Take SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives last October (and its counterpart bill in the US Senate, called “Protect IP Act”, PIPA.) They are supposed to protect intellectual property. But opponents to the bills argue that it will have a chilling effect on free speech, that it violates the First Amendment of the US constitution (which guarantees freedom of expression to US citizens and is the first of the Bill of Rights), and that it amounts to internet censorship.

To protest SOPA and PIPA (remember that they are bills and are not yet enacted into law), prominent groups and companies are planning on taking action. Google will have something on their main page; Wikipedia will be off-line for 24 hours on Jan 18th; reddit is going down for 12 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA. That all is going on in the US. What’s going on in India?

India is an interesting case. Like that of the US, the government of India depends on a compliant citizenry: people who do as they are told, and to shut up when they are told to STFU. Of course, this is not all that difficult since a majority of Indians have been brainwashed into the belief that the government is a benevolent agency — mai baap — which hands out goodies to favored groups and therefore has to be obeyed. The trouble is (from the government’s point of view) that some people are not very cooperative and insist on exposing the government’s lies. This simply would not do. These people write stuff and say things that could be damaging to the government’s case.

The government has a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, do something about the “demand side.” If people cannot read and write, they are unlikely to be exposed to the truth. The way is therefore to control the education sector and make it dysfunctional enough that even after more than 60 years post independence, about half a billion Indians are illiterate. Destroying the future of the people just to keep them in the dark is one of the greatest crimes that the governments of India have committed against India. The Congress party has directly and indirectly held the reins of government for around 50 years, and mass illiteracy is one of their enduring legacies.

The Indian government has censored news reports, banned books and movies, and made it illegal for people to discuss current affairs on radio. That’s what I call the “supply side” of the matter: make sure that the supply of information is limited to what the government likes. But then came the new threat: the internet and with it access to the world wide web of information.

As long as the internet was just text based, the government was not too worried. What scared them into action was that the internet became multi-media. Not just text, you could watch videos and listen to a variety of opinions, and you did not have to be literate to do so. That, as you can imagine, put a spanner in the carefully designed works of the government to keep the people uninformed through illiteracy.

So here we are. The country is being run by a bunch of crooks, headed nominally by the most despicably dishonest man, the appointed prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. His master is an Italian woman who rules her minions with an iron hand. Among her hand maidens is one Kapil Sibal, a man who is roundly despised and is perhaps a cretin. Sibal is in charge of internet censorship. He regularly tells internet firms to censor content that will damage the carefully built images of his master and her family.

The Center for Internet & Society has an informative article, “Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen” by Pranesh Prakash (dateline Dec 15, 2011.) Here’s an extended excerpt:

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors

Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for ‘government criticism’. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

‘Self-Regulation’: Undetectable Censorship

Mr. Sibal’s more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to ’self-regulate’ reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is ‘objectionable’ (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google’s Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to ’self-regulate’ user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about ‘transparency’ and ‘dialogue’ only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act

Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal’s latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn’t remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any ‘due process’ or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

So what are we going to do about it? We, if we care, should make sure that Manmohan Singh and his cohorts like Kapil Sibal, and their master the Italian Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, and her puppy are stopped from destroying the nation. Let’s vote them out.

. . . Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal’s strange decision to wade into a needless battle with the chattering classes, a battle that will leave him with a bleeding nose. His claimed intention behind summoning representatives of Google, Yahoo! and other service providers and demanding that all content should be pre-screened to weed out that that which is ‘offensive’ is to preserve law and order.

That’s bunkum. Delhi is abuzz with whispers that certain exalted individuals, whom Mr Sibal describes as “popular politicians”, are not pleased with being rudely caricatured and lampooned. Since most of the lampooning is facilitated by Photoshop, a logical extension of Mr Sibal’s move should be to ban the program from Indian shores. This would be of a piece with what many Arab regimes once tried: Restricting the import and sale of printers as they feared these would be used for printing anti-establishment pamphlets. That could be followed with a ban on smart phones. Technology, after all, is a wrecker of the status quo.

Mrs Indira Gandhi tried to tame the Press during the 1975-77 Emergency. Lowly babus who could barely spell their names were appointed official censors and decided what was fit to print. Some 14 years later, Rajiv Gandhi tried to muzzle the media with his Press Bill but had to scrap it in the face of fierce protests.

We now have this brazen attempt to censor content on the Net, and it’s definitely not propelled by the noble desire to preserve communal amity. Of the 358 ‘requests’ for removal of pages and content received by Google from the Government between January and June this year, only eight pertained to ‘hate speech’, three to ‘pornography’ and one to ‘national security’.

Among the rest, 39 pertained to ‘defamation’, 20 to ‘privacy’ and 14 to ‘impersonation’. A whopping 255 ‘requests’ cited ‘criticism of Government’ as reason for removing content or pages. Google was asked to remove 236 items from Orkut and 19 from YouTube for the same reason.

It’s clear that what the Government is aiming for is political censorship of the Net. By doing so, it is treading the path adopted by China and other tin pot dictatorships. Understandably, the chattering classes are up in arms. And, as I said, a bloody nose awaits Mr Sibal.

Nehru introduced the first amendment to the Indian Constitution — which restricts freedom of expression. His spawn continued to walk along that path. India will never be truly free until the Congress party is given a decent burial.

This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where Sheikhs take a draconian view of Shariah law, that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats.

I’ve spent nearly a year here, on more than a dozen visits since the early days of the war, and that seemed about as preposterous as Iraq could get until I heard about the grocery store in east Baghdad. The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he suggestively arranged his vegetables.

I didn’t believe it at first. Firebombings of liquor stores are common, and I figured there must’ve been one next door. But an Iraqi colleague explained matter-of-factly that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flyer directing groceries how to display their food.

Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might – to the profoundly repressed – suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.

I’ve seen a lot in Iraq that has surprised me. A family living in the guard shack of an abandoned nuclear plant, suffering from what local doctors described as radiation sickness; the bearded head of a bomber, 500 feet from his still flaming vehicle. Sick stuff. But I’ve also been inspired: by a soldier who agreed to an interview with a bullet in his leg; by American military surgeons who operated side by side on an Iraqi policeman and an Iraqi insurgent; and Iraqis who’ve returned to work with us, despite death threats, kidnappings, and slain relatives.

