There's more to Brussels than what you see. It's the spider locus in a cosmic configuration.
In my hippie days, Brussels to me was a site of magical and mystical activities. I used to go there for meditation at the Zen dojo near Halle Gate or the Tibetan centre in the Capouillet Street, to particpate in the meetings of the neo-theosophical World Teacher Trust, to read and buy books in the esoteric bookshop Le Lotus in the borough of Elsene (more spiritual than its counterpart downtown, General Occult), or to attend the 1983 New Age fair "The world we choose". Kind of Kathmandu.
I read all about the heraldry of the city and the secret alchemical references in the names of and statues upon the buildings around the townhall square, including Manneken Pis, whom indeed you do see in Renaissance alchemical treatises. More secular but still colourful was the story of Everaard t'Serclaes, a patrician who in 1356 organized a citizens' guerrila action that chased the occupying garrison of the Earl of Flandres from the city and opened its gates to the troops of the legal ruler, the Duke of Brabant. He was murdered in 1388 by the bastard son of the Lord of Gaasbeek, and is depicted in his death throes on the outside wall of building De Sterre on the townhall square. If you caress his arm there, it guarantees a whole year of being lucky in love.
At some point, it dawned on me that Broekzele ("swamp-forest"), to use the original Dutch name of Brussels, is more than just a city. It is the capital of the Flemish region, which is not the old county of Flanders (now the western provinces East and West Flanders and the adjoining regions in France and the Netherlands) but the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, including most of the old dukedom of Brabant and the region of Loon, now called Limburg. It is the capital of Belgium and the seat of the most important governing bodies of the European Union. And finally, it is the administrative seat of the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and consequently also the favourite place for anti-NATO demonstrations. On its central boulevard in the early 1980s, I and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators repeatedly marched against the installing of more nuclear weapons by Ronald Reagan. We shouted: "Belgium out of NATO, NATO out of Belgium!"
NATO was conceived as an alliance to defend freedom. To symbolize this lofty ideal, Brussels is historically very apt. In 1830, at the founding of Belgium, it pioneered the most liberal constitution of the age. Political refugees found freedom of speech there (recently whittled down by "hate speech" laws), most famously Victor Hugo and Karl Marx. Normally, the enemies of freedom, or at any rate of NATO and its intervention in Afghanistan, ought to treat Brussels as a favourite target for terrorist action. Yet, this has never happened so far. Today a NATO counterterrorism expert told me the hidden mechanisms behind the deceptive peace and quiet here, including the tacit understanding between the Belgian state and the terrorists that they will be left undisturbed if they merely use Belgian soil for preparing action elsewhere. This is top secret, so don't tell anyone. And if you really must (say, under torture), at least you don't have it from me.
But drop the mundane data now. Just think of this truly mystic insight: Brussels is the capital of North Atlantis. Gee, isn't that cosmic? Stop the search for Plato's Atlantis, it is right here.
Read more!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Russia's Chinese future
Denial of unmistakable trends and of their crystal-clear predictions for the future are still de rigueur in European elite circles. This also seems to be the case in the one country to which European nationalists look up full of hope: the Russian Federation. Compared to Western Europe, immigration in Russia has a rather different character, but there as here, downplaying its foreseeable effects remains fashionable.
A few days back I attended a seminar on Russo-Chinese relations hosted by KU Leuven's think-tank for Global Governance. Professor Yana Leksyutina of St-Petersburg University presented interesting data on the trade equation between the two giants. Thus, we learned Russia's status as arms supplier is threatened by two developments: the looming end of the Western embargo against China that will bring other arms suppliers like France and Germany onto the Chinese market; and China's own increasing capability in advanced arms production.
In the energy sector, the traffic in oil and gas from Russia's Far East to China is characterized by a stark inequality: the raw material comes from Russia, but China keeps its high-tech processing entirely in its own hands and on its own side of the border. This means that Russia is to China what Africa is to Europe. Nothing in Prof. Leksyutina's diction indicated that she realized or deplored this humiliating condition for a once-proud European superpower. Has the nation that put the first man in space degenerated into a high-income but low-creativity mining estate, a kind of Congo or Saudi Arabia?
Of course, we all wanted to know about the most consequential trend of all, far more important than arms or oil: the demographic slide of the Russian people into dispersion and replacement if not extinction, at least in the historical non-Russian territories of the Far East. The beautiful blonde professor assured us, and possibly reassured herself, that nothing was going to happen. A very unlikely prediction.
The Russian population is shrinking. In the Far East, there is not only a birth deficit, but also considerable emigration to more westerly parts of Russia, or to the West. Admittedly, some of the Chinese imigrants move on westwards as well, but the main trend still is large-scale Chinese immigration, which continues unabated. In spite of China's draconian birth control policy, the world's most populous country sees its population increase by about ten million per year. It is happy enough to be rid of them.
From undoubtedly reliable documentary sources, Prof. Leksyutina knew that the Chinese state does not organize the emigration to Russia. No Chinese conspiracy there. Well, of course not, why should they? The People's Republic of China has generally observed diplomatic niceties and respected borders. Thus, it has respected British sovereignty over Hong Kong for 48 years, abiding by the agreed-upon date of 1997 for ending the concession. It has so far refrained from taking "the Republic of China on Taiwan", preferring to let trade and the Republic's pan-Chinese nationalism slowly effect an organic reintegration.
In the case of Chinese emigration to Russia, as well as to the West and to Africa, China's interests are best served by giving free rein to private initiative. Whenever a conflict arises between the interests of individual Chinese migrants and their host countries, the Chinese government gladly respects the wishes of the host country. Speaking from personal experience with Chinese immigrants in Belgium, I would say that Beijing's cooperation with Belgian authorities in cases of repatriation of unwanted immigrants is impeccable (much in contrast with some African and West-Asian countries). This puts it in good standing with host countries like Belgium, which in turn makes it easier for individual Chinese immigrants to enter and get accepted under one label or other. So, without offending anyone and without spending a budget or energy on it, China is very effectively facilitating the emigration of its citizens.
Moscow has taken some token measures, like requiring that every business in Russia be Russian-owned. This is a formality, allowing for legal constructions with Chinese ownership through Russian middle-men. At any rate, it makes no difference to the demographic evolution. Maybe Northeast Asia is better off under Chinese than under Russian control, I don't know, but either way there is no reason to expect dramatic events. To that extent, the Russian professor was right: there is no reason to fear a Chinese military conquest of the coveted resources-rich Russian Far East. The process will be gradual. One day, the Chinese will find themselves in a majority position in some provinces and elect ethnic-Chinese administrators. Technically they may remain separate from Beijing and united with Moscow, but for all practical purposes it will be a part of Greater China.
To be sure, history is full of surprises, and we should be wary of long-term predictions. On the other hand, demographics is one area where safe predictions are possible for the duration of a couple of generations. Yes, China's population growth seems bound for a standstill and maybe reversal within a few decades, but by then Russia's population will have imploded, if we may extrapolate from current evolutions. So, it is strange to see experts hurry to assure us that nothing is going to happen. I don't know just what is going to happen, but I am sure it won't be nothing.
Read more!
A few days back I attended a seminar on Russo-Chinese relations hosted by KU Leuven's think-tank for Global Governance. Professor Yana Leksyutina of St-Petersburg University presented interesting data on the trade equation between the two giants. Thus, we learned Russia's status as arms supplier is threatened by two developments: the looming end of the Western embargo against China that will bring other arms suppliers like France and Germany onto the Chinese market; and China's own increasing capability in advanced arms production.
In the energy sector, the traffic in oil and gas from Russia's Far East to China is characterized by a stark inequality: the raw material comes from Russia, but China keeps its high-tech processing entirely in its own hands and on its own side of the border. This means that Russia is to China what Africa is to Europe. Nothing in Prof. Leksyutina's diction indicated that she realized or deplored this humiliating condition for a once-proud European superpower. Has the nation that put the first man in space degenerated into a high-income but low-creativity mining estate, a kind of Congo or Saudi Arabia?
Of course, we all wanted to know about the most consequential trend of all, far more important than arms or oil: the demographic slide of the Russian people into dispersion and replacement if not extinction, at least in the historical non-Russian territories of the Far East. The beautiful blonde professor assured us, and possibly reassured herself, that nothing was going to happen. A very unlikely prediction.
The Russian population is shrinking. In the Far East, there is not only a birth deficit, but also considerable emigration to more westerly parts of Russia, or to the West. Admittedly, some of the Chinese imigrants move on westwards as well, but the main trend still is large-scale Chinese immigration, which continues unabated. In spite of China's draconian birth control policy, the world's most populous country sees its population increase by about ten million per year. It is happy enough to be rid of them.
From undoubtedly reliable documentary sources, Prof. Leksyutina knew that the Chinese state does not organize the emigration to Russia. No Chinese conspiracy there. Well, of course not, why should they? The People's Republic of China has generally observed diplomatic niceties and respected borders. Thus, it has respected British sovereignty over Hong Kong for 48 years, abiding by the agreed-upon date of 1997 for ending the concession. It has so far refrained from taking "the Republic of China on Taiwan", preferring to let trade and the Republic's pan-Chinese nationalism slowly effect an organic reintegration.
In the case of Chinese emigration to Russia, as well as to the West and to Africa, China's interests are best served by giving free rein to private initiative. Whenever a conflict arises between the interests of individual Chinese migrants and their host countries, the Chinese government gladly respects the wishes of the host country. Speaking from personal experience with Chinese immigrants in Belgium, I would say that Beijing's cooperation with Belgian authorities in cases of repatriation of unwanted immigrants is impeccable (much in contrast with some African and West-Asian countries). This puts it in good standing with host countries like Belgium, which in turn makes it easier for individual Chinese immigrants to enter and get accepted under one label or other. So, without offending anyone and without spending a budget or energy on it, China is very effectively facilitating the emigration of its citizens.
Moscow has taken some token measures, like requiring that every business in Russia be Russian-owned. This is a formality, allowing for legal constructions with Chinese ownership through Russian middle-men. At any rate, it makes no difference to the demographic evolution. Maybe Northeast Asia is better off under Chinese than under Russian control, I don't know, but either way there is no reason to expect dramatic events. To that extent, the Russian professor was right: there is no reason to fear a Chinese military conquest of the coveted resources-rich Russian Far East. The process will be gradual. One day, the Chinese will find themselves in a majority position in some provinces and elect ethnic-Chinese administrators. Technically they may remain separate from Beijing and united with Moscow, but for all practical purposes it will be a part of Greater China.
To be sure, history is full of surprises, and we should be wary of long-term predictions. On the other hand, demographics is one area where safe predictions are possible for the duration of a couple of generations. Yes, China's population growth seems bound for a standstill and maybe reversal within a few decades, but by then Russia's population will have imploded, if we may extrapolate from current evolutions. So, it is strange to see experts hurry to assure us that nothing is going to happen. I don't know just what is going to happen, but I am sure it won't be nothing.
Read more!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
The BJP and the Ayodhya demolition
On 6 December 1992, in the presence of BJP leader L.K. Advani, Hindu activists demolished the Babri Masjid, a mosque structure imposed on the site in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple during the era of Muslim occupation. Only days after the event, an investigative commission led by Justice M.S. Liberhan was mandated to inquire into the facts and causes of the demolition. Seventeen years and an astronomical budget later, the Liberhan report was first leaked to the press and then finally presented in the Lok Sabha. It is hopelessly shoddy and biased, but its malicious conclusion that the BJP leadership engineered the demolition, though false, is paradoxically quite fair and fitting.
The Liberhan Commission's reported finding that the Bharaitya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's Party, usually described as Hindu Nationalist) leadership is guilty of the “criminal” demolition of the Babri Masjid, has provoked some protests and denials in BJP and pro-BJP circles. These implicitly assume that the demolition was indeed a crime, that Advani c.s. have to be absolved from it, and that the guilt must be shifted to Congressite Pirme Ministers Rajiv Gandhi (r.1984-89) and Narasimha Rao (r.1991-96). Meanwhile, Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati, then second-rank BJP leaders, have owned up their responsibility, but they happen to be the leaders who ended up clashing with the BJP. Hindu activists loyal to the Rama temple cause will commend their steadfastness. They will also praise Rajiv Gandhi for starting the process of replacing the usurper Babri structure with a proper Rama temple; and Narasimha Rao for passively helping the demolition by his refusal to intervene. By contrast, the BJP leadership’s denial of responsibility will only earn it their contempt.
To be sure, a more orderly procedure to replace the mosque structure with proper temple architecture would have been preferable. Advani had a point in lamenting the breakdown of RSS discipline that made way for the demolition fervour. But even what actually took place was a lesser evil compared with the continuation of the Babri structure, at least in the real world. For one thing, it saved many lives. Just compare the riot toll in the years preceding the demolition with those in the subsequent years. After the Muslim revenge had run its course with the Mumbai bomb attacks of 12 March 1993 (which set the pattern for later terrorist actions in London, Madrid, Bali, Delhi etc., one of the international offshoots of the Ayodhya affair), all was relatively quiet on the Hindu-Muslim front until 2002. The demolition and its aftermath, shocking though they were, triggered a catharsis that sobered up the marching crowds, both Hindu and Muslim. Imagine what riots would have taken place had the Babri eyesore remained standing, a scandal to Hindus and a prop to Muslim hopes of taking it back. Indeed, the prospect of endless Ayodhya-related riots is probably the unstated reason (apart from putting the BJP on the defensive) why Narasimha Rao allowed the demolition to be completed.
As for the pre-planned nature of the demolition, it has always been obvious. This too the BJP should concede unequivocally. Members of the demolition vanguard have told me about their training and the equipment they had brought. They also mentioned the name of the mastermind of the whole operation; it was not Advani nor A.B. Vajpayee. Which brings us to the most startling fact of the demolition’s aftermath: the total refusal of the Indian media to investigate the details. Collectively, they spurned the scoop of the decade, viz. a cover picture with the caption: “Meet the mastermind of the Ayodhya demolition.” The reason is that they found it more expedient to blame Advani and barred themselves from publishing or indeed finding anything that might disturb this story-line.
Once the vanguard had started its operation on 6 December 1992, the rest of the crowd followed. For them at least, the demolition had indeed not been pre-planned. And this unprepared crowd included the unwilling Advani. He and most BJP leaders (if not all -- I cannot claim completeness for my data) clearly were not in on it, and the Liberhan report offers no proof for their involvement either, only some suppositions about what they “must” have known. Even so, they did bear a political responsibility. Today the BJP says that if Home Minister P. Chidambaram did not personally leak the Liberhan report, he remains politically responsible. That makes sense, but the same principle naturally applies to the BJP leaders’ responsibility for the demolition. They should have owned it up right then, and they can still do so now.
Justice M.S. Liberhan is unconvincing in his unfounded allotment of blame for the demolition's technical preparation to them. But it is petty-minded to make a fuss about this, because their political responsibility is so undeniable. Focusing on the technical whodunnit is politically incorrect in that it misrepresents the whole issue as conceived by the pro-temple movement. The crime is not that a usurper structure was demolished, but that the government (egged on by the English media, the CPM, the JNU historians and similar usual suspects) had been thwarting the restoration of a Hindu sacred site to its pilgrim constituency, the Hindus. The right policy would have been to acknowledge and act upon the self-evident principle that a Hindu sacred site should be in Hindu custody and adorned with Hindu architecture. Will the secularists insist on the imposition of a Rama temple on the Kaaba site in Mecca, or on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? Of course not, and for the same reason there should not be a mosque on a hill that for centuries has been the main site dedicated to Rama.
