[nukkad] Mindset

["Homi Kaikobad" <>]

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JUSTIFICATION

Without a doubt the people who caused widespread ravage today found ample
justification to do so in their minds. They had evolved a system of
constants which became the standard, holy and sacred and sanctioned by God,
against which any and every act could be measured. If it involved sudden
murder of entirely innocent men, women and children who happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time, this was not only acceptable, but
actually an act of heroism and sanctity in their system of assessment.

The standards most humans work by thus become redundant once a vicarious
system begins to function. It is very possibly many of the persons who
wreaked murder so completely without any qualms, could be actually very
tender and loving to the ones they hold dear. Thus such a vicarious system
allows sectored cruelty and justifies segmental atrocity.

The crux here is discrimination. Different humans are seen differently.

The parameters which regulate this assessment are peculiarly internal to the
closed system of community. Within, what happened is seen as high heroism,
sacrifice and service of God and people. It is very possible the last words
on their lips were God is Great or some such thing, or in their hearts the
prayer, "Into thy hands do I commit my soul O Almighty. Have mercy on me and
mine." This, entirely possible and deemed justified, while the act is about
to unleash fiery scalding death upon simple office goers, mothers of kids in
the nursery in the lower floors, fathers, husbands, just common salt of the
earth folk. The victims in turn must have appealed to their God, who in many
instances could have been the same one.

What could cause one set of minds to find justification to do this? Even
glorify and edify what seems to us a most horrific action? How did rank
murder of a phenomenal footing become heroism and a holy crusade?

It seems the mind in such people does not monitor itself by common human
parameters.

Sanctity of life, kindness, generosity, abhorrence of cruelty, never
wielding the murderer's blow, so much the currency of accepted norms, are
defunct here and justified as necesary actions in the furtherance of their
scheme of things.

Such a mind set is not new. It led Hitler and Goering and Hess and even the
heroic Pommel to embark on mass killing of the people they saw and
different, even inferior to them, who were Jews, Gypsies and Catholics and
Poles. Many looked exactly like the Sons of the Fatherland, with the same
blue eyes and Nordic Teuton face, but this did not prevent horrific
genocide.

More near at home, in the late 1940 s people who had hitherto lived together
for generations if not centuries, suddenly took up arms and went on a
rampage, killing without mercy men, women who were pregnant, children born
and unborn, if they happened to be different than them. Lucknow, Bihar,
Sialkot, Lahore, Julleder, Karachi, Bombay, Surat, Navsari, Hyderabad,
Gondal, even small towns bordering the Thar erupted in such killing before
which what happened today pales.

Amidst mass frenzy trains full of pathetic people would regularly travel to
what was seen as safety, on either side, and be stopped at a makeshift
border post, where wholly at random people with swords, knives, rusted
spears, would walk through the scattering humanity and do murder.

Sane people, now turned insane. Horrible acts which hitherto seemed
abhorrent, suddenly justified, even retaliatory and heroic, even acts in the
service of God.

History is replete with the same mass pathology, with the same symptoms,
with the same natural history. It is always for a higher purpose, adulatory
to God and Country, but always abhorrently rapacious and with the same
pathologic symptom of a mindset which justifies any act however outside of
human values it is.

How does the mind reach this station of solitary state of justification of
all acts heinous. How and when does it deem itself outside common law? How
and when does this lethal transition begin, sustain and perpetuate?

Who amongst us is safe from such minds?

Arya.





































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