Sunday 5 February 2017

For whom the bell tolls


Many of my heroes are persons who fought against huge odds for freedom or some other high ideal, were unsuccessful and were defeated and killed or suffered some other harsh penalty.

For Indians, foremost among such heroes are Bhagat Singh, Surya Sen ( Masterda ), Chandrashekhar Azad, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla, Rajguru, Khudiram Bose, etc who fought against the British and were killed. They are our real freedom fighters, but they have been relegated... to the footnotes in our history books and described as mavericks and deviants outside the mainstream of the freedom struggle, while that feudal minded reactionary, hypocrite, fraud and British agent Gandhi has been painted as a 'Mahatma', and thrust down the throats of the gullible Indian people as the 'Father of the Nation' ( see my several blogs on Gandhi in my blog justicekatju.blogspot.in ).

Apart from these, my other heroes who fought against great odds for a high ideal but were defeated, are :

1. John Brown, who before the Civil War ( 1861-65 ) fought against slavery in America, but was caught and hanged

2. Spartacus, who led a slave revolt in ancient Rome, but was killed

3. The Russian Decembrists, many of whom were idealistic memmbers of the Russian nobilty, who revolted against Tsar Nicholas 1 in December 1825, demanding a constitutional govt. as in England, but were crushed, hanged or incarcerated in Siberia for 30 years.

The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, kept in touch with the banished Decembrists through secret letters.

Leo Tolstoy, when he started writing his great novel ' War and Peace ' had in mind the Decembrist Revolt

4. The participants in the revolts of 1830, 1848, and 1870 in France and elsewhere in Europe, which failed

5. Toussaint L'ouverture and other blacks who revolted against the white rulers in Haiti, but were suppressed

6. Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and others who participated in the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, and were defeated and killed.

7. Levellers, Lollards and Chartists

8. Thomas Muntzer, who opposed both the Catholic Church and Martin Luther, but was killed

9. Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by the Nazis

10. The partipants in the Spanish Civil War ( 1936-39 ) on the Republican side, including the International Brigades

You can know more about them by Google search

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