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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.
When Uganda decolonized it immediately engaged in ethnic expulsion of 90% of it's businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda
Zimbabwe promptly used literally North Korea trained death squads to commit genocide against the Ndebele as soon as it could.
Algeria promptly ethnically cleansed 10% of it's population upon de-colonization. About 1 million Pied Noir were expelled. No one calls it ethnic cleansing or genocide though, because they were told they had a choice. the choice given to them:
Kenyan independence immediately led the the complete destruction of the Arabs of Zanzibar.
Even Singapore itself was effectively born from ethnic race riots. See the 1964 Race Riots. Plural.
I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.
Could you elaborate more on this point?
tl; dr
epistemic status: Not a Fanon scholar. Pretty much this.
Everything I say is going to be crude but direct. A Fanon-ist would disagree with my characterization, instead opting for language and terms that takes his world view in more gushing tones. Nevertheless I think my characterization is broadly correctly.
Fanon believed colonization had wormed its way into the character and self-conception of every colonized people. That the very ethnic identity of everyone living under colonial rule had altered their morals, values, ethnic self-conception, and ultimately, their own personal psychology. He mixes Marxism, esoteric psychology, and Race/ethnicity and comes up with own model of colonization as psychological totalitarianism. That colonial rule has tainted everything with no escape. So what is to be done? How do you liberate your people and also yourself when you live in a totalitarian system?
You commit acts of violence. You get your whole community together and bomb innocent civilians. You beat up innocent passerby's because they are of the race of your colonial masters. Because there are no innocents. Because they are part of the colonial power structure.
and when you do that you personally rupture yourself away from the Colonial Worldview. Your personal acts of violence emancipate you from the totalitarian thought control of your overlords. All of this from exploding disco's where young people went to dance.
He structures this all in extremely high-falutin terms. terms which are absolute catnip to a certain type of intellectual inclined to give the status of High Cause to what is, on the ground, really just old tribal-brain us vs them hatred. Colonialism is frozen Hegelian dialectic between colonizer and colonized. Violence breaks the frozen system and restarts the dialectic so that the oppressed can restart progress.
So lets compare to Singapore & Zimbabwe
Lee Kuan Yee's first language was English. His grandfather named him Harry. He once had the British Foreign Secretary
Later he visits London and notices
LKY then works tirelessly to work with an incredibly complicated multi-ethnic city-state. But everything is done pragmatically. It's about making sure every community feels like they are being given a fair shake in their city. That not one is exploiting them just because they are small, but also that meritocracy itself isn't being dismantled for the sake of equity. There is a ruthless pragmatism, but never an outlook of resentment.
For Fanon this hard fought public safety & ethnic harmony isn't success. This is total failure. Abdication of the fight for Liberation & Decolonization. Algeria ethnically cleansed itself of 13% of it's population to free itself from European influence/psychology/ways of knowing/epistemics/ethics/etc. Now it has dignity. That's success. Meanwhile LKY has become the colonizer himself. His society is a farcical continuation of colonization by "westernized elites". Only now without the British having to do the heavy work.
In this sense even Zimbabwe is richer than Singapore. Because Zimbabwe has overthrown is colonial superstructure for native rule. It's people might be poorer as a matter of GDP. But they are mentally far richer since, having committed prolonged acts of violence against their colonial masters, they've emancipated their minds from colonial influence.
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