Demonization: Method; Mechanics & the Madness

 

The day when Churchill will join Genghis Khan, Taimur Leng, Adolph Hitler for the top honors of being the greatest killer of humanity is not far off.

Extract from one of Churchill’s 1897 newspaper reports | Image source & courtesy – dailymail.co.uk | Click for image.

For instance, in the Swat Valley, during the First Mohmand Campaign (1897-1898) in the picturesque part of North India (now in modern Pakistan), Churchill

gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, writing: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.”

He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages.”

When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.” Later, he boasted of his experiences. “That was before war degenerated,” he said. “It was great fun galloping about.”

As war secretary and then colonial secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tans on Ireland’s Catholics, to burn homes and beat civilians. When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq, he said: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” It “would spread a lively terror.”

Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

Didn’t everybody in Britain think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye’s research is that they really didn’t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

This hatred killed. In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused,by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.

This is a real Churchill (via Book Review – Churchill’s Empire – By Richard Toye – NYTimes.com).

Winston Churchill in the Hussars just before he saw action in North India | Image courtesy – dailymail.co.uk | Click for image.

Churchill was someone who excelled at reducing other people with a non-stop flow of derogatory labels, till the tide of opinion turned.

This ‘reduction’ process works in four stages:

• Stereotype
• Demonize
• Genocide
• Apologize

Let us see how this process has been used in the USA. This kind of

dehumanization can have deadly consequences.

Saturday, June 23, is the 30th anniversary of one of the watershed events in the formation of the Asian American community as we know it: The killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit, Michigan, by auto workers Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. Chin, due to be married in two days, was celebrating his bachelor party at a strip club called the Fancy Pants when Ebens and Nitz began verbally haranguing him. “It’s because of you m_____f_____ that we’re out of work,” shouted Ebens. A fight broke out, after which all of the participants were encouraged to leave.

Chin challenged Ebens to continue the fight outside. Ebens responded by going to Nitz’s car and procuring a Louisville Slugger baseball bat (ironically, a Jackie Robinson model). After chasing Chin and cornering him in McDonald’s parking lot, Nitz held Chin down as Ebens pummeled him with the bat, sending him into a coma from which he never awoke.

Ebens and Nitz were convicted in a county court of manslaughter. They were given three years probation with no jail time, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay court costs of $780. Though Ebens was later found guilty of violating Chin’s civil rights in federal court, and sentenced to 25 years in jail, the decision was overturned on appeal.

Neither of Chin’s killers spent any time in prison for his death.

News of the case galvanized the Asian American community, forcing many who had resisted political involvement in the past to consider the grotesque implications of Chin, a Chinese American, being mistakenly identified as Japanese, and then blamed by proxy for the decline of the U.S. car industry.

The upshot is that Chin’s killing was like a bad ethnic joke gone horribly wrong: “Chinese, Japanese? What’s the difference?” (via Is Your Font Racist? (Tao Jones) – Speakeasy – WSJ).

British officers and Indian troops from the 45th Sikhs Regiment in 1897 at Chakdara fort sent to subdue Indian militants | Image source & courtesy – dailymail.co.uk | Click for image.

Or for that matter, it can also be brown-skinned people.

In 1943, some 3 million brown-skinned subjects of the Raj died in the Bengal famine, one of history’s worst. Official documents and oral accounts of survivors paint a horrifying portrait of how Churchill, as part of the Western war effort, ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia. And he did so with a churlishness that cannot be excused on grounds of policy: Churchill’s only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.

British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretense that it was conducted for the benefit of the governed. Churchill’s conduct in the summer and fall of 1943 gave the lie to this myth. “I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.”

Some of India’s grain was also exported to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to meet needs there, even though the island wasn’t experiencing the same hardship; Australian wheat sailed past Indian cities (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans; and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down. India was not permitted to use its own sterling reserves, or indeed its own ships, to import food. And because the British government paid inflated prices in the open market to ensure supplies, grain became unaffordable for ordinary Indians. Lord Wavell, appointed Viceroy of India that fateful year, considered the Churchill government’s attitude to India “negligent, hostile and contemptuous.”

The way in which Britain’s wartime financial arrangements and requisitioning of Indian supplies laid the ground for famine; the exchanges between the essentially decent Amery and the bumptious Churchill; the racism of Churchill’s odious aide, paymaster general Lord Cherwell, who denied India famine relief and recommended most of the logistical decisions that were to cost so many lives.

Churchill said that history would judge him kindly because he intended to write it himself. The self-serving but elegant volumes he authored on the war led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to bestow him an award for peace, to give him, astonishingly, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill’s self-justifying embellishments. (via Books: Churchill’s Shameful Role in the Bengal Famine – TIME).

For Indians the crucial lesson is that an enemy’s enemy need not be our friend.

He may be the second enemy.

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Related Articles

• Op-Ed Contributor: Why Vincent Chin Matters (nytimes.com)
• Hope Against Hate (psychologytoday.com)
• Forging a More Successful Multicultural America – Ron Takaki and Asian American Leadership (psychologytoday.com)
• The Magna Carta and Our Shared Anglo-Saxon Heritage with the UK (Open Thread) (wtpotus.wordpress.com)
• The Fourth Reich: Abortion Holocaust (cnsnews.com)
• The Devil Made Him Do It (esquire.com)
• Genocide and identity conflict (oup.com)
• TV review: The Churchills; Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder – The Big Clear Out (guardian.co.uk)

 

Between a rock and hard place

Modern Indian State has acquired Desert-Bloc-Platonic-Confucian authoritarian principles of State as parens patriae

Hitler-Gandhi meter

Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. (It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are) …

… Though Gandhi didn’t support killing, his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here.

For me, that is a problem. (via ‘First they called me a joker, now I am a dangerous thinker’ – All That Matters – Sunday TOI – Home – The Times of India).

Run … hide … but you can’t turn your back

Slávoj Zizek can’t (presumably) support Hitler. A status quo-ist like Gandhiji, is unacceptable to Slávoj Zizek. His dilemma! Having to choose between two दुरातान्त्रिक duratantrik systems (like socialism or communism), Slávoj Zizek’s is having a difficult time. Slávoj Zizek’s views are, to say the least, provocative, forcing you to re-think.

The world faces a Hobson's choice today. You can have any colour you want - as long as it is black. (Cartoon by RK Laxman; Courtesy - timesofindia.com). Click for larger image.

India itself does not know the place that भारत्तंत्र Bharat-tantra (Indic political system) has, means or stands for in the history of the world. The history of the world, till about 8 AD,  is basically torn between दुरातंत्र, duratantra, (meaning vile political systems) versus सुरातंत्र suratantra (equitable political systems) systems. भारत्तंत्र Bharat-tantra (Indic political system) was highly respected in the ancient world – went into decline from 8th century to 18th century.

Glimpses into the past

Property rights India, till the 12th century, vested property rights with the producer, upto the advent of the Islamic iqtadari system. The 200 years foreign, Islāmic rule in India, by Turko-Persian offshoots, changed Indian property holding patterns. The main Islamic dynasties, of the Middle East /West Asia, the Abbasids and Ummayads, never directly, attempted any military campaigns against India.

Slavery (distinguished by capture and recapture, buying and selling, state protection, ‘free’ slave markets) were unknown in Indic regions.

Quo Vadis (where are you going) …

The political constructs of the West have hit a wall – and there is no way, but down! Since the West is busy hiding elephants in the room, the need for a different political ideology remains unaddressed. The development of the four Western political systems – i.e. Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism and Communism, is related to two factors. Property (and loot of property) and slavery – the two elephants in the room of Western history.

Gandhiji supporting the British in South Africa (Gandhi, middle row 5th from left with stretcher bearers of the Indian Ambulance Corps - 1899-1900).

The costs of the Western welfare State is going up – not down, not away. Welfare bills are getting more ambitious – and the domestic lobbies want more ambitious schemes. Western  economies have become isolated, high cost protected by barriers and stockades.

Completely ignored by ‘modern’ Western education system, (which India also blindly follows), the Indian political theory and its application have been largely forgotten in India too.

Platonic-Confucian axis

The axis of Confucian-Platonic authoritarian, ‘wise’ rulers, was the alternate model for the world. Property rights remained with less than o.1% of the people. Under the CRER principle, (cuius regio, eius religio, meaning whose land, his religion; CRER) even personal religious beliefs of the individual were subject to State approval, as per law.

The West scorns the Chinese one party rule. How does one more, collusive party in the national polity, in a ‘democratic set-up, become the paragon of political virtue. Two-party democratic polity is just a more polished and conniving way of exercising the same authority – in a more invisible manner? In India, with more than 70 crore voters, the winning party got less than 13 crore votes and the final difference between the winning party and the second largest party. Approximately 5 crore voters. This leaves people with little or no choice – much like the choice between one-party ‘dictatorship’ and two-party ‘democracy’.

Now compare

The only exception to this was the Indic system of polity – where property rights were vested with the user, justice was decentralized (did any Indic king dispense justice?), religion was maya and dharma was supreme. The modern Indian State has acquired the Desert-Bloc-Platonic-Confucian authoritarian principles of the State as parens patriae. So, the power of the Indic ideas is something that India seems to have completely forgotten, missed and lost!!

One party dictatorship or two-party democracy. What's the difference? One more collusive political party! (Cartoonist - Matt Bors; Posted on August 4, 2008; Cartoon Source and Courtesy - cagle.com). Click for larger image.

Is there an Indic political system at all? Simple leads …

1. What is Sanskritic word for slave? Or what does the Indian narrative call Slave owners?
2. Why do traditional traders resist taxes even today? The biggest tax offenders of modern India are the traditional ‘marwari’ business man. Why?
3. What triggered the persecution of the Roma Gypsies in Europe?
4. How did the Roma Gypsies start the Church Reformation in Europe?
5. Why does India have the lowest crime rates and incarceration rates in the world? Yet was behind the biggest crime wave in history?
6. Why and how did India build the world’s largest private reserves of gold? Without loot, luck or slaves?
7. From the carbon-dated 3000 BC Indus Valley to the India in 2000 AD, how could India resist cultural and military invasions?
8. How did India emerge as software service economy in a short 15 years?
9. India is today a counterpoint in softpower – in TV, cinema,publishing, newspapers, et al! How come?
10. While the Western world is going public sector, how come India continues down the private sector path?

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