The retards vote the hypocritical governments into power, and in turn the governments make sure the retards stay uninformed and retarded.

I find two items interesting today. One is an online petition titled “Demand for withdrawal of a flawed book on Hindu History published by PENGUIN” making the rounds. Addressed to the presidents of the Penguin Group and Penguin India Pvt Ltd, it says:

“The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger is rife with numerous errors in its historical facts and Sanskrit translations. These errors and misrepresentations are bound and perhaps intended to mislead students of Indian and Hindu history.

 

The other item is the story about M F Husain giving up his Indian citizenship and becoming a citizen of Qatar.

To my mind they are related. They reveal much about the mentality of Indians and their government. To the various epithets that adorn India such as “the most populous democracy” and “Land of elephants and tigers” must be added “the Land of the largest bunch of retards” and “Home of the most hypocritical governments in the world”.

They are related thusly. The retards vote the hypocritical governments into power with sickening predictability, and in turn the governments make sure that the retards stay uninformed and retarded.

The governments routinely divide the population along religious lines with total impunity. What’s really surprising is that the government discriminates against the people of the majority religion –the Hindus – and is openly biased towards the largest religious minority – the Muslims.

One would have thought that in a democracy where an overwhelming majority is Hindu, the governments would at least be not biased against Hindus. At the very least they would make sure the Hindus don’t feel like second-class citizens in the only country that Hindus have.

(An aside: Hinduism is hard to define. The operational definition I use is that it is the aggregate set of beliefs and practices of the people of India who do not self-identify themselves as Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, or Buddhists. It is a “residual” definition. All Hindus are Indians or the descendants of Indians abroad. Hinduism as a religion is only found in India.)

I am forced to the conclusion that India is a basically a land of retards ruled by hypocrites. The most important aspect of the retarded, as I have mentioned before, is that they elect governments that do their best to keep Indians poor. India is poor because of the policies that the governments choose. India is poor by choice. All the talk and all the actions of the governments have always been almost diametrically opposite of those that would promote economic growth and consequently development. I think it was Milton Friedman who noted that for any economy to prosper, what it has to do is to implement the policies that are exactly the opposite of India’s.

In any case, right now I want to get to another matter that illustrates the retarded character of the Indian public. It is this: they give ammunition for others to use against them.

Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus: An Alternative History” must make fascinating reading to some. I know precious little history, including Hindu history. I know even less about psycho-sexual Freudian theories. To me they appear to be two separate domains, something like the separation between the domains of quantum mechanics and natural healing.

According to some, Doniger gets off on writing about weird sexual practices and concocting fabulous theories about the sexual meaning of ordinary tales of Hindu mythological figures. Whatever floats her boat, I say. If she wants to connect the psycho-sexual and Hindu mythology, that’s her prerogative. As far as I am concerned, the book fills a much-needed gap, as Moses Hadas (1900-1960) had said about some other book. And like he said, “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.”

 

 

Some Hindus are up in arms about Wendy’s book and have petitioned the Penguin Group to:

1. WITHDRAW all the copies of this book immediately from the worldwide bookshops/markets/universities/libraries and refrain from printing any other edition;

2. APOLOGISE for having published this book. It seriously and grossly misrepresents the Hindu reality as known to the vast numbers of Hindus and to scholars of Hindu tradition. PENGUIN must apologise for failure to observe proper pre-publication scrutiny and scholarly review.

That’s USDA Grade AA retardedness. There are about 80 signatures to the petition at the time of this writing.

I can understand people telling Penguin to fix factual errors. I appreciate the work the petitioners have done in pointing out the errors. They should publish the errors or petition Penguin to publish the rebuttal. They can write newspaper op-eds and reviews of the book.

But asking for the withdrawal of the book is not a smart thing to do. Doniger may be a deranged person with a vicious agenda against the Hindus. But she must not be silenced. If what she says is wrong, then her views need to be contradicted, not her right to publish or the publisher’s right to publish what they want. If you don’t like reading what Doniger writes, don’t read her.

We must stand for free expression. That is at the core of all human progress. Even thought that one disagrees with.

We must stand for free expression. That is at the core of all human progress. Even thought that one disagrees with. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it succinctly: “Not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.” There is a very practical and self-interested need for this. If you deny others the right to free speech for whatever reason, others will also deny you the freedom of speech when it suits them.

These people who want Doniger’s book withdrawn are handing out ammunition to their enemies. These people are behaving like retards. They are surrendering what I consider to be their most potent weapon. Allow me to repeat what I wrote earlier in “The Danger of Surrendering our Most Potent Weapon” (Jan 28, 2010):

Human societies that allow the free expression of ideas do better than those that don’t allow new ideas. The evidence is all around for us to see.

For those of us who value human civilisation and human progress – or even those who are merely interested in economic growth and development – our best tools are ideas. The source of these ideas is free people who have the freedom to bring forth new ideas. We progress only by looking at things in new ways, which is what ideas allow us to do. The minimal condition necessary for ideas is the freedom of speech.