After the fall of the Soviet Union, America considered itself to be the global hegemon. Thus it repurposed the 'soft power' it had built up through its Universities and Research Institutes so as to take control of the 'knowledge systems' indigenous to various 'Civilizations' which pre-existed the Capitalist-Communist syzygy. Hindu India was an obvious target because, after all, the Brits had taken control of Hindu knowledge systems and thus got plenty of cheap soldiers to do force projection from Hong Kong to Egypt and even, during the two World Wars, the battlefields of Europe. Thus America decided to take over 'Indology' so that the Hindus could be used against whichever enemy the Americans were currently targeting. There was also a 'Human Rights' type bullshit agenda designed to prevent any indigenous administration gaining internal hegemony as well as dominance. Sadly, India's long tradition of non-alignment in Foreign Policy frustrated America's designs. However, Manmohan Singh realized that American backed NGOs were fucking over India and changed the law so that action could be taken against them. Unfortunately, 'activists' and virtue signallers within Congress scuppered the big ticket reforms he proposed in 2011-12 and thus the dynasty began dying nasty. To be clear, India would have had no problem keeping the mooncalf Rahul on the throne if growth was proceeding apace. Indeed, Indians can be as hypocritical as Americans. However, America fucked up- first financially, then militarily and diplomatically. Its Academy turned to shit- it became a circular firing squad of stupidity. India's academy may have been equally shite, but Indians don't give a flying fart for Professors.
Turning to the subject of this post, I may need to remind my readers that, some 6 or 7 years ago, Sheldon Pollock- a Sanskrit Professor- condemned the fact that some JNU students were arrested and prosecuted. The view of the democratically elected Central Government of India was that those students were engaged in anti-national activity and that they had broken the law of the land. Pollock disagreed. This caused some Indian academic to demand that he be removed from the editorship of some private sector venture funded by the founder of INFOSYS.
Pollock says his
reaction was, are these people deranged? The suggestion that an obscure professor of Sanskrit off in the middle of nowhere
Pollock is American. America is an evil country which killed over 1.3 million Muslims in a so called 'War against Terror'. That country also takes a dim view of Hindus. America pressurized India to join its war on Islam and, now that war ended in defeat, is seeking to pressurize India to join an alliance against Russia and China and any other country which is not America's puppet. India, like Pakistan, but more politely, is telling America to go fuck itself. The days are long gone when anybody around the globe believed that America cared about human rights or freedom of expression or anything at all save increasing its own power and wealth while killing Black people at home and bombing Muslims abroad.
Pollock may have been obscure and certainly well deserves an oblivion greater yet. But the country he represented was powerful. It is much less powerful now. Thus it is safe for us to tell him that he backed the wrong side in America's War on those who won't do what it tells them. This is because that War failed. It wasn't high minded. It was mercenary. It wasn't courageous. It was cowardly.
could be a threat to the integrity of the great nation of India, simply because I signed a letter in support of students who have been arrested for nothing more than demonstrating their freedom of expression—I thought that was utterly delusional.
Because Pollock was delusional. He didn't get that he himself was part and parcel of American soft power which had a Huntingdon 'Clash of Civilization' type rationale. The notion was that the 'Hindu' civilization should accept the hegemony of Pollock type American savants such that it would be available to fight Islam and China and Russia and anybody else the Americans needed it to fight. Meanwhile, it must also arrange its own internal affairs in a manner America found satisfactory. Pollock was a good soldier in this foolish war.
The Indians didn't need to do much to defeat America's invidious agenda. Pollock's bollocks and Witzel's witzelsucht were easily ridiculed. Those they championed or those who championed them were equally illiterate, paranoid, and utterly incapable of mobilizing public opinion or getting votes. Indian Democracy defeated America's attempt to export its stupidity.
The third reaction has come slowly, and it’s more serious. It’s a little more nuanced and complicated. What is it in contemporary India that could produce such an ignorant, hostile document?
This ignorant man didn't get that America was waging a war close to India's borders. But it was doing so in a manner precisely calculated to lose it. Meanwhile it had foolishly built up China- deluding itself that China would turn democratic- while seeking to undermine democracy and the rule of law in India. Now Biden has run away from Afghanistan and Iraq and Ethiopia and is having to pipe small towards China and India, it is safe to say what was always apparent to Indians- viz. Americans are as stupid as shit. Their ignorance imperils the world. They destabilize their own puppets, they shit on their own friends, and help only their enemies. The UAE and Saudi are now openly snubbing Biden. Imran Khan told the America to shove its invitation to a 'Democracy summit' up its capacious arse. Countries no longer fear being Magnitskied or condemned for Human Rights or other violations. Why? America is destroying its own soft power. Sanctions destroy any dual loyalty members of an indigenous elite might develop.
