Michael Parenti on the Third World

Back in the nineteenth century, Indian Nationalists developed a 'drain theory' such that the Brits were creating poverty in India. But the Brits provided security and protected minorities. In 1947, many Indian Nationalists found they had to flee from their ancestral homes because the Nation they had been fighting for was on the other side of the border. 

Over the course of the Fifties and Sixties, Indians realized that the 'drain theory' was nonsense. The Brits were gone but the country was getting poorer. By some calculations, material standards of living for the vast majority were no better than they had been under the Mughals. India would need to do sensible things rather than focus on historical grievance. 

Michael Parenti, who passed away recently at the age of 92, was a champion of the 'drain theory'. Sadly, his ideas have not perished with him. The following is extracted from his book 'Contrary Notions'.  

The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World" to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct "Second World" of communist states.

Why? The first two worlds were technologically advanced and had great military power. The Third World was technologically backward and militarily weak.  

Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original and inherent historic condition.

The meaning was that they had a lot of potential for 'catch up' growth. One may say of a person who does little exercise, this his muscles are underdeveloped. If he takes up weight training, he might soon become a fine figure of a man. We may equally say that a person who watches TV rather than reading good books is mentally underdeveloped. If they turn off the TV and start reading good books, they will soon find their mental powers have increased. Similarly a country with too few roads and schools and factories may quickly become richer and stronger by emulating what has been done by advanced countries.  

In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources.

Some did. Most didn't.  

That is why the Europeans went through so much trouble to plunder them...

Why occupy them? Why not just keep returning every few years to plunder them again?  

The Third World is rich.

Hobos are rich. Billionaires keep stealing all their wealth which is why they are homeless.  

Only its people are poor-and they are poor because of the pillage they have endured.

Very true. A friend of mine was mugged when he was 18. Everybody thinks he is now a millionaire, but actually he is very poor because he was mugged 50 years ago.  

The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago.

Rich countries can kill invaders or looters of any type. If the Third World was pillaged, it must have been underdeveloped relative to those doing the pillaging.  

First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices; then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, and ebony; and still later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium.

Why were those colonizers not killed? Was it because the colonized were very rich and technologically advanced? No. It was because they were poor and technologically backward.  

Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.

If your own people enslave you and sell you, the guilt lies with them.  

From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe certainly was "ahead" of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings,

as opposed to human sacrifice? 

murders, and other violent crimes;

Europeans invented rape and murder. Such things were unknown elsewhere.  

instances of venereal disease,

Syphilis originated in the Americas 

smallpox,

believed to have originated in North East Africa or India 

typhoid,

we believe it originated at some early date in Africa 

tuberculosis, cholera, and other such afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); and frequency of famines,

England's last famine was in 1623. For the Indian sub-continent, it was in 1974 

slavery,

Europe got rid of slavery a long time ago. True, there was serfdom but it began to breakdown in the middle ages in most parts of Europe.  

prostitution,

which seems to have existed everywhere 

piracy,

see above 

religious massacres and inquisitions.

This is a feature of Abrahamic religions. But there have been religious massacres for political reasons elsewhere.  

Superior firepower,

based on superior technology 

not superior culture,

a culture favourable to scientific discovery is superior.  

has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of global supremacy.

it has also raised up Japan and now China.  

What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries.

Very true. The reason I have no muscles to speak of is not because I am lazy. It is because King Charles is forcing me to watch TV and stuff my face with pizza. Left to myself, I would be working out in the gym.  

With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were set back in their development sometimes for centuries.

If they hadn't been underdeveloped, they wouldn't have become colonies.  

British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India.

But England started to substitute water power and then steam power for human muscle power. 

By 1830, the trade flow was reversed.

because Indians wanted cheap cloth.  

The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods

So what? They were a tiny island far far away. The fact is British ships were transporting Indian textiles to new markets around the world. Indians started opening British style textile mills in the 1850s. Sadly, they were a bit shit at manufacturing. But the Japanese weren't. 

and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force.

Who doesn't want cheap cloth? Poor people. They say 'ban cheap cloth! We want to pay more money to avoid being naked.'  

Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns.

Dacca's decline dates back to 1717- i.e. before the Brits took power. There was significant depopulation in the early British period but Jute exports enabled it to rise in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dacca muslin disappeared after a particular type of cotton plant- phuti karpas (Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta) disappeared. Even if the Brits protected their own textile industry, Indian textiles could be exported to other countries. 

The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories.

No. The Brits bought cotton from the Southern States of the US.  

In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British investors.

Cows get milked because they are technologically backward.  

By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds.

It stagnated. It couldn't fall because it was already very low. But the number of very rich Indians increased. They enjoyed something their ancestors never had- viz security (save in some provinces during the Mutiny). The truth is the Indians paid the Brits for security because they couldn't trust each other.  

The value of the raw materials and commodities that the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers.

Thus, once India became independent, its per capita income doubled. What's that? India got poorer and less able to feed or defend itself after the Brits departed? How can that be? The answer is obvious. Evil Wall Street bankers secretly entered the huts of starving Indians and stole all their gold and diamonds. The Indians cried and cried.  

British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development,

It was so developed a handful of foreigners from a distant island were able to take over the country.  

then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.

Not as successfully as Nehru's 'licence permit Raj'.  

The massive poverty we associate with India was not an original historical condition that antedates imperialism.

But, being shit at fighting or- more accurately- being shit at coming together to oppose a foreign power- did not antedate imperialism. It was a sufficient and necessary condition for it to occur. 

Wealth is transferred from Third World people to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and later on Japan) by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices.

Similarly, the wealth of hobos is being forcibly transferred to Bill Gates & Elon Musk.  

The colonized country is denied the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, trade, and industrial capacity.

But colonialism ended long ago. It was Socialism which kept certain countries poor. Look at North Korea and then look at South Korea. Connect the fucking dots.  

Self-sustenance and self-employment are discouraged at every turn.

By Socialists. Communists were worse in that they collectivized land and created big famines.  

Hundreds of millions of Third World people now live in destitution in remote villages

which formerly had plenty of skyscrapers.  

and congested urban slums, suffering hunger and disease, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption.

This problem is even more acute in Scotland, where the UN rapporteur on food security has shown that lack of access to arable land is causing Scottish women to be unable to grow oats to feed their children.  

Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, with their mental and physical health severely damaged.

There is no fucking Imperialism anywhere- unless you count Putin's Ukrainian invasion as such.  

In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.

Whereas their distant ancestors used to attend fancy Prep Schools and Colleges- right?  

In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force.

by their parents.  

In the Philippines and Malaysia, corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment.

Whom have they lobbied? Their own governments.  

When we say a country is underdeveloped, we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve.

No. We are saying it doesn't have a lot economic development. That may be a good thing if we are speaking of a National Park or other protected landscape.  

The negative connotations of "underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street journal, and parties of contrasting political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as developing nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading.

We should refer to them as countries which are being beaten, robbed and incessantly sodomized by evil Wall Street bankers.  

I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" still implies that backwardness and poverty were part of an original historic condition

whereas the truth is the ancestors of today's Third World people all had private jets and superyachts and penthouse apartments with a view of Central Park.  

and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.

Also, they are being incessantly sodomized. Do you really think the Imperialist will just be content with robbing poor people? Why not rape them as well?  If you see a darkie, you should offer him rape counselling. He may beat you, but you should persist in tenderly inquiring into the state of his rectum. 

What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitative form of dependent capitalism.

Still preferable to Communism or Socialism.  

Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of corporate investment.

Also all the poor people have sore backsides which are dripping with the jizz of evil Capitalists.  

The problem is not poor lands 'or unproductive populations but self-enriching transnationals.

who incessantly sodomize poor people. That's the real story here. People may not mind your telling them they are being economically exploited. What gets to them is the suggestion that Bill Gates has been wrecking their rectum.  

The local economies of the world are increasingly dominated by a network of international corporations that are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan.

The parent companies are sodomizing trillions of Third World people even as we speak.  

Historically, U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without the bother of owning and administering the nations themselves.

But they do insist on fucking all the poor people in the ass.  

Under neo-imperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere.

not to mention their jizz.  

After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a similar strategy of neo-imperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule.

Very true. Hobos are being indirectly controlled by evil Capitalists who steal all their gold and diamonds and then fuck them in the ass.  

Though the newly established Third World country might be far from completely independent,

i.e. it was a client of Moscow or Beijing 

it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a foreign colonial power.

Which is why the smart people ran away from it to some place still ruled by Whites.  

Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on skimming the cream-which is all they really want.

No! They also want to fuck everybody in the ass.  

After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer

they have become habituated to anal rape 

and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere.

Coz they miss having sore bottoms.  

Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.

US sodomizes poor people wherever they may be found. Also, they steal all their gold and diamonds.  

The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global corporate orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and loans.

and anal rape.  

In many instances a comprador class was installed as a first condition for independence, that is, a coterie of rulers who cooperate in turning their own country into a client state for foreign interests.

Third World countries may well end up as kleptocracies.  

A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors.

Strangely, investors lose interest if you tell them they won't make any money by providing finance. You will steal the money and beat them into the bargain.  

In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, no minimum wage or occupational safety laws, no prohibitions on child labor, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.

Why? Because the guys running the place are being paid off handsomely.  

The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.

Plenty of newly independent countries chose to ally with the Communist block. Look at Cuba. It is very rich now.  

In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong social regulations, effective labor unions, and higher wage and work standards.

There is a risk premium associated with shithole countries. A change in regime or a fall in commodity prices can turn your investment into a 'stranded asset'.

Third World countries understood that whining about Whitey won't help them rise. They need to mobilize national savings to invest in infrastructure and 'merit goods' like Education, Public Health etc. Also, don't send your students to study non-STEM subjects in the West. Their brains will turn to shit. Stick to STEM subjects and try to rise up the value chain.  

Katsafanas on Fanaticism & Grievance Politics

 A fanatic is a person who does crazy shit which is counterproductive to the cause he or she espouses. The original meaning was of a person possessed by some God whose behaviour is excused by the devout for that reason. But it is not good behaviour. It must not be emulated even if it is a 'wonder and a sign'. 

Paul Katsafanas disagrees. He thinks fanaticism is a vice- i.e. something which can be controlled. He says 'Like other vices, it can be present in a person who is directed at good ends.'

No vice is directed at good ends. Consider the vice of drunkenness.  A person may be 'directed at a good end'- viz. driving the School bus- but, if he is drunk, what he is doing is very bad indeed. He should be sent to jail. 

Fanaticism is not necessarily a vice. Consider a fanatical vegan who makes a nuisance of himself at the dinner table by banging on about how meat is murder. But being a boring shit head is like being very flatulent. You commit a nuisance which falls below the threshold of vice or immorality. 

 'And it can even be connected to individual or social flourishing: 

No. In that case it would be merely a vociferous sort of 'enlightened self-interest'. We may say 'Churchill was fanatically opposed to Indian independence' in that his own colleagues in the Conservative party felt his speeches and other interventions were counter-productive. It was better for the country to proceed down the path to self-run in a manner which was beneficial to the British economy and Imperial defence. By contrast, nobody says 'Churchill was fanatically opposed to Hitler' . After all, it was common knowledge that he could say nice things about Hitler when Germany posed no threat to the UK. Indeed, more even than Mussolini, there was a possibility that Hitler could serve British interests by gaining territory to his East in a manner which made Eastern Europe more secure, stable, and economically integrated. (Indeed, when Poland and Hungary took a bite out of Czechoslovakia, there was a possibility that a German 'corridor' would be ceded in return for a collective security pact). Thus, since Churchill's policies with respect to Hitler were highly productive, it follows that he was no fanatic in that connection. Later, it turned out he also wasn't a fanatic on the topic of India. He apologized to Nehru and made friends with him with the result that India remained within the Sterling Zone and retained a British Admiral after Churchill returned to Downing Street. 

there can be conditions under which it’s all things considered better, either individually or socially, to be a fanatic.' 

