Brain Dead American Left Can't Get Enough of Arundhati Roy

Not only has Z Magazine just finished serializing Arundhati Roy's new terrorist travelogue ("Walking With the Maoist Murderers"), but San Francisco based Anarchist book vendors Haymarket Books are "proudly" promoting (and hosting) Roy's current speaking tour of the US, and Rachel Maddow wannabe Laura Flanders has posted a fawning interview with Roy on her website (that link actually goes to truthout.org, which also carries the interview, and where you can leave comments, if you are so moved).

Flanders starts out her interview by posing the question of whether or not "incipient fascism and nationalism are running amok" in India. This is typical of the blind hatred for India and Hinduism that is now de rigueur among American leftists.

Roy also appeared last week on Democracy Now, where her segment was introduced like this: "We spend the rest of the hour with acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy on the dark underbelly of India . . . ."

India is a nation with a population of about 1.2 billion, of whom about 800 million are eligible voters, and of those about 60% turned out to vote in the national elections last May. This election took place, without any more irregularities than one might encounter in the US or in any Western European nation. Nevertheless, Roy and her slack-jawed American fans insist on dutifully intoning the mantra that India is "supposedly" a democracy, or "calls itself" a democracy.

Meanwhile, Roy continues to pimp for the murderous thugs known as Naxalites, whom her ignorant American devotees, like Laura Flanders, stupidly refer to as "resistance fighters."

What Kind of Religion is Buddhism?, Continued

When we look at Buddhist or Taoist cultures, for instance, we don’t see enduring bureaucratic apparati generated in order to hunt out ‘heretics,’ torture them into ‘confessions’ of their errors, and murder them by way of ‘rendering to the secular arm’. Why not? This isn’t to say heretic-hunting appears nowhere else - a species of it exists in some forms of Islam, for example. But why did the institutional Inquisition arise in the West, in Christianity? Why was it extolled as a fine contributor to ‘social stability’, even by influential ‘secular’ intellectuals? I realise that these may be uncomfortable questions, but it seems to me valuable to inquire. We need to understand and avoid such institutions, which we also see in modern totalitarianism. We must beware of the temptation to generate or adhere to an ideocracy - especially in times of economic and social disruption. As Sinclair Lewis put it in the title of his 1930s novel, It Can Happen Here. The West has a great legacy that emphasises not centralised power, but decentralisation, subsidiarity, federalism. This is the legacy of cherishing individual liberty, a very precious contribution to the world, and one I would like to emphasise.
[Arthur Versluis, in a November, 2007 interview with Amol Ragan for "Battle of Ideas"]

I have just started reading Arthur Versluis' 2006 book The New Inquisitions: Heretic Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, which I was drawn to because Versluis sets out to show "how secular political thinkers in the nineteenth century inaugurated a tradition of defending the Inquisition." (!) Versluis is a leading American scholar of Esotericism and is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at MSU.

In The New Inquisitions, Versluis asks difficult and uncomfortable (to some) questions about (1) the nature and origins of state sponsored ideological repression during the Middle Ages in Western Europe, and (2) the relationship, if any, of that pattern of ideological repression in that time and place to modern totalitarianism.

From what I can tell, Versluis is himself a Christian, so it is hardly his intention to attack Christianity. He is a careful scholar who is guided first and foremost by his desire to understand his subject better, wherever that desire may lead. And so Versluis does not shy away from things that some Christian scholars might prefer to avoid or, worse, attempt to misrepresent.

In fact, Versluis seems to be motivated precisely because he is a Christian Esotericist who sees his own spiritual "lineage" as being rooted in various forms of medieval mystical Christianity. Of course it needs to be emphasized that Versluis is a scholar writing as a scholar. He is not primarily writing to defend his own religious point of view, but is genuinely interested in a better understanding of an important scholarly question: the intellectual origins of modern totalitarianism.

Versluis honestly seems to think that "heretic hunting" only appears in certain forms of Christianity and not in others. He appears to think that "heretic hunting" and the Inquisition were fundamentally new phenomena in Western Christendom during the so-called "High" Middle Ages, and previously had not been associated with Christendom.

