TheTruthAboutLiars describes the mutilated, Marxist version of Indian history being used to propagandize against Hinduism and India:

“Figure 2 on the right is an extract of a page on South Asian History from FOIL’s website. For all the South Asian history and cultural expertise of FOIL’s members, it is indeed surprising that they only cover ‘Indian’ history and leave major gaps in their ‘sketches’. Prehistoric Era is defined as 5000-1500 BC[1]. It is interesting (and perhaps FOIL is unaware) that when one clicks on the link, it actually takes one to a different website on the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, containing links that actually have certain articles and papers debunking the racist Aryan Invasion Theory, the same theory that FOIL and its members subscribe to.

In the section called Ancient India (1500-711)[2], we only find two write-ups. The first one is about the Greeks and their expedition to India in search of the Ocean. The second one is about ‘The First Victory of Caste in South Asia’. Interestingly, FOIL could not find anything else to write about India in the roughly 800 year time span! How about the Gupta Empire? How about the Maurya Empire? How about Indian trade with Persia, Greece, and other parts of the world? How about the famous Indian institution of Takshashila? How about the achievements of India in sciences, math, ship building, architecture, etc.? How about the travels of Chinese pilgrims Fa Xian and Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) to India and their documentation of the richness and inclusiveness of Indian civilization?

Or, is all this not as important as highlighting the Greek invasion of India? FOIL’s obsession with caste resurfaces again in the second article. Even though, there is growing evidence that Caste identity fault lines became invigorated and politicized through the British Censuses of India[3], the only two things that FOIL can find to talk about are a foreign invasion of India and the so called victory of caste.

The Medieval Period (712 – 1564)[4] is completely blank. It begs the question why? Could it be co-incidental that 712 AD marks the first Muslim Invasion of ‘South Asia’? Mohammad Bin Qasim invaded India in 712 AD and conquered Sindh which became the province of Omayyad Khilafat. [5]Following his conquest, for the next 800 years, there are a series of Muslim invasions, establishment of the Delhi Sultanate between 1206 and 1526 and culminating with the establishment of the Mughal Dynasty in 1526. How about the achievements of kingdoms like the Vijaynagara Empire or the Maratha Empires? Or, even the Mughal Dynasty? Why isn’t FOIL including such important historical points in the history of India?

Continuing on, in the Early Modern Period (1565-1946)[6], one can see a similar pattern – only three articles. The first one portrays Shivaji and his ‘complexities’. The second talks about the Revolt of 1857 and the third is a brief history of the Communist Movement in Kerala, citing the works of the General Secretary of the Community Party of India (Marxist) Prakash Karat and showing how the Left ‘liberated’ the oppressed castes from the clutches of upper caste Hindus. …..

In an interview with Pradeep Krishnan of Haindava Keralam, Joseph highlights the hypocricy [sic]of the Communist party in Kerala:

In Kerala, Marxism provided opportunity to the scions of feudal families to extend exploitation and domination of the underclass feeding the latter with visions of Utopia. Instead of seeking emancipation through education, large numbers of youth of the underclass became followers of Marxist upper crust feudal leaders and the (sic) perished in the flames of Calcutta thesis uprisings. It took fifty years for the Marxist parties in Kerala to put an avarna [i.e. an ‘outcaste’ or ‘untouchable’] in the chair of the Chief Minister (VS Achuthanandan). It is not known how many years will it take for West Bengal to do so. Feudalism in Kerala would have crumbled without Marxism and feudal scions would have been compelled to work hard for a living but for Marxist politics. Leaders like Jyoti Basu to EMS to Nayanar to AK Gopalan to Prakash Karat (the Marxist supreme leaders) rose from the upper crust of feudal society. Much of their stories show that they used ideology to ride and cling to power, rather than for emancipation of the oppressed from poverty and backwardness.”

