Kerala: The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part III

WWII A Nazi propaganda poster. In English: “Marxism is the guardian angel of capitalism.” his file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Dontworryifixedit.

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Pointless War #3: The War on “Bourgeois” Liberty and Democracy

Finally, consider liberty-protecting electoral democracy.  Over in these “Western” parts we adore liberty-protecting electoral democracy, of course.  But other world players have considered it so evil that Der Fuhrers, Dear Leaders, Big Brothers, Generalissimos, Chairmans and Commandantes have all felt obliged to smash and destroy it with totalitarian enslavement, sometimes garnished with genocide.  Though their methods may have seemed harsh, these figures imagined they were merely breaking the eggs necessary to make beautiful, radiant omelets, like, say a thousand-year Reich of Righteousness from the fascist/Nazi side, or True Democracy from the totalitarian communist side (“democracy” embodied in obsequious groveling obedience to The Party).  In the totalitarian view, legally-protected liberty and the electoral-parliamentary forms of democracy were the eggs that had to be smashed in order to prevent them from poisoning people’s minds away from these utopian projects.  Totalitarians feared that “Western”-style individual liberty and electoral parliamentary democracy would turn the precious volk into capitalists, selfish individualists, bourgeois liberals and rejectors of civilization and sublimity.

But Kerala defies both forms of totalitarian genocidal expectations by being a liberty-protecting, parliamentary democratic kind of place where communism flourishes politically and religion flourishes culturally.  Kerala has hammer and sickle flags flying all over.  It also bills itself as “God’s own country,” with ordinary people praying, God-believing and religious service-attending as far as the eye can see.  So liberty-protecting electoral democracy in Kerala did not destroy either communism or religion there, as totalitarian genocidals might have imagined it would.

And, for that matter, declining to destroy communism and religion did not lead to the implosion of liberty and democracy in Kerala, as anti-communists and anti-religionists might have imagined it would. If anything, bourgeois “Western” electoral parliamentary democracy and individual liberty have grown stronger in Kerala over the years.  And they’ve been growing in a fertile soil that combines regularly-elected communism with indigenous or indigenized Indian religions.

In another article, “Reconsidering Communism, Religion and Liberty-Protecting Democracy Through the Lens of Kerala” I present detailed empirical evidence that Kerala is a delightfully free and peaceful communism-inclined state, a delightfully free and peaceful religion-inclined culture, and a delightfully free and peaceful liberty-protecting democratic political entity.  I nevertheless argue that in none of these particulars is Kerala an “exception that proves the rule,” at least not in the usual sense of the phrase.  Kerala is not, in other words, a bright spot for X (X being communism, or religion, or liberty-protecting democracy) that just throws into sharper relief how repulsively evil X usually is by nature.

When avoiding post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacies and other failures to account for confounds, the relevant empirical data points in a surprising direction.  The data suggests that communism, religion and liberty-protecting electoral democracy are all somewhat salutary to peace and freedom and thus are compatible with each other in their most basic, stripped down, core value-grounded forms.  Want to spend another half hour wading through my prose so you can see that data?  Read the article here, and don’t forget to click the links.

Kerala: The The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part II

Unidentified Vietnamese women and children before being killed in the My Lai Massacre.In the public domain. Author: Ronald L. Haeberle

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Pointless War #1: The War on Communism/Socialism/Equality/Human development

Consider the battle against communism.  Communism was supposed to be so evil that stopping it required slaughtering millions of people, developing expensive and expansive programs of government torture and mind control, and terroristically overthrowing multiple democratically-elected or otherwise popular governments throughout the world.  But Kerala is the most communist state in India.  Since 1957 it has regularly elected communists into governance.  These were and are free, contested elections by private ballot, with rights to assembly, protest and dissent constitutionally guaranteed.  And yet (or therefore, or “as luck would have it”) Kerala is also an Indian standout with regard to education and literacy, high life expectancy, low infant and maternal mortality, and high voter turnout.  Other regularly communist-electing states in India also stand out in these regards.  In regions outside India, even places like “totalitarian1” undemocratic communist Cuba and “totalitarian genocidal2” China (communist for four decades, and still ruled by The Party) stand out in human development terms: life expectancy, mortality, and literacy.  Of course questions of voter turnout are moot in both Cuba and China.

