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Civilising the ‘Hindoo’ Savage : Part Two

Civilising the ‘Hindoo’ Savage : Part Two

The Zoo Keeper and Tourist
William Dalrymple: 'I regret laughing at Boris's jokes about the ...In India’s case we have William Dalrymple, a complete social misfit in his own native land, so he decided to transplant himself in the same manner which bubonic plague once ravaged Europe by hitching a free ride on fleas infesting rats. Dalrymple has suddenly become the spokesperson on what he calls Hindu ‘extremism’ when he really has no knowledge of the subject and has immense hatred of this land which he has adopted to spread his own special form of hate.

Good old William has this genteel way of showing how concerned he is for India and how these Hindu ‘fascists’ will ruin it for the minorities. Such spin and soft-faced hate are nothing new.

It was after all Verwoerd himself who described apartheid as a misunderstood “policy of good neighbourliness”. Dalrymple lauds  Mu’in al-Din Chishti in the thirteenth century as compiling Treatise on Nature of Yoga which stressed the compatibility of Islamic and Hindu mysticism. Yet what this hooray Henry type negates is that Muhammad Ghuri to invade and despoil the land in the name of Islam. Literature on the true fanatic nature of Sufis such as that of the Chishti order abound.

Image result for Buland Darwãza of Muin-ud-din shrineSculpted stones, apparently from a Hindu temple, are incorporated in the Buland Darwãza of Muin-ud-din’s shrine and his tomb is built over a series of cellars which may have formed part of an earlier temple. A tradition, first recorded in the ‘Anis al-Arwãh, suggests that the Sandal Khãna is built on the site of Shãdî Dev’s temple.

Four Islamic mystics namely Moinuddin (d. 1233 in Ajmer ), Qutubuddin (d. 1236 in Delhi ), Nizamuddin (d.1335 in Delhi ) and Fariduddin (d.1265 in Pattan now in Pakistan ) accompanied the Islamic invaders in India . All of them were from the Chistiya order of Islamic mysticism. Not just satisfied with presenting an anti-Hindu bigot as somehow the epitome of communal harmony, this joke of a writer also claims that Aurangzeb was “a pragmatic ruler who frequently patronised Hindu institutions, whose reign was less orthodox, less tyrannical and centralised than previously thought”.

Josef Mengele - Wikipedia

Josef Mengele

The comparison with Holocaust deniers is undeniable and disturbing. Holocaust denying ‘revisionists’ say there was no Holocaust and that Hitler merely planned to resettle the Jews. Any deaths that did occur were just due to the unfortunate vicissitudes of war. Such talk would get a person jailed in many parts of the western world. David Irving himself has been subject to the full force of the law in this regard. But Dalrymple has the audacity and freedom to preach his anti-Hindu revionism within India itself. In that sense Dalrymple is worse than Irving.

Just because Dalrymple claims to be an admirer of Indian culture does not mean he is a not a racist. After Germany started liquidating the Jewish communities, in what is now the Czech Republic, Dr. Augustin Stein suggested to the Germans that they set up a Jewish Museum to hold all the objects that the Germans were confiscating from the synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia.

Hitler approved the project and in 1942, the Central Jewish Museum was created, he museum which Hitler allegedly wanted to call “the Museum of an Extinct Race.” Dr Mengele kept a 3 year old Gypsy boy as a mascot for which he used to entertain guests.

When he got bored however he threw him into the gas oven along with other victims of the Holocaust. Dalrymple’s work therefore echoes that of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi pseudo-scientific institute in Nazi Germany set up by Himmler and purposed to research the archaeological and cultural history of the hypothesized Aryan race. Dalrymple, unsurprisingly, adheres to this Nazi view of an Aryan race who invaded India. Strangely he calls anyone who disagrees with this racist idea, a Hindu fascist. But Mr Dalrymple, in the light of all the evidence just who is the fascist now?

