To the editors of Wikipedia, particularly the lemma on Dr. Koenraad Elst
Mortsel, 20 May 2013
Dear editor(s),
It has been for quite a few years that I have chosen not to react to my
own Wikipedia lemma and the many inaccuracies in it. Currently I think I have
no other option. My temporary work contract at the Belgian Senate came to an
end, and while looking for a new job, I find that all employers who care to
explain why they refuse to hire me, refer to the Wikipedia lemma at the head of
the results of the google search they now automatically apply to all
applicants. It seems you have a lot of influence, in fact more than anyone else,
for you inform or misinform the decision-making part of mankind. And power
brings responsibility.
Being by definition the greatest expert in the world on this lemma’s
subject, I know for fact that a lot of it is mendacious. It is either your own
lie or the lie of a source that you have cited or reproduced in good faith, but
either way, it is not truthful. It does not follow your self-imposed
requirement of “objectivity”. It describes an imaginary strawman, not me.
While untruth would be a serious flaw in any text, there are moreover
several aspects in your article that
could fit in some other genre, but not in an encyclopedia. This lemma relies on
hearsay rather than certified facts, and it mostly discusses my supposed
opinions, but leaves practically unmentioned what I have actually done. If I
have a Wikipedia lemma at all, it is not because of opinions, which everybody
has, but because of what I have achieved. I have not merely uttered views, but
also offered arguments for them, discovered or outlined facts to support them,
convinced people, and very moderately changed the ideological landscape. People
who consult the Wikipedia about me, probably want to know what I have done that
made a difference.
So, permit me to go over some strange traits of your lemma on “Koenraad
Elst”, presented to the world as objective scholarship but in fact suffering
from many defects.
Selectiveness
This is only
partly untrue, but even where true, it clearly biased by being very partial.
For instance, in exactly the same years when I was on the editorial board of TeKoS, meeting 6 or 7 times in the said
period, I also wrote for the business weekly Trends. Though one article in Trends
had far more readers than all my TeKoS
articles combined, you fail to mention this. Given your eye for selective
detail, it is also remarkable that you omit my leftist period, from far-leftist
camp follower at 15 to occasional anti-NATO demonstrator at 24. Not that it is
that important, but then neither is my having written for this paper or that.
In an article that pays far more attention to my alleged opinions than to what
I have actually done, it remains at any rate remarkable that you omit a turn of
opinion that would add some perspective to my ideological development.
I started
public life in 1989 with an article about the Satanic Verses affair in the Communist weekly Toestanden. It illustrates that there is nothing right-wing about
criticism of religion, but this is apparently inconvenient to the message you try
to convey. My first lectures about Islam were for local departments of the
Masereel Foundation, which was linked to the Communist Party of Belgium. This
foundation’s chairman Antoon Roosens (Archief
1994) wrote that multiculturalism “is always characterized by a more or less
serious disturbance of society’s order” and “not a usable model of
living-together”. Since Angela Merkel’s utterance in the same vein, this is the
received wisdom, but back then it was quite a statement.
Around 1990,
well before joining TeKoS, I also wrote regularly for Inforiënt, a monthly issued by the Asian Studies Department of my
home university. This was a non-political scholarly paper, and clearly some
pseudonymous contributor decided that this was not the association he wanted
for me.
Anyway, name
me a single lemma that starts out with a living author’s membership of the
editorial board of a trimonthly paper 18 years ago, which met 6 or 7 times in
this period, and where no decisions whatsoever were taken; when the same author
has written more than 20 books, some of them best-sellers or otherwise
remarkable..
Right and left
Your lemma
claims: “His writings are frequently featured in right-wing
publications.”
Left-wing
publications as well as many conformistic commercial media have mostly decided
to boycott me, so I am left with right-wing publications (at least in the time
when this was first written, the internet having opened new avenues of
publication). A better way of putting the same state of affairs would be: “The
left has issued boycott orders, which are followed up by leftist camp-followers
and by a compliant bourgeoisie. That is why you get to see his texts mostly in
right-wing publications.”
As for the
“right-wing” publications that choose to feature me, this term itself is
ideologically coloured. It may be hard to avoid on Wikipedia but should be
handled with utmost care – more than was applied in this case. For instance, Adolf
Hitler is conveniently dubbed (extreme) “right-wing”, but he more than anyone
else pursued the formulas of the socialist economist John Maynard Keynes, at
the time also applied by the progressive President Franklin Roosevelt to the
extent that the “checks and balances” of the American republic allowed him, and
currently still championed by the centre-left parties in Europe. Part of Hitler’s
inspiration (e.g. in mass murder) and much of the reason for his rise to power
came from Bolshevism, left-wing par excellence. He and his lieutenant Heinrich
Himmler were pro-Muslim, like most contemporary neo-Nazis and like the
contemporary Indian and much of the European left. He pursued what we now call
“identity politics”, currently a left-wing preoccupation. At a time when
“right-wing” still meant “pro-monarchy”, he failed to bring the Kaiser back. Much can be said for the
Libertarian view that he was a Leftist.
I am not
saying that the concepts of Left and Right no longer matter, as political
illiterates and crypto-Rightists would say. But they have a slightly different
meaning than the Left presupposes when it doles out these labels to different
actors in the field at its own convenience.
Hindutva
It would be
more appropriate to say that I am the only Westerner who criticized the
Hindutva movement all while knowing the subject. I criticized it thoroughly in
my book BJP vs. Hindu Resurgence and
passim in Decolonizing the Hindu Mind
and some other books. But the approved Western “experts” are just parrots of
the Indian establishment, which in turn has historically been formed by an
ideological interiorization of Western prejudices about Indian religions and
society. Their position is that everything that conflicts with the conventional
view must be “Hindutva”. I have explicitly analyzed and refuted that assumption
at length, and if your contributor had actually read me, he would have known
that and mentioned it.