From Sandeepweb.com:

“In 2003, a certain eminence named Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai from the Kashmiri American Council spoke at a discussion forum on the Kashmir situation at San Francisco. Angana Chatterji was one of the prominent people adorning the forum. Guess what he spoke about at that forum as well as on hundreds of other occasions? That’s right: he spoke on the same circus theme, did new tricks, etc. On July 19, 2011, the FBI arrested Fai on charges of being an ISI agent. More specifically:

His stay in the US was to carry out a “decades-long scheme with one purpose — to hide Pakistan’s involvement behind his efforts to influence the U.S. government’s position on Kashmir”

His handlers in the ISI “funneled millions through the Kashmir Center to contribute to U.S. elected officials, fund high-profile conferences and pay for other efforts that promoted the Kashmiri cause to decision-makers in Washington.”
The final goal was to “to persuade the United States government that it was in its interest to push India to allow a vote in Kashmir to decide its future.”
Oh and no prizes for guessing what the ISI’s “line” on Kashmir is. Pakistan’s lust for Kashmir dates back to the time of India’s independence. That Pakistan is using a multi-pronged strategy to ensure that it wrests Kashmir from India is clear. Back in India, it regularly sends terrorists trained to “persuade” India by massacring swathes of innocent Indians. This project was so successful that about 4 million Kashmiri Pandits were ethnically cleansed and large numbers fled out of the state. News of these persuaders—armed, trained, and supported by Pakistan—going on a shooting spree is still commonplace in India even as we speak.

And so there we have it: the ISI agent Ghulam Nabi Fai who parrots His Master’s Line and Angana Chatterji also known as “Mary,” his associate/friend/co-activist, who takes the exact same line. But let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth: the FBI charge sheet mentions a certain Mary who “would be testifying in front of a United Nations working group. Mary is a human rights activist; Major General Mumtaz Ahmad Bajwa had requested that Fai introduce him to Mary in July 2009.” Major General Bajwa was the head of ISI’s Security Directorate, which was responsible for nurturing and helping Kashmiri terrorist groups……………

That she got away with such dangerous subversive activities points a finger at the climate in the United States. The extent of Ghulam Nabi Fai’s lobbying success is evident when Congressman Joseph “Joe” Pitts from Pennsylvania “introduced a resolution in 2004 calling for peace between Pakistan and India in the disputed territory of Kashmir – just days after he had received a $2,000 campaign contribution from Zaheer Ahmad, one of two men charged with distributing Pakistani money to U.S. politicians.” Pitts has donated that money to charity since Fai was discovered to be an ISI agent but the question remains: didn’t he do due diligence before accepting said $2000? If the answer is yes, and he still took the money, serious doubts arise regarding Pitts: is he implementing some sinister agenda?  If the answer is no, it says a lot about Pitts’ capabilities as a man who represents the people of Pennsylvania’s 16th congressional district. The same applies in equal measure to Indiana Congressman Dan Burton, who took $10,000 from Fai. Dan Burton already carries the tag of being too pro-Pakistan on the exact same Kashmir issue…….”

Comment:

The piece goes on to note that Chatterjee, who frequently wrote for Dissident Voice, was fired from her academic position and is under gag orders not to talk about her termination.

Whatever you think of the charges against her, or the case of her termination, or of the Kashmir issue, this story suggests that ideological fixity is a naive and dangerous trait. Every situation is unique and complex, and anyone who takes an unswerving position regardless of the history or the facts on the ground, runs the risk of playing into the hands of street-smart operators who game the naive ideologues into actions that cross legal boundaries, or more importantly, endanger the lives of others.

From AFP:

Two shooting deaths at Occupy Wall Street-style camps in Vermont and California and a third fatality at a camp in New Orleans, where the body went unnoticed for two days, rocked the nationwide protest movement Friday.

In Burlington, Vermont, a man was found dead Thursday in his tent from a gunshot which the Burlington Free Press newspaper reported may have been self-inflicted.

News video showed police lifting the man’s body out of a tent in the park taken over by the anti-capitalist demonstrators.

Tensions rose at the camp when armed police ordered protestors out while the investigation unfolded. News footage from the Free Press showed the city’s mayor intervening to ask that police release a protestor they had detained, finally placating the angry crowd.”

“Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

I saw this notice for a world-wide strike/demonstration posted at P2P Foundation:

Anonymous Strike Notice
Global WikiStrike 11.11.11
Decommodify the Commons, Build a P2P Economy, Reclaim Life, Peace and Justice on Earth
On November 11th 2011 at 11:11 AM GMT
We declare that we have no division among us, the people united. We are united as humanity and nature, one whole planet. We are ONE and we are here for ALL, including the 1%! 
We declare that we need to take over the world agenda, to shape our future together, in a bottom-up, horizontal and egalitarian way! Let’s make real democracy a reality and put an end to the ‘ancient regime’ [sic] of the elite.
We call Occupy Together/Democracy Real Ya!/Take The Square/15O/15M Movements, Anonymous, LulzSec, WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, Yes Man, Avaaz, The Zeitgeist Movement, Zapatistas, Water Warriors, Slum Dwellers, Street Traders, NetWorkers, Free Culture and information activists, environmentalists, unionists, feminists, anti-war activists, political parties, and all other like-minded groups and individuals from every country, to support this cause by engaging in law making processes within their nearest occupy assemblies around the world and linking your actions in the WikiStrike framework!”

The current political alteration process can, eventually, replace current production, ownership and distribution relationships across the globe with fundamentally egalitarian ways of distributed, peer to peer economies through which we could protect the planet, realise justice and maintain peace.

The strike notice attacks “the grip of greed” and demands a global basic income, as well as a four-hour workday. It calls for recovery of the trillions of dollas “stolen from the people” by the 1%. and suggests that this will be a transition to a more equitable world. Then it calls for action:

“Today, we launch a world wide and continuous WikiStrike involving traditional industrial action as well as new generation media actions, leaks, hackatons, occupations, meditations, art strikes and many other creative and peaceful forms of self-expression to make this happen.”

It ends with calls for unity, using a phrase from the Four Musketeers (“One for all, all for one”) that probably has resonance from its use in “V for Vendetta”.

Breaking news from Wayne Madsen at Global Research:

“Former Representative and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney was offered “victim witness” special protection by the FBI after the indictment of four men in northern Georgia for plotting to kill McKinney, Attorney General Eric Holder, and, according to FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Brian Lamkin of the bureau’s Atlanta office, President Barack Obama.

Frederick W. Thomas, 73, and Dan Roberts, 67, were charged in the U.S. District Court in Gainesville, Georgia with conspiracy to buy explosives and possession of a silencer, while Samuel Crimp, 68, and Ray Adams were charged with conspiracy to manufacture and disperse the deadly toxin ricin. Federal law enforcement officials seized 52 weapons, including assault rifles, and 30,000 rounds of ammunition, including special sniper rounds, from Thomas’s Toccoa, Georgia home.”

McKinney says that she had been making overtures to white nationalists in the interests of cooperating against the common enemey – the corrupt elites. That may have provoked the threat.

From Tikkun.org:

“The big problem facing us is how to take the millions of Americans who are ready to move in this new direction to work together coherently. Yet we can rejoice the first step has been taken: Americans coming out of the closet of despair and calling for a world of justice, peace and caring for each other and for the planet.

I’m particularly proud that young Jews participating in these demonstrations have created Sukkot, the temporary huts that Jews are supposed to live in for 7 days (the holiday started Wednesday night October 12) to symbolize detachment from the material security provided by our homes, to re-identify ourselves as a people that has mostly been homeless for most of our history, and to remind ourselves that all the accomplishments of material security are meaningless unless shared with everyone else. Tikkunista Jews (tikkun means healing and transforming the world) are challenging the establishment Jews, some of whom run the very institutions that all of us supporting Occupy Wall Street hope to see replaced by a more just order. Though right-wingers have followed David Brooks’ attempt to smear the demonstrators as anti-Semitic, the truth is that the Jewish world can be proud that a high percentage of these demonstrators are Jewish — and challenging the establishment Jews who have a disproportionate presence in the community of bankers and investment brokers.”

“In the market every profession is a helping profession,” says one libertarian.

Not true. There is a huge market for snuff movies. 

No one would suggest that this kind of “helping” is “better” than the work of many bare-foot doctors who bring help to villages for a pittance, since that is all their patients can pay.  Those are extremes, of course.  There are certainly non-profits that are simply sinecures.

