THG Recom. 11: Fighting fascism, one godman at a time
Plus space travel insights, a documentary from Somaliland and a podcast with Adam Tooze.
In Nepal, we are all set to celebrate the Tihar festival. Termed ‘Diwali’ in India, this is one of the largest festivals among the Hindus there too. So, it is apt to scrutinize some of the perversions the godmen or the religious ‘guru’s have brought about in the subcontinent now.
In a long piece for Nepali outlet Setopati, I explore the modus operandi of Jaggi Vasudev, the popular and flambuoyant godman who calls himself Sadhguru (literally someone who introduces you with truth), as the guru of postmodern era.
Summary: while his flawless English, a good sense of humor and incisive wit make anything he speaks irresistible, below the surface of his teachings lurk the starkly fascist ideas of communal discrimination, stratification and exclusion. He even calls for violence and silencing of the critics of Indian government in one of the video I’ve embedded in the article. Of course he never uses the terms like ‘beating’ or ‘killing’ but ominously says this: They [critics of Modi government in India] should not be walking the streets….This is the time to deal with all of them….. So we must act for solution.
To me, this smacks of Hitler’s die Endlösung or Final Solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’.
While researching for the article, I was surprised to find out how the Indian and European fasicsts and Nazists have been collaborating for nearly a century by now.
We may now have conveniently forgetten the 1938 speech of VD Savarkar, the so called father of Hindu Rashtravad in India, supporting Mussolini and Hitler and his fascination to Hitler’s extermination model for India’s ‘Muslim problem’. After all, more than eight decades have passed since his speech.
What if his ideas still matter, though? Please juxtapose this information with this tweet from India’s PM Narendra Modi:
If you still doubt those connections between fascists ideologues in India and Europe matter, please read this excerpt from 2011 Islamophobic manifesto made by Anders Breivik before slaughtering 77 people in Norway in which he writes:
The only positive thing about the Hindu right wing is that they dominate the streets. They do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control, usually after the Muslims disrespect and degrade Hinduism too much. India will continue to wither and die unless the Indian nationalists consolidate properly and strike to win. It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical.
If you think that the term fascism is being used in Indian context as a mere slur or a vendetta by the opponents of a popularly elected prime minister, read this from the acclaimed Indian political psychologist, social theorist, and critic Ashis Nandy:
More than a decade ago, when Narendra Modi was a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary, I had the privilege of interviewing him along with Achyut Yagnik, whom Modi could not fortunately recognise. (Fortunately because he knew Yagnik by name and was to later make some snide comments about his activities and columns.) It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.
Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.
Other recommendations:
Here is one fine excerpt fom William Shatner’s book ‘Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,’ about his space experience in Variety:
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
In cinema, fetes de septembre is over but if you are in Nepal, Nepal-EU film festival 2022 is about to commence and you can watch many brilliant films from Europe in festivalscope.com. In the meanwhile, you may enjoy this documentary from Somaliland and Denmark which will teach you a invaluable life lesson:
In podcast, please do not miss this episode of The Ezra Klein Show in which he talks with Adam Tooze focussing on the persisting ‘polycrisis’:
So this is a conversation about the fragile, uncertain future of the global economy at this history-making moment and the Fed’s role in it. We discuss what the British financial market meltdown means for the rest of the world, how the interest rate hikes in rich countries export inflation to other countries, the looming possibility of a global recession, why Tooze believes something could break in the global financial system, why countries in South Asia are experiencing a particularly severe form of polycrisis, how the Fed should weigh its mandate to bring down inflation against the global consequences of its actions, why he believes analogies to the American inflationary period of the 1970s are misguided and more.