Swamy and his Harvard enemies I : the real story
An anti-Hindu clique has made a mockery of academic freedom using an unwieldy administrative mechanism to cancel Subramanian Swamy’s courses. The result has been a fierce backlash.

Part I

Dr. Navaratna Rajaram

Background: Insular Indologists and generous donor

Georges Clemenceau (1841 – 1929), prime minister of France during World War I once said: “War is too important a matter to be left to the generals.”

This wisdom can now be applied to those calling themselves by names like Indologist, India Studies Expert, South Asia Expert (the latest fashion) and so forth. Thanks to their ham-handed expulsion of the economist and visiting professor Dr Subramanian Swamy, Harvard now has a major public relations problem on its hands.

To understand the nature of Harvard’s public relations problem, it helps to recognize that Harvard has a dual personality: it is a university that is also a business. Harvard University is part of the Harvard Corporation which answers to its board. (Actually it has two boards, of fellows and of overseers—don’t ask me why.) It is the richest university in the world with assets (called endowment) valued at $32 billion (over one lakh sixty thousand crore rupees in today’s values). Its assets are managed by the Harvard Management Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard.

In 2007, its assets stood at $36 billion. During the global economic downturn Harvard endowment lost 22 percent of its value or eight billion dollars. It has recovered somewhat in the past two years and is now valued at $32 billion, better but still well short of what it was five years ago. To grow, Harvard needs money from two sources— income from its assets and contributions from its ‘customers’. The latter may now take a hit thanks to the controversy and the backlash following the cancellation of Subramanian Swamy’s courses.

Like any successful business Harvard treats customer loyalty as its most valuable asset; it takes extraordinary care to cultivate and nurture good relations. Its customers are its alumni. They donate generously and also send their children to Harvard. Increasingly, Harvard is drawing its students—and donations—from the wealthy Indian-American community and in recent years from businesses and professionals in India. In the past year alone, individuals from major Indian business houses like Tata, Infosys and Mahindras (to name just a couple) have given tens of millions of dollars to Harvard.

Hubris results in backlash

The last thing that Harvard needs at this juncture is as it is just recovering from the fallout of the financial crisis is a public relations disaster of this nature. A question that needs to be answered is— how could Harvard, whose public relations skills are second to none, allow itself to be blindsided by an avalanche of this magnitude? The only answer I can think of is hubris—it took the goodwill and loyalty of an important segment of its ‘customers’— the Indian alumni and students—for granted and failed to respond adequately to their complaints over the shrill anti-Hindu and anti-Indian rhetoric and propaganda of some of its faculty. The worst offenders were Indologist Michael Witzel and a few of his associates.

The dismissal of Subramanian Swamy was the last straw. He is regarded as a hero by a large number of Indians because of his uncompromising stand against terrorism and his crusade against corruption. Judged by Witzel’s record over the past several years, going back to his unseemly involvement in the California school curriculum controversy— and the anti-Hindu rants of his hate group IER (Indo-Eurasian Research), it was a disaster waiting to happen. I had brought his unsavory activities to the attention of Harvard administration more than once, but they had always advised me that however disagreeable it may be, Witzel’s (and other’s) views were protected by academic freedom. (This was before Dr Faust took over as president.)

All this was public knowledge, and I was not the only one to object. Now for Harvard to dismiss Subramanian Swamy at the instigation of people like Witzel and his departmental colleague Diana Eck looks like hypocrisy of the first order. It is not only Indians that are outraged by this decision: academics and free thinkers who have nothing to do with India or Hinduism have expressed their outrage. This is made worse by the fact that other institutions like Yale have also buckled under Islamist pressure. Last summer (2011), Yale expelled Dr Charles Small (of the Yale Initiative for the Inter-disciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism), because he held a conference in which Islamic anti-Semitism and Islamic terrorism were discussed. The following excerpt from a blog by a non-Indian (Pamela Geller) gives an idea.

[Lila: Pamela Geller is of course a shrill war-monger, but on this subject she’s isn’t wrong]

“In response to the triple bombing in Mumbai on July 13, 2011 that left 26 people dead, Former Indian Law Minister Dr. Subramanian Swamy published an op-ed in a mainstream Indian daily called ‘How To Wipe Out Islamic Terror’. Dr. Swamy is not much loved by the current Indian government as it was through his anti-corruption campaigning efforts that the previous Telecoms Minister ended up in jail on corruption charges, and he is actively pursuing other high ranking members of the government on similar charges.

“The article was unquestionably provocative, but what it provoked was debate — a good thing for any democracy, especially on a difficult topic. However, it seems, it was too much free speech for Harvard University. For years Dr. Swamy, a Harvard Ph.D. and former Commerce and Industry Minister of India, has taught summer courses in economics at Harvard. This year, in an unprecedented move, his courses were taken away based on the article.”

The author of the article went on to point out that the Harvard Crimson justified the move by saying, in part, “there is the further concern that his publications may incite religious violence.” Religious violence where? On the Harvard campus? There were no incidents of ‘religious violence’ in India following the publication of Dr. Swamy’s article. The Harvard Crimson seems to have a low opinion of the intelligence and maturity of its readers, of Harvard students and faculty in particular.

[Lila: In India, in contrast to the practice (not profession) of the US, “backward castes”, Muslims, Christians, and women have all held the highest offices in the land – President and Prime Minister. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, with over 30% of its population Muslim. Before the British empire, Muslim rulers ruled large parts of India for nearly a thousand years – the entire medieval period. Lectures on pluralism and tolerance from either Christians (or Jewish-Christians) or Muslims directed at Hindus, on the subject of religious pluralism and tolerance, are thus in the nature of ex-convicts lecturing their victims on financial probity}

Unwieldy administration, disgruntled faculty

It is understandable that Harvard President Drew Faust should have caught of much of the flak in this avoidable backlash. Actually, she seems to have been a victim of circumstances beyond her control: a combination of circumstances allowed a disgruntled faculty in its shrinking Sanskrit and India Studies program to take advantage of an unwieldy administrative mechanism. I will look at the former in some detail later, but a brief observation on the latter as seen by a U.S. academic (and administrator) with several decades of experience may be in order. (A phone call to the President’s office at Harvard elicited the response that she, the President had nothing to do with the cancellation.) Here is how the cancellation of Swamy’s courses seems to have come about.

