Because of bad leftists' publicity?

The RSS: Roadmaps 21st Century
Sunil Ambekar

Imagine a time 20 years ago. We were all fed with a single narrative. The government-controlled media or media barons churned out cable news will tell us 'the truth'. There was no counter-narrative to argue this. The world accepted this one version. The fringe publishment that aired an alternative perspective of the event is labelled a rabble-rouser and scorned. Now with the availability of all the information at our disposal, we are still unsure of many things. For every piece of news churned, there is an immediate contradictory explanation just to shoot it down at its inception, making us none the wiser.

I have always been given the impression that RSS is terrible news. My brother-in-law, who spent much of his formative years in India, and his wife, an Indian citizen who gave up her citizenship for her newfound love and land, Malaysia, have no qualms that RSS is synonymous with bigotry and fanaticism. Any piece of news from RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; National Volunteer Organisation) is immediately labelled propaganda and untrue. Yet another family member who has found employment in Malaysia has nothing nice to say about RSS. To him, the RSS management cherry-picked delinquents and academically weak students to do their dirty job in the name of religion.

My schoolmate, who probably had his long-lost ancestors coming from India, believes Muslims are selectively persecuted in India. He himself is a Muslim. He is convinced that RSS in India is what Mossad is to Israel, just like the symbiotic relationship between Sein Fenn and the IRA. He is cocksure that RSS is the militant wing of the BJP (like Al-Aqsa martyr Brigades and Fatah). 

But then alternative news tells me otherwise. In the aftermath of any calamity, volunteers of RSS are the first to be at the scene giving moral and humanitarian support. They are so well organised and are said to provide service without much fanfare. Being an NRI, I was naturally conflicted between what I read and what I had heard.

Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar

I thought this book gives a complete account of RSS' genesis, its earlier objectives, and how it evolved in a post-independent India. India was a restless country from the turn of the 19th century to the 20th. The rebel yell was heard from all four corners of Bharat. Every third person that one saw was a freedom fighter. Events like the Partition of Bengal in 1905 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 further ignited the fire for self-rule.

Against this background, with the shouts of 'Vande Matram' and Lokmanya Tilak's 1906 visit to Nagpur, Maharashtra, a young Keshav Baliram Hedgewar's national interest was piqued. Thilak was labelled 'the Father of Political Unrest'. He made a political life of agitating the British for self-rule. Nagpur, at that time, was a fertile ground for nationalistic activities steeped deep into the Hindu way of life. Keshav went on to read medicine in Calcutta in 1910. Dr Keshav Hedgewar returned to Nagpur in 1915 with a medical degree and a chest full of Indian nationalism after interacting with Bengali revolutionaries. 

RSS flag

His idea of disciplining the young mind was through physical activity, traditional martial arts and wrestling. Slowly his group started participating in satyagraha movements and campaigning against social ills. Somewhere around the 1920s, the British managed to introduce the idea of the 'Muslim-Hindu unity' concept. Gandhi, with his Congress Party, parted ways with Hedgewar over Gandhi's support of the Khalifat movement. Some within the Congress Party also opposed Hedgewar's so-called militant-natured activities. RSS was formed in 1925. Its objective at inception was to influence the mind and soul of the Nation to gain independence. Not wanting to fall into the British divide-and-rule trap, the RSS decided to dig deep into the Nation's civilisation to inculcate value readily present into the subcontinent before the invaders wrecked our knowledge and infused theirs. 

After independence, the RSS continues their service to the needy. It promotes the Hindu way of life, fights for social and caste justice, and tries to improve modern familial relationships. Contrary to what they are accused of, RSS is not a misogynistic organisation. They have many prominent female leaders. Even though detractors hurl abuses of religious bigotry, the RSS have many Christian, Muslim and Farsi members and leaders in their fold. 

They must be doing something right for being around for almost a century. The RSS must be relevant for drawing so many non-Hindu members into their fold. Something to ponder.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Swing at the New Leftist

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Thinkers of the New Left
Roger Scruton (2015, reprint)

I was always under the impression that the input from the academics and intellectuals is the one that is propelling the world forward in the right direction; averts hegemony by a certain group and tries to create a sort of utopia where fairness and justice is handed to all. With a single stroke of his pen, the author puts all these thoughts to the bin. He paints them all as troublemakers, who promised utopia but what they offer instead is dystopia, mayhem and destruction.

For a start, he defines the leftist as the group of people traditionally seated to the left to King Louis XVI, the despotic monarch whose reign ended with the 1789 French Revolution. The members of the Estate and Generals usually were placed to the left while the nobelties occupied the right. Of course, it is all perspective which is right or left depending on whether you are an audience in apalace or looking from the monarch's end.

It is a tough book to read. With the many name dropping and verbosity of the writer, he steamrolls most modern thinkers, if not all, as frauds. They speak in unintelligible speeches using meaningless jargon like in Orwell's 1984 Newspeak. They justify their assertions with absurd mathematic formulas.

The author systematically destroys intelligensias from France (Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, Foucault, Sartre, Camus) Germany (Hegel, Heidegger, Habermas, Althusser), USA (Galbraith, Dworkin), Italy (Gramsci), British (Thompson, the Fabians) and the representatives from the former communist block (Lukás, Žižek). Even though communism has proven to have failed, these people are actually promoting communist ideology in a new approach where capitalism (the burgeious ideology) is portrayed as the bad guy out to destroy man's freedom and liberty. They failed to realise that these are very same idea as the right wingers (read: democratic process) have been trying to do over the centuries - to find law and order in society, to propel the human race to a higher level and the promise of a better future.