Westerners who defend Hinduism

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Dr David Frawley

However it is important to remember that a lot of westerners unlike Dalrymple truly respect the world’s oldest surviving civilisation. Just because of the actions of misguided demagogues like Dalrymple we cannot condemn entire nations and ethnic groups. But media outlets like the BBC never speak to these people.

Instead they always speak to the revisionist-negationist types like Dalrymple and the Indian-born co-conspirators who always mingle in the same clique: Romilla Thapar, Sunny Hundal, Priyamvada Gopal, Chetan Bhatt.


Born into a German-Irish American family, Dr David Frawley was fascinated with Hinduism form an early age. He taught himself Sanskrit and felt so connected to this ancient culture that he took the name Vamadeva Shastri. Frawley is the author of many books and founder of the American Institute of Vedic Studies which disseminates knowledge on Indian astrology and ayurveda. Yet he is never consulted in such matters. Instead that deadbeat has-been Dalrymple gets wheeled out of his intellectually bankrupt sarcophagus to spout a few unintelligible words and then put back in the closet until needed next time.

 

Image result for Dr Koenraad Elst

Dr Koenraad Elst

Dr Koenraad Elst was born into a Catholic Flemish family in Belgium. He later gained his PhD from an Indian university, in Varanasi. Once again the author of many groundbreaking books, Dr Elst is effectively blacklisted for no towing the line with regards to Hinduism. Francois Gautier left his native France at the age of 19 and has since lived in India.

Again because he identifies with this country and its ancient culture he is frozen pit of all discussion. But most fascinating of all is William A Gans, born in Chicago in 1950.

At age 18 Gans travelled to India and in 1971 became the first foreigner to be initiated into India’s ancient order of yogis and shamans, the Naga Sannyasis, during the Allahabad Maha Kumbh Mela in 1971. He since became Baba Rampuri and hosts an international camp at the Kumbh Mela.

Yet do we ever hear of him? There are many western Hindu swamis and gurus around the world has any been approached. These are just a few examples. But that is the whole point. A westerner who identifies with Hinduism is vilified, marginalised and takes the kiss of intellectual ostracism. In Hawaii there is a whole community of western Hindu monks who run Hinduism Today magazine. But one again they never get approached on matters of relevance. The difference is not just a matter of misunderstanding. It is at a deeper metaphysical level.

Monotheism as Theory

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Laplace

French physicist Laplace was eerily accurate when Napoleon asked him where god fitted into his idea of the universe. He replied that he had no use for that “hypothesis”. God did not need to be a spiritual being, real or imaginary to take the binary opposites now offered by the religious/secular divide. This demiurge only needed to be a theory, a hypothesis, an idea, a concept. But of course where arguments failed arms win.

Through coercion, cultural appropriation, and physical elimination of the pagan gods and their followers, Europe was pushed under the monotheist imperialist doctrine as the Roman Empire crumbled. Its roots had already been seen in the imperial cult which gave a single, central focus that the Church filled with ease.

The same elements were taken as Christian Europe expanded into the New World and then Africa, Asia, and the Pacific to crush indigenous cultures underfoot. Hinduism is the last large survival of these polytheist and pagan religions. Unlike the rest it would not die and hence remains under attack under those same forces which have taken on new garb.

Image result for Battle of RocroiOf course within this monotheist behemoth there are bitter divisions. The Reformation set Europe ablaze as Catholics and Protestants battled each other for supremacy. Now that same battle remains but along new fault lines: Left and Right, religious and secular, statist and market, and a host of others.

While Catholics and Protestants killed each other, destroyed half of Germany in the Thirty Years War and burnt women and girls at the stake for being witches, nevertheless when it came to the pagan savages such as Hindus they were united in their odium.

Hence we see the atheist and militantly anti-clerical Marxists uniting with their erstwhile enemies in the form of evangelical Christian missionaries to show Hinduism as evil caste ridden and full of superstition. India has been portrayed as the rape capital of the world. The images of evil sexually obsessed beasts preying on their own women, but especially preferring white women (foreign tourists), is repeated ad nauseam. It is all part of the same myth making and denigration. It was as if western sexual mores have been set by Peter Sutcliffe, Fred West and Marc Dutroux.