But the idea that an excess of materialism had no part to play in the financial crisis, as some argue, is simply laughable.

The problem is the opposite.

Supposedly charitable/non-profit outfits and professions that used to adhere to standards of professional conduct have succumbed to the mentality of the state-capitalists, producing nothing, wanting perks, privileges, and subsidies, and adhering to no market discipline of any kind or to any ethical standards of any kind either. 

In a society with self-restraint, the laws work and the markets produce prosperity.

Without virtue (and virtu), the laws become instruments of plunder, and you get criminality. The law itself becomes criminal.

But as long as people think ideologically, and determine blame by ideology, things will continue along the same path.

My money is on OccupyWallStreet….at least, so far.

A recent book on the Bengal famine of 1943, in which recent studies say 5-6 million people starved, finds documentary evidence that it was the result, not of “ineptness,” but of the calculated policy of Winston Churchill.

Churchill is the hero of empire-lovers in America, who promote it as “good for the natives.” Natives, left to themselves, would have nothing.

That is the imperial position, even though it doesn’t explain why, before the arrival of the British empire, India was one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Remember also that large numbers of Indian soldiers had been deployed to fight on behalf of the British empire (as they always had) at the very time Indians were being starved in a humanitarian catastrophe that has been white-washed by British academic historians.

Churchill, it should be noted, often expressed his hatred for Indians and Hindus and his preference for Islam.

(Lila: Not that I object to WC expressing his preferences, but it’s a bit odd to claim then that the imperialists were in India for the good of India).

Mind you, the findings of Ms. Mukherjee, a nuclear physicist and Guggenheim fellow, contradict the well-known thesis of economist Amartya Sen that the Bengali famine was avoidable.

Note also that Sen, married to historian Emma Rothschild, is supported in this thesis by Jeffrey Sachs, ideological architect of the looting of Russia through “privatization” in the 1990s, who is feted in this Time article.

Note further that Sachs is also one of the folks, along with Joseph Stiglitz, advising OccupyWallStreet…

[Correction: For some reason, the names Summers and Greenspan got pasted next to Stiglitz’s name. I’ve deleted them].

Note the number of agendas to which the Bengal famine can be put: It can be white-washed to show that the British were “good” for India; it can be blamed on Churchill, thus absolving imperial policy (Mukherjee, although that doesn’t seem to be her intention); it can be blamed on lack of democracy the empire, thus attacking the government in Bengal, while saving Churchill (Sen); it can be used to show British hatred for Hinduism, thus undermining the Islamicist-Marxist nexus….

Oh dear. I sense a mine-field…

Telegraph:

“According to a new book on the famine, Sir Winston ignored pleas for emergency food aid for millions in Bengal left to starve as their rice paddies were turned over to jute for sandbag production and supplies of rice from Burma stopped after Japanese occupation.

Between one and three million died of hunger in 1943.

The wartime leader said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies as the streets of Calcutta filled with emaciated villagers from the surrounding countryside, but author Madhusree Mukerjee has unearthed new documents which challenge his claim.

In her book, Churchill’s Secret War, she cites ministry records and personal papers which reveal ships carrying cereals from Australia were bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean where supplies were already abundant.

“It wasn’t a question of Churchill being inept: sending relief to Bengal was raised repeatedly and he and his close associates thwarted every effort,” the author said.

“The United States and Australia offered to send help but couldn’t because the war cabinet was not willing to release ships. And when the US offered to send grain on its own ships, that offer was not followed up by the British,” she added.

The man-made famine and the contrast between the plight of starving Indians and well-fed British officers dining in the city’s many colonial clubs has been described as one of the darkest chapters in British rule on the Indian subcontinent.

Miss Mukerjee blames Churchill’s ‘racism’ for his refusal to intervene.
He derided Gandhi as a “half-naked holy man” and once said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
He was known to favour Islam over Hinduism.
“Winston’s racist hatred was due to his loving the empire in the way a jealous husband loves his trophy wife: he would rather destroy it than let it go,” said Miss Mukerjee.”

Lila: I’ll come back to this topic again….which interests me not only in itself, but in the way it’s being deployed in current debates.