Newsletter: Week 7, 2023
The BJP launches a resentful attack on the BBC, issues of caste among Indian-Australians, and why removing books from libraries inhibits our understanding of the past
The BJP Attacks The BBC
This week saw the BJP, once again, reveal exactly what kind of political party it is. It instigated an extraordinary raid on the BBC offices in New Delhi by tax authorities in response to a documentary about prime minister Narendra Modi’s actions during the Gujarat riots in 2002 (when he was chief minister of the state).
The BJP consistently uses the tax authorities as a convenient tool to harass journalists they don’t like. It’s a way of pretending that their harassment is more “above board,” instead of more physical forms of intimidation. But it’s also part of a conspiratorial mindset that believes journalists are paid off by external groups to publish critical articles on the BJP. The Washington Post reported that “several officials from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) put forward the idea that the BBC may be receiving inappropriate funding from China.*”
This is a common line of reasoning, and anyone would who has written critically of the BJP would be likely to receive a barrage of tweets accusing them of being in the pocket of Pakistan, China, Sikh organisations, or feminists.
It’s a psychology that believes that there can never be any objective inquiry into an issue, that the world is simply a zero-sum contest between jealous groups. The obsessively self-interested cannot comprehend the idea of pursuing truth, as to them there is no truth, only a battle over who has the biggest firehose of bullshit, and fantasies about the nefarious money that pays for it.
India’s former Minister of Information, Manish Tewari, described the raid as “imbecile, childish & beyond even silly,” and worried how it made India look as the current president of the G-20, stating that India was “telling the world that rather than an emerging great power we are an insecure power.”
It is true that like all authoritarian political parties and movements the BJP is deeply emotionally insecure. But I also think they don’t care about this affecting their international reputation. Firstly, because almost all of what it does is about servicing the same emotionally insecure domestic constituency – that, ironically, believes these actions are a display of strength. And secondly, because partners like Washington and Canberra are so desperate to align with New Delhi to contain China that they will continue to ignore the BJP’s behaviour** – which may be a form of power, but it is one based on other states’ own weakness of character. The BJP knows these countries won’t criticise them, and therefore it has no incentive to shift the way it operates.
*That the Chinese Communist Party despise the BBC and constantly harasses its journalists is an inconvenient part of this narrative. Although with the BJP’s own firehose of bullshit they are unlikely to care.
**The irony of this is that the BJP are displaying similar characteristics to those of the CCP that the US and Australia deem a threat.
Caste Adrift
This week there was an interesting article in The Guardian on how caste is exhibiting itself in the Indian-Australian community. The story of the 2021 Census was the explosion in Indian migration to Australia over the past two decades. I have previously written that this is overall a positive phenomenon, but it also does come with some challenges. Particularly the transnational nature of the BJP’s fervent nationalism and the animosity this is creating locally (see Newsletter 4).
Issues of caste are a further complication. One glaring component of this is how the “equality of manners” – Australians informal relations with each other regardless of wealth or position – will clash with the social and professional hierarchies of caste. For those who care deeply about maintaining caste privileges and prejudices, the “who gives a shit?” attitude of Australians to social status will be a disappointment. But it also may bring great suspicion from Australians who find caste to be offensive to their own dispositions.
From speaking with Indian-Australian friends, it is clear that caste doesn’t dissipate upon migration, but can be used as a way of initially obtaining social power when one is seeking to establish themselves in a new cultural environment. However, the hopeful side of this is that integrating into a broader Australian culture that is uninterested in such social structures caste is likely to melt away in second and subsequent generations.
Our Present Efforts To Cleanse The Past
This week The Age reported that Northcote High School, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, has removed dozens of non-fiction book from its library in a move to “decolonise” the school’s book collection. This is part of a well-meaning, but thoroughly misguided, understanding of the nature of books and especially the nature of history.
We do not – and nor should we – have to like or agree with everything we read. History is about understanding the past – including the aspects of the past that sit uncomfortably with today’s values. Attempting to scrub the past clean gives us no sophisticated comprehension of human beings and the way we have behaved and organised ourselves and subsequently changed the ways we behave and organise ourselves.
The removal of books deemed distasteful doesn’t allow us to compare and contrast ideas, knowledge and values of the past with those of today. To sit books on the same or similar topics, but from different eras, next to each other on the shelf. This is the study of history.
This movement – and that of the Republican Party’s current attempt to ban books – is driven by a psychological impulse that feels incapable of tolerating anything that doesn’t provide positive reinforcement of a favoured worldview.
To be sympathetic, I think we are finding the modern world so complex and this complexity so confronting that we are seeking actions that provide a sense of emotional reassurance. Yet, complexity is here to stay, and ham-fisted responses to it won’t make us more resilient. Nor will it help us to better understand the brutal failings of humanity so we won’t repeat past mistakes. Especially if we find learning about these past failings too “unsafe.”