But even Versluis' view still boils down to a clear distinction between, on the one hand, Christianity and Islam as religions that do give rise to "enduring bureaucratic apparati" of repression, and, on the other hand, religions like Buddhism and Taoism that do not. For this to be true it need not be the case that every group of Christians everywhere throughout all of history have been, to a person, rampaging persecutors. It need only be that case that there is a pattern of persecution associated with Christianity (and Islam), and that this is pattern is far less evident or even absent in other religions.

I'll close with another quote from a another religion scholar, Bernard Faure:

The claim that Buddhism is a tolerant religion is based on the fact that Buddhist history does not show the kind of fanatic excesses familiar in the histories of Christianity and Islam. Opponents of the Buddha may have been labeled as "heretical masters," but (in part for lack of an ultimate authority) the accusations of heresy rarely led to physical purges . . . . But [any such] cases are the exception that proves the Budhist rule, and they underscore the contrast with the practices of Inquisition in Christianity.
[Buddhist Warfare, p. 218]

For more on this quote from Faure see this previous post. Also see the first post on What Kind of Religion is Buddhism? and also this post on Buddhism as an example of Religions of the Library.

Geert Wilders Film Premiere Cancelled Over Gay Rights Dispute

The American Right has run into yet another snag in it's courtship of Geert Wilders.

The May 1st premiere (in Los Angeles) of the film "Islam Rising: Geert Wilders' Warning to the West" has been scrubbed. Wilders himself precipitated this by his decision to, in effect, boycott the premiere and sever any connection with the film's backer, The Christian Action Network (CAN).

Wilders decision came after homophobic actions and statements by CAN and its founder, Martin Mawyer, were brought to his attention. Wilders and his Party for Freedom are pro-gay-rights, including gay marriage.

At first Wilders was only told that the CAN was opposed to gay marriage. His response to that was 'I totally disagree with them about this [gay marriage] . . . . But they can make a film about me.'

But when more information about CAN and Mawyer's hatred of gays was made available in the Netherlands, Wilders quickly called the whole thing off.

CAN was founded by Martin Mawyer in 1990, the year after Jerry Fallwell's original "Moral Majority" closed up shop. Mawyer had been the longtime editor of that groups mouthpiece, the Moral Majority Report. In 1997 Mawyer attacked Ellen Degeneres for "dumping her filthy lesbian lifestyle right in the center of your living room."

In 2000, CAN produced an attack ad against Hillary Clinton, then running for US Senate, which said, in part, "It is rumored that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian . . . . Sometimes, rumors are true. Shouldn't you know the truth?"

Mawyer also sent out a fundraising mailer in 2000 that said, in part: "I am not ready to give this great nation over to one-world government extremists ... radical, disease-carrying homosexuals ... anti-family lesbian feminists ... or anti-American U.N. globalists!"

Some have tried to portray Wilders as tainted by this episode, for even considering having anything to do with CAN in the first place. But Wilders has actually done nothing that suggests any willingness on his part to deviate from a principled position of supporting gay rights and opposing all forms of bigotry, including racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia.

Consider Wilders' willingness to accept support from people who oppose gay-marriage, while still explicitly stating his own disagreement with that position. Compare that to Barack Obama's alliance with anti-gay "preachers" while campaigning in the South for the Democratic nomination in 2007, including Donnie McClurkin, a leader of the "ex-gay" movement! And unlike Wilders, Obama has never and still does not support gay marriage!

For more on CAN, see, for example, this 2005 profile of them over at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

For more on the film itself and the recent dust-up, here is a blog entry over at the right-wing pro-Wilders blog Gates of Vienna, from just before the debacle. Here is a similar item from a similar right-wing site (the "Inernational Civil Liberties Alliance").

And here is a fairly straightforward news item reporting on Wilders' decision to pull out, from dutchnews.nl.

I hope that Wilders continues to demonstrate that it is possible to take a principled stand against Islam on the basis of defending individual liberty against a totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion. Such a principled stand has nothing to do with evil bigots like Martin Mawyer.

Why Does the American Left Hate India and Hinduism??

In this blog mention has already been previously made of Arundhati Roy's love affair with India's Maoist terrorists, also known as Naxalites.

Now she has churned out a series of breathless dispatches based on her recently completed working vacation among the Naxalite terrorists of the "Red Corridor". Therein, Roy consistently refers to world's largest democracy, her native India, with sneering contempt. Her terrorist friends, on the other hand, (people who are responsible for over 6000 murders during the last 20 years) are invariably described by Roy as charmingly earnest idealists with "lovely smiles" who are "full of fun and curiosity."

