It isn’t just “Biden, Macron who know what’s going in in India but won’t talk.”
Quote from below: "Roy: I would say that it would be foolhardy for you to think that a process in which a country of 1.4 billion people that used to be a flawed democracy – and is now falling into a kind of, well, I can only use the word fascism – is not going to affect the rest of the world, you’re extremely wrong."
At the risk of offending people here (so I will carry on this analyses more in depth on Substack and Covert Action magazine when I get time), this interview of Roy goes to what I have been railing about these past few years as Trump came to power with "ideas” formulated by past “Conservative” political theorists credited as precursors to Trumpism. Which means those so favored by “Surveillance State Complex” Oligarch as Palantir founder, Peter Thiel, propagates as “National Conservatism,” beginning with fascist political theorist Carl Schmitt’s, and his friend, Leo Strauss, as Thiel self-identified. The following, without my abstracting quotes from each, tell the "story” pretty well.
Here is one of the better analyses of the "ideas” held in common by Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump, et al.: Quote: "In general, nationalism consists in the celebration of coercive uniformity. . . . But to combat ideas, ideas are also needed." "So centre-right parties are drifting to the far right, which pushes the far right even further right, says Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia."
To paraphrase one of the last sentences in this article to make it correspond to reality: "Meanwhile, their erstwhile donor and godfather Benjamin Netanyahu (and Yoram Hazony and Peter Thiel) has become a Right-revolutionary winner.”
As a Human Rights attorney, and involved with Nuclear Policy as a lawyer with LCNP, I have an obligation to oppose these “ideas” and ideology. But as that offends some here, anyone interested in “American Fascism” as it increasingly takes hold of both U.S. political parties, presented as “opposition” to each other, while committing mass murder around the world, feel free to contact me at:
todd@american militarism.org or todd.e.pierce@icloud.com
for a “Critical Military Studies” analysis of U.S. policy and our militaristic culture, as carrying on from my late friend, Bill Polk. Which I know Bill was in full agreement with me on. Begin forwarded message:
From: Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com>
Subject: [Salon] Arundhati Roy: ‘Biden, Macron know what’s going on in India but won’t talk’
Date: September 12, 2023 at 8:27:01 PM CDT
To: salon@listserve.com
Reply-To: Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>
Arundhati Roy: ‘Biden, Macron know what’s going on in India but won’t talk’From
her New Delhi home, the acclaimed Indian writer and activist talks
about the G20 summit and the state of India’s minorities. By Oliver Jarvis Published On 8 Sep 20238 Sep 2023 India
is preparing to host world leaders at a Group of 20 (G20) summit this
weekend in what is being described as a crucial moment for Prime
Minister Narendra Modi to cement his place as a global leader. New Delhi has gone under a massive – and controversial – “beautification drive” for the event, with many slums bulldozed and their occupants displaced.
Newly-painted
lotus flower murals – the election symbol of the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) – have appeared and billboards with Modi’s face line
the reworked roads. “You’d be forgiven for thinking it was the BJP that was
hosting this event, not the government of India,” acclaimed author and
activist Arundhati Roy told Al Jazeera.
Author and activist Arundhati Roy [File photo]
Roy, 61, is a vocal critic of the Indian government’s
treatment of minorities – mainly its 200 million Muslims – and other
rights violations since Modi came to power in 2014. From her home in New Delhi, she spoke to Al Jazeera about the G20 event and the state of India’s minorities. Al Jazeera: What is your opinion of India, in the context of its treatment of minorities, hosting the G20 summit? Arundhati Roy: Look, I don’t think
anybody really cares about that because… the G20 is here, everybody is
looking for an opportunity, a trade deal or a military equipment deal or
a geopolitical strategic understanding. So it’s not as if any single
one of the people who are coming here, the heads of state or anyone else
doesn’t know exactly what’s going on in India. In countries like the US
and the UK and France, the mainstream media has been so critical of
what’s happening in India, but the governments have a different agenda
altogether. So I don’t think one needs to be naive enough to believe
that that is an issue at all for the people coming here. Al Jazeera: Do you see the G20 being held in India
as an opportunity for leaders to call the Indian government out for its
treatment of minorities? Roy: It won’t. None of them will. I have
no such expectation. But I think what’s interesting is that if you were
in Delhi, as I am now, if you look at the publicity, if you look at the
banners, if you look at all the preparations that are being made for the
G20, you would be forgiven for imagining that it wasn’t the government
of India that is hosting the G20, but the BJP. Every single banner has a
huge lotus on it, which is the symbol of a political party. Modi’s BJP. What has happened in India and it’s so dangerous, so
blatant, is that the country, the nation, the government and its
institutions have all been conflated with the ruling party – a political
party. And that ruling party has been conflated with Modi, the
individual. In fact, there is hardly any ruling party now, there’s just a
ruler. So it’s as if Modi is hosting the G20. All of us are locked in.
We can’t go out. The poor have been purged from the city. The slums have
been screened off. The roads are barricaded, the traffic is shut down.
It’s as quiet as death. It is as if he’s so ashamed of all of us, of
what the city is really like. It’s been purged and locked down for this
event. Al Jazeera: It sounds like you’re saying it’s a vanity event for Modi. Roy: Of course it’s a vanity event. He’ll
pirouette and it’s just before the elections. So it will feed into his
campaign. All these Western leaders who speak about democracy – I mean,
you can forgive someone like Trump because he doesn’t believe in
democracy – but Biden, Macron, all these people who talk about
democracy, they know exactly what’s going on here. They know that
Muslims have been massacred, that Muslims who protest have their homes
bulldozed, which means all the public institutions – courts,
magistrates, the press – collude in that. They know that Muslims in
certain towns have X marks on their doors and are being asked to leave.