To get metaphysical about this phenomenon, I think we live in an era where we can, to a certain extent, also live in other eras. Now songs released in 1985 can reach the top of the present day charts through streaming services, for one example. Having access to the sum of human knowledge – and so much of human culture – across the span of time, has given us a warped sense of time. We believe we can scrub the past clean because the past is at our fingertips and able to be cleaned.
Or, in the case of the Republican Party, a refusal to exist in the present and an attempt to bully societies back into the past.
We’ve always seen the written word as threatening, but our suspicion of it comes in waves. Unfortunately, I think we are now entering a phase where this suspicion is heightened, creating a fear of knowledge, rather than an embrace of it.
This Week’s Reading
Japan Briefs Pacific Islands On Fukushima Wastewater Release Plan
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“The discharge of this contaminated water is of grave concern to Pacific Island countries. A central component of PIF’s 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent is tying the future of the Pacific Islander peoples to the well-being of the Pacific Ocean. This framework seeks to submit all policymaking to an understanding of the Pacific Ocean’s geography, the unique identity of the Pacific and its people, and a consideration of the health and longevity of the ocean’s resources.
For Pacific Islanders, their relationship with the ocean is core to the region’s way of life. It has shaped the cultural and historical nature of these nations, and there is an inseparable link between the ocean and Pacific Islanders’ values, traditions, and spirituality. For Pacific Islanders, who feel a strong guardianship over the Pacific Ocean, Japan’s plan to release contaminated water into the ocean is of critical importance.”
These Women Journalists Were Doing Their Jobs. That Made Them Targets
Taylor Lorenz - The Washington Post
“Online violence against women journalists is one of the most serious contemporary threats to press freedom internationally,” the report declared. “It aids and abets impunity for crimes against journalists, including physical assault and murder. It is designed to silence, humiliate, and discredit. It inflicts very real psychological injury, chills public interest journalism, kills women’s careers and deprives society of important voices and perspectives.”
In many countries, women who are targeted in these campaigns are doing some of the most crucial journalistic work in their regions: investigating powerful cultural leaders, exposing government wrongdoing and revealing corruption. Many who are targeted report on the internet itself and how it is being used to bolster extremists.”
David Miliband - New York Times
“The lack of accountability for crimes in places like Syria and Yemen has fuelled the culture of impunity we now see in Ukraine and elsewhere.
It’s not just war zones. Impunity is a helpful lens through which to understand the global drift to “polycrisis,” from climate change to the weakening of democracy. When billionaires evade taxes, oil companies misrepresent the severity of the climate crisis, elected politicians subvert the judiciary and human rights are rolled back, you see impunity in action. Impunity is the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers.
That is the significance of the “Atlas of Impunity” released today. Published by the Eurasia Group and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, it scores all 197 countries and territories across five different areas of impunity: abuse of human rights, unaccountable governance, conflict and violence, economic exploitation and environmental degradation. All represent the abuse of power. The Atlas uses more than 65 independent, credible and comparable data sources to produce a score for each country.”
Krithika Varagur - Foreign Affairs
“Indonesia’s modern democracy attracts no shortage of superlatives. The sprawling country of nearly 300 million people and more than 17,000 islands has made huge strides since the end of the Suharto dictatorship. Average life expectancy has risen from about 47 years in 1960 to 72 today, the economy has entered the ranks of the G-20, and the government has undertaken ambitious social welfare projects, including one of the world’s largest health insurance schemes. But Indonesia’s democracy can nevertheless feel rather hollow or insubstantial. Corruption is hopelessly entrenched, civil society is extremely weak, labor organising is practically impossible, people are jailed for blasphemy, environmental activists are murdered, and the press is, if freer than in neighbouring countries such as Myanmar or Vietnam, perennially muzzled. No one can be an “issues voter” because patronage, rather than ideology, drives party politics.”
Fiji: A Chance To Stop Political History Repeating
Mere Nailatikau - The Interpreter
“Fiji economist and former politician Wadan Narsey observed that among all the parties it is “rare indeed to find any with a definite succession plan, based on genuine democracy in the party and government”. Indeed, “the practice used to be quite the opposite”, with leaders choosing non-threatening deputies, kept agreeable through coercion, isolation and capture. Even well-meaning mentors cast long, withering shadows over protégés, leaving them to diminish in profile and seek nourishing sunlight elsewhere or persevere under their ever-extending tutelage and ever-elusive retirements.
Eroded institutions, weakened democratic norms and heightened tolerance for flouting the rule of law have defined the political economy of the past 16 years in Fiji. Escaping its shadow will require moving beyond merely creating new winners and losers. The country will have a challenging course ahead in avoiding the easy path of retribution and instead leaning towards the complex work of justice and restoration. It is too early to tell, but certainly early enough to ensure that the ultimate winners are the Fijian people. Having lost, reclaimed, and survived much, we may be enough for each other after all.”