The procedure at Harvard requires that the whole faculty of the college in question vote on the courses and instructors for each term, in this case the college of arts and sciences on the summer courses to be offered in 2012. Swamy’s economics courses were voted down at the instigation of Diana Eck, a religious studies professor who heads something called the ‘pluralism project’. As we shall see later Eck invoked reasons which made faculty competence irrelevant and steamrolled over the wishes of the economics department chair.

This strikes one as an unwieldy and inefficient procedure. Things were quite different in colleges where I taught. Once the department in question gets its budget approved by the college, the department chair, assisted by a departmental committee decides on the courses and assigns instructors. After all they have the competence. One cannot have the absurd situation—as happened at Harvard—of a theologian exercising veto power over science and mathematics courses! (One of the courses cancelled was ‘Quantitative Methods in Economics’.) The last time anything like it happened was in Italy 500 years ago when Galileo was forbidden by the Church to teach astronomy.

Actually there is more to this bizarre episode than meets the eye. Diana Eck was sending a political message to President Drew Faust no less! Eck gave the game away when she haughtily told the faculty why Swamy’s courses should be cancelled. Here is a revealing report (The Harvard Crimson):

“In her remarks, Eck emphasized the ‘destructive’ nature of the positions Swamy advocated in India, and characterized the proposals as going well beyond free speech to the advocacy of abrogating human rights, curtailing civil rights, and intruding on freedom of religion. She wondered why the courses had not been ‘quietly dropped’, rather than submitted for approval in 2012. Swamy’s positions crossed the line to ‘incitement’ and to ‘demonizing’ Indian minorities, and were therefore sharply at odds with Harvard’s pluralism,” Eck said.

But here was the real message: “Given President Faust’s planned trip to Mumbai and New Delhi in January, it would be important for people in that country to know where the faculty stood on the views Swamy advocated.”

(Dr Swamy’s response: “… the vote at Harvard was nothing serious. …non-economists at Harvard don’t like my views on how to protect India.” Citing Eck and a colleague who also wanted his courses dropped, Swamy tweeted: “I have been held accountable at Harvard for what I write in India. This means India studies’ [Michael] Witzel and Eck are accountable in India. Healthy?”)

To get back to Eck’s reasoning, she wants President Faust to tell ALL Indians—1.2 billion of them— most of whom have never heard of Harvard let alone Professor Eck, that they should toe the line drawn for them by this religious scholar— a Christian who claims to speak for all of Harvard in the name of ‘pluralism’. Hinduism is and has always been a pluralistic “religion,” which Christianity and Islam with their exclusive beliefs are not, but this Christian theologian would stand this on its head as only a theologian can.

L’affaire Swamy: policing academic freedom

So this committed Christian fanatic masquerading as a ‘pluralist’ wants to turn the Harvard President’s goodwill visit to India into a crusade against Hinduism! It is not hard to imagine what President Faust can expect if she were to carry Diana Eck’s message to India! As it is, she can expect a torrid time defending the sacking of Dr Swamy against Harvard’s own professed policy of safeguarding academic freedom.

This brings us back to Eck’s (and her colleagues’) contempt for academic freedom when it rubs against their Orwellian brand of pluralism. It may not be out of place here to mention that a large number of Christian theologians led by Diana Eck signed a long letter of apology addressed to Muslim divines for past Christian violence against Muslims including the Crusades. No such apology has been forthcoming for violence against Hindus and other pagans during the Goa Inquisition in India (instigated by ‘Saint’ Xavier).

[Lila: This is because the Muslim world is “already in the bag” for the West. But India and China are not quite there yet. Allowing Hindus to do their own thinking would be dangerous at this point. The Muslims are Abrahamic brothers of the Jews and Christians, ultimately, and when necessary can help present a monotheistic front against the Hindus so as to render them as impotent as the Chinese Confucians have been rendered by the communists, secular monotheists descended from the Abrahamic faiths]

It is hardly necessary to point out that academic freedom cannot come with strings attached. In the memorable words of Abraham Lincoln, 150 years ago, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” This applies to academic freedom no less than to personal freedom. But Diana Eck was able to persuade her faculty colleagues that her higher principle of pluralism cancelled out Swamy’s academic freedom along with the freedom of the economics department to choose whom it may to teach its courses.

When it comes to curtailing academic freedom, the problem is where to draw the line? Can a theologian like Diana Eck be allowed to act as thought police cum moral police to rule on the freedom of others? What if one were to apply a similar standard to Eck and her ilk? It is no secret (see Wikipedia) that she (and her likeminded colleague Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago Divinity School) follows a lifestyle that many in India and even in the U.S. consider perverse. Can this be brought up in approving Eck’s fitness to teach her courses? It can be argued, and has been argued that such people should be kept away from impressionable young minds who might be corrupted by their teaching and example. There would be howls of protests if Eck were treated in the same manner as Swamy for her personal conduct in her private life and for her negative public image in the eyes of majority in the U.S.

Actually what Subramanian Swamy wrote and said had been said before by others before him including Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar. (In addition, Swamy himself has close relatives who are non-Hindus including a Parsi-Zoroastrian wife and a Muslim son-in-law. He doesn’t need any lessons in pluralism.) All that is beside the point, what is at stake is academic freedom being derailed by moral policing. Even at Harvard, other faculty members have engaged in hateful activity (which Swamy has not) that has been defended in the name of academic freedom. Diana Eck’s colleague Michael Witzel is a prime example.