Pointless War #2: The War on Terror/Islam/Religion

And consider also religion, the bugaboo of contemporary War on Terror ideology.  The genocidal part of “totalitarian genocidal” China, mentioned above, reflects China’s dictatorial enthusiasm to one-up the US “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) program by murdering and brainwashing Uighur Muslims.  Uighurs hail from Xinjiang, a Western Chinese province that is, not coincidentally, just north of Tibet.  The US CVE program is rooted in an Islam-impugning junk science that China has only been too happy to capitalize on, as part of their longstanding hostility to religion.  The US CVE program reflects the fact that in the post-9/11 political economy and propagandaverse, the US increasingly resembles China.  In our 21st century “War on Terror” culture, religion, especially Islam, is supposed to be so evil that we Americans must eviscerate all our own rights and freedoms, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and wantonly destroy cradles of civilization to stop it.

But in Kerala, religion-including-Islam doesn’t look so bad.  Kerala is about as religious as the rest of India (that is, very religious)—with approximately half of other Indian states being more religious than Kerala and half being less religious.  Kerala is about 52% Hindu, 20% Christian, and 28% Muslim.  This means Kerala has one of the largest proportions of Muslims among the Indian states.  Nevertheless (or therefore, or as luck would have it), in addition to enjoying the human development benefits listed in the previous paragraph, Kerala is also a standout in women’s equality, and the undisputed leader in India with regard to LGBTQ rights, particularly transgender rights.

And various lines of research, many of them cited in an article I co-authored for Religion, Brain and Behavior (“Religion and Oppression”), suggest that in general religion is okay.  Specifically, the core God-worshipping element of religion appears to attenuate oppression and oppression-related prejudices and inclinations to violence.  Religion does not, as War-on-Terror ideologists would claim, cause or exacerbate oppression.  As for the supposed perils of Muslim religiosity, supplementary analyses for the same article suggest that among Muslim majority countries, the more religious their populations are, the freer they are.

Footnotes

1. The word “totalitarian” evokes a sense of the impossibility of normal life due to a total, and often death-threatening, intrusion of the state into all aspects of life.  Cuba and China are more “lapsed totalitarian” in this regard, and their relics of totalitarianism blend into ordinary authoritarianism.  Near-constant fear of the state varies greatly individual by individual and group by group, and “normal life”—with humor, friendship, parties, intellectual discussions, social enjoyment, etc—abounds in both countries.  The ever-present menace of the state often registers as little more than a faint background hum.

2. The word “genocidal” evokes a sense of organized millions-killing mass murder on the scale of the Holocaust.  It can also refer, though, to attempts to exterminate a culture or religion by mostly cultural means like “education”, or sublethal/minimally lethal means like deportation and resettlement.  These attempts are often backed up with only a punctuated drip of state murder, rather than a roaring river thereof.  China is genocidal in this latter respect, though by no means unique—a “soft” genocidal zeitgeist is sweeping countries of various ideological histories in recent years, including India and the US.  The fires of war could turn these relatively soft genocides hard pretty quickly though.

When will they ever learn?

by Kathie MM

I cannot even say those words (“When will they ever learn?”) without Pete Seeger’s ballad, “Where have all the flowers gone,” flooding my brain. We had such optimism in the sixties, despite the vile and catastrophic assassinations of JFK , MLK,, and RFK, such hope that people would study war no more.  But the current era is more bloodthirsty and terrifying than ever as the government, the people behind the government, the arms industry, the NRA, and other war profiteers promote and benefit from deadly weapons and the sacking of lands far from our shores.

As is typical of bullies, those responsible for sending our young men and women to kill civilians (that’s who almost all the victims are) refuse to take responsibility for their devastating assaults on human beings and environments.  If the power brokers learned any lessons from Vietnam, it was how better to cover up dirty deeds and blame their victims for the violence unleashed upon them.

The Sacking of Falujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi (a frequent guest author on Engaging Peace), Richard Hil, and  Donna Mulhearn takes you behind the scenes of a more recent major bloodletting by the U.S. The book  is not only engrossing, but dares to speak truth to power, to describe events as experienced at Falujah not only by the three authors but by dozens of Iraqis who suffered from the second invasion of Iraq and its endlessly deadly aftermath.

Reading this book will not only provide you with hitherto unavailable information about the sacking of Falujah by the US and “Coalition Forces” but also about the events that led up to it—events that the US government is not eager to share or take responsibility for—and the role of that sacking and related events in the rise of ISIS. It will get you thinking about sociocide and urbacide, and information wars. It may also motivate you to think more about our government’s current rhetoric concerning “enemies” in other parts of the world and its threats regarding the selected enemies of today’s regime. You know who the current targets are. Can you ask your Congresspeople to resist complicity?

To view a video of my interview with Ross Caputi about The Sacking of Falujah, go to https://youtu.be/H7KatbFAI6U and send us your comments on this and all engaging peace posts.