Many Hindu
stalwarts who granted me interviews after my pro-temple conclusions in my first
Ayodhya book would never talk to the established “specialists” on their very
own movement. That is why I have collected data on the Hindu movement that the
“experts” cannot even hope to get. Moreover, the “experts” show no inclination
to actually talk with Hindu activists. As admitted by a professor on my
doctoral jury, I had presented a truly exceptional collection of data; few could
muster it, fewer still even tried to get at it. They are satisfied in repeating
and elaborating the enemy-image of the Hindu movement common since at least the
Mahatma Gandhi murder. As recently also pointed out by Prof. S.N.
Balagangadhara and Mr. Rajiv Malhotra, Western Hinduism experts are, with only
little hyperbole, the only academic specialists who actively work for their own
field of study to die. (Well, I’ll grant you the criminologists.)
At any rate,
the “experts” have political opinions, but because these are so dominant, these
are taken in stride and often not even noticed as such. Their viewpoints can
definitely not be invoked as “scholarly” let alone “impartisan” findings just
because they sport academic titles. Indeed, exposing the political bias in the
dominant academic output on India has precisely been one of the cornerstones of
my work, and a decent lemma on me would have to mention this.
One of the
features typical of established India “expertise” is the conflation of the
specific viewpoint that calls itself “Hindutva” (a Persian-cum-Sanskrit
neologism thought up in the late 19th century and meaning
“Hinduness”, effectively “Hindu identity”) with the broader Hindu activism.
Hindutva, now incarnated in the mass organization RSS with its clumsy
quasi-nationalist discourse, is easy to find fault with, so lazy academics with
an anti-Hindu agenda call every utterance of Hindu survival “Hindutva”. It is
only in this inaccurate and politically motivated sense that Wikipedia can call
me a defender of “Hindutva ideology”. It amounts to siding with the trend that
I have explicitly criticized – the very criticism this lemma ought to be describing
objectively.
I have
analyzed the concept of Hindutva at length – to my knowledge, deeper than
anyone else, including the “experts”. So I challenge you to give me one quote
of mine that substantiates your description. If this matter ever goes to court
(but praise yourself lucky that I have neither the inclination nor the means
for litigation), I will give ten quotes that refute it. But of course it is not
my task to prove my innocence. Since you leveled a claim that is meant (and
read) as an allegation, it is your task to prove you claim – or to withdraw it.
Of course I
have accepted invitations to speak on Hindutva platforms, as on many others,
but it is quite wrong to deduce from this that my viewpoints and those of the
organizers are the same. My viewpoints are only those which I myself pronounce,
on those platforms as on others. In fact, intellectuals tend to find it insulting
to be described as party activists. They may perhaps inform the official
doctrine of a party or organization, but it is insulting to reduce the
complexity of their thought to the simplicity of a party manifesto. This is
what is called a “category mistake”.
Subjectivity
Your lemma
claims: “He describes himself as an independent scholar.”
This is not untrue, but why “he describes himself”, an
unusual phrase on Wikipedia, when this self-description happens to be factual?
What stops you from writing “KE is an independent scholar”? You have no reason
to present as a personal fantasy or plain lie what is just a plain fact. I have
three MAs and a PhD, dozens of books (most of them packed with footnotes or
other references) and hundreds of articles to my credit, and have spoken at
many academic conferences, enough to qualify as a “scholar”. I doubt that your sophomoric
contributors have as much to show.
Further, I have no affiliation at present, a condition
expressed through the word “independent”. It is precisely the goal of your
contributors to warn possible employers against me and make me unemployable, so
this “independence” is not entirely innocent. But it is factual, and that
should be enough for an encyclopedia. Of course I have opinions; but so do most
scholars.
“Elst says
that his language has ‘softened and become more focused on viewpoints rather
than groups of people such as, ‘the’ Muslims or the Marxist historians.’ He
writes that he has reoriented his scholarly interests towards more fundamental
philosophical studies and questions of ancient history, rather than questions
in the centre of contemporary political struggles.”
The position that Islam as an ideology is the problem,
rather than that part of the population which calls itself Muslim, has been my
position since the beginning. The change lies elsewhere: in the 1980s, I set
out to do fundamental research into Asian civilizations, then was derailed by
the gaping lack of proper scholarship on India’s interreligious relations, and
later found that I had made my contribution so I could move on. I also realized
that I had become old enough to have something serious to say on the deeper
issues. Actual events keep calling me back to commenting on contemporary political
issues; but as a general reorientation, I am indeed focusing more on
fundamental doctrinal issues instead of day-to-day events. So, in practice, I
still comment on communal issues when I’m asked for it, but basically Islam and
communalism have lost my interest some years ago. Everything important on those
topics has already been said; now these insights have to inform policy.
At any rate, if you doubt what I say, you should
decide for yourself, on the basis of hard proof, whether I am saying the truth
or not. Then write your conclusions in your own name.
The Hugo Claus incident
I am a long-time supporter
of my country’s liberal euthanasia policies, and had nothing but sympathy when
Hugo Claus did it. That the socialist-liberal (red-blue or “purple”) coalition
saw it as a crowning achievement of their reforms is true and noteworthy, but I
supported it nonetheless. What happened was that the editor of ‘t Pallieterke added a disparaging
sentence to my article about the affair, an intervention which I found
unacceptable so I ceased writing in his paper. I explained the whole event and
reiterated my position in an article in next month’s issue of Nucleus. Full knowledge would have
allowed you to write correct information worthy of an encyclopaedia, but a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
By the way, the publisher of
Nucleus, the late Mr. Pieter Huys
(whom I knew as a sincerely good person), was decidedly against the
liberalization of euthanasia. That I could publish my article there, testifies
to his open-mindedness and to the objectivity of my article. It also illustrates
a more general principle: one cannot find out about someone’s views by listing
the papers in which he published or the people he talked with. This refutes the
assumption by which most gossips go, and by which your contributors have gone.
