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Kashmir and the eternal motte and bailey of the soyjeet mind
Yesterday, terrorists, muslim terrorists, killed innocent tourists in Kashmir. They asked people their names, checked if they were circumcised or not, to ensure that the people killed were Hindu. The reaction to this news has been predictable. The right wing or the boomer wing wants more state control and will be fine with 24/7 mandatory survellance of every cell phone whilst the online soy left is back to its motte and bailey games. You can check places like /r/librandu, /r/kashmiri and /r/vaushv for takes there where people cannot openly celebrate it, so they have to resort to calling religions bad. "Religions are bad, we must all be atheists". This is thinly veiled, though I am not coming out of my hiatus to link to an unfortunate tragedy or point out logical fallacies.
Kashmir has been unstable since its independence due to being run by a tiny Hindu population and a large Muslim underclass. Indian independence meant that the feudal states would be disbanded and democratic elections would replace the ruling class. This meant death for Kashmiris. The place was on the brink of collapse, only saved by Jamwals, a nearby Rajput clan, literally buying it from the Brits and allowing Kashmiri Pandits breathing space. Both groups are upper caste, the highest two varnas and made up nearly all of the Hindu population of a muslim place.
This bit of history is important to understand recent attacks. Kashmir, at one time, was a place with quite a few Buddhists. Kashmir Shaivism, the local religious sect of Hinduism, was not on bad terms, and plenty did convert, unfortunately post post-Islamic invasions, you saw Muslim populations rise via conversions. The higher caste Hindus there, the Brahmins, the Kashmiri Pandits, were facing active persecution, and the religion itself was nearly dead. Until the State was established.
Jamwals were mercenaries from the neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, and very likely descendants of the same stock as me, as once claimed by the current King. Shaivism and the Kashmiri Pandits were saved, but things would get worse. The largest displacement started in 1991 with the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from Srinagar and since then, they have been living in various parts of the nation, unable to ever go back to Srinagar.
The underclass actively resented the ruling class. Unlike Buddhists, muslims did not like Hinduism and seeing a minority that is responsible for every single thing good about your culture that can whip you at any time did not sit well with them. 1947 offered a break with Pakistan, a nation formed simply to support the rights of Mujeets (muslim pajeets) and quasi socialists like the INC, led by a kashmiri pandit in Nehru being squarely against the Dogra Dynasty. The problem India now faces is that the people who were displaced can never return unless you allows Kashmir to escape the laws of India.
The Indian state is a nanny state, whilst Americans can own guns and even hunt, anything beyond a knife will get you felony charges. Given that the state runs on explicit bioleninism, this meant that Islamic ghettos here become no-go zones. Police officers do not enter these ghettos, and you would find azaan playing in the background in most Indian cities simply because people live in secluded places. Kashmir today is that ghetto, but instead of 5-10 percent of the population, it's closer to 99.
India can never allow its citizens the right to own guns and rule a piece of land with any amount of sovereignty, this act actively delegitimises the state. Having a place next to you where people lead better lives with actual freedom would raise questions no one wants to answer. Kashmir will keep getting worse, the area will get more militarised, the mujeet youth will take up anti hindu activities more as they get less options for the future due to economic collapse and Indian state will intrude furhter into the lives of ordinary citizens.
My own biases are quite apparent. I came to this place a broken man. I was 20, and I was sure that my life would collapse sometime soon. I was able to change my ways this year due to my discovery of Kashmir Shaivism(not a Kashmiri btw). My family itself has personal ties or at least used to have ties with the Dogra Dynasty's current head and also the muslim ruling class and their last popular chief minister, whom I will not name for privacy concerns. The locals will always hate the Hindus, the leftists here do that too, they are just too cowardly to admit that they do too. Motte and Bailey was my favourite slatestarcodex post, helps explain a lot of what I grew up seeing.
In my darker moments, I wonder if "decolonization" in practice is somewhat genocidal. For all the lofty "self governance" rhetoric, there are uncomfortably many examples, of which I'd consider the Subcontinent one (also Palestine, Rwanda, and many others), in which some of the first actions with newfound independence were to start killing and forcibly relocating each other.
Even some places that set out with lofty rhetoric (South Africa) haven't really been able to realize those stated values. I recognize that the colonial powers weren't exactly saints either, so I don't have a better suggestion. Just the sad state of the world. On the other hand, there are success stories: Singapore, for example.
Decolonisation is a weird term. People who use it here remind of the Hindi term dehati, its closest translation would be hick I guess. There is a growing online population of people who want to "decolonise" which means becoming more afghanistan like but still staying liberal lol.
"True decolonisation" here would be like Kashmiris seeing the Hindu rule that civilised the place as evil, hence justifying current acts of violence. South Africa and Zimbabwe have become actively worse economically.
I hate the word because it is used mostly by bioleninists. India cannot "decolonise" unless you have revolutions against the upper castes, as they were here far longer than the Brits, at least that's the bioleninist narrative here.
Muslims obviously can run a civilized-if-not-to-western-preferences society(Iran and the Gulf States clearly qualify), while it is not at all clear that India and Nepal qualify as 'civilized'- and there's no hindu counterfactual.
Hinduism represents the last active strain of Aryan religious beliefs of the Indo Europeans. The place, the people have declined substantially, but you can take a look at Bangladesh and Pakistan or even Afghanistan and see how much worse they are by comparison.
Afghanistan is wracked by multiple decades long wars and governed by lunatics. It’s not clear to me that Bangladesh is worse and it’s unclear that Pakistan is significantly worse, especially not in ways that aren’t just side effects of geography(mountains+third world is a bad combination).
The last civilized society run by an elite with Indo-European religious beliefs was what, Persia in the 600’s? Abrahamaic religions, Confucianism, and communism have all shown they can run a civilized and technological society. It may not be to your or my preferences, but they can. In contrast Indo-European religions have not.
Hindu supremacy is laughably dumb to me. Hindus didn’t rule themselves for centuries before British budgetary constraints came due for a reason. My ancestors stopped practicing Indo-European paganism under king Clovis for a reason. Some beliefs are just better.
Bangaldesh is absolutely worse by every metric.Christianity exists in both Africa and Scandinavian nations the way Islam exists in both Turkey and Nigeria. Is it Islam's fault that Nigeria is bad or the fault of Christianity that ghettos and inner cities cannot be fixed? Leftism itself came out of protestant values, I'm pretty sure nothing like that was ever encouraged by people of the steppe.
India was alright up until early medieval ages. Indo European religions absolutely can and have run societies fine. The decay here is due to the people being too stupid and lacking the characteristics required to abideyby by their religious beliefs. This is in ways inevitable, things peak and decline. The Victorian brits were far more dominant than current ones.
Christian beliefs are just not better, better than Islam but they are just not better. I don't write agaisnt about them because the majority of people here are practicing Christians. Buddhism btw is an offshoot of Hindu values, Buddha was an Indo European man and his worldview exists in plenty of East Asian nations, even ones without explicit confucian values.
Europe did well because of its people, it would have done well had it been Islamic, Jewish or kept it's real faith alive.
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Many pagan societies were at the same level of technological development as their Abrahamic/Confucian contemporaries, though. They weren’t comparatively primitive. They were defeated militarily, yes, but it’s nowhere near as simple as saying that this was because their societies were not able to maintain civilization and technology while the non-pagan ones were.
A huge number of the “conversions” of pagans to Christianity were compelled by military force and just straight-up slaughter and torture. Charlemagne had to fight the brutal thirty-year Saxon Wars to conquer, subjugate, and forcibly convert the pagan Saxons, who were a peer society.
The Northern Crusades were fought in the 12th century to conquer and forcibly convert the pagan Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic people, who had managed to resist Christianization over a thousand years after the birth of Christ. These peoples were not savages living in mud-huts.
The Muslim conquest of the Zoroastrian Persians led to such brutal persecution of those who refused to accept Islamization that they had to flee all the way to the Indian subcontinent, where their modern descendants, the Parsees, are very disproportionately successful and wealthy relative not only to Hindus but also to the Abrahamic Muslims who, in your formulation, should be the ones who are the most successful and civilized.
Abrahamic religions didn’t simply “win in the marketplace of ideas.” Certainly a great number of conversion were sincere! A much larger number of them, though, were made either out of political/economic considerations — leaders wishing to become integrated into the political and financial networks emanating from the Christian Mediterranean — or by force. We didn’t have any opportunity to observe how a pagan society with a European level of human capital would have handled the Industrial Revolution, as they’d all been wiped out hundreds of years prior. The closest example we do have — Japan post-Meiji Restoration — is one of the most successful and civilized industrial societies on earth. I think it’s wildly dishonest to claim that paganism can’t sustain civilization or technology, when we simply have no idea whether or not it could. We have little to no data to work with.
Agree on all points. You see the same religious trains of thoughts in two wildly different places and somehow only the smarter ones are "blessed by god".
Abrahamic faiths, Islam and Christianity work on conversions, devotees having instincts to convert others indirectly or call others demon worshippers are understandable to an extent, they still not make low effort easily disprovable claims that do nothing but seem antagonistic.
The single most harmful strain of social chaos was a result of protestant values in modern leftism which seems to be beyond solutions as of now. Indo European societies existed around ancestor worship, you could never have had a pope equivalent telling people to accept refugees in such a system without the said person losing all relevance overnight.
People had to convert due to violence or at least threats protected by violence the same way many have to abide by crazy laws in our own nations. Modern society is explicitly anti christ and far more technologically sound than the 1800s, so is only leftism capable of sustaining the world's most advanced point times?
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