Can you guess what the Politics in, and, of the Nations would’ve resembled had Adolf Hitler triumphed in WWII? And how many more governments would have become propagandist, aided and abetted by their own Himmlers, Görings and Goebbels? Would heinous crimes in war be War Crimes? Would their occurrence be in the hundreds? Would states use coercion, lies, force, punishment and espionage to control and discipline its citizenry’s conscious experience and life?
Perhaps.
But, perhaps, it would be more meta to wonder how different the answers to the fore questioned have been since the eponymous Wolf’s Lair (Hitler’s military headquarters on the Eastern Front) was found sans wolf and since Nuremberg released its principles; to try and guess the answer to the question “What is so different in the elected governments of the world and their govern-mentality since the defeat of the Nazis and the principles and practice they stood for?”
Hitler’s Third Reich was a fascist totalitarian dictatorship fuelled and powered by the strict control and subjugation of the population. Dissent was not permitted; interpretation disallowed and defectors/deviants were killed and mutilated. The State was total, absolute and dogmatic. Every area of social life was monitored and controlled often covertly and other times overtly. These dynamics, especially, the absolute control on discourse, provided the necessary ideological context for the radicalisation of Nazi Jewish policy into genocide, beginning with Adolf Hitler’s worldview. In other words, Hitler’s ideology was akin to a secular-religion, one not open to interpretation or exegesis.
Now, think of our state of affairs, in which nearly 1000 Shia citizens have been killed in two-years. A governor was shot dead for disagreeing with an ‘Islamic’ law. In 2011 the only Christian member of the then central Cabinet was gunned down in the capital and more recently an activist was assassinated for trying to encourage debate. In light of the fact that Mr. Taseer’s murderer was showered with rose petals at his original trial by those who practice the law, and the killers of Shabaz Bhatti are still at large, can you guess the number of ways in which the ideology of this republic is different when it comes to its minorities and outliers?
My intention, however, is to focus your attentions on another more specific area of control, one that some say is equally if not more damaging: The “Love-Laws” of the State. Murder can be defined as robbing someone of the experiences of life; of love, family, associations, ambition etc. Love-Laws act in the same way, they too rob one of the experiences of love, family, associations etc., by telling you whom you can and cannot love, associate with, or be. In this sense the state is also a murderer; the killer of conscious experience. And our state is no different.
Below I have reproduced two sections from two separate Constitutions, configurations, Sprites of the Laws, frameworks  - whichever nouns floats your philosophical boats - that seek to modulate social and private behaviour among two cognizant, consenting adults; one from the Third Reich and one from the Pakistan Penal Code.
They read thus:
“Section 377: Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”
“Sub-Section 175: Unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex is to be punished by imprisonment; a sentence of loss of civil rights may also be passed”
and,
“Section 124-A: Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Federal or Provincial Government established by law shall be punished with imprisonment for life to which fine may be added.”
“Sub-Section 2: Whoever publicly spiteful, hateful or convincing of low attitude statements about leading personalities of the State, its orders or established by them makes … , shall be punished by imprisonment for an indefinite period.”
Can you spot the difference and guess which one is which?
Let me give you a hint. Hitler’s laws are absolutely unapologetic and quite boisterous in phrasing. They don’t hide behind erroneous orientalist biological claims which confuse the statistical mode in the sexual behaviour of a population with the adjective ‘natural’ while everything else under the normal curve becomes ‘unnatural’ and is otherised by default. The same applies to laws or free speech- perverted into blasphemy or treason. The former laws in Germany and Pakistan were passed to life and diversity, and the latter quoted laws to discipline freedom.
Pluralism - the allowance for experimentation with lifestyles and for diversity - is a goal of democracy and its promise if such lifestyles and ‘choices’ are rooted in biology, human behaviour and consciousness. Without the chance for minorities to become a majority in the political system democracies become fixed and rigid and transmogrify into tyrannies. And like all self-interested entities these governments of the majorities, in the hope of crystallising power, seek to eliminate all other minorities that might offer opposition thereby becoming fascist, dogmatic, totalitarian, and dictatorial. The ‘other’ is first demonised and then annihilated. Hitler robbed his citizenry of the promises of democracy by passing the Enabling Act.
Incidentally, 68 years ago we were also promised a democracy. Can you guess when it might be delivered?