The recent slaying of Charlie Kirk reminds us that stupid Professors pushing obsolete ideological agendas can cause a backlash amongst students which proves highly beneficial to 'outsider' politicians like Donald Trump.
Kirk only spent one semester at a Community College. It was enough for him to see that he could rise very rapidly simply by attacking or 'debating' the stupid lies spouted by ageing Professors. He founded 'Turning Point' in 2012, at the age of 18. By the time of his death, aged 31, he was spoken off as a future President.
Young people can do well for themselves by challenging the stupid lies peddled by brain dead pedagogues. It is easy to do so. Just take any statement made by a Professor and ask Copilot whether it is true. Within seconds, you will have the answer. Not only is the statement false, it is foolish and highly mischievous. Copilot will do your 'debate prep' for you. You could be the next Charlie Kirk.
The Paine Phule Foundation, registered in Sacramento, California, aims to ' educate about social histories and organize cultural and social initiatives through a research-based agenda and practice. It aims to empower institutions and individuals in their approach to the history, society, and contemporary views of marginalized communities and minorities across the world.'
How does it chose to do so? The answer is, it invites ignorant shitheads- like Jason Stanley- to give lectures.
The following is taken from his '2025 Raosaheb Kasabe Distinguished Lecture on History' organised by the Paine Phule Foundation.'
How fascism works in India
Some years after the King of Italy appointed Mussolini the Premier of Italy, the country became a one-party State. That is a characteristic feature of both Fascism and Communism. Fascism is more favourable to free enterprise whereas Communism leans towards State ownership and control of the means of production.
India is a multi-party Democracy which has moved steadily away from State Socialism over the last four decades. There is no Fascism in India. True, in the Fifties, there was the possibility that the Congress party, under Nehru, would entrench itself in the manner in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico ruled that country for 70 years. But, though Congress won majorities at the Centre and most States for 25 years after Independence, India was never a de facto one party state. Why? One reason is that in segmentary societies, political parties tend to factionalize and split. In India, this meant that if X is denied a party ticket, he promptly joins an opposition party to fight the election. If he wins, it might be worth cajoling him to return.
However, ambition or opportunism wasn't the only reason for factionalism. Extreme Leftists could split over ideological issues of an arcane type- e.g. being for or against Lin Biao. Equally, a Party which was created on the basis of a specific alliance of castes or regions could split because of a divergence of economic interests or, more simply, personality clashes and a feeling that one's community wasn't getting a fair share of the spoils of office.
A peculiarity of democratic politics in African and Asian countries is Dynasticism. Sometimes this is reinforced by the Army but, in that case, there is the risk that a General takes over. Where you have militaristic authoritarianism, you may well speak of Fascism of the sort imposed by General Franco in Spain.
India has had no such thing. Indeed, the fact that the Army is non-political means that no regime can stay in power by shooting protestors. Still, during the Emergency in the mid-Seventies, Mrs. Gandhi showed that the Government had sufficient resources to lock up all political opponents. Could India have turned Fascist at that time? No. Autocracy is tempered by assassination. If the ruling party is only held together by fealty to the Dynasty, then it will fall apart if the leader is killed and his or her spouse or son or daughter can't, for whatever reason, take over as Ruler. That is what happened in India after both Indira and her son Rajiv were killed. Sonia, Rajiv's widow, was Italian and loath to take on the job. Still, her Party made a political comeback once the son and heir returned to India and stood for Parliament. Sadly, Rahul was gun-shy. He refused to become PM and lead his party to victory in 2014. Why? He didn't want to be shot or blown up. This was understandable. Why didn't he simply put in a bland technocrat as CEO? Sonia had done that. The answer is that Rahul has a dog in the manger attitude. He doesn't want to do the job but he also doesn't want to watch somebody else do it.
It must also be said, he is stupid and politically naive. It is only thanks to him that Modi won in 2014 and 2019. In 2024, Kharge, the new Congress President, was willing to give up seats for 'pre-poll pacts' with other opposition parties. That's why, though Modi is still PM, his party no longer has a majority. Thus. Modi has to rely upon allies like the infamous turncoat Nitish Kumar. Still, it appears that nobody has an interest in bringing down the Government just in case the ruling party wins big. The other factor is that it now appears that seats will be redistributed before the next General Election. The Hindi belt will have more seats. Nobody can be sure what this means. My guess is that, cow-belt, dynastic, caste-based parties will gain. I could be wrong.
Is there any significant party in India, currently, which wants a one-party State? No. Why? Factionalism. A leader who is a 'vote catcher' can keep his colleagues in line. But, if elections are a formality, there will be nothing but endless internecine intrigue leaving no time for administration. The public, which has grown used to 'last mile delivery' of certain essential goods and services, will rise up. The regime will be toppled in the manner in which the Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi & Nepali administrations have been toppled in recent years.
I may mention that Sheikh Hasina, in Bangladesh, was called dynastic/Fascist because her father, though elected to office, decided to create a one-party State before he and most of his family was assassinated. However, he would be seen as a Socialist whereas both Sheikh Hasina and her main rival, Begum Khalida, the widow of a slain military dictator, were pro-free market and backed particular Islamist factions or personalities. There were allegations that voting was rigged in previous elections and this is the reason Hasina's Democratic credentials were not accepted by the Biden administration.
A student uprising forced Sheikh Hasina to flee after the Army refused to back her. Currently, it appears Sheikh Hasina's party will not be allowed to participate in the next election. Perhaps Begum Khaleda's party will win or form a coalition government with an Islamist party.
Indian politicians, for very good reasons, prefer the 'safety valve' of free and fair multi-party elections because, in the event of a popular uprising, they don't want to have to take their families and run away to some other country.
India’s fascist turn under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule has multiple parallels with global fascist tactics and history, including in Nazi Germany and Trump’s United States
Nonsense! Weimar Germany faced a terrible economic crisis. India's economy was growing rapidly when Modi came to power. What made the 2014 election unusual was that Rahul refused to stand and would not nominate anyone else to stand in his place. Modi got a walk-over. Such a thing has never happened before in any large parliamentary democracy.
I suppose a misogynist might say 'by nominating first Hilary & then Kamala- neither of whom had a penis- the Democrats gave Trump a walk-over in both 2016 and 2024.' I admit, Kamala was a weak candidate and Biden's having to drop out was a great blow to his party. Still, there is a lot of empirical evidence that people voted for Trump rather than against Cameltoe.
INDIA HAS BEEN central to my work on fascism.
Jason was a shit analytical philosopher whose stupidity I have frequently exposed on this blog. He knows nothing of German or Italian or Indian history. He just strings together a bunch of stupid lies.
Both my books on fascism, How Fascism Works and Erasing History, use India as a primary example.
Pakistani politics, because of the role of the Military, could be said to have some Fascist aspects. But, even there, the comparator would be with Kemal Ataturk, not Mussolini or Hitler.
India, the structure of India, is somewhat different. No two fascist situations are the same.
All Fascist states are de facto one-party. Spain only permitted other political parties in 1976.
In India, you have a long-time structure of a caste system.
As you do in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh etc. Incidentally, Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables while Japan has untouchables but no Brahmins.
Fascism in Western societies is based on race.
No. Franco brought in Moors to rape leftist Spanish women. They took their time with this. The Italians and the Germans did most of the actual fighting.
There is of course now a lengthy 20th-century and 21st-century literature on the relationship between caste and race.
It is nonsense.
But in a classic example of scapegoating, India has used its Muslim minority as a way to bind together the different castes in support of what looks to be a campaign of ethnic cleansing that is either starting now or at least threatened.
The ethnic cleansing of Muslims happened when Nehru was Prime Minister. The proportion of Muslims in Delhi went down from 33 to 5 percent. Nehru passed a law forbidding those Muslims who had fled in panic from returning to claim their property or to take Indian citizenship.
The theorist René Girard
an expert on Proust. Fuck did he know about anything? The fact is many Hindus and all Jains & Buddhists stopped sacrificing animals long ago. The very notion of a 'scapegoat' is alien to Indic religion.
argued that a political community is created by a scapegoat, that you need to make an innocent scapegoat to bind together otherwise different groups.
The Brits were that scapegoat. Indians of every sort blamed them for everything. Then they slyly fucked off and things turned to shit for minorities.
So this is a different structure than in European fascism.
Congress did form a 'Seva Dal' which looked militaristic at around the time of the 'March on Rome'. But, it was obvious that the Police would be loyal to whoever was in power. The big question was whether the Princely States would meekly accept integration. But the Princes were lazy and stupid. Thus the only real problem was the Muslims. Once they got Pakistan, Indian politicians didn't really have to worry about them. True, in the Nineties, you started to get Islamist terror- even in peaceful Tamil Nadu- but that problem was easily contained.
One could say 'Communists ruled West Bengal for 30 years'. Mamta Bannerjee is a Fascist because she fought the Commies in the streets. Once the Commies alienated the peasants and lost power, Mamta's goons beat them with vim and vigour. That's 'Fascist' right? The answer is- no, not really. Mamta's TMC isn't a disciplined cadre. It is an opportunistic coalition of thugs. Anyway, the Commies lost power only because they had moved so far to the right that they were taking land away from peasants to make a present of it to big Corporations.
We’d have to ask, in other non-Western countries too, what the structure of fascism would look like.
A one party state with guys in military style uniforms presiding over all Government offices. Those who displease the administration are taken to Party HQ and tortured.
For example, in Kenya, with over 40 tribes, you just don’t have the background structure that would allow for something that looked like fascism.
There was a one-party state under Kenyatta, Moi, etc. till 1991. Some people did 'disappear' or went into exile after serving a prison sentence.
We could ask whether a dictator like Idi Amin was a fascist, but again, Uganda has such a different structure, such a different base, that it may be too complex to apply a European concept, a concept like fascism.
We get it. Jason is a racist. He thinks African darkies are too primitive to have Fascism. But Indian darkies are smart and make a lot of money in High Tech industries. Thus India is like Trump's America- i.e. totes Fascist. Also, the smart sort of Indian are Brahmin. They incessantly sodomize Dalits & OBCs. They slit the throat of innocent Muslims because that's what happens to 'scapegoats'. Anyway, the guys he is delivering this lecture to, even if their Mummies and Daddies qualified as Doctors or Engineers and thus got visas to America, are descendants of non-Brahmins. Thus he is very kindly explaining to those thickos that, if they return to India, they will be sodomized by fair skinned Brahmins... like Rahul Gandhi? Modi is OBC. The President is ST. The Chief Justice is a Dalit Buddhist. Since as Pete Navarro says 'Hindu Brahmins are responsible for the suffering of Christians in Ukraine', it follows that Rahul Gandhi will personally sodomize each and every Indic origin member of the 'Paine-Phule' association if ever they return to India.
So why is India so central when there are these differences, when you have caste, and when you have religion, and when you have a Muslim minority? India is different because the theorists of Hindu fascism, V D Savarkar
a revolutionary and freedom fighter jailed over a decade before the 'March on Rome'. His suffering took a toll on him. I suppose, had the French not handed him back to the Brits, he would have ended up working with other revolutionaries in Europe. Would he have turned to the Left as most of them did? I suppose so.
and M S Golwalkar,
not a real smart guy but he kept the RSS separate from Savarkar's Mahasabha.
explicitly took the Nazis’ treatment of Jews as a justificatory model for targeting India’s Muslim population.
No. They took the Muslim targeting of Hindus as the justificatory model for retaliating in kind. But it was Congress which was the muscular arm of Hinduism. When it came to killing and chasing away Muslims, only the Sikhs and Dogras could match their record.
The truth is Indians didn't then, and don't now, give a shit about stuff happening in Europe or America. Those are very far away places.
And the tactics that were used in Hindu nationalism, in the fascist parts of Hindu nationalism, of Hindutva, mirror quite precisely the tenets of fascism, the strategies and tenets of fascism, as I lay out in How Fascism Works.
Jason didn't understand how Italian Fascism worked or how German Nazism worked or Franco's Falangism worked. Fuck would he understand about India? The fact is that Dr. Hedgewar's RSS was a 'non-political' copy of his pal, Dr. Hardikar's, Congress Seva Dal (which he was a member of). The idea was that the RSS could continue to operate when the Seva Dal was banned. The inspiration for both was the 'Anushilan Committees' of the Young Revolutionaries in Bengal in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Both Hardikar & Hegdewar were Medical Students in Calcutta at that time. These revolutionary movements (Jugantar, Ghaddar, etc.) were associated with the 'Garam dal' of the Congress led by Bal, Pal & Lal. After the death of Gokhale (the leader of the moderate 'Naram Dal') Congress reunited on a platform of 'Purna Swaraj'- complete Independence. Sadly, this would entail the partition of the country.
Chapter one of that book, of my analysis, is called ‘The Mythic Past’. You draw on a mythic past to create this illusion of past purity.
Jason is drawing on the mythic past of Fascism. The plain fact is, it only came into existence where there was a clear and present Communist threat. Otherwise, as with Moseley's British Union of Fascists, it was a joke.
So obviously, Hindutva, by its claims of a pure Hindu past in India,
This is a claim made by Mahatma Gandhi and Pundit Nehru. It is simply a fact that India was Hindu (as Indian law defines Hinduism) before any foreign religion appeared in the country.
is a core example of the mythic past,
No. It is simply a tautology. If we define Native Americans as everybody descended from those who lived in America before Christopher Columbus showed up, then it is a fact that there was a pure Native American past in America which stretched back at least ten thousand years.
first saying we were pure and then we were invaded and made impure.
Currently, there are people in South Mexico who are of Maya heritage. They object to their land and resources being taken away by Multinational Corporations. They don't have enough drinking water for themselves, but Heineken wants to take a 100 million liters of water from them to turn into beer. They object that beer is something foreign. It is not part of Maya culture. No doubt, Jason would see these indigenous people seeking to protect the fragile ecology which has supported them for thousands of years as evil Fascists who appeal to a 'mythic past'.
And the language of purity invites comparison of immigrants to termites, vermin and disease, something also familiar in contemporary politics in India.
Tribal people in Assam, etc. are Fascists. They should not object to losing their land and their language and their culture to hordes of immigrants of a different religion. They should shut the fuck up and quietly convert.
The mythic past also connects to another tactic of fascism, which I call sexual anxiety. And one of the primary examples I use is the “love jihad” discourse in India.
The first politician to make this an issue was from the Communist party in Kerala.
Charu Gupta works as a theorist of both fascism, Nazism and Hindutva, so she can really see these parallels, and has done work on both structures within National Socialism and contemporary India.
She teaches at JNU. Sadly, as a Central University, it will fill up with useless, braindead, RSS types just as, under UPA, it filled up with useless, braindead, Leftists.
So what’s the idea of the love jihad?
What is the idea of 'grooming gangs' in England? The answer is to turn girls into prostitutes unless, obviously, they are earning well in which case they can support you and your other three wives.
Well, if you have an underlying structure of purity, if you have an underlying structure of a mythic past of purity, then you can create panic that a minority group is disturbing that purity not just by entering the country but by threatening women, the pure women. And this is classic.
Under Sir Keir Starmer, England has become totes Fascist. Nice Pakistani origin men who introduced young girls to cultural diversity with their dicks are being sent to jail. At least this is what the tabloid newspapers keep telling us.
The political erasure of Indian Muslims
occurred under Nehru. In 1946, they voted overwhelmingly for the League & Pakistan. The result was that they lost all the concessions previously given them. Sadly, some also lost their lives and homes in Delhi right under the nose of Prime Minister Nehru.
National Socialism said, according to the stab-in-the-back myth of the Nazis, that Jews were bringing in black Senegalese soldiers who would then rape Aryan women or just sleep with Aryan women to create non-white babies in Germany.
Nonsense! They said the French Army, which was occupying Rhineland, had lots of Senegalese soldiers with really big dicks. Innocent Aryan maidens might innocently sit down on one of those ginormous Senegalese dicks and this would cause them to become totally depraved. They might demand equal opportunities and equal pay rather than staying at home and devoting themselves to cooking and cleaning and looking after their children.
So this structure of creating fear about your women is central to fascism.
Jason comes from a country which wasn't Fascist but where plenty of 'Negroes' were lynched because of rumors that they were having affairs with White women.
So it is also, as the journalist Ida B Wells laid out in 1892, an attack on the women of the dominant group.
Jason thinks there was Fascism in America in 1892. There wasn't. There was Racism. But there was also 'Liberal Democracy'.
So love jihad is a straightforward attack, an even more straightforward attack than the ideology and propaganda behind the mass lynching of black American men. Why? Because
of changes in inheritance law- including that of Syrian Christian (thanks to Arundhati Roy's mother)- which means that a particular community will become vigilant about 'out-marriage' of girls. Why? Because resources- particularly land- goes out of the community.
Incidentally, greedy White men would marry Native American women who inherited valuable land in Oklahoma. Indigenous people often want to prevent this happening for economic and sociological reasons- i.e. they don't want land which has been reserved for them from going out of the community. Jason, we already know, considers indigenous people to be totes Fascist.
it grants that Hindu women might fall in love with Muslims.
Jason is now going to demand that the Ayatollah change Shariah law so a Muslim girl can marry a non-Muslim.
And then it says, “Oh no, they’re actually being tricked.” They have no agency. They are the property of Hindu men. And when they marry Muslims, they have been tricked because they can’t make their own decisions. It targets 50 percent of the Hindu population, and it says women are the property of men. They cannot marry Muslims.
Indian law permits Hindu women who are of age to marry whom they please. This is not the case in Pakistan. A Muslim girl can't marry a non-Muslim unless he converts.
Whenever they marry Muslims, it is not under their own agency, and they must be saved from that. It’s harsher than the ideology behind lynching, because the thought behind lynching was that black men were raping white women.
This cretin doesn't even know that Jim Crow States had laws against miscegenation. Cancel that. Cancel that. He does know this from his own family history. Still, what's the harm in telling lies to the stupid type of Indian origin people that the 'Paine-Phule' Association seeks to miseducate?
So here it’s saying that even when Hindu women marry Muslim men, they’re not agents, because they’re like objects. They’re owned by Hindu men.
Like Pete Navarro, Jason hates Hindus. Did you know that Hindu Brahmins are causing all the suffering in Ukraine?
These parallels, the idea that immigrants are a kind of infestation,
Americans reading this would feel that Hindus moving into the neighborhood represent a kind of infestation. It is good to know that Jason is doing his bit to help Trump & Pete Navarro.
a violation of purity, these are all characteristic marks of fascism.
Jim Crow America wasn't Fascist. Italy was Fascist, while Mussolini ruled the roost, but an Indian or an African was welcome to marry an Italian girl. In Hitler's Germany, an Indian could not marry a Jew (this is what happened to Vikram Seth's uncle) but could marry an 'Aryan' German girl. (Netaji Bose married his Austrian Secretary)
So it’s a global fight.
If Jason is on your side, you are bound to lose.
Trump and Modi, Netanyahu, Putin, Orbán, these are linked figures using similar strategies.
No. All those named came to power before Trump. Modi is exceptional because of his high approval rating. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that the Opposition still hasn't been able to come up with a credible alternative candidate for the top job.
But in India, we have a more explicit case.
India is unusual because the Dynast turned gun-shy. Also he is a moon-calf.
In India, Hitler is not represented as the worst man in history.
Nor in Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc. Zail Singh, later the President of India, praised Hitler in Parliament. His comments had to be expunged.
Hitler is, in the popular culture in India, a conqueror.
No. He is considered a pal of Netaji Bose. But he is known to have been defeated. Otherwise, surely, he'd have helped his pal conquer India- right?
So fascism does not have, as it were, the bad reputation that it has in the West.
It had a better reputation than Communism. Franco's Spain became a favorite holiday resort for Labour voting English people.
And that’s something that makes it an even more concerning situation.
Only if you are also concerned about a revival of the Spanish Inquisition.
We can see the attack on Muslims,
like the two Jews who died in Manchester? They were attacking an innocent Muslim's knife using their bodies. This is a typical Fascist tactic.
on non-Hindus, partly as a method of scapegoating to bring different Hindu castes together.
J.N Mandal didn't fall for that base trick. He allied with Jinnah and told his people to vote for Pakistan. Jinnah appointed him his Law Minister. Sadly, the fellow had to run away to India as did most of his people. That's what put paid to talk of a Muslim-Dalit alliance.
And this is exactly, as it were, out of the playbook.
Indira, at one time, could use a Brahmin-Dalit-Muslim formula. But the rise of the OBCs put an end to that strategy. There were other formulae- e.g. Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim in Gujarat. But governance matters. Modi delivered better governance and suddenly caste formulae broke down. Now, it is the poorer female voter who is decisive in more and more constituencies. What they care about is money paid into their bank accounts. Modi & Nitish have just paid 10,000 Rs to 2.5 million Bihari women. Will this buy them the election? I doubt it.
We can also see in India another tactic of fascism that I call anti-intellectualism.
Jason is an intellectual. But he tells stupid lies. There are Professors who don't tell stupid lies. We don't call them intellectuals. We just say they are smart and make sound predictions.
Attacks on universities, representing universities as anti-national, as seditious, representing student protests as anti-national, sedition. The idea is you take critical intellectual enquiry and you represent it as an attack on the nation.
The idea is that you take advantage of the general feeling that non-STEM instruction at Uni has turned to shit and gain popularity by going after an easy target.
Because, in fact, the history of India is much more complex.
Jason knows shit about the history of any country.
It is not a history of a pure Hindu past. And Hinduism is itself a complex religion that does not easily fit into notions of Aryan supremacy.
The word 'Arya'- just means 'noble' or 'free born'. It has no racial meaning.
So how does this form of anti-intellectualism take shape? What I do in my work and my activism is draw parallels between what is happening in other democratically back-sliding countries,
because if the son, grandson and great grandson of Indian Prime Ministers is not Prime Minister, then, clearly, there has been 'democratic backsliding'. But this only happened because Rahul would neither take the job himself nor let anyone else from his party take it. There is no parallel with this type of dog-in-the-manger attitude in the political history of any country.
in other regimes, and I say, look at the similarities. And India is something of a pioneer in these techniques.
India is similar to other South Asian countries. It is foolish to compare it with Europe or America.
There are very clear borrowings in the United States from Viktor Orbán’s authoritarianism in Hungary.
It was an American political consultant who gave Orban the idea to target Soros. Hungary hasn't much experience of democratic politics. It borrows. It does not lend.
For example, Orbán targeted Central European University and used his country’s accreditation system to make it impossible to accredit students.
Why? CEU was useless. Hungarians thought it would focus on AI and Fintech. It didn't. It was shit. The Viennese aren't exactly crowing about having acquired a non-STEM private University which attracts only thickos.
Central European University had to move to Vienna. We can see very similar tactics in the United States: Columbia University being targeted, and they are going after Harvard University.
Jason ran away from Yale. Perhaps he really is crazy enough to believe his own paranoid shite.
Orbán now very clearly appears in the United States as a hero, and is inspiring the Trump administration,
Fuck off! Orban's country is tiny. Nobody gives a shit about it.
the Make America Great Again movement. And in India, Modi is doing something similar.
Indians don't care if Universities are shit. What worries them is young people paying good money to coaching centers and sitting various competitive exams year after year. There are just too many people chasing too few government jobs. The country desperately needs reform of Labour & Land laws such that 'Gen Z' can be accommodated. Otherwise, there will be a youth uprising in the Cities and Towns.
It’s inarguable that the tactics we saw in India, for example, and the reaction to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, are being followed almost point by point by the Trump administration.
No. Trump is playing hardball. He is deporting people ruthlessly. India isn't- save maybe in Assam.
The CAA agitation was a political misstep. Modi & Kejriwal were delighted that Congress & the Left shot themselves in the foot over the issue. Now, it seems, Modi has edged Kejriwal out of Delhi. But Kejriwal won't be quiet for long.
Anyone familiar with 2019 in India, with what they did to Jawaharlal Nehru University, for example – the police coming onto campus, going after protesters, the representations in the media – will see the parallels.
As I said, BJP & AAP have already squeezed the issue as much as they can. Anyway, JNU is a Central Institution. It will fill up with useless RSS types just as it was previously filled up with useless Leftists.
We see the New York Times attacking US universities again and again for being anti-national,
anti-Semitic
for having protests against Israel, even when there are Jewish students deeply involved in these protests. And the media in the United States, like the New York Times op-ed page, has attacked universities relentlessly for ten years – essentially for not being patriotic, for centring Black history, for criticising scientific racism. I think you see something similar in the press in India, and you saw something similar in the press in 2019, these justifications of the representations of the universities as anti-national.
Pat Buchanan's 'Culture War' speech dates back to 1992. Smart Republicans saw that losing that war- at least on campuses- would benefit the Right very greatly in the long run. Why? Ordinary students would feel alienated. In any case, it is only by making non-STEM subjects boring and stupid that you can ensure that smart kids quit the lotos-eating life of the grad-student.
But in India at the time, you had those media outlets where, essentially, there’s good reason to believe there was government pressure, that the negative coverage was part of a campaign.
TV shows like having 'student leaders' or 'rising young academics' to come in and shout at old fogeys wearing khadi caps. This is called 'debate'. But some young people can click with the audience and, depending on their caste, get offered a party ticket. Thus, you might start off by losing as a Communist but then switch to Congress or one of the Samajvadi parties
Whereas in the United States, you have universities being attacked by the media for a decade with no government involvement. The media has willingly played the role of laying the path for attacking universities.
America is rich and higher education is 'income elastic'. Thus College retained or even increased its importance. But, now, jobs are becoming scarce. Young people are worried about AI. There is little point protesting about Gaza if you yourself might end up homeless a few years down the line.
Let’s go back to 2019 and the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Which confirmed laws previously passed under Nehru. Non-Muslims will be given refuge. Muslims won't. Why? Look at what happened to Dr. Taslima Nasrin. She was granted asylum but then the Indian Mullahs started baying for her blood. The message is, if the Muslims in a Muslim country want to kill you, you won't be safe in India because the Indian Muslims are just as bloodthirsty. True, they can't do much to the majority because, almost immediately, they get stomped, but nobody is going to stick their neck out for a Muslim being killed by an even more fanatical Muslim.
We have the media in India attacking universities,
Media should not be free to attack things I like.
we have the disparaging representation of students protesting laws that create tiers of citizenship
India has only one type of citizenship
– the hallmark of fascism discriminating between Hindus and Muslims
Which happens in Muslim countries.
– and we have students as the source of resistance to authoritarianism.
In Bangladesh- sure. In India, not so much. Perhaps, this is because there is only lawful exercise of authority. There is no authoritarianism.
You have professors targeted, like when Pratap Bhanu Mehta was cast out of Ashoka University in 2021.
He wasn't cast out. He resigned. Why? Well, teaching nice-but-dim kids in rural Haryana isn't exactly a reputation-builder. The guys who hired him weren't happy because they wanted evidence based critique of Modi's backsliding on the reform agenda (this was before the farm protests). Instead the nutter was writing about his lurve for Lord Ram in the Indian Express. The thing was simply embarrassing. Anyway, Mehta pretended he had been sacked because Modi demanded his head on a silver platter. Nobody believed him. Another senior Professor took the opportunity to resign 'in solidarity'. It had become clear that Ashoka might do okay as a tony private college for thickos. But it couldn't compete with Aziz Premji University (a similar, newly set up, private University) in doing Social Science research.
Mehta is no radical, he’s a liberal – he’s a liberal political theorist.
He is a shit-head. I think he still has his column in the Indian Express. He probably has one or two valuable sinecures or 'grants' from wealthy foundations. Most importantly he no longer has to teach nonsense or supervise nonsensical theses.
So you have this sort of targeting of prominent academics. Columbia University did this with Katherine Franke.
She lied on TV about ex-Israeli Army students using chemical weapons on other students.
They forced her into retirement
because the entire branch of the law she specialized in is fast disappearing?
for comments she made on the news programme Democracy Now!, which supposedly made Jewish students feel unsafe at Columbia. And she, like Mehta, is a professor that any university should be proud to employ.
to clean toilets using only their heads- maybe.
Of course, Mehta was immediately hired at Princeton University as a distinguished visiting professor. And yet you know he cannot go back to an Indian university.
There are prestigious State Universities in Chennai and Kolkata which would hire him because they are Opposition ruled states. The problem is that Professors of Political Science are meant to do evidence based research. This is tedious and allows little scope for ethical grand-standing.
This targeting of prominent intellectuals – the targeting, the revision of history and perspectives – we now see in the United States too. Surely one of the greatest writers of the last century, certainly of the last 50 years, is the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
Coz she is bleck.
Instead of expressing pride about her being American, about such a great thinker and writer,
& the fact that she is bleck
her works have been banned because they represent a perspective on the United States that does not extol the white majority.
Her books implicitly extol the white majority at least when compared to incestuous black nutters.
We find similar revisions of history in the textbooks
wherever there are textbooks
that are now promulgated throughout India. We find an attack on India’s secular democracy. We find subtle revisions of history to represent M K Gandhi as a traitor. One textbook I talk about in Erasing History says that one of Gandhi’s central goals was to get India to pay reparations to Pakistan. If you think about that, what they’re saying there is that Gandhi was a traitor.
This is hilarious! Jason is saying Gandhi was a traitor because he went on a fast to get Nehru & Co to hand over Pakistan's share of assets despite the fact that there was an ongoing war between the two dominions at that time. Gandhians have always drawn attention to this. Why? When it comes to money, honoring your commitments boosts confidence in your probity. Way more money will come into your hands by your being pro-active in such matters.
This revision of history, the minimisation of Muslim leaders
Jason is directing us to an article by Harsh Mander. His parents had to run away from their ancestral home because of Muslim Leaders.
in India and Muslim periods in India’s history, is central to a fascist movement,
Only in the sense that urinating upon Jason's head is central to a sound monetary policy. The fact is, the two things aren't connected at all. No doubt, I might think it wise to urinate on Jason's head for macro-economic reasons but I might also think that History or Socioproctology or Farting wistfully is really really important.
as is the erasure of the pasts of minority groups and the elevation of the identity of the dominant group as the identity of the nation.
Nobody gives a fuck about such erasures. Even Professors of shite subjects are only going through the motions when they say 'the role of sodomy in the formulation of the theory of Bose-Einstein Condensates has been erased by fat Lesbian ho-bags'.
India’s attacks on universities went further in 2019 than what we’re seeing in America, but we are quickly catching up. Some participants of the 2019 anti-CAA protests, like Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal
they did 13 months porridge. They seem to have quietened them down a lot. The fact is, it costs money to keep people in jail. If these two aren't a threat, why not let them fend for themselves? It isn't as though the charges against them have been dropped.
of the women students’ group Pinjra Tod, were accused of sedition. We see already in the United States that students are being hauled off the street for co-authoring op-eds in student newspapers and dragged to brutal prisons in Louisiana.
unlike those genteel jails they have in Texas.
Let’s turn to the topic of resistance. I want to turn here to Bangladesh, where the students led the resistance. We can see the centrality of students and the centrality of universities – and those who seek to dismantle democracy, they too can see the centrality of students and of universities.
The students were protesting against reservations. India has reservations. Should students take to the streets to get rid of the thing? Sure. Let seats be awarded on the basis of merit.
It is essential that universities hold their ground
No. They are useless. If neither parents nor taxpayers are willing to pay for them they will disappear.
because these hallowed democratic institutions
This cretin doesn't get that there were universities long before there were any fucking democratic institutions of the type we have now. Also, autocracies have universities.
have within them young students who cherish freedom and are willing to act on that.
by quitting University? That's cool.
So we have to look to India for the kind of resistance that Bangladesh provided, and we have to respond to the tactic of scapegoating.
by pissing on each other's heads. Me first!
We must recognise that there are many oppressed groups in India, and there has to be solidarity between the oppressed. In the United States, the great scholar and civil-rights activist W E B Du Bois described how poor whites and poor blacks were unifying in a labour movement because they collectively recognised the similarity of their oppression.
Then he realized he was talking bollocks so he went to Ghana, renounced his American citizenship and joined the Communist party.
The northern industrialists and the southern planter class used race as a divide between people who should otherwise have been united.
No. Both put their economic interests first. Interestingly, in White majority Appalachia, Black coal-miners were paid more because they could be relied upon to 'black-leg'- i.e. keep working during a strike.
Essentially, they told poor whites, “We are all white. You might not have any money, we might be treating you like trash, but at least you are white.”
No. This was a stupid story stupid Commie nutters told. That's why they couldn't get elected dog catcher.
That’s how race works.
What about Gravity? How does Gravity work? The answer is that there's this rich White dude- Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the fucking Mint, who says to peeps who are plunging into poverty 'listen, you and me are equally subject to the law of gravity. True, you keep falling down while I keep rising but this is because Gravity is totes Fascist. Did you know it went to Narendra Modi's birthday party? Guess who else was there. That's right! It was Adolph Hitler and his pet bunny rabbit, Donald Trump.'
That’s how the fascist regime of the Jim Crow era in the US South worked. It drew poor whites into that fascist regime by telling them, “We’re going to keep on having you do the manual labour for wealthy whites, but at least you are white.”
Why stop there? Why not say, 'the fascist regime told black men, we're going to have to keep lynching you, but at least you have a dick which you are free to use to rape your kids.' ? After all, isn't it a fact that fascist regimes- e.g. those of US, Canada, UK etc.- only survive by invoking a 'Myth' of pure incestuous origin? That's why all the kids in such countries have been buggered or fisted senseless by their parents. It is this which we should alert our students to. If you can't confront Mum & Dad with accusations of their incessantly fucking you in the ass all through Grade Skool & Graduate Skool, how are you going to be able to challenge Trump, Netanyahu, Starmer & the fucking Pope?
When challenging scapegoating as a tactic,
This cunt scapegoats everybody he doesn't like. But for them, he wouldn't have been buttfucked by so called 'parents' and other such Fascist collaborators.
it is essential to emphasise the similarity in material conditions.
Jason has the same material conditions as a homeless bum- right?
The targets of fascism are minority groups, intellectuals, the media, the universities – and women, because the idea is to say that the dominant group must reproduce, because the only people in the nation should be the dominant group. And members of the non-dominant communities are always invaders.
The Native Americans were totes Fascist. That's why they objected to people from Europe- like Jason's ancestors- turning up and taking away their land.
The concern that many of us have about what is happening in India today is that the basis is being laid for anything from ethnic cleansing to genocide.
It happened already in 1947/48. Perhaps, Jason is thinking of the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pundits from their ancestral homes. But two can play at that game.
I’ve been worried about India. My book How Fascism Works was published in 2018, and India is a principal example there because
the book is shit. India is a multi-party Democracy- probably because that is the only way it can stay together. The alternative is dynastic autocracy tempered by assassination. There's the rub. In a country where the P.M's own security detail can gun her down, would be autocrats turn gun-shy. Look at Rahul.
we see the rhetoric laying the basis for this, we see what’s happening with the legal system, we see what looks to be something like the Nuremberg Laws, which took citizenship from my father as a Jew in Berlin in the 1930s.
He was happy enough to emigrate to Jim Crow America where what counted was that he was White.
We see a structure, between the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act, that threatens to remove the citizenship of many, many Indians.
It can't remove citizenship from people who never had it in the first place. Anyway, it is Pakistan and Iran which are actively deporting hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
And then, when you criticise that, you are told, “Oh, we’re helping immigrants. We’re allowing non-Muslim immigrants to come in.” Like with Jim Crow, there is the use of these superficially neutral methods to remove the citizenship of a large population of Indians.
Jim Crow did not deny citizenship to African Americans. It denied them some Civil Rights. Nehru did cancel the citizenship of Indian Muslims who had fled across the border in panic. But this was to make room for non-Muslim refugees from the 'Land of the Pure' (which is what Pakistan means).
We already see that non-Hindu citizens of India are being treated like second-class citizens, being arrested and prepared for mass deportation.
No we don't.
Somehow, the structure of Indian democracy has held in certain places, probably because of the federalist structure of India.
It has a unitary structure. Nehru was very clear on that. So was Ambedkar.
The country’s various states have some power and the capacity for resistance.
No. America has 'dual sovereignty'. India does not.
So far, though there are regular lynchings of non-Hindus,
& ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims in Muslim dominated areas.
India has not crossed the line – even after the experiment in Assam – of having grand concentration camps to collect people whose citizenship and heritage in India has been removed because they lack the proper documentation.
The Bench mandated the setting of detention centers back when Manmohan was P.M. The question is whether Tribal people should have superior rights on their ancestral land. From the time of the British, Governments have accepted this in principle though they turn a blind eye to illegal migration. Why? India is poor. We have empathy for poor people. The hope is that a modus vivendi between the indigenous people and the newcomers can be maintained.
Unlike in the United States, there are not yet vast deportation centres packed full.
The US was taking in Whites, like Jason's dad, when it was deporting Mexicans under 'Operation Wetback'.
But as you see in the United States, the language that we had in the first Trump administration is now being transformed into policy. My concern with India is that we’re seeing that process slowed somewhat, for numerous reasons, but you have the rhetoric – and, like in the United States, it could soon turn into policy.
Pakistan may or may not have had rhetoric. But we know their policy has been pretty consistent towards kaffirs.
When we look at other non-Western countries, there is an old debate – in African philosophy, for instance, as with Léopold Sédar Senghor on African socialism – where you ask whether the material conditions in a non-Western country are similar enough to those in a Western country to apply the same concepts.
African leaders agreed that African Socialism meant Mercedes Benzes for themselves and poverty for everybody else.
I think in India, despite its bewildering variety of groups and languages, the scapegoating mechanisms of Hindu nationalism have allowed India to create something like a European fascist structure.
India had a strong coercive apparatus which easily dealt with agitations of all and every type. It could also use extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale. That's why Communists had to give up Maoist tactics and tamely join the multi-party system. Where they are better at Governance- or, just winning elections- e.g. in Kerala, they get to rule. There was no Right Wing threat similar to that of the Communists. Hindu nationalism triumphed in 1947. The country had a Brahmin dynasty. Sadly, Rahul- a janeodhari Brahmin- didn't want to become PM lest the same fate befall him as did his Daddy & his Granny. Like his Mum, he could have appointed a proxy- e.g. Montek rather than Manmohan- but he has a dog in the manger attitude. Now, he is enjoying himself as the Greta Thurnberg of Indian politics.
Narendra Modi himself is a kind of cultish leader; he doesn’t exactly look like Mussolini, he doesn’t exactly look like Hitler, but he does have a kind of, almost religious, cult around him.
He is a good leader. Like Atal, a previous PM, he took the oath of celibacy for National Service which Mahatma Gandhi urged 'all thinking Indians' to take up. But, his party may decide to ditch him and go with someone younger- maybe from a Hindi-speaking state- because seats will be redistributed by the time of the next election and younger people in the Hindi belt will have more representation in the next Parliament.
He is the Leader in the European fascist sense.
No. He isn't the leader of the RSS. He may be replaced if his party feels he is getting old or if he makes a mistake. Indeed, he will be made the scapegoat if his party loses seats in the next General Election. From praising Modi, everybody will turn to blaming him for everything which went wrong ever since 2014. While Atal was PM, everyone said he was great. The moment he lost the 2004 election, they said he was senile and Brajesh Mishra had made all the decisions. As Enoch Powell said, all political careers end in failure.
And then, finally, we have an explicit history of Hindu nationalists acknowledging the influence of and drawing justification from Nazi Germany.
It was Govind Vallabh Pant who said 'Gandhi is the Il Duce & Fuhrer of India'. As for Hitler, that was the sobriquet of Indira Gandhi. That is why Zail Singh praised Hitler in Parliament. Indira made him President of the Republic.
As for Jason, he has been screaming himself hoarse about Trump. Has this hurt the Donald in any way? No. What has been hurt is the reputation of Yale University's Philosophy Department. Still, now Jason has run away to Canada, it may begin to recover. I'm kidding. Anal-tickle Philosophy is as dead as the dodo.
