Takeshi Morisato, a Professor of Philosophy, has an essay in Aeon titled- 'Between being and emptiness'
Which was bridged well enough by Shingon Buddhism.
In Japanese philosophy, unlike the atomised Western self, we are ‘ningen’ (人間),
i.e. the space in which humans are found- the world of men, not gods or demons.
each enmeshed with other humans and nature.
They may be. They may not. The hermit meditating in a mountain cave may transcend the world of men.
In 1934, Watsuji laid out the methodological foundation of Japanese ethics with his Ethics as the Study of the Human [ningen],
Hilarious! Japan had decided to do very evil shit. Some Professor thinks this is a good time to gas on about Ethics!
and gave the earliest formulation of Japanese environmental ethics in Fūdo (1935) – translated as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study.
Japan should invade other climes and extinguish their more ancient cultures. Watsuji's racist shite was used by the regime to justify their horrible claims.
He then published his magnum opus, Rinrigaku – translated as Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan – which was originally a series of essays written between 1937 and 1949, during one of the most tumultuous periods for modern Japan (and, indeed, the world).
He was doing his bit to make the world a lot more evil.
In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human.
Killing, raping and looting Chinese and Vietnamese and Indonesian people?
How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values.
Teach shite at University and you will become a shithead. Watsuji went the extra mile by becoming an evil shithead- like Heidegger.
Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject,
though Japan had decided to imitate the West and 'escape from Asia'.
arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign to the ways in which what it means to be human (ningen, 人間) has been thought about for millennia in East Asian and Japanese philosophy.
It was better. Don't do evil shit even if your country has decided to do evil shit. You don't need to be enmeshed in stinky poo.
First, Watsuji shows that the conception of the Western subject is both individualistic and self-referential,
Because conceptions are held by individuals and their conception of the self must be be self-referential.
although most ethical systems have tried to paint it as being universal.
None have. They all thought there were barbarians and savages who were more like beasts.
Take the example of the Cartesian ego, derived from his cogito argument.
It is stupid. Most things which exist can't think. The fact that you can think doesn't mean you exist. What exists is the body. It does not disappear when you stop thinking. Descartes made a contribution to math. One might say that Math exists because there is a creative subject. It isn't necessarily Platonic.
René Descartes locked himself in a room, then decided to doubt his perception, among other things, concluding that, even when he doubted everything, he could not doubt his activity of thinking as the foundation of his subjectivity.
But Occassionalism might be true. God is efficient cause. You only think you are thinking just as you only think you are free not to think you are free.
To a Japanese reader, this is a story about a Frenchman who could afford the time to meditate on how his mind works,
Plenty of Japanese soldiers had similar stretches of leisure. Buddha too got to sit under a Bodhi tree. He came to the conclusion that existence is empty.
thereby laying out a reflection on his consciousness in his solitude. But then this Western philosophical model of thinking, which a solitary Frenchman set forth, somehow became the prescriptive model to describe the structure of the mind for all human beings.
This simply didn't happen. There were a few Cartesians but there were plenty of Thomists, Empiricists, Platonists and so forth.
Aside from appealing to the conception of divine transcendence that created the universe, nothing in this ego-cogito framework of epistemology suggests that we should think of our minds as working in exactly the same way as Descartes thought about his own mind in the 17th century.
Nobody was doing so. Science had progressed a great deal since then.
The same goes for Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative
criticized by Hegel
or Hegel’s dialectic of self-determining reason.
criticized by Schopenhauer
The basic methodology of modern, Western philosophy is the same, according to Watsuji: a philosopher from a specific cultural and historical background
like Watsuji's or Radhakrishnan's. But they weren't Western even if one of them taught at Oxford.
reflects upon how they conceive of the structure of their mind, and declares that what we might call their ‘self-referential abstraction’ is the universal model that theoretically applies to every sentient being across all space and time.
This is the foundation of Buddhism. Japan, sadly, had decided that killing and raping and looting was totes ethical.
(We should also not forget that, in practice, many of these models denied certain demographics access to the universality of reason.) For Watsuji, this is deeply problematic as a foundation for a system of ethical thinking.
But killing lots of Chinese people was cool.
What makes the modern conception of the subject that commits this ‘self-referential abstraction’ so problematic, according Watsuji, is that it had to come up with a supra-individual self that aims at the happiness of society or the welfare of mankind, in order to cloak the foundational problem of individualistic self-centredness.
So, his beef was with Utilitarianism. It might lead to Communism.
What is worse, Watsuji argues, is that, despite this move towards intersubjective consciousness,
e.g. having empathy or compassion for the victims of Japanese Imperialism?
the conception of the modern subject creates conflict between human subject as the source of ethical values, and the objective world or nature as meaningless ‘thereness’.
We should care about trees. Raping and killing innocent Chinese people, however, is perfectly fine.
Nature, in this case, is conceived of as a heteronomous other – a threat to human autonomy, an irrational outside entity that needs to be conquered through the self-determining intelligibility of ‘I think.’
Thinking people figure out that if you keep killing Chinese people and then are stupid enough to attack America, you will get stomped but good even if you keep gassing on about Nature being very nice.
At this point, what Western philosophy describes as an intelligent modern subject looks more like an unreasonable despot
like the Japanese Emperor- or rather the clique controlling him?
who believes themselves to be the highest form of conscious existence, or even a delinquent child who claims to be the sole determiner of world intelligibility, yet in truth is just severed from its mother, Nature.
Please don't nuke us. We are just a naughty child who got separated from Mummy.
This, incidentally, is how Western subjectivity appears to most thinkers from a non-Western philosophical background.
No. Western subjectivity is the same as Eastern subjectivity. Anything in our philosophy, they have in theirs. Sadly, philosophy is useless shite even if Mummy Nature is dandling you in its lap.
Watsuji is just one of many who, out of the same concern, proposed an alternative way of thinking about human existence
there is no need to think about it. Moreover, those who go in for it end up endorsing stupid, evil, shit.
through the system of ethics particular to his own cultural and intellectual milieu.
Japan would regret doing evil shit.
The Japanese conception of human being (ningen sonzai, 人間存在) in the larger context of East Asian philosophies is radically different from the Western conception of humanity.
It really isn't. Every culture has a concept of oikos, oikeosis and oikumene as the habitable world where men live in families and communities to which they feel a 'natural' sense of belonging. This extends to the flora and fauna which make their survival possible. Ancient people saw the need to protect rivers and mountains and forests for ecological reasons.
What makes us human (ningen) is not the ontological structure made by the first principle or divine transcendence.
We are welcome to believe in God, the Creator. But what we believe has nothing to do with what makes us human.
Nor is it reason, spirit, nor even the metaethical structure of meaning that provides a theoretical ground for our ethical values, but rather the ‘concrete practice of betweenness’ or ‘in-betweenness of act connections’ that constitute our humanity (ningen-sei, 人間性).
Nonsense. We have concrete practices of betweenness with our puppy dog just as much as with out baby. But only the baby has the genes to grow into a human being rather than a woofy dog.
And this practice of betweenness always already comes with the practical self-awareness of emptiness.
There is no such awareness. You may pretend that you are so spiritually advanced that you are aware of fairies or angels or emptiness or plenitude, but this mere pretence.
How could we possibly be a human or an ethical being without God, or reason, or the universal ground of modern subjectivity or of meta-ethics?
We are human if we have human DNA. Imitate good people not the nasty people who do stupid, evil, shit. Japan made a mistake in seeking to imitate the Fascist powers who thought they could grab territory with impunity.
To conceive of the nature of human existence in Japanese philosophy,
you have to accept that Japanese philosophy is just philosophy done by Japanese people. It may be shittier than the philosophy done elsewhere but it is the same type of shit.
Watsuji argues that we must make a double de-/re-constructive movement away from the European conception of humanity as the modern subject.
i.e. lets imitate what the cretin Heidegger is doing.
First, we must deconstruct the fixed notion of the self that we inherited from the history of European philosophy
why inherit useless junk? Oh. Your job is to teach useless junk. You couldn't get a better job because you were as stupid as shit.
– Alexander Douglas made a similar point with regard to an argument with Zhuangzi on the non-substantial nature of the self (or ‘non-self’) in his Aeon essay ‘Essence Is Fluttering’ (2025).
The Universe may be a radical entanglement fluttering in a higher dimensional space.
Second, we must then triangulate the proper understanding of human existence as a dynamic life in the midst of the world.
There is no 'proper' understanding of human existence. T
This is to reconstruct our sense of who we are in our active engagement with each other in our inseparable relation to history, society, culture and climate (including all sentient beings and natural environments therein).
We are easily separated from history, society etc. Why not reinvent the wheel, instead?
Imposing a fixed conception of the human subject as something irreducible to its objective environment is very foreign to most Asian and Buddhist thinkers,
Nonsense! Buddhists from India were happy to go to far away countries to spread their ideas. The Dalai Lama doesn't say you have be Tibetan to be a Tibetan Buddhist. He says his religion is universal.
whether it is conceived as the soul or integrity of human existence as created in the image of the divine in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or as the possessor of reason or spirit, in line with a secular understanding of the human subject.
or as inherently possessing Buddha nature (tathaagatagarbha) as in Mahayana Buddhism.
As Douglas’s Daoist essay shows, some Asian thinkers (including Watsuji) even go so far as to say that this fixed, essential conception of subjectivity is delusional
as is the opposite. Everything is delusional. The question is, which delusions (or structural causal models) are useful. Still, I suppose if you are a Professor of useless shite whose name is is Nagasaki Sushi, then you might as well gas on about Watsuji or Wasabe or whatever.
because it suffers from a propensity to view each human as a ‘self-sustaining being’,
this Professor can't feed himself or tie his own shoe-laces.
abstracted or removed from their social, historical and climatic/natural groups.
This dude teaches in Edinburgh. He has been separated from his own Mummy Nature and thus has become a delinquent. He told his parents he was going to Scotland to buy haggis. They are deeply disappointed that he started teaching Philosophy instead.