Some people were ready to act upon this simple and logical insight. When Rajiv Gandhi had the locks on the Babri Masjid opened, he clearly embarked on a policy of accommodating the Hindus in compensation for (and in proportion with) the plentiful Muslim “appeasement” by his own and previous governments. It was a typical instance of the Congress culture with its compromises and horse-trading. Nothing very noble, but with the virtue of pragmatism. That approach would normally have led to a deal, with the Ayodhya site for the Hindu lobby and some sweeteners for the Muslim lobby, of which package the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was an opener. Indeed not quite noble, but it would have saved a lot of lives and political energy. Today the Rama Janmabhumi temple would have become just one among many uneventful Hindu places of pilgrimage. Come to think of it, that option could still be tried by the present Congress government.
But in 1989-92, that option was thwarted by the offensive of Babri ultras, and by this I don’t mean the warriors for Islam but the conformistic intellectuals shrieking and howling that the contentious building was the last bastion of “secularism”, a matter of high principle, of life and death. Under their fierce calls for “hard secularism”, no administrator dared to reduce the controversy to its true and manageable proportions anymore. Not the Congress, not the various left-populist parties, and not the BJP either. They were all paralysed and consequently bought time all while taking sides against the weaker party, the pro-temple movement with its vacillating and politically incompetent leadership.
And this shows us another sense in which the BJP is politically responsible for the demolition and for its erratic implementation by an unguided crowd. They too took the side of the status-quo against the Hindu demands. The Hindutva rank and file defied its leaders because it felt cheated by them. After the 1991 elections, when the BJP rose to the rank of largest opposition party, the Ayodhya demand was ditched, first mentally, then gradually also in practice. The activists felt that the leaders didn't mean business, that they didn't dare to push for the logical next step, viz. physically replacing the mosque structure (already in use for Hindu worship) with temple architecture. It was clear that the leaders had no clue on how to go about it. As it later turned out, in 1998-2004, even with the mosque gone and the BJP in power, Advani c.s. didn't move a finger towards the construction of the temple. So the ordinary activists had rightly sensed the unwillingness of the leaders to take the movement forward. That is why they took the law into their own hands.
The leaders could have avoided this outcome by charting a political roadmap towards a negotiated temple construction and then staying the course. Instead they tried to give the issue a quiet burial all while still making some increasingly faint pro-temple noises in order to retain their vote-bank. For that hypocrisy, they ought to pay a price. The Liberhan findings are shoddy and biased, but the disgrace now suffered by the BJP leaders and worsened by their denials is well-deserved.
Read more!
The Liberhan Commission's reported finding that the Bharaitya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's Party, usually described as Hindu Nationalist) leadership is guilty of the “criminal” demolition of the Babri Masjid, has provoked some protests and denials in BJP and pro-BJP circles. These implicitly assume that the demolition was indeed a crime, that Advani c.s. have to be absolved from it, and that the guilt must be shifted to Congressite Pirme Ministers Rajiv Gandhi (r.1984-89) and Narasimha Rao (r.1991-96). Meanwhile, Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati, then second-rank BJP leaders, have owned up their responsibility, but they happen to be the leaders who ended up clashing with the BJP. Hindu activists loyal to the Rama temple cause will commend their steadfastness. They will also praise Rajiv Gandhi for starting the process of replacing the usurper Babri structure with a proper Rama temple; and Narasimha Rao for passively helping the demolition by his refusal to intervene. By contrast, the BJP leadership’s denial of responsibility will only earn it their contempt.
To be sure, a more orderly procedure to replace the mosque structure with proper temple architecture would have been preferable. Advani had a point in lamenting the breakdown of RSS discipline that made way for the demolition fervour. But even what actually took place was a lesser evil compared with the continuation of the Babri structure, at least in the real world. For one thing, it saved many lives. Just compare the riot toll in the years preceding the demolition with those in the subsequent years. After the Muslim revenge had run its course with the Mumbai bomb attacks of 12 March 1993 (which set the pattern for later terrorist actions in London, Madrid, Bali, Delhi etc., one of the international offshoots of the Ayodhya affair), all was relatively quiet on the Hindu-Muslim front until 2002. The demolition and its aftermath, shocking though they were, triggered a catharsis that sobered up the marching crowds, both Hindu and Muslim. Imagine what riots would have taken place had the Babri eyesore remained standing, a scandal to Hindus and a prop to Muslim hopes of taking it back. Indeed, the prospect of endless Ayodhya-related riots is probably the unstated reason (apart from putting the BJP on the defensive) why Narasimha Rao allowed the demolition to be completed.
As for the pre-planned nature of the demolition, it has always been obvious. This too the BJP should concede unequivocally. Members of the demolition vanguard have told me about their training and the equipment they had brought. They also mentioned the name of the mastermind of the whole operation; it was not Advani nor A.B. Vajpayee. Which brings us to the most startling fact of the demolition’s aftermath: the total refusal of the Indian media to investigate the details. Collectively, they spurned the scoop of the decade, viz. a cover picture with the caption: “Meet the mastermind of the Ayodhya demolition.” The reason is that they found it more expedient to blame Advani and barred themselves from publishing or indeed finding anything that might disturb this story-line.
Once the vanguard had started its operation on 6 December 1992, the rest of the crowd followed. For them at least, the demolition had indeed not been pre-planned. And this unprepared crowd included the unwilling Advani. He and most BJP leaders (if not all -- I cannot claim completeness for my data) clearly were not in on it, and the Liberhan report offers no proof for their involvement either, only some suppositions about what they “must” have known. Even so, they did bear a political responsibility. Today the BJP says that if Home Minister P. Chidambaram did not personally leak the Liberhan report, he remains politically responsible. That makes sense, but the same principle naturally applies to the BJP leaders’ responsibility for the demolition. They should have owned it up right then, and they can still do so now.
Justice M.S. Liberhan is unconvincing in his unfounded allotment of blame for the demolition's technical preparation to them. But it is petty-minded to make a fuss about this, because their political responsibility is so undeniable. Focusing on the technical whodunnit is politically incorrect in that it misrepresents the whole issue as conceived by the pro-temple movement. The crime is not that a usurper structure was demolished, but that the government (egged on by the English media, the CPM, the JNU historians and similar usual suspects) had been thwarting the restoration of a Hindu sacred site to its pilgrim constituency, the Hindus. The right policy would have been to acknowledge and act upon the self-evident principle that a Hindu sacred site should be in Hindu custody and adorned with Hindu architecture. Will the secularists insist on the imposition of a Rama temple on the Kaaba site in Mecca, or on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? Of course not, and for the same reason there should not be a mosque on a hill that for centuries has been the main site dedicated to Rama.
Some people were ready to act upon this simple and logical insight. When Rajiv Gandhi had the locks on the Babri Masjid opened, he clearly embarked on a policy of accommodating the Hindus in compensation for (and in proportion with) the plentiful Muslim “appeasement” by his own and previous governments. It was a typical instance of the Congress culture with its compromises and horse-trading. Nothing very noble, but with the virtue of pragmatism. That approach would normally have led to a deal, with the Ayodhya site for the Hindu lobby and some sweeteners for the Muslim lobby, of which package the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was an opener. Indeed not quite noble, but it would have saved a lot of lives and political energy. Today the Rama Janmabhumi temple would have become just one among many uneventful Hindu places of pilgrimage. Come to think of it, that option could still be tried by the present Congress government.