I’m very concerned about the sources of this hostility and ignorance
that source was Pollock's refusal to accept that what America was doing in Asia was cynical and genocidal.
and how to address it in a manner that is progressive and salutary,
Pollock needed to get woke to the horribly racist nature of his own country. He is now accusing Indians of 'hostility and ignorance' just as Muslims had been accused of the same thing. But, though the Muslims may have taken between 1.3 and 4 million casualties, they prevailed over unctuous Uncle Sam.
What ignorant Pollock doesn't get is that America has engaged in hostilities of a foolish and counter-productive type. Killing lots of brown people will cause brown people to hate and fear you- more especially if you are ignorant and stupid because the problem was caused by American ignorance and stupidity.
that produces not more conflict but cooperation.
Nobody will cooperate with cretins who eat their own shit and think it is chocolate cake
So I’m not angry. I’m intrigued and worried about the cultural and psychological sources of the anger and shame that are evident in that document. When I refer to shame, I mean shame among people about the loss of their own cultural knowledge.
Fuck shame. We don't want stupid Americans trying to divide Hindus the way they tried to divide various Muslim polities against each other. India isn't losing its cultural knowledge. It is saying that American shitheads should fuck the fuck off because American foreign policy consists, in Obama's words, of doing stupid shit. Cunts like Pollock contribute to the stupidity and self-defeating nature of American foreign policy. They must be disintermediated. A side-issue is that the Academy has turned to shit because non STEM subjects have become adversely selective. The notion that PhD students should express dissent is laughable. They are as stupid as shit. Look at Kanhaiya Kumar. Where is he now? The answer is that he is in the bosom of the Congress Party which has been wiped out of Punjab, U.P, Bengal- the list goes on.
Shame that it is virtually impossible to produce in India. a series of the quality of the Murty Classical Library. That fact is the result of a deep historical…I don’t want to say robbery, but loss. There is the shame of, “Oh, here’s this guy talking about power, domination, inequality, and hierarchy, and we don’t want to talk about that, we want to just talk about flying saucers in the Vedas and ancient plastic surgery, but here comes along this mean Orientalist.”
But this cunt wasn't talking about the power and domination involved in the War against Terror. So long as there was a prospect that America would pay a little for Afghanistan's reconstruction, India kept quiet. But there is no reason to do so any more. It is clear that America is a racist shithole exporting racist madness. Pollock won't talk about that. He prefers to pretend that he is battling guys who believe in flying saucers. Yet he comes from a country were half the population believes in alien encounters and anal probes. Au fond, he is a naive, ignorant, Yankee doodle who just doesn't get why brown people hate the 'Ugly American' who brought napalm to Indo-China and drone strikes to Islamic lands.
But my sense is that the true shame that is motivating and empowering the document is the ignorance of things that people’s grandfathers and grandmothers knew which they no longer know.
Pollock's grandparents knew that America was a deeply racist country founded upon genocide. He is utterly shameless in not acknowledging that America has continued to kill its Black people while killing gooks and ragheads by the million. There is a good reason Hindu India kept America at arm's length.
They’ve lost it, and how can they possibly get it back? I may be wrong: maybe too much psychology. But that is my sense of things.
This cretin did not have enough psychological nous to get that brown peeps could see Americans killing other brown peeps on their TV screens. They could read American history. They knew what America had done to its 'Indians'. Why the fuck would they want to trust Americans with any riches of their own?
Pollock's interlocutor is a female student with a South Indian Hindu name
GR: You say you’re worried about what kinds of ignorance are driving this kind of document. I was reading the petition and going through the signatories, and a lot of them are associated with IIT [Indian Institute of Technology] and IIM [Indian Institute of Management],
in other words smart peeps who make India stronger
which I find interesting, almost obvious—but it brings me back to something that George Packer wrote about in the New Yorker about Tunisia and the Arab world in general,
which Obama fucked over while appearing nice and cuddly
that “The most likely radicals are people in technical or scientific fields who lack the kind of humanities educations that fosters critical thought.”
Hilarious! Science can call a spade a fucking spade. The (Sub) Humanities shove the spade up their arse in the belief that they are using a spoon to eat some nice chocolate cake.
This is something you bring up in Crisis in the Classics, where you note that the number of humanities PhDs being produced in India are nowhere close to what Western universities aspire to.
India is very poor. It needs to do what Bangladesh is doing not what Belgium is getting up to. This means getting young people into industry- not University- and into private enterprise, not civil service jobs. Religion is useful to economic development because it fosters high trust networks and resolves conflict with 'rent seekers' because of the superior normative status of charitable donations. This is enough to keep classical paideia alive as the handmaid to orthopraxy. Meanwhile, people studying STEM subjects can associate 'open problems' in mathematics with the mysteries of faith and this can drive hermeneutic inquiry. That's it. That's the whole story. But it is not a story Pollock can understand. He is simply too stupid.
No comments:
Post a Comment