It is unnecessary to go into the details of the now discredited campaign by Michael Witzel and his associates trying to stop the removal of references to the Aryans and their invasion from California school text-books. What is remarkable is that a senior tenured professor at Harvard of German origin should have concern himself with how Hinduism is taught to children in California. Witzel is a linguist, but he presumed to tell California schools how Hinduism should be taught to children. It turned out that Hinduism was a convenient cover; his real concern was saving his pet Aryan myth from being erased from books. (This is not to deny his dislike of Hindus, especially those who question him, more of which below.) In the same way, Eck and her colleagues too are concerned about academic survival— of themselves as well as their discipline.

Preserving a defunct belief system

The reaction of the likes of Eck and Witzel can be understood only when we recognize that though Nazism and European colonialism, the twin pillars that supported Indology up to World War II are now defunct, some of their beliefs are part and parcel of what these academics represent. In particular they hold on to the notion of Indians, especially Hindus, as an inferior subject race who should submit to their stereotyping and behave accordingly. The fact that they don’t makes them react viscerally when challenged as seen in what Eck did to Swamy and Witzel’s reaction to Hindus rejecting his Aryan theories. Having seen Eck’s reaction, it is worth taking a brief look at Witzel.

In addition to his support for the Aryan theories and the California campaign, Witzel is known for his association with the notorious Indo-Eurasian Research (IER), which has been accused of a hate campaign against the Hindus. An article that appeared on December 25, 2005 in the New Delhi daily The Pioneer (for which Rudyard Kipling used to write) began: “Boorish comments denigrating India, Hindus and Hinduism by a self-proclaimed ‘Indologist’ who is on the faculty of Harvard University has unleashed a fierce debate over the increasing political activism of ’scholars’ who teach at this prestigious American university.

“Prof Michael Witzel, Wales professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, is in the centre of the storm because he tried to prevent the removal of references to India, Hinduism and Sikhism in the curriculum followed by schools in California which parents of Indian origin found to be inadequate, inaccurate or just outright insensitive.” The author of The Pioneer article (Kanchan Gupta) went on to observe: “Witzel declared Hindu-Americans to be “lost” or “abandoned”, parroting anti-Semite slurs against Jewish people. Coincidence or symptom? Witzel’s fantasies are ominously reminiscent of WWII German genocide. He says that ‘Since they won’t be returning to India, [Hindu immigrants to the USA] have begun building crematoria as well. …”
This extraordinary behavior on the part of Witzel, Eck and their colleagues can be understood only when we recognize their venial fear that the academic discipline which they represent may be on the verge of extinction. This is what we may look at next.”

Comment:

Swamy’s article (“How To Wipe Out Islamic Terror,” DNAIndia.com, dated July 16, 2011 in the URL which doesn’t work, republished at Pamela Geller’s blog with the date July 14) was certainly strident and, given his position in Indian politics, unwise. But it was a reaction to the Mumbai bomb attacks just a day before, July 13, that left 17 (?) dead and 131 injured.

India, unknown to much of the reading population, is at the epicenter of terrorism in Asia, suffering repeatedly since Independence from insurgent violence from Muslim and Sikh separatists in the NW; Mizo and Naga rebels funded by foreign elements in the east; and Eelam Tiger (Tamil Tiger) insurgency on its southern front.

It’s also ringed around by US military bases (Diego Garcia in the West and NATO bombing in Af-Pak) threatened by both Pakistani and Chinese infiltration and revanchist claims on both sides, and by internal friction between dozens of states, hundreds of languages, and thousands of dialects, not to mention religious differences between the half-a-dozen major faiths represented in its population.

That is the context of Dr. Swamy’s remarks.

Furthermore, if everyone in academia were held to the standard applied to Swamy, the faculty lounges of the US would be empty.

Third point. Omitted in analysis of Dr. Swamy’s remarks, both among his supporters and among his critics, is another case of academic free speech about the Indian subcontinent, the case of Dr. Angana Chatterjee and her husband, Richard Shapiro, professors at the California Institute of Integral Studies. CIIS is supposedly devoted to the promotion of mind-body studies in the Hindu and neo-Hindu tradition, but if this case is typical, it is apparently a hot-bed of political activism.

Dr. Chatterjee was dismissed from her post on July 19, a couple of days after Swamy’s DNA article. The reason seems to have been that Chatterjee went beyond expressing her opinions to active participation in radical groups, allegedly sponsored by/associated with the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI of Pakistan).

A member of the ISI, one Ghulam Fai, was arrested by the FBI on the same day as Angana Chatterjee’s dismissal. Fai was allegedly implicated in lobbying and bribery of US representatives.

The actual grounds for Chatterjee’s dismissal as stated by the institution were dereliction in her duties as a teacher and the fostering of an intimidating atmosphere in the classroom. Since July, former students and associates, as well as human rights organizations, have been bombarding the media with requests for her release.

My question. Could this campaign have something to do with Swamy’s dismissal?

Point Four. As some supporters of Dr. Swamy have pointed out, Harvard has free speech for the likes of Dr. Alan Dershowitz (well-known for advocating torture) and for Danish cartoonists who caricature the Prophet Mohammed, but it forbids what are essentially factual statements by an Indian nationalist in an Indian newspaper, one day after a terrorist bombing that is part of an ongoing multi-decade low-level war conducted against India.

Part of that low-level war is the academic war to subtly demonize, trivialize, and mock Hindusim.

In this war, Islam is an ally where necessary, and the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) provides the racist justification – white Aryans naturally gave Indic people everything of worth in their culture.

Michael Witzel, a vocal advocate of this increasingly discredited theory, is a scholar of German origin. Of all people, he should be sensitive to the connotations of the word Aryan, which has never been used in the racist sense in the Vedic texts, but was generally used in that way in 19th-20th century European literary and political circles, out which Nazism, most notably, derived its ideology.

But Witzel’s inflammatory anti-Hindu rhetoric and history of anti-Hindu activism have not been censured at all. Instead, they may have fueled the action against Swamy and the broader campaign against Hindu identity.