No. If a thing succeeds then it was not a case of fanaticism. It was a case of foresight. 

Katsafanas contradicts his previous assertion that fanaticism is a vice. He says it is a type of devotion.

We should reserve fanaticism for a pathological form of devotion,

just say it is obviously counterproductive and be done with it. There is no need to speak of pathology. It is not as though the thing can be cured.  

which couples devotion with a problematic stance.

Everything is 'problematic' to some shithead or the other. 'Counterproductive' is objective. Look at the outcome. Consider the Circumcellions. They were a Christian sect with left wing views. But zeal for martyrdom caused them to attack soldiers with wooden swords in the hope that they would be killed for the the greater glory of God. But this gave their sect a bad name. It caused 'scandal'- i.e. it created a stumbling block to faith in the new Religion.  

Insofar as devotion to some end is good, fanatical devotion to the end will also be in certain respects good.

No. If you attack a soldier hoping to achieve martyrdom, you aren't a 'witness' to a great Truth. You are crazier than a shithouse rat.  

But it will still be a pathology, involving a problem with the person’s psychology. 

Not necessarily. There really are people with nothing to lose. Why not die doing crazy shit if the alternative is cholera or leprosy or just remaining a half starved prole? 

Distinguishing fanaticism and devotion, while treating fanaticism as a vicious form of devotion, clarifies what is at stake in the debates about whether fanaticism is bad.

No. The devout get to say what is or is devotion and what is crazy shit. The Catholic Church condemned the Circumcellions along with other Donatists (who believed the Church must be a community of Saints, not flawed human beings.).  

There are three important points. 

If by 'important', you mean 'stupid'- sure. 

First, in ordinary discourse we typically treat fanaticism as bad. There should be at least a minor presumption in favor of accounts that match customary usage. Treating fanaticism as a vicious form of devotion enables us to do so.

No. Farting at the dinner table is bad. It isn't 'vicious'.  

Moreover, it enables us to do so while still recognizing that many praiseworthy forms of devotion resemble (but are not identical to) fanaticism.

The word comes from 'fanum'- a temple or sanctuary. Such places might have a 'fool for God'- i.e. a crazy, drooling, naked dude shrieking obscenities. The congregation says 'he is touched' or possessed by the tutelary deity of the shrine.  

Second, one underlying disagreement in these disputes about the badness of fanaticism is whether every case of resolute, doubt-free dedication to costly ends constitutes fanaticism.

If it is counter-productive, it is fanaticism. Otherwise, it is foresight. Some years ago, I'd have said the Taliban was fanatical. But, they are now in power and appear better able to do deals with other powers- e.g. Russia, China, India etc.  

Many forms of political and social activism involve the three core features of fanaticism (high degree of commitment, 

Nonsense! A fanatic who shuts the fuck up if beaten sufficiently, is still a fanatic just as a crazy person who behaves while the eye of the muscular orderly upon his remains crazy.  

high degree of certainty,

This is not required at all. Self-confidence is one thing. Vociferousness is another. But degrees of certainty have to do with some sort of epistemological calculus. True, there may be highly educated fanatics but what is more common is ignorant nutters doing stupid, counterproductive, shite.  

         high degree of willingness to sacrifice

Some fanatics are the first to turn tail and run away. Sacrifice requires self-control. Impulsive shitheads may lack it entirely. 

Consider someone like Nelson Mandela,

sentenced at the Rivionia trial in 1962. Significantly, only Xhosa, Sotho, White & Indians were involved. There were no Zulus. The big question was whether South Africa would be dominated by Boers or by Zulus. The Xhosa needed to play their cards cleverly.  

who devoted himself in a wholehearted, unbending manner to his cause and was willing to endure extreme costs to sustain it.

After McMillan's 'winds of change' speech and increasing Soviet and Chinese aid to African leaders, a rapid transition to majority rule was expected. The Apartheid regime lasted longer than expected at least partly because African leaders turned out be utterly shit. Still, by 1985, the writing was on the wall. Mandela's genius was to stay in jail while Govan Mbeki went free in 1987. What really mattered was the attitude of Buthelezi, leader of the Zulus. 

It was obvious that after Buthelezi became critical of the ANC in the Eighties, that some sort of deal would have to be done once the Soviets and the Americans came to an understanding and the Cubans were withdrawn. No fanatics featured is the politics of the period. After the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Ian Smith had to commence negotiation. In South Africa, a corruption scandal (Muldergate) had a big fallout at the end of the Seventies. The incentive matrix for White politicians had changed. But African politicians too understood that what really mattered was money. Majority rule was the only safe way to loot the country without, like Eschel Rhoodie, being extradited and sent to jail. 

More generally, the champion of civil rights, the environmental activist, the person struggling against oppression might all display these three features.

That display may be a pretence. What matters is whether they actually achieve anything.  

Katsafanas does not see that fanaticism may be strategic. Indeed, the ability to delude yourself that you are fanatically devoted to a particular cause may have survival value. 

A person counts as fanatical to the extent that: 

1. Sacred values: she adopts one or more sacred values.

One may go to the 'fanum'- e.g. Church- without adopting any sacred value. Indeed, one may 'speak in tongues' or handle snakes or experience conversion hysteria one day and be back to your usual self the very next day. A lot has to do with suggestibility and vulnerability to 'engulfment'. 

Katsafanas clarified what he means by a 'sacred value'. Strangely, it isn't what religions have meant by it.  

1. Inviolable: if V2 is an ordinary value, then it is prohibited to sacrifice V1 for V2, regardless of the quantities of V1 and V2.

Not in any religion known to us. Everybody sacrifices VI for V2 and then expiates their sin by saying a couple of Hail Marys or whatever. As the Greek Orthodox Church teaches, Economia is better than Akreibia.  

2. Incontestable: It is prohibited to contemplate trading or sacrificing V1 for most or all other values.

There's always a workaround.  

3. Dialectically Invulnerable: The agent insulates her commitment to V1 from the effects of justificatory reasoning. That is, while the agent may think about V1’s justification, consider objections to V1, consider alternatives to V1, engage in thought experiments with respect to V1, and so on, the agent does not stake her commitment to V1 on the outcome of this justificatory reasoning. There is no dialectical move that would disrupt the agent’s commitment to V1.

Because it is meaningless. Philosophers don't seem to get that 'commitment' doesn't mean shit.  

2. Fragility of the self: she needs to treat the value as sacred in order to preserve her identity.

No. This 'engulfment'. Her identity has been compromised by the bat in her belfry.  

3. Fragility of the value: she takes the value’s status as sacred to be threatened when it is not widely accepted.

That's just cognitive dissonance. But if the thing relates to God- i.e. what is genuinely sacred- there's always a workaround.  

4. Group identity: she identifies herself with a group, where this group is defined by shared commitment to the sacred value.

Groups split up all the time. So do couples- including married ones. Many commit. Few stay the distance. 

 Both the fragile and nonfragile agent can see a core commitment as an essential component of their identity;

Anybody can see anything as an essential component of their identity. They are always wrong. There is no component of identity which is true in all possible worlds. 

both can attempt to secure that commitment against certain kinds of threats.

but 'securing' a commitment doesn't do shit.  

But the fragile agent has an exaggerated sense of threat, seeing threats where there are none, and seeing mere disagreement as threat.

A robust agent may do so. A fragile agent might simply run away or take a lot of drugs.  

Empirical research supports this point:

Sadly, empirical research in this field is crap.  

fanatics tend to display a heightened sense of threat,

Guys who work as bodyguards do so. OMG! The US Secret Service is staffed entirely by fanatics. By contrast, a religious fanatic may handle poisonous snakes oblivious to the threat they present.  

seeing themselves and their communities as facing “intense trouble, difficulty, or danger” (Jensen et al 2018: 7).

Or they may fanatically believe that their community is invulnerable. Why is Churchill making such a fuss about Hitler and the so called 'Battle of Britain'? It is well known that Krauts are stooooopid. They can't fly planes. All they can do is eat sausages and drink beer.  

Importantly, these individuals typically take mere disagreement or mere non-acceptance of their sacred values as constituting a threat.

Do they shit themselves? If so, they genuinely think there is a threat. If they aren't shitting themselves, chances are they don't feel threatened. They are merely jelly or grumpy or angry coz they feel their dick isn't getting the acclaim it deserves.  

For one example, consider Anders Breivik.

Nazi nutter. He didn't really feel threatened by the guys he shot. But he probably did feel his dick was tiny. Apparently, his mother had been an utter loony toons who 'feminised' him. His best friend was Pakistani and thus he was not forced to pay jizya to the Muslims gangs who ruled much of Oslo. 

Breivik carried out a bombing and mass shooting in Norway in 2011 and was widely characterized as a fanatic.

He was a loser with delusions of grandeur. We might compare him to Herostratus who burnt down the Temple at Ephesus so as to gain immortal notoriety.  

Shortly before carrying out his attacks, which left 77 people dead, Breivik distributed a 1518- page manifesto that described the various ways in which he saw traditional nationalist values, which he regards as sacred, as threatened by Islam, political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, and a host of other putative enemies.

In other words he was a MAGA fan avant la lettre.  

The examples of fanaticism offered at the beginning of this paper— the insurrectionist, the jihadist, the white nationalist—are analogous: there, too, we often find apocalyptic theories and a sense of widespread threat to their sacred values.

Trump or Musk or Thiel may have such theories. But they are very successful in propagating their beliefs- probably because they are as rich as fuck. 

Katsafanas has a well written essay in Aeon titled- 

Incandescent anger

Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged.

Sure they can. Trump's grievance was that he wasn't POTUS. His grievance has been assuaged. Now his grievance is that he isn't immortal. Maybe Musk can freeze his head. 

For democracy’s survival, we must grapple with this dynamic

Democracy will survive in places which have never been ruled any other way. It won't endure long in places where it has never existed.  

‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.’

– from Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin

Baldwin knew about pain. Many of the guys who hated him didn't. That's why they had no empathy.  

Some people seem driven more by what they oppose, reject and hate than by what they promote, affirm and revere.

Some people are 'antagonomic'. They are against anything and everything. But they tend not to be fanatics precisely because they are also against fanaticism.  

Their political commitments, personal identities and emotional lives appear to be structured more by opposition, resentment and hostility than by a positive set of ideals or aspirations.

Women are fanatical. That's why they don't want to sleep with me. It isn't the case that they find me ugly, smelly and as poor as fuck.  

Tucker Carlson, a prominent Right-wing television host and former Fox News anchor, has no shortage of enemies. On his shows, he has condemned gender-neutral pronouns, immigrants, the removal of Confederate statues, mainstream media, the FBI and CIA, globalism, paper straws, big tech, foreign aid, school curricula, feminism, gingerbread people, modern art – and the list goes on. Each item is presented as an existential threat or a sign of cultural decay. Even when conservatives controlled the White House and the US Senate, he presented those like him as under siege. Victories never brought relief, only more enemies, more outrage, more reasons to stay aggrieved.

One could say the same thing about Noam Chomsky. The difference is that Tucker makes way more money.  

In April 2025, Donald Trump took the stage to mark the 100th day of his second term as US president. You might have expected a moment of triumph. He had reclaimed the presidency, consolidated power within the Republican Party, and issued a vast range of executive orders. But the mood wasn’t celebratory. It was combative. Trump spent most of his time attacking his predecessor Joe Biden, repeating false claims about the 2020 election, denouncing the press, and warning of threats posed by immigrants, ‘radical Left lunatics’ and corrupt elites. The tone was familiar: angry, aggrieved, unrelenting. Even in victory, the focus was on enemies and retribution.

In other words, he recycled his old material. If it aint broke, don't fix it.  

This dynamic isn’t unique to the United States. Leaders like Narendra Modi in India,

who has to keep pivoting because the country is growing rapidly and expectations have changed. In particular, it is now poorer women who are the swing voters. Look at Modi & Nitish's campaign pitch in the recent Bihar elections. It came down to bribing women while reminding younger voters of 'Jungle Raj' under the Yadav dynasty.  

Viktor Orbán in Hungary

he pivoted big time on the advise of Finklestein. He started off as a Soros-funded Liberal before moving further and further to the right. Again, this comes down to buying votes and ensuring his allies get rich.  

and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil

Who wouldn't have been elected if Lula hadn't been in jail. Now it is his turn to do porridge.  

have built movements that thrive on perpetual grievance.

The Left has its own Grievance Studies industry. Why do heterosexual men have dicks? Dicks cause RAPE! Chop them off immediately.  

Even after consolidating power, they continue to cast their nations as under siege – from

Neo-liberalism, Patriarchy, Normative Heterosexuality, Misogyny, Homophobia, Racism, and the fact that heterosexual dicks haven't been chopped off.  

immigrants, intellectuals, journalists or cultural elites. The rhetoric remains combative, the mood aggrieved.

People get aggrieved about not being allowed to compete in Women's Athletics just because they have a long beard and a big dick. J.K Rowling is very evil for not supporting them.  

Figures like Carlson and Trump

and Kamala. Biden's job was to make her look good. He was very evil. Did you know he has a white dick?  

don’t pivot from grievance to resolution. Victory doesn’t bring peace, grace or reconciliation. Instead, they remain locked in opposition. Their energy, their meaning, even their identity, seem to depend on having an endless list of enemies to fight.

Trump & Sanders rose relative to Hilary because they opposed TPP. Trump went the extra mile. He promised to protect American jobs from low wage foreign competition as well as from immigrants.  Carlson is a successful TV personality who knows about 'focus groups' and what's trending on Social Media. 

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition.

Why do Political parties oppose each other. Democrats ought to campaign for Republican candidates. Also, how come the guys at Ford don't praise the cars made by G.M.  

When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Competition doesn't entail enmity.  

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention.

Why don't they just talk about their cat, Mitzi?  

Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation.

Yes it can. People are motivated by money and fame and power and influence.  

Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.

We call them Feminists. Bitches be kray kray.  

And not all leaders appear to be calculating and strategic: Trump’s outrage is genuine.

It is tactical. He made nice with Mamdani because he could see the young man was popular with voters. Lots of Jews voted for him.  Trump needed to pivot to 'affordability' though he now seems to be turning away from it because he realizes that inflation won't go away in time for mid-terms. 

This pattern of endless denunciation and grievance has been noticed by many scholars.

Grievance Studies was a Leftist innovation. It is only with the Tea Party that you saw an organized back-lash. But it was Protectionism and Migration which gave them the edge. But for COVID, Trump would have got his second term. 

As a recent study puts it, ‘grievance politics revolves around the fuelling, funnelling, and flaming of negative emotions such as fear or anger.’

& using the right pronouns and saying 'Latinx' and not hiring straight White males.  

But what makes this oppositional stance appealing?

Competition works that way. We like to see athletes trash-talking each other. It lends drama to the proceedings.  

If it’s not just strategic posturing, what explains it?

Entertainment value. We pay more for what is more engrossing.  

We can begin answering that question by distinguishing two ways that movements or orientations can be oppositional.

Either the opposition involves something which actually matters or it is just 'trash talk'.  

Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s.

Young people genuinely didn't want to get killed by 'gooks'. Tax-payers too were unhappy.  

This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.

In other words, 'rational self interest' was involved. That's why Carter granted unconditional pardons to draft dodgers.  

The anti-apartheid movement offers another example. For decades, activists fought to dismantle a specific political system in South Africa. The struggle demanded great sacrifice and long-term opposition, but these efforts were tethered to a definite goal. Once that goal was achieved, the movement largely dissolved. Its antagonism had a purpose and, when that purpose was fulfilled, the opposition faded.

There will still be people who want White farmers to fuck off. Actually, all Europeans and Asians and dudes from the other tribe should fuck the fuck off.  

The Vietnam War protests and the anti-apartheid movements both involved forms of opposition and grievance, but their antagonism was in the service of positive goals.

Just as those who were getting rich of the Vietnam War or the Apartheid system were pursuing a 'positive goal'. They called it keeping Communism at bay.  

The movements discussed above – those led by Carlson, Trump, Orbán and so on – are very different.

Nope. Trump & Orban wanted and got power. Trump is hinting that he might change the Constitution to get a third term.  

Their energy, coherence and sense of identity seem to depend on opposition itself.

You can say this about anything. My sense of identity seems to depend on my spirited opposition to turning into a cat.  

Grievance animates their followers; hostility to enemies becomes central to how they think, feel and see themselves. Without enemies, the movement would unravel.

This dude's essay would unravel if he didn't hate Carlson, Trump & Orban so much.  

These examples indicate that hostility, anger and opposition don’t necessarily make a movement problematic.

Problematic is just a polite way of saying 'shitty'.  

On the contrary, they can be signs of moral concern, legitimate reactions to the fact that something precious is being threatened.

e.g. my personhood is threatened by the danger that I might turn into a cat.  

As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life

as can peeing and shitting 

by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action.

I wanted to piss upon Amartya Sen to express moral concern. Sadly, I was too drunk and ended up pissing on a cat. I think it put a hex on me. That is why I have to struggle so hard to keep from turning into a cat.   

Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values.

As can pissing and shitting. 

And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’

He got shot by an angry dude.  

But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake.

Shooting uppity niggers wasn't done for its own sake. It was done to benefit White males.  

Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point.

In which case there is no movement. There's just a group of antagonomic nutters. Exile them to some shitty University Department.  

That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations.

Neither term has a well defined extension.  

Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better.

Trump wants to change America. Kamala merely wanted to replace White heterosexual Males with African-American women. Homos were welcome to fuck themselves.  

Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.

That's Kamala. She even expresses hostility to African-American women in Biden's White House.  Why can't everybody just dedicate themselves to praising Kamala? 

Grievance politics involves a constitutively negative orientation.

Why are White peeps so goddam White? Can't they at least have black stripes, like Zebras? Also how come some peeps don't have to sit down to pee? How is that fair?  

That’s what sets it apart from liberatory movements,

which are against the interests of the 'oppressors'. They may want to defend the status quo.  

struggles to realise ideals,

Ideals can clash with each other.  

or efforts to defend cherished values.

see above.  

If you value something, you’ll be disturbed by threats to it. You’ll be sensitive to people who might undermine it, and you may be moved to defend it. That’s normal. That’s part of what it is to value anything at all. But constitutively negative orientations are different.

Only if they amount to pathological 'antagonomia'. This may be treatable with medication. 

Values are just pretexts for expressing hostility.

But hostility can be expressed even if values are shared. Also, it may be dangerous to express hostility.  

If one value is secured, we just need a new outlet and a new justification for hostility.

If you get paid to be hostile- that's what you do. Soldiers are meant to be hostile to the enemy. They shouldn't be blowing kisses to them.  

The driving need is not to protect or preserve, but to oppose.

In the UK, there is a person who gets paid to be the Leader of the Opposition. 

But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation?

If they get paid to do it, the answer is 'money'. But it may also be 'public esteem' or 'power & influence'.  

Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards.

Money has a very positive psychological effect.  

Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility,

Nonsense! You can't cure a migraine by shouting 'boo to Trump!'  

offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

Money does that. Being as poor as fuck while screaming your tits off at Neo-Liberalism doesn't provide shit.  

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms.

Emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. They are mechanisms which have been selected for because they have survival value. But suppressing emotions or running the fuck away may be preferable.  

Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed.

More particularly if they don't exist.  

They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Charlatans might make some money by helping you 'repurpose' your feelings of inadequacy brought on by having a tiny dick into a feeling of superiority because 'small is beautiful'. 

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have.

e.g. immortality.  

If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure.

Religion exists for this reason. It has high income elasticity of demand because even rich peeps die.  

In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks.

This tends to be true. There's an opportunity cost to a young person's time. The nerd may be on track to becoming a billionaire.  

Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.

If you are as stupid as shit- sure. Otherwise you try to find out about crypto or day trading or becoming a distributor for Chinese electric cars.  

There’s a similar mechanism that transforms humiliation and low self-worth into a form of spiteful hatred. Philosophers call this ressentiment – a French word for resentment, but with a twist. It names not just a passing feeling, but a deeper emotional mechanism, one that transmutes pain, powerlessness and humiliation into condemnation.

Not in Germany. They went in for Science & Technology and building up industrial capacity and a kick-ass army.  

In the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that ressentiment is the emotional mechanism behind many of our values.

He taught worthless shit. Also he had syphilis and went mad. Smart Germans were doing STEM subjects.  

Modern ‘morality begins’, Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), ‘when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.’

In other words, Christianity sucks ass big time. Nietzsche's daddy was a Minister of Religion.  

Since then, a range of thinkers

shitheads who studied and then taught worthless shite 

have traced the way that ressentiment shapes social and political life. As Wendy Brown describes it, ressentiment is a ‘triple achievement: it produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt, it produces a culprit responsible for the hurt, and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt …

In other words, bitches be kray kray coz they have to sit down to pee.  

’ Put simply, ressentiment is an emotional mechanism that transforms feelings of worthlessness or humiliation into vindictive feelings of superiority, rancour and blame.

People who teach non-STEM subjects know they are worthless. This makes them very vindictive and rancorous.  

We can see how this plays out in individual lives. Imagine someone who grows up in a declining rural town.

or who teaches imbeciles in a declining University department.  

She dreams of escape, fantasising about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life.

No. The stupid cunt telling this story thinks the woman is a failure just because she doesn't teach worthless shite to imbeciles. 

But then she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric.

As opposed to Professors of 'Grievance Studies'.  

The people she once admired and envied – the people she now identifies as the urban elite – are cast as the cause of her suffering.

Only if they keep putting up immigrants in hotels while she can't make rent on her mobile home.  

They are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, and hostile to her way of life.

True enough.  

What once seemed like an image of the good life now appears as injustice.

Demographic replacement appears unjust. White peeps don't want to go the way of the First Nations.  

And, rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices,

e.g keeping out migrants and getting protection from low-wage competition.  

she becomes energised by condemnation and hostility.

Just as these guys are energised by hating on this trailer trash woman from a fly-over state. I bet she is morbidly obese and smokes Marlborough Lights. 

Or picture another person, a lonely man who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins.

Coz he is poor. Money is honey my dear sonny & a rich man's joke is always funny.  

He feels isolated, sad, alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him, it’s the world.

He becomes a Marxist?  