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Marc Dutroux.

These were among the many violent sexual predators and child molesters who got away with their crimes. But one rape in India condemns an entire country, civilisation, culture, people and belief system. In the case of Dutroux, there was widespread anger and frustration among Belgians due to police errors, the general slowness of the investigation and the disastrous outcome of the events.

This suspicion that Dutroux had been, or was being, protected was raised when the public became aware of Dutroux’s claims that he was part of a sex ring that included high-ranking members of the police force and government, to which he supplied girls. What is known is that he kidnapped them, raped them and tortured them in a specially built dungeon. .

On the witness stand, Jean-Marc Connerotte, the original judge of the case, broke down in tears when he described “the bullet-proof vehicles and armed guards needed to protect him against the shadowy figures determined to stop the full truth coming out. Do these same Leftists portray Belgium, let alone the whole of Europe in the same manner as India, even when worse crimes are committed?

When it comes to Hindus terms such as left-wing and right-wing, even secular and religious become meaningless. They are united in their hatred and disgust. Hence even secular progressives spout the same racist mythology as the colonialists they claim to disown and despise. David Frawley in ‘Arise Arjuna’:
 
“The views of these leftists are often on par with the anti-Hindu views of Christian fundamentalists while the latter see Hinduism as a religion of the devil, the former see it as a personification of social evil, the manifestation of caste division which is their devil (though curiously Marxism works to encourage class hatred, not to promote social harmony and peace between the classes). Hindus today, like followers of other religions, should no longer accept the Marxist view of their religion and their history, but to do so they must first unmask it.”
 
While these Leftists are often atheists, Marxists and socialists, they nevertheless see the Jesus tool of the Church as a useful ideological battering ram. The confluence of these ideas for example led to Liberation Theology. Where once the Church tries to save pagan souls, the atheist and secularist uses the same Christ myth, overtly or covertly, to show the road to progress and prosperity. While the atheist/secularist/humanist combine may hate all religion, nevertheless some backward beliefs are evidently less backward than others.
 

What the Mainstream Media Omits – and the Alternate Follows

 

Image result for ‘Negationism in Indian History’ bookThe popularity of alternative media such as RT News from Moscow and the now largely banned Press TV from Tehran is due to the fact that mainstream news channels no longer appeal to those seeking accurate information. But when it comes to Hindus they might as well be part of the same behemoth. Now while RT and Press TV are funded by countries, Russia and Iran respectively, where democracy and free speech is heavily censored, the BBC, Sky, CNN, France 24, Channel 4 News and a host of others pride themselves on their ‘impartiality’ and ‘independence’. But how far is this actually the case?
 
In his 1992 bookNegationism in Indian History, Dr Koenraad Elst of Belgium observed this:

“On the other hand, in the day-to-day reporting on the communal situation in India, there is a lot of bonafide copying of the anti-Hindu views dominant in the Indian English-language press. A typical mixed case of some complicity and some gullibility was the TV documentary about Hindu fundamentalism made by BBC correspondent Brian Barron, and broadcast in the week of the first round of the Lok Sabha elections in May 1991.

Brian Barron is an otherwise meritorious journalist, witness his revelations in October 1991 about the massacre of thousands of Buddhist monks in the early years of communist rule in Mongolia. But his programme about the Hindu movement was second-rate and biased. For a start, it contained some factual mistakes (like a map meant to show the trail of Hindu leader L.K. Advani’s procession in support of the Ram Janmabhoomi cause, which drew a line unrelated to the actual trail, apart from placing Delhi on the Ganga river), exemplifying the carelessness which Western correspondents can afford when it comes to India reporting.”