That campaign is being conducted within scholarship about Indic religion/Indian area studies (now suitably renamed South Asian studies, in order to demote nationhood in that region) by American Marxist and gender activists posing as disinterested academicians.

By the way, Diana Eck and her partner are the first lesbians to become dorm parents at Harvard and Wendy Doniger, another anti-Hindu Indologist, is also gay. Their gender preferences are issues here, only because of their own reductive and highly sexualized psychoanalysis of symbols and myths in Hinduism, in a manner often completely at variance with actual texts, practices, and learned commentary. Unfortunately, few people in the US know Sanskrit well enough, even in the academic community, to take them to task.

And the almost completely white circle of American Indologists seems to be at war with the Indian community. Yet another example of how liberal projects supposedly meant to foster minorities are actually tools to dominate and break them.

That it’s all political and not principled is clear from related facts.

To wit, Eck is happy that “Boston is part of the Islamic world” and supports the outspoken pro-Islamicist activist, Tariq Ramadan. By the standards deemed fit to foist on Dr. Swamy, Ramadan is a good deal more objectionable.

[Correction 1/6/2012]: I should note, in fairness, that the video of theRoxbury mosque sermon is by MEMRI, a neoconservative outfit which has a documented history of distorting its excerpts from the Arabic press in order to inflame. Also, at least in one instance I was able to spot, the text accompanying the video was actually false. However, the general tenor of the speeches would be deemed at least as offensive as Mr. Swamy’s article by any objective reader.]

So is the Islamic Society of Boston, which is behind the Boston mosque that Eck applauds.

Here is Ramadan on video praying for Allah’s help and retribution against the enemies of Allah all over the world, including those in Palestine and those in Kashmir.

In Palestine, Muslims surely are within their rights, even if their methods are not.

But the case of Kashmir, especially, is different. In 1989, it was the Hindus – some 350,000 of them – who were ethnically cleansed from their native land by the Muslim majority and who have yet to be allowed to return.

Legally, Kashmir’s Hindu king acceded to India quite legitimately, in accordance with the British policy during partition. In the princely states, the decision whether to join Pakistan or India was left to the monarch, not to the population. Historically, Kashmir has been part of ancient Bharatvarsha.

It was only because of subsequent Pakistani infiltration and terrorism over the years, leading to the dispute with India, that the population dynamics changed, and with it, political sentiment in favor of secession.

Eck is no unworldly activist, oblivious to the history and political dimensions of her academic positions.

She is a gender activist, a Jewish progressive activist on reconciliation with Muslims, and a diversity guru.

She should know that Islamicist groups, not Hindus, advocate death for gays.

Islamicist groups, not Hindus, are at war with Jews.

In fact, Hinduism, in its popularized form, supplies the only growing religion in the US, outside of Islam, in the so-called New Age.

Hinduism both in doctrine, organization, and actual history, is also the most libertarian of all the major religions.

Sanatana Dharma, the way of life it prescribes, is really the mode of interfaith existence practiced successfully in India for thousands of years. In Hindu India, Jews flourished for two thousand years, without persecution.

The same thing cannot be said of either Christianity or Islam.

Eck, the diversity guru, might show a little humility toward the religion that gave her her intellectual career, if not her moral practice; that sheltered the Jewish people when they were persecuted elsewhere; and has lit the path of plurality and tolerance for centuries, in the opinion of many objective students of history.

Ironically, Eck heads an influential project on religion called the “Pluralism Project”.

Ironic, because it is a product of “foundation” (NGO) activism, and thus no more than a branch of state power. The project is funded by the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the latter two well-known to work hand-in-glove with US intelligence.

Eck is also a member of the State Dept. Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom abroad, a twenty-member group that advises the Sec. of State on religious issues in the context of human rights.

What that means is she is a leading member of the “soft power” arm of American empire in its internationalist mode. She is one of those opinion leaders who get trotted out on human rights issues to bolster US/globalist policy, as needed. I have called this “liberventionism” or human rights interventionism. [note: I used this term a few years ago in a discussion about Jean Bricmont, but I should note that Joseph Stromberg used it in 2002. I can’t tell if I coined it myself or got it from Stromberg unconsciously, but it’s likely the latter].

This liberationist activism of Eck and Co. is predictably inflected with the egalitarianism of cultural Marxism. But that is only the tolerant mask worn by the totalizing rationality of the state when it presents itself as distinct from religion, operating in its own space.

In fact, the state competes with religion for the same space. And what is demanded is not tolerance at all. It is power. Power that is never content with parity but inevitably demands supremacy.

Eck, Witzel and their fellow travelers are no more than mandarins of empire.

And their action against Dr. Swamy was not in defense of pluralism. “Pluralism” and “diversity” are just deployed strategically to provide ammunition for an ongoing sub-rosa war on all civilizations resistant in any way to globalist values and ultimate control.

Walter Block at LRC:

“It is not at all the case that newer is necessarily better than older. Murray N. Rothbard has characterized this as the Whig fallacy. Yes, certainly, in some arenas, many of them, we have made great progress. Transportation, communication, medical practice, all readily come to mind in this regard. But it cannot be denied that in other areas, we have retrogressed.

[Lila: I think I’ll add medical practice also to the things that have regressed…]

We no longer have the technology or the skills to manufacture Stradivarius quality violins. Although this is of course subjective, I and many others would argue that modern music is vastly inferior to that of Bach, Mozart and Handel.

And so it is with our Founding Fathers (apart from slavery, of course). Their foreign policy was arguably better than that of Bush and Obama. Just because it is historical, does not render it fallacious, as critics of Ron Paul all too often “argue.”

[Lila: Actually, slavery is the condition of vast numbers of people even today, as a direct result of our aggressive foreign policy and global currency manipulation. Enslavement of foreigners is surely not an improvement over enslavement of native populations]

Similarly, Congressman Ron Paul sees our drug policies pre 1914 as far more humane and beneficial than our present drug war. It will not suffice to prove him wrong to note that he is living in the past. No, these things have to be argued out on their merits. It is simply fallacious to maintain that since this policy was once tried and then rejected (with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914), it is inferior to present day practices.

