On October 7, a terrorist attack by Hamas killed 1,400 people in southern Israel. Days later, a Cornell professor led a hate rally on campus. “It was exhilarating … energising,” he exclaimed, as the mob clapped and cheered. A Stanford lecturer separated out the Jewish students in his class. He made them stand in a corner and called them colonisers. “Yes, only six million,” he said, when he was told how many Jews had died in the Holocaust. Last month, the parliament in Canada came together to give a standing ovation to a Ukrainian ‘freedom fighter.’ His name: Yaroslav Hunka, 14th SS Galicia division, a Nazi military unit.
“It was like a Nuremberg rally,” a prominent Australian sports writer wailed the other day. But he was not talking about these shocking incidents at Cornell, Stanford, or in Canada. He was talking about fans at the cricket stadium in Amdavad in Gujarat. Apparently, they had all shown up in blue to support the Indian cricket team. And absolutely refused to cheer for Pakistan. That makes them Nazis? Seriously?
How did the liberal rhetoric about India get so crazy? For decades, they trolled every word and every action of anyone connected to the BJP as “Nazi” and “Fascist.” Then they did this to Narendra Modi, now prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, with 230 million votes behind him. So now they do it to anyone who they believe might be sympathetic to the BJP. Such as a crowd of cricket fans in Gujarat.
No, you cannot use the N-word so lightly: Nazi. It is a horrible insult to the six million Jews who died in the holocaust. It is an insult to hundreds of millions of Indians who choose their leaders peacefully, in free and fair elections. And it helps political groups who were actually associated with Hitler’s crimes to get off easy. Who uses the Nazi jibe against the Hindu right anyway? The Communists for example. The same Communists who launched the Second World War as Hitler’s comrades in arms and gobbled up Poland. The same Communists who followed closely behind, with tails wagging, as Nazi German troops marched into Paris in June 1940. Just because we have so many Communist historians does not mean that nobody knows how Communists and Nazis used to be allies.
Why then does the Nazi jibe against the Hindu right keep happening? One reason is that the West is trying to cover up its tracks. They want people to forget the role of anti-Semitism in European Christian society, as well as in Communism. And present Nazism as if it came out of nowhere. Let me quote Hannah Arendt, an intellectual hero of the liberal left. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that Nazism “owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman.” Ironically, liberals in India often use Arendt’s work to draw parallels between Nazism and the Hindu right. Yes, if you do not want to see the roots of Nazism in the West, who do you blame instead? Someone in India, of course! They have brown skin and believe in a ‘pagan’ religion that looks strange to others.
But you cannot shrug off history so easily. Where did the Nazis get the idea of making the Jews wear the infamous yellow star? It was from the Popes who made the Jews wear yellow caps for three hundred years, while they were imprisoned inside the Roman ghetto.
And no, you cannot use the F-word so lightly either: Fascist. What is Fascism? It was a merger between the Catholic Church and governments in Western Europe. That is how Mussolini gave control of Vatican City to the Pope. During the 1930s and 1940s, Catholic and authoritarian regimes came up in Western Europe one by one: Mussolini in Italy, Petain in France, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. The Catholic party voted for Hitler to become dictator. After this, the Church quickly signed an agreement with the Nazis. Konrad Adenauer of the Catholic Party had even taken a pension from the Nazi government, after he wrote a letter explaining all the good things he had done for the Nazis as a public official. After the war, Adenauer went on to form the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and remained Chancellor of Germany for 14 years! One of his successors was Kurt Keisinger, also of the CDU, who became Chancellor of Germany in 1966. During the war, Keisinger had been deputy for broadcasting at Hitler’s foreign office, working as liaison with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
But the Indian liberal does not want you to know these direct connections between the white Christian West and the Nazis. They want you to make long drawn out comparisons between modern democratic India and Nazi Germany. So what if Pierre Trudeau led an underground fascist organization in Canada to support Mussolini? The Trudeau dynasty is liberal royalty. Their reputation must be protected. So must Kurt Waldheim, the Nazi intelligence officer who became Secretary General of the United Nations, and also President of Austria. The Church tracked him down in his retirement and made him a knight of honor. That was only 1994, not that long ago. Remember the Pope who signed that agreement with Hitler? The Vatican tried to declare him a saint. That was 2013.
But the liberals would rather have you worry about random things in India. Have you seen the saffron themed ‘angry’ Hanuman car sticker? Scary, right? Because liberals use the word “fascist” for anyone they do not like. If they make the meaning broad enough, people will forget the real Christian roots of Fascism. It is a neat little trick. Very clever.
There is a second reason that Nazi and Fascist jibes are used so freely against Hindus. It is because most people do not know what the Hindus have been through. Hindus have been victims of two major genocides in the last 100 years. The first was in 1946-47. It began with the call for “Direct Action Day” by the Muslim League in Calcutta, when thousands of Hindus were killed. The second was in 1971 in East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. But these events were neither studied nor documented properly. So much so that estimates of the dead vary from 300,000 to 3 million! To this, the so-called scholars have added a second layer of genocide denial. They insist on saying that the victims were “Bengalis,” not “Hindus” nor “Bengali Hindus.” That way they have completely erased the intent of the Pakistani government, and who was targeted. A bill in the US Congress to recognize the 1971 genocide is still pending. Because that bill mentions that Hindus were victims. And you cannot have that.
“Moreover, with support of Pak military, non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people’s quarters and murdering Bengalis and Hindus. Streets of Dacca are aflood with Hindus and others seeking to get out of Dacca.” This is the content of the aptly nicknamed Blood Telegram, sent by Archie Blood, then US Consul General in Dhaka on March 28, 1971. They know that Hindus were victims. You are just not allowed to say that.
To this list, you can add at least two ‘smaller’ pogroms that Hindus have faced. One is the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kashmir in the early 1990s. The other was the 1921 Moplah massacre in present day Kerala. That was during the Khilafat movement, supported by the Indian National Congress, to restore the Islamic Caliphate in Turkey. The same Caliphate which had just carried out a genocide of 1 million Armenians during World War I. There is an important side note here. While Islamic in nature, the Caliphate in Turkey was also a constitutional monarchy. The actual government was run by an organization known as the “Young Turks,” who are considered secular and liberal. Yes, the first major genocide of the 20th century was carried out by liberals.
Liberal thinkers have also played their mind games with the 1921 Moplah massacre. They have rebranded it as an uprising against landlords. Not a massacre of Hindus. As with the 1971 genocide, you just cannot admit that Hindus can be victims.
Nazism and Fascism were among the three great evils of the 20th century, the other being Communism. Together, these murderous ideologies have taken more than 100 million lives. In the case of Communism, liberals have rebranded it as some kind of human rights movement. For Nazism and Fascism, liberals have worked hard to make people forget their Western and Christian roots. So now they use these as jibes against all forms of Hindu political expression. Another reason this happens is because the liberals know that the Hindu right will not be able to hit back in sufficient numbers. Much of the Hindu right sees the English language as a colonial hangover. This may be true, but English dominates today as the worldwide link language. The Hindu right does not invest in making its case in English, let alone French or Spanish. So the liberals know they will have a free run in media around the world. They are doing the intellectually lazy thing and picking on Hindus. Because it is just so easy.
In many ways, they are just continuing what they did with the infamous Nazi symbol. Hitler called it the hakenkreuz, which means a hooked cross. But when translating from the original German, the scholars felt that the English speaking world would not be able to understand a term like “hooked cross”. So they translated it as ‘swastika’. Did they think that the English-speaking world is fluent in Sanskrit? Or did they want to subtly pass the blame for Nazi ideology from the Christian world to the Hindu world? Or from West to East? Since then, people have changed the way they use so many words. They stopped using words that may be seen as racist, sexist, or homophobic. How come nobody ever thought of changing it back to ‘hooked cross’ from ‘swastika’? Because they have been saying it on purpose. Because Hindus are still a target.
Abhishek Banerjee is an author and columnist. Vijita Singh Aggarwal is a professor of international business at Indraprastha University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
Comments
0 comment