Remembering Romain Rolland in these dark days

A little more than one hundred years ago, on June 26, 1919, L’humanite, morninger of the Parti socialiste de France (Socialist Party of France) –later the daily of Parti communiste français (Communist Party of France) as a sequel to the split in the PCS – carried a 519-word declaration.   

It reflected a worrisome trend. “Let us note the disasters to which the almost complete abdication of the intelligence of the world and its voluntary subjection to the unleashed forces led. The thinkers and the artists have added to the scourge which eats up Europe in his flesh and in his mind an incalculable sum of poisoned hatred; they have sought in the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination old and new reasons, historical, scientific, logical, poetic reasons to hate; they worked to destroy understanding and love among men. And in doing so, they have degraded, lowered, degraded the thought, of which they were the representatives. They have made it the instrument of passions and (without knowing it perhaps) of the selfish interests of a political or social clan, a state, a country or a class. And now, from this wild melee, from which all the struggling nations, victorious or conquered come out bruised, impoverished, and in the depths of their hearts - though they do not admit it - shameful and humiliated...the thought compromised in their struggles, with them, falls” (rough  translation from French).

It was drafted by Romain Rolland, the great French dramatist, novelist, essayist and art historian, and co-signed by 46 topmost intellectual giants, including Nobel laureates like Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russel, Hermann Hesse, Selma Lagerlof and Jane Addams as also Beneditto Croce, Georges Duhamel, Heinrich Mann, Henri Barbusse, Henry van de Velde, Stefan Zweig and others – all belonging to the comity of geniuses. It was a few months after the end of World War I.

The centenary of the declaration is historically relevant as the anti-libertarian tendencies permeated the world over, amidst a ‘world.., wild with delirium of hatred’.

But Rolland, feeling the post-war trauma in Europe, was shocked at the role of most of the intellectuals for  letting their knowledge, their art, their reason in the service of their governments during the war, terming this as 'perilous hijacking of thought and art in the service of hate and violence’.  

As one of the greatest-ever humanists, he urged people from all walks of life to take the lesson from the WW-I. “The thinkers and artists have added an immeasurable amount of poisoning hatred to the scourge destroying Europe’s body and mind...”

Rolland’s faith in India was unflinching. “ If there is one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence,it is India”, he famously said.  

Today there is a global pattern, inspired by emerging Right Wing populism with multiple  manifestations. The hidden agenda is an asymmetric demolition of dissent, sobriety and social justice. The populists of apparently dissimilar strains are globally a political family, enacting a gigantic drama. Leading among the dramatis personae are the US President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,  Hungarian Premier Viktor Mihály Orbán, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Polish Prime Minister Jarosław Aleksander Kaczynsk and the like who  have created “fundamentally different national trajectories” and developed a common strategy  with ‘ a shared authoritarian-populist art of governance.’

It’s this that produces the family resemblance, appropriately perceived by Jan-Werner Müller, professor of politics at the Princeton University. “Populism is not just anti-liberal, it is anti-democratic — the permanent shadow of representative politics,” he suggests. India today tends towards Right Wing populism. Stefan Zweig, biographer of Rolland,  captured the spirit of the declaration that harps on the only law 'that of brotherhood; its only enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations’.

Peaceniks, writers, artists and their side-walkers need to come down to streets, keeping in mind Rolland’s words: ‘It is the artist’s business to create sunshine when the Sun fails’.

The Author is a writer and social scientist