Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Internet Hindu: Dehumanizing Virtualization

Recall how the Nazis made Jews wear yellow/blue color-coded badge associated with the Star-of-David, and systematically deconstructed the Jewish race and religion - to dehumanize as well as ID them and others like the Roma people, making it much easier for their death squads to implement their final solution without troubling their conscience that they are taking the lives of human beings. Once Operation Barbarossa was launched, the Nazis and Communists fought the most savage battles ever known to mankind, leading to a complete breakdown of dharma. Each side forced the other into cannibalism and acts of extreme depravity and perversion. They were able to achieve this state of mind by completely dehumanizing their opponents. Such methods, once adopted in real life, never fade away.

Fast-forward to India today, and what triggered this post.
India Today carried this article: "Rise of the Cyber Hindu" that is written for one and exactly one purpose: demonize a dharmic, grassroots movement of a heterogenous group of marginalized voices belonging to multiple religions,  Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, from different parts of India and also from different parts of the world, who even before the turn of the century, and much before Narendra Modi became CM of Gujarat, began to go online seeking alternatives to the increasingly virulent anti-Hindu monoculture being promoted in mainstream media literature. Today, we have prominent media persons and powerful politicians who apply eerily similar methods to WW2 Europe: Pin saffron-coded eSwastikas on Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, who go online to ask for their rights as citizens, to virtualize, mock, and denigrate them as "Internet Hindus", etc., projecting a virtual caricature of a group of humans. Once 80% of India is dehumanized, almost exactly like how the Jews and Roma people in Europe, and the  majority native Americans in North America were portrayed by colonizing minority Europeans, and the majority native Africans were targeted by the apartheid minority, it eases the burden on the conscience, paving the way for  the rest of the media, politicians, and even the so-called intellectuals to declare open season on native Indian culture, lives, and rights. Atrocity literature, foundation-sponsored research studies, and error-riddled newspaper articles on caste, cow, dowry, Sati, superstition, are used to reinforce the idea of a trouble-making subhuman, backward species that need to be put back in their place. Cultural genocide and quiet appropriation and digestion of anything useful and valuable in Hinduism becomes acceptable, even desirable. Chota-mota bombs don't hurt cartoons, floods & land-slides won't hurt straw-people. Saffron zombies in a secular video game - made of bits, and can be blown to bits. Easy. .... Dehumanize .. Desensitize .... provoke .... execute .... justify ...

Sagarika Ghose appears to be especially proud of her cleverness in coining "Internet Hindu", and gets upset when she is not credited for it.

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