But in 1989-92, that option was thwarted by the offensive of Babri ultras, and by this I don’t mean the warriors for Islam but the conformistic intellectuals shrieking and howling that the contentious building was the last bastion of “secularism”, a matter of high principle, of life and death. Under their fierce calls for “hard secularism”, no administrator dared to reduce the controversy to its true and manageable proportions anymore. Not the Congress, not the various left-populist parties, and not the BJP either. They were all paralysed and consequently bought time all while taking sides against the weaker party, the pro-temple movement with its vacillating and politically incompetent leadership.
And this shows us another sense in which the BJP is politically responsible for the demolition and for its erratic implementation by an unguided crowd. They too took the side of the status-quo against the Hindu demands. The Hindutva rank and file defied its leaders because it felt cheated by them. After the 1991 elections, when the BJP rose to the rank of largest opposition party, the Ayodhya demand was ditched, first mentally, then gradually also in practice. The activists felt that the leaders didn't mean business, that they didn't dare to push for the logical next step, viz. physically replacing the mosque structure (already in use for Hindu worship) with temple architecture. It was clear that the leaders had no clue on how to go about it. As it later turned out, in 1998-2004, even with the mosque gone and the BJP in power, Advani c.s. didn't move a finger towards the construction of the temple. So the ordinary activists had rightly sensed the unwillingness of the leaders to take the movement forward. That is why they took the law into their own hands.
The leaders could have avoided this outcome by charting a political roadmap towards a negotiated temple construction and then staying the course. Instead they tried to give the issue a quiet burial all while still making some increasingly faint pro-temple noises in order to retain their vote-bank. For that hypocrisy, they ought to pay a price. The Liberhan findings are shoddy and biased, but the disgrace now suffered by the BJP leaders and worsened by their denials is well-deserved.
Read more!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Hindus and Jews, India and Israel
One of the most sensational papers at the American Academy of Religion conference in Montreal was Shana Sippy's on Hindu-Jewish religious rapprochement as a corollary of Indian-Israeli military cooperation. A promising alliance whose time has come, bypassing the power of its jaundiced critics in academe.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Narasimha Rao (r.1991-96) lost no time in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel (1992) and, more importantly, replacing the USSR with Israel as India's chief arms supplier. Between India and Israel, weapons have long replaced diamonds as the most important trade good.
Dr. Shana Sippy presented a commercial film shown by the Israeli arms dealers at trade fairs. Daringly crystal-clear. Indian girls were dancing in between upstanding missiles and singing: "I need protection, I need strength" etc. Then a stereotypical Israeli guy hops onto the stage, with a broad smile, gracefully receiving the compliments of the Indian girls: "Safety and protection, security and perfection" etc. The Israelis reportedly congratulate themselves at having "won the Kargil war for India" by sending India weapons tailored to the specific challenges of the Paki occupation of peak terrain.
Then she focused on joint Hindu-Jewish initiatives in the USA and internationally. She acknowledged the strength of this alliance, though clearly begrudging the Hindu community the benefits of any alliance. She tried to muster reasons why Jews should refrain from this alliance: these are not just Hindus but the "Hindu Right"; these are the people who have issued a history textbook praising Hitler (a canard, thoroughly analysed and refuted in the first chapter of my book *Return of the Swastika*); Hindus are idolaters; at least Jews should have demanded that Hindus guarantee the religious rights of the many thousands of Jews who visit India annually (are these rights threatened?!); as a minority, Jews should side with the minorities in India, etc. Her understanding was that the Jews purposely ignore a lot of troubling facts or take them in stride because this alliance is politically so useful to them. On the Hindu side, meanwhile, she saw (quite correctly) an absolute ignorance of specific Jewish agendas.
The joint Hindu-Jewish declaration, earlier this year in Jerusalemn, between Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the chief Ashkenazi Rabbi and some more worthies on both sides, was a natural target of her criticism. She lambasted some of the points the two sides had agreed on, obviously at the Hindu side's insistence:
* the much-maligned swastika is innocent (banal);
* the Aryan Invasion Theory is bunk (totally misplaced, and strange that the Jewish side bothered to agree, but perhaps a way of saying that the much-maligned term "Aryan" is innocent too);
* Hinduism is monotheistic too (questionable, an imposition by a particular faction within the Hindu spectrum);
* Hindu murtipuja is not "idolatry" per Halakhic definition;
* the opposition to the Christian mission, which according to SS is no longer an issue for the Jews (nearly true in Israel in so far as Christian denominations have agreed to stop conversion attempts among Jews, but unchangingly a concern elsewhere when intermarriage mostly means conversion to Christianity or Islam);
* the obviously anti-Islamic rejection of "terrorism".
An orthodox Jewish member of the audience remarked that the meeting would have been impossible without a preliminary agreement between the Rabbi and the Israeli Government. The Israelis are not uptight about separating religion and politics, so this is quite likely. Shana Sippy alleged that the Jerusalem meeting had been sponsored by Rajiv Malhotra, whom she mislabelled as a Hindutva man. After all those years of Hindutva-watching, most supposed experts haven't even noticed the sharp divisions in the spectrum of Hindu activism.
On the whole, though, I was quite impressed with Shana Sippy's presentation. No silly pieties, not too much holy/hollow indignation at Hindutva schemes, not as soporific as so much theological and sociological talks at such conferences, her finger really on the pulse of the Yahudi-Hindu-bhai-bhai scene, and most of all, a truly important and consequential topic.
I refrained from volunteering my own experiences with this alliance, e.g. when in 1993 a Mr. Tiwari of the Washington DC chapter of the VHP took me along on a vsit to the office of the American-Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the spider in the web of the fabled Jewish Lobby. We got an impressive demonstration in some of the AIPAC feats in influencing US Congress decisions. The idea was that Hindu activists would get some training there in the noble art of lobbying. (Not that I've seen them put their new skills to any use since then.)
During the discussion, I learned that this annual panel on "Hinduisms and Judaisms" was from the beginning mistrusted by the AAR, initially because it looked like a joint Hindu-Jewish platform against Christianity, now because it looks like a gang-up against Islam. There is no substance to this, every speaker went out of his way to placate Islam, absolve it of any role in terrorism, and to lambast "Islamophobia" both in India and in the West. Perhaps on Christianity some Jews have taken a firm stand, but certainly no one on the "Hindu" side. In the three years I have attended these sessions, I have never heard a Hindu-bron speaker or an Indologist take as his own any known pro-Hindu (i.c. anti-mission) positions. In this session too, Hindu assertiveness was only present as the whipping-boy.
Read more!
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Narasimha Rao (r.1991-96) lost no time in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel (1992) and, more importantly, replacing the USSR with Israel as India's chief arms supplier. Between India and Israel, weapons have long replaced diamonds as the most important trade good.
Dr. Shana Sippy presented a commercial film shown by the Israeli arms dealers at trade fairs. Daringly crystal-clear. Indian girls were dancing in between upstanding missiles and singing: "I need protection, I need strength" etc. Then a stereotypical Israeli guy hops onto the stage, with a broad smile, gracefully receiving the compliments of the Indian girls: "Safety and protection, security and perfection" etc. The Israelis reportedly congratulate themselves at having "won the Kargil war for India" by sending India weapons tailored to the specific challenges of the Paki occupation of peak terrain.
Then she focused on joint Hindu-Jewish initiatives in the USA and internationally. She acknowledged the strength of this alliance, though clearly begrudging the Hindu community the benefits of any alliance. She tried to muster reasons why Jews should refrain from this alliance: these are not just Hindus but the "Hindu Right"; these are the people who have issued a history textbook praising Hitler (a canard, thoroughly analysed and refuted in the first chapter of my book *Return of the Swastika*); Hindus are idolaters; at least Jews should have demanded that Hindus guarantee the religious rights of the many thousands of Jews who visit India annually (are these rights threatened?!); as a minority, Jews should side with the minorities in India, etc. Her understanding was that the Jews purposely ignore a lot of troubling facts or take them in stride because this alliance is politically so useful to them. On the Hindu side, meanwhile, she saw (quite correctly) an absolute ignorance of specific Jewish agendas.