It was not just the BBC:
 
Image result for Der Spiegel“At the time of the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, the German left-leaning weekly Der Spiegel summarized the communal riots in independent India as follows: “Since 1947, Indian statisticians have counted 11,000 riots with 12,000 Muslim victims.” Hindu victims are not even mentioned, as if you were reading a fundamentalist paper like Muslim India or Radiance.”

Western journalists have always used anti-Hindu demagogues as their source, knowing that this does not risk retaliation from the same group they are always painting as intolerant and fundamentalist. If they had done this with any other non-western and above all indigenous culture, they would be labelled racist and colonialist.

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Sanjoy Majumdar

However the western media has as its defence the offspring of British civil servant Macaulay, who wanted to create an administrative class to help continue rule by the superior white master race, formulated an English-medium education system that would create brown sahibs – Indian by race but Englishmen in their mentality. That is exactly the sort of person who is pushed forward by the BBC and others as the authentic native voice, such as with this piece by that corporation’s Sanjoy Majumdar. On 12 August 2014 he wrote ‘Why is Sanskrit so Controversial’:

But then why is the teaching of Latin and ancient Greek not seen as a ‘right-wing’ issue by the BBC? Is this because Sanskrit is in essence a ‘Hindu’ language and its teaching would go against the Macaulite class on whom the BBC relies on for its distorted anti-Hindu image? It was Image result for white man's burdenthe BBC who created the brand known as Mother Teresa, when its reporter Malcolm Muggeridge when to the then Calcutta in 1967 to interview Albanian missionary Sister Agnes who like so many before her used poverty and sickness to force backward Roman Catholic dogma on her hapless victims. It was a rerun of the classic colonialist and racist doctrine that only superior religion by a superior race could civilise these jungle type savage Hindus.

Mother Teresa’s sinister work and unethical financial dealings were later exposed by secular writer Christopher Hitchens. Yet the BBC mythology surrounding Sister Agnes stuck as it suited the anti-Hindu agenda.

The BBC like so many others has reported on the terrorism in Kashmir, using such soft terms as insurgency. But there are comparatively few reports on how the entire indigenous Hindu community of Pandits were forced out at gunpoint. Look at this from BBC’s Zubair Ahmed in April of this year:

Hindu ‘migrants’? That makes it sound so innocent and voluntary. They are refugees. Yet only two months later the BBC reported on Muslim outrage against exclusive Hindu settlements to resettle Pandits.
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Amrit Wilson

However the BBC’s anti-Hindu stance is nothing when compared with that bastion of liberal and left opinion, the Guardian. This detestable propaganda broadsheet actively excludes Hindu opinion –while simultaneously welcoming contribution from all other communities. If anything remotely Hindu does manage to get past its anti-Hindu gutter journalism, it will always be from the submissive Gunga Din type who should not be too uppity and think they are the intellectual equal of Hindu-baiter’s.

If you really want to make your career in journalism by acting in ways that if it were any other community, it would be deemed racist, then the Guardian is your route to fame and advancement. On 3 July 2014, Amrit Wilson wrote ‘When will the Kashmiri nightmare end?’:

Image result for kashmiri pandits genocide

Kashmiri Pandit Hindus

What Wilson calls a popular uprising was a holy war and ethnic cleansing against Hindus? Yet she accuses the government of initiating demographic shifts. She mocks that this land was their ancestral place. To cap it all she says this will go against the wishes of the ‘majority’ in Kashmir. Well this majority is a minority in India, where the majority elected the present democratic government. Now according to the Guardian itself:

“Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan, a Black, South Asian and minority ethnic women’s organisation dedicated to combating violence against women in Britain. She was a founder member of Awaaz and an active member of OWAAD.”

 

 Wilson is of course beaten by the venom rent by another Guardian brown sahib, Anish Kapoor. He is an artist and strangely for a Guardian writer close to the Netanyahu government, is silent on the plight of Palestinians  – after all his work enjoys great exposure in Israel  where he once emigrated to by that country’s ‘Right of return’ (being Jewish on his mother’s side). On 12 November 2015 Kapoor graced the pages of Britain’s most anti-Hindu newspaper by writing that ‘India is Being Ruled by a Hindu Taliban’ which was strangling that democracy and oppressing minorities and lower castes.

