Thread by @aurvabhrg

I admire Godse. He saw that the Duratma was taking the country for a ride with his saintly halo and fasting-unto-death threats, & took him out. After taking Duratma out, he handed himself over, and in the courts, he justified his actions in clear terms.

His defense spooked Cha-Cha so much that it wasn't made public. He fully accepted the consequences of his actions and didn't beg for mercy. There's something admirable there.

However Godse & Gandhi were Heroes under two different Moral universes.

As Herr Nietzsche wisely pointed out, mankind ever since civilization has been under the influence of two different moral systems - The Master Morality and the Slave Morality.

The Master Morality is a primary morality in which those that are strong, capable and noble define what is "Good" by what they do. Anything that stands opposed to this definition of good, i.e timidity, cowardice, pettiness was considered to be "Bad".

The Slave Morality is a response to the Master morality, defined by people who are unable to live up to the lofty standards defined by the Master morality. So under this, meekness is what is defined as "Good" and anything that opposes meek behaviour is termed oppressive & "Evil"

Godse's actions are heroic from the prism of Master morality. Gandhi's actions were guided by Slave Morality.

Now if you want to take down a Hero, the strategy depends on the moral prism under which the heroism of the hero is interpreted.

To pull-down heroes defined by the Master-Morality prism, you need to take them head-on, defeat them and if required even kill them. The adherents of the master-morality framework will see the defeat as a proof of the Heroes's weakness & will end the adulation poured over them

However, this strategy won't work if the heroes are defined by the Slave-Morality. The heroes under slave morality are typically messianic figures who are supposed to usher a new world order that will banish "Evil" forever and cement the position of the Good (i.e the meek)

The ideals under Slave-Morality are Utopian in nature and the heroes here are those who promise to realize these Utopian ideals in their lifetime. If such heroes are killed before they can usher the Utopian world, they become Martyrs, thereby cementing their "Hero" status.

Thus, in this moral prism, their death ends up "resurrecting" them and their ideals, and makes them immortal (This is the core Christian ideal as @ArmchairPseph recently pointed out).

The in the early days of Christianity, good-for-nothing members of the society embraced martyrdom, because it gave them a chance to become heroes within their flock.

The Roman magistrates and governors were dumbfounded as to why would people reject life and embrace death.

And yet, they gave the wannabe martyrs the death they so yearned. Hence Tertullian's statement "The church is built on the blood of the martyrs".

On the other hand, the Japanese in the Edo period, denied the missionaries the Martyrdom that they yearnt for.

Instead, the Japanese tortured the missionaries & got them to publicly apostatize.Since the missionaries were heroes under the Slave-Morality prism,apostasy meant that they are no longer able to deliver the Utopian ideal that they once promised. Thus they lost their hero status.

The famous dialogue "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villian" from the movie "The Dark Knight" perfectly describes the heroes under Slave Morality.

Note that Gandhi was a hero within the Slave-Morality prism. At the time of independence, the moral framework of the state was based on Slave-Morality. Thus, killing Gandhi meant cementing his hero-status. Which has been milked by the Indian state ever since even to this day.

When viewed in this manner, Godse's murder of Gandhi proved to be problematic in the longer run because it resurrected the meek Gandhian ideals which was on the wane post-partition & made it an essential feature of post-independence Indian polity. /END