Peace and Justice Post

By Badri Raina, ZNet, Friday, April 19, 2013,

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Epigraph

                               I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

And falls on th’other—

(Macbeth, I,vii)
 

“Intent” you will see is the horse that Macbeth wishes to ride to the glory of the Scottish throne.  And the only spur he has to race that horse is his “ambition. “ Wretchedly, he recognizes this to be a “vaulting” ambition, and as in gymnastics, the momentum of intent in the athelete carries the gymnast past the vault to fall on the other side.  Such Macbeth acknowledges to himself to be the force of his wanting, one inherently slated to “overleap” into disaster.

I have from very early on sought  in the career of Macbeth a prescient type of the modern day fascist imagination, and sought to draw lessons from  Shakespeare’s exploration  for our understanding of our own Narendra Modi phenomenon. 

In one word, these are demonstrations of unmitigated self-regard that assumes to itself the right to trample the world to the pulpit of absolutism, sustained by a Dionysian/Nietzschean drive to the high morality of denying the powerless the right to exist at all.  And getting to that goal  without being hostage to any loyalty, if such loyalty thwarts the attainment. Thus, if Dionysus and Nietzsche define the goal—be thou the superman, and let women, the chosen ones, be the begetters of supermen, and eliminate all the rest—Chanakya and Machiavelli, bringing the East and West together, show the ways to the goal.

Continues >>

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