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Anish Kapoor

Nida Najar

Nida Najar is a freelance journalist based in Delhi who writes for the New York Times, another classic ‘progressive’ piece. On 13 February 2015 she penned another one of her classics condemning the attacks on churches in Delhi:

As is usual in these cases Najar omits any mention of that attacks, destruction and vandalism of Hindu temples in that same period; by ‘right-wing’ Christians or others. In India’s north-east she does not find any ‘right-wing’ extremist Christians to condemn for banning Hindu practices by the minority in states such as Nagaland. Reading this sort of one-sided propaganda one could easily think that Hindus suffer no persecution in India at all, because whoever controls the media controls the supply of information. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, author George Orwell warned us exactly where that would lead.

Now there are legion other examples. But it is not just the media that is affected. If Hindus try and exercise their democratic rights in Britain they soon hit another brick wall, not faced by other communities. This was the case with the writer of this piece who in February 2014 was invited to the newsroom to be interviewed by broadcaster Lucy Hocking.

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Lucy Hocking

This was for a live broadcast on BBC World News over the recall (not banning) of Wendy Doniger’s insulting book ‘The Hindus’ which revamped the usual Hinduphobic muck-raking and gutter writing which this American demagogue is known for. She had already been backed by revisionist historian William Dalrymple.

When pointed out that back in 2003 Doniger herself had demonstrated unashamed intolerance by stopping inconvenient questions at SOAS (backed by Dalrymple), Hocking was having none of it and instead kept trying to return to the same straw man arguments which she and her BBC paymasters had so carefully constructed. As a result the interviews Hocking conducted with Dalrymple and Doniger can be found on YouTube. The one with HHR has mysteriously disappeared.

Is the West intrinsically anti-Hindu?

Why is anything remotely Hindu drummed out of the western media, and even by alternate media? Why is it so denigrated in academia? Is there a common glue to all this?
Image result for john grey philosopher

John Grey

In Black Mass, John Grey wrote on how modern secularism and scientific atheism could not have been conceived outside a Christian and therefore monotheistic environment. As much as the revolutionary creds of the past three centuries which by their aspirations to create an earthly utopia, should rightly be seen as political religions, modern secularism, liberalism, atheism and the very idea of progress has more in common with religious movements such as evangelical Christianity than it would want to admit or confess. On pages 189 and 190:

Like other ideas, secularity has a history. Pre-Christian Europe lacked the distinction between the secular and the sacred in much the same way that other polytheist cultures do. The world itself was sacred, and there could be no question of confining religion to a private sphere – the very idea of religion as a set of practices distinct from the rest of life was lacking. A domain separate from the sacred was recognized only when Augustine distinguished between the City of Man and the City of God.

In this sense secular thinking is a legacy of Christianity and has no meaning except in a context of monotheism. In East Asia, polytheism has lived side by side with mystical philosophies in much the same way that the two coexisted in pre-Christian Europe, and the clash between science and religion that has polarized western societies has not taken place. It is no accident that Darwinism has not triggered culture-war in China or Japan.”

Indeed despite the best efforts of ‘secularists’ it has failed in many respects in India, where the Hindu ethos that does not bifurcate the world into sacred and profane (hence secularism and religion) stands at odds with the west.

Image result for Dr K Radhakrishnan prayingHence India’s rationalists were up in arms when Dr K Radhakrishnan, chairman of India’s space program ISRO and its mission to Mars, offered special paryers and performing pooja with the replica of Mars Orbiter Mission at the Lord Venkateshwara temple in Tirupati, a day before the successful launch of the spacecraft from Sriharikota.

The anger of the ‘rationalists’ was a mirror image of the American creationists who denounce evolution as just another ‘theory’ at best, and a complete lie because it contradicts the Bible. The ‘rationalists’ were upset at their religion being offended; and this religion was at the heart of the clash between Hinduism and the west.