[Lila: Worship of the young at the expense of the old, indeed, the invention of whole categories of young – teens, pre-teens, teeny-boppers, bobby-soxers – has always been characteristic of twentieth-century mass culture, the purpose of which is simply to create a consumer market aligned with hormones, an unbeatable combination, if the number of fortunes it has generated is any proof.]

As far as economics is concerned, the move from Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard to the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Ben Bernanke was one of retrogression, not progress.

By going “forward,” we have lost, not gained.”

Charles Burris, at LRC blog:

“Bill Buckley was a student at Yale University (Skull and Bones 1950) where he served as shill and informant for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. One of Buckley’s Yale professors, former Trotskyist Willmoore Kendall (formerly of the OSS and later consultant to the CIA) was a recruiter of talent for the newly created Agency.

Kendall recruited Buckley in 1951. Kendall introduced him to former Trotskyist James Burnham (also formerly of the OSS). Burnham was consultant to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA’s covert action division, actively working on the coup d’etat against Mossadegh in Iran.

Burnham first introduced Buckley to agent E. Howard Hunt in his Washington, D. C. apartment. Buckley then served with Hunt in Mexico where Hunt was chief of station and Buckley’s control officer. Hunt later figured as a principal in the Watergate Scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.

Hunt, in his memoirs, American Spy, (in which Buckley wrote the introduction) observes that prior to his stint in the CIA, Regnery published Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, an indictment of the supposed pervasive liberalism on that campus. The book launched Buckley’s career as spokesman for the emerging “Conservative” movement of the early 1950s. With what we now know about CIA covert recruiting on college campuses during this period, particularly Yale, Buckley’s initial book bears a new revisionist examination.

What is not widely known is that the whole enterprise was largely that of a “vanity press” arrangement, with the Buckley family operating covertly under the clandestine guise of the Catawba Corporation, commissioning and financing the book’s publication and publicity. The book’s ownership copyright secretly belonged to Catawba, not WFB.

Buckley was later approached by Regnery to serve on the board of directors of the publishing firm, along with that of William J. Casey. Casey was a prominent Wall Street attorney who had served in the OSS and later became CIA director under Ronald Reagan.

Hunt pointed out that Regnery was subsidized by the CIA during its early years.

At this time James Burnham, who had maintained many of his former leftist connections, was active in the CIA sponsored front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funding left-wing, anti-Soviet scholars and publications networks producing magazines such as Encounter.  These CIA-sponsored social democrats and ex-Trotskyists later emerged as the neocons.

When later, at Burnham’s urging, Buckley created National Review magazine, the premier “Conservative” publication of the past fifty years, joining him in the endeavor as principal editors were Kendall, Burnham, and his sister Priscilla, all of whom had been employed by the CIA.

William J. Casey drew up the incorporation papers for National Review, and served as its long-time legal counsel.

The mysterious early funding of this “non-profit” publication has long been an enigma to researchers. One hoped that Hunt (and Buckley) would finally shed light on this subject, for in one of the most fascinating, if incomplete, chapters in Hunt’s memoir, “The Great Propaganda Machine,” he describes some of his activities in the CIA’s on-going efforts to manipulate, subsidize, and influence the news media and, through it, American public opinion.

The great unanswered question remains: What was Hunt’s role in assisting his old colleague in creating the CIA’s synthetic “Conservative” movement?

Buckley’s National Review editorial colleague Frank Meyer (and his good friend, National Review contributor Murray Rothbard) believed that the magazine was a CIA operation run by Burnham as Buckley’s control. And Hunt does detail in the book how the CIA was engaged in many clandestine operations of covert front groups and foundations using media manipulation and propaganda to project American imperial power and hegemony throughout the world.

Buckley and Hunt are dead.

Why not come clean about National Review? Buckley remained close to Hunt and, as he relates in the memoir, helping him through some trying post-Watergate legal difficulties after the mysterious airline death of his wife Dorothy.

Years later, Buckley was outted as a CIA operative by former CIA agent William Sloane Coffin (Skull and Bones 1949).

Coffin was a long-time colleague of George H. W. Bush (Skull and Bones 1948) when they both attended Phillips Andover Academy and later Yale together.

Former CIA Director George Bush later presented Buckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom, something Hunt never got for his years of clandestine service.

Buckley subsequently created his famous fictional character of CIA agent Blackford Oakes, as Hunt had done earlier in his own series of eight spy novels (under the pseudonyn of David St. John) featuring CIA agent ‘Peter Ward.’

But it is not Hunt with whom Buckley should be compared but author Mary Shelley.

Buckley’s entire life as America’s premier “conservative” public intellectual was sheer fiction based on lies and deception. And so has been the Frankenstein movement he created for his intelligence community masters.”

Gloria Borger faux-scandal-mongering about the Ron Paul newsletters of twenty years ago.

It seems decades old comments are more important than what the candidates actually say and do on pressing contemporary matters. That’s the essence of gotcha journalism. Manufacture fake outrage (Rude words in America? Pass the smelling salts!) to distract from really outrageous things (like the National Defense Authorization Act).

We are not post-racial, whatever that means. We never will be. Thank god.

Race consciousness is not racial ignorance. It is fundamentally benign, part of being a healthy human being.

We all like “our own kind” better. Good for us.

Besides, sometimes “our own kind” means Spanish or Nigerian….at other times, it means Austrian-speaking or Tamil-speaking. Our own kind could be “we Jews”…or “we tall and lean men”…or “we Sumo wrestlers” or  “we high-powered feminist lawyers”….

Why isn’t generalizing about political groups or cultural groups (say, right-wing Christians) denounced as sharply as generalizing about white skins? They’re both misleading ways of thinking. And they’re both things we all do.