The joint Hindu-Jewish declaration, earlier this year in Jerusalemn, between Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the chief Ashkenazi Rabbi and some more worthies on both sides, was a natural target of her criticism. She lambasted some of the points the two sides had agreed on, obviously at the Hindu side's insistence:
* the much-maligned swastika is innocent (banal);
* the Aryan Invasion Theory is bunk (totally misplaced, and strange that the Jewish side bothered to agree, but perhaps a way of saying that the much-maligned term "Aryan" is innocent too);
* Hinduism is monotheistic too (questionable, an imposition by a particular faction within the Hindu spectrum);
* Hindu murtipuja is not "idolatry" per Halakhic definition;
* the opposition to the Christian mission, which according to SS is no longer an issue for the Jews (nearly true in Israel in so far as Christian denominations have agreed to stop conversion attempts among Jews, but unchangingly a concern elsewhere when intermarriage mostly means conversion to Christianity or Islam);
* the obviously anti-Islamic rejection of "terrorism".
An orthodox Jewish member of the audience remarked that the meeting would have been impossible without a preliminary agreement between the Rabbi and the Israeli Government. The Israelis are not uptight about separating religion and politics, so this is quite likely. Shana Sippy alleged that the Jerusalem meeting had been sponsored by Rajiv Malhotra, whom she mislabelled as a Hindutva man. After all those years of Hindutva-watching, most supposed experts haven't even noticed the sharp divisions in the spectrum of Hindu activism.
On the whole, though, I was quite impressed with Shana Sippy's presentation. No silly pieties, not too much holy/hollow indignation at Hindutva schemes, not as soporific as so much theological and sociological talks at such conferences, her finger really on the pulse of the Yahudi-Hindu-bhai-bhai scene, and most of all, a truly important and consequential topic.
I refrained from volunteering my own experiences with this alliance, e.g. when in 1993 a Mr. Tiwari of the Washington DC chapter of the VHP took me along on a vsit to the office of the American-Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the spider in the web of the fabled Jewish Lobby. We got an impressive demonstration in some of the AIPAC feats in influencing US Congress decisions. The idea was that Hindu activists would get some training there in the noble art of lobbying. (Not that I've seen them put their new skills to any use since then.)
During the discussion, I learned that this annual panel on "Hinduisms and Judaisms" was from the beginning mistrusted by the AAR, initially because it looked like a joint Hindu-Jewish platform against Christianity, now because it looks like a gang-up against Islam. There is no substance to this, every speaker went out of his way to placate Islam, absolve it of any role in terrorism, and to lambast "Islamophobia" both in India and in the West. Perhaps on Christianity some Jews have taken a firm stand, but certainly no one on the "Hindu" side. In the three years I have attended these sessions, I have never heard a Hindu-bron speaker or an Indologist take as his own any known pro-Hindu (i.c. anti-mission) positions. In this session too, Hindu assertiveness was only present as the whipping-boy.
Read more!
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
The output of the Mumbai film industry largely consists of superficial plots with light-hearted music and little contact with pressing social and political realities. By contrast, Danny Boyle's movie Slumdog Millionaire, set in Mumbai, is not that innocent.
When people from the so-called Third World complain about lingering colonial attitudes, I am inclined to yawn, knowing the self-hate and the guilt-trip of Europeans and Euro-Americans that have replaced their colonial-age pride. All these anti-colonial rants sound so anachronistic. But then I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire, about a young man who can answer the questions of a TV quiz thanks to his experiences as a slum kid.
About this Oscar-winning movie, the following points have been made on Hindu forums, and by Rajiv Malhotra at last week's Montréal DANAM conference, and partly also by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, the very author of the book on which the movie was based:
1) The poverty and neglect in Mumbai are a bit overdone in the movie. In the book, protagonist Jamal meets his heroine Latika not as a child thrown out into the rain then to live on the streets, but as a teenager living in an apartment, after having spent his childhood in a Catholic orphanage. Likewise, the cruelty is a bit overdone, as with the gory scene of a child blinded in order to make it more lucrative as a beggar. Flemish-born sister Jeanne Devos, founder of a trade-union for house personnel in Mumbai, commented that in her decades of work among the underclass there, she has heard stories of children thus mutilated, but has so far never come across an actual instance. Now that India is projecting a less miserable, more modern and confident image of itself, this movie revives the Mother-Teresa image of India as the ultimate in material and human misery and in heartless exploitation of fellow human beings. If you have seen the movie, you will have noticed that, as French India-watcher François Gautier puts it, "Slumdog literally defecates on India from the first frame".
2) The book's protagonist is a transreligious pan-Indian kid, Rama Mohammed Thomas (the commonest names for Hindus, Muslims c.q. Indian Christians), abandoned as an infant in a church by his mother, whose religion remains unknown. The movie turns him into a Muslim kid, Jamal, orphaned by a Hindu mob killing his mother in a pogrom in the name of Rama. The insertion of a quiz question about "the weapon with which the Hindu god Rama is depicted" (a total non-starter as quiz question in India, because everybody knows the answer: a bow) and Jamal's memory of seeing a boy with hate-filled eyes enacting Rama-with-bow at the start of the anti-Muslim pogrom, serve to give body to the mediatic fiction of India as a land where an overbearing Hindu majority terrorizes hapless fearful minorities.
The effect is to drive the nail deeper into the coffin of Hinduism's former reputation for tolerance and confirm its newly crafted image as hateful and a threat to non-Hindus. As François Gautier has observed: "Can there be a more blatant lie? Hinduism has given refuge throughout the ages to those who were persecuted at home: the Christians of Syria, the Parsis, Armenians, the Jews of Jerusalem, and today the Tibetans, allowing them all to practise their religion freely."
We may add that Hindus in Kerala also permitted Muslims to settle and to marry native girls, hence their name Mapilla-s or Moplahs, "sons-in-law". This hospitality was repaid with military conquest by other Muslims and with large-scale anti-Hindu pogroms in the 1920s by the Moplahs themselves. It made even Mahatma Gandhi say that Muslims are "bullies" while Hindus are "cowards"; but in the movie, the Muslims are poor hapless victims of Hindu bullying. That is how Western interests like to imagine India, among other reasons because it justifies their anti-India position in the Cold War (as during the Bangladesh war of 1971) and its support to Pakistan even now. It also allows them to take a pro-Muslim stand and to depict Muslims as victims rather than terrorists, which looks progressive in the West's internal multiculturalism debate. For the US, pro-Muslim positions in South Asia (like in the Balkans or in the question of Turkey's EU accession) serve to appease Muslim anger at the American support to Israel in the Palestinian question.
The anti-Hindu twists in the movie form the typical second phase of a propaganda/disinformation campaign. After the actual meessage is hammered in by specialists, i.c. India-watchers misreporting on India's religious conflict invariably shifting the blame to the Hindu side, it is fixated in popular consciousness by repeating it not as a news item but as a piece of received wisdom, common knowledge. This is done not through thematic channels (i.e. papers and reports on India's religious conflict) but through general channels moulding opinion indirectly, such as TV shows, women's magazines, tourist guidebooks and others related only tangentially to the theme. In the first phase there is still a risk of getting countered by better-informed and less partisan specialists; but in the second, propagandists can work on the masses ignorant of the specifics, i.c. the Western cinema audience whose knowledge of India's religio-politics is hazy at best.
3) Jamal is handed to the police for torture on the pretext that he must have cheated, for how else could a "slumdog" know all the answers? In the book, this is done by an American visiting India in connection with the legal rights to the quiz format. In the movie, it is done by the Indian quiz master, who comes across as a lurid incarnation of the well-to-do Indians' smug and callous mistreatment of their poorer fellow-countrymen. Likewise, the movie's American tourists in Agra are an incarnation of sanity and benevolence contrasting with the barbarity of the ambient Indian society. This is a throwback to colonial-age stereotypes about India as a backward society in dire need of benevolent Western intervention.
4) No surprise then that according to a mastermind of the Christian mission, Joseph D'Souza, the movie has caused a windfall in donations for the mission's work in India. Director Danny Boyle has declared that as a boy he had wanted to become a missionary, and that the same spirit still animates him.
5) Finally, a detail that may have escaped the notice of Western critics: successful as the English movie was in the West and among the anglicized Indian elite, its Hindi version has flopped. As Rajiv Malhotra has testified: when he and some friends wanted to see the movie in Delhi, the queue for the English version was very long, so they moved to the hall where the Hindi version was showing and there they could go in without waiting. This follows a pattern: Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and other Indian writers produce English novels for the Western and westernized-Indian audience, get the Man Booker prize and other Western awards, but leave the Indian public cold. This is not because Indians are xenophobic and averse to novelties. Thus, the Western TV quiz format Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire? has indeed caught on mightily among the Indian TV viewers in vernacular versions like Kaun Banega Krorpati? They use the foreign-borrowed format and turn it into a game of their own, filling it in with the native Indian genius. But novels like Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things or now the movie Slumdog Millionnaire are rightly mistrusted as products designed to curry favour with non- and anti-Indian audiences by disparaging India.
Read more!
When people from the so-called Third World complain about lingering colonial attitudes, I am inclined to yawn, knowing the self-hate and the guilt-trip of Europeans and Euro-Americans that have replaced their colonial-age pride. All these anti-colonial rants sound so anachronistic. But then I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire, about a young man who can answer the questions of a TV quiz thanks to his experiences as a slum kid.
About this Oscar-winning movie, the following points have been made on Hindu forums, and by Rajiv Malhotra at last week's Montréal DANAM conference, and partly also by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, the very author of the book on which the movie was based:
1) The poverty and neglect in Mumbai are a bit overdone in the movie. In the book, protagonist Jamal meets his heroine Latika not as a child thrown out into the rain then to live on the streets, but as a teenager living in an apartment, after having spent his childhood in a Catholic orphanage. Likewise, the cruelty is a bit overdone, as with the gory scene of a child blinded in order to make it more lucrative as a beggar. Flemish-born sister Jeanne Devos, founder of a trade-union for house personnel in Mumbai, commented that in her decades of work among the underclass there, she has heard stories of children thus mutilated, but has so far never come across an actual instance. Now that India is projecting a less miserable, more modern and confident image of itself, this movie revives the Mother-Teresa image of India as the ultimate in material and human misery and in heartless exploitation of fellow human beings. If you have seen the movie, you will have noticed that, as French India-watcher François Gautier puts it, "Slumdog literally defecates on India from the first frame".
2) The book's protagonist is a transreligious pan-Indian kid, Rama Mohammed Thomas (the commonest names for Hindus, Muslims c.q. Indian Christians), abandoned as an infant in a church by his mother, whose religion remains unknown. The movie turns him into a Muslim kid, Jamal, orphaned by a Hindu mob killing his mother in a pogrom in the name of Rama. The insertion of a quiz question about "the weapon with which the Hindu god Rama is depicted" (a total non-starter as quiz question in India, because everybody knows the answer: a bow) and Jamal's memory of seeing a boy with hate-filled eyes enacting Rama-with-bow at the start of the anti-Muslim pogrom, serve to give body to the mediatic fiction of India as a land where an overbearing Hindu majority terrorizes hapless fearful minorities.
The effect is to drive the nail deeper into the coffin of Hinduism's former reputation for tolerance and confirm its newly crafted image as hateful and a threat to non-Hindus. As François Gautier has observed: "Can there be a more blatant lie? Hinduism has given refuge throughout the ages to those who were persecuted at home: the Christians of Syria, the Parsis, Armenians, the Jews of Jerusalem, and today the Tibetans, allowing them all to practise their religion freely."
We may add that Hindus in Kerala also permitted Muslims to settle and to marry native girls, hence their name Mapilla-s or Moplahs, "sons-in-law". This hospitality was repaid with military conquest by other Muslims and with large-scale anti-Hindu pogroms in the 1920s by the Moplahs themselves. It made even Mahatma Gandhi say that Muslims are "bullies" while Hindus are "cowards"; but in the movie, the Muslims are poor hapless victims of Hindu bullying. That is how Western interests like to imagine India, among other reasons because it justifies their anti-India position in the Cold War (as during the Bangladesh war of 1971) and its support to Pakistan even now. It also allows them to take a pro-Muslim stand and to depict Muslims as victims rather than terrorists, which looks progressive in the West's internal multiculturalism debate. For the US, pro-Muslim positions in South Asia (like in the Balkans or in the question of Turkey's EU accession) serve to appease Muslim anger at the American support to Israel in the Palestinian question.
The anti-Hindu twists in the movie form the typical second phase of a propaganda/disinformation campaign. After the actual meessage is hammered in by specialists, i.c. India-watchers misreporting on India's religious conflict invariably shifting the blame to the Hindu side, it is fixated in popular consciousness by repeating it not as a news item but as a piece of received wisdom, common knowledge. This is done not through thematic channels (i.e. papers and reports on India's religious conflict) but through general channels moulding opinion indirectly, such as TV shows, women's magazines, tourist guidebooks and others related only tangentially to the theme. In the first phase there is still a risk of getting countered by better-informed and less partisan specialists; but in the second, propagandists can work on the masses ignorant of the specifics, i.c. the Western cinema audience whose knowledge of India's religio-politics is hazy at best.
3) Jamal is handed to the police for torture on the pretext that he must have cheated, for how else could a "slumdog" know all the answers? In the book, this is done by an American visiting India in connection with the legal rights to the quiz format. In the movie, it is done by the Indian quiz master, who comes across as a lurid incarnation of the well-to-do Indians' smug and callous mistreatment of their poorer fellow-countrymen. Likewise, the movie's American tourists in Agra are an incarnation of sanity and benevolence contrasting with the barbarity of the ambient Indian society. This is a throwback to colonial-age stereotypes about India as a backward society in dire need of benevolent Western intervention.
4) No surprise then that according to a mastermind of the Christian mission, Joseph D'Souza, the movie has caused a windfall in donations for the mission's work in India. Director Danny Boyle has declared that as a boy he had wanted to become a missionary, and that the same spirit still animates him.
5) Finally, a detail that may have escaped the notice of Western critics: successful as the English movie was in the West and among the anglicized Indian elite, its Hindi version has flopped. As Rajiv Malhotra has testified: when he and some friends wanted to see the movie in Delhi, the queue for the English version was very long, so they moved to the hall where the Hindi version was showing and there they could go in without waiting. This follows a pattern: Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and other Indian writers produce English novels for the Western and westernized-Indian audience, get the Man Booker prize and other Western awards, but leave the Indian public cold. This is not because Indians are xenophobic and averse to novelties. Thus, the Western TV quiz format Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire? has indeed caught on mightily among the Indian TV viewers in vernacular versions like Kaun Banega Krorpati? They use the foreign-borrowed format and turn it into a game of their own, filling it in with the native Indian genius. But novels like Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things or now the movie Slumdog Millionnaire are rightly mistrusted as products designed to curry favour with non- and anti-Indian audiences by disparaging India.
Read more!
Impressions from Montréal on Remembrance Day
Canada looks like one of the most secure parts of the world, a cornerstone that isn't swayed by the troubles rocking ordinary countries. I'm touching wood as I write this, for I really wish the country and its people(s) all the best after the good time I just had there. Here only a few impressions.
Except for the inside of some conference halls in Toronto and the Niagara Falls, I had never seen anything of Canada. Now I just got back home from a week in Montréal, where I attended the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion and of the Dharma Association of North America. This amazing megalopolis seems to combine the best of Europe and America. It is safe and relaxed and full of activity, and seems to be a rare counterargument against the now-widespread feeling that multiculturalism is a hopeless dead end. The numerous Haitian taxi-drivers and service personnel are the most visible face of Québec's policy of attracting immigrants from French-speaking countries. Which implies that as a citizen of Belgium and fluent in French, I could make a similar move: walk on water to Acadia!
The conference was a major affair, an intense concatenation of numerous parallel and successive sessions with thousands of scholars attending. Apart from the actual academic brainstorming, there were some entertaining talks by star intellectuals, esp. Tariq Ramadan (barred from last year's conference in Chicago when the US authorities denied him a visa) and Slavoj Zizek. The congress centre was in the Chinese neighbourhood and could be reached through underground routes from my hotel, which was located next to the Rue Sainte-Cathérine. The latter is referred to in a well-known pop song, Complainte pour Sainte-Cathérine by Kate & Anna McGarrigle: "Moi je me promène sous Sainte-Cathérine, j'profite de la chaleur du métro... quand il fait trente en d'sous d'zéro" ("I'm walking underneath Sainte-Cathérine, profiting from the underground's warmth... when it's 30 centigrade below zero"). No need for the underground, though: after a few freezing days, temperature jumped up to 18° and stayed there till after I left: the fabled Indian summer, "une saison qui n'existe que dans le nord de l'Amérique". So I got a quick introduction to all I need to know for bluffing my way through a Canada conversation.
It was easy enough for me to curry favour with the Québecois, standing out between all those Americans as the only one to address them in French. They especially liked my assurance that in Belgium, everyone supports their cause: the Walloons because they are French-speaking, the Flemish because they side with the underdog. I'm not sure, though, that Québecois visiting Brussels would side with the Flemish underdog.
The really touching discovery for me was how serious Canadians take Remembrance Day. From a week before, most of them wear poppies reminding of Flanders' Fields. The author of the WW1 poem In Flanders' fields, John McCrae, was indeed Canadian. By contrast, in the country where it all happened, and where the poppies still grow on Canadian soldiers' graves, row on row, interest is limited to strictly official ceremonies without popular resonance. For Anglo-Saxons, it is a day to commemorate sacrifice and victory, for us a day to contemplate the senseless pity of war. That is why the Yser Tower, the Flemish war monument in WW1 site Diksmuide, carries the caption No More War, a testimony to post-war pacifist zeal rather than to the war psychology of triumphalism c.q. vengeance.
Only the quaint minority of Belgian royalists try to make 11 November a victory celebration, but the fact is that the then Belgian king kept his army out of the great offensives, until 1918 merely standing guard behind the flooded Yser plain that prevented further German advances, then only releasing his forces for the final American-backed offensive (not to mention his secret attempt to reach a separate peace with the Kaiser). That's why Albert 1, our "king-soldier", was so popular with his soldiers: he didn't ask them to die for their country. By contrast, the Commonwealth, that was only dragged into the war because our king's cousin on the British throne wouldn't tolerate Germany's "rape of Belgium", intended to drive the Germans back, and in this endeavour sacrificed hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives in futile offensives. Logical then that their commemoration of all those wasted heroes is far more serious than the artifical patriotic hoompapa of the Belgian royalists.
Nonetheless, for me it was a good time of the year to introduce myself as a Fleming, born and raised moreover in Leuven/Louvain. That was WW1's martyr town where the university library was destroyed by German fire, in Commonwealth propaganda the symbol of the destruction of civilization by the "furor Teutonicus". To Canadians, a Flemish visitor must look like those poppies invoked on Remembrance Day celebrations: a sign of life living on after the slaughter.
Read more!
Except for the inside of some conference halls in Toronto and the Niagara Falls, I had never seen anything of Canada. Now I just got back home from a week in Montréal, where I attended the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion and of the Dharma Association of North America. This amazing megalopolis seems to combine the best of Europe and America. It is safe and relaxed and full of activity, and seems to be a rare counterargument against the now-widespread feeling that multiculturalism is a hopeless dead end. The numerous Haitian taxi-drivers and service personnel are the most visible face of Québec's policy of attracting immigrants from French-speaking countries. Which implies that as a citizen of Belgium and fluent in French, I could make a similar move: walk on water to Acadia!
The conference was a major affair, an intense concatenation of numerous parallel and successive sessions with thousands of scholars attending. Apart from the actual academic brainstorming, there were some entertaining talks by star intellectuals, esp. Tariq Ramadan (barred from last year's conference in Chicago when the US authorities denied him a visa) and Slavoj Zizek. The congress centre was in the Chinese neighbourhood and could be reached through underground routes from my hotel, which was located next to the Rue Sainte-Cathérine. The latter is referred to in a well-known pop song, Complainte pour Sainte-Cathérine by Kate & Anna McGarrigle: "Moi je me promène sous Sainte-Cathérine, j'profite de la chaleur du métro... quand il fait trente en d'sous d'zéro" ("I'm walking underneath Sainte-Cathérine, profiting from the underground's warmth... when it's 30 centigrade below zero"). No need for the underground, though: after a few freezing days, temperature jumped up to 18° and stayed there till after I left: the fabled Indian summer, "une saison qui n'existe que dans le nord de l'Amérique". So I got a quick introduction to all I need to know for bluffing my way through a Canada conversation.
It was easy enough for me to curry favour with the Québecois, standing out between all those Americans as the only one to address them in French. They especially liked my assurance that in Belgium, everyone supports their cause: the Walloons because they are French-speaking, the Flemish because they side with the underdog. I'm not sure, though, that Québecois visiting Brussels would side with the Flemish underdog.
The really touching discovery for me was how serious Canadians take Remembrance Day. From a week before, most of them wear poppies reminding of Flanders' Fields. The author of the WW1 poem In Flanders' fields, John McCrae, was indeed Canadian. By contrast, in the country where it all happened, and where the poppies still grow on Canadian soldiers' graves, row on row, interest is limited to strictly official ceremonies without popular resonance. For Anglo-Saxons, it is a day to commemorate sacrifice and victory, for us a day to contemplate the senseless pity of war. That is why the Yser Tower, the Flemish war monument in WW1 site Diksmuide, carries the caption No More War, a testimony to post-war pacifist zeal rather than to the war psychology of triumphalism c.q. vengeance.
Only the quaint minority of Belgian royalists try to make 11 November a victory celebration, but the fact is that the then Belgian king kept his army out of the great offensives, until 1918 merely standing guard behind the flooded Yser plain that prevented further German advances, then only releasing his forces for the final American-backed offensive (not to mention his secret attempt to reach a separate peace with the Kaiser). That's why Albert 1, our "king-soldier", was so popular with his soldiers: he didn't ask them to die for their country. By contrast, the Commonwealth, that was only dragged into the war because our king's cousin on the British throne wouldn't tolerate Germany's "rape of Belgium", intended to drive the Germans back, and in this endeavour sacrificed hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives in futile offensives. Logical then that their commemoration of all those wasted heroes is far more serious than the artifical patriotic hoompapa of the Belgian royalists.
Nonetheless, for me it was a good time of the year to introduce myself as a Fleming, born and raised moreover in Leuven/Louvain. That was WW1's martyr town where the university library was destroyed by German fire, in Commonwealth propaganda the symbol of the destruction of civilization by the "furor Teutonicus". To Canadians, a Flemish visitor must look like those poppies invoked on Remembrance Day celebrations: a sign of life living on after the slaughter.
Read more!
Thursday, November 5, 2009
A Fleming for EU president
The expected choice of Herman Van Rompuy as first-ever "EU president" would end his still-brief term as Belgian Prime Minister, a job he never wanted in the first place. It would also reward the Belgian state and the Flemish nation for their pioneering role in the story of Europe's unification.
Herman Van Rompuy, currently Prime Minister of Belgium, is rumoured to be the big EU countries' favourite choice as first-ever "EU president". He is known to be diplomatic, reasonable to the point of being pliable, to speak four languages fluently including French (a must for France, and an argument against Dutch candidate Jan-Peter Balkenende), and to be a leading member of Europe's leading political family, the Christian-Democrats. I would applaud his selection for the job.
With the capitalized "Van" (meaning "of", "from"), insiders will immediately recognize his name as Flemish: Frenchmen/Walloons would have "de" or "De", while Dutchmen would have the "van" with small v, which is disallowed in Belgium, on analogy of the similarly common prefix "de" ("the"), which if non-capitalized could be mistaken for the French nobility prefix "de". Unlike the numerous Walloons with Flemish names, indicating the post-Napoleonic Flemish ancestry that burdens one third of them, this one is a real Fleming. At least, he is from a Dutch-speaking family all while being Belgian, which is the definition of a Fleming, but his enthusiasm for the Flemish cause against Francophone dominance is lukewarm at best. In that respect, he is a real Belgian.
Flemish Christian-Democrats like him have always been inclined to compromise and half-heartedness, even proverbially so, and Herman even more than most. So, it would be quite misplaced to wave banners on account of anything achieved by or associated with him. But a moderate note of satisfaction would be appropriate on the hoped-for occasion of his promotion to the post of EU figurehead.
As a Fleming, I think it would be entirely right and just if a Fleming were to lead a long chain of future presidents of a glorious European Union. If George Washington's example is anything to go by, "Van Rompuy" may once outdo "Waterloo" as the best-known Flemish name. From its inception, the European Community, now Union, has never had more loyal supporters than us. We can also take credit for one of the EU's institutional multilinguism, one of its finest traits, though to outsiders one of its most incomprehensible (e.g. Kishore Mehboobani in a recent interview extolling the ASEAN's choice of English as its sole working language and lambasting the EU alternative). The story is as follows.
When the first six-nation European associations were founded in the fifties, a decision had to be made on their working language. Everybody expected it would be French, the official language of France, the dominant language of Belgium and also official language in Luxemburg. The Dutch in those days still still learned French in school, they couldn't think of a reason to object. Germany and Italy were so bruised from the war that they were in no position to take positions that might be considered nationalistic. There was no one left to object except the Flemish element in Belgium, a numerical majority but politically the underdog. When they proposed linguistic equality between the official languages of all the member states, no one could object to the holy principle of equality, so multilinguism carried the day.
As new members joined the Union, one after another their official languages gained the same status in the EU institutions. This led to an unwieldy translation bureaucracy, a small price to pay for upholding such a lofty principle. Jobs for the boys, om condition that they are bilingual in, say, Latvian-Maltese or Irish-Slovak. In practice, the use of the smaller languages is limited, but there is still a plurality French-German-English even for everyday working purposes. This fits the EU's guiding motto of "unity in diversity".
Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, we can now say that the French, or the Francophones, missed the opportunity of a lifetime when they gave in to the Flemish demand. Suppose they had insisted on having French as the sole EU official language. The Flemish would have ended up giving in, they always do, and French would have regained its waning importance with every institutional and territorial expansion of the EU. Even the UK would have accepted it; when it joined in 1973, British officials for the European institutions were handpicked for knowledge of French. In the 1990s, all the ambitious young people in Central Europe whose countries prepared for accession would have taken up studying French, the language of the new European empire. This in turn would have encouraged outsiders (say, Kishore Mehboobani) to study French once more. The imperial dream of Louis XIV and Napoleon would have been fulfilled after all, at least at the (to the French) all-important level of language.
But in the fifties, nobody foresaw that the little committees co-ordinating the coal and steel industries of six war-worn countries would expand to become the administration of a nearly continent-spanning superstate. So the Flemings could get away with their multilingual alternative for the EU's governance. Good for Europe.
Read more!
Herman Van Rompuy, currently Prime Minister of Belgium, is rumoured to be the big EU countries' favourite choice as first-ever "EU president". He is known to be diplomatic, reasonable to the point of being pliable, to speak four languages fluently including French (a must for France, and an argument against Dutch candidate Jan-Peter Balkenende), and to be a leading member of Europe's leading political family, the Christian-Democrats. I would applaud his selection for the job.
With the capitalized "Van" (meaning "of", "from"), insiders will immediately recognize his name as Flemish: Frenchmen/Walloons would have "de" or "De", while Dutchmen would have the "van" with small v, which is disallowed in Belgium, on analogy of the similarly common prefix "de" ("the"), which if non-capitalized could be mistaken for the French nobility prefix "de". Unlike the numerous Walloons with Flemish names, indicating the post-Napoleonic Flemish ancestry that burdens one third of them, this one is a real Fleming. At least, he is from a Dutch-speaking family all while being Belgian, which is the definition of a Fleming, but his enthusiasm for the Flemish cause against Francophone dominance is lukewarm at best. In that respect, he is a real Belgian.
Flemish Christian-Democrats like him have always been inclined to compromise and half-heartedness, even proverbially so, and Herman even more than most. So, it would be quite misplaced to wave banners on account of anything achieved by or associated with him. But a moderate note of satisfaction would be appropriate on the hoped-for occasion of his promotion to the post of EU figurehead.
As a Fleming, I think it would be entirely right and just if a Fleming were to lead a long chain of future presidents of a glorious European Union. If George Washington's example is anything to go by, "Van Rompuy" may once outdo "Waterloo" as the best-known Flemish name. From its inception, the European Community, now Union, has never had more loyal supporters than us. We can also take credit for one of the EU's institutional multilinguism, one of its finest traits, though to outsiders one of its most incomprehensible (e.g. Kishore Mehboobani in a recent interview extolling the ASEAN's choice of English as its sole working language and lambasting the EU alternative). The story is as follows.
When the first six-nation European associations were founded in the fifties, a decision had to be made on their working language. Everybody expected it would be French, the official language of France, the dominant language of Belgium and also official language in Luxemburg. The Dutch in those days still still learned French in school, they couldn't think of a reason to object. Germany and Italy were so bruised from the war that they were in no position to take positions that might be considered nationalistic. There was no one left to object except the Flemish element in Belgium, a numerical majority but politically the underdog. When they proposed linguistic equality between the official languages of all the member states, no one could object to the holy principle of equality, so multilinguism carried the day.
As new members joined the Union, one after another their official languages gained the same status in the EU institutions. This led to an unwieldy translation bureaucracy, a small price to pay for upholding such a lofty principle. Jobs for the boys, om condition that they are bilingual in, say, Latvian-Maltese or Irish-Slovak. In practice, the use of the smaller languages is limited, but there is still a plurality French-German-English even for everyday working purposes. This fits the EU's guiding motto of "unity in diversity".
Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, we can now say that the French, or the Francophones, missed the opportunity of a lifetime when they gave in to the Flemish demand. Suppose they had insisted on having French as the sole EU official language. The Flemish would have ended up giving in, they always do, and French would have regained its waning importance with every institutional and territorial expansion of the EU. Even the UK would have accepted it; when it joined in 1973, British officials for the European institutions were handpicked for knowledge of French. In the 1990s, all the ambitious young people in Central Europe whose countries prepared for accession would have taken up studying French, the language of the new European empire. This in turn would have encouraged outsiders (say, Kishore Mehboobani) to study French once more. The imperial dream of Louis XIV and Napoleon would have been fulfilled after all, at least at the (to the French) all-important level of language.
But in the fifties, nobody foresaw that the little committees co-ordinating the coal and steel industries of six war-worn countries would expand to become the administration of a nearly continent-spanning superstate. So the Flemings could get away with their multilingual alternative for the EU's governance. Good for Europe.
Read more!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