Reading incel websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him.

Why can't hot girls just suck me off already?  

In time, he internalises this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to voice.

I suppose these nutters will get Chairs in 'Loser Studies'.  There is no shite too stupid not to be taught at Uni. What is interesting is that many younger White heterosexual men who have been squeezed out of tenure track positions by DEI have already take this road. It turns out Church going young men, can get attractive wives who don't beat them. 

These cases differ in an interesting way: the economic case involves a real form of structural injustice, whereas the incel case involves an ideology that invents a grievance.

If you punch me, I have a genuine grievance. If I punch you, your grievance is imaginary. 

But notice that beyond this difference, there’s a similar emotional arc. A person starts out with a positive vision of the good. But their life is full of hardship, disappointment and despair.

No it isn't. If you keep your faith in God, you are a winner.  

Initially, they might blame themselves. And that’s painful. It’s hard to sit in one’s own pain, feeling responsible for it, feeling like a failure. It’s especially hard when you see other people enjoying the life that you wish you had.

Just accept Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Lord God and Saviour and you are ahead of the game.  

In time, these people encounter a narrative that redirects the blame.

Socialism. Feminism. Atheism.  

Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault, it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed or undermined. This kind of story is seductive.

Communists ruled half the world not so long ago.   

It offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth.

As does getting a pay hike.  

It offers a way to deflect pain, assign blame and recast oneself as a victim.

Fuck that! Recast yourself as a winner. Victims tend to get fucked in the ass.  

It also offers a community of like-minded peers who reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound together through animosity, they attack or disparage an outgroup.

Just as this cunt is doing.  

The individual now belongs to a group of people who share outrage and recognise the same enemies.

His enemies are Trump, Orban- even Modi in distant India.  

The chaos and turmoil of life is organised into a clear narrative of righteousness: in opposing the enemy, we become good.

This cunt thinks he is fighting for the good by bad-mouthing Trump & Carlson. But his efforts are counter-productive. We feel he is shit at the subject he teaches.  

As the 20th-century thinkers René Girard and Mircea Eliade remind us,

you can leverage a PhD in Proust or Samkhya into any kind of charlatanry 

opposition can do more than divide – it can bind. Girard saw how communities forge unity through a common enemy, channelling their fears and frustrations onto scapegoats.

Girard was wrong. Scapegoats don't achieve shit though they may be part of some hoary ritual. What forged unity was good military training and capable generals. Otherwise, the people were conquered, enslaved, and shipped off to different parts of the Empire.  

This shared act of condemnation offers not just relief, but belonging.

It really doesn't. The thing was a spectacle- like watching criminals being hanged at Tyburn.  

Eliade, approaching these points from a different angle, examined our yearning to fold personal suffering into a larger, morally charged drama.

He too was wrong. Still, he did fuck the 13 year old daughter of his Sanskrit Professor.  

Grievance politics draws on both patterns. It doesn’t just vent rage; it weaves pain into a story. It offers a script in which hardship becomes injustice, and outrage becomes identity.

Like what Mamdani did in New York? The suffering of Gazans helped him immensely.  

These patterns aren’t just speculative. Scholars have traced how pain, disappointment and a sense of failure can be transfigured into grievance – how personal frustration becomes political identity.

This has never happened. There are economic and political issues which people have good reason to believe can be resolved in a manner favourable to themselves.  

In her work on rural Wisconsin,

Wisconsin was more reformist and Socialist because of the high number of Scandinavian and German migrants.  

Katherine Cramer shows how economic stagnation can give rise to resentment toward urban elites.

But Wisconsin flipped for Biden in 2020. Maybe they just didn't like female candidates.  

Arlie Russell Hochschild, drawing on interviews in Louisiana, describes a ‘deep story’ in which people feel passed over, displaced, left behind.

They keep voting for Trump.  

Kate Manne and Amia Srinivasan examine how narratives in incel communities convert rejection and loneliness into a sense of moral entitlement.

They make a mountain out of a molehill. There does seem to be a cult of the mass shooter. But there are also people who go in for 'suicide by cop'.  

And a wide range of research in psychology, sociology and philosophy explores how diminished self-worth can be redirected outward: into anger, blame and opposition.

I suppose Professors of non-STEM subjects have diminished self-worth. That's why Grievance Studies flourishes on campus.  

When movements are formed and sustained in this way, they are no longer organised around a shared vision of the good.

There never has been a 'shared vision of the good'. What people agreed about was that getting conquered and enslaved sucks ass big time.  

Instead, they are structured by shared animosity. Opposition isn’t incidental. It becomes the structure through which meaning, coherence and solidarity are generated.

Nonsense! There may be a political party or looser type of organization which offers individuals a method of self-advancement while pushing for a particular socio-economic agenda.  

Often, these narratives begin with real problems and legitimate grievances – the economic case certainly does.

That's the one that matters. Trump now has to persuade voters that the economy has gotten better under him. It's a tough sell.  

The most effective narratives are superficially plausible. But they tend to be exaggerated and simplistic.

Like this essay. Trump is bad. But who is good? Kamala?  

It may be true that economic opportunities are scarce and financial security is precarious. But the ressentiment narrative turns this into a story of blame and hostility,

like Mamdani banging on about billionaires?  

painting a simple picture of who is responsible and what can be done about it.

That's what got Mamdani elected. Trump was very sweet to him because he saw the lad was a 'winner', not a 'whiner'.  

It transforms genuine frustration into wholesale animosity.

Students of non-STEM subjects experience genuine frustration because their Professors are stupider than they are. 

And that’s why these movements need enemies.

No. They would prefer it if their rivals sucked them off and pledged allegiance to them. 

They define themselves through rejection.

Trump hasn't been rejected.  

Unlike contingently negative orientations – which are built around the pursuit of some good, some value worth realising – constitutively negative orientations draw their energy from resistance, antagonism and negation.

in the old days, when you said this, people understood you meant Jews or uppity niggers or peeps who have to sit down to pee.  

Their integrity depends on the persistence of something to oppose.

Bitches be kray kray because they have to sit down to pee. That is why they make such a fuss about getting promoted at work. Why can't they understand that they'd be happier sucking off the boss for half the pay of their male colleagues?  

The result is a kind of political metabolism that requires enemies to function. If the enemy disappears, the orientation loses its shape.

Very true. That's why the USA collapsed once Mad King George fucked the fuck off.  

This is not simply a matter of having enemies, which is common to many political movements. Nor is it a criticism of all forms of opposition; many just causes require resistance and a focus on enemies. The key point is structural:

if I like it, it is good. If I don't like it, is a form of mental illness.  

in constitutively negative orientations, opposition is pursued for its own sake. Opposition is no longer a means to an end; it is the end itself.

That's antagonomia.  

Resolution becomes a threat rather than a goal, for resolution would rob the movement of the very antagonism that gives it purpose.

After the Revolution you have to kill a lot of antagonomic nutters. Stalin did a great job killing Old Bolsheviks.  

Viewed in this light, the Carlson monologues and Trump rallies aren’t simply strategic or performative. They’re sustaining a structure of belonging built around the rhetoric of attack. What the movements share is an inability to rest, to consolidate, to affirm. They live through negation.

Like Sanders & Mamdani & so forth.  

With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly.

We can see this man's bigotry.  

In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals.

No. It begins with injury.  

We have definite ideas about what the world should be like.

No we don't- unless we teach useless shite.  

We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices.

e.g. women having to sit down to pee.  

From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.

Biden forced Kamala to sit down to pee. What a bastard! 

But grievance politics operates differently.

It may use class action suits or form coalitions to change political outcomes. Grievance Studies, by contrast, is stupid shite about how it's totes unfair that women have to sit down to pee.  

It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy.

That's how we all feel as babies. The solution is obvious. Ban babies. Everybody should be 30 years old at birth.  

Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame.

Guys who get laid off because the bosses have moved the factory to Mexico don't feel angry.  

Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances.

like this cretin mentioning Modi. Fuck does he know about India?  

The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much.

No. They are crucial. Trump will lose the mid-terms unless he brings down the cost of living. The fear is that he will get sucked into costly wars in Nigeria and Venezuela. True, they have oil but so did Iraq. That didn't end well.  

What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.

In a Democracy, it is the rival party. We have competitive markets including a market for votes.  

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire.

These guys have no fucking engagement with anything real. That's why they teach useless shite.  

People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want?

Why not do your fucking job properly?  

Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

Redress grievances and then go the extra mile by solving collective action problems in a manner which benefits them. Suddenly, they start voting for you.  

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears.

 No. People are rational. The question is why Western Governments did stupid shit on issues like migration. The answer was they were afraid of a vocal minority which would label them Racist or Fascist or whatever. That bluff has been called. 

The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies.

What sustained Grievance Studies and DEI was the need for jobs as administrators creating work for each other while the Chinese ate our lunch.  

Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation

is meaningless shite.  

– as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond.

It makes your response even stupider and more counter-productive. Just say, half of all American are evil cunts. They voted for Trump. Send them to concentration camps and then deport their sorry asses. Also make gender reassignment surgery free and compulsory for all heterosexual males.  

It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause.

In other words tell the Grievance Studies nutters to shove their Identity Politics up their own arses.  

If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain.

Very true. George Washington got so depressed when Mad King George fucked off that he topped himself.  

It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage.

Chamberlain appeased Hitler. But then became obvious that Hitler was just getting started. Thus Germany became England's enemy.  

The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

No. The Brits won. Then they focussed on rebuilding their own country.  

Seeing the dynamic in this way also clarifies what real resistance would require.

Churchill knew what real resistance required. This useless cunt knows shit.  

The aim isn’t just to rebut false claims, to condemn hostility or to attempt appeasement. The solution is to redirect the energies that grievance politics mobilises. To do so, we need alternative forms of meaning, identity and belonging, which satisfy those needs in a way that doesn’t depend on hostile antagonism.

Get angry white folk to turn into dope-smoking zebras.  

We need an orientation that is grounded not in grievance, but in affirmation.

i.e. virtue signalling 

One that draws strength not from hostility, but from commitment to something worth loving, revering or cherishing.

Mom's apple pie especially if she is actually your Daddy and performed gender reassignment surgery on himself while high on drugs at an 'Occupy Wall Street' encampment.  

What we need, then, are narratives that can sustain devotion.

The Bible has such a narrative.  

Devotion is a form of attachment that combines love or reverence with commitment and a willingness to endure.

No. A devout Buddhist may reject any form of attachment. A devout Christian may fear, not love, God. As for 'willingness to endure', some devout people have it. Others don't.  

It orients a person toward something they regard as intrinsically worthwhile

in which case that orientation pre-existed.  

– something that gives shape to a life, even in the face of difficulty or doubt.

No. Devotion may not give shape to this life. It may alter the after-life.  

Like constitutively negative orientations, devotion can provide identity,

or it can lead to the dissolution of personal identity 

purpose and belonging.

It may involve giving up both.  

But it does so without requiring an enemy.

But it can have an enemy. Even Lord Buddha had to face Mara.  

Its energy comes not from opposition, but from fidelity to a value that’s seen as worthy of ongoing care.

It may have no fucking energy. An unfaithful person may be devout. Great fidelity may coexist with complete nihilism.  

In my own work, I’ve argued that devotion can supply a stable sense of meaning, identity and purpose, without lapsing into antagonism and dogmatism.

Or it can do the reverse. There is no causal connection, or even any strong correlation, between these things.  