The world is always in flux and uncompromisingly dynamic.
We aren't. Robustness is evolutionarily adaptive.
If we have a chance to travel to different continents and to different parts of large nations, we quickly learn how vastly different our ways of living, modes of communication, art media, senses of histories and so on can really be.
Fuck off! We discover that economically developed parts of different countries are more similar than different.
But Western philosophers succumb to the temptation to hold on to a fixed notion of the self
because everybody has a fixed notion of the self unless they are mad or get paid to say stupid shite.
that exists independently of that uncompromisingly polyphonic world,
This Professor turned into a cat when he came to Edinburgh. Currently he is in a state of flux between being a penguin and a porpoise.
so that we can somehow construct a universal theory of ethics
e.g. the notion that human rights are universal
through the self-referential universalisation of individual consciousness.
Since human beings are constantly turning into penguins or porpoises, human rights are useless.
And because Western philosophers and those in their thrall prioritise one model that drives towards universal ethics through its self-centred modelling, we endure the problem of colonial thinking that privileges the European way of thinking about what it is to be human above all other alternative conceptions.
The Japanese didn't think the Chinese had human rights. If they don't get nukes, they may be China's next target after Taiwan.
Instead, Watsuji’s understanding of the existence of ningen adopts the dialectical structure of dynamic individuality and polyphonic open totality derived from the Mahayana Buddhist notion of emptiness.
Which is itself empty. The good thing about Umaswati, Nagarjuna & Sankara is that they render Matam (dogma) otiose because Vigyan (praxis or science) is observationally equivalent.
This concept (which also has a Daoist influence) is meant to break down a fixed conceptualisation of what humans, or anything else, should be across infinite space and time.
We don't have such a conceptualisation. Darwin explained why. The fitness landscape matters.
It means that we cannot ultimately fix any definition of anything because nothing remains what it is forever: every thing is in flux, and nothing is fixed.
What is fixed is that we are attached to physical bodies. Doing stuff which is good for those bodies is useful. Sadly, this may involve teaching stupid shite if you were too stupid to study anything useful.
Everything must ultimately turn to nothing
We don't know that.
and, thanks to this ‘turning into nothing’, everything has a space to be what it is.
It would do so in any case if it actually exists in our world.
The world is made of this endless cycle of what the Heart Sutra calls ‘form and emptiness’, and in Buddhist philosophy, this logic of emptiness also requires an act of detachment, self-negation and compassion (that is, for a self to give room for others to be what they are, or are becoming, as others do the same for the self).
Sadly, the doctrine of emptiness is itself empty. Anyone can gain instantaneous enlightenment at any time.
Watsuji uses this concept of self as emptiness, or what Buddhists call ‘interdependence’, to ground Japanese ethics as the study of the human, a culturally specific grasp of human existence as ningen.
This was at a time when Japan was looting and raping and killing on an industrial scale.
A Buddhist defence of the concept of emptiness (pace Daoism) goes something like this: because there is no fixed essence to human existence (the doctrine of ‘no-self’),
it can't be the cause of anything nor can it logically entail anything. Thus the word 'because' in the above sentence is not justified. In other words, Buddhism has no defence.
each group of individuals in a specific historical, cultural and natural milieu can constitute their sense of humanity
or refuse to do any such thing. We don't have to a common 'sense of humanity'. I am welcome to say that my cat is my fur-baby.
with their self-awareness that this place-specific conception of their inter-relational humanity is both transient and finite.
Everybody knows they will die. It is likely that our planet will be destroyed sooner or later. There is no need to bang about transience. Still, if that is what you are paid to do...
But because they practise self-negation – a detachment from the temptation to essentialise their self-conceived notion of themselves beyond their transient existence – they can be truly aware of themselves.
Not if they negate that self-awareness. The neat thing about Nagarjuna & Dignaga is that apoha goes all the way down.
This is often expressed in Buddhist language as enlightenment or no-self, as a manifestation of existential totality (of the ways the world and the self are) as emptiness.
Which is cool because anyone at all can gain instantaneous 'satori'. You don't have to study this shite in a Monastery or a University.
Unlike the Western ethics that strives for the perennial conception of self as a being with a fixed, unchanging, discoverable essence,
i.e. the fact that I am not Bill Gates which is why I can't access his Bank Accounts.
Japanese ethics strives to become aware of the self as a temporary and finite expression of what it means for it to be a self-emptying human.
Which is why it is cool to kill Chinese people.
Watsuji, then, argues that each language necessarily contains this dialectical structure of the interplay between being and emptiness,
which is itself empty. You can talk nonsense in any language. But you can't really turn into a penguin or a porpoise.
and that the Japanese language (rooted in classical Chinese and other Asian intellectual traditions) has a peculiar way of preserving the speaker’s awareness of this dialectical thinking.
Like Heidegger who thought German was super special. It wasn't. Germans & Japanese savants took to English as it became the common language of the STEM subjects.
Regarding languages, Watsuji argues that:
No one person has the privilege of declaring that she alone has created [words].
Fuck off! Mark Okrand created Klingon.
In spite of this, for everyone, words are one’s own. Words are the furnace by means of which merely subjective connections made by individual human beings are converted into noematic meanings.
Noematic merely means meaning. The meaning of meaning is meaning. How fucking profound!
In other words, words are concerned with the activity whereby preconscious being is turned into consciousness.
Only if we can't think without words. Maybe these guys are mentally damaged in some way and thus have become like that aunt of E.M Forster who didn't know what she thought till she heard what she herself said.
‘Noematic meanings’ are ideas, perceptions and thought contents that we recognise as being a part of our subjective consciousness, apart from the objective world.
Only if we are brain damaged will we think any such thing.
Watsuji is saying that the world is a cluster of practical act-connections
at the Quantum level, maybe.
and, in order for me to express my thought or feeling therein, then, we (including you and I) must engage in the dialectical interrelation of parts and the whole through the praxis of emptiness prior to the rise of noematic meanings.
Which would be fine, if we actually gained super-powers in that way. The Maharishi made a lot of money teaching people to levitate. Religion is a service industry. Some people make a lot of money out of it.
It should be easy for us to understand this self-negating dialectic of emptiness if we compare the relation of self and language with that of author and reader in reading the words of this essay now.
This reader is laughing his ass off at the author.
In order for me to express myself in this article, every reader (you) would have to give me a space to do that in my own terms.
No. You can express yourself even if you have no fucking readers.
There is a sense of self-negation needed from your side as the audience if you are not to impose your understanding of the world or yourself on my explanations of the Japanese worldview.
You have shit for brains. Plenty of Japanese people don't. You can't explain shit about the worldview of Japanese Physicists or Mathematicians.
You must empty your cultural and personal assumptions as much as you can when allowing me to speak about my culture and myself for a few pages.
Only if you want to be brain washed. Otherwise, you should verify that the author is telling stupid lies. This has become easier to do thanks to Google, Grok, etc.
But, at the same time, I must know how you, as the readers, speak this language so that I can anticipate misunderstanding.
No. You merely need to know the standard version of the language. It solves the underlying coordination problem.
In addition to knowing how the English language functions, with its peculiar grammatical rules and unique punctuations, I have to think with the editors about how we can best connect the idea with the target readership,
which is middle-brow. Nothing wrong with that at all.
many of whom will come with a very different set of cultural norms and knowledge from my own. There is a sense of self-negation on our side as writers, in that we do not entirely impose our scholarly understanding of Japanese philosophy in its original form, a form that would make sense only to specialists familiar with Japanese history, philosophy and language.
The problem here is that this cunt does not understand Japanese history or philosophy though he may know the language well enough. This is because Japanese history is just history. The Structural Causal Model is the same.
A good article usually consists of the balance between these two sides of self-emptiness.
No. It is well written or conveys useful information. Zen Buddhists can do both when they aren't trying shit higher than their arsehole.
When the author fails to achieve such a balance, the result is often a highly abstract article
Nothing wrong with abstraction. Math is abstract. It is very useful.
that few can understand, or else one that allows readers to project their opinions and pre-existing prejudices on the article with the result that the authorial intent escapes,
His intention was to defend a shithead who was cool with the stupid evil shit Japan got up to in the Thirties and Forties.
and they interpret the article in an entirely subjective way. Watsuji argues that the same dialectical relation of mutual self-negation as a basis of human communication takes place in the balance between individual speech acts and language.
He was wrong. Communications is about coordination and discoordination games.
Because of that, if we look at how a language functions in relation to its speakers, and vice versa, through this model of dialectical emptiness,
which is itself empty
Watsuji thinks we will better understand how ethics is both practised and theorised in each domain of world philosophies in general and in Japanese philosophy in particular.
We understand that the cunt was for Japan doing evil shit when he thought his country would get richer by doing so. Later, he repented his stupidity and focused on writing meaningless shite just like Heidegger.
If language is a constitutive depository of our experience,
It isn't. We had experiences before we learned to speak. Also, depositories can't constitute what they contain. This guy is as stupid as shit.
as Watsuji argues, paying attention to how a set of philosophical terms in a particular language functions with its symbols and rules can help us understand how we articulate the sense of what it means to be human, and to be ethical, in that culturally specific framework of thinking.
But we all already understand this even if we had no contact with any type of philosophy. I recall writing an essay when I was 5 on 'what I want to be when I grow up.' My answer was 'A cat. Cat's don't have to go to Skool.'
Rinri (倫理, りんり), meaning "ethics" or "morals," was introduced into modern Japanese to translate Western ethical concepts, often attributed to philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō in 1881. It combines the characters 倫 (reason, human relations) and 理 (reason, principle), signifying "the reasonable way to maintain harmonious human relationships" and community order.In this sense, Watsuji invites us to explore the function of Japanese words as rinri (ethics)
and ningen sonzai (human being)
the word Ningen derives from middle Chinese. In other words, both these Japanese words were imports. They functioned in the same way as the thing they were translating or importing from a foreign language or culture.
and to capture distinct ethical concepts in the Japanese intellectual tradition.