Guilt by association
In my journalistic capacity
I have talked with all kinds of people, and photographs of us in conversation
could be used by gossips to “prove” that I share the same views with the other
person. We have a famous example in our country: as a student, top Flemish
leader Bart De Wever attended a debate featuring Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was
photographed alongside him. This photograph proves nothing, but is used as
“proof” against him by all the Francophone dailies. As for articles, I as a
marked man have a limited choice of avenues, so I am not very choosy as to
where I publish. But it is typical of gossips that they deduce my opinions from
the papers I publish in, instead of the contents of what I write.
For ordinary people, this
mostly stems from laziness: it is easier to see a name in the table of contents
of a paper and draw your conclusions on that limited basis than to go through
the trouble of reading and digesting his article; let alone place it in the
context of his whole ideological evolution. But for leftist intellectuals, it
is also an everyday reality that they avoid anyone suspected of different views
and exclusively associate with fellow Leftists. If you want to understand the
caste system and the exclusion of untouchables, watch the uptight behavior of Leftist
intellectuals. So, they genuinely assume that if I talk to someone or appear in
his paper, he and I must be holding the same opinions.
Nouvelle Droite
“Elst
actively contributes to nationalist New Right Flemish
publications, and has shown sympathy to the Nouvelle
Droite movement since the early 1990s. He has sometimes criticised that
movement in relation to particular topics. He said that the collaborationist
aspects of the careers of two Belgian writers were covered up in Nouvelle
Droite articles, and that he suspected that ‘its critique of egalitarianism in
the name of ‘differentialism’ could at heart simply be a plea against equality
in favour of inequality, Old-Right style’.”
Actually, even
when I occasionally published in a Nouvelle
Droite paper (TeKoS), I never
endorsed Nouvelle Droite viewpoints,
such as their anti-Liberalism, their anti-Americanism, or their championing
“identity”, or the “Traditionalism” which some of its leading lights espouse. The
only time I wrote in a real Nouvelle
Droite publication (Nouvelle Ecole
2000), it was to defend the Out-of-India Theory against the Aryan Invasion
Theory, central to the Nouvelle Droite
worldview and defended in that same issue by both Prof. Jean Haudry and Alain
de Benoist. Recently I have written some skeptical comments on the Nouvelle Droite, but throughout, I have
absolutely never expressed any kind of agreement with it or, when it still
mattered, even just an opinion on it. You or your sources are simply inventing
this. If not, show me. And I don’t mean the gossip by my enemies, quoted on
your talk page as authoritative, but an actual text by me. As the writer of
thousands of pages of well-considered findings, I have a right to be evaluated
on what I have actually written rather than on some vague rumours propagated by
my self-declared enemies.
After I had
become somewhat well-known as an Islam critic, I accepted a fully non-committal
post on the editorial board of TeKoS
at the request of the general editor Luc Pauwels, who wanted a counterweight to
the heavy pro-Muslim presence with their fantasies of a “Euro-Arab alliance
against the US” on his editorial board. It took some time before I knew what it
was all about, and by the time I did, I left.
“However,
his endorsement with the Nouvelle Droite is still active: ‘Wisely or unwisely,
I have not taken my scepticism to be a reason for any active hostility to the
Nouvelle Droite people, some of whom I count as friends... Time permitting, I
accept invitations from that side, so that I spoke at their conference in Antwerp
in 2000, if only as a stand-in for an announced speaker who had cancelled at
the last minute for health reasons (Pim Fortuyn, no less,
the Dutch liberal sociology professor who criticized Islam, subsequently went
into politics, and ended up murdered by a leftist).’”
Of course I
shake hands with all kinds of people. As an intellectual, I am conversant with
Marxism (of which I have always appreciated the pretence of intellectual
seriousness), structuralism, postmodernism etc., as I am with the Nouvelle Droite. There is no difference
in the way I treat Leftists and Rightists, there is only a difference in the
way they treat me. It is an idiosyncrasy of Leftist intellectuals to practice
untouchability and to veto any contact with different-minded people. Thus, when
the French academic André Taguieff wrote a publication on the Nouvelle Droite some twenty years ago,
he was criticized by his Leftist friends for appearing to know too much about
it. They opined that someone who had gone that deeply into the actual positions
of a Rightist movement had to be contaminated by it. To them, ignorance is
virtuous; and that is the secret behind the shoddiness of my lemma too.
Also, I
judge ideological movements issue by issue (rather than a wholesale endorsement
or rejection, as follower types do). Thus, at the time of my involvement it was
not important, but nowadays I retrospectively agree with the Nouvelle Droite’s choice for European
unity rather than for the nation-states, and its consistent stand against
Christian doctrine and apologetics. Or, back then I endorsed its anti-Communism,
all the more so since I personally had to even out my own past in that regard.
By contrast, I disagree with its opposition to globalization (an inevitability
and for the generation that was raised on science-fiction even an inherently
good thing), its emphasis on identity and, in my early years, its fascination
with the “Conservative Revolution”. This is the common name for a string of
schools in Weimar Germany, of which I have read nothing at all except Hermann
Keyserling’s report on his stay in India. You may contrast this with my work on
Hindu revivalism, which is very thorough, or even with American paleoconservatism,
of which I read a lot in about 1995-2005. It is at any rate only of historical
value, as the Nouvelle Droite has
lost its importance as a distinct ideological movement.
Vlaams Blok
“Jan De
Zutter criticized Elst for being too close with the Vlaams Belang, as in June
1992, Koenraad Elst gave a speech directed against Islam at the Vlaams Blok Colloquium
where the party proposed its first version of its 70 point anti-immigration
policy.”