This picture resonates with Josiah Royce’s claim that loyalty – which he understands as a form of devotion – provides ‘a personal solution of the hardest of human practical problems, the problem: “For what do I live? Why am I here? For what am I good? Why am I needed?”’

Resonating with a useless tosser only means you are a useless tosser.  

It aligns with Harry Frankfurt’s claim that a person’s life is meaningful only if it is devoted to goods that the person cares about for their own sake, and with Thomas Aquinas’s observation that ‘the direct and principal effect of devotion is the spiritual joy of the mind …’ Devotion, so understood, is a steadfast responsiveness to what we cherish, capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy.

This is also true of enjoying a crafty wank.  

Of course, offering devotion as an alternative to grievance politics does not mean dismissing all grievances.

It doesn't mean anything at all. Wanking is an alternative to grievance politics. Monetize it by buying shares in Pornhub.  

Many forms of suffering and injustice – economic inequality, systemic racism, political exclusion – warrant deep frustration and sustained protest.

Sadly, sustained protest may cause smart people to run away. The economy goes off a cliff. China takes a technological lead. They get the whip-hand.  

To feel aggrieved in the face of real harm is not pathological; it is often morally appropriate.

Fuck that. If you are facing real harm, run away or call the police or buy a fucking gun.  

Anger, complaint and critique are vital political tools.

They are counter-productive is smart peeps run the fuck away.  

What makes grievance politics problematic is not the presence of complaint, but the constitutively negative orientation.

That is certainly the problem with Grievance Studies.  

Grievance politics is not rooted in a desire to repair or transform, but in a need to oppose.

This was the problem with the librards. Trump & Co. promised to make working people better off. Hilary & Kamala were all like 'vote for me coz I have to sit down to pee- which is totes unfair.'  

The problem isn’t the grievance itself – the problem is when perpetual grievance becomes the whole point, and opposition displaces aspiration.

That's why non-STEM subjects turned to shit. They couldn't raise productivity and thus focussed on whining about how it was totes unfair that smart peeps were doing well.  

Grievance politics offers coherence, energy and a sense of belonging.

Identity politics does that- but it can be counter-productive. 

But it does so by centring life around perpetual opposition.

This dude is perpetually opposed to Trump, Orban and even Modi in distant India.  

Its psychological and existential satisfactions are real, but profoundly damaging.

This guys brain was damaged by studying stupid shit.  

When identity is built through antagonism, it becomes dependent on conflict. And that means it can’t stop; it can’t rest.

It publishes essays in Aeon while schilling another worthless book.  

The deeper challenge, then, isn’t just to rebut its claims or counter its policies. It’s to offer orientations that can sustain identity, meaning and solidarity without requiring an endless sea of enemies.

Orient yourself to wanking. Please yourself without worrying about all the dudes currently ploughing your wife.  

That’s a harder task – but it’s the only hope for combatting the politics of grievance.

No. The politics of grievance is combatted by providing better solutions to collective action problems. When the underlying harm is remedied, the grievance disappears. People feel they have a stake in the system. They are willing to make sacrifices to preserve it from external and internal enemies. 

Political problems have political, not philosophical, solutions. In an advanced economy, this has to do with fiscal and monetary and trade policy. Trump is a Wharton graduate of the class of '68, back when optimal tariff theory, industrial policy, and closed economy Keynesianism were mainstream. He got elected because Clinton's NAFTA & Obama's TPP had hurt many American workers. Hilary did do a U turn because of pressure from Sanders (who had sponsored a bill revoking China's 'most favoured country' status in 2005) but it was too little too late. Trump's genius was to deliver for Evangelicals with his SCOTUS appointments. Still, we thought the reversal of Roe v Wade would hurt him but he wriggled out of it by saying 'State's Rights'. Kamala failed to capitalize on the issue. The truth, I suppose, is that she was an air-headed Diversity Hire.

Meera Nanda's nonsensical new book

James I of England was a learned man. He also had a strong belief in witchcraft. This was not the reason he was called the 'wisest fool in Christendom'. Rather it was because he was 'wise in small things but a foole in weighty affaires.' It is remarkable that the Reformation and the diffusion of Renaissance learning were accompanied by heightened persecution of supposed witches between 1560 to 1630. 

Isaac Newton's religious writings mark a turning point. By 1680, he is dismissing the reality of demons or devils- e.g. the devils Christ cast out. Though Newton kept his views secret, many shared them. Interestingly, it was by getting rid of the mechanistic dogma forbidding 'action at a distance' (though Newton retained a substantially repurposed the Platonic notion of an all pervading 'Aether' similar to the Medieval, Alchemical, 'quintessence')  that what would come to be called 'the Enlightenment' could make progress. This also meant that 'the invisible hand' of the market, as suggested by the 'natural law' School of Salamanca and, later that of Hutcheson, Hume & Adam Smith (the so called Scottish Enlightenment) could be seen as beneficial and operating spontaneously. This gave rise to 'Deism', as opposed to Theism, and thus gave the Enlightenment a potentially non-sectarian, or secular, character.

Inter alia, this meant, acting in a self-interested manner could no longer be interpreted as being possessed by a demon. Thus, if you had sex with your spouse, you were not surrendering to the demon of lust. If you, as a merchant, 'bought low and sold high', you were not possessed by the demon of greed. Usury itself was not 'unnatural'. Interest was merely the reward for thrift- i.e. foregoing present consumption. The 'Wealth of a Nation' was determined by productivity not grabbing gold. Utility, Hume said, is the aim of all service industries- including the Law and Education and even the Church and the Moral Sciences. This led to a new, 'value free' way of looking at social phenomena and ideologies. Their existence was a matter of supply and demand which could be understood by Political Economy. What was the incentive for burning witches? Did disproportionate penalties discourage people- save the mad- from claiming magical powers? Not always. Economic Science began to distinguish 'substitutes' and 'complements'. By the end of the Seventeenth Century there were quite good empirical estimations of what we now call 'price elasticity'. It was becoming clear that demand for a thing became 'elastic' if better and better substitutes became available. But certain goods are 'complements'. One thing may be bought because it is complementary to another good which yields great utility.

Consider the myth that people are superstitious and prone to magical thinking. Rationalists can dispel the fanatical ignorance of the great unwashed by making reasoned arguments. The world would be a better place if a bunch of Sciencey types went around debunking the claims of witches, warlocks, magicians, priests, politicians and ideologues. Sadly, this view is itself a product of magical thinking. Telling a Nationalist that it is irrational to believe that Nationalism is a good thing- when, without it, a particular community will suffer demographic replacement or foreign oppression- is itself irrational. No doubt, the 'Rationalist' felt the same moral or epistemic superiority as the Nationalist or the Theist or the believer in UFOs, but she was displaying an even more naive, as opposed to strategic, type of stupidity.

Consider the 

Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)

Wikipedia says it 

is a program within the U.S. non-profit organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims."[2] Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization (before merging with CFI as one of its programs in 2015, to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, and support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general. Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists, educators, and authors. It is headquartered in Amherst, New York.

Is it as thorough a waste of time as it sounds? Yes. Unlike Richard Dawkin's cult, it has gained no traction. After all, Dawkins can say nasty things about Islam. The CSI can't. What can it do? The answer is it can hire an elderly lady named Meera Nanda to fulmine against Hinduism and Indian Nationalism  under the rubric of attacking some sinister convergence of  'Postcolonial theory' (a sublimely silly academic availability cascade on which Leela Gandhi, a descendant of the Mahatma, wrote the handbook) and the writings of people like Rajiv Malhotra & J. Sai Deepak. 

It is characteristic of paranoia, or an ignorant type of polemics, to substitute for the devils and witches of an earlier time, talk of Hitler and the imminent threat that Nazi Vampires will take over the country. Thus, according to these shitheads, if some stupid shit is not done, Hitler will rise from the dead. We must all urgently pull together to talk worthless shite, lest Hitler takes over. 

Meera Nanda, who is 72 years old and who lives in Connecticut- where, no doubt, she receives a wage for propagating this type of magical thinking, has written a books titled 'Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason'. It was published by Routledge, 2025.

Since Hindu Nationalism pre-existed European Colonialism (being anti-Muslim at that time, because it was faced by Muslim, not European, Imperialism) and since it was part and parcel of the very internationalist anti-colonial ideology which transitioned into internationalist postcolonial ideology (i.e. Bandung, NAM, North-South dialogue, and now BRICS) it is utterly mad to suggest that an academic availability cascade featuring a miniscule number of tenured shitheads, teaching in wholly worthless University Departments, had anything to do with what became the dominant ideology at the very moment when Soviet and other Command Economies began to falter and fall behind initially poorer countries which pursued export-led growth (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) and which began to transition to welfarist democracies in the Nineties. India was a separate case because it had a Dynasty which, following two assassinations, grew gun-shy of taking the top job in the country. Thus, in 2014, Rahul refused to become PM and so Narendra Modi had a work over. This gave a new lease of life to shitheads like Nanda who pretend to be fighting Fascism.  

Why has the 'Hindu Right' risen? The answer is that Religion is not an 'inferior' or 'Giffen Good'. It does not have negative Income elasticity of Demand. Rather it is a Service industry with positive Income elasticity. Since Income elasticity correlates with Education in useful subjects as well as with Productivity (which correlates with the level of Technology used), Religion has risen whereas more miserabilist ideologies- e.g. Gandhian Socialism, Maoism, Dynasticism etc.- have fallen by the wayside. 

This is also the case with 'Rationalism'. It was cool, back in the Sixties when most Tamils were very poor, that the handsome MGR always portrayed 'rationalist' heroes. Back then, there was always the fear that if you left your kid with Granny and he fell ill, the silly cow would take him to some Holy Shrine rather than the Hospital. Thus you took Granny to watch movies produced by leaders of the Dravidian movement where MGR or Jayalalitha or some other movie star gently explained the 'germ theory of disease' and persuaded the superstitious village folk to give up insanitary or superstitious practices. But that was long ago. Audiences were getting more sophisticated. Movie producers couldn't go on pretending that it wasn't irrational to beat a wholly obsolete 'Rationalist' drum. 

Back in the mid-Seventies, in America, there may have been the fear that more and more people were taking LSD or other drugs with the result that they might believe in UFOs and Mayan prophesies and that MK-ULTRA really had 'remote viewers' and 'men who stare at ghosts' till the goats' hearts explode and that Hitler is the last incarnation of Vishnu and is living in a flying saucer inside the 'hollow earth' where dinosaurs still roam (this last was Ambassador Serrano's contribution). 

The CSI was created in that obsolete context. It was wholly useless. People might watch 'Poltergeist' or 'ET'. They might even claim to have been abducted by Aliens. But this was just to pass the time. It wasn't the case that they voted for Reagan because their brains had turned to shit. It was simply that Reagan was the better candidate. Similarly, if people have voted for Modi since 2014, it is because there is no other candidate. Rahul still won't step up to the plate. He doesn't want to meet the same fate as his father or grandmother. It is safer for him to be the Greta Thurnberg of Indian politics. 

The following extract from Nanda's new book has been published in 'The Wire'.

This book tells the story of two strange bedfellows, the Postcolonial Left

which was represented by Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Nasser etc. It had nothing to do with stupid shite called 'Postcolonial Theory' taught in English or History Depts. from the Eighties onward. 

and the Hindu Right.