Yet over three years of visits, I’ve never been able to fully appreciate the violent justice there. I’ve heard of a boy in Najaf whose throat was slit for blinding a neighbor’s cow with a rock. I’ve learned a new oxymoron: religious assassins. And I’ve watched friends move repeatedly, to stay ahead of attacks by insurgents. And now, Iraqi’s are dying over goat panties and naughty veggies.

Sick stuff, as Hendren says. And you know what? Kapil Sibal, if he had his way, would drag India down that path. After all, some Muslims in India are sure to find the sight of some vegetables and undiapered goats to be offensive.

(Please do me a favor and not forward this post to Kapil Sibal — it may give him ideas. Thank you.)

Related Post: The Asinine Fatuity of Kapil Sibal.

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal today asked Internet companies to screen alleged derogatory, defamatory and inflammatory content about religious figures and Indian leaders such as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi on the Web.

Officials from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo!, who met the minister, however, refused to make a commitment beyond saying they would look into any specific complaint that was brought to their notice.

Their response is learnt to have upset Sibal greatly — more so because, sources said, a US embassy official called up an additional secretary in his ministry after the meeting to express displeasure over the Indian position.

Kapil Sibal is an idiot because he does not understand that the internet cannot be policed. It’s an open forum and free people tend to express their opinions freely on it. If you don’t like what you see or read on the internet, there is a simple way out: don’t get on the internet.

Kapil Sibal is an idiot because he thinks that his way of looking at the world is the only right way. He is a barbarian who “thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature” (in the words of George Bernard Shaw.) Sibal does not like to see his idols painted in their true pathetic colors and insists that no one see it that way either.

Kapil Sibal is an evil retard. His reaction to the unpalatable truth is like the proverbial Dracula’s reaction to sunlight. He wants to banish the truth because it makes him out to be a sad little man scurrying about doing his master’s bidding.

Kapil Sibal is an ignorant runt. He does not understand that the people of India do have the necessary intelligence and judgment to figure out for themselves what they should read and watch, and what to believe and what to discard. By censoring information, he is treating Indians as they are gullible retards. If Indians do not kick his sorry ass out, they will be confirming his position.

In a more enlightened age, Kapil Sibal would be the laughing stock of the nation. Right now he is the minister in charge of Telecom. That is one of the starkest indications that India is in dire danger of being dragged to the stone ages.

Here’s something related to the matter at hand.

CAIRO: An Islamic cleric residing in Europe said that women should not be close to bananas or cucumbers, in order to avoid any “sexual thoughts.”

The unnamed sheikh, who was featured in an article on el-Senousa news, was quoted saying that if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve.

He said that these fruits and vegetables “resemble the male penis” and hence could arouse women or “make them think of sex.” Bikyamasr.com cannot independently verify the accuracy of the news item at time of writing.

He also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

The sheikh was asked how to “control” women when they are out shopping for groceries and if holding these items at the market would be bad for them. The cleric answered saying this matter is between them and God.

Answering another question about what to do if women in the family like these foods, the sheikh advised the interviewer to take the food and cut it for them in a hidden place so they cannot see it.

The opinion has stirred a storm of irony and denouncement among Muslims online, with hundreds of comments mocking the cleric.

One reader said that these religious “leaders” give Islam “a bad name” and another commented said that he is a “retarded” person and he must quite his post immediately. [Source.]

Kapil Sibal should apply for the job of that mullah. He’s stupid, narrow-minded and allergic to reality. Sibal is fully qualified to get that job.

Related Posts: The topic of freedom of expression has been regularly visited on this blog. See “The Land of Retards and Hypocrites” (Feb 2010) for example. See the “Freedom of Expression” category for more.

Listen: Joseph Lelyveld talking about his book on KQED Forum.

Talking about his painting that he had named “Goddess of Fifteen Minutes of Fame,” Prakash said, “Here, three dangerous ideologies have been depicted in the form of artistic nudes. Chairman Mao represents the power of brute force, Bin Laden represents use of religion for violent acts and Arundhati Roy depicts the morally rudderless intellectuals who keep looking for causes right, left and centre to patronise and constantly remain in media glare.”

Arundhati Roy is a celebrity and definitely not a goddess of 15 minutes of fame. However, she is a damn nuisance, as I complained in last October.

Arundhati Roy is really — how should I put it delicately — an attention whore. Maybe she has a point or maybe she doesn’t. Her vile attacks on India are thinly disguised attacks on Hindus. The UPA, which normally would be allied with her united as they are in their hatred of Hindus, find themselves parting company since she is bringing attention to the disaster that is Kashmir — a disaster that Chacha Nehru created. That is not kosher. So what does the UPA do? Try to throttle her. Same as they do with anyone who speaks out against the vile stupidity of their misgovernance.

I am a free-speech fundamentalist. No one must be silenced. Period. Free speech is non-negotiable. The response to speech has to be more speech. If the principle of freedom of speech has to have any content at all, it must protect the speech of ignorant house-niggers like Arundhati Roy. {Emphasis added.}

I detest Arundhati Roy and pretty much everything that she stands for. But I will oppose anyone who would attempt to shut her up. The principle is simple. It is called the bronze rule: do not do to others what you would not want done to you.

My favorite thinker of the European Enlightenment is Voltaire (1694-1788). He was an advocate of freedom — freedom of speech, of religion, of trade. He said, “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.” (The quote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is frequently mistakenly attributed to him, as the Wiki informs us.)

Getting back to the matter of the cancellation of the art show. The art exhibition managers’ decision to not show the artist’s work is their prerogative. It’s their property and they decide what color to paint their inside walls or which paintings to put up, or whom to admit into their premises. That’s called property rights — also non-negotiable. The artist, according to the Mid-Day report said, “What about my right to freedom of expression?”

The artist misunderstands the principle of freedom of expression. It means that he is free to paint whatever strikes his fancy, but it does not mean that everyone has to exhibit his paintings. Perhaps he is a good painter but in the reason department he scores very poorly.

Freedom of expression, to beat a dead horse, is my right to write whatever I want. But if the New York Times refuses to publish my rants, I cannot whine that I am being denied my freedom of expression.

People do whine after misunderstanding that simple point. Take the case of one “SB” who commented on the previous part of this blog post. His first comment was that my blog posts are all rants, conjectured that I don’t have a job and that he has learned nothing from reading me. So I replied to his comment saying that if he has nothing to add other than an ad hominem attack, he should stop reading the blog. I said, “Good luck and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

His reaction? He whined, “The crusader of free speech is now showing me a door.”

That’s an idiotic reaction. I am not preventing him from speaking or writing. But I do have the right to prevent him from writing stuff on my blog. He is free to speak his mind but whether I allow him into my living room or not is my decision. By telling him to get off my property I am telling him to get off my property. If he does not understand that, I am afraid all this writing about free speech is wasted on him.

Ok, moving on. Today is April Fools Day. Curiously I wrote about freedom of expression last year on this day as well.

What the hell, I am just going to quote the whole post — Philip Pullman on Being Offended and Free Speech — right here.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ BEGIN QUOTE ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Happy Birthday, April Fools! And for the birthday cake, we have a short YouTube video of Philip Pullman, author of the the novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. On March 28th, he was addressing an audience in Oxford. Here’s how Mr Pullman replied to one person’s charge that the title of the book to an ordinary Christian was offensive.

For the record, here’s the transcript (via BoingBoing):

It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.

Hear, hear!

Thank you, Mr Pullman. That needed to be said.

Related Post: The Freedom to be Offended. Feb 2006

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ END QUOTE ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I think Westerners have a better understanding of the freedom of speech and expression. Indians have yet to get there. The Islamic parts of the world are the least free — and that includes freedom of expression.

How much freedom of expression and speech a group permits itself is a function of how much confidence it has in itself and about its self-worth. Only those who are supremely confident can afford the luxury of doubting their capacity. People whose self-image is shaky do not like a mirror held up to them.

Take this article, “Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters” in the HuffingtonPost by Bart Ehrman. You will never see an equivalent article in the Islamic world. They will not allow it because they are not confident of their own faith.

Ehrman in his article asks “does the bible actually contain lies?” and goes on to explain —

. . . good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle — Peter, Paul or James — knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.

Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books “pseudepigrapha.”

You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It’s the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means “writing that is inscribed with a lie.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My antipathy towards Gandhi arises from my distaste for poverty. (Same goes for “Mother” Teresa — she was a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor, as Hitchens has so eloquently pointed out. See the post “Hell’s Angel” for more.) Gandhi did not understand what the causes of poverty were and therefore had no idea what needed to be done to eradicate poverty. Unfortunately, too many people uncritically idolize Gandhi and that is why I believe the more people find out what a nut case he was, the sooner Indian can break free from the poverty that Gandhi has forged for India.

More to come.

Read: On the ban of the book in Gujarat.

Listen: Joseph Lelyveld talking about his book on KQED Forum.

Maharashtra government will initiate steps to ban sale of a controversial book on Mahatma Gandhi by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Joseph Lelyveld.

“Gandhiji was a respected leader and is known as the father of nation. He led the freedom movement of India. The government will initiate steps to ensure that the book is not published in the state,” industries minister Narayan Rane told the Legislative Council on Tuesday.
The minister also informed that the state government would write to the Centre for not publishing the controversial book.

Congress MLC and Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) president Manikrao Thakre said in the upper house that the book ‘Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India’ has maligned the character of the Father of Nation.

This issue is doubling interesting to me. First, because I am a free speech fundamentalist. I think the Indian government’s penchant for banning books is reprehensible. I am convinced that India’s backwardness is revealed by its government’s paternalistic attitude which seeks to suppress all dissenting views. India is at best what I have been calling a cargo-cult democracy, not a real democracy where people have the maturity to figure out for themselves what is the truth and what is not.

Second, I am not an admirer of MK Gandhi. Indeed, I believe that most of India’s ills — even today — is because of his mistakes. He was a towering figure in the Indian landscape and his shadow continues to darken the path even today. I have read very little of his voluminous writing. When I read his autobiography — “The Story of My Experiments With Truth” — I felt revolted by his egocentricity and arrogance, and his drive to dictate to all what they must do.

I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to people who give orders, even those who are powerful enough to dictate to the masses. In my view, all profound changes in human societies are due to powerful people who dictate (perhaps not overtly) to the masses. For weal or woe, great leaders determine the fate and fortunes of societies. It is not whether they were dictators or “democratically” elected leaders that matters; what matters is whether they were wise enough to have dictated correctly.

From what little I have read of Gandhi’s writings, I could tell that he was not wise. I think he was rather stupid actually. Take for instance his much quoted claim that “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” It is not only inane bullshit but bullshit with a cherry on top.

But I didn’t have to read Gandhi to know that he was definitely not what he was cracked up to be. I saw the evidence around me and could not but conclude that he must have had more than a few screws loose. Stupidity — or even full-blown mental illness — is not a crime. But if it leads to misery on a civilizational scale, I stop being forgiving.

Gandhi was the Father of the Nation. That’s repeated ad nauseum, in every government mandated textbook, and by every mealy-mouthed politician in India. That’s a reasonable premise.

India is a desperately poor, starving, impoverished, backward, illiterate, kakistocracy. The world’s largest “democracy” is most definitely the world’s largest kakistocracy — rule by the most corrupt and the least competent. There are other nations that are equally miserably poor but they are tiny compared to India. India is a collection of 1.2 billion people. India’s poverty is a class apart.

If Gandhi is the father, and India is the child, then looking at India today should tell us a lot about Gandhi.

The objection may be that Gandhi passed on over 60 years ago and he cannot be held responsible for the disaster that India is today. Actually no. Gandhi is still responsible for the disaster that he thrust on India. Gandhi dictated that Nehru would succeed him in dictating to India. Nehru’s departure saw the rise of another dictator — Indira Gandhi. Nehru was a garden variety average intellectual and a below average thinker. Indira was even worse. She dragged the country into poverty — even going so far as to amend the Constitution of India to declare it a socialist country.