This sentence wrongly suggests any causal connection
between that 70-point plan and me. In fact, I didn’t know about this plan
before and even during the conference, which I didn’t attend except in the late
afternoon for giving my own speech plus listening to the concluding words by
the chairman. Later I learned that the plan was news even to many party
leaders, as it was a private idea of one of them which the others were then
forced to defend. They amended it to bring it in line with the law, and later
abandoned it altogether. Even for the party it is old history; only the Left keeps
on bringing it up. Till today, I haven’t read the 70 points (only those few
relating to Islam), but have vaguely heard that some of them have been
implemented into law by the mainstream parties, so apparently they are not that
extreme. One of the points relating to Islam is diametrically opposite to my
own view: the party wanted to separate Muslim pupils in Muslim schools (exactly
like the Mullahs), while I myself expressed belief in immersion and
assimilation.
At any rate, I have nothing whatsoever to do with this
plan, and it has no reason at all for figuring in an encyclopedia article on
me. It is based on rumours which all go back to a single libelous article in
the tabloid De Morgen, also the only
source for the Vlaams Blok claim of Jan De Zutter, then working for the very
same tabloid. The Vlaams Blok connection has always been only a Leftist fantasy
and has nothing in common with the facts. Since when does an encyclopedia deal in
fantasies?
“Elst said
that he spoke there because it was the only party where the ‘problem of Islam’
was brought up, but that he also explicitly said that he did not agree with the
party's solution for that problem, and disapproved of their xenophobia. He
stated that the VB can not be and was never his party because of its xenophobia
and ethnocentrism. Since this event, he has often been accused of being the
party's specialist on Islam and its link with the new Pagan Movement.”
No, I have
only been accused by this tabloid, and then by a few of its readers, that is
all. No truthful observer (worthy of being quoted by an encyclopedia) has said
that, and everybody in Flanders knows that the party has other Islam
specialists. Even this tabloid later changed its tune, e.g. describing me in
2011 as a “new-rightist separatist”, not accurate either but vague enough to be
passable. In my own country, this very old rumour, refuted by the facts many
times even for those who initially believed it, has died down. The rumour,
however, lives on through other, ignorant avenues; including Wikipedia.
It becomes
wholly ludicrous when the Pagan movement is brought in. Having even several practising
Pagan members of Parliament, the party hardly needed a critical observer like
me as middle-man. Anyway, this is all Leftist fantasy, and it is just shameful
that this is included in an encyclopedia article.
One thing of
supreme importance to scholars, including most writers of encyclopedias, but
only a bothersome trifle to the activists who wrote my lemma, is the question
of truth. What I said more than twenty years ago about Islam, later expanded
into book form (De islam voor ongelovigen,
1997), was the scholarly truth. Since then, my position on Islam has hopefully
become a bit more sophisticated but essentially it has remained the same. It
might have been different if anyone had proven me wrong, but that hasn’t
happened. Lambasted and called names, often enough, but refuted, never. The only
feeble one-sentence attempt to prove me wrong was by Lucas Catherine, who
reacted to my analysis of the Koran by asserting that “the Koran is already an
old book”. Well, let him repeat that in a mosque: “The Koran is a 7th-century
book by a half-literate businessman, maybe acceptable as a testimony of its
age, but no longer relevant to you moderns. Live your lives without regard to
what it says!” If the Koran was just an ancient book, like so many others, it
would not be studied now by a host of scholars (including myself) and a mass of
non-scholars.
“Though he
himself denies any affinity to the party program, he admits to ‘lukewarm’
sympathy for the Flemish cause (of independence). Lucas Catherine contrasted
Elst's viewpoint with the viewpoint of Filip
Dewinter, who according to him could not have been very happy with Elst's
opinion that not Muslims, but Islam, is the problem.”
The conflation of two
unrelated issues is another indication that you have no grasp of the subject
and merely quote by hearsay a few claims made by various parties and that fit
in your mission of doing me maximum harm. Having sympathy for the Flemish cause
(which can take more forms than just striving for independence) is unrelated to
any viewpoint for or against this party. Other parties and non-party movements
and people are pro-Flemish or even pro-Independence.
As for Lucas Catherine, a
pro-Palestinian campaigner and sometimes a critic of mine (but some of whose
books I have reviewed favourably), he rightly pointed out that the party’s
position and my Islam criticism (even as enunciated before a party audience) are
at variance. The same observation was made by other party critics such as Marc
Spruyt, and by the party’s own Islam specialist Marc Joris. In fact, it was
remarked by every single commentator who based himself on contents rather than
on association. That should suffice to make some of your earlier insinuations
untrue and superfluous. It also illustrates how there is a big difference
between speaking to people and being on the same wavelength with people.
Omissions
You also leave unmentioned that Jan De Zutter is a Socialist
Party functionary, hardly a neutral observer. While you made sure to describe
Koenraad Logghe as a “Neopagan high priest” (below), you fail to do so in Jan
De Zutter’s case, though it is equally true: he is a Wiccan high priest as well
as a practitioner of Santería, and
writer of several handbooks of Neopagan religion. At the time (1998) he wrote for
De Morgen, a tabloid known for its partisan
and untruthful reporting.
The whole Flemish public knows a number of notorious
cases of De Morgen’s mendaciousness.
For example, it has waged a campaign against “sollicitor X”, accusing him of
raping his sons, repeatedly getting crowds of Leftist camp-followers to
demonstrate against him, and seriously damaging his reputation and livelihood.
When grown up, the sons have denied the allegations and explained the whole
affair, but the offending journalists have to this day refused to admit that
they were wrong and guilty of libel. You have entered a very murky field here,
and you are not equipped to deal with it competently. Fortunately you don’t
need to, for a real encyclopedia would have left these unimportant rumours of
unimportant incidents undiscussed.
