Politics on this list; goodbye

[Koenraad Elst]

(for the record: a mail withheld from sending for the sake of peace, Dec.
1999)

Dr. Wujastyk,
        Does one and the same set of rules apply to
everyone here?  In the last week there have been two personal attacks with
political content on me, and you
didn't find it necessary to intervene, unlike in other recent cases.
                1. Irene Maradei supplies a list of URLs including fervently
political ones such as the "Bible of the Aryan invasion" by Uthaya Naidu.
But she adds a political comment only to mine, describing me as a "fervent
Hindutva fan".  I  outgrew fanhood years ago, and as for my view of
Hindutva, vide my critical book BJP vs. Hindu Resurgence, 1997.
                2. In one of the personal attacks with which Dr. Zydenbos
keeps polluting this list, he accuses me of a "preoccupation with Hitler".
It happens to be a fact of history that in Nazi textbooks, the AIT scenario
of dynamic
white Aryans invading a country of dark natives, then imposing a racial
apartheid system on them, then degenerating because of their mixing with
dark natives nonetheless, was *the* illustration of the racist worldview.
Like Léon Poliakov in Le
Mythe Aryen, I found I could not give a fair account of the AIT without
mentioning its Nazi episode.  But I never deduced any conclusions about the
rightness or wrongness of the theory from the political uses made of it.
            As you can verify, it was Zydenbos himself
who chose to introduce Hitler into the recent discussion on Vedic
chronology.  It
was also he who on October 28 made an uncalled-for reference to an unnamed
"political personality" as saying that a lie repeated often enough will end
up passing for the truth,-- a principle which he himself is applying with
his endlessly repeated denial (as "lies", no less) of my observation that he
started this whole wrangle on 12-12-1993 in
his Indian Express article "An obscurantist argument".  There he made
several Nazi references in his attack on NS Rajaram (who didn't know
Zydenbos and hadn't attacked him), e.g. he described Rajaram's
non-invasionism as "close to the *Blut und Boden* ideology of
Nazism".  When I reminded him of this, he took his pedantry to
the surrealistic extent of insisting on a distinction between a "Hitler"
smear (as alleged, imprecisely, by Rajaram against him)
and a "Nazi" smear (as effectively committed by him in his IE article).
Such a distinction does not exist, unless you know of an employer telling an
applicant: "At first I wasn't going to hire you, for I had heard that you
are a
Hitlerian, but since you are only a Nazi, it's OK."
            If Zydenbos doesn't want to own up his "Nazi" attack on Rajaram,
he could simply disown it, say that he changed his mind or so.  We welcome
conversions to fairness.  When Zydenbos denied his own statement, I had
posted a correction to this
list not because I have anything against Dr. Zydenbos (do
reread those September E-mails or my website article to see for yourself
what kid gloves I had put on before expressing my disagreement with him),
but simply for the record, as yet another example of how
otherwise well-behaved invasionists routinely lapse into abuse when they are
faced with AIT skepticism.
            As for my mention of Hitler in my review of the Deshpande &
Bronkhorst volume, do verify that I was commenting on such references
given in the book itself (p.148) and by invasionist polemicists in general.
Where people volunteer Hitler references to a debate, in most cases (not in
the D&B volume) it is not as a real argument but as a trump card to knock
the other side out of the debate, e.g. against ecologists: "But the great
pioneer of
ecology was none other than Hitler!"  I have never
used that kind of argument against the AIT, because unlike Zydenbos, I have
more substantive arguments.
            And also because I have seen other debates completely derailed
by contrived Hitler references.  In writings about Hindutva, "Hindu fascism"
rhetoric systematically replaces fact-based analysis, cfr. MJ
Akbar's or MS Aiyar's pre-election phrases like "1933: If the BJP Wins..."
(As we all know, in its 28 months' rule, the BJP has emulated Hitler by
abolishing parliament, opening concentration camps, prohibiting interracial
marriage, and a bloody Long Knives purge of its own ranks;-- must be, for
none of the
"Hindu fascism" mongers has yet apologized for misinforming the public).
All kinds of wild stories are abroad to buttress the "Hindu fascism" line,
e.g. in his acclaimed book Hitler's Priestess (p.66), N.
Goodrick-Clarke writes: "After (...) March 1939, Indian opinion on Germany
polarized sharply into two camps: those who would be loyal to Britain in the
event of a war between Britain and Germany and those who would not.  The
Hindu Mahasabha adopted a particularly strong pro-German position".  In
reality,
the HMS decided, immediately after Britain declared war on
Germany, to call on all Hindu young men to join the British-Indian Army.
HMS president V.D. Savarkar was derided as a "recruiting officer" by
Congress activists, but it was his recruits who
saved the day for Britain in Dunkirk, Libya, Iraq, Burma.  Even the nadir of
Hindutva history proves it: of the seven conspirators involved in Gandhi's
