THERE is an old scholar who once suffered in the hands of tyranny. There is an old scholar who was once buffeted by the storm and fury of the tyrant’s whim. In the dark days of the martial order when liberty was unknown in this isle, when a murderous tyrant seized the nation with the toxin of fascism, there was a scholar who was inflicted with all the terrible illustrations of a goon squad regime.

In that dark yesterday when a captive people spoke in hushed, panicky silence, when the dark-goggled leviathan affirmed himself in eternal relevance, the scholar bore the pains, the terrors of the lash and the cudgel in a thousand places. He was whipped and bludgeoned, smashed down with cold steel, kicked with the force of volleyed leather, his cranium battered with indifferent fury, provoking a possible damage to the brain that is perhaps still subsisting.

He was dragged down from the comfort of his home by primitive men who wielded the truncheon and the chain as legitimate tools of power.
Hurled from one dungeon to the other, often marooned in some dark, frightening abyss, tortured by the jailer’s whip, forced to starve behind the cold, solitary iron of the tyrant’s cavern – the scholar endured the indignities and the miseries of the oppressor’s cage.

Flung in personal anguish and woeful deprivation, the abused scholar lingered in this shattered, humiliating frame for endless months, stricken with dizzying spells and mental confusion that often rendered him prostrate and useless before a redeeming fortune turned the wheel of fate and snatched him from the edges of hell.

Alas, the monstrous tyrant tumbled into an un-mourned, unforgiving grave, thus breaking the oppressor’s chain, ensuring the freedom of the broken scholar and a thousand more captives once held at the dungeon of a failed god.

The battered scholar of yesterday has now resuscitated and resurfaced in the new ambit of power. Woven today in the glistening panoply of rehabilitation and a new found relevance, he is now renewed in a new energy of proprietorial swagger, vaunting about the civic appropriateness, indicating the limits of personal liberty, sermonising about the necessary restriction to fundamental rights, virtually applauding the very rule and the dark sway of the gulag that once reduced him to subhuman existence.

Astir and drunken in the swindling opium of the moment, the muddled scholar has forgotten the brutal scars and the vast humiliating lash of the dead tyrant.

The scholar has forgotten the scorching emblems of adversity. He has forgotten the haunting terror in the early dawn that dragged him down in sheer misery and helplessness before his captive family and cowed neighbours. The scholar has forgotten the shame of deprivation, the reckless torture of the gulag, the venomous whip of malignant actors, the sweeping malice of unrestrained power that knew no god, that is undeterred by any faith, that is scornful of all truths, that mocks at heaven with befuddled arrogance.

All verities are now abandoned. Nothing is real again. The scourge of aberration now triumphs over normalcy. The scholar thus inhabits a dark dystopian universe where the victim of a recent, horrible past is invariably the inglorious paladin of a withering present.
Alas, the abject victim of an odious yesterday gleefully basks inexplicably in a creeping evil that threatens our collective liberty. The confused scholar in some distorted frame unbelievably champions the gradual mutilation of the fundaments of the democratic corpus.

He speaks presently in some terrible giddiness of one pumped with power and ecstatic reckoning, somehow disoriented from normative patterns, deluded with a sudden proximity to power, perhaps unbeknown to him that he is now slipping into the very evil that almost claimed his life!
We are now confronted with a grim irony that defies clarity and reconciliation. How do you judge an authentic victim of a gulag who dishonors the emblems of adversity by endorsing the chains of the new oppressor?

Surely we cannot forget the horrible scars of old. We cannot ignore the trauma of the dungeon, the brutal lashes of hate, the bruising, debilitating wounds inflicted in the dark solitary corners.
Does the scholar remain vitiated and impaired, irreparably tarnished for his new gospel? Do we embrace the new disturbing preachment of an exhausted old man as a defining summation of all his journeys? To indict him in prompt dismissive largeness at the twilight of his life will be to imperil his sterling beginning and savage the sacrifice of old. And yet we cannot ignore the present malady!

In this moral dilemma, we therefore seek refuge in an extenuating compromise which will attempt to disguise the flaws of today in the orbit of senility and gradual dementia. Nothing else will do!
If the scholar then has lost the pristine charm and the meritorious allure of old, frittering duty, honour and selflessness on the paltry altar of temporary reckoning, we will not be detained in mere dismay and crushing excoriation. We will not share in his confusion and in his festering malady.

Alas, we will weep for him in the immortal words of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, disowning his abject straying and muddled totality, gnashing our teeth in sorrow because:
“So fallen! So lost! The light withdrawn

Which once he wore!
… the glory from his grey hairs gone forevermore
Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains.
A fallen angel’s pride of thought,
Still strong in chains
Then , pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward with averted gaze
And hide the shame. “