They know that Muslims have been ghettoised. And that now people who are
accused of actually lynching, murdering Muslims are leading so-called
religious processions through these ghettos. They know that vigilantes
are out there with swords, calling for annihilation, calling for the
mass rape of Muslim women. They know all this, but that doesn’t matter
because as always with certain Western countries, it’s like “democracy
for us” and, you know, “dictatorship or whatever else it is for our
non-white friends”. It doesn’t matter. Al Jazeera: On that, and this is a completely
hypothetical situation, but let’s say you are invited to give a speech
at the G20. You’re opening up the G20 summit. What would you say? Roy: I would say that it would be
foolhardy for you to think that a process in which a country of 1.4
billion people that used to be a flawed democracy – and is now falling
into a kind of, well, I can only use the word fascism – is not going to
affect the rest of the world, you’re extremely wrong. What I say
wouldn’t be a cry for help. It would be to say, “Look around at what you
are, what you are actually helping to create.” There was a moment in
time in 2002 after the anti-Muslim Gujarat massacre – in which
intelligence reports by countries like the UK actually held Modi
responsible for what they called ethnic cleansing. Modi was banned from
travelling to the US, but all of that is forgotten now. But he’s the
same man. And every time somebody allows him this kind of oxygen and
this kind of space to pirouette and claim that only he could have
brought these powerful people to India, that message magnified a
thousand-fold by our servile new channels, it feeds into a kind of
collective national insecurity, sense of inferiority and false vanity.
It’s blown up into something else that’s extremely dangerous and that
people should understand is not going to just be a problem for India.
Al Jazeera: During a recent speech in the southern
Kerala state, you said India is entering a new chapter. What did you
mean by that? Roy: What I meant was that, you know, in
the last few years, we have actually spoken about the rise of the BJP,
of Modi, of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s ideological
mentor] – the mothership of the cult of Hindu Supremacy – of which Modi
has been a lifetime member. We have, some of us, critiqued it
politically, structurally. But now we are in a different situation
altogether. Although we do have elections, I wouldn’t call us a
democracy anymore. But because we have elections, this message of Hindu
supremacy has to be beamed out to 1.4 billion people in order to create a
reliable constituency. So election season becomes extremely dangerous
for minorities. What I meant by “We’ve reached a different phase now” is
that it’s no longer just the leadership that we must fear, but a section
of this indoctrinated population that has made the streets dangerous
for minorities. The violence is no longer limited to
government-orchestrated pogroms. We are witnessing incident after
incident of banal evil, as Hannah Arendt might have put it. The world
saw the video of an ordinary little classroom in north India where the
teacher, the principal of the school, gets a seven-year-old Muslim boy
to stand up and has all the other Hindu children come up and slap him. complicit, the security forces do
not have a chain of command. It’s beginning to resemble what happened in
the Balkans. We saw the horrifying sight of women being paraded naked
and gang-raped. We learned that it was the Manipur police who handed the
women over to the mob. We have, as I said before, people accused of murder, of
lynching, of burning alive young Muslim men, now leading religious
processions. We have a situation where the prime minister speaks on
Independence Day about women’s rights, but at that very moment, his
government signs a pardon for the 14 men who gang-raped Bilkis Bano and
killed 14 members of a family. And they are now respected members of
society. These are men who had been convicted to life imprisonment by
the highest court in the land. So we have a situation now where the constitution has been
more or less set aside. If they win the election next year, in 2026,
there’s going to be what we call “delimitation”, which is a kind of
gerrymandering where the number of seats and geography of constituencies
will be changed and the Hindi speaking belt where the BJP is the
strongest, will get more seats, which will basically change the balance
of power. The south will definitely be very, very uneasy with this and
that too has the power of or the potential of Balkanisation. We have a situation where, you know, we are talking about
one nation, one language, one election. But actually, we are in a
situation where you have one dictator, one corporation. We have a
corporate head who has been an old friend of Modi’s from the time of the
Gujarat pogrom, who now is accused by not just not just a short selling
company called the Hindenburg Research, but now by a whole coalition of
journalists who report organised crime, talking about him pulling off
the biggest corporate sort of scandal in history. But nothing will be
done. So we’re in a situation where the world also has to assess what
happens when the rules don’t apply to some people and apply differently
to other people. All the rules. You know, we have a rule of law. We have
a very sophisticated jurisprudence. But how it’s applied depends on
what your religion is, what your caste is, what your gender is, what
your class is. We are in a very, very dangerous place.
Al Jazeera: If you were to summarise in just a few sentences, what is the state of India today? Roy: The state of India is very
precarious, very contested. We have a situation in which the
constitution has been effectively set aside. We have a situation in
which the BJP is now one of the richest political parties in the world.
And all the election machinery is more or less compromised. And yet –
not just because of the violence against minorities, which of course
causes a kind of majoritarianism and may not cause them to lose
elections – but because of unemployment and because we live in one of
the most unequal societies in the world, we have an opposition that is
building up. This government is seeking to crush it because it does not
believe that there should be an opposition. We are in a situation of
great flux and we don’t expect, I don’t think anybody expects, anybody
outside of India to stand up and take notice because all their eyes have
dollar signs in them, and they are looking at this huge market of a
billion people. But, you know, there won’t be a market when this country
slides into chaos and war, as it already has in places like Manipur.
What they don’t realise is that this market won’t exist when this grand
country falls into chaos as it is. The beauty and the grandeur of India
are being reduced to something small and snarling and petty and violent.
And when that explodes, I think there’ll be nothing like it.
Source: Al Jazeera
-- Salon mailing list Salon@listserve.com https://mlm2.listserve.net/mailman/listinfo/salon
|