It Makes No Sense To Blame The West For The Ukraine War
Gideon Rachman - Financial Times
”The argument that the US bears responsibility for the war in Ukraine ignores a principle fundamental to both morality and law — that the responsibility for a murder, or a murderous invasion, lies with the person who pulls the trigger or gives the command. Preventive wars are sometimes regarded as acceptable — but only if a rival nation is poised to strike. Ukraine was obviously not in that position last year. By blurring this point, Mearsheimer does become an unwitting apologist for Putin’s war of aggression.
This is not to deny that his theories can be a powerful analytical tool, which provides insights not just into Russia’s behaviour, but also into China. As long ago as 2001, Mearsheimer was arguing that efforts to integrate China into a liberal world order were doomed to fail — and that Beijing would inevitably seek to dominate its own region, making war with the US likely. Those arguments also look prescient today. But dig deeper into Mearsheimer’s work and it sometimes bears the hallmarks of an academic too in love with his own theoretical constructs to accept that there are some facts that do not fit the theory.”
‘They Didn’t Understand Anything, But Just Spoiled People’s Lives’
Anne Applebaum & Nataliya Gumenyuk – The Atlantic
“The modern Russian occupation also belongs to the equally old, equally ugly traditions of Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide. Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine as a separate country, and Ukrainian as a distinct identity. The occupiers thought that task would be easy, because, like Putin, they assumed that the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society are weak. But they are not. That clash between assumption and reality has also forced the occupiers to broaden their use of violence. Wayne Jordash, a British barrister who documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine, argued in a Reckoning Project interview that the extraordinary number of detention centers in occupied Ukraine represent the Russian army’s attempt to fulfill its original plan, which was “to capture and kill all the leaders” of Ukraine. But as the occupation dragged on, “the idea of leaders got bigger. It was originally ‘Zelensky and the government,’ and it quite quickly, inevitably, became ‘local leaders,’ which includes everyone from military to civil servants to journalists, to teachers—anybody who had a connection with the Ukrainian state.”
Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction, pain, and suffering. This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street, in the villages where the Ukrainian state cannot yet count the torture chambers, let alone shut them down.”
American Teenage Girls Are Experiencing High Levels Of Emotional Distress. Why?
Moira Donegan - The Guardian
“This better world, one that inflicts less violence on women and girls and endows them with more dignity, does not seem to be forthcoming. Since the survey was conducted, in 2021, Roe v Wade has been overturned; public schools and colleges have become pawns in the cynical culture war plays of the right; a backlash to #MeToo has left sexual abuse as culturally accepted and institutionally entrenched as ever. Maybe it is no surprise that LGBQ+ teens and teenage girls are now facing such high degrees of violence and psychic distress: the reinforcement of gender conformity and gender hierarchy, through both violence and the law, has rapidly become the focal point of our politics. Today, teen girls are looking out at a country that values their talents and ambitions less than their breeding capacity, values their individuality less than its own fears, and refuses to take the necessary steps to make their lives better.
The mental health crisis among teen girls is an emergency, one that is worsening. Their suffering will not abate until we, American adults, make a world that is more worthy of them, and give them lives of prosperity and hopefulness – that is, we need to give them a more hopeful future and a country that is worthy of them.”
The Republican Trifecta Of Extremism
Brian Klass - The Garden Of Forking Paths
“We’ve designed a political system in which members of Congress become influential, famous, and rich if they’re extremists. At the same time, moderate pragmatists who serve their constituents face losing their jobs and remain political nobodies, obscure, forgotten, never appearing on Fox News. Like it or not, this is the system we’ve designed. And it’s beyond broken.
This, therefore, is what I call the Trifecta of Extremism:
Uncompetitive elections caused by gerrymandering and demographic sorting
Low-turnout primaries that empower extremists and diehards while systematically punishing compromise
The rise of political influencers who get rich and famous because they’re extremists
Each of these pillars of the Trifecta of Extremism has the power to erode democracy. With all three together, they could destroy it.”
Scottish Nationalism Will Survive Sturgeon
Tom McTague - Unherd
“Brexit has made Scottish independence a far more complicated prospect than it was before. It is now possible that we will look back on the referendum in 2014 as the moment Scottish independence made the most sense. Fair or not, Brexit means that Scotland cannot dilute the dominating reality of England simply by leaving the union and joining the rump UK in a wider EU. If anything, Brexit has made England’s hulking presence next to Scotland even more pronounced, while demanding answers from the SNP that it does not seem ready or able to provide. What happens at the border with England? Will Scotland introduce the euro? Will Holyrood accept common European debts? Will it rejoin the Common Fisheries Policy? For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things
Gurwinder - The Prism
“Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).
By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalising.”