Aryan invasion debate

[Koenraad Elst]

Dr. Zydenbos, your pedantic ironies cannot obscure the fact that you did
bring in
no less than three references to Hitler in your short article (one of them
seconding such a reference by Romila Thapar), all while Hitler was an AIT
believer like yourself.  That the exact words were not "Rajaram is Hitler"
makes no difference: bracketing someone with Hitler ("close to the Blut und
Boden rhetoric of Nazism") does the trick well
enough in smearing him.  Indeed, these days, it is the single worst smear
available to smearmasters, surpassing the other stuff I've seen in this
debate, where AIT skeptics have been called lunatics, Atlantis freaks,
obscurantists and what not.  Surprising that some people on this list get
indignated over Rajaram's dismissing Indology as a pseudo-science, for
Rajaram's crudeness is very mild compared to what AIT defenders routinely
throw
at AIT skeptics.

It is true that rewriting history may be done out of political motives,
though these make no difference at all to the rightness or wrongness of the
new version.  But keeping the history books from being rewritten may equally
be done out of political motives, and that is the story behind the
denunciations of AIT skepticism in India.  A JNU student gave it away during
discussion time after David Frawley's lecture at JNU: "Alright, the AIT has
been refuted.  But because that bolsters the position of Hindu communalism,
we should not accept the change."

Dr. Fosse, your suggestion that it's useless discussing theories with
politically committed people is fair enough.  I in turn suggest that other
list members who object to any debate with AIT skeptics start using this
argument.  It sounds more public-spirited than the argument of boredom, and
has a bit more basis in fact than the claim that all the objections have
already been rebutted.  However, it all makes no difference to the status
quaestionis of the research.  Thus, if you don't want to explain to
politically
motivated AIT skeptics how you reconcile the geological data on the
Saraswati with the Rg-Vedic data on the Saraswati (i.e. your alternative to
moving the RV back a thousands years or more), at least you can tell your
politically neutral colleagues, for that anomaly between the facts and the
AIT is not going to go away just because someone can be banished from the
debate for his alleged political motives.


Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst
http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/