Comrade Nehru jumped into bed with the Stalinists back in the 1950's, and the Indian left has never looked back. Nehru's attitude was: screw Hinduism, screw Kashmir, screw Tibet, hell, screw India; if Indians can't become properly British maybe they can at least try to become good Soviet style Marxists. But today even the Russians have long since turned their backs on Communism. Where would Indian leftists be without those diehard Maoist Naxalites and their lovely smiles?

Seriously. The Naxalites of India still proudly proclaim their love and devotion to Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao.

Dependency on one or few individuals instead of developing collective leadership and involving the entire Party membership and the masses in decision-making has been one of the causes that led to great reversals in Russia and China where, after the demise of outstanding proletarian leaders like Stalin and Mao, the CPSU and the CPC turned revisionist so easily.
["Comrade Azad" of the CPI(Maoist) in an interview from the June 2006 People's March]

But why would the soft-core Anarcho-Pacifists over at Z-Magazine put up with this shyte, this idiotic glorification of a bunch of AK-47-toting Pol-Pot wannabes? What exactly do they think the admirers of "oustanding proletarian leaders like Stalin and Mao" do with any Anarcho-Pacifists with master's degrees that they happen to get their hands on?

Roy is a regular contributor at Z-Mag, and they are dutifully serializing her latest terrorist travelogue. Like all good American leftists the Z-Magazine crowd know less than nothing about India. They rely exclusively on semi-Stalinist Indian "sources" who, like Roy, are openly anti-Hindu and unapologetic apologists for the Naxalite terrorists.

Anyway, if you have the stomach for it, here is Roy's latest adventure in putting a smily face on terrorism (and who thought of the obscene subtitle "Gandhians with Guns"?? -- there is nothing Gandhian about these Comrades):

Walking with the Comrades, Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

"Realistic to the point of being inhuman": Christoph Waltz is a Glourious Basterd, and so is Quentin Tarantino!

{ -->> significant spoilage may be contained in the following <<-- }

OK, we finally watched Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It is a wonderful film, even glourious. I own very few movie DVD's, but two of them are Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and I am sure that before long Inglourious Basterds will join them (the one we watched was a rental).

To be brutally honest, I wanted the movie to be even better. My own subjective experience was that it peaks during the basement-rendezvous-gone-wrong scene (more specifically during the brilliant King Kong "joke" scene) and then, well, kind of falls apart. But if Quentin Tarantino were not such a genius it would be literally inconceivable to find fault with this film!

But there is one aspect of Inglourious Basterds that was absolutely perfect: Christoph Waltz's performance as Standartenführer Hans Landa of the Nazi SS. Waltz himself had this to say about Hans Landa, in an interview with Hunter Stephenson of slashfilm.com:

he is realistic to the point where it is bordering the inhuman, you know. He really looks at the various layers of reality, and he understands that there is not just one thing, the world is many things at the same time. And they might appear to contradict each other, but that does not mean that they necessarily do. And it’s a very interesting subject for conversation and discussion, and that’s naturally the ideal outcome of something like this.

I suspect that with the passage of time, Inglourious Basterds will age quite well. The period of history that Tarantino has taken on persists in defying all efforts to "explain" it. Were the Nazis inhuman monsters, or were they ordinary human beings who did horribly evil things? If they were monsters, where do such monsters come from? If they were ordinary human beings, how do ordinary human beings do such horribly evil things? And how many Nazis were like Hans Landa, who was "just doing his job", and, in this fictional version of history, turns against his Fuhrer and helps to win the war for the Allies?

But, in reality, it was the "Jewish Vengeance" of Shosanna Dreyfus that was "really" responsible for decapitating the the Third Reich. What is Tarantino saying with that? What does Landa represent? Some dark malevolently amoral aspect of western culture that not only managed to survive the destruction of Nazism intact, but insidiously receives credit for helping to rid the world of fascism? And why is this evil piece of shit so fascinating, so charming, so intelligent and cultured and "realistic"?

And think about it. Hans Landa really did bring down the Third Reich, but not because the Inglourious Basterds needed his cooperation to bring off their plan. It was Landa who allowed Shosanna to live, and it was Shosanna who really pulled off the real "Operation Kino" . . . .

