By Gurnam Singh | Opinion |
From time to time history has a tendency to produce monsters. That is political leaders who use power to commit, promote and preside over violence on a large scale. In today’s context, one might identity Vladamir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu along with many rulers in Arabic countries, as examples of such violent leaders. Some might also suggest gone unchecked, at some future point, Donald Trump may also quality for inclusion in the rogues gallery of violent political leaders.
Though official Russian history continues to downplay or deny the extent of Stalin’s crimes, the historical record reveals that Joseph Stalin was arguably the most violent leader the modern world has known—certainly more violent than Adolf Hitler in terms of sheer numbers of victims. While such comparisons are always fraught and morally complex, the scale of Stalin’s purges, famines, forced labour camps (Gulags), and mass executions under his regime is staggering. Historians estimate that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of between 15 and 20 million people through state-orchestrated famines.
Timothy Snyder, a prominent historian of totalitarianism and fascism, has written extensively on these issues, particularly in his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). In it, he details how both Stalin and Hitler orchestrated mass violence in Eastern Europe, with Stalin’s policies resulting in millions of deaths through deliberate famine and mass executions. Snyder’s work challenges the notion that Stalin’s crimes were less ideologically driven or less destructive than Hitler’s.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt, a Jewish intellectual and survivor of Nazi persecution, has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of totalitarianism. She is perhaps best known for two seminal works. The first is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which is based on her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key organiser of the Holocaust. Eichmann had been a mid-level bureaucrat in the Nazi regime, responsible for coordinating the logistics of mass deportation to extermination camps. After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he lived under a false identity until he was captured by Mossad agents in 1960, brought to Israel, tried, and ultimately executed.
What shocked Arendt, and became central to her thesis, was the nature of Eichmann’s personality. Far from being a monstrous sadist, Eichmann appeared to be a rather ordinary man: a loving father, polite and coherent, yet utterly incapable of critical reflection on the crimes he had helped facilitate. Arendt described this as “thoughtlessness”, not in the sense of rudeness, but as a profound absence of the inner dialogue that forms moral judgement. Eichmann, she argued, had committed heinous crimes not out of fanatical hatred, but from a bureaucratic obedience and lack of reflective thought.
Arendt developed this idea further in her philosophical work The Life of the Mind (published posthumously in 1978), where she explores how the inability or unwillingness to think—particularly to think morally—can lead individuals to commit or enable acts of extreme violence. She identifies this lack of thought as a key feature of modern totalitarian regimes, where the machinery of the state enables ordinary individuals to become cogs in a system of destruction.
As Sikhs, we often narrate our collective history through the lens of victimhood. There is truth in this, our community has suffered immense historical injustices. But if we are not careful, this self-perception can become a shield against self-critique. We risk imagining ourselves as morally immune simply because we have been wronged. In doing so, we forget that victimhood does not automatically confer virtue. Spirituality is not a substitute for self-awareness.
In our pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, many of us have become mindless rather than mindful, clinging to ritual behaviour and mimicry rather than cultivating within ourselves ethical reflectivity. As a result, beneath the surface of performative humility and religious observance, there often festers unspoken resentment, exclusion, and even hate. This internal contradiction is dangerous. It blinds us to our own capacity for violence, especially when that violence is subtle, expressed in our speech, our judgments, or the way we exclude others from our moral community.
Arendt teaches us that the refusal to engage in critical reflection, is not a passive state, it is a moral failure. As Kabir says ਅਪਨੈ ਬੀਚਾਰਿ ਅਸਵਾਰੀ ਕੀਜੈ ॥I I have made self-reflection my mount. For Sikhs who claim to walk the path of Gurbani and truth, the need for critical self reflection is urgent. It demands that we confront our own ego and complicities, no matter how uncomfortable. It calls us to move beyond historical grievance toward moral accountability. Only then can our humility be genuine, and our pursuit of justice truly aligned with Gurmat. I believe the current fragmentation in the Panth is evidence that we have drifted far from the Gurus message; I include myself in the list of drifters!
Gurnam Singh is an academic activist dedicated to human rights, liberty, equality, social and environmental justice. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Warwick, UK. He can be contacted at Gurnam.singh.1@warwick.ac.uk
* This is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Asia Samachar.
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