Despite the much reported clash between western democracies and radical Islam there is more commonality than both sides would care to admit. Page 71 of Black Mass:

It is misleading to represent Islam and ‘the West’ as forming civilizations that have nothing in common. Christianity and Islam are integral parts of western monotheism, and as such they share a view of history that marks them off from the rest of the world.”

Just as the ancient Greeks, on whom the west bases its civilisation (and the rationalists base their humanism and atheism), saw the zero concept as chaotic and at odds with their nice geometric view of the cosmos, so Hinduism is seen as dysfunctional and contradictory.

It lacks the reason and order if seen through the monotheistic paradigm. Despite the war on terrorism, Islamophobia and culture clash over issues such as the burkini, the western mindset understands Islam even if it disagrees or even opposes it. This is true of the ‘secular’ as much as the ‘religious’.

The ground shifts often. Much of the recruitment to radical Islam came from the militant Left such as the staunchly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. But other examples are legion. In his 1944 classic Road to Serfdom, FA Hayek notedImage result for Road to Serfdom, FA Hayek how communists and Nazis seemed to interchange quite happily. Many neoconservatives were once staunch Trotskyists. Atheists can easily become the most hardcore evangelicals.

What they have in common is an inbuilt animus to Hindu concepts, especially that of Dharma and Rta, which upset their view of their entire universe, their moral compass and above their sense of ‘progress’. For that reason America and Britain always felt closer to Pakistan than India.

The former followed a fellow monotheistic creed and hence was essentially part of the ‘west’. Despite the present war on terror and fears of jihad, it must be remembered that these countries backed those very same holy warriors and their Salafist ideology. In the media the mujahedeen were portrayed as freedom fighters resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This same media was warning of the dangers of militant Hinduism; a complete warping of the facts and reality.

In the not so recent past we have examples of how other indigenous ancient peoples suffered. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Native Americans and Native Australians were wrenched form their families. Put into boarding schools or foster care by a state that was determined to ‘progress’ them into the modern world, they were compelled to forget their language, religion, culture and gods.

Image result for Rabbit Proof FenceThe films Rabbit Proof Fence and The Sapphires shows the poignant and harrowing severe social dislocation caused by this state programme in Australia. Such policies are now denounced as racist. Liberal and bohemian types lament that such fine specimens of humanity can only be found in museums.

Yet these same people look at Hindus in the same manner an earlier generation of colonialists, missionaries, scientific racists and progressives saw these ancient non-western peoples and cultures.

It is for that reason that only those deemed ‘assimilated’ and ‘integrated’ are deemed the acceptable brown face. They are then pushed as the experts on India and Hinduism. All else is backward and primitive, even fascist (forcing a label which came from the genocidal loins of the western civilisation which gave birth to it, and much else). Ram Swarup, writing in 1991:

 
Further:

The denigration of Hinduism across the political spectrum, especially by people who shudder at the thought of being labelled as ‘racist’ and especially by the token brown sahibs, is therefore deep rooted in the western psyche. It is nothing less than a replay of the colonial past when indigenous cultures were trampled underfoot in the name of saving souls or the more earthly ‘progress’.

But above all it is fuelled by a fear of an alternative cosmological paradigm with its own set of metaphysics that are seen as an eternal threat to eschatology, millenarianism and utopianism that is integral to western thought, because that false vision has finally reached its Armageddon. It has failed and unlike other ancient cultures Hinduism has withstood it. It is something which the high priests that dictate western values simply cannot contemplate.

 

 

Civilising the Hindoo Savage : Part 3

 

Civilising the ‘Hindoo’ Savage : Part One

 

 

About The Author

Ranbir Singh : Writer and lecturer, HHR chairman : BA (Honours) History, MA History from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London : , Have lectured previously at De Montfort University, London School of Economics, Contributor to various political and human rights discussion outfits.

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