The whole bunch of thieving politicians arise from the socialist control of the Indian economy, for which Gandhi cannot be absolved of responsibility.

Anyway, I am getting side-tracked. Let me get back to the issue at hand. The banning of a book on Gandhi. Gandhi was a serious weirdo. Not your friendly neighborhood weirdo but a world-class weirdo. Here’s an excerpt from a WSJ review of Lelyveld’s book by Andrew Roberts titled “Among the Hagiographers“:

Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.

For all his lifelong campaign for Swaraj (“self-rule”), India could have achieved it many years earlier if Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful. With 300 million Indians ruled over by 0.1% of that number of Britons, the subcontinent could have ended the Raj with barely a shrug if it had been politically united. Yet Gandhi’s uncanny ability to irritate and frustrate the leader of India’s 90 million Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (whom he called “a maniac”), wrecked any hope of early independence. He equally alienated B.R. Ambedkar, who spoke for the country’s 55 million Untouchables (the lowest caste of Hindus, whose very touch was thought to defile the four higher classes). Ambedkar pronounced Gandhi “devious and untrustworthy.” Between 1900 and 1922, Gandhi suspended his efforts no fewer than three times, leaving in the lurch more than 15,000 supporters who had gone to jail for the cause.

A ceaseless self-promoter, Gandhi bought up the entire first edition of his first, hagiographical biography to send to people and ensure a reprint. Yet we cannot be certain that he really made all the pronouncements attributed to him, since, according to Mr. Lelyveld, Gandhi insisted that journalists file “not the words that had actually come from his mouth but a version he authorized after his sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts.”

We do know for certain that he advised the Czechs and Jews to adopt nonviolence toward the Nazis, saying that “a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees” might be enough “to melt Hitler’s heart.” (Nonviolence, in Gandhi’s view, would apparently have also worked for the Chinese against the Japanese invaders.) Starting a letter to Adolf Hitler with the words “My friend,” Gandhi egotistically asked: “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” He advised the Jews of Palestine to “rely on the goodwill of the Arabs” and wait for a Jewish state “till Arab opinion is ripe for it.”

In August 1942, with the Japanese at the gates of India, having captured most of Burma, Gandhi initiated a campaign designed to hinder the war effort and force the British to “Quit India.” Had the genocidal Tokyo regime captured northeastern India, as it almost certainly would have succeeded in doing without British troops to halt it, the results for the Indian population would have been catastrophic. No fewer than 17% of Filipinos perished under Japanese occupation, and there is no reason to suppose that Indians would have fared any better. Fortunately, the British viceroy, Lord Wavell, simply imprisoned Gandhi and 60,000 of his followers and got on with the business of fighting the Japanese.

Gandhi claimed that there was “an exact parallel” between the British Empire and the Third Reich, yet while the British imprisoned him in luxury in the Aga Khan’s palace for 21 months until the Japanese tide had receded in 1944, Hitler stated that he would simply have had Gandhi and his supporters shot. (Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce’s “service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and Labour, his passionate love for his people.”) During his 21 years in South Africa (1893-1914), Gandhi had not opposed the Boer War or the Zulu War of 1906—he raised a battalion of stretcher-bearers in both cases—and after his return to India during World War I he offered to be Britain’s “recruiting agent-in-chief.” Yet he was comfortable opposing the war against fascism.

Although Gandhi’s nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. “We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs,” Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. “We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.”

In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa’s Natal province, Gandhi wrote of how “the Indian is being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir,” someone, he later stated, “whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.” Of white Afrikaaners and Indians, he wrote: “We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do.” That was possibly why he refused to allow his son Manilal to marry Fatima Gool, a Muslim, despite publicly promoting Muslim-Hindu unity.

Gandhi’s pejorative reference to nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her “nightly cuddles” with him. After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: “Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience.”

Yet he could also be vicious to Manu, whom he on one occasion forced to walk through a thick jungle where sexual assaults had occurred in order for her to retrieve a pumice stone that he liked to use on his feet. When she returned in tears, Gandhi “cackled” with laughter at her and said: “If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy.”

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” he wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” Gandhi nicknamed himself “Upper House” and Kallenbach “Lower House,” and he made Lower House promise not to “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two then pledged “more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”

They were parted when Gandhi returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that “you are always before my mind’s eye.” Later, on his ashram, where even married “inmates” had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: “I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women.” You could even be thrown off the ashram for “excessive tickling.” (Salt was also forbidden, because it “arouses the senses.”)

In his tract “Hind Swaraj” (“India’s Freedom”), Gandhi denounced lawyers, railways and parliamentary politics, even though he was a professional lawyer who constantly used railways to get to meetings to argue that India deserved its own parliament. After taking a vow against milk for its supposed aphrodisiac properties, he contracted hemorrhoids, so he said that it was only cow’s milk that he had forsworn, not goat’s. His absolute opposition to any birth control except sexual abstinence, in a country that today has more people living on less than $1.25 a day than there were Indians in his lifetime, was more dangerous.

Telling the Muslims who had been responsible for the massacres of thousands of Hindus in East Bengal in 1946 that Islam “was a religion of peace,” Gandhi nonetheless said to three of his workers who preceded him into its villages: “There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you were killed.” To a Hindu who asked how his co-religionists could ever return to villages from which they had been ethnically cleansed, Gandhi blithely replied: “I do not mind if each and every one of the 500 families in your area is done to death.” What mattered for him was the principle of nonviolence, and anyhow, as he told an orthodox Brahmin, he believed in re incarnation.

Gandhi’s support for the Muslim caliphate in the 1920s—for which he said he was “ready today to sacrifice my sons, my wife and my friends”—Mr. Lelyveld shows to have been merely a cynical maneuver to keep the Muslim League in his coalition for as long as possible. When his campaign for unity failed, he blamed a higher power, saying in 1927: “I toiled for it here, I did penance for it, but God was not satisfied. God did not want me to take any credit for the work.”

I will pause here for a bit before I conclude this post.

Read: Part 2 of this post.

Listen: Joseph Lelyveld talking about his book on KQED Forum.

She’s special and has been peddling her wares for a long while. An article, “Damn Nuisance” in the Telegraph of the UK put it thusly in March 2002:

Nobody questions the rights of writers to express political opinions but when it comes to the bulk delivery of unsolicited guidance on the world’s shortcomings, Miss Roy’s currently in a class of her own.

Attention whores thrive on attention. The best way to deal with her is to ignore her. But the main stream media in India depends on her types to get their TRPs and GRPs. Unfortunately we are not going to see the last of her.

Related Posts: I have argued a lot for the freedom of expression on this blog. Note especially this, “Freedom to be Offended“, and this, “Forbidding Expression,” and this, “Ridiculing Religious Insanity“.

For the record, here’s the transcript (via BoingBoing):

It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.

Hear, hear!

Thank you, Mr Pullman. That needed to be said.

Related Post: The Freedom to be Offended. Feb 2006

When I try to access the site, I get a blank screen. It does not say, “This page intentionally left blank.” I guess the govt of India should have the decency to put the notice “This page intentionally left blank by the government of India.”

Then, contradicting itself, it should further explain why.

“You, Indian citizen, are a serf. You are an ignorant serf. You are not capable of handling some information. You are not discerning. You are easily misled. We, your government, are your rulers. We decide what is good for you. We tell you what to think, what to read, what to write, what to listen to on the radio.

“You are a serf. We dictate and you listen. We go around in cars with rotating red flashing lights on top. We are your masters and we get the police to clear the roads when we pass. You dutifully wait till our motorcade has sped through the cleared roads.

“You are slaves that obey without questioning. You are free to do what we order you to do. We want you to only access sites that allow and you read only at our pleasure.

“You are a serf. You know your place. Now stay there and don’t make a fuss. Or we will send our running dogs and put you away.

“We are your masters. Obey or prepare to be imprisoned.”

I used to wonder how small marauding bands of barbarians ruled India for centuries, or how a few thousand people from a tiny island in the Atlantic ruled for nearly a hundred years a population of hundreds of millions.

Now I wonder no more. I think there is something in the Indian psyche that make Indians very easy to rule. The foreign rulers have been (to a large extent) replaced by domestic ones. There aren’t all that many rulers relative to the population.

All told, if you consider the members of the various state and central legislative bodies, the bureaucrats in the various ministries, the police and judiciary — all told it cannot amount to more than a few hundred thousand people. But like their foreign counterparts before 1947, these rule over hundreds of millions.

The poor sods — nearly 1,200,000,000, or one thousand two hundred million — cowering spineless sods dutifully obey the diktats of the rulers.

If this had been a population with any spine, any dignity, or honor, they would have dragged the criminals ruling over them on to the streets and strung them up from the lamp posts.

All the poor sods have to do is to drag half a dozen of the most corrupt politicians and judges and lynch them. The other few hundred thousands would get into line. They will know that it is they who are the servants and the people are the rulers.

Once I had heard an IAS officer say that if the people of India only knew how much damage the administrative services do to India, the people of India would thrash every government bureaucrat. I told the man that that this has not happened yet should tell us that Indians are incapable of fighting for their rights.

There was no freedom struggle. The British were tired of administering a country that had become so poor that there was nothing left to steal. Colonialism was becoming unpopular. Besides the British had trained their replacement — Mr Nehru — and were confident that he would do as they dictated. Mr Nehru was happy to be the boss and rule.

Indians did not have a freedom struggle. The British left without a fight because India was just not worth it any more.

The new rulers found it very convenient to claim that they were the ones that threw out the British. That message was relentlessly broadcast, put in school books, the education system was controlled, and generations of brainwashed Indians believed in this nonsense.

The real freedom that India needs is the freedom from the brain washing that they have had for the last 60-odd years.

The Indians did not have to fight the British because the British wanted to leave of their own accord. But these present day brown-sahibs are not in a hurry to leave. They will not leave without a fight. And the Indian people are not willing to fight.

So let’s all settle down to many generations of slavery. The children who are growing up today, born into slavery, will give birth to slaves.

Welcome to the slave state of India.

My response to someone who says, “I am offended by that” is to quote Stephen Fry: “Well, so fucking what!” (See the video at the end of this post.)

Just because someone is offended by someone else’s speech does not give the former any rights whatsoever to muzzle the latter. You are free to take offense to your heart’s content — but don’t expect other people to fall in line and say only those things that please you.

The attempt to regulate free speech is made fairly regularly — and not just in third world impoverished countries. Even in rich countries with a very robust culture of freedom, some attempt to curb speech. I am reminded the Communications Decency Act of the US — an “attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the U.S. Supreme Court partially overturned the law.”

The CDA made no sense. I quote in full here an editorial on the subject published around that time. It was written in protest against internet censorship by a retired trial judge and and assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas.

Two things. First, I must caution the reader of delicate constitution easily offended by strong language against reading this editorial. It will definitely upset you if you are in favor of dictating what others should read, write, hear, speak, watch or show. You have been warned very seriously.

Second, when reading it, remember that it was written a long time ago — around 1996. Think no youtube, think google just about getting started. Remember, for example, India did not have internet access, and so on. And then note how relevant even today the message of this editorial is.

THE X-ON CONGRESS: INDECENT COMMENT ON AN INDECENT SUBJECT

by Steve Russell

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — You motherfuckers in Congress have dropped over the edge of the earth this time. I understand that very few of the swarm of high dollar lobbyists around the Telecommunications Bill had any interest in content regulation — they were just trying to get their clients an opportunity to dip their buckets in the money stream that cyberspace may become — but the public interest sometimes needs a little attention. Keeping your eyes on what big money wants, you have sold out the First Amendment.

First, some basics. If your children walked by a public park and heard some angry sumbitches referring to Congress as “the sorriest bunch of cocksuckers ever to sell out the First Amendment” or suggesting that “the only reason to run for Congress these days is to suck the lobbyists’ dicks and fuck the people who sent you there,” no law would be violated (assuming no violation of noise ordinances or incitement to breach the peace). If your children did not wish to hear that language, they could only walk away. Thanks to your heads-up-your-ass dereliction of duty, if they read the same words in cyberspace, they could call the FBI!

Cyberspace is the village green for the whole world. It is the same as the village green our Founders knew as the place to rouse the rabble who became Americans, but it is also different. Your blind acceptance of the dubious — make that dogass dumb — idea that children are harmed by hearing so-called dirty words has created some pretty stupid regulations without shutting down public debate, but those stupid regulations will not import to cyberspace without consequences that even the public relations whores in Congress should find unacceptable.

In cyberspace, there is no time. A posted message stays posted until it is wiped. Therefore, there is no way to indulge the fiction that children do not stay up late or cannot program a VCR.

In cyberspace, there is no place. The “community standards” are those of the whole world. An upload from Amsterdam can become a download in Idaho. By trying to regulate obscenity and indecency on the Internet, you have reduced the level of expression allowed consenting adults to that of the most anal retentive blueballed fuckhead U.S. attorney in the country. The Internet is everywhere you can plug in a modem. Call Senator Exon an “ignorant motherfucker” in Lincoln, Nebraska and find yourself prosecuted in Bibleburg, Mississippi.

In cyberspace, you cannot require the convenience store to sell Hustler in a white sleeve. The functional equivalent is gatekeeper software, to which no civil libertarian has voiced any objection. Gatekeeper software cannot be made foolproof, but can you pandering pissants not see that any kid smart enough to hack into a Website is also smart enough to get his hands on a hard copy of Hustler if he really wants one?

In cyberspace, there is the illusion of anonymity but no real privacy. It is theoretically possible for any Internet server to seine through all messages for key words (although it seems likely the resulting slowdown would be noticeable). Perhaps some of you read about America OnLine’s attempt to keep children from reading the word “breast?” An apparently unforeseen consequence was the shutdown of a discussion group of breast cancer survivors. Don’t you think more kids are aware of “teat” (pronounced “tit”) than of “breast?” Can skirts on piano legs, er, limbs be far behind?

But silly shit like this is just a pimple on the ass of the long-
term consequences for politics, art and education. You have passed a law that will get less respect than the 55 m.p.h. speed limit dead bang in the middle of the First Amendment. Indecency is nothing but a matter of fashion; obscenity is the same but on a longer timeline. This generation freely reads James Joyce and Henry Miller and the Republic still stands. The home of the late alleged pornographer D. H. Lawrence is now a beautiful writers’ retreat in the mountains above Taos, managed by the University of New Mexico.

Universities all have Internet servers, and every English Department has at least one scholar who can read Chaucer’s English — but not on the Internet anymore. Comparative literature classes might read Boccaccio — but not on the Internet anymore. What if some U. S. Attorney hears about Othello and Desdemona “making the beast with two backs” — is interracial sex no longer indecent anywhere in the country, or is Shakespeare off the Internet?

Did you know you can download video and sound from the Internet? Yes, that means you can watch other people having sex if that is interesting to you, live or on tape. Technology can make such things hard to retrieve, but probably not impossible. And since you have swept right past obscenity and into indecency, the baby boomers had better keep their old rock ‘n roll tapes off the Internet.

When the Jefferson Airplane sang “her heels rise for me,” they were not referring to a dance step. And if some Brit explains the line about “finger pie” in Penny Lane, the Beatles will be gone. All of those school boards that used to ban “The Catcher in the Rye” over cussing and spreading the foul lie that kids masturbate can now go to federal court and get that nasty book kept out of cyberspace.

But enough about the past. What about rap music? No, I do not care much for it either — any more than I care for the language you shitheads have forced me to use in this essay — but can you not see the immediate differential impact of this law by class and race? What is your defense — that there are no African-Americans on the Internet, since they are too busy pimping and dealing crack? If our educational establishment has any sense at all, they will be trying to see more teens of all colors on the Internet, because there is a lot to be learned in cyberspace that has nothing to do with sex.

There are plenty of young people in this country who have legitimate political complaints. When you dickheads get done with Social Security, they will be lucky if the retirement age is still in double digits. But thanks to the wonderful job the public schools have done keeping sex and violence out, we have a lot of intelligent kids who cannot express themselves without indecent language. I have watched lawyers in open court digging their young clients in the ribs every time the word “fuck” slipped out.

Let’s talk about this fucking indecent language bullshit. Joe Shea, my editor, does not want it in his newspaper, and I respect that position. He might even be almost as upset about publishing this as I a about writing it. I do use salty language in my writing, but sparingly, only as a big hammer. Use the fucking shit too fucking much and it loses its fucking impact — see what I mean? Fiction follows different rules, and if you confine your fiction writing to how the swell people want to see themselves using language, you not only preclude literary depiction of most people but you are probably false to the people you purport to depict.

Do you remember how real language used by real people got on the air and in the newspapers? Richard Nixon, while he was president, speaking in the White House about official matters. A law professor and a nominee for Supreme Court Justice arguing about pubic hairs and porno movies during Senate hearings. Are these matters now too indecent for the Internet? How much cleansing will be required of the online news services? Answer: Enough cleansing to meet the standard of what is appropriate for a child in the most restrictive federal judicial district.

This is bullshit — unconstitutional bullshit and also bad policy bullshit. To violate your ban on indecency, I have been forced to use and overuse so-called indecent language. But if I called you a bunch of goddam motherfucking cocksucking cunt-eating blue-balled bastards with the morals of muggers and the intelligence of pond scum, that would be nothing compared to this indictment, to wit: you have sold the First Amendment, your birthright and that of your children. The Founders turn in their graves. You have spit on the grave of every warrior who fought under the Stars and Stripes.

And what mess of pottage have you acquired in exchange for the rights of a free people? Have you cleansed the Internet of even the rawest pornography? No, because it is a worldwide system. You have, however, handed the government a powerful new tool to harass its critics: a prosecution for indecent commentary in any district in the country.

Have you protected one child from reading dirty words? Probably not, if you understand what the economists call “substitution” — but you have leveled the standards of political debate to a point where a history buff would not dare to upload some of the Federalist v. Anti-Federalist election rhetoric to a Website.