We all generalize about race and culture and religion and gender and national identity. So what?  All of us harbor forms of exceptionalism, modes of affiliation, things and people we prefer…. some more dangerously than others.

Focus on the dangerous part, forget the rest.

We can’t afford not to.

We have reached the point where reporters hack the phone messages of people who just died, where the government can read every electronic message you write and tap every conversation, where politicians think you can spend more than you have because you can always print it up, where the main moral drawback of killing more than a million foreigners found guilty of living in the wrong country seems to be that it ruined our reputation.

We have far, far bigger problems than someone’s less-than-politic phrasing in some dead and gone newsletter. Far bigger problems.

And the fact that we let unscrupulous journalists, fully embedded with the crony capitalist oligarchy, set the moral and intellectual tone of the most serious political debate in at least half-a-century may turn out to be the biggest of them all.

Susanna Harwood Rubin, an American yogini and devotee of Jesus and Shiva describes the interfaith love and harmony that already exists and has existed for millenia in India, especially with the aam aadmi, the common man:

“Walking through the Marketplace, Chidambaram

Driving from Chidambaram to Swamimalai
We climbed into one of the two white vans outside of the hotel, and I eased myself into the cool air-conditioned seat just behind the driver. As everyone settled in around me, I looked at the dashboard, which was evenly ornamented with two little deities: on the right, a shiny gold-colored Ganesha sat cross-legged, and to his left stood the Virgin Mary, gracefully draped in blue robes.

I loved seeing this juxtaposition just a few days after my conversation with Bharathi. I pointed to the dashboard – You like Mary and Ganapati! – I said to our driver – Me too! He said – Yes, yes – Mary and Ganapati! Very good! Then, because we had exhausted his English and my Tamil, which doesn’t go beyond Hello, Thank you, and ordering food, we smiled at each other as he began backing the van out into the street for our ride to the Subrahmanya temple in Swamimalai.

I remembered how, when I was here in December, every roadside restaurant seemed to have a crèche, or manger scene, with lots of rainbow-colored tinsel, Merry X-mas banners made of shiny cardboard letters, and sometimes strings of blinking lights. Somewhere in the vicinity there would be a Ganesh or a Subrahmanya, Ganesha’s warrior brother, who is particularly popular in Tamil Nadu. There didn’t seem to be any conflict or contradiction in the two different belief systems being simultaneously acknowledged and celebrated, and there didn’t seem to be any attempt to separate them. On the contrary; the Christian figurines were mixed right in with the Hindu ones. Everyone was invited to the party.”

Comment:

The “interfaith dialogue” of scholars and dogmatic theologians has its place, but peace rarely begins with the brain and its dogmas. It needs a peaceful will and an open heart.

The cabby with his icons of Mary and Ganapathy comes far closer to the Lord of the Dance than ambitious scholars and pontiffs. Their worldly pronouncements betray, perhaps, the acrid presence of a different lord…..

Interfaith Dialogue: Western Christian imperialism vs. the Non-Christian world – Sandhya Jain

Posted on December 27, 2011 by IS

“Inter-Faith Dialogue is a deeply political business with a very political agenda. Hindu Civilisation does not have a global political agenda; hence there is no legitimate reason for Hindu/Indian dharma-gurus to engage in an exercise which can only weaken our defences and facilitate the siege of our own citadels.” – Sandhya Jain

As America leads a resurgence of imperial muscle in Britain and France, India finds herself in a precarious position as battleground of a fresh Evangelical assault on her civilisational ethos and as a launch pad Washington hopes to use in its containment of Russia and China, having effectively crushed much of the Islamic world and confident of being able to trounce the rest. In other words, it is the West against Everyone else, and we can ignore this reality only at our own peril.

Central to the evangelical mission recently led by Vatican’s Cardinal Jean-Pierre Louis Tauran (called inter-faith dialogue) was a tacit isolation of Islam along with a tactical split of the seamless native Indian tradition into Hindu-Jain-Sikh.

There is merit in Vatican keeping Islam out of the purview of its inter-faith dialogues in India. Foremost is the fact that a dialogue between faiths claiming descent from the patriarch Abraham is an intra-Abrahamic dialogue, and would have to be conducted at a different level, which would mostly make it a diplomatic engagement. A real dialogue can only aim to settle which Abrahamic cult (possibly which sub-sect within that cult) is the true revealed faith with the right to conquer the world (sic), while the rest must submit.

As that is unlikely, another objective of dialogue could be to arrive at an understanding regarding the regions of dominance allowed to each cult. That too, is ruled out as the Christian Colonial Western world is deep into a new crusade against Islam, as witnessed in the actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (beaten to pulp), Sudan (divided on demographic lines), with Iran, Syria and Lebanon in the crosshairs. Even loyal stooges in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen were abandoned to new geopolitical calculations, a reality dawning on old faithful Pakistan.

Anyone doubting this assessment must explain the sudden haste among Western nations to reassert their Christian credentials, from Australia, France, Switzerland, and now the United Kingdom: “We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so. The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today. Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend” – Prime Minister David Cameron
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/article2725196.ece

Behind this affirmation lies the Western Christian assault upon Muslim communities in the west, which are practicing identity politics (beard and burqa) as a way of carving out cultural space to counter their growing marginalization. Suffice it to say that Islam is in a terrible bind; it remains to be seen if it can find the intellectual and moral energy to rescue itself from the current morass.

The writer avers that as orthodox Islam experiences growing Western Christian pressure and admits its worst enemies are brethren allied with the crusaders, it must logically seek friends outside the Abrahamic fold – among Non-Monotheistic traditions. This explains the response even West-friendly Muslim nations have given to the People’s Republic of China, a country that has abandoned its communist (Abrahamic) ideology and suppressed its Confucian-Taoist-cum-Buddhist identity (the latter being dangerous, in the writer’s view).

