“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana
The great tragedy of our times is the failure to come to grips with the decline of democracy and its failure to accept the new age of autocracy and its democratising of violence. In the context of the present decline in the very idea of democracy, there is a need to reflect on the changing political dynamics in a post-industrial age. In particular, the genealogy of fascism as experienced in the traditional forms of dictatorship and the evolution towards the contemporary notions of the brute power of the state not only overtly refute or sneer at democracy, but rather go to great lengths to deceitfully annex democratic practices.
The revelation about the evil capabilities of the human race were shown in the post-Holocaust era. As Hannah Arendt points out in her book, Origins of Totalitarianism, “We can no longer afford to take that which is good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dream of our tradition.” This is abundantly obvious from the wreckage of the two wars and the rise of fascism scarring the deep-seated liberal philosophy prevailing in Europe. Humanity’s capability for evil casts a murky shadow on our vision of history where the triumph of democracy always seemed inevitable.