Since the lobby reporting requirements were not law when the censorship discussion was happening, I hope you got some substantial reward for what you gave up. Thirty pieces of silver doesn’t go far these days.

[This article may be reproduced free forever.]

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And now for the video of Stephen Fry taking about “respect” and “offense.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And finally, I like this old post of mine from four years ago: The Freedom to be Offended — Part 3.

To my mind they are related. They reveal much about the mentality of Indians and their government. To the various epithets that adorn India such as “the most populous democracy” and “land of elephants and tigers” must be added “the land of the largest bunch of retards” and “home of the most hypocritical governments in the world.”

They are related thusly. The retards vote the hypocritical governments into power with sickening predictability, and in turn the governments make sure that the retards stay uninformed and retarded.

The governments routinely divide the population along religious lines with total impunity. What’s really surprising is that the government discriminates against the people of the majority religion — Hindus — and is openly biased towards the largest religious minority — Muslims. One would have thought that in a democracy where an overwhelming majority are Hindus, the governments would as least be not biased against Hindus. At the very least they would make absolutely certain that the Hindus don’t feel like second class citizens in the only country that Hindus have.

(An aside: Hinduism is hard to define. The operational definition that I use is that it is the aggregate set of beliefs and practices of the people of India who do not self-identify themselves as Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Buddhists. It is a “residual” definition. I have deliberately not excluded Jains because I consider them to be a very strict and special sub-set of Hindus, and anyway Jains form a very tiny minority, and for the purposes of this point, they don’t matter. Hinduism also differs from the other major religions. Hinduism is not a world religion, unlike say Christianity and Islam. There are scores of Muslim and Christian majority nations around the world. In contrast to that, to a first approximation, all Hindus are Indians or the descendants of Indians abroad. Hinduism as a religion is only found in India.)

I am forced to the conclusion that India is a basically a land of retards ruled by hypocrites. The most important aspect of the retarded, as I have mentioned before, is that they elect governments that do their best to keep Indians poor. India is poor because of the policies that the governments choose. India is poor by choice. All the talk and all the actions of the governments have always been almost diametrically opposite of those that would promote economic growth and consequently development. I think it was Milton Friedman who noted that for any economy to prosper, what it has to do is to implement the policies that are exactly the opposite of India’s policies.

In any case, right now I want to get to another matter that illustrates the retarded character of the Indian public. It is this: they give ammunition for others to use against them.

Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus: An Alternative History” must make fascinating reading to some. I know precious little history, including Hindu history. I know even less about psycho-sexual Freudian theories. To me they appear to be two separate domains, something like the separation between the domains of quantum mechanics and natural healing. According to some, Doniger gets off on writing about weird sexual practices and concocting fabulous theories about the sexual meaning of ordinary tales of Hindu mythological figures. Whatever floats her boat, I say. If she wants to connect the psycho-sexual and Hindu mythology, that’s her prerogative. As far as I am concerned, the book fills a much-needed gap, as Moses Hadas (1900-19660) had said about some other book. And like he said, “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.”

Some Hindus are up in arms about Wendy’s book and have petitioned the Penguin Group:

PENGUIN GROUP to:

1. WITHDRAW all the copies of this book immediately from the worldwide bookshops/markets/Universities/Libraries and refrain from printing any other edition.

2. APOLOGIZE for having published this book “The Hindus: An Alternative History”. This book seriously and grossly misrepresents the Hindu reality as known to the vast numbers of Hindus and to scholars of Hindu tradition. PENGUIN must apologize for failure to observe proper pre-publication scrutiny and scholarly review.

That’s USDA Grade AA retardedness. There are about 80 signatures to the petition at the time of this writing.

I can understand people telling Penguin to fix factual errors. I appreciate the work the petitioners have done in pointing out the errors. They should publish the errors or petition Penguin to publish the rebuttal. They can write newspaper op-eds and reviews of the book. But asking for the withdrawal of the book is not a smart thing to do. Doniger may be a deranged person with a vicious agenda against the Hindus. But she must not be silenced. If what she says is wrong, then her views need to be contradicted, not her right to publish or the publisher’s right to publish what they want. If you don’t like reading what Doniger writes, don’t read her.

We must stand for free expression. That is at the core of all human progress. Even thought that one disagrees with. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it succinctly, “not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.” There is a very practical and self-interested need for this. If you deny others the right to free speech for whatever reason, others will also deny you the freedom of speech when it suits them.

These people who want Doniger’s book withdrawn are handing out ammunition to their enemies. These people are behaving like retards. They are surrendering what I consider to be their most potent weapon. Allow me to repeat what I wrote earlier in “The Danger of Surrendering our Most Potent Weapon” (Jan 28, 2010):

Human societies that allow the free expression of ideas do better than those that don’t allow new ideas. The evidence is all around for us to see.

For those of us who value human civilization and human progress — or even those who are merely interested in economic growth and development — our best tools are ideas. The source of these ideas is free people who have the freedom to bring forth new ideas. We progress only by looking at things in new ways, which is what ideas allow us to do. The minimal condition necessary for ideas is the freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech and expression has value in itself but it is also instrumental in giving rise to good ideas. The ancients in India realized the power of ideas. A Rig Vedic prayer roughly translates into “Let Noble Thoughts Come to Us From All Directions.”

It’s a war out there. The war is eventually one of ideas. Those who are short of ideas, are forced to resort to weapons. Suicide bombings, terrorism, rioting in the streets — all these are done by people who have no good ideas and are so threatened by the power of ideas that they seek to destroy those who have good ideas.

Look around and see who are the terrorists and suicide bombers and rioters. They don’t have ideas, and perhaps know that they cannot compete and lash out in their fury to show that they do have some power. Terrorism is the weapon of the powerless and the idea-less.

Surrendering the freedom of speech is stupid. It is stupid to surrender the most potent source of one’s strengths.

It is a mystery to me why some apparently smart people don’t understand the need for the absolute freedom of expression. Don’t they get it that that is the source of all progress?