Islam’s quest for rapprochement with non-Abrahamic traditions may have broken new ground in India with Darul Uloom Deoband vice chancellor Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani defending Srimad Bhagawad Gita against a “Russian diktat” and urging Hindus and Muslims to unite on the issue. Maulana Nomani denounced the “allegation portraying Gita as extreme literature.” He asked both communities to fight against anti-Islamic bans that Muslims face in the west, as on the issue of hijab. Simultaneously, Maulana Khalid Rashid, head of Lucknow’s Firangi Mahal seminary, denounced “Russian arrogance” and said Muslims must offer unflinching support to Hindus in this direct attack on their private space. He wanted the government to take a firm stance so such blasphemous interference is not repeated.

With respect, the writer wishes to gently state that under the East India Company and British Crown, Hindus and Muslims received the colonial stick. But ultimately Hindus suffered as Muslims (as Abrahamic brothers) allowed themselves to be manipulated to demand separatism from a Common India. The journey from the Shimla Delegation and formation of the Muslim League to the Lahore Resolution and Partition gave Muslims a sense of false empowerment, as our brothers in Pakistan are now discovering to their own chagrin.

Indian Muslim leaders must understand that by insisting upon some form of separatism even after independence, they debilitated the Hindu community and the nation, with no commensurate benefit to themselves. Hence, even as we welcome their support, we request them to revisit the history of the past century or more and introspect whether the extreme positions taken by the community on any issue have advanced the community in any way. It is our contention that worldwide, the disempowerment of the Muslim community has proceeded in tandem with its extreme radicalization.

Regarding the proposed ban on the Bhagavad Gita by a court in Tomsk city, Siberia, we must differentiate between Russia’s natural suspicion of the white western monks of the Krishna Consciousness movement (ISKON), who are not much liked in some Indian cities), and the circulation of a commentary of one of the most powerful texts of the Hindu tradition.

After the US-NATO assault upon and dismemberment of Yugoslavia and attempts to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church which is one of the pillars of Russian nationalism and statehood, Moscow has naturally been wary of Christian evangelism from the West and attempts to infiltrate white monks into the country in the name of Krishna Consciousness. New Delhi cannot ignore the role played by the Vatican and America in funding in the Coloured Revolutions in former Soviet Republics, and the continued manoeuvring to contain Russia (more later).

The complaint from an orthodox organisation with poor understanding of Hindu dharma and philosophy to ban the Bhagavad Gita – which caught Moscow by surprise – could well be an inspired mischief to strain relations between New Delhi and Moscow at a time when the Russian nuclear venture at Kudankulam, Tamil Nadu, stands checkmated at the behest of the Catholic Church and reported heavy external funding (which Delhi is investigating). It is significant that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, who has for some years been celebrating Mass at her residence, recently allowed the media to photograph her celebrating Mass with the Archbishop, where she announced free pilgrimages to Jerusalem for Christian converts (at the expense of the taxpayer of a Secular nation!).

The timing suggests the Gita ban move was intended to appear as a Russian tit-for-tat. But after its initial surprise, Moscow quickly got its act together and the Russian envoy to India, Alexander M Kadakin, himself a student of Indian civilisation, expressed unhappiness at a holy scripture being taken to court, and said his country accorded equal respect to scriptures of all faiths, viz., the Bible, the Holy Quran, Torah, Avesta, and the Bhagvad Gita.

Actually, the issue is neither religious nor academic, and will be tackled with political wisdom by the Kremlin. Already it has been clarified that it was not the Bhagavad Gita itself which was under scrutiny in the Tomsk court, but some comments in the 20th century Russian translation of Swami Prabhupada’s translation of the text, which are alleged to be insulting to non-believers. The Gita itself, the sources said, was first published in Russian in 1788 and has since been published in several editions and translations in that country. Russian Indologists favour dismissal of the charges, and that may still happen.

What Indian Hindus must understand is that protests to the Russian Embassy in Delhi were organised by a White sanyasi, so the West is definitely injecting itself into the controversy. As someone who distrusts even native globe-trotting sanyasis and their addiction to modify tradition to cater to the needs of white disciples with agendas at variance with the dharma of this land, the writer fully appreciates Russian discomfort with ISKON. We need not hyperventilate on the matter; Russians have produced some of the world’s best renowned Indologists, and for decades they performed the Ramayana in ballet while we were busy distancing ourselves from Sri Rama.

To put the issue in perspective, note how Vatican operates in tandem with the US-led Western colonial countries. Observe the synchronicity between Cardinal Tauran’s trip to India and the Asia-Pacific paradigm unveiled by President Barack Obama in his recent visit to Australia. Add the global moves of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and you get a complete picture of Empire and Church, marching hand-in-hand. Can you hear the trumpets?”

The Reverend Jon Arnold, in “At The Foot of the Bed,” in Chicken Soul for the Soul (Ed., Canfield and Hansen, 2005):

“During my daily rounds at the hospital, I came across a room where I could immediately tell by looking through the glass doorway that the man inside, though his back was to me, was visibly disturbed. He was anxiously sitting up on the far side of the bed with his feet hanging off while he pulled repeatedly at the unkempt sheets.

Knocking on the door frame, I announced myself: “Hello, I’m Chaplain Jon. Is everything all right in here?”

Pointing to the wall at the foot of the bed, the man replied, “No, there is a crucifix.” I sighed as I examined the wall, knowing full well what was there, and I quickly looked at my census list to verify the patient information and faith tradition. I found the room number and the only word I needed to see: Hindu.

As a Protestant chaplain serving at a Catholic hospital in the multicultural and interfaith environment of Los Angeles, it was not infrequent for me to find patients perturbed by the presence of a crucifix on their wall. Trying to be diplomatic and defuse the situation, I explained, “If you are offended by the crucifix, I can make arrangements for it to be removed during your stay here.”

The truth, more accurately, is that some of the more zealous of the Catholic faith had learned of this practice of accommodating people of other faith traditions, and had most of the crucifixes permanently installed on the wall, so the best effort to accommodate patients often was to drape a cloth over the offending relic.

