The Hindu mythology presents to us Narada in Matsya Purana as a model devotee of Lord Vishnu. He wished to understand the secret of Vishnu’s Maya, and his wish was granted. He was asked to enter a lake and emerged from it as Sushila, a lovely young woman, daughter of the king of Varanasi. She was given in marriage to the son of the king of Vidarbha.
Sushila experienced all the pleasures of life. Her husband had replaced his father on the throne. They had children and grandchildren. However, one day there arose a conflict between her husband-king and her father-king. In the bloody war that ensued all her dear males killed each other.
Filled with grief, Sushila visited the battle-field and ordered a pyre on which the corpses of her dead dear ones were laid. She lit the pyre herself and joined the flames. All of a sudden the fire died, the pyre turned itself into a lake and Sushila came out of it as Narada, assisted by Vishnu’s guiding hand.
The Hindu mythology has other versions of Maya. They all convey the futility of the collective dreams of humanity: Dreams of wealth, power and pleasures that end up devoured by themselves, but only to be replaced by fresh dreams that will have the same fate. It is a lure of imagined happiness, egged on by the progress of knowledge and new technologies that sustain every new generation of humankind and makes them victims of ongoing cycles of war and peace.
The human kind experienced this process since the pre-historic glaciations, the so-called ice ages, till the more recent age of Enlightenment and technological-industrial-political revolutions, proclamations of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. This march of human history has been poisoned by nationalism, as the Indian sage Gurudev, the first Asian Nobel for literature described in his novel The Home and the World (1915), and more forthrightly in his collected essays on Nationalism (1917), published after his visits to various countries and their parliaments as invited guest.
To quote from Nationalism, “When this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity.” (p.23) He concluded the essays with a poem “The sunset of the century”, wherein he refers to “The last sun of the century sets amidst the bloodred clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, in dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.” (p. 157).
Europe infected the rest of the world with its model of nationalism through its colonial and imperial politics, extending its feudal conflicts and its reverse of enlightened liberalism to the rest of humanity it set out to civilise. The civilisers could not conceal their greed and rivalry behind the missionary activities they all sought to promote as a cheaper strategy of domination and loot with divine blessings. After many campaigns of “pacification” of peaceful populations in the occupied territories, the western powers got to each other’s necks during the two World Wars, dragging the rest of world into gruesome violence and misery.
In the march of progressive self-delusion the World Wars ended with creation of international organizations, such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, aimed at resolving the future conflicts through diplomacy. These were projects managed by those who retained the power to dictate and keep the defeated and less favoured peoples subdued. Hence, their effective functioning was doubtful from the start, and their short duration guaranteed. It is not surprising if we read opinions reminding that UN is aged 70 and qualifies for retirement.
At the core of the human development is the instinct, raised to rationality as a more sophisticated and glorified version of ability to cheat the neighbour to promote one’s own welfare. The prevailing phase of the modern capitalism has fine-tuned this ability with democratic politics and control of media networks to dissimulate its strategies. Mohamed Elbaradei, the retired nuclear watch-dog and Nobel for Peace in 2005, published The Age of Deception, conveying his knowledge of hidden truth behind the reality of recent international conflicts, particularly since the invention of WMDs by the G W Bush regime in Saddam’s Iraq.
Since then there have been brave American whistle blowers who have laid bare the neoliberal culture of their governments invading privacy of their own citizens and of other world leaders to ensure home security. Nothing seems to be sacred before these self-serving goals, including FMD (Financial Mass Destruction) through manipulation of banking services and rating agencies, which since 2008 have reportedly killed 15 million worldwide and left nearly 75 million people in grave economic distress.
The strategy of provoking and promoting Springs, Orange and Pink revolutions seems to have boomeranged on every occasion, giving rise to the so-called terrorist organizations, which have become ever harder for the terrorist states to control. If terrorism means violating international law, the dominant western powers have probably done better than Putin’s Russia. The looming icy war may be a prelude to the sunset of Kaliyuga and take us to a fresh kalpa of glaciations and stone age.
Teotonio R de Souza is Founder-Director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (1979-1994), Fellow of the Portuguese Academy of History (since 1983), retired professor of Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa (1996-2014), author of Medieval Goa (1979,1994,2009), Goa to Me (1994), Goa outgrowing Postcolonialism (2014) and a dozen of edited works and over 200 published articles