Whose vehicle to power was the Indian National Congress which was started by a Scottish ICS officer who converted to vegetarianism, Vedanta, and the cause of cow-protection. There was a split between the Garam Dal (Bal,Pal,Lal) who were allied with the Revolutionaries (Ghaddar, Jugantar, etc) and the Naram Dal (Gokhale, Sastri etc.) but after 1917 this breach was healed because British withdrawal was inevitable. The only question was whether the country would be partitioned. It was. First Buddhist Burma went its own way and then the Muslim majority areas formed Pakistan. Faced with a Muslim as well as a Communist threat, Hindus decided to hang together. Muslims lost all previous concessions and there was ethnic cleansing and an exchange of populations in some areas. Communists were killed or incarcerated till they learnt to play nice. Later, when Mrs Gandhi broke with the 'Old Congress' both the Commies and the Dravidian parties helped her rule till she won by a landslide. Like other countries in the Region, India moved to the left in the early Seventies but, since this was economically disastrous, India reversed course. Indira became more religious but so did the leaders of Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

It argues that the Postcolonial Left’s relentless attacks on the “epistemic violence” of Western norms of rationality and modernity are

about appealing to the low IQ of kids in the West who are too stupid to do STEM subjects. If 'magical thinking' is what they want, serve that up to them. The fact is if you are doing a PhD in History or Comp. Lit, you know you are doing the intellectual equivalent of finger painting. Not so, people doing PhDs in Algebraic Topology or Computer Science. There is an implicit 'epistemic violence' operating on campus against Humanities students such that they feel anally raped and fat shamed by the catachresis of the desublimation of the oesophagus of the strategically essentialized catachresis of that thing Spivak referred to in her next book. Thanks to post-modernism,  the subject of your thesis can be Enid Blyton's Timmy the dog whom you always thought should have his own book series and get to marry the, sadly, still cis gendger Georgie.  True, your supervisor, whose Doctorate from Calcutta was on Walter Pater & Hugo von Hofmannsthal, may get you to title it 'Gramscian Giacondas- deconstructing the diaphanous doggie in Blyton's Blighty.' Still what matters is that you have struck a blow for, not just Queer Theory, but also Timmy the randy dog Theory. This subverts Neo-Liberalism, Patriarchy, and Donald fucking Trump. 

providing the conceptual vocabulary for the Hindu Right’s project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind.”

Nonsense! The thing is as old as the hills. Everybody has always attacked everybody else for having fallen under the spell of some foreign or fraudulent type of thinking. Also, the Hindu Right's 'conceptual vocabulary' is Sanskrit based. One may say such and such American tech entrepreneur or Tamil Supreme Court advocate has published this book or that, but these authors are not part of the Hindu Right. 

It is a different matter that there is a 'decolonization project' associated with replacing the use of English in the higher Courts with the State language or Hindi. What if it results in the use of traditional 'nyaya' maxims as substitutes for Anglo Saxon equitable rules? Some work was done on that long ago and one or two senior judges introduced Nyaya maxims into their prolix and unreadable judgments. It made no difference at all. The reason Indians need to shift from English to vernacular languages is that our senior judges are writing illiterate, ignorant, shite. So are our Professors. Consider the plight of a boy who goes to the local Engineering College. He needs to speak functional English. But the people hired to teach him gained PhDs in Eng Lit by submitting garbage to equally illiterate Professors. They can't teach English because they don't know English. All they can do is write 'The scotomization of subaltern in Singur countervailed the catachresis of the oesophagus of the Derrida of the Delueze of the Post Colonial Subject'. This does not represent a defence against Hindutva. It is merely credentialized gibberish for the sake of gibberish. 

The postcolonial project of creating an alternative modernity free from the “imperialism” of Eurocentric concepts harks back to the late 19th century

which harked back to the late 18th century which harked back to the 17th and so on. The plain fact is post-colonial projects built on anti-colonial projects which, in the case of India, built on anti-Muslim projects and so on. Moreover, in India, there really were and are 'alternative modernities' cheek-by-jowl in cities and, increasingly, even the villages.  

when Indian nationalists first began to “provincialize” Europe

they did no such thing. Europe became 'provincial' after the Second World War. By the mid-Sixties it was set firmly on an American path. Disneyland Paris reflects Europe's success in catching up with Peoria. 

and is widely shared by the contemporary Hindu Right.

The contemporary Hindu Right is too busy ruling the country to bother with any such thing. The plain fact is, the country urgently needs bottom-up Judicial reform. The alternative to having illiterate High Court judges writing  gibberish Judgements- which the Supreme Court confesses it is itself unable to understand- is to get all judicial procedures and documents put into the simplest, clearest, form of the State language. But if the same thing is done in the Humanities Depts. of Western Universities, you would shake out all the Woke nutters who have found a safe space there. 

Consider the following excerpt from a judgment given by a former Chief Justice-

"This batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of 'reasonableness' ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one's reputation"

India must put a stop to this nonsense. De-fucking-colonize the Judiciary right now! If you must talk nonsense, let it be grammatical nonsense. That way Mummy or Granny will slap you silly if you get into the habit of writing like former Chief Justice Dipak Mishra. 

This book will show that far from an avant-garde progressive movement, postcolonialism in India bears a strong family resemblance, in context and content, with “conservative revolutions” of the kind that brought down the Weimar Republic

The Weimar Constitution permitted its own suspension. Weimar was brought down by Weimar. Hitler acted constitutionally because the stupid Professors who wrote the Constitution wanted a 'Caesarist' President who could act in a wholly unfettered manner.  

and prepared the grounds for the Nazi takeover.

In other words, this book will display an equal and impartial ignorance of both India and Europe. The truth is 'postcolonialism' in India was about Bandung and Non-Alignment and Import Substitution and Panchayat Raj and Hindi becoming the National language and telling Coca-Cola and IBM to fuck the fuck off. Then, important people began to notice that their sons and daughters had quietly emigrated to places still ruled by White peeps. If they wanted to be able to talk to their grand-kids, they had better learn about Spiderman and Batman and so forth. 

What prepared the ground for the Nazi takeover was the Weimar Constitution drafted by fools like Max Weber & Hugo Preuss. It had nothing to do with Hugo von fucking Hofmannsthal or Stefan George or, for that matter, Rabindranath Tagore. Still, there's nothing wrong in doing a PhD on Walter Pater's influence on Hofmannsthal and how this meant the German reception of Tagore diverged from the British or American reception of him. 

For nearly five decades, a prominent segment of left-leaning intellectuals

have been completely useless. When Indira broke with the Syndicate, the Left kept her in power till she won a landslide victory. In return she permitted them to make 'a long march through the Institutions'- in particular the Universities- with the result that their destination was collective imbecility and coprophagic futility.

Since Indira wanted to disprove. her Dad's pal, Gunnar Myrdal's thesis that India was a 'soft state'- i.e. because she cracked down hard on lawlessness, the Janata Morcha needed the RSS to defeat her electorally. First Lohia & then JP accepted this necessity. But each time Janata tried to purge itself of the RSS, it fell apart . Thus, the BJP inherited its mantle at the centre. Then, because Rahul didn't want to get assassinated but also didn't want anyone else from his party to rule the country, Modi became PM. There being no other PM candidate, he remains in power.  If Nitish & Co, pull him down, his party might once again get a majority. It appears the next elections will occur after the expansion of Parliament giving more seats to the Hindi speaking North. This means, one way or another, English's role will diminish. But this won't involve much 'decolonization'. It genuinely isn't the case that the Bihari bhaiyya's brain is stuffed full of Milton & Macaulay. 

who speak for social justice and cultural rights of the marginalized have been waging a war against the ideal of secular modernity that India set upon at the time of Independence.

Very true. Their farts are very fearsome and equal to the use of chemical weapons. But they aren't waging a war because nobody bothers to fight them.  

They believe that India’s experience of modernity is not organic because the elites running the show have accepted the colonial legacy of scientific reason and secularization as universally valid and universally desirable. Instead of universality, the critics find a deep difference, even incommensurability, between India and Europe.

Or Europe & Europe. Bilgrami wants a return to 'Enchantment' or 'Rewards & Fairies' as Kipling put it. But Bilgrami teaches in America. Also, he is Muslim.  

These intellectuals see the critique of colonial legacy as a precondition for creating a modernity that is authentically “our own.”

Nanda lives in Connecticut. What is authentically her own is Donald Trump.  

Our critics insist that Kant’s directive of escaping the tutelage of all external authorities by daring to think for oneself — the famous Sapere Aude! “Dare to use your own reason” — will not work for us in India in the manner it worked for Europe in the Age of Enlightenment.

It didn't work in Prussia. The new King was religious. So, all the Professors became so. On the other hand, no daring was needed to expound the 'Common Sense' Scottish philosophers precisely because everybody has common sense.  

For the once colonized,

i.e. any part of Europe which had been a Roman colony 

the Kantian spirit of Sapere Aude! demands that we first escape the apprenticeship of our erstwhile colonial lords and masters before we can dare to think for ourselves.

But Kant didn't escape his lord and master. He was a faithful and loyal 'Beamte'. Voltaire did escape. He did think for himself. But he had won the lottery earlier and thus didn't starve. That's what matters- not fucking starving.  

Thus, to live more authentically and chart our independent course in the modern world, they argue, we must rediscover the indigenous modes of living and thinking that are still alive among the non-modern masses who are marginalized and condescended to by the elites with colonized minds.

Anyone can make such a claim about anything. You are a slave. Not till you eat all, and only, your own shit will you be truly free.  Otherwise you are a fucking Nazi slave to 'Big Food'.

To that end, this segment of the Indian Left has produced withering critiques of the “Western” values

they can't critique shite. Also, what Westerners valued was being able to treat Easterners as donkeys. I suppose, Nanda is doing her bit for the Donald by shitting on those nasty Hindus- Brahmins in particular- who, Peter Navarro tells us, are wholly responsible for the plight of the Christian Ukrainians.  

enshrined in the Constitution, especially the commitment to secularism and the cultivation of a secular worldview.

The East India Company was the first ruler of a great expanse of territory which was wholly secular. Later, during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi put the word 'Secular' into the Indian Constitution. After all, the Dynasty might become Christian and more and more European over the course of time. Thus, instead of a Brahmin dynasty, the Constitution should stipulate that the Republic must be 'Secular'. Hindus need not apply. Later Indira fought a court case to establish her sons were Hindu not Parsi. Sonia too was careful that, when her daughter married a Christian, the ceremony was conducted by Hindu priests. However, it wasn't till about a decade ago that Rahul came out of the closet as a 'janeodhari' Brahmin of Dattatreya gotra. This caused the 'Sickularists' to cry and cry. 

They see these values as cast-off clothes of Europe that don’t fit Indians and turn them into pathetic mimic men.

That was V.S Naipaul. He wasn't a Leftist. Also, his book 'mimic men' referred to Trinidad which was still a colony in the Fifties. That's why Evelyn Waugh praised him. The dude understood that Independence would worsen matters. Naipaul wasn't talking about India where the leaders wore khadi kurtas. He could scarcely pretend that Lal Bahadur Shastri sought to dress an talk like the 14th Earl of Home.

Has Nanda gone quietly mad? She isn't that much older than me and could scarcely be drinking quite as much. The truth, I suppose, is that she is simply ignorant.  

What unites these critics is a suspicion of the Enlightenment ideal of rational progress, something they see as a product of European history tainted by colonialism, Orientalism, and racism.

and the fact that Kant didn't eat his own shit.  

We will refer to these critics of Indian modernity collectively as the Postcolonial Left.

Is Bilgrami part of it? No. This lady isn't smart enough to go after an Anal-tickle philosopher. Yet, as I have shown in two of my books ('Argumentative Indian imbeciles' & 'The fairies up Akeel Bilgrami's garden's bottom') he is even more subject to magical thinking than a Dipshit Chuckthefuckup. Anyway, Dipshit is now trying to turn from a brown turd into a green turd. 

The rise to academic prominence of the Postcolonial Left through the last quarter of the 20th century coincided with

the 'Humanities' turning to shit.  

the rapid rise of the Hindu Right.

No. That rapid rise occurred between 1963, when Lohia entered Parliament and gave the Sangh an alternative to propping up Rajaji's Swatantra party, and 1974 ,when JP's call for 'sampoorna kranti' turned the RSS into the backbone of the anti-Indira resistance in the North. Gujarat had a different trajectory but it was always more Hindu and Right Wing. 

The same shock to the Indian polity — the imposition of the Emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977 — that led many on the Left to rethink the trajectory of Indian modernity,

The Left Front entrenched itself in Bengal. Jyoti Basu could have been PM rather than Gowda.  

also brought the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent of the family of Hindu nationalist outfits, into the public sphere from which it had been banished after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.

This lady is 9 years older than me. How can she be so utterly ignorant? Her first PhD was from IIT Delhi. Surely she could see with her own eyes that an RSS guy- Brahmananda Gupta- had become Mayor of Delhi in 1970? But Atal- the future PM- got elected to Parliament in 1957. But there were already 3 Lok Sabha MPs from the Sangh in 1951. 

The same turn away from state-led development to a neoliberal market economy that enabled a culturalist turn among “Third World” intellectuals as they moved to the centers of learning in the “First World,”

That occurred in the Sixties and Seventies when India was moving to the Left. Ranajit Guha emigrated and took British citizenship in 1959.  

also brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political front of the RSS, to the commanding heights of Indian politics.

Nanaji Deshmukh was offered the Deputy Prime Ministership in 1977. He stayed out of the Cabinet. But Atal was Foreign Minister.  

The BJP has adroitly welded neoliberal economic policies with a discourse of Hindu civilizational supremacy.

Those economic policies were brought in under Congress. They worked. The old way did not. This had nothing to do with the BJP. Nanda, of course, thinks there should be a discourse of how shitty Hindus are. Thankfully, she now lives in Trump's America.  

We will refer to the 21st-century manifestation of Hindu nationalism as the Hindu Right.

In which case Hindu anti-nationalism is the Hindu Left.  Does it involve love of Donald Trump? I suppose so. Nanda must be seventh heaven when she hears Navarro blame 'Hindu Brahmins' for Ukraine's suffering. 

A deeply palingenetic, or revivalist, ultranationalism runs through the ideology of the Hindu Right.

Not now. The thing has been alive and burgeoning for four generations. What hasn't died yet, can't be reborn. There is no need to 'revive' that which has been gathering strength for a century.  

Like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, the late 19th-century pioneers of Indian nationalism,

this stupid woman doesn't get that they converted to the thing in their youth. It pre-existed them. 

the contemporary Hindu Right seeks the rebirth of the ancient “Vedic” civilizational virtues while embracing the technological and economic opportunities of 21st-century global capitalism.

Vedic civilization is ongoing and uninterrupted in hundreds of millions of Hindu families. Nanda didn't notice. 

The rebirth of the Hindu nation in a formally secular nation-state demands a reformulation of the idea of India, which in turn demands purging it of alien impurities, Western as well as Islamic. How else, Hindu nationalists ask, can the ancient nation be restored to its original glory if its ruling ideas don’t bear the mark of its primordial civilization?

But all this was done long before we were born. Even at St. Columba school in Delhi, it was dinned to us by our Sanskrit teacher. The Hindi teacher was a Yadav. He derived great pleasure from beating fair skinned Bengali Brahmins.  My father, despairing of any other way of getting me to pass Hindi, sent me to him for tuition. Strangely, he developed a liking for me. He may not have been able to teach me grammar or spelling but he did transmit the Hindi version of Hindu nationalism to me. It really isn't anything a sensible person would object to. 

Western ideas and ideals that first came to India through colonialism have long been targets of Indian and Hindu nationalists.

Which one's? Chucking our foreigners and becoming independent? Did they really object to that? How fucking stupid is this woman?  

Following the long Hindu tradition of hierarchical inclusivism,

There is no such thing. That is why neither Muhammad nor Christ feature in the Hindu pantheon. On the other hand, Derrida is widely worshipped as part of the cult of Dattatreya.  

Hindu nationalists don’t oppose these ideas outright but subsume them under the presumed superiority of the holistic nature of Hindu dharma that denies any separation between the human, social, and natural realms from the divine.

Nope. Hinduism separates this realm completely from the Divine. God is Sat- Truth/Being. Everything else is Maya or Mithak- i.e. irreal. This woman truly is as stupid as shit. She probably thinks God is not separated from the turd she squeezes out- at least for benighted Hindus like herself.  

Thus key ideas of modernity — separating the secular sphere of governance from the claims of faith,

was a feature of East India Rule, not that of Britain itself. Holyoake, the guy who invented the word 'Secularism' said that if India, a vast country, could be ruled in a Secular manner by English people, why not England itself? Why should he have to go to jail for Blasphemy for saying something for which he could not be prosecuted in Calcutta or Madras?  

recognizing the priority of rights-bearing individuals over the claims of the community,

which we know must have occurred before the Buddha was born. 

and honoring the separation of material nature from any kind of mind-stuff,

Panpsychism isn't taboo for Western Scientists. It occurs to me that this silly moo did not keep up with developments in her own field. Thus she started talking nonsense about something she knew zero about- viz. Indian politics and the Hindu religion. Since the CSI is based on magical thinking of an ignorant and obsolete sort, they made her a Fellow. She receives the 'wages of unreason'. One can't have enough Hindoooos on the payroll mooing mutinously about how shitty those Hindus are. Peter Navarro is right to blame all Ukraine's ills on 'Hindu Brahmins'. 

whether a personal God or impersonal Intelligence — are deemed to be un-Hindu colonial intrusions which must be suitably reformulated, or “spiritualized,” to conform to the imperatives of the integral, holistic worldview of Hindu dharma.

This is nonsense. Advaita means sublatability- i.e. every hypothesis is wrong because a superior one will supplant it. Moreover the matam/vigyan (dogma/ science) distinction is a lot like Reichenbach & Observational Equivalence save there is no nonsense about how Philosophy can provide 'demarcation criteria' or do any other sort of a priori work.  

In a tragic reversal, left-leaning intellectuals who once stood firm in defense of the secular humanist worldview that lies at the core of modernity,

Nonsense! Leftists indulged in magical thinking of various types. The humanist view was that presiding over man-made famines for a political reason- which is what Stalin & Mao did- was not just evil, it was stupid.  

and was embraced by the framers of India’s Constitution,

which is why there is a Directive Principle regarding cow- protection 

have become its most vocal critics. Once some of India’s best-known public intellectuals

People have heard of Amartya Sen and Shashi Tharoor. Nobody has heard of Dipshit or whoever else this silly moo is thinking off.  

went native, so to speak, and later joined forces with poststructuralist currents in the metropolitan universities, words like secularism, science, development, and the Enlightenment would not be mentioned in academic discourse without scare quotes.

But Marxists back in the Twenties were already saying that all these things were forms of 'bourgeois idealism'. I suppose, this silly moo really doesn't know about dialectical materialism. By about the time she got her first PhD, there was a category theoretical representation of the Hegelian dialectic or alternatively, a chaos theoretic approach to the materialistic dialectic. Even this cretin must have heard of Jacques Monod or Rene Thom's 'catastrophe' theory. Stuff like that was like catsnip to Lefties back then.  

These critics have expended enormous intellectual labor to debunk these ideas as imposing Eurocentric conceptual categories on the post-colonial world, thereby perpetuating “mental colonialism.”

Also, European 'biopolitics' caused Indians to choose to have either a dick or a vagina. Previously everybody had plenty of both.  

The Left and the Right, thus, are united in their search for “alternative modernities” that are no longer bound by the “Western” model of modernity as a progressive decline of ignorance and blind faith, along with a growth of individualism and personal freedoms.

When this silly lady was about 10 years old, even remote parts of India were invaded by 'Beatles' and 'Hippies' and so forth. It turned out that the West didn't have any 'model of modernity' of the sort she is describing. She must have completed her foreign PhD in the Eighties. Where in America would she have been able to find the shite she mentions? Who in the West was talking about blind faith? Why not mention superstitious practices and adherence to witchcraft or Voodoo? The fact is, if you said you practiced 'Wicca', people understood you had an MFA in Queer Theory. They didn't say to you- 'kindly read about Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. That will help you overcome your ignorance, superstition and blind faith in the Warlock's wand. Let me tell you, it isn't a wand at all. It is his penis. Don't let him put it inside you.' 

The Argument: What the Book Says and Does Not Say

The central argument of this book is that the Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right belong to the family of “conservative revolutions” against Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism on behalf of indigenous traditions.

All Enlightenments are 'indigenous' and have precursors within the borders of their own linguistic area. Liberalism has a separate origin story. It objects to despots, however 'Enlightened'.  

Intellectuals who first called themselves “conservative revolutionaries” were a loose group of intellectuals who were bitterly opposed to the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first constitutional democracy,

They were nothing compared to the 'Whites' in Russia. Spanish 'Carlism' in the Nineteenth Century is an example of a Conservative Revolutionary movement. Legitimists in France in the nineteenth century & Jacobites in early Eighteenth Century England are other examples.  

and hastened its demise at the hands of the Nazis.

Nonsense! They were useless tossers.  

They condemned the rational foundations of modern liberalism and socialism as culturally alien to German Volkisch traditions and sought a “Third Way” rooted in Germanic values.

So what? They had no money, no goons, and no fucking Parliamentary representation. The Nazi party was started by Hitler while he was serving as an intelligence officer for the German Army. It carried out the maximal program of the German General Staff.  

Their attempt to reawaken the German Volksgeist would provide a blueprint for the National Socialism of the Nazi party.

It didn't need any blueprint other than Mein Kamf or any one of Hitler's speeches. The Weimar Constitution envisaged rule by a 'plebiscitary' Dictator if an Emergency arose. It did when 'extend & pretend' became impossible thanks to the Wall Street crash. There was the Great Depression. Hindenburg was too old to run things himself. After he dumped General Schleicher and accepted Hitler, Enabling Laws were inevitable. Once Hitler killed Schleicher (and his wife!) during the Night of the Long Knives, General Blomberg was happy to get the Army to take an oath of personal loyalty to the new Chancellor. 

The kernel of thought on which this book is based is simple: India is facing a Weimar moment,

If so, the President must be ruling by decree.  

and its intellectual landscape bears a comparison, in context and substance, to the Weimar Republic before it fell to the Nazis.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Germany had some of the best Mathematicians and Physicists in the world before Hitler came to power. India does not. But it also hasn't been defeated in war, suffered hyperinflation and isn't currently in the throes of a Great Depression. It has been growing at over 5 percent a year for three decades. 

The short and spectacular

shitty 

life of the embattled Weimar Republic can illuminate the dilemmas and challenges facing India’s faltering democracy.

If so, people like me- who were born in Germany and who know German history would have noticed. This very stupid woman knows nothing of history or economics or political science.  

The role the conservative revolutionaries played in the downfall of the Republic

was zero.  

can illuminate the dangers of the intellectual assault on modernity from the Left and the Right wings of postcolonial studies.