He praises the philosophers of the yesteryears, the Greeks thinkers and later  ones like Spinoza and Kant. The conservative side of politics has had something going. Unfortunately many misfortunes happened along the way and Man wanting to look at other ways of doing things have embarked on the leftist agenda. Even though, their economic models have repeatedly shown dismal results, they are hellbent to come out with yet other strategies to put forward their scheme!

A nice perspective of view from the other side.

Excerpt From: Roger Scruton. “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands.” iBooks.

“Whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the IRA, the Venezuelan Chavistas, the French sans-papiers, or the Occupy movement – whatever the radical cause, it is the attack on the ‘System’ that matters. The alternative is ‘unnameable in the language of the system’. Didn’t Paul Cohen prove the point?

As in 1789, as in 1917, as in the Long March of Mao, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the work of destruction feeds on itself. The Event is ‘the void at the heart of the actual’. Fidelity to the Event means commitment to nothing. The windbaggery of Žižek and the nonsemes of Badiou serve one purpose, which is to turn attention away from the actual world, from real people and from ordinary moral and political reasoning. They exist in order to promote a single and absolute cause, the cause that admits of no criticism and no compromise, and which offers redemption to all who espouse it. And what is that cause? The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing. ”

“Leftist Newspeak is a powerful tool, not only because it wipes away the face of our social world, but also because it describes a supposed reality that underlies the genial appearance and also explains that appearance away as a deception. ”

“That feature of ideology has long been apparent. But exactly the same goal of hiding reality behind inviolable screens of words can be found in the mathemes of Lacan and Badiou, in the litanies of Deleuze and Guattari, and in the rhetorical questions of Žižek as he patrols the world in search of those who still possess the risible belief in the Big Other and who have not yet discovered that they don’t ex-sist.”

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson

Where thinking is allowed...

2016: Obama's America (Documentary; 2012)
Director: Dinesh D'Souza, John Sullivan

What is the hallmark of a mature society? Is it the ability to agree in unison to everything that is charted out by the forefathers? Is it the ability to assess, reassess, argue and substantiate all assertions with facts and figures? And that too without resorting to our primal elements of anger and violence. The member of society must be free enough to express his opinions without fear of persecution by decerebrate members of the community who are in the realm of power not by intelligence or erudite stature but by accident of birth. The society must be allowed to think. Creativity cannot be curbed or forced upon. Many of Man's most significant achievements come about by our ability to think outside the box, outside the conforms of the norm. Remember Star Trek. Just 50 over years after it fascinated our imagination, all the devices that were seen in The Enterprise are a reality, including the possibility of teleportation (at least in the laboratories!)

This documentary, which is D'Souza's maiden production, got him into a lot of trouble. This partisan production, supportive of conservative America, was made just before Obama's re-elections. It eventually landed him in a lot of trouble. He subsequently had to undergo a prison sentence.

Just like his subsequent films, this flick grossed well at the box office but failed to impress any of the movie critics. They collectively denigrated the show and gave their thumbs down with scathing remarks.

D'Souza tries to uncover the mystery behind this relatively unknown candidate who just moved into the White House without occupying any major posts. He attempts to analyse his policies, break down the rationale underlying the genesis of his foreign and home policies and in a way try to psychoanalyse his every action.

In the first part of the documentary, D'Souza tells a bit about his background. Hailing from Mumbai, he was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League University of Dartmouth College. After graduation, he was absorbed into Reagan Presidential team, and the rest is history.

Looking at Obama's strategies after his first term, D'Souza noticed that many of his proposals mirror that of his native country of India and many of the Third World countries of the world. From there, he goes on to propose many outlandish theories that could justify his actions that appear to lean towards the far left, almost communist-like, anti-colonist and sympathetic towards the oppressed groups.

Obama has the uncanny ability to skirt around topics that are forwarded to him, This is a shift from other minorities leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who clash head-on with the issue at hand. Obama can tell his audience what they want to hear; he is a darling to the big multinationals and a saviour to the downtrodden. His anti-colonist stance is seen in his unabashed attempt to strip the wealthy and bankrupt corporate America. In his eyes, America is just another evil empire like the British Empire which was out to rob the needy blind.

The story explores deep into the life of Barrack Hussein Obama Sr. He was a freedom fighter who abhorred the British for the brutality on the Mau Maus in Kenya. His stepfather in Indonesia, Lolo, also had issues with the authorities during the trying times of mid-60s when Sukarno was fighting communism. Obama, the President, grew up worshipping his absentee father. He built up some much hope in the ghost of his abusive father who turned out to be nothing like what he imagined to be. He grew up to be an insecure kid. Dinesh makes his assumptions from the manner Obama penned his autobiography, 'Dreams from My Father'.

Credit: Current.org

Obama's formative years saw him interact with overtly firebrand leftist individuals like Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Unger from Brazil, fiery preacher Jeremiah Wright and even bomber Bill Ayers. His anti-imperialism outlook is also seen in the proliferation of movements like Occupy Wall Street Protest and the sprouting of Jihadist movement. He also accuses Obama of putting the national security of the USA in limbo by actively disarming itself of nuclear while the rest of the world, including Iran and China, building more nuclear facilities.

In passing, D'Souza mocks at Obama's election catchphrase of 'Change'. America indeed had changed, not for the better but for worse.