Clearly, they were distinctive to Japan. They were imported.
In Japanese ethics, both the conception of ethics as rinri and of human existence as ningen sonzai retain the strong mutual implication of such opposing terms as individuality and totality, singularity and plurality, and self and other.
The Greek word 'ethos' & the Latin word 'mores' refer to the same thing- viz. customary ways in which people behave and relate to each other.
The term rinri, meaning ‘ethics’, consists of two characters: rin (倫) and ri (理).
Used to translate Western ethical concepts.
The Chinese character 倫 (simplified: 伦, pinyin: lún) primarily means human relationships, ethics, morals, order, or coherence. It implies the natural order of relationships (e.g., Confucian "five relationships") and is commonly used in terms related to ethics (倫理) and social order.Rin refers to fellows or nakama, a group of sentient beings that follow a certain set of relational rules, or what Confucianism calls ‘constancies’.
This includes the ways in which we relate to each other as parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, minister and subject, and so on. Once again, these relational roles are not fixed: the ways in which partners relate to each other do not have to follow one model. But they are determinable expressions of human relations that retain some communicable patterns, which are always subject to change. Additionally, the Japanese term nakama, or fellows, signifies both singularity and plurality. We can point to a person to say that he is our nakama (an ally) or describe ourselves as nakama (friends). It retains both meanings of singularity and plurality.
Nakama (仲間) translates to friend, comrade, or companion, but it deeply signifies a close-knit group member, such as a crewmate or teammate sharing an unbreakable, family-like bond. It doesn't mean some stupid shit some shithead pulled out of his arse.
Ri (理) is often translated as principle(s) or reason in the context of philosophy but it also refers to a kind of sensible pattern (kata) or conventional agreement through which we constitute our relations. There are certain expectations or constancies in the ways that we write our essays or relate to each other as friends or families. Once again, these are not fixed rules that have to be permanently observed in the same way but are a relatively stable aggregate of social, cultural and climatic behaviours through which we constitute our sense of belonging and mutual understanding. Thus, ri refers to the patterns of interactions that constitute the sense of what it means for us to be human (ningen).
This is stuff we already understand. Why did it change greatly in Japan after Nagasaki & Hiroshima? The answer is that if the Japanese didn't surrender and change their ways, they would be reduced to a pile of radio-active dust.
The term ningen consists of two characters, nin or hito (人) and gen or aida (間). A combination of these characters is also dialectical, through and through. The term nin or hito usually means a person or a human but also retains some sense of plurality as ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’. As we can imagine from the shape of the Chinese character, 人 indicates two persons supporting each other to constitute a sense of a person or personhood. In other words, in Japanese ethics hito or person is both singular and plural. If we lose the balance between the two, we lose the sense of what it means to be hito or person.
No we don't. On the other hand, if we don't understand 糞 we won't be able to shit.
The second character, aida (間),
of Chinese origin
consists of two parts, 門 and 日. The first character looks like the entrance to a saloon bar in a western movie. When the protagonist pushes through the swing door, the piano stops and everyone looks at him in silence. I think this is a good method of ‘remembering the kanji’, as the philosopher James Heisig put it. Indeed, the character symbolises a Buddhist temple gate,
The 'untouchable' Burakumin weren't allowed into Buddhist temples.
which is usually open, and we should be able to feel the hollow expanse behind it. The second character, 日, symbolises the sun: so, the sense of space is dictated by the temporal movement through the gate of the star (and also, probably, by the shadows it casts).
The original word had the sense of moon-light filtering through a crack- e.g. beneath a door. The moon symbol was changed to the Sun.
Watsuji shows that adding this character symbolising the spatial concept of betweenness (with some implication of temporal space) to the character of person or hito was not accidental. Rather, it indicates the historical fact that ancient Chinese thinkers, and Japanese thinkers as their critical followers, adopted the insight that human individuals cannot exist apart from the social-natural whole of their being in the world.
Who didn't know this? What other great discovery did the shithead make? That people have Mummies and Daddies? They didn't give birth to themselves?
Hence, for them, as much as for contemporary Japanese ethical theorists, what makes human existence is the ‘dialectical unity of those double characteristics that are inherent in a human being’.
or the univocal plurality of the infinite characteristics that are inherent in quarks.
This ‘unity of contradiction’, Watsuji argues, does not remain within the bounds of what we call ‘humanity’ in Western languages, but the ‘concept of [betweenness, or the open totality] already involves the historical, climatic, and social structure of human existence’.
Some stupid Germans thought their 'culture' & 'authenticity' made them the enemies of Western Civilization. Some stupid Japanese who were imitating those stupid Germans believed the same theing about Japan. That's why they were justified in killing and looting China- which was where they had got most of their own civilization from.
He continues:
To see ningen only in the form of hito [ie, an individual human being] is to
show a sense of autonomy & responsibility. This means you don't have to go along with the stupid, evil, shit that your Government is doing.
see a human being merely from the perspective of his individual nature. This view, if it be held alone, and even if it is allowed as a methodological abstraction, cannot come to grips with ningen concretely.
Nobody gets to grips with words concretely. You can't fuck the word fuck nor can you fart the word fart.
We must grasp [the Chinese-Japanese sense of the human] ningen through and through as the unity of the … contradictory characteristics.
We mustn't grasp stupid shit.
This dual structure means that, in order for an individual self to act,
e.g. when you scratch your arse
it always acts in relation to its betweenness,
only in the sense that it always act in relation to its N.D.A with the planet Uranus.
or the form of engagement that covers not only intersubjective relations but also the ways in which human beings interact with each other through their engagement with shared social, cultural, linguistic and natural environments.
Pearl Harbour meant that Japanese people would soon be interacting with Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on them. Cultural environments don't matter in a world of ICBMs and global markets.
The concept of betweenness that characterises the nature of human existence in Japanese ethics
didn't stop them doing stupid, evil, shit. Thus it was useless.
does not designate the sense of the world as a fixed place
Japan was a fixed place. It could be bombed to buggery. That's why it surrendered.
where we can find the sum total of natural objects. Since it is not a fixed place, we cannot give a determinate identity or framework that escapes radical change.
Japan made radical changes because the alternative was being bombed to buggery.
We must instead imagine it as the hollow expanse behind the gate of the Buddhist temple,
there is a courtyard or something similar. So what?
or as the clearing behind the shadowy protagonist in a western film. It implies an infinite possibility of interrelations that ground individuals, which allow them to express these interrelations as their social, cultural and natural belongings.
No. It just means that there's some space behind them.
It is the self-emptying dunamis (ancient Greek for ‘potentiality’ or ‘potency’) of what makes you and me,
I suppose shitting is a type of self-emptying. Kenosis is the Greek word for Christ's 'self-emptying' during the incarnation.
as the reader and the writer of this article, as much as it is the unfixed foundation sustaining our communication as the shared practice of mutual self-negation.
Mutual masturbation maybe. On the other hand, it may be that this dude's colleagues say 'you don't fucking exist' to him and he replies in kind.
The world consists of this pre-ontological space
if there is a space, it has an ontology. This may be the hypokeimenon which undergirds everything.
where we interact with each other to constitute our sense of polyphonic belongings.
Only in the sense that it consists of pre-ontological farts.
Ancient Chinese and Japanese thinkers,
like other ancient thinkers
who emphasise the dynamic interrelation between a single human being and the open totality of such individuals as they live and die in the midst of one another and nature, refer to the dynamic space of social-natural community, where both the world and the individual exist in their contradictory and mutually implicated relation.
Which is what gives rise to Economic and Political theory.
The betweenness of ningen is pure transformation, that is to say, it is, as a concept, empty in and of itself, but it calls for the practical negation of each person’s self-centredness for the realisation of the other and vice versa.
only in the sense that it calls for pre-ontological farts to discursively constitute their own anus.
Like the Buddhist notion of codependent origination
which originated in India
or emptiness, the principle of self-negation is the movement between the zone of being and of non-being, not as a victim of self-determining reason, but as an open community of compassionate beings who allow each other to express themselves in their own terms.
Japanese troops were killing and raping Chinese people so as to allow them to express themselves in their own terms. Sadly, they were beaten before getting to India.
It allows them to be understood fully in relation to each other.
No. We don't 'fully' understand ourselves, let alone any one else.
There are many interesting implications from this Watsujian conception of Japanese ethics
there are none. It was stupid shit.
as rinrigaku. One of the more remarkable implications is that, as early as the 1930s, Watsuji was laying the foundation for decolonial ethics
at a time when his country was colonizing others in a particularly brutal manner. Why not say Heidegger, in the 1930s, was training as a Rabbi while laying the foundations of independent Israel's fiscal policy?
by practising the intellectual genealogy of ethics as the study of human existence in relation to each subfield of world philosophies, rather than taking the more usual Western route of seeking a universal ethic.
Which is what must exist if all human beings, regardless of race, gender, religion, culture are essentially equal in dignity. The West is the good guy here. The East- as represented by some Japanese junior Heidegger- is the bad guy.
This is to say that every philosophy programme that specialises in ethics – ranging from the traditional theoretical exposition to applied fields, such as medical and environmental ethics – should encourage its researchers to gain fluency in different languages and to investigate various historical ways in which ethics has been both conceptualised and lived in different spheres of world philosophies.
Fuck off! If you are doing medical ethics or AI ethics etc. study Medicine or AI by all means. Don't bother with Japanese shitheads gassing on in a Heideggerian style.
If we care to move beyond the colonial, self-referential abstraction of Western universal ethics, Watsuji argues, we should practise ethics based on different cultures and languages, beyond the confines of Anglo-European philosophy.
i.e. the Japs should be allowed to colonize China & Indo-China and so forth.
Unlike the Western anthropocentric formulation of ethics that sets forth a self-subsisting subject apart from nature, Japanese ethics starts
by imitating Chinese, Indian & later Western ethics. One might say there is an animistic layer to it- but that is also true of Europe.
with an assumption that each individual, and each group of such individuals, constitutes their sense of what it means for them to be human always already in their interrelation with their social, historical and natural surroundings.
Humans who are doing stupid shit are always already interrelated with geography and history and so forth.
Japanese ethics, in this sense,
is nonsense when it isn't actively evil.
does not add one subfield to the discipline of ethics but opens up its border to a plethora of world philosophical formulations of ethical thought.
which are shit. Ethics is about promoting better outcomes. If you want to succeed in your Profession, it is wise to at least pretend to have good Professional ethics. Sadly, teaching Philosophy is a shit profession. This cretin thinks he can pass off a dude who approved of Japan's evil Imperialist policies as some sort of Eastern Sage. How stupid do you have to be, to do so?
Stathis Kalyvas's 'The Logic of Violence in Civil War' came out 20 years ago. It was deeply silly. Civil Wars differ greatly from each other. They have no common game-theoretic or other logical structure.
It is sometimes said that Civil Wars are more savage but this isn't always the case. Where combatants face significant penalties for war-crimes, less of them occur. Where barbaric behaviour is rewarded, the opposite is the case.
Civil war is defined as armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities.
The American Civil War fails to meet this criteria because, when it began, 'dual Sovereignty' was weighted towards the States not the Federation and secession occurred. It wasn't till 1868, with the 14th Amendment, that the opposite was clearly affirmed.
Within civil war, my focus is on violence committed intentionally against noncombatants.
For what purpose? Ethnic cleansing? Religious conversion? Punishment for sin- e.g. that of having slaves? Collection of tribute? Sadism? The motives for violence are too varied for there to be anything to focus on. Moreover, there doesn't have to be a Civil War for massive violence to be inflicted on 'non-combatants'.
This sort of violence is a phenomenon that has long remained off research limits
For the same reason that people don't research the effect of farting on Feminists. There is nothing sensible one can say on the topic.
because of its conceptual complexity and empirical opacity.
Stupidity
To use Antoine De Baecque’s (2002:851) felicitous words, my goal is to bring reason to circumstances when reason is pushed to its limits.
We could use reason to explain why Feminists aren't offended by their own farts but get very angry when we lower our trousers and fart in their faces.
From a methodological point of view, I show the importance of systematic research at the microlevel.
Farting is important from the methodological point of view because a person who doesn't fart will remain full of shit and eventually die.
Typically, microlevel evidence tends to be marginalized as irrelevant or too messy. It is commonplace among historians that the “local” must be integrated with the “global” yet efforts to do so rarely venture beyond the boundaries of the case study.
Why is there no general theory of farting in its relation to Feminists?
Here, I show a possible way of achieving this integration. I begin with a simplified and abstract characterization of violence in civil war,
i.e. one where uncorrelated asymmetries (which side you choose) have associated 'bourgeois strategies' with different pay-offs.
yet one that stands on well-specified conceptual foundations.
He says modestly. But he is lying. He can't 'well-specify' shit.
I analytically decouple civil war violence from civil war.
In which case you need to differentiate anarchy related violence caused by the curtailment or suspension of the rule of law and violence permitted, but not caused, by such conditions whose cause we can trace back to something related to the civil war itself.
I show that despite its many different forms and the various goals to which it is harnessed across time and place, violence in civil war often displays some critical recurring elements.
Like farting. However, we will see they aren't critical at all. In other words, nothing would have changed if those elements had been omitted.
Rather than just posit this point, I coherently reconceptualize
i.e. cherry pick
observations that surface in tens of descriptive accounts and demonstrate that seemingly random anecdotes tend to be facets of the same phenomenon.
Women seldom applaud a truly stupendous fart. Women are more likely to be Feminists than men. It follows that there is a well defined and widely distributed correlation between farting and Feminism. Sadly, researchers have shied away from this important field.
The positive component of the book consists of two parts: a theory of irregular war
which isn't necessarily a Civil War nor is a Civil War necessarily irregular
and a microfoundational theory of violence (with two strands: indiscriminate and selective).
my farts are sometimes indiscriminate. Occasionally, I am able to selectively fart in the face of someone I dislike.
Unlike existing work, the theory stresses the joint character of civil war violence, entailing an interaction between actors at the central and local levels,
there need be no such thing.
and between combatants and noncombatants.
Which is the case in any type of conflict in a populated area.
This interaction is informed by the demands of irregular war,
which are ideographic- i.e. dependent on local contingencies.
the logic of asymmetric information,
which militates for signalling and screening mechanisms. Again, these will be ideographic.
and the local dynamics of rivalries.
because two rivals for the poetry prize are likely to take advantage of a Civil War to stab each other- right?
Hence the theory differs from existing accounts of violence that stress exclusively macrolevel motivations and dynamics, pinpoint overarching and preexisting cleavage structures, and characterize violence as “wanton,” “indiscriminate,” or “optimal” from the users’ point of view.
War matters. Smart people should analyse different types of War. Stupid people are welcome to focus on farting or whatever the fuck this cretin has hit upon.
From the theory, I specify a model of selective violence that is consistent with the theoretical characterization, in which the interaction between actors operating at different levels results in the production of violence in a systematic and predictable way.
Useless shitheads love to speak of 'production' though all they can produce is shit.
This exercise yields counterintuitive empirical predictions about the spatial variation of violence at the microlevel, which I subject to an empirical test using data I collected in Greece.
Which had a failed Commie insurrection. But the outcome would be decided outside Greece and would depend on what deal was struck between Soviets & the Anglo-Saxons. The odd thing about Kalyvas's book is that he spends a lot of time on the German occupation of Greece and the habit of local Albanians to denounce their relatives to the Germans. But that is a case of enemy occupation, not Civil War.
Societies are in equilibrium- i.e. stable- when, for all mission critical classes of society, expectations match outcomes. Ceteris paribus, a Society will be unstable when an important class of people either gain much more or much less than was foreseen. Instability isn't a bad thing. If some make unanticipated gains because their productivity rose, this could have Tardean mimetic effects which raise productivity across the board. What if an important segment of society faces a much bleaker future than had been anticipated? Might this not precipitate a revolution? The answer, generally speaking, is no. Kill a few thousand malcontents and show that you are just warming up and suddenly there are no malcontents.
What if the malcontents are 'elite'- i.e. stand out from the crowd by reason of superior intelligence, education or arduously acquired skill? The answer is elites can be killed just as easily as non-elites. Moreover, kicking their heads in brings joy to the hearts of horny handed peasants and the sort of decent, god-fearing, pimp we find in the humbler class of speakeasy or honkytonk.
Peter Turchin grew up in Soviet Russia which certainly had plenty of very bright people- like his father- who might be called an elite though they also tended to be in greater danger from the KGB.
About 15 years ago he published his influential theory of Elite overproduction
which describes the condition of a society that has an excess supply of potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
People who feel aggrieved about not having enough to eat- more particular if they are soldiers & policemen- can indeed cause 'social instability'. So can the desire to kill and eat the rich- or at least those of the rich who belong to the wrong religion or region or whatever. But, it would be truer to say that such a society is collapsing or that it is not currently viable that to say it is unstable.
Some countries have traditionally had an elite administrative & military cadre. The French "énarque"- or graduate of France's elite ENA school- is an example. But we might also speak of elite schools or Colleges or particular academic programs (e.g. the Harvard MBA program or Yale Law School) or particular enterprises (Goldman Sachs, McKinsey) which are disproportionately represented amongst the ranks of the 'great and the good' or the 'movers and shakers'. Do such institutions overproduce? They may do but elites are generally smart enough to do 'product differentiation'- i.e. find a way to reclassify themselves so as to restrict supply. That's why some people who went to Eton & Oxford end up teaching Classics while others move effortlessly between the Treasury or the Foreign Office and the top Merchant Banks or Hedge funds. Indeed, they might even decide that spending a couple of years as Prime Minister might be a way of giving back to the community.As a term in sociology, elites are simply a small segment of the society who concentrate social power in their hands.
Sociology is the province of stupidity. It is obvious that elites perpetuate themselves even when 'social power' changes hands. The suave Mandarin can serve a Minister who was a coal miner just as easily as he can serve an Aristocrat or a self-made billionaire.
They are the power-holders (and I increasingly use this term in my lectures, to avoid confusing them with those “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading” folks that the right-wingers love to hate).
You aren't a power-holder if there's a guy who tells you what to do. In China, Chairman Xi is that guy. This doesn't mean China doesn't have an elite.
Next question, what is social power? Answer: ability to influence other people’s behavior.
If that behaviour does not entail compliance for some purpose of maintaining or extending power then 'social power' is irrelevant. We may imitate Borat or Ali G or the KPop singer 'Psy'. But fictional personae have no social power.
Sociologists such as Michael Mann distinguish four sources of social power: military (coercion),
that is military power. It isn't social power. Only if the Army takes over the country can it gain sufficient political power to attain the power to dictate behaviour across large swathes of society.
economic, administrative or political, and ideological.
what about cultural, aesthetic, religious, spiritual, moral etc. ?
Put simply, there are many ways to influence people behavior.
Behaviour is mimetic and affected by incentives. Provide a better mimetic target or incentivize others to do so. That's it. That's the whole story.
I can make you to do something by force,
by giving you the incentive of not having your head kicked in if you imitate the actions of the person I consider to be compliant with my order
or a threat of force;
i.e. 'expected disutility'
I can pay you to do it;
That is not an exercise of social power. It is just buying and selling- i.e. exercising spending power.
I can order you;
if you are an agent, employee or otherwise obliged to follow my directions
or I can persuade you.
In which case, it is you who have the power to decide whether to listen to me or tell me to fuck off.
The last is one of the most important, if often underappreciated, forms of social power.
No. We understand that an enterprise with a lot of money can hire very smart Advertising or PR professionals to persuade us to buy all sorts of trash or to vote for all sorts of morons.
The bottom line is that in a liberal, democratic, country, money talks to a certain extent but various types of countervailing power exist.
In most situations, different kinds of power are combined in various proportions. For example, military officers primarily influence the behavior of soldiers by giving them direct orders (political power), but this is buttressed by the threat of court martial (coercion).
This may be true of the Russian army or a conscript army under conditions of total war. Otherwise, the sanction which applies to a non-compliant soldier is the same as in private enterprise- viz. denial of career advancement and, possibly, being fired for cause.
Most effective power involves all four components. Thus, a charismatic military chief (think Alexander the Great) gives direct orders through the chain of command, rewards followers with loot, hangs the deserters, and inspires his followers to fight for an idea.
Fuck has this to do with elites?
Although the elites governing a country
may not be an elite at all. The thing may be like Jury duty or 'Buggin's turn'. Elites may be perfectly content to let boring bureaucrats or stodgy socialists or brain-dead aristocrats do the governing. Deciding policy is what really matters. But skilled courtesans may be better able to do this. Aspasia was no better than she should be. Theodora took it up every orifice and clamoured for yet more dicks.
use a combination of all four kinds of power, there is a lot of variation in how ruling elites are recruited and from whom.
A governing class may not be elite. It may be hereditary or 'representative' in the sense of average and undistinguished or it may be merely a matter of 'Buggin's turn'.
Interestingly enough, an elite deriving its power from a particular source tends to dominate others. For example, in Egypt it’s the military elites. Modern Egypt has been ruled by generals from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak, and now (after a brief intermission) by Sisi.
Military regimes generally hand over the day-to-day administration to a technocratic elite which rose through public sector institutions.
China, France, and Russia have traditionally been ruled by administrative elites.
No. It is not the case that the most promising young Mandarin will end up as President though I suppose it could happen- look at Macron.
In Russia during the last Time of Troubles of the 1990s, a clique of wealthy billionaires, known as “oligarchs,” attempted to install themselves as the ruling elite. But they were easily defeated by the bureaucrats, led by Putin.
A KGB man. We suspect that he was good at killing people.
Some oligarchs were exiled, another ended up in prison and then was exiled, and the rest accepted subordinate positions in the political order.
Fuck does this have to do with elites? We are talking of gangsterism of a repulsive kind. It isn't the case that Putin represents the finest flower of the Russian academy.
In the United States coercive power is thoroughly controlled by the political leaders.
No. It is a country under the rule of law- though maybe not so much under Trump.
Political (and ideological) bases of power, in turn, are subordinated to the economic elites.
No. 'Bases of power' are Governorships, seats in Congress or City Hall etc. Money can certainly alter outcomes where offices are elective. But any vested interest group- or just a bunch of pissed off proles- can put some money together or create a grass-roots organization to turn out the vote.
I won’t go into details here, just note that power is exercised indirectly and in subtle ways.
No. Power is exercised directly and in legal ways which are matters of public record unless they are classified for reasons of National Security.
Those interested in understanding how this works should read William Domhoff’s Who Rules America (see also his web site) or Chapter 4 of Ages of Discord. The conclusion that we reach is that, to a first approximation, American power holders are wealth holders.
As opposed to hobos. America is a wealthy country. Smart people tend to be more productive and thus get wealthier. There was a sort of 'cursus honorum' tradition whereby the rich dude felt he needed to 'give back' by spending a bit of time in Government. Oddly, the Ambassador who had made a big donation to the President's campaign was often just as good or better than the career diplomat.
Thus, a pretty good answer to the question, who are the elites in America? is “those whose personal worth exceeds X million dollars.”
It is a shitty answer. Currently, the US has 2.3 million decamillionaires (individuals with a net worth, including assets like trust funds, of $10 million or more). We are speaking of a 'lucky sperm' club, not an elite.
What is X? It’s somewhat arbitrary, but it’s around 5-10 million as the following graph suggests:
You can see from the chart, that if you want to be in the proverbial 1 percent, you need to amass at least $7.8 million.
You read this and bought bitcoin at 50 dollars a dozen years ago. You sold last year at 126,000. Congratulations! You are part of the 1 percent. Are you of the 'elite'? No. You just got lucky like the shut-in in the trailer park who won the lottery.
An alternative way to define the elites would be to start enumerating the most important political offices and bureaucratic positions, from the US president down; the officers of Fortune 500 companies; the owners and editors-in-chief of major media companies; major donors to politicians, and so on. But you would end up pretty much with the same group of people, because the great majority of these people would also be significant wealth holders.
No. You would have excluded those who are stupid but who got a good alimony settlement or had a Mafia boss for a grandfather.
In America, wealth (economic power) is very closely correlated with overall social power.
Correlation is not causation. Turchin doesn't have a Structural Causal Model. He is just waving his hands and saying 'there are too many millionaires. No wonder things are turning to shit.' The truth is 'elites' are themselves capable of screening and signalling such that they differentiate themselves from the broader class they sprang from. Not every Old Etonian got to be Prime Minister in the last decade. It was just two of the stupider ones who did it on a dare because the alternative was to have to truthfully confess to the number of times they had bummed each other.
Leaving aside elites, what happens if lots of people make investments expecting one outcome but are disappointed to find they were mistaken? Consider the problem of 'educated unemployment'- i.e. guys with degrees or even Doctorates who can't get jobs. India has this problem in acute form. Is it causing 'instability'? No. People realize that they were taught worthless shite & don't really have any skills. The same thing happened to other over-credentialized people around the world. The good news is, young people are resilient. They may find a better path for themselves than any their Professors could have prepared them for.
Ambedkarite politics is based on hatred of Brahmins (though Ambedkar's second wife was Brahmin). Their political program was based on Churchill's speech 'our duty in India' given in March of 1931 which insisted that 'Gandhi stands for the substitution of Brahmin domination for British rule in India.' Churchill believed Gandhi to be a charlatan or a simpleton who had been given command of the Congress only so as to pull the wool over the eyes of the British, the Muslims & the 'depressed classes'. Churchill said 'Already Nehru, his young rival in the Indian Congress, is preparing to supersede him the moment that he has squeezed his last drop from the British lemon'.
Nehru was aware of Churchill's views. He saw that 'federation', which Churchill championed, would leave the Brits in charge and thus became the strongest voice for a unitary India- a fact which Rahul doesn't seem to understand. Interestingly, in his Autobiography, he called for the 'Brahminization' (as opposed to Baniaization) of India. Gandhi was a bania- i.e. a businessman just as the Brits were a 'nation of shopkeepers'.
Churchill's intellectual heirs are firstly the Pakistanis- who embrace the two nation theory that he propounded. Secondly, the DMK in Tamil Nadu which is the successor of the 'Justice Party' and which holds 'sanatan dharma' as anathema. Thirdly, we have the Ambedkarites. Indeed, Ambedkar himself welcomed the killing of the Mahatma. At the time, he wrote as follows in a private letter-
"My own view is that great men are of great service to their country, but they are also at certain times a great hindrance to the progress of the country. Mr Gandhi had become a positive danger to this country,"
"He had choked all the thoughts. He was holding together the Congress which is a combination of all the bad and self-seeking elements in society
this is precisely the gravamen of Churchill's 1931 speech. His own Tory colleagues thought he was mad. Brahmins couldn't be uniquely evil. If there were corrupt and cowardly Brahmins, the same could be said of every other community.
who agreed on no social or moral principle governing the life of society except the one of praising and flattering Mr Gandhi. Such a body is unfit to govern a country,"
Idolatry of Ambedkar or Periyar, on the other hand, is perfectly fine.
"As the Bible says that sometimes good cometh out of evil, so also I think good will come out of the death of Mr Gandhi. It will release people from bondage to supermen, it will make them think for themselves and compel them to stand on their own merits,"
Sadly Ambedkar & his pal J.N Mandal (who was Jinnah's law minister) had no merit. Mandal had to run away to India. Ambedkar couldn't get elected to Parliament. Without the Brits to prop them up, they collapsed.
Anand Teltumbde is married to a grand-daughter of Ambedkar. He writes in 'the Wire'-
Reflections on the Murder of Gandhi and the State of India
Gandhi’s murder cannot be viewed merely as an event of the past.
Nor can the pogrom carried out against Brahmins in Pune by the Congress party.
It marked the beginning of an ongoing project.
As did the killing of two other people with the surname 'Gandhi'.
January 30, 1948 was not an end; it was the first shot in a long war against pluralism,
the country had been partitioned. Pluralism was dead in the water. Ambedkar may have dismissed his contribution to the Constitution as 'hack work' but, the fact remains, the Constitution is unitary and it stripped Muslims of any type of affirmative action (e.g. such as had been given to Muslim Dalits by the 1935 GoI Act)
secularism,
Cow protection is a Directive Principle
and constitutional democracy in India.
The Constitution creates a unitary State with an overmighty Centre. Moreover, it permits its own suspension as Mrs. Gandhi's opponents discovered during the Emergency.
Reflections on the Murder of Gandhi and the State of India
Seventy-seven years ago, on January 30, 1948, three bullets struck down Mahatma Gandhi at a prayer meeting in Birla House. The gunman, Nathuram Godse, was a Chitpavan Brahmin from Pune.
The previous assassination attempt was made by a Punjabi refugee some of whose family had been massacred by Muslim mobs. He was angry that Gandhi was saying the refugees should go back while Muslims who had fled should be allowed to return.
It was however no simple act of homicide. It was the Brahminical ideology
Madanlal Pahwa was Khatri
that sought to exterminate Gandhi’s plural, inclusive vision of India
which had already been exterminated by Jinnah
as an obstacle to a project of Hindu supremacy
established by Nehru & Indira
and a nostalgic yearning for a restored Peshwai order.
This is the crux of the matter. Ambedkar had got it into his head that the Peshwas had discriminated against his community. This was the line that British officials were pushing in the Nineteenth century. Gokhale must be just as bad as Tilak because both are Chitpavan. But the founders of the RSS weren't Chitpavan.
The assassin did not act in isolation. He was backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
No. The RSS wasn't stupid or crazy. Killing Gandhi was foolish. If it must be done, get a Muslim to do it.
and the Hindu Mahasabha, and blessed by V. D. Savarkar
who had suffered so much when in prison that he wasn't quite sane
the father of Hindutva.
He only adopted it after the War when it became obvious that the Brits were on the way out. The question was whether they could leave India weak by creating an artificial coalition of Muslims, Dalits, Dravidians & the Princes as a check to the Hindu majority. Thanks to Nehru, the answer was no.
After the assassination, the RSS sought to distance itself from Godse. But historians like D.N. Jha
who was so shit at history that he said there was never any temple at the Ram Janambhumi.
demolished that claim.
By lying.
In his memoir, Godse’s brother Gopal Godse himself confessed that all the Godse brothers had been associated with the RSS at the time of the murder.
They were also associated with the King Emperor because, in law, they were his subjects. OMG! King killed Gandhi!
Public anger followed reports that RSS members had celebrated the murder by distributing sweets in parts of Maharashtra provoked public attacks on Brahmin houses at many places.
Distribution of sweets should be banned. It provokes 'public attacks'. Jews were distributing sweets in Poland. That is why Hitler was provoked into attacking that country.
Ideological disposition
The historical disposition of Brahminical ideology has been to secure and preserve supremacy over the religio-social and cultural order,
So, Churchill was right! Indian 'freedom struggle' was actually a cunning Brahmin plot! Ambedkar should be praised for serving the Brits. Jagjivan Ram should be castigated for going to jail.
rather than to exercise political power directly. Within the varna hierarchy, rulers who wielded temporal authority were placed below Brahmins, their legitimacy dependent on rituals, codes, and moral sanction controlled by them.
Very true. Brahmin priests controlled British & Muslim rulers.
This deeply entrenched hierarchy shaped Brahminical attitudes towards political power, particularly when external forces entered the subcontinent. As a social group, Brahmins were rarely opposed to being ruled by outsiders;
Peshwa didn't fight the British. He distributed sweets. That provoked the Brits to attack him.
instead, they tended to accommodate and even support the dominant power, provided it guaranteed the preservation of their social hegemony.
Very true. Brahmins in Pakistan supported Muslim League. J.N Mandal was actually a Brahmin.
There is no sustained historical instance of Brahmins as a community organising resistance to an external ruling power merely on the grounds of foreignness.
Just as there is no historical instance of Ambedkarites telling the truth.
Even under Muslim rule – so relentlessly vilified in contemporary Hindutva discourse – Brahmin elites adapted, served as advisers, administrators, and intellectual intermediaries, and secured their privileged position within the social order. This pattern repeated itself under British rule.
Smart people do well. Ambedkar did well. His Brahmin wife must have been controlling him.
The only moment of collective Brahminical rage was provoked not by colonial domination per se, but by the defeat of the Peshwai in Pune – the singular historical instance of direct Brahmin political sovereignty.
Because Brahmins were seldom Kings. This proves they must have been controlling Kings- more particularly British Emperors of India.
The subsequent rebellions, including participation in the events of 1857 (later romanticised by Savarkar as the “First War of Independence”), were driven less by a universal anti-colonial vision than by the desire to restore lost Brahmin rule.
Mangal Pandey was a Brahmin. Thus, he was very evil.
Even here, the acceptance of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s nominal leadership illustrates a familiar strategic flexibility: political alliances were negotiable, so long as the deeper structure of social dominance could ultimately be reclaimed.
Did you know Brahmins are dominating Pakistan? Field Marshall Munir is secretly wearing janeo.
Birth of Hindu consolidation
In Indian history, most external groups that entered the subcontinent eventually settled, assimilated, and made India their home.
Unless like Nadir or Abdali, they were content to simply loot it and then withdraw- no doubt, because they were secretly wearing janeo.
The British – and other Europeans – were different. They arrived as merchant capitalists, captured political power to secure commercial interests, and never intended permanent cultural integration.
A.O Hume, founder of the Congress party, was a vegetarian Vedantist advocated cow protection on agronomic grounds.
This distinction mattered.
The Brits didn't want to lose power to a miscegenated Creole caste.
For Brahminical elites, the real historical disruption had come earlier from large-scale conversions of marginalised castes to Islam,
plenty of Brahmins converted to Islam. Iqbal was related to Sapru. Incidentally, Acharya Kripalani's elder brother had become a Muslim.
which weakened their demographic and cultural monopoly. Islamic civilisation posed a sustained challenge to their authority, creating a deep, if often tacit, resentment toward Muslim rule.
Why did J.N Mandal run away from Pakistan? Do Dalits in that country not feel any resentment to 'Muslim rule'?
When the British defeated the Muslim powers, they were naturally happy.
As were Dalits.
The British, unlike earlier rulers, were expected eventually to depart. By the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that preparations had to begin for reclaiming political authority by exterminating Muslims as the competitors.
By contrast, Muslims never dreamed of re-establishing a Caliphate.
This shift is traceable to eastern Bengal,
which is where J.N Mandal came from. He got the Namasudras in Sylhet to vote for joining Pakistan. They soon had to run away from there.
where Brahminical elites felt threatened by Muslim numerical strength and by colonial policies that empowered Muslim peasantry.
Tagore warned his people not to cut their own throats by supporting the Freedom struggle.
Religion was increasingly mobilised to consolidate Hindu identity against the “Muslim other.”
While J.N Mandal was mobilizing Dalits to vote for the Muslim brother. But he soon had to run away.
The intellectual fountainhead of this turn was Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894). In his later novels – Anandamath, Devi Chaudhurani, and Sitaram – Bankim articulated a vision that cast Muslim rule as civilisational darkness and imagined Hindu regeneration through militant unity.
Meanwhile, plenty of Muslims were talking of killing kaffirs the way God commanded us to do.
Anandamath (1882) depicted Hindu ascetics rising violently against Muslim authority and introduced Vande Mataram, equating the nation with Hindu goddess imagery, implicitly excluding Muslims and Christians from the imagined community.
Ambedkarites think Hindus are very evil for not wanting to live under Muslim rule. But, J.N Mandal- Ambedkar's most important ally- had to run away from such rule.
Bankim’s project was clearly anti-Muslim.
Because Muslims are against kaffirs.
British rule was portrayed as a one that had ended Muslim dominance and thus as benefactor.
This is also what Raja Ram Mohan Roy & Dwarkanath Tagore thought. But the Peshwai regime disagreed.
Thinkers such as Ahmed Sofa
who wasn't actually a Sofa
later observed that Bankim was among the first to articulate the dream of a Hindu Rashtra.
He himself supported the dream of a Bengali Muslim Rashtra.
Organisationally, this vision was seeded through movements like the Hindu Mela of 1867, led by figures such as Debendranath Tagore, Nabagopal Mitra, and Rajnarayan Basu.
The last two were Kayastha, not Brahmin.
These gatherings, often described as “national,” were explicitly Hindu in character, defining Indian identity through religious symbolism and excluding Muslims from the cultural imagination. The ideological seed had been sown.
It is fair to say that Hinduism was the 'seed' of Indian nationalism. It is what holds the country together. That is why anti-nationals hate it. Yet, without a strong India, they too will suffer. Like J.N Mandal, they may have to run away to some place where kaffirs are protected.
The birth and shaping of the RSS
Two Marathi Medical Students in Calcutta before the Great War were inspired by the 'Anushilan Samitis' of 'Jugantar'. Later on, Dr. Hardikar founded the Congress Seva Dal which his pal, Hegdewar, joined. When it appeared likely that the Seva Dal would be banned. Hegdewar founded the RSS. By then, communal riots had become widespread as local politicians jockeyed for power.
Reform currents within Hindu society arose along two tracks: Western-educated reformers seeking modernisation,
i.e. Brahmo & Prarthana Samaj
and orthodox revivalists seeking a return to scriptural “originals.”
Which was also the claim of the Brahmos & Prarthana Samajis.
The most influential of the latter was the Arya Samaj, founded by Dayanand Saraswati, a Gujarati whose movement found its strongest base in Punjab.
Arya Samaj is anti-casteist. Its leaders belong to different castes. Since Indian Arya Samajis are patriots of India (just as British Arya Samajis are British patriots) they are very evil.
After his death in 1883, its followers decided to establish Hindu Sabhas, culminating in the foundation of Punjab Hindu Sabha on December 16, 1906 under leaders such as Lal Chand,
a Khatri
U.N. Mukerji,
Bengali Brahmin
and Lala Lajpat Rai.
from a Jain Agrawal family.
This consolidation of Hindu organisational politics was mirrored among Muslims. On December 30, 1906, Muslim elites gathered in Dhaka to found the All-India Muslim League under figures including Khwaja Salimullah, Aga Khan III, and Hakim Ajmal Khan, to articulate Muslim socio-economic and political concerns.
It had predecessors in the 1880s.
While the Muslim League evolved into a political counterweight to the Congress – widely seen as the majority organisation – the Hindu Mahasabha made little headway beyond a largely upper-caste constituency.
It decided to follow an appeasement strategy in 1916. That is why it promoted Motilal Nehru & Mahatma Gandhi.
In the interwar years, the rise of fascism in Italy under Benito Mussolini impressed sections of India’s right wing.
Mussolini impressed Gandhi, Tagore, Iqbal & Bose.
Marathi journals associated with Bal Gangadhar Tilak praised European nationalist icons such as Giuseppe Mazzini. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his brother Ganesh had earlier founded Abhinav Bharat, inspired by Mazzini’s Young Italy. Though Savarkar once influenced revolutionary circles in England, his incarceration in the Cellular Jail marked a turn: he submitted mercy petitions to the British
because a lot of other prisoners were given an amnesty. The fact is, the Brits had conceded the principle of transfer of power. The only question was whether Hindus would be masters in their own house. Gandhi only had salience when it appeared that he could deliver a united India strong enough to protect minorities if not its own borders (because the Royal Navy would remain necessary till India built up its own fleet. The first Indian admiral was only appointed in 1958.)
and later articulated Hindutva as a political doctrine for Hindu consolidation.
Hindutva is ecumenical and anti-casteist. Since this is good for India, it is very evil.
B.S. Moonje,
a Doctor who had seen service in the Boer war.
a Savarkar associate
a Tilak associate. The Savarkars were junior to him.
and mentor to K.B. Hedgewar,
and Hardikar
the founder of the RSS drew organisational lessons from Mussolini’s youth brigades
No. He was imitating what his pal Hardikar had already done at the end of 1923. There may have been a member of the Seva Dal committee who had returned from Italy and who knew about the Black Shirts. However, the inspiration for Seva Dal was Bengal's 'Anushilan Samitis' from before the Great War. I should mention that all the nationalists of the period paid reverence to Sri Aurobindo who was in exile in Pondicherry.
and shaped RSS as a secretive militant organisation.
A voluntary organization which is a cross between the Boy Scouts & the Rotarians.
The RSS, from its inception, kept itself aloof from the anti-colonial struggle.
It was an over-ground 'social' organization which, it was hoped, would not be banned when the Seva Dal was banned. Nehru was an enthusiastic member of the Seva Sal.
Myths and falsehoods
Stupid myths and falsehoods are Teltumbde's stock in trade.
The Hindutva movement is deliberately founded on the myths and falsehoods.
It is founded on the vision of a Hinduism purged of hereditary distinctions of caste and sectarian squabbles about dogma. Since it is good for India, anti-nationals hate it.
It follows the Goebbelsian dictum that “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.,”
That is the Ambedkarite stock in trade. The problem is that repeating stupid lies causes people to think you are a stupid liar. Nobody cares if you rot in jail.
The propaganda machine assumes bigger importance in this than the truth. The RSS followed this dictum in its tenacious spread.
No. It followed the dictum that if you are part of a voluntary organization, then you need to be polite and to behave decently. It is this ingrained habit which has helped RSS pracharaks to rise. Other Sangh Parivar outfits may lack this organizational ethos.
At his trial, Nathuram Godse read a 92 page hand-written statement justifying killing of Gandhi. Each reason he cited rested on a selective or false reading of events.
Sadly, there was more truth in them than in any tome written by Teltumbde.
Partition of India: Godse blamed Gandhi for “vivisecting” the nation.
Gandhi could have launched an agitation to prevent it. There is such a thing as 'command responsibility'.
In fact, Gandhi opposed Partition to the end
by going on a fast? He would do that in order to get India to pay money to Pakistan despite ongoing hostilities. The truth is he didn't oppose Partition. It is a different matter that it saddened him.
and held no executive authority;
yet he had been acclaimed by Govind Vallabh Pant, Premier of UP, as the Il Duce & Fuhrer of India'. He had command responsibility even if he held no legislative or executive office.
the decision emerged from negotiations among the British, the Congress leadership, and the Muslim League amid spiralling communal violence.
Ambedkar supported Partition. So did his pal, J.N Mandal. But Mandal had to run away to India.
“Muslim appeasement”: He claimed Gandhi “privileged Muslims over Hindus”,
true enough. He actually offered Jinnah the post of Prime Minister of a united India.
citing Gandhi’s fasts and support for Hindustani.
India decided Godse, not Gandhi, was right. Hindi in Devanagari script is the official language.
Those fasts in Calcutta and Delhi sought to stop retaliatory killings
they failed utterly.
and restore civic peace for all citizens, while Hindustani was proposed as a bridge language in a deeply divided society.
India decided it didn't need no stinkin' bridge.
Release of Rs 55 crores to Pakistan: Godse treated this as Gandhi’s betrayal.
It was. There's a good reason Congress did little to keep the Maha-crackpot safe.
The transfer was a Cabinet decision honouring financial commitments made at Independence; Gandhi’s fast pressed for communal peace in Delhi,
this failed. The Muslim percentage of the population dropped from 33 to 5 percent. Nehru brought in a law to prevent Muslim refugees who had fled in panic from returning to India and reclaiming their property.
not for overriding state policy.
State policy was right to override the Mahacrackpot.
Non-violence (ahimsa): Godse argued that Gandhi’s creed weakened Hindus.
Gandhi, writing after the Second World War broke out, said Congress was the party of the High Caste Hindus. They were devotees of Ahimsa- i.e. shit at fighting. Thus the Brits should hand over the Army to Congress otherwise the Muslims & the Punjabis (regardless of creed) and perhaps also the Gurkhas, would take over the country. The anal cherries of the Dalits might be protected by the Ahimsa fairy, but, otherwise, the Hindus would be reduced to destitution and virtual enslavement.
Godse was right to say that Gandhi's creed weakened Hindus. It also weakened India. If the majority won't fight, even the minorities are fucked.
Gandhi’s non-violence was a mass political strategy against colonial rule and communal hatred,
which failed utterly the moment it was tried
not a denial of a state’s right to maintain order or defend citizens.
Gandhi thought the Brits should hand over their country to Hitler. He didn't think the British state had a duty to fight.
Undue influence on government:
Which was fucking obvious.
Godse portrayed Gandhi’s moral authority and fasts as coercion outside democracy. Gandhi held no office; his interventions were appeals to conscience in moments of breakdown, not instruments of state power.
Those appeals stopped once he was shot. A nuisance had been curbed.
Long before January 30, 1948, Gandhi had faced a string of threats and failed attempts by Hindu extremists. A bomb was hurled at his motorcade in Pune on June 25, 1934 during his Harijan tour against untouchability; in May and September 1944 at Panchgani and Sevagram, Nathuram Godse himself was stopped while trying to attack Gandhi with a dagger and released when Gandhi refused to press charges.
If this is true, then the Police should have kept Godse under observation. They have a duty to prevent crime irrespective of the target of the crime. The big question is why Morarji Desai, when informed of the wider conspiracy of which Pahwa was part, refused to take any action. Maybe he was simply stupid. Equally odd is the fact that Godse was caught by an American.
In June 1946, boulders placed on a rail track near Nerul – Karjat derailed the train carrying him; a bomb planted at a Bombay venue in September 1946 exploded prematurely; and on January 20, 1948 a grenade was thrown at Birla House to create confusion for an assassination attempt that failed.
Pahwa was arrested. He had previously made a confession to a Sociology Professor who informed Desai. Yet, no action was taken. Why?
This record predates both Partition and the Pakistan payment controversy, undercutting claims that these were the motive. The earliest attack was clearly against Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign after the Poona Pact, suggesting their Opposition to Gandhi’s social reform agenda and hatred for the Dalits.
It was the suggestion Gandhi himself made. Nobody believed him. The Poona Pact was based on Rajah-Moonje pact- i.e. it was seen as a smart move by the Hindutvadis.
Rather, the Hindutva hostility toward Muslims, Christians, and Communists – articulated by M. S. Golwalkar – can also be read as reflecting
their virulent attacks on Hinduism?
a deeper hatred for the lower strata of Hindu society, which formed the bulk of these targeted groups.
Sadly, it is the lower strata of Hindu society which attacks Dalits.
Gandhi might seem an odd target for a Hindu assassin.
Which is why people didn't believe there were any such attempts. People assumed it would be a crazy Muslim who would get rid of the Mahacrackpot.
He proclaimed himself a sanatani Hindu, invoked Ram Rajya, drew on bhajans and epics, and for much of his life accepted varna and even caste as moral ideas. What Godse and the Hindutva camp opposed was not Gandhi’s religiosity but the political use he made of it; his vision of inclusivity.
i.e. everybody, including the Brits, should do what he told them to do- e.g. surrender to Hitler.
Using Hindu idiom to argue for coexistence and caste reform, he undercut the project of Hindu consolidation.
No. His one good idea was that Congress-wallahs should spend time in jail. This built esprit de corps and was good for Hindu consolidation. On the other hand, when rioting occurred, his financiers stepped in to make sure Hindu gangsters killed plenty of Muslims. Gandhi was cool with that. He said that he personally knew which Bihari Congressmen had killed innocent Muslims. Did he demand their suspension from the Party? Nope. As he said to Viceroy Wavell, if India wanted a blood-bath, let it have a blood-bath. The soldier was shocked by the callousness of the civilian.
It was antithetical to Godse’s worldview: Gandhi blocked the idea of India as a Hindu nation, humanised Muslims amid communal fury, and redefined Hindu virtue away from revenge and dominance.
No. Gandhian administrations after 1937 alienated Muslims who complained of school-children having to sing 'Vande Mataram' etc.
He was dangerous not because he was insufficiently Hindu, but because his moral politics hollowed out the case for Hindu majoritarianism.
He was a nuisance. Godse is praised for having curbed it. But he too was a nuisance and was hanged.
The attitude returns: From Gandhi to Gauri
Although moral censure curbed its open expression, Hindutva ideology did not disappear; it
was the basis of the Congress party. Nehru succeeded in 'Brahminizing' India by using 'Socialism' to clip the wings of the mercantile and productive classes.
receded and endured. Its subdued existence is reflected in the permission for Godse to read out his long justification for his crime though Justice Khosla was inclined to bar it as irrelevant.
It relevant. The danger was that rumours would spread that the actual assassin was a Muslim close to Nehru or something of that sort.
Over decades, this current moved from the margins toward state power,
Lohia & JP had brought the Jan Sangh into the mainstream in the Sixties. The RSS played a big role in bringing down Indira in 1977.
culminating in 2014 with a former RSS pracharak becoming the prime minister.
Vajpayee became a pracharak in 1947. He became PM in '97-98.
In the run-up to the 2014 elections, a high-octane campaign backed by the RSS was launched against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
Rahul had refused to become PM. Moreover, he wouldn't let anybody else take that job. Thus, it was a case of 'Modi or nobody.' Sadly, that remains the case today.
II government on patently false alibi but it succeeded.
I suppose Teltumbde means 'allegations (not alibis) of corruption were false.' But, they were irrelevant. Rahul should have become PM saying he would root out corruption. He'd have won a majority before fucking up and getting shot or blown up like Daddy and Granny.
The defeat of the Congress at the polls appeared certain. From 2013 onward, a grim pattern re-emerged: public intellectuals
whom nobody had heard of
marked, tracked, and shot at close range for what they wrote and said. Narendra Dabholkar was killed in Pune on August 20, 2013. His work against superstition and for scientific temper made him a target.
Of some nutter whom nobody has heard of.
Govind Pansare was shot outside his home on February 16, 2015 after challenging sectarian readings of history and organising workers.
Sadly, Teltumbde wasn't shot because he was utterly useless.
M. M. Kalburgi was murdered at his doorstep in Dharwad on August 30, 2015 for his critique of blind faith and Brahminical practices. Gauri Lankesh
was important because of the Lingayat/Veerashaiva controversy.
was gunned down in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017 for her relentless journalism against hate politics. As the investigations revealed they were planned and executed by Hindutva outfits – Sanatan Sanstha
founded by a crazy hypnotherapist who had spent a couple of decades in the UK
and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti.
Which denounces films. It is harmless.
These killings
didn't matter at all, save in that Lankesh was a Lingayat journalist with her own magazine.
reflected the same animus that once marked Gandhi as an obstacle, now marking rationalists, scholars, and journalists who stand in the way of a Hindu Rashtra vision.
Teltumbde doesn't stand in the way of any vision. Nobody wants to kill him. Sad.
Godse’s Deification
After 2014, Nathuram Godse – long confined to the margins of public memory – began to surface in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier decades.
Why? The Mahacrackpot had made Nehru his heir. Indira had made Congress dynastic. So long as Gandhi parivar was willing to supply Prime Ministers (or Regents like Manmohan keeping the seat warm for Rahul), it made sense to say 'Gandhi was great'. But those days are gone. Currently, Modi is the only guy who can run the country. The Opposition don't have a candidate. Thus, precisely because nutters like Teltumbde say 'RSS killed Gandhi' we are obliged to say 'killing Gandhi was an act of great heroism.' The real problem, however, is that autocracy is curbed by assassination. Indian politicians don't want to get shot. Rahul knows that if he is PM, he will get blamed for some stupid shit and thus become a target for some group or the other.
The shift did not come through official endorsement, but through a loosening of taboos in parts of the public sphere: fringe groups openly praising him, attempts to install his busts, small shrines dedicated in his name, and social media campaigns recasting him as a “patriot” rather than an assassin. What had earlier been whispered in closed circles started appearing in rallies, local commemorations, and online networks.
Why? Teltudmbe's answer is 'It is a Brahmin plot dating back thousands of years!'
Elected representatives from the ruling ecosystem occasionally made statements praising Godse or calling him a nationalist, triggering controversy but also revealing how far the moral boundary had moved.
Moral boundaries don't matter. What matters is whether the Gandhi dynasty will appoint a technocrat to run things so that they don't get shot when GoI does stupid shit.
Each episode followed a pattern – outrage, tactical distancing by party leadership, and then quiet return of the same sentiment in another form. The cumulative effect was to normalise public ambivalence toward Gandhi’s assassin in a way that steadily eroded the earlier national consensus that treated the act as a civilisational shame.
Ambedkarites did much to paint Gandhi as an evil bastard. Logically, they should praise Godse as their deliverer. Had Gandhi lived, would the Hindu Code Bills have been passed?
Digital media accelerated this rehabilitation. WhatsApp forwards, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels circulated selective readings of Godse’s courtroom statement, stripped of context, presenting it as heroic testimony.
It is better than this cretin's testimony.
This cultural re-framing did not require state proclamation.
RSS was banned because of Gandhi's assassination. Yet it could grow so large as a Parliamentary party that it got Cabinet seats in some States by the end of the Sixties. From '77-to '79 if even had a Cabinet minister at the Centre. But the first BJP Chief Minister dates from around 1990. The killing of Rajiv Gandhi gave it the chance to gain power at the Centre. But once Rahul returned to India in 2002, Congress regained momentum. Thus 'cultural framing' doesn't matter. What matters is whether the owner of a dynastic party has a dog in the manger attitude. Rahul won't rule- because he doesn't want to get shot- but he also won't let any one else rule. This is the political 'framing' which decides outcomes.
It flourished in an atmosphere where majoritarian assertion,
i.e. what happened in 1947
grievance politics,
see above
and hostility to dissent
see above. Ambedkar approved India's First Amendment which goes in the opposite direction to America's.
had become mainstream. In that climate, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi could be reimagined not as a warning from history but as an icon for the present.
It is obvious that a lot of people who joined the RSS in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies etc. thought the Mahacrackpot was a nuisance. Thanks, first to Indira & Buta Singh and then to Rao & Manmohan, Gandhianism was kicked out of Indian politics long ago. Ambedkarite shite was given a shot in the arm by Mayawati. Let us see if she can make a comeback in the Hindi belt after delimitation.
Millions of Godses Murdering India
What is alarming today is not an isolated act of violence but the gradual social production of a mindset in which hostility is moralised and prejudice is recast as patriotism.
This happened when Muslims were massacred or chased out of Delhi. Nehru was Prime Minister at that time.
The outlook once identified with Nathuram Godse now circulates through a broad ecosystem of schooling, cultural work, and media messaging that presents India as exclusively Hindu, treats minorities with suspicion, and brands dissent as betrayal.
Custodian of Evacuee (later 'Enemy') Property treated Muslims with suspicion. They seized property because they 'anticipated' that the owner might migrate to Pakistan.
This reproduction happens across channels. Institutions linked to the RSS, thousands of schools and hostels where cultural instruction shades into ideological orientation. Curricular revisions soften or omit difficult histories
stupid lies spread by Leftist Professors
– Gandhi’s assassination context, caste oppression, communal violence
this nutter is pretending that Brahmins love Muslims and want to kill only Dalits. That may have been J.N Mandal's belief but he had to run away to India.
– while elevating civilisational pride.
Indians should hate and be ashamed of Indian civilization.
Social media sustains a flow of grievance narratives, misinformation, and selective hero-making;
e.g. Ambedkar worship
parts of broadcast media echo majoritarian frames and stigmatize critics as “anti-national.”
This works if the shoe fits. It doesn't work- as with Owaisi- if it doesn't fit at all.
Even fringe attempts to memorialise Godse, though not mainstream, signal how far the moral threshold has shifted.
The 'moral threshold' for this nutter shifted when he started to tell stupid, paranoid, lies. If was genuinely smart, he'd be an IT billionaire.
Gandhi’s murder cannot be viewed merely as an event of the past. It marked the beginning of an ongoing project.
To make India strong and prosperous. That's what this nutter objects to.
January 30, 1948 was not an end; it was the first shot in a long war against pluralism,
which succeeded at Partition. The word 'pluralism' was coined for Burma which had already split off from India.
secularism,
i.e. saying Hinduism is evil. Taliban is very nice.
and constitutional democracy in India.
Dynasticism. Why is a low-born chai-wallah sitting in the office which used to belong to Cambridge alumni like Nehru, Indira & Rajiv? Incidentally, Rahul has an MPhil from Cambridge. Also, he is a janeodhari Brahmin.
The forces that killed Gandhi are today in power. They are no longer rebels
There were Communist rebels. There were no Hindu rebels in independent India because the country was ruled by Hindus.
but the rulers of the state. The danger, therefore, has multiplied many times over.
In which case, Muslims should be fleeing.
Every attack on minorities, every killing in the name of cow protection,
e.g. the cow protection riots in Bihar in 1917? Gandhi was sent to Champaran to distract attention from it.
every hate speech,
so long as only Hinduism is attacked
every communal riot, every attempt to erase composite culture – these are all part of the same project that killed Gandhi.
& which succeeded thanks, in some part, to him. Going to jail together created esprit corps. Gandhi's son married Rajaji's daughter- thus breaking caste taboos. More remarkably, when Nehru's sister married a Muslim, it was Gandhi who broke up the marriage and got her a suitable Brahmin groom.
The incidents may appear separate, but the ideology behind them is coherent.
It is the Indian national ideology. If the majority won't fight for India, the minorities are equally doomed.
Millions of Godses are at work to destroy India in body and spirit.
In which case the country should be getting poorer and weaker. Yet, under Modi, the opposite has been the case.
Bodily India is being disfigured by their regime through silence over or the lies about the effective loss of control on vast lands along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh at Galwan, Depsang and Hot Springs.
More was lost under Nehru. But then, had Gandhi prevailed, the whole country would have been lost to the Japs in '42.
Simultaneously, India is being devastated daily by flattening of hills, ecological damage, diversion of forest lands, devastation of environment and destruction of rivers through policies that favour big capital.
Big Capital has the money to finance the State. This cretin thinks India should emulate Venezuela.
All facilitations for rich and wealthy at the cost of the people are being sold as development and people are being intoxicated with religion and silenced with free rations and occasional freebees.
Rich and wealthy foreigners finance the Wire and publicize this cretin's worthless books.
India is being killed in spirit through systematic destruction of her history, disfiguration of its archaeology, culture, and trampling upon all the values embodied in the Constitution.
Also, Modi is incessantly sodomizing Dalits like Teltumde. He is too traumatized to talk about it but we should do so for him.
In this, we must acknowledge our own responsibility.
Teltumbde should not tried to suck Modi off. That randy bugger went ass-to-mouth on him. Dr. Ambedkar must be turning in his grave.
By remaining silent,
because Modi has shoved his dick in your mouth
by treating all this as ‘normal,’
It isn't normal for the Prime Minister of a big country to sodomize an elderly shithead every day.
and by viewing each incident in isolation, we too have become complicit with Godses’ projects.
Fuck Godse's projects. It is Modi's project of going ass-to-mouth on every elderly Dalit which should worry us. By not speaking out against this atrocity, the editors of 'the Wire' are complicit in Teltumbe's brains having been buggered to buggery. Omidyar Sahib should kindly take action.
