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Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

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Abhijit Naskar

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“Giants in Jeans Sonnet 49 Vegetables have destiny, Humans have responsibility. Vermin have luxury, Humans have simplicity. Nightcrawlers have insecurity, Humans have dignity. Bedbugs have stability, Humans have community. Donkeys have self-love, Humans have self-annihilation. Horses have competition, Humans have revolution. Fancy castles of glass belong in fairy-story. No time to rest, we have too much duty.”

“Why stay silent, why stay asleep, why - why - why - no more - no more - wake up, wake up from indifference, wake up from practicality, wake up from mystical moronism - wake up and take charge - take charge with conscience, courage and compassion - throw all nonsense of magic, dogma and habit overboard, and stand up with a fresh breeze of reason and clarity in your heart. Only then - I repeat, only then shall the world know true progress - only then shall the world know true humanity.”

“Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other. Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural' relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism. All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality. The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.”