Similarly, on the talk page someone refers to a brief
exchange with journalist Freddy De Pauw without mentioning the (otherwise
unimportant but here somewhat relevant) fact that he is a known Trotskyite. The
only exchange with him that I remember was friendly enough, with us agreeing to
disagree. I have always respected him, unlike the two professors who follow.
Someone also quotes Prof. Robert Zydenbos without
mentioning that he has a serious axe to grind. In an Indian Express column at the very beginning of the Aryan invasion
debate, he likened critics of the Aryan Invasion Theory to the Nazis, no less,
forgetting that this simile is generally a give-away of unscholarly intent, and
that the Nazis themselves were very much on the side of the European homeland
hypothesis, implying an Aryan invasion of India. I pointed out that this theory
deserved to be called the “Hitler-Zydenbos theory”, after two of its best-known
proponents. Though he had ventured outside his field, misunderstood the whole
Aryan debate and should simply have admitted and corrected his mistake (the
record shows that I myself always do this), he took it as a grave insult to his
authority and has been nurturing a desire for vengeance ever since. On the
Religion In South Asia list, he broke the list’s academic decorum by calling
all Hindu nationalists, a category intended to include me, as “the scum of the
earth”. On the secretive Scholarly List Services list, he (together with
Michael Witzel) has been advocating censorship of me.
That is always the reaction of the out-argued.
Countless times I have been censored, excluded, disinvited under pressure, as
well as decried and covered with abuse. Some debating partners have also
disinvited themselves upon hearing that I was going to be on the panel. At any
rate, my critics always try something else than the simple scholarly avenue,
which would be to prove me wrong.
You also omit the possibility of change. Many people
who peddled or relayed accusations against me long ago wouldn’t do so now. I am
not sure Jan De Zutter would repeat today what he wrote fifteen years ago.
“According
to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, he has connections to the far-right Vlaams Blok. though Dr.
Subrahmanyam did not provide any supporting evidence.”
What in the
world is Sanjay Subramahnyam doing here? He is neither an expert on me nor on
Belgian politics, so no self-respecting encyclopedia would cite his layman’s
opinion. Moreover, he has an exceptionally big axe to grind. In my book Ayodhya: the Case against the Temple (2003),
I have devoted a chapter to him and exposed his partisan and unscholarly
treatment of former Indian Express
editor and the BJP Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie. Since he failed to refute
me on contents, he tried to get back at me by repeating a convenient rumour he
had picked up. So he wrote an article against my person, predictably displaying
his ignorance, which I thoroughly refuted in a chapter of my book The Saffron Swastika (2001). This left
him smarting for even more revenge. He is just about the last person an
encyclopedia would quote.
Finally, in your lemma on him, you conveniently omit
Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s single claim to fame: that he served as poster-boy for
the BJP Government’s “saffronization of education” by his nomination to the
Oxford-based chair of Indian Studies which the BJP created. This was the only
time that Sanjay Subrahmanyam made news headlines, so as an encyclopedia,
Wikipedia had a duty to mention it in its lemma on him. In my books, the
incident was proof of the BJP’s spinelessness and stupidity, since it used this
opportunity to prove (in vain) its “secularism” by nominating one of its known
opponents, instead of creating status and influence for one of its sympathizers.
Incidentally, since his reply can be foreseen, let me clarify that I myself was
no candidate at the time, being incapacitated (from everything except writing) by
a heart disease that was only resolved by a heart transplantation in 2007.
Neopaganism
Slander against me has often
taken the form of confusing a speech or article directed at a certain audience
with being of those people’s opinion. Thus, the Jan De Zutter you quote, has
taken my speech in 1996 at the conference of a Pagan group which was also
predominantly nationalistic as “proof” that I must be nationalistic too. In
reality, my speech, which was in the press folder and of which his paper must
have obtained a copy, is very explicit in denouncing the nationalistic use of
Paganism, not on modern or moralistic grounds (which that particular audience
would be insensitive to) but precisely on Pagan grounds: nowhere in the musings
of the Edda or its hymns to the gods is nationalism in evidence. Germanic
religion was different from Celtic religion, not for the principled nationalist
reason that Woden or Freia are “more fit for the Germanic soul” or some such
ethnic consideration, but simply because of the distance in language and sheer
geography.
This is in line with my
oft-stated criticism of Hindu nationalism or “Hindutva”. I have consistently
argued that nationalism was understandable in the context of the anticolonial
struggle, but had now become counterproductive and leads to a misstatement of
legitimate Hindu concerns. In fact, this is one of the points that define the
specificity of my analysis of the Hindutva movement and should certainly figure
in a lemma on me.
“In his
twenties, he participated in the New Age movement, worked in a New Age
bookstore and organized New Age events, although he later seemed to depart from
New Age groups. In the 1990s he became interested in the European Neopagan movement:
he co-edited the extreme New Right from 1992,
together with ‘pagan high priest’ Koenraad
Logghe, whom he joined at the World Congress of Ethnic Religions.”
I have never co-edited a paper called New Right, which I have never heard of;
much less would I have anything to do with an “extreme” paper. You are
misinformed and must correct your error forthwith. There is simply no excuse
for this misinformation in an encyclopedia.
Also, you say that I became “interested” in the
Neopagan movement. Many people are interested in many things, without it being
mentioned on their Wikipedia page. Here it is only mentioned as a way to do me
harm. For your information: it was at the suggestion of Ram Swarup, who didn’t
know the specificities of every Neopagan movement, that I became interested in
the Neopagan associations locally available.
But this much is true, that in 1995-98 I have written
some articles in a Neopagan paper. You will fail to quote an incriminating
sentence from those (as will also be clear from Jan De Zutter’s treatment of
the same, viz. to remain conspicuously silent). It was in fact one such article
which led to my temporary break-up with the Neopagan movement: a description of
the meanings and uses of the swastika ending in a plea that heirs to Flemish
and other collaborators in World War 2 could not use the swastika without
making a clean break with the misuse of the swastika by Nazi Germany. This
provoked the criticism that I had introduced politics into a religious society
which had resolved to keep politics out. That remark was not incorrect, though
I still think that this caveat was necessary. This outcome was translated by a
few Leftist sources as my being thrown out for Left deviationism.
I have never had any kind of privileged relation with
Koenraad Logghe, and there is no reason for even mentioning him here; except
for your contributors’ strategy of “guilt by association”. I met him as a
co-editor of TeKoS among many others,
whom you rightly don’t mention. As the circles involved have long known, in my
view he represented everything that is wrong with the Neopagan movement. A nice
and helpful fellow in his personal life, he is also philosophically a vitalist
as well as a Freemason and a Traditionalist in the mould of René Guénon (a
convert to Islam, the anti-Pagan religion par excellence), and so he did
Neopaganism a lot of harm by mixing it up with other agendas. With his racist
past (very much past since his Thai love affair and subsequent U-turn, but he
knew fully well that Leftists would use it against him forever anyway), he
should also not have put himself at the head of the Neopagan association he
founded, knowing that this would only damage it. He should have followed the
example of Leon Trotski, who refused to be Lenin’s successor because as a Jew,
his becoming the leader of the Soviet Union would only confirm Christian
conservatives in their allegation that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy. But
alas, unconventional religions attract people who enjoy playing guru.
I was not
involved with the organization of the World (now more realistically called:
European) Congress of Ethnic Religions conference in Antwerp 2005, the only one
I attended, and that too on the press benches. My only involvement with the
erstwhile WCER is that at the time of its founding, I e-mailed in some reasons
for opposing the label “ethnic”, but in vain.
Criticism of Islam
“Some of his books or articles contain harsh
criticisms of Islam as a whole
(among others Wahi: the Supernatural Basis of Islam, [and] From
Ayodhya to Nazareth, an article written in the form of an open letter to
the Pope and Indian church Bishop Alan de
Lastic, whom Elst calls ‘Your Eminences’, and in which he invites them
to ask Muslims for repentance towards Christians, or Ayodhya And After,
a book in which he delves into the realm of establishing a purported link
between Ayodhya and the conflict between Palestinians and Israel -- section 2.2
Jerusalem and Ayodhya --, not an isolated attempt in some far-right
European movements;”
This passage
is fairly accurate, but then the totally unnecessary and inappropriate last
phrase spoils it all. Please show me what is “Right-wing” about my critique of
various aspects of Islam. Karl Marx said that “criticism of religion is the
beginning of all criticism” (he too would be called an “Islamophobe” today),
and I have taken this maxim to heart, whereas the contemporary Left looks the
other way when it is even mentioned. That
so-called Right-wing movements say similar things will not do; Left-wing
individuals and movements have done so as well. In the Muslim world, religious
conservatives are deemed Right-wing though their line is defended by our Leftists,
and critism of Islam Left-wing (Aziz Nesin, Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin). Quote
me a Right-wing sentence from my discourse (say, a rejection of democracy), or
else strike these insinuations from your article.
You
continue: “similarly, section 13.2 of that book is called Islam and Nazism).
More precisely, Elst argues often that ‘not Muslims but Islam is the problem’.
His views on Islam are markedly in line with the neoconservative think-tank Middle East Forum, to which
he has contributed.”
Yes, like myself, the Middle East Forum has devoted
some attention to the Muslim-Nazi connection. It just happens to be a
well-documented fact, first remarked by Sir Winston Churchll. Drawing attention
to facts doesn’t require a political position. By contrast, your article’s
insistence to present my awareness of this fact as something bizarre that needs
to be boxed up into a political position, itself betrays a political agenda.
Aryan invasion debate
“On the topic of the ‘Indigenous
Aryans’ polemic within Hindu nationalism,
Elst writes: ‘One thing which keeps on astonishing me in the present debate is
the complete lack of doubt in both camps. Personally, I don’t think that either
theory, of Aryan invasion and of Aryan indigenousness, can claim to have been ‘proven’
by prevalent standards of proof; even though one of the contenders is getting
closer. Indeed, while I have enjoyed pointing out the flaws in the AIT
statements of the politicized Indian academic establishment and its American
amplifiers, I cannot rule out the possibility that the theory which they are
defending may still have its merits.’”
This is a
rather meagre representation of my ample contribution to the Aryan invasion
debate, but your choice of a single quote is quite felicitous. It also
illustrates nicely who in this debate takes extreme views and who does’t.
“The Hindu
nationalist N.S. Rajaram criticized
Elst's book Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan because of Elst's alleged agenda
of ‘rescuing Indo-European linguistics from
oblivion’. Elst's views on the Aryan Invasion Theory were also criticized by,
for example, Hans Hock, Edwin Bryant, George Cardona and by Michael Witzel.”
It is normal
for new theories to be criticized by the establishment. In this case, it was
criticized from both sides, as you rightly note (though it will escape most of
your readers): whereas Michael Witzel is the proverbial champion of the Aryan
Invasion Theory, N.S Rajaram is one of is leading critics. You might have
specified in more detail what my position in this debate is. In particular, you
might have mentioned that unlike 99% of the Aryan Invasion skeptics, I stand by
the comparative-linguistic approach and have defended it in writing at some
length. Though this specifies my position in the Aryan debate in a fundamental
way, you choose to leave it unmentioned.
Predictions
In science,
a true theory is proven by correct predictions. In this regard, established
Indology has proven to be an outrageous failure. During the 1990s, the
established “experts” predicted that if the BJP would come to power, all
Muslims would be thrown into the Indian Ocean, civil war would ensue, the
Government would come down on women and Dalits, and what not. The BJP did come
to power from 1998 to 2004, and nothing happened (except high growth figures
that today’s Indians can only dream of). Not one of their predictions beame
reality, even remotely.
By contrast,
lonesome me stood vindicated by reality. The “experts” may be uncontroversial,
but they were totally wrong. I may be controversial, but I was right.
In 1996, I
spoke in Boston before the Union of Concerned Scientists. Upon their enquiring
about what the BJP in power would do, and whether it would go nuclear, I said
that it would do nothing which the “experts” foresaw (Muslims in gas chambers,
etc.), that they would not get serious about any of the “communal” points on
their agenda (Common Civil Code, resettlement of the Kashmiri Hindus chased out
by the Muslims, etc.), but that they would very certainly go nuclear. Unlike
the “experts”, I am willing to repeat now what I said in 1996, because I have
been proven right in every respect.
Talk page
Coming to the talk page, we get to see the
motives for these distortions. At the head, the principles by which Wikipedia
swears are stated: (1) No original research; (2) Neutral point of view; (3)
Verifiability. Contributors are also warned: “Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living
persons must be removed immediately from the article and its talk
page, especially if potentially libellous. If such
material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report
the issue to this noticeboard.”
Endless
pages are spent on deciding whether I am a scholar. That your contributors are
not, is a foregone conclusions, but am I? If I am not, it should be easy for
legitimate scholars to prove me wrong, rather than to lambast or censor me. But
you fail to quote even one who has done that. You only quote their gossip and
scatologism.
At any rate,
status is not that important, at least not for finding out the truth of someone’s
theories. Laymen look up steeply to people equipped with academic titles, as do
your sophomoric contributors; but people in the know are less impressed.
Academic post are given, or withheld, for all kinds of reasons. As an Indo-Canadian
professor told me: “You certainly deserve a professorate. But don’t count on
ever getting it.” Conversely, all kinds of mediocre people have academic
careers. If you know a certain scholarly subject well, you will be familiar
with the sight of professors making fools of themselves by their silly
utterances, and of outsiders contributing very serious insights.
But
socially, of course, status is very important. The Hindu bourgeoisie, for
instance, including the leaders of the Hindu nationalist movement, will give
more credit to an enemy with status than to a friend without status. And the
slanderers know it: by denying status, they aim precisely at isolating the targeted
person from the general society including his natural supporters. The libel in
this Wikipedia article follows the same pattern.
A certain
Alex Oriens, very active in this lemma, remarks: “It is impossible to speak of
K. Elst without mentionning the very controversial aspects of his writings.” I
preserve his French spelling of “mentioning” on purpose, as many elements
indicate that he is French-speaking.
Anyway, his
remark that my writing is “controversial” is a statement of a social fact, but
is not an evaluation of my work. There is, for instance, nothing controversial
about my perfectly logical and factual observation, repeated on many forums,
that Indian “secularism” fails the very first test of secularism, viz. by
adhering to separate law systems depending on religion. Of course I know that
the Indian establishment and its parrots in Western academe swear by this
hypocritical situation: treating citizens differently according to their religion
yet calling it “secularism”. But what I say is just logic and would be approved
by any candid and unforewarned outsider, while the prevalent claim of Indian
“secularism” amounts to a defence of vested political interests.
Most Western
experts start their papers with the assertion: ”India’s secularism is
threatened by Hindu nationalism.” That position is not socially controversial,
it is the received wisdom, but it is logically controversial and implies the
untrue description of the present system as “secular”. It is also logically
controversial, in fact untenable, to describe as a “threat to secularism” the BJP,
the only party whose manifesto promises the enactment of a Common Civil Code,
that definitional cornerstone of secularism, taken for granted in most Western
countries.
He also
claims that my “‘rewriting of Indian history’ is of very controversial nature,
and, in fact, very controversed by many Hindus themselves and also by the vast
majority of Indologists”. Well, let him describe what is wrong in my version of
history, which to my knowledge I have never called a “rewriting”. It is simply
objective factual history, taken for granted by earlier historians like
Jadunath Sarkar and R.C. Majumdar. For instance, when asserting that “Hindu
Kush” means “Hindu slaughter”, I simply repeat what I have learned at the feet
of Prof. Pierre Eggermont, a very established Indologist, and what time-witness
Ibn Battuta wrote. These sources are not infallible, but are worth quoting. If
you can do better, the reader would like to see it. At any rate, there should
be nothing controversial about quoting them and approving of what they say. By
contrast, the establishment’s insistence on denying this well-known fact ought
to be seriously controversial, at least for someone with the scientific temper.
He also
says: “Voice of India, in which many of his books are published, is pretty well
known to be on the far-far-right side.”
This is
definitely untrue, and a give-away of political bias. Voice of India is by no
means “far-far-right”. The very first criterion for calling something “far”
this or “extreme” that, is willingness to use violence. Nobody published by
Voice of India has ever hurt a hair on the head of any Muslim. By contrast,
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Prime Minister
Tony Blair have praised Islam to the sky but have killed hundreds of thousands
of Muslims: by starvation, targeted assassination, torture and bombing. The
facts show that criticism of Islam is inversely proportional to violence
against Muslims.
Secondly,
another criterion to decide whether a movement is “far” or “extreme” is its
attitude to democracy. Many secularists who dole out the label “extreme right”
so easily, have completely forgotten about democracy. Of course they do,
because India was declared a “secular, socialist republic” under Indira
Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship, which many vocal secularists supported. The
first thing that Hitler (following Lenin) did upon coming to power, was to
abolish democracy. Now, let us look at Voice of India in this regard. Ram
Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, Gandhian freedom-fighters in their youth (whereas the
much-revered Dr. Bhimrao Ambekar emphatically pronounced himself in favour of
the continuation of colonial rule), stood by democracy all their lives. They actively
opposed the Emergency dictatorship, in this case alongside the Hindutva
organizations (and a faction among the Communists), against its secularist
enforcers.
What counts
as “extreme” and “controversial” in India is Voice of India’s criticism of
religions. There is nothing “Right-wing” about that; if anything, it should
rather be called Left-wing, but it is principally just a scholarly pursuit.
Finally,
Alex Oriens uses Muslim convert René Guénon’s (1886-1951) book Introduction Générale à l'Etude des
Doctrines Hindoues (“General Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines”
) to analyze my position within the spectrum of Hindu doctrines, calling it “westernized
Vedanta” or “neo-Vedanta”. As a matter of fact, I have consciously avoided
taking sides in intra-Hindu quarrels and hardly written about them for the
first so many years. Of course I had to report truthfully that the reformist
Arya Samaj was a major influence on budding Hindu nationalism (with Lala Lajpat
Rai and Swami Shraddhananda as key figures); but that doesn’t mean that I opt
for the Arya Samaj.
Someone
counters Alex Oriens by saying: “Elst's works are relatively free from
political bias. He writes truthfully about communalism and is critical of the
political establishment in India, including the Sangh and Congress governments.
‘I don’t need to belong to ... any specific ideological categories in order to
use my eyes and ears.’" That’s nice, but it hasn’t really percolated to
the lemma read by the general public.
Another one
of critics doesn’t like my making an issue of the Aryan question: “The ‘Aryan
Invasion Debate’ is of a very special nature. It has never been considered in
India and Hinduism, through all its long history, but only in very modern times”,
probably starting with Swami Dayananda Saraswati ca. 1870.
In reality,
the notion of an Aryan Invasion was imported into India from Europe, and its
political abuse had dire consequences for India. Of course Hindus then chose to
react to it. And just as naturally, they hadn’t made an issue of it in the
preceding millennia, when they didn’t know any other version than that the
“Aryans” had always lived in India. Noting these facts is not political, but
insinuations against this objective attitude are.
“About
Elst's comments on ‘revivalism’, the following reference contents detailed
proofs of Elst's patent lies and ideological bias: ‘Koenraad Elst--Sangh
Parivar's Apologist’ by A. Khan http://communalism.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_communalism_archive.html. Khan's
point is substantiated by historical evidences carefully deleted by Elst.”
Well well,
we’d like to see those evidences. Meanwhile, we note that it is logically
impossible to prove anything about me by quoting someone else, moreover someone
who is explicit about his hostile intentions. Yes, there are allegations
against me. Unlike Sanjay Subrahmanyam and other hostile Professors, this A.
Khan even does more than just lazily lambast me. But still he does not prove
his points. Or is it that your contributors have a more relaxed definition of
proof than scientists do? At any rate, I have replied to my critic A. Khan at
length in my book The Problem with
Secularism, which is a bigger compliment than my enemies have ever done to
me.
“Now on
Elst's secularism standpoint that you mentionned. Once again, it suffices to
cite Elst himself to get acquainted with his use of secularism as a weapon to
dissimulate other motives:”
Welcome to
conspiracy country! People who have proven unable to refute me on the Indian
application of the simple notion of “secularism”, now resort to accusing me of
ulterior motives.
“In other
words, as long as secularism substantiates Elst's point, it is of value. If
not, let's reject it. But it is not ‘universal’ secularism that is important to
Elst:”
Quite the
contrary. Secularists when cornered often resort to the argument that the word
“secularism” happens to have different meanings in Europe and India. I however
maintain that “secularism” has only one real meaning, that this meaning was
already firmly established before the word came to be used in India, and that
what prevails in India is therefore something else than secularism.
“In
conclusion, Elst's stance suffer from very partisan and ideological bias, and
it is important to warn readers in a non-partisan encyclopedy like Wikipedia.”
Well, there
you have it. The lemma on me has ended up taking this form because some
militant among your contributors purposely wanted to “warn readers” against me.
Please cite me an instruction for encyclopedists that names “warning” among the
legitimate goals of an encyclopedia.
Conclusion
Someone on
your talk page tries to sound reasonable. He says: “Elst is a controversial
figure, and it is difficult to describe this controversy in a manner which does
not inflame feelings on either side of the debate. It serves no purpose to
insist on portrayals which clearly show sympathy with one or the other side in this
debate, as that is not a description, but partisanship. (…) It serves no
purpose to indulge in wars of opinion online here; the readers of Wikipedia are
mature enough to follow up on a controversy when it is pointed out to them, and
come to their own opinion without the need of pointing them on their way.”
Indeed it
serves no purpose to take sides for or against me. But as is clear from your
many readers that I have had to deal with, the lemma strongly takes sides, viz.
against me. This is intentional, as illustrated by a contributor’s insistence
to “warn readers”. Moreover, it is very naïve to think that “the readers of
Wikipedia are mature enough to follow up on a controversy when it is pointed
out to them, and come to their own opinion without the need of pointing them on
their way”. That is too easy a way to deny an encyclopedia’s responsibility. My
experience amply teaches that most readers don’t “follow up” on a controversy
at all. And among those few who understand the truth of the matter, a majority reasons
that the Wikipedia version may be slanderous and the targeted person may be
right, but clearly he is the object of a controversy, and therefore to be
shunned. To be seen associating with someone who is bad-mouthed on a powerful
forum like Wikipedia is sure to bring trouble. So even then, the contributor
who wants to “warn readers” against me, has his way.
Now it is up to
you to do something about this. Either you remove the lemma altogether, or you
straighten it out and apply the rules of encyclopedia-writing to it. At any
rate, in a encyclopedia, I count on being judged for what I myself have said or
done, and not for the gossip my declared enemies have come up with.
Kind regards,
Dr. Koenraad
Elst