murder, three were British-Indian Army veterans of WW2.  But no reviewer has
pointed this out, and Goodrick-Clarke's howler will pass into the
conventional wisdom.  Probably some list members are already teaching it in
class.
            By the way, apart from the AIT, Hitler had something else in
common with most India-watchers.  From Mein Kampf and from
the minutes of his meeting with Congress leftist Subhash Bose, it is clear
that Hitler had a steep contempt for Hindus, much in contrast with his high
esteem for Islam.
            3. While we are at it, Dr. Wujastyk, you yourself once
volunteered a political intervention here, viz. that Aditya Prakashan is a
very "right-wing" publishing-house.  It seems you define AIT-skeptical books
as "right-wing", even when written by Marxists like Bhagwan Singh (The Vedic
Harappans, 1995).  For the rest, all AP books are about
indological topics like music, text editions of versions of the epics and of
illustrated Buddhist manuscripts (also in Chinese and Tibetan), painting
etc., much of it edited by art historian Dr. Lokesh Chandra, former Congress
MP.  How could such topics be "right-wing", from what perspective?  I'll
give you one.  When I was a juvenile Maoist, the bookstore where I bought my
copy of the Little Red Book had some translated literature of the Cultural
Revolution, then (1974) not officially over yet.  That's where I read that
the Buddhist manuscripts and sculptures
which had fed the bonfires of Beijing were "reactionary", "feudal",
"oppresive", "poisoning the people's minds with superstition".
> From Mao's angle, the Aditya Prakashan subject-matter would indeed be
"right-wing", but  I had not expected to run into that viewpoint here.
            Dr. Wujastyk, you have offered an apology to Dr. Zydenbos
because Mr. Agarwal had used intemperate language ("pathetic") against him.
If you owe an apology whenever a list member gets intemperate language
thrown at him, you owe several to me.  There definitely are class A and
class B
members on this list, but since that is just the way of the world, I won't
make
a point of it.  Rather, I'll satisfy Dr. Zydenbos's repeated complaints that
I haven't answered his questions, "even the most elementary one".
            Most elementary was certainly the question "whether 2
comes before 3".  The first time he posed it, I had understood it
as rhetorical, but when he started repeating it, with the grim airs of a
judge entitled to an answer from the man in the dock, I wondered if I
was faced with a mental case.  The facts: in my website article, I had
mistakenly assumed (in spite of having the correct date in footnote) that
the 1993 articles by Rajaram and Zydenbos were written in 1992, due to
Zydenbos' referring to the date of the 1992 Ayodhya demolition as "December
6",
without giving the year.  Alright, my mistake.
I had also noticed the mistake when rereading the article, but since
changing things on a website is pretty cumbersome for an internet beginner,
I had postponed correcting it, on the assumption that it was
inconsequential.  My assumption that nobody would be petty-minded
enough to make a point of this little mistake proved to be yet another
mistake: one such person did show up.  So for his
benefit, I can now clarify that upon closer inspection, 2 does precede 3
(except in numbers like 32 or 9392).
            He also wanted to know why Westerners like Francois
Gautier and myself make common cause with
the so-called Hindutva forces.  To the extent that this is the case, we're
certainly not doing it for the money, for it is a bad career move.  The
answer is simpler: we are taking the stand that we are convinced is the
right one.  For example, we can see for ourselves that there is much truth
in the
BJP allegation that Nehruvian secularism really is "pseudo-secularism".
Thus, India has separate religion-based civil codes, defended by all
"secularist" parties: in demanding a Common Civil Code, the BJP represents
secularism while the "secularist" parties uphold religious
discrimination.  This is a very simple fact, so simple that opponents short
of arguments dismiss it as "simplistic".  The question is not why *we* have
noticed this fact, for it is obvious enough, but why all those tenured
experts have failed to notice it.
        Dr. Wujastyk,  I am now quitting this list, because dealing with all
the abuse I have been receiving, is taking too much of my time and energy.
My conclusion regarding Dr. Zydenbos is that one
just can't argue with a sick mind.  If I had known that a supposedly sobre
academic could run away from his own words in such a nasty and destructive
manner, I would never have intervened in the AIT debate on this list, which
was making promising
progress.
        But I still find it odd, Dr. Wujastyk, that you banned AIT
discussion
because it "doesn't bring out the best" in some of us, all while continuing
to allow the very type of intervention which gave you that negative
impression, esp.
the calumny which Dr. Zydenbos has been spewing against Rajaram, S.R. Rao,
Agarwal, and
myself.  Banning the debate ad rem while permitting the attacks ad hominem
is a case of throwing out the baby and retaining the dirty bathwater.  So,
you keep what you chose to keep, and I follow the baby on his way out.
Goodbye.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst