A MONTH OF WRECKAGE: APRIL, ASSASSINATIONS & AUTICIDE

 

by Budhaditya Bhattacharjee
Assistant Professor,
Department of Media Science, TISL

Ponder a calendar that squeezes fascists and a civil rights activist into the same month. One would hardly pay attention to such a coincidence unless keywords such as suicide and assassination intruded upon the thought. This paragraph is deliberately trying to frame something as haunting and revelatory and why shouldn’t it? Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King are uncannily connected through history, more particularly – through the month of April.

It was April 1948 when two of the most infamous fascists – a mentor and his pupil – Mussolini and Hitler, respectively, lost their lives. Mussolini was assassinated on April 28, 1945 by Walter Audisio, a communist partisan acting under orders from the National Liberation Committee. Two days later, on April 30, Hitler shot himself inside an underground bunker ((Führerbunker) in Berlin while Soviet forces approached. Then, in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray – an event that sparked riots and several conspiracy theories surrounding the killing. Hitler’s suicide too has been a subject of countless conspiracy theories. If you’re expecting a Däniken-styled pseudoscientific analysis of these deaths – you’ll be disappointed.

History is not a tale of improvement; it is an accumulation of wreckage. The deaths of Hitler and Mussolini act as suggestions of progress (defeat of fascism and history inclining on justice) and King’s assassination is read as an obstacle to that progress (history bending towards regression) – both concepts can be dismissed. Within a consequential narrative, none of these deaths represents progress or regression. Instead, they merely are wreckage – debris of devastation getting accumulated without resolution. The deaths of the fascists did not refurbish what fascism had ruined, just as King’s death did not overturn what the Civil Rights Movement accomplished. The month of April doesn’t symbolize a narrative arc but a heap of violent behaviour, ideological fringe and silenced voices that sit next to one another without cancelling each other out.

The month of April, like any other month, ceases from producing closure or irony. On the contrary, it gives us visibility – a period of time where ever-accumulating wreckage, momentarily seizes our attention. The whole moral spectrum of the twentieth century is covered by these deaths (including Gandhi’s) spanning two decades; however what this spectrum doesn’t offer is a lesson or a pattern – just fragments, temporarily illuminated. 

Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons