To speak of Left and Right is in many cases outdated and irrelevant. It no longer reflects the political reality. Even when it did there were no neat compartments.
The Right is regarded as variously conservative, libertarian, lack of state intervention, nationalist, militarist, imperialist, neo-colonialist, racist and even fascist. Left-wingers however are seen as anti-establishment, progressive, socialist, communist, Marxist, state interventionist, feminist, and above all supportive of minority rights.
Yet even from its inception these neat categories blurred, merged, or failed to understand political and social machinations, especially in non-western situations.
In fact both Left and Right wings of the western political spectrum end up pushing the same agenda, which is rooted in western imperialism, colonialism, ideas of racial superiority, and attempts to create a utopian New Order out of the unfathomable polytheistic mess that they see around them. Its roots lie in seeing divine intervention and providence in their ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ view of the world.
And this ‘divine’ does not have to be supernatural being. It just has to be an idea. Because the ‘idea’ is basically the same, Left and Right have negligible difference when it comes to viewing ancient civilisations and cultures such as Hinduism. The conclusions are actually very similar if not the same.
For example, animal welfare and environmental issues are classic left-wing causes. These range from the Green political movements to campaigns promoting vegetarianism and veganism.
Case files of data are produced to prove the soil erosion, climatic change, and ecological dislocation caused by clearing the Amazon rain forest to make way for large scale cattle ranching in Brazil.
The rearing of cattle destined for the slaughter house to produce hamburgers and beef steak is condemned for the senseless cruelty which the animals endure in the abattoir, as well as the destructive clearing of rain forest to leave swathes of wasteland and desert due to soil despoliation.
Indeed the treatment of animals destined for the dinner plate is one of the classic Left environmental causes. Secret film shows cows being skinned alive in the abattoir.
Or chickens packed so close together that they contract skin conditions by being in constant contact with their own excrement.
Vegetarianism and veganism is seen as the only ethical choices as against a western capitalist consumer society that treats humans as commodities, and animals as mere ‘things’ to serve their needs.
It is closely tied with how such industrial scale agriculture and slaughter house are negatively impacting on our environment, with the resultant rise in food prices as well as food shortages.
Above all it is tied in with how the ‘noble’ savage of Rousseau knew how to farm ethically, and extract what was needed from nature. The noble savage was in a state of nature and a part of nature. So with the Amazon, we are informed of how the Native Americans could take what they wanted from the forest without destroying the whole ecosystem.
Cattle ranching and the slaughter house by contrast permanently upset this delicate balance, destroying it for generations in perpetual.
The beef industry is built on the backs of forests being cleared en masse and the indigenous peoples forced into poverty, drugs and prostitution as their lands are taken over by settlers.
This makes it all the more surprising that these same Leftists denounce Hindus for stopping the killing of cows in India as intolerant and inspired by backward obscurantist religious fundamentalism.
The same animal welfare sentiments are suddenly flipped to demand that raising cows for beef consumption is now progressive. Why in India is eating beef a sign of progress but elsewhere the trade mark of unsustainable exploitation?
The Left believe that their credentials provide them with some sort of immunity from criticism. How can they be racist? It is the Right that is racist.
The reality is not so clear cut. Whilst those of conservative hue were often loyalists of empire, whites only immigration and apartheid, the Left is hardly innocent.
After all what is Nazism? Portrayed as ‘right-wing’ extremism, in the original German (as with its French antecedents) it is national ‘socialism’. In the 1930s Hitler was seen as a progressive.
Eugenics, racial segregation and even genocide were seen as the means to which humanity would get rid of the backward elements and move forward to a brighter world – which usually meant a whiter world.
Thus when the Left behemoth condemns Hindus, it says more about this ideological cul-de-sac than about the accuracy of their data and reports.
Without the need for holy war and well funded evangelism, the multiple character of Hinduism has impacted in western countries for decades. Just by looking at facts of life such as yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, a fascination with ancient cultures, it is clear that among the western public Hindus ideas have deep resonance.
The ideas of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi were taken up by the Beatles and Beach Boys. The former were also influenced by the raga scale of Indian classical music, which itself has deep spiritual roots.
Going back even earlier to the late nineteenth century, Swami Vivekananda propounded Hindus ideas to the West. So overall the view of Hinduism is positive.
However this is certainly not the case in academic circles, politics and the media.
When we examine these aforementioned areas, it is as if we have been catapulted back in time, to an era when the White Man as intrepid explorer and missionary carried the teachings of his superior civilisation to the dark heathen savages who were wallowing in superstition, backwardness and crass ignorance. The superior race had to elevate these subhumans from the animalistic cultures in which they were mired.
The strange thing is that we find these views in the most surprising places, not least among the Left who would eschew any idea that they were racist and stuck in a colonial mindset.
This includes the Guardian, BBC and Labour Party to name but a few. However a closer examination reveals that this is exactly the case.
A major difference between the old school colonial racism that saturated mainstream academic discourse and its contemporary manifestation is that the present form of anti-Hindu hate is fronted not by whites but by the ethnicity and community for whom such vitriol is deemed politically correct.
Macaulism did not just create an elite who were Indian in appearance but British and colonialist in their mentality. It spawned what has become the accepted and indeed only way of looking at Hindu issues.
It is for this reason that we see the most uncompromising Hindu hate inexorably intertwined with self-abasement in the need to escape one’s past by writers and thinkers with obvious Hindu names, especially on the Left.
Pankaj Mishra, Sanjoy Majumdar, Shami Chakrabarti, Anish Kapoor and Aditya Chakrabortty are just some of the culprits. In this warped political correctness their anti-Hindu animus is protected by virtue of their ethnicity and brown skin.
No white commentator would get away with the stuff they come out with.Indeed if this was directed at any other community, there would at least be equitable space for a counter argument. Not so with Hindus.
Macaulite Spawn – Stephen Syndrome
Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained showed the brutality of slavery in America. Calvin J. Candie is the charming but cruel owner of the Candyland plantation in Mississippi, where slaves are forced to fight to the death in brutal wrestling matches called Mandingo fights.
But in reality, Candie is but the secondary villain. The main evil character in this is his head slave Stephen who actually runs the plantation. Samuel L Jackson , who played this character, explains this to Anthony Breznican of Entertainment Weekly:
“Calvin’s major concern is just to go out and stage Mandingo fights. Stephen, when you see him, he’s sitting there writing checks. So he’s the guy who makes that plantation run.
Within those 75 miles that are Candieland, he understands he’s king. He can do anything he wants to there.
Even the white people obey him. But if he steps foot outside that 75 miles, he’s just another slave in the South. He’s smart enough to know he needs to keep up his own kingdom. The institution of slavery works for him.”
“He might be an early instance of Stockholm Syndrome. He has bought into it all and just has to keep things status quo. That’s why when Django rides up on a horse, with a gun, speaking out of turn, the first thing Stephen has to do is let those other negroes around there on the plantation who see Django know that they can’t aspire to that.
The first thing Stephen wants to do is pull him down off that pedestal: Y’all can’t aspire to be that type of person.”
While this is a work of fiction the fact is that slavery in the South did have blacks who remained loyal to their white masters and even fought in the Confederate army.
This does not prove that the South was not racist nor that slavery was not a central cause of the war. In South Africa, apartheid relied heavily on blacks serving in the police to crush resistance.
The defense forces also recruited heavily among the very people they were oppressing. But apartheid was more than just white supremacy. Blacks were forced out of having citizenship of their ancestral land.
Instead they were assigned to designated homelands. These required collaboration by a new bureaucracy and security apparatus staffed by blacks, and headed by those designated by the whites as ‘traditional’ leaders.
Those who agreed such as Lucas Mangope and Mandela’s own nephew Kaiser Mathanzima were made presidents of their homelands – Bophuthatswana and Transkei, respectively.
Those who refused such as Chief Albert Luthuli of the Zulus suffered a rather more grim fate.
In his case it was to be killed by mysteriously falling under a train. Mangope was to resist negotiations to end apartheid even while former hard-line white separatists such as PW Botha and FW De Klerk put in reforms that would dismantle the system.
This went as far as inviting neo-Nazi militia into Bophutaswana to stop his private kingdom being reintegrated back into South Africa.
For that reason we should not be misled by Indian ethnicity, brown faces and ‘Hindu’ names when examining where some of the most vitriolic anti-Hindu verbiage comes from.
We should not be distracted from the roots of such language at a time of colonial dominance and ‘scientific’ racism. India may have become independent but the Macaulite brainwashing has multiplied like bacteria.
Such writers collude in their own oppression and mental slavery. It is very hard to see this because it has become mainstream.
Yet look at the writings of Pankaj Mishra, Amrit Wilson, Anish Kapoor, Sanjoy Majumdar and many others to see how that common thread develops.
These Macualite writers are as cut off from their Hindu roots as much as the skinny latte drinking, Guardian reading, bohemian types were from the masses when Britain voted to leave Europe. Any other point of view is simply unacceptable.
It is also a threat. It threatens the fairy-tale world they have so carefully constructed and profited from.
Just like ‘Stephen’ if they put one foot outside this false utopia, then they are nothing. They have scant value. They are just another brown face. Their ‘expert’ knowledge is of no value. Hence the defences must be maintained at all costs.
For that reason they readily employ swearology such as reactionary, regressive, Hindu fascist, Hindu fundamentalist and much else.
These terms are just words picked at random to denigrate.
They are divorced from any accuracy. Sita Ram Goel wrote about this extensively in his book ‘Perversion of India’s Political Parlance’:
“…..one discovers very soon is that people and parties who call themselves Leftist also claim to be progressive, revolutionary, socialist, secularist and democratic.
At the same time they accuse the “Rightists” of being reactionary, revivalist, capitalist and fascist. At this stage, the labels cease to be merely descriptive.
They become laudatory and denunciatory instead. Labels like progressive and revolutionary, etc., acquire an aura of virtue and holiness. On the other hand, labels like reactionary and revivalist etc., start smelling of vice and sin.”
“They hail as socialist only those countries where totalitarian states have reduced the communities to conglomerations of dumb-driven slaves.
In India, the Leftists describe the public sector as a signpost of Socialism, self-satisfied bureaucrats and swollen-headed babus who are bribed and/or bamboozled by another cartel of freebooters known as the private sector.
The two cartels fatten together with utter disregard for the suffering and privation they inflict on the community.”
“One is not secular unless one harbours and expresses a pronounced anti-Hindu animus. One should lodge an immediate protest against the least little expression of Hindu religion or culture in public media and at government functions.
One should frown upon every government dignitary performing a pooja in a Hindu temple or going to Hindu place pilgrimage.
One should accuse all educational, cultural and research institutions of hiding Hindu communalists. One should put the blame squarely on the RSS for every communal riot.”
The language of Macaulites sounds reasonable on the surface. But you only have to scratch this surface to find that it merely takes the ideology so beloved of Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden to see that it is nothing more than colonial style arrogance and racism revamped.
The fact it might be done by people with brown faces, of Indian origin, and having ‘Hindu’ names does not exonerate it.
If anything it shows just how brainwashed and anti-Hindu these so called secularists really are. Whether they are Left or Right is inconsequential. That is why the Telegraph, Times and Daily Mail rigorously exclude the Hindu viewpoint as much as the Guardian or BBC.
From one political upheaval to another. The election of Narendra Modi as prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, India, sent shockwaves not least among the western commentators who espousing their so-called progressive and liberal views denounced him as a fascist, Nazi and latter day Hitler.
But in this whole quagmire it has been forgotten that it has never been about Modi who is just a convenient scapegoat in an anti-Hindu campaign.
Go back just over a couple of centuries and we see that the advanced democratic nations were busy burning thousands of women and girls as witches and in league with Satan.
Now instead of burning people they vilify them with all sorts of colourful language that makes them the very Devil incarnate. Such is the case with Modi. The witch-hunts which lasted right into the modern era were brought about by a state and established church which was determined to root out the ‘Other’: that faceless shape shifting evil which represented the demonic.
This mantle has now been taken up across the political spectrum against Hinduism. Whether Left or Right the ideological arsenal is the same. Hinduism represents what they cannot understand and what they feel threatened by. Like the witches it has to be rooted out.
The trial of witches took a very interesting method from which there was no escape. Bound in heavy chains the unfortunate victim was flung into the river.
If she sank and drowned she was innocent. However if she floated this was proof of her guilt. Exactly the same methodology is now used with regards to Hinduism by supposedly advanced democratic nations.
You are presumed either guilty or extremely guilty. Innocence is not an option. The absurdity used to establish the guilt of a witch by modern Europe and America is now used to attack Hinduism and all it stands for.
This is not a fair trial or rational debate. It is a witch-hunt gorged full of the rotting stench of superstition and paranoia.
Even in these largely secular societies the Christian world view remains. Infected with monotheistic self-righteousness the theological residue enforces the idea that there is good and evil. For Left and Right, the opposite is always evil. But when it comes to Hindus they all gang-up like the witch-hunting mobs that heralded the arrival of modern Europe and America.
Hinduism is the ultimate evil. Witch-hunts were a result of a threatened church and an absolutist state which claimed the divine right of kings such as Charles I of England.
Attacking folk beliefs and long-held traditions the churches were determined to root out all trace of the heathens and pagans. Hinduism therefore represents the ultimate abomination.
It is proud of its pagan traditions and without apology. The absolutist state and its ecclesiastical support may have ebbed away but the mentality remains. Secularism was merely the same dogma in a different format.
Indeed we still live in a world dominated by monotheistic secular ideologies of the nineteenth century. Therefore to look at this through the prism of just Left and Right is a false dichotomy.
Catholics and Protestants declared each other heretics and killed each other in wars of religion. Germany suffered economic, political and above all demographic catastrophe as a result of the Thirty Years War.
The result was an unseasy peace known as secularism. Catholics and Protestants may have hated each other. But when it came to burning witches there was no difference. When it came to converting the pagan infidels there was no difference.
One therefore should not be swayed by the cosmetic outer layer, because what lies beneath is something monstrous and toxic waiting to emerge. The same with political badges. Here again there is scant if any difference when it comes to Hindus.
The non Racist Racist
For examples it will be no surprise to learn that Social Darwinists, imperialists, colonialists and those who supported elimination of whole races by eugenics supported the rule of India by the racially superior British.
But this was a view held by Karl Marx as well. Indeed it was the liberals and progressives who supported eugenics as a means of improving society by getting rid of inferior stock. Genocide was a just a stepping stone in this process to make utopia. This attitude only wears new masks but has not fundamentally changed.
For example which westerners are eager to come to India. There are the classic missionary types who take up the White Man’s Burden of Rudyard Kipling to convert and baptise the benighted heathen with his witchcraft and false gods.
To these idealistic yet at the same time rather stupid and naive idiots Hinduism is Satan-worship the adherence of false gods which will lead its followers into hellfire.
Ignoring of course the fact that it was the church that literally stoked the fires which burned thousands if not millions of decent women and children condemned as witches, it ignores the fact that this very religion has long been in decline in western nations.
It only survives in places such as poor areas of France and Britain where there has been an influx of Third World immigrants, or where the welfare state has been rolled back so that millions of needy rely on food banks run by charities. So how can these people ever hope to solve India’s magnitude of problems?
Despite secularisation, western nations are eager to take the missionary position when it comes to Hinduism. Just as France eagerly used the Catholic Church which it so vilified on its home turf with laicism, yet had no problem using these very same religious nutcases to enforce their laughable beliefs onto their colonial subjects, secularist ideas see Hinduism as the ultimate evil.
It is backward, regressive and an impediment to the modern world. Hence these secular social engineers come to India to again solve the Hindu ‘problem’.
In 1901 a young boy accompanied his missionary parents as they left their home in the Netherlands and moved to South Africa. This immigrant would grow up and attempt to remould the native masses among whom he lorded over with his unique recipe to the demographic complexity in which he found himself. That boy was Hendrik Verwoerd who became prime minister of South Africa. His solution was apartheid.
Continues in
Civilising the ‘Hindoo’ Savage : Part Two