Nobody gives a shit about that shit. Germans believed they had to conquer land to the East to avoid starvation and gain gold reparations from France (as they had in 1870) to rise up economically. That's why Weber & Preuss created the possibility for a 'Caesarist' President directly elected by the people with a 7 year term of office. Guess how long the 7 years war lasted? Seven years. This is a country which wanted a second Fredrick the Great. That's what it thought it had found in Hitler. 

Pakistan could be compared to Weimar Germany. India can't.  

In the chapters that follow, I juxtapose the intellectual history of India

of which she knows nothing 

with the revolution against the Enlightenment in Germany between the two world wars.

there was no such revolution. There was only the Army's maximal program. The Nazis did borrow some ideas- e.g. Racial laws based on 'Jim Crow', sterilization of disabled people, like in the Myrdal's Sweden- but everything they did was within the framework of the Weimar Constitution precisely because, as Carl Schmitt kept saying, it provided for its own suspension. The Nazis didn't need a new Constitution- which is why they told Carl Schmitt, whom they considered an opportunist, to shut the fuck up.  

The mantle of conservative revolutionaries in India rightfully belongs to the neo-Hindu founding fathers of modern India — notably, Mahatma Gandhi,

who was against the 'garam dal' revolutionaries 

Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo

who were for them- most notably Jugantar. Why does Nanda not know this? Does she not have access to Wikipedia? 

— who bought into the Orientalist and Romanticist conceptions of India as an idyllic, spiritual nation of perennial wisdom.

No such things existed. Everyone knew about the 1857 Mutiny. They understood that the Brits had plenty of White soldiers in India. They alone operated the artillery. If the Sepoys rose up again, they would be slaughtered by canon fire. As Randolph Churchill- who expanded the Empire into Upper Burma- put it, Maxim guns, not moral maxims, ruled the non-settler colonies (but were also effective against the Boers at a later date).  

They were not hostile to non-Hindu minorities as the openly Islamophobic parties like the Hindu Mahasabha or the RSS were and are.

But it was Mahatma Gandhi & Nehru who ruled the roost when Indian Muslims were ethnically cleansed and expelled.  

(Germany’s conservative revolutionaries, too, were not openly anti-Semitic.

Only if they weren't Jewish- like Hugo von Hoffmansthall.  

Their nationalism was more cultural than racialist.) Nevertheless, they saw India as an essentially Hindu nation

because it is. 

whose “soul” lay in its spirituality and its holistic communitarian way of life.

Where else, save in spirituality, can the soul lie?  

When they were not openly hostile to parliamentary democracy, industry, capitalism, and socialism, as in the case of Gandhi,

he wasn't hostile to shit. He just wanted everybody to give up sex and eating nice things and wearing nice clothes.  

Nanda sees herself as

 an old-fashioned Enlightenment secular humanist who proudly locates herself on the side of universal norms of reason and human flourishing,

We see her as a useless shithead. Like Vandana Siva, she isn't an actual scientist. But Vandana had charisma.  Nanda had zero salience in India. There is a Left which has salience- viz. Comrade Vijayan in Kerala- and a Right which matters- viz. Modi & Yogiji. There are no intellectuals in India or Germany or England or the US who matter. Musk is smart and very very rich. But he isn't an intellectual. Musk matters.  This ignorant old woman doesn't matter in the slightest. Nor does the organization which pays her 'wages of unreason'. 

I have watched in anguish how the Postcolonial Left has shredded the ideals we rationalists hold dear.

They were stupid but they got tenure somewhere nice. This lady didn't. Boo hoo.  

I am alarmed when I see the stalwarts of postcolonial and decolonial theory — Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy, Nicholas Dirks, Walter Mignolo, and Anibal Quijano —respectfully cited in the Hindu Right literature.

By whom? Rajiv Malhotra? J. Sai Deepak? They have science backgrounds and may have thought Professors at Ivy League can't be utterly shite. But they can if they teach a shite subject. 

I am alarmed when tirades against “mental decolonization” make their way from the Ivory Tower into the halls of government, as happened when the Modi administration made decolonization the guiding principle of the National Education Policy of 2020.

Since the guiding practice of such Policy is to create more and more illiterate tossers with PhDs- who actually gives a fuck?

Looking beyond India, I am alarmed when the European Right passes itself off as an anti-colonial movement defending European civilization against immigrants

e.g. the 1905 British Act curbing immigration of East European Jews. Chesterton was way more 'anti-colonial' and anti-Semitic than anyone we see today. Indeed, Gandhi was inspired to write 'Hind Swaraj' after reading an article by Chesterton which said that Jews in England should wear the Kaftan. They had no right to dress like Christians. Indians should not demand a Parliament. Parliaments are for Europeans. Let them, by all means, revive ancient institutions of their own. In fact Herbert Spencer, too, advised his Japanese admirers to preserve indigenous forms. They rejected his advise and rose and rose.  

and the homogenizing influences of globalization, or when Alexander Dugin, the Russian ultranationalist, speaks the language of decoloniality.

Which was being promoted back in the late Sixties by Yulian Bromley at the Soviet Institute of Ethnography. That's why, as I discovered to my discomfort some forty years ago, a Sri Lankan Tamil who studied in Moscow had a more paranoid anti-Brahmin ideology than any DMK hack. But Lenin & Stalin had always supported the ecumenical 'anti-colonial' (and later the State sponsored 'post-colonial') ideology whereby a united front against the advanced capitalist powers must be maintained regardless of ideological differences within the fold. 

Dugin is useful because he is saying that Slavs and 'Tartars' share something which the 'materialistic' West has lost. I visited Moscow in 1982 and was surprised at the official tolerance of what I thought off as 'skinheads'. But this had to do with the Yuzhinsky circle which was connected to a type of 'esoteric Nazism' we Indians understood because Serrano had been an ambassador to India. Nanda, being a shithead with zero knowledge of India, will not know that Foreign Secretary Rasgotra arranged a Conference of Occultists for Indira Gandhi. My father was a diplomat and thus made it his business to put an acceptable gloss on this bizarre event in case he was quizzed about it by the Soviets. There was no need. The fix was already in. Incidentally, Justice Krishna Iyer, whom I met in Moscow, was a great believer in Soviet para-psychology. 

I am equally alarmed when theorists of decoloniality

crazy, ignorant, shitheads- they have no influence or importance. 

embrace authoritarian states like Russia, China, and Iran (and India, too) as mascots of de-westernization and civilizational “plurivarsalism.”

Embracing a big state like Russia or China is like embracing the planet Jupiter. It is cheaper and safer to just gaze at it wistfully and have a wank. Even a Trump who goes in for such embraces is merely having a wank. Geopolitics doesn't work that way. Economic and strategic interests prevail though coalitions may change. Still, we see pretty much the same coalition in both the first and second world war. Ideology doesn't matter at all. 

Above all, I am concerned about the kind of cultural values and ways of knowing that are being promoted for our salvation,

Salvation is God's business.  

and if these values are adequate for creating a society that respects rational thought, human equality, and individual freedoms.

They aren't. Only Economics- that is mechanism design- matters. If useless people are paid to pretend they are capable of rational thought, they may also be willing to pretend to be very concerned about some useless tossers on the Left or the Right or the Centre. But, waged or unwaged, they are as useless as Socioproctologists.  

At the heart of this book lies my concern that under the cover of radical-sounding rhetoric of “decolonization,” and making India the world’s guru, ways of knowing that have been superseded by modern science, and cultural values that belong to the premodern world of integral communities organized on the principles of hierarchy, deference, and duties are being glorified and institutionalized.

So, what this silly lady is doing is pretending that Modi will ban Western Science and get everybody to drink nothing but cow urine. If she gets paid by Whitey to do so, well and good.  

Let me clearly state what the convergence of the Left with conservative revolutionaries of the Right that I describe in this book does not imply.

It implies nothing whatsoever.  

I am not suggesting that Hindutva’s assault on the idea of India as a modern secular state 

ruled by a half Italian dynasty? 

would not have happened if it were not for the unremitting barrage of anti-Western and anti-modernist high theory emanating from the postcolonial battalions from the Left of the political spectrum.

Nor would that 'unremitting barrage' have happened if the Academy hadn't turned to shit long ago- which is why this silly moo had a career and Socioproctology has something to point a censorious finger at. 

The Hindu Right does not need any assistance from the Left on this count.

The Hindu Left or Right or Center needs support from Hindus. To secure this it needs to appeal to Hindu scripture and practice. Talking about Derrida or Dirac or Darwin won't help. Mention of Dattatreaya, on the other hand, is fine. 

There's nothing wrong with doing a non-STEM PhD on a topic which seemed meaningful at that time. There is also nothing wrong with teaching cretins. But it is silly to pretend you are actually fighting Fascism or Nazism or the Spanish fucking Inquisition. 

What is shameful is taking money from foreigners to shit upon your own country. 

In other words, I am not suggesting that the Postcolonial Left single-handedly lit the fires of Hindu chauvinism.

Hindus are bad. Ask Peter Navarro. He'll tell you.  

What I am claiming is that it has enabled the fire to spread by disabling a principled critique of Hinduism and Hindu nationalism that could have acted as a fire retardant.

This retard can't retard shit.  

By recklessly propagating the cult of indigeneity, the high priests of postcolonial theory have succeeded in tilting the intellectual-political center of gravity toward a politics of nostalgia and revival, which is the natural terrain of the Right.

But it is Nanda's America which has tilted right- not India. Was this too the fault of 'post-colonial theory'? I suppose one might say that the real problem was the Woke ideology and its crazy Grievance Studies spin offs. Some Indians jumped on that bandwagon to emigrate. They got paid a little money to say 'Boo to Hinduism!' Still, they were mere 'rice bag' converts without any influence. 

What about people like Charlie Kirk?- who, sadly, has been shot by some nutter.  Is it really the case that the Leftists in the Academy sparked the backlash we now see? It may seem so. Kirk- whom Nanda would no doubt call the 'Horst Wessel' of the Trumpian Right-  got his start by pushing back against Leftists on Campuses. Vivek Ramaswamy got his political start by attacking Corporate 'Wokeism'. 

Perhaps, in America which was rich enough to afford the nuisance of 'Wokeism', such people can have political influence. But not India. It is too poor. 'Reservations' matter. India may well face a Bangladesh type 'youth-quake' on the issue. Indeed, some stupid Leftists thought the rise of the BJP in the Nineties was solely due to 'Mandir vs Mandal'- i.e. was a reaction to the extension of affirmative action to OBCs. 

The plain fact is the Rightward shift we see in America and parts of Europe has to do with demographics and structural changes to the Global Economy. Neither witches not ideological witch-hunts matter. 

Consequently, there is now a void

its name is Rahul Gandhi. He should have taken charge of the Commonwealth Games in the manner that his Dad had taken charge of the Asian Games. He should have shouldered Manmohan aside and led his party to victory in 2014 as Prime Minister. He, understandably, was gun-shy. That's why we have Modi- who, it must be said, has been excellent.  

where there should have been a strong, principled, secular-democratic front against Hindutva’s onslaught on all that was once decent and promising in the idea of India.

Nanda now lives in Trump's America. She is safe from 'Hindutva's onslaught'. But is she safe from ICE? Once people like me and Nanda have our Visas or foreign passports ripped up and are sent back to India, we may begin to feel it was always only Hindutva which preserved what is decent and promising about our sacred land.