The Hindu patient left me dumbfounded by what he told me next. Turning more toward me and pulling one knee onto the bed, his face wrinkling from being misunderstood, he explained, “I am not offended by the crucifix. I am disturbed that it is at the foot of my bed, which is a place of dishonor in my culture. Every time I lie down, I feel as if I am disrespecting the God of this hospital.”

The teacher had just become the student. I was overwhelmed with how much respect this man had for a faith not his own. I couldn’t help but think that I had just glimpsed a nugget of human unity whose offspring surely is peace.”

Hilaire Belloc in “A Remaining Christmas”:

Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things. Moreover, there is this great quality in the unchanging practice of Holy Seasons, that it makes explicable, tolerable and normal what is otherwise a shocking and intolerable and even in the fullest sense, abnormal thing. I mean, the mortality of immortal man.

Not only death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, are challenged, chained, and put in their place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability. The threats of despair, remorse, necessary expiation, weariness almost beyond bearing, dull repetition of things apparently fruitless, unnecessary and without meaning, estrangement, the misunderstanding of mind by mind, forgetfulness which is a false alarm, grief, and repentance, which are true ones, but of a sad company, young men perished in battle before their parents had lost vigour in age, the perils of sickness in the body and in the mind, anxiety, honour harassed, all the bitterness of living–become part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude. For they are all connected in the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were, the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.

* * *

This house where such good things are done year by year has suffered all the things that every age has suffered. It has known the sudden separation of wife and husband, the sudden fall of young men under arms who will never more come home, the scattering of the living and their precarious return, the increase and the loss of fortune, all those terrors and all those lessenings and haltings and failures of hope which make up the life of man. But its Christmas binds it to its own past and promises its future; making the house an undying thing of which those subject to mortality within it are members, sharing in its continuous survival.

It is not wonderful that of such a house verse should be written. Many verses have been so written commemorating and praising this house. The last verse written of it I may quote here by way of ending:

‘Stand thou for ever among human Houses,
House of the Resurrection, House of Birth;
House of the rooted hearts and long carouses,
Stand, and be famous over all the Earth.’

Commentary by Gerald Russello:

[Gerald J. Russello is a Fellow of the Chesterton institute at Seton Hall University and editor of The University Bookman.]

Charles Taylor has written in his book A Secular Age that among its other effects, modernity has shattered the religious sense of time, which is not horizontal — one thing following another, but non-linear — connecting the sacred with the mundane, where the eternal can touch the temporal. Belloc’s Christmas essay is a throwback to this traditional Christian way of thinking. The essay recounts the traditions of Christmastide as observed in Belloc’s home in Sussex, King’s Land. The essay opens with Belloc declaring the problem and the purpose of the essay:

The world is splitting more and more into two camps, and what was common to the whole of it is being restricted to the Christian, and soon will be to the Catholic half.

What was “common” are the traditions and customs of the Christian world.

One cannot avoid those traditions in a house such as King’s Land, the older part of which “grew up gradually” over the past five centuries. When Belloc speaks of the great dining room table in his house, for example, he connects the centuries with the stuff of history, which are infused into this common object:

The table came out of one of the Oxford colleges when Puritans looted them three hundred years ago . . . . It passed from one family to another until at last it was purchased [in his youth and upon his marriage] by the man who now owns this house. . . . It was made, then, while Shakespeare was still living, and while the faith in England still hung in the balance.

History is not, in other words, something that is past. History is something we live with now. With the Incarnation, Christianity has infused history with a sacred meaning. Tradition binds us to our beginnings and enables us to weather the changes of fortune and the losses in human existence. Some might dismiss this kind of language as needlessly florid or triumphalist. As it happens, although discredited at the time, Belloc’s interpretation of the hold of Catholicism on England after the Reformation has been confirmed by historians such as Eamon Duffy. Belloc’s point here, however, is to remind us that every physical object can be charged with meaning and can remind us of the larger traditions of which we are a part.

After describing his house and the surroundings, Belloc details how he and his family celebrate Christmas and the full season through Epiphany, with an account of the old custom of opening doors and windows shortly before midnight New Year’s Eve to let out the old year and its troubles, and bring in the new one with hope. The language on occasion rises to the lyrical, and is in any event hard to summarize other than directly quoting large chunks of the essay. We read of the game-songs played by the village children, Midnight Mass being said in the house, the tree brought in with proper ceremony; in short, “everything conventional, and therefore satisfactory, is done.” And the power of Belloc’s language is such that, whatever your own Christmas traditions, they too begin to seem like his; that is, we can begin to see the commonality in the different ways of celebrating the birth of Jesus in the very physicality of existence, sacralized by this one Birth.

In the conclusion, Belloc summarizes the importance of these traditions in the life of his house, and their connections with the wider world. For these customs are not just for children, and not just for indulging in nostalgia; they form something larger altogether.

Some Yuletide revelry may be in order for fans of Patrick Byrne’s “Deep Capture” site. The Canadian court has lifted its injunction  against the site, after assurances from Mr. Byrne’s lawyers that he would indeed be presenting a defense of his alleged libels of one Altaf Nazerali, a stock promoter, already possessed of a questionable reputation before the Deep Capture crew tarnished its luster.

So much for earlier assertions that Mitchell and Byrne had NO defense and had conceded as much in their casual comments on the case.

I got the news from an article posted at Seeking Alpha by their inveterate foe, Gary Weiss, who has now also added Ron Paul to his hit list:

[For a response to the Paul piece, check out this video by Tom Woods]

From the Weiss article:

 “The contempt motion, which was filed against Byrne and Mitchell, was to be heard on Dec. 13, but has been put off until a date in the new year that has yet to be determined. So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I understand, the court lifted an injunction that had shuttered Deep Capture, based on assertions by Byrne’s lawyer that he will indeed be putting up a defense! If he isn’t allowed to run to the border, that is. So you will soon see Byrne’s smears up on the Internet again, for the time being.”

“Smear” in this context just means that a few journalists got the same treatment they so generously dole out to other people…