The more I think about it, the more exquisitely multi-layered the King Kong reference reveals itself to be. Could anyone seriously argue that the Third Reich was any more morally depraved than the societies that involved themselves in, indeed, become stinking rich from, the African Slave Trade, not to mention (and there are references to this as well) the Genocide of the Native Americans. But in that case all of our metaphysical head-scratching over how those evil Nazis could be so evil is rather cluelessly un-self-aware, no?

"The Bill Hicks Story"

I am in such awe of Bill Hicks that I can't find words....

There's a new movie about him -- it looks like it could be pretty damn good.

Here's a youtube video of Uncle Bill giving some career advice:

"Suck it, Republicans"

I actually know and respect many people who hold very conservative political views. My father, whom I loved and admired a great deal, was a huge fan of Ronald Reagan, although he despised George W. Bush. I also have very little tolerance for well-programmed knee-jerk "progressives" who mindlessly repeat whatever they believe the party line to be, and who are quick to resort to epithets such as "racist" and "fascist" against all arguments that they disagree with, or, more likely, fail to understand.

I am disgusted by all attempts to limit freedom of speech in the name of regulating so-called "hate-speech", and I believe that anyone who doesn't think that the Bill of Rights protects the rights of individual citizens to own guns, well, doesn't understand the Bill of Rights. And I believe that anyone who wants to monkey with the Bill of Rights is a danger to us all.

I could go on and on with other legitimate protestations about my appreciation for nuance and subtlety in political matters, and my own loathing of the poison of lockstep political factionalism. But fuck all that. The Republican Party opposed Social Security. They opposed Civil Rights. And now, as a Party, they are monolithically opposed Health Care Reform. So I have to agree with a friend who said, simply, "Suck it, Republicans." That's right. Suck it.

I mean Jesus fucking Christ. Newt Gingrich actually came right out and compared Health Care Reform to Civil Rights, like that was a bad thing:

Former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill “the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times,” Gingrich said: “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
[Dan Balz, Washingont Post, March 21, 2010]

I mean how can a person say such a thing? And Gingrich is no drooling idiot. In fact, among Republicans he is widely considered to be a towering intellect -- a scholar, even. A scholar of history in particular. And yet he can still bring himself to think: boy howdy, the Democrats have sure fucked themselves again, just like they did with the Negro Question.

I mean for fuck's sake, Civil Rights legislation was needed in order for African Americans to be able to vote at all! Before Civil Rights, Blacks who wanted to vote in the South were murdered, and the murderers got away with it. Yeah, OK, maybe the Democrats paid a political price for saying enough of that shit was enough. And maybe as a Party they took a political hit, as Republicans spent the next half a century fine-tuning their appeals to white racists, especially in the South.

Gingrich has since tried to "walk back" his comments, claiming that, oh, yeah, sure, like Civil Rights was the right thing to do and all that. But Gingrich can Suck It, too. He was following a very old script, and one that originated in the Democratic Party, by the way. Before the Civil Rights legislation of the 60's there was Harry Truman's advocacy for civil rights, including the desegregation of the military in 1948. Which led to Strom Thurmond and other "Dixiecrats" bolting from the Democrats and eventually landing in a party where racists were still welcomed: the Republican Party.

The script that Gingrich was following goes like this: these dangerous radical experiments (like desegregtion and health care for all) go too far. They represent an unwarranted and unconstitutional invasion of individual rights and States' Rights. At best they amount to reckless governmental over-reaching, at worst they are the thin end of the of the dreaded Totalitarian Wedge. I can't believe this shit still works, but on some people it apparently still does.

I know that not all opponents of Health Care Reform are raving, racist fools. But a very significant portion of them are. And even those who aren't are simply on the wrong side of history. You pay a political price for that, too.

The Amazing Randi Pulls Yet Another Rabbit Out Of His Hat!!

I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it turns out that, true to form, James Randi has had something rather interesting up his sleeve all along. And, also true to form, he has now dispelled the illusion and revealed the truth that had previously lay hidden. But I'll let him tell you all about it in his own words: How To Say It?

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming!!!!

American politics now has a brand new shiny Third Rail, people!!!

The Republicans opposed Social Security because it would end civilization as we know it. They claimed that minimum wage laws were tantamount to Communism. They claimed that the Voting Rights Act violated the freaking constitution.

It's happening, it's really happening! Health Care is a Right, Not a Privilege!! Holy shit, what's next? The metric system?!?!?!?