War: Absolute Necessity for Politicians

‘‘What is the best government?’’ a disciple asked Osho.

‘‘No government!" replied Osho, “The very idea of somebody governing somebody else is inhuman. Government is a game, the ugliest and the dirtiest game in the world. But there are people in the lowest state of consciousness who enjoy it: these are the politicians’’. The only joy of a politician is to govern, to be in power, to enslave people.

The greatest desire of all those who have reached the peak of consciousness has been the dream that one day we can get rid of all governments. That day will be the greatest in the whole history — past, present, future — of a human being, because getting rid of all governments will mean destroying the ugliest game, the game the politicians have been playing for centuries.

They have reduced a human being to just a chess piece, and created so much fear that without government there will be anarchy, disorder and chaos and everything will be destroyed. And the strangest thing is that we go on believing this nonsense.

Governments have not done anything for the people except exploit them, exploit their fear and set them against each other. Is this happening with the India - Pakistan confrontation today?

A continuity of war somewhere or the other on earth is almost an absolute necessity for politicians to exist. In his autobiography, Adolf Hitler has many insights on this question; and he is a man worth understanding because he is the purest politician — the dirtiest. He said that war is an absolute necessity if you want to remain in power. If you cannot create war people start thinking of you as a nobody. Only in wartime are heroes born.

He was right. If you think of all the ‘heroes’ — Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and, of course, Adolf Hitler they would have been diminutive figures without the ‘wars’ to prop them up. The bigger the war, the bigger the heroes it creates.

Hitler says that if you cannot create war then at least continue to propagate the idea that war is coming. Never leave people in peace because when they are in peace, you are a nobody. They do not need you; your very purpose does not exist. They need you when there is danger. Create danger. If there is no real danger, at least create the climate of a false danger.

Osho says that every country lives in the fear of every other country. And it is nothing but a game of the politicians. People themselves are exactly the same all over the world — they do not want to be killed in wars and they do not want to kill others in wars. But the politician cannot exist without wars. Hence war is the dirtiest game — because it feeds on human blood, the bloodshed of millions of innocent people.

When someone says no government is the best government he/she knows perfectly well that perhaps it will not ever be possible. But it is better to have impossible dreams but of a higher consciousness, of beauty and love. If the idea continues to inspire people, some day we 
may come close to it. We may not be able to achieve it totally— hence the closest to no government is one government, which is not impossible. After achieving one government, the next step which becomes very possible is ‘no government’.

When this world has so many presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, and everyone is trying to prove that he/she is the greatest, it becomes a game. However, with one government it becomes functional; and nobody is against it.

The whole joy of politics is in ‘‘the enemy’’. When there is no enemy, then you are just working like the Red Cross Society or the administrations of the post offices or railways or airlines. We do not know, for example, who runs the railway trains in America as he is just a functional head.

And when there is one government we can make it something like the United Nations. We can have a President for two years instead of our/five years and every region of the world is represented. One government means that nations disappear and every unit becomes a direct democracy which is functional, utilitarian and not based on the lust for a power. This is Osho’s vision in his discourse, ‘From Darkness to Light’ - Governments to cease, only administrations to function. 


- Swami Chaitanya Keerti