by exploding Nuclear devices and quotes Newsweek and Los Angeles Times’ which contend that "India could be a harbinger of a more chaotic world order, of rivalrous nationalities scrambling to arm themselves with the bomb". But one asks, why blame India? What is NATO doing? What have the so-called superpowers been up to?

The twentieth century has often been called the bloodiest in the history of the world because the will to harm and the availability of technology have put the power of unimaginable destruction in the human hand. It is estimated that in World War I, 10 million people were killed and 20 million wounded. In World War II more than 78 million people, including soldiers, civilians, women and children were killed and wounded. Since the World War II, things have not eased, rather they have worsened. In her book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, Barbara Ehrenreich reports that an estimated 22 million people have been killed in the 160 wars and skirmishes the world over.

Man has not been able to stop war and violence because once war has occurred, it can never really be over unless there is a radical change in man, which unfortunately, is not possible. The post-war memorialisation serves to perpetrate the injury in the case of the vanquished and glorification in the case of the victor. That the defeated may again raise, their head and seek revenge does not help neutralise the potentialities of further violence. Rather, the festering ego seeks to avenge the humiliation. Thus, any truce or treaty never helps end an armed conflict; it gives it a lull to spurt again when time is ripe.

The bodily wound caused by the war or violence may heal with time but the psychological and emotional wounds have a tendency to seep into the unconscious and lead to trauma. The Holocaust survivors like Isreali actress Gila Almagor, the witnesses to the inhuman frenzy of the partition and the innumerable terrorised victims of the various armed conflicts know the hard experiences. They would like to forget the bitter memories but they are not able to. For some, the images come back and haunt. Earnest Hemingway, the American Nobel Laureate, records the nightmarish effect of the violence, killings and wounding of the War in many of his novels.

In an attempt to foster reconciliation between victims and their tormentors, leaders — both religious and political — have on occasions invited people to forget atrocities suffered. In Athens, for example, in 403B.C., the new regime established after the end of the oppressive dictatorship tried to bring civil harmony by decreeing an amnesty for the supporters of the previous rulers. It can be easy to cancel by decree the memory of atrocities perpetuated on the innocent. But it is not humanly possible for the survivors to forget loved ones lost in war or in atrocities. After the end of World War II, many European countries declared amnesty to citizens guilty of war crimes. Those who urge the victims or their descendants to forgive and forget feel that remembering the past may ignite further hatred. They opine that while forgetting unites, remembering divides. We cannot turn back the pages of history, however, horrendous the sufferings were. But we cannot force the people to forget because we cannot deny the reality of suffering. Further, trying to make people forget tantamounts to shedding responsibility. Remembering is in fact a warning to future generation. The atrocities perpetuated by man bring to mind that the twentieth century man has been unable to contain violence. The most painful legacy of war or armed or armed conflicts is the invasive effects that enter into the domestic and private spheres and into the deeper recesses of cultural expression. The violence experienced during combat by the combatant or by his relatives can be translated into illness, emotional disturbance, traumatic conditions and subjective extremity and may well continue long after the cessation of the war.

The senseless and inglorious slaughter leading to hundreds of lives extinguished, scarred or disabled does not warrant silence. Man has a heightened responsibility towards his fellow beings. Would man like to enter into the new millennium with the awakening of his brutal instincts and the memory of monstrosity? Not only physical violence, but the very act of killing and torturing involves violence to the human species as reasoning being.

Dr S. Radhakrishnan once observed that man behaved like brute when his "soul is poisoned and perverted by collective myths," and when he follows the outer demands at the cost of the inner voice. The elimination of the inner world is not a sign of progress, rather it is a malaise of the spirit. "When the fountain of spirit from which the creative life of the individual and society is fed dry up, diseases of every description, intellectual, moral and social break out. The everlasting vagrancy of thought, the contemporary muddle of conflicting philosophies, the rival ideologies which cut through national frontiers and geographical divisions, are a sign of spiritual homelessness." Before the turn of the present millennium Jesus wanted man to get inner transformation so that he becomes a "new" man. At the end of the millennium we still stand on the brink of demonic passions, negating the inmost reality, the self, in a state of endless agitation and perpetual disquiet. We are groping in the heart of darkness. As Swami Vivekananda once asserted:

Power will come,
Glory will come,
Goodness will come,
And everything that is excellent will come
When the sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity.