Author:
Publication: Hindu Human Rights
Date:
URL: http://www.hinduhumanrights.org/articles/racism.html
"In response to protests this year from
several faith based groups, the California Board of Education agreed to withdraw
materials considered to be giving a distorted view of Christian and Jewish
ideas. But Hindus, as is usual in these cases, were given short thrift."
In this article we examine some of the background to the Hindu objections
to how their history and culture are taught in the USA and the rest of the
world and will focus on some of the special interest groups campaigning for
the status-quo.
Most racist and colonialist viewpoints of
non-European cultures and history are now regarded as outdated. They are recognised
as not giving an objective view consistent with responsible academic study,
but merely the vehicle by which one was able to peddle the prejudices by what
we can now see was a less enlightened age. On the positive side humanity can
be said to have learnt from its mistakes - a century ago what would now be
recognised as prejudiced and a prescriptive view of non-European and non-Western
cultures nevertheless did lay the foundations of modern academia. Indeed it
was those very tools which were later utilised to eradicate the respectability
of scientific racism and denigration of ancient customs and beliefs, merely
to satisfy a preconceived point of view. This was most evidently seen in the
USA, a paradoxical country in many respects. While laying the foundations
of what we now understand as democracy, a normative principle to which all
civilised nations are said to aspire, the continuation of slavery for many
years led to an unhealthy dose of extreme ethnic prejudice.
Modern racism, as well as democracy, can also
be said to be an American product, or in another rather better way, according
to one caption describing a photographic exhibition of African-American victims
of murderous lynching in the Deep South, "Racism is as American as apple
pie". Nevertheless if at one time American intellectual life was dominated
in the early Twentieth Century by thinkers such as Madison Grant, Lothropp
Stoddard and Ernest Sevier-Cox, whose racism was paraded as rational and scientific,
it was also neutralised by the work of someone who is regarded as the founding
father of anthropology, Dr. Franz Boas. Although Boas may yet again have had
some facts not entirely correct, something more evident with his disciples
Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, by the time Mississippi senator Theodore
Bilbo warned white America in 1946 to deport all blacks to Africa in order
to save the white race of America's founding fathers, such ideas, while permissible,
were increasingly less respectable and harder to justify.
Bilbo had penned "Take Your Choice: Separation
or Mongrelisation" to ask white America to push for expulsion of all
African-Americans to Liberia in order to stop America's downfall by the mixing
of the races. He claimed that Rome, Greece, Carthage and Egypt had befallen
the same fate when the "white master race" in those ancient civilisations
had mixed with the Negroid inhabitants and slaves. Interestingly he said the
same thing about India, and was following in the footsteps blazed by the scientific
racist writers such as Madison Grant. According to this gang, Hindu civilisation
fell because the white master race of Aryan invaders, mixed their blood with
the subjugated dark-skinned population, despite the rigorous attempts to outlaw
miscegenation by means of the caste system. Now this was nothing unique as
the whole idea of the Aryan Invasion myth had been manufactured by German
Indologist Max Muller to satisfy his British imperialist sponsors during the
nineteenth century. But unlike the scientific racists, Muller retracted his
ideas and clarified that his references were to language groups, and not race.
Nevertheless, in an age when Europe was becoming the world master, and the
indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas and southern Africa were being
displaced, vanquished or exterminated by settlers of European origin, the
idea that the same thing had been done in the distant past by the white master
race fell on fertile ground, and were regarded as undisputable fact. Hitler's
"Mein Kampf" was therefore not anything unique in this respect,
and only its practical application as witnessed by the horrors of National
Socialism culminating in the Holocaust eventually led to a full rethink of
where such uncontrolled mental gymnastics could lead to.
Unfortunately old prejudices die hard. In
1999, America's most notorious National Socialist, former Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke published the updated version of a "Mein Kampf" more
suited to the racist mentality of a new century. This book was called "My
Awakening". Duke's thrust in the work is a polite and sugar coated academic
version of an idea which he told an audience in 1976: "The problems of
this country [USA] can be summed up in two words: Jews and niggers."
While the beginning of the book deals with how all people of African descent
are genetically inferior than other races, and more prone to extremely high
levels of violent crime and sexual promiscuity which are supposedly responsible
for ruining white societies around the world, the second part of the book
actually shows Duke trying to make common cause with hardcore ethnic nationalists
from the black community. His reasoning as that they must face their common
enemy in the form of Jewish supremacism, a sarcastic term in deference to
the white supremacist terminology often associated with the former Klan leader.
Nicely sandwiched in the middle of all this, in Chapter 29 to be exact, is
David Duke's commentary on how India became racially degenerate through the
ethnic mixing of superior white Aryans with the indigenous darkies of India.
When we at Hindu Human Rights came to know of this, we contacted Duke to see
if he could explain himself and his use of this fraudulent pseudo academic
myth. However, ironically enough it turned out he was in prison for fraud
at the time and was not willing to talk openly for fear of his true identity
becoming known in the midst of a riot by Mexican inmates. In any case, a refutation
of Duke's racist theories on India is something that has not even been taken
up by normally anti-racist writers. Why is this? Could it be that Duke's racism
is actually respectable if it happens to victimise Hindus? What respectable
academic, in this day and age, could possibly share these noxious and racist
ideas? Well as it happens, quite a few actually.
After the attack on Pearl harbour in 1941
and the entry of America into the Second World War on the side of the Allies,
the entire ethnic Japanese population of the country was imprisoned and suspected
as a potential fifth column of the Axis. However, no such fate befell the
even larger numbers of Americans who were of Italian or German descent. Indeed
as shown by the example of Eisenhower, having a Teutonic name would not necessarily
even hamper a career at the very apex of the Allied military machine. Moving
to the year 2005 it would seem that California, a state now led by a man who
not only speaks English tinged by his native German but whose father served
in the Waffen SS, has found a new community to treat on an unequal level.
In response to protests this year from several faith based groups, the California
Board of Education agreed to withdraw materials considered to be giving a
distorted view of Christian and Jewish ideas. But Hindus, as is usual in these
cases, were given short thrift. Not only that but an unhealthy array of anti-Hindu
extremists has built up to warn of the danger posed by so-called "Hindutva"
supporters and the "Saffronisation" of Indology - reminding us of
parallel verbiage used to indoctrinate fear about the so-called Zionist lobby
and Mossad. Instead of sinister yarmulke clad figures examining the globe
in a menacing manner to make logistical plans for their nefarious designs,
we now have the myth of some amorphous saffron mass doing exactly the same
thing with Indological studies. Although it has not gone as far as the myth
generated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, at least not yet, the seeds
have been planted that respectable academia should keep its distance from
these weeds in the garden. The demolition of the racist Aryan invasion myth
is seen as the most dangerous example of "saffronising" Indology
and related subjects. So who are these people who inject anti-Hindu venom
into mainstream academia?
Judging by their sympathy of the Aryan Invasion
Myth, one could safely assume they were closely associated with the likes
of Duke, the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist neo-Nazi militias. But
this would be where one would initially at least be mistaken. In fact they
often parade themselves as anti-racists and social liberals. On the surface
they may seem at polar opposites but on issues such as Hindus, they are united
with Duke and the Klan, although they put across their ideas more convincingly.
Prominent among the anti-Hindu group is Michael Witzel, an American professor
of Sanskrit at Harvard University, who has the support of a number of academicians
including Indian historians Romila Thapar, D.N.Jha and Shereen Ratnagar. In
the light of what has just been written it is very interesting finding Thapar
in this as she built her career in India based upon her unshakable belief
in scientific Marxism, as opposed to a backward, obscurantist and ultimately
socially evil Hinduism. Then, in the well worn path of pseudo-academics who
constantly berate the West for its capitalism and exploitation, she went to
take up a plum well-paid position in that great counter-revolutionary, reactionary,
capitalist whore of Babylon, the United States of America itself.
From his ivory tower, Witzel surveys the scene
of Hindu protestors just as Mahmud Ghazni did before he attacked and desecrated
Somnath. He can brush them off just as Hitler and Stalin did to the Poles
in 1939:
"The proposed revisions are not of a
scholarly but of a religious-political nature, and are primarily promoted
by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far
outside their area of expertise,"
Well if the demands are of a political nature
then what of his own sidekick Romila Thapar? By trying to impose a Marxist-Leninist
social model on Indian history is she not more guilty of this, especially
since the reality of the proletarian paradise came crashing down in Eastern
Europe in 1989, and in the former Soviet Union in 1991? The humanities in
India have long been dominated by pseudo-academics with Stalinist sympathies
who have about as much objectivity towards Hindu culture as Comrade Joe had
in dealing with the Ukrainian kulaks. Thapar is herself a product of this
environment, one of the most damaging legacies of what can accurately be termed
as Nehruvian National Socialism which was and continues to be responsible
for the ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Hinduism across the Indian-subcontinent.
The California Board of Education should objectively
look at all the facts. Why are Jewish, Christian and Islamic perspectives
on their own respective cultures taken as legitimate, while Hindus are denied
equal treatment in this? Why are Witzel and his Klan allowed to mock and denigrate
Hindus in a manner which if applied to any other community, culture or belief
system would be denounced as bigoted, prejudiced and racist? In fact why is
the Witzel SS Legion going unchallenged when it supports a racist idea, namely
the Aryan Invasion Theory, yet ironically slams anyone opposing it or bringing
evidence to the contrary as some sort of Hindu fascist. Judging by the similarity
Witzel has in this sphere with David Duke, perhaps the fascist is within the
self and not in some imaginary external entity. When we examine how Hindu
Dharma is taught, and how Hindus are portrayed in American academia, it seems
as if Dr. Boas had not even existed. The ideas of Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard,
Ernest Sevier-Cox, and Theodore Bilbo lie triumphant. However it is not David
Duke championing these ideas within academia, although he is trying very hard
to. It is supposedly respectable scholars such as Witzel and Thapar. In "My
Awakening" Duke praises Bilbo for his ideas. In changing the substance
but not the title, perhaps Americans had indeed take their choice. Will it
be to look at other cultures objectively and make their intellectuals act
with some responsibility towards their fellow human beings? Or will it be
to allow Witzel, Thapar, and the rest of the same Klan to be the window for
which the ideas of Duke can actually gain greater mainstream acceptance, as
they have done with the continued respectability of the mythical Aryan Invasion
in the highest echelons of American academia? Will America live up to ties
democratic ideals, or will Hindu-bashing become as American as lynching once
was, and as apple pie continues to be?
While it commendable that many Hindus and
Hindu groups are taking up this issue in California and elsewhere, we remind
all concerned individuals, organisations and academics that this incident
is just the tip of the iceberg. Pseudo-academics who continue to peddle and
romanticise the residues of Nazi fantasies and wet-dreams of a super-human
Aryan Master Race need to be exposed wherever they lurk.