Now to the hypocritical governments. They talk loudly about development and then do everything that retards economic growth. It started with Nehru. The problem is that it did not end with Nehru. His progeny continue to rule and destroy India with Nehruvian socialistic policies. Even if the progeny of Nehru get good counsel and realize the folly of Nehruvian policies, they cannot change course as it would directly imply that Nehru’s policies were retarded. Repudiating Nehruvian socialism is not possible by Nehru’s descendants. Divide and rule is an idea that Nehru inherited from the British (as much of everything else). His descendants continue to do as he did.

Caste and religion divides are much beloved of the Congress governments. There are poor people in India by the hundreds of millions. The poor belong to every caste. There are Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Muslim poor. But, as the ‘care-taker’ prime minister Mr Manmohan Singh put it, only the religious minorities (read Muslims) have a right to relief and have a claim to India’s resources. Naked, shameless, unprincipled pandering doesn’t get any more sickening. The man’s dividing of the poor of India into the “deserving poor” (minority religion people) and the “undeserving poor” should have earned him universal opprobrium. Should have but it passed almost without comment.

Mr Singh is not stupid. He dares to do it because he knows that the retards will not figure it out how dangerous his policies are. Mr Singh is of course right in his assessment. No politician has ever lost an election by underestimating the intelligence and morality of the Indian voter, to paraphrase H L Mencken.

Mr Manmohan Singh knows as well as I do that the Indians are retards. He does not have to say it but his policies are consistent with his assessment. I say it but then I don’t have to be politically correct. I will be vilified by the “chatterati” for saying this but that’s not a very good reason for me not to say it like I see it.

I don’t know how one can simultaneously claim to be a secular democracy and also discriminate against people based on their religion. The examples abound. Mr Rushdie’s book was banned because it would hurt the sentiments of Muslims in India. Then artistic freedom was not trotted out as a principle worth defending. Anyone doing anything anywhere that would hurt Muslim sentiments is worth gagging, killing, imprisoning, and deporting. Ms Taslima Nasreen, for instance, was hounded out of India despite her many impassioned pleas for sanctuary in India.

Another example. The control of Hindu temples rests with the government and it appropriates the donations that Hindus make in temples. It uses the revenues of Hindu temples for its own use. The government supports Muslim pilgrimages from taxes taken forcibly from non-muslims. This is jaziya, a tax that non-muslims are forced to pay for being allowed to live under Islamic rule. As a non-muslim, I find this policy to be abhorrent, unjust, malicious and in the end, undermines the very basis of a secular society — non-discrimination based on religion.

The list of what the government does to protect the delicate sensibilities of Muslims is long and interesting. A bunch of cartoonists doing their work 10,000 miles away apparently poses a danger to India’s social harmony. But when it comes to Mr M F Husain painting nudes of Hindu icons, artistic freedom is paramount. Mr Husain is celebrated in Indian government publications. When hoodlums vandalize Mr Husain’s property, the outrage against “Hindu taliban” is deafening. But when Ms Taslima Nasrin is roughed up by hoodlums, the reaction is to hound her out of the country.

When Muslim terrorists kill people by the scores, the oh-so-secular main stream Indian press is quick to point out that Hindu fundamentalists are all over the place. This gives cover to the LeT and other Islamic organizations who have proclaimed as loudly as they can that they are sworn to destroy “Hindu” India and claim it for Islam.

I am sickened by the government hypocrisy. But bothers me more is the retarded behavior of the Indian public. If the public were not retarded, the hypocrites like Mr Manmohan Singh would have been shoveling shit in Louisiana.

Mr Husain apparently has become a citizen of Qatar. The annual per capita GDP of Qatar is US$ 86,000, the highest in the world. It’s a great choice for Mr Husain. Besides, since the government is overtly Islamic (unlike the Indian government that only covertly follows the dictates of Islam), Mr Husain will have the freedom to paint nude Hindu goddesses which the rich citizens of Qatar and the Islamic world would pay millions of dollars for. Mr Husain can do his painting without being bothered by the “Hindu taliban” (an expression much beloved of Vir Sanghvi.)

Mr Husain’s move is good for the Indian government too. It will not have to confront charges of hypocrisy that it protects Husain and persecutes people like Taslima Nasrin.

I think that Mr Husain made the right move. May his tribe increase by the millions who want the right to impose their religious dictates on others. May all those who think that their religion mandates the killing of infidels follow Mr Husain’s example and take up Qatari citizenship.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Related posts:

Abolish the Haj Subsidy. Aug 2009.

I have written a fair bit on freedom of expression. It is a non-negotiable right, in my opinion. Here are a few from that category.

Defending Free Speech. Jan 2009.

Weep for Taslima, and then for India. May 2007.

Forbidding Expression — Part 1. Nov 2007.

Forbidding Expression — Part 2.

That whole day, the man considered his wealth and made big plans about all the things he would buy and how happy he would be. His imagination ran wild. He was rich. Richer than everyone he ever knew. But then suddenly he remembered the monk at the edge of the village. The monk had given him the diamond without the slightest hesitation. The man ran back to the monk outside village, fell to his knees and said, “Sir, tell me how can I get the inner wealth and contentment compared to which all external wealth is worthless?”

End of my retelling of the story that I got in an email. The email said that the story was from HinduismToday.org.

I cannot access that site from India. (My ISP is TataIndicom Broadband.) I suppose the “secular” government of India does not allow it. Sites preaching jihadi hate meet the exacting standards of the Indian government’s stamp of secularism. But kafir ideology is prohibited. So if you have the misfortune of living under the dispensation of the “secular” Indian government, you could use this online anonymous proxy server and type in http://www.hinduismtoday.org/ in the address bar.

BTW, do drop a note to Mr Manmohan Singh telling him how much you appreciate his government’s efforts at not allowing the corruption of Indian minds by blocking the HinduismToday site.

[This post filed under the categories "Freedom of Expression," "Ruled by Monkeys," "Stupid Monkeys" and "Corruption."]

Postscript: I have heard from several people across the country saying that they are able to access the HinduismToday site. I still cannot access it unless I go through an anonymous server. Therefore it could be that Tata Indicom may be involved in this instance of censorship.

PS: I don’t think it will be long before the government of India bans this blog. There are too many things here which are embarrassing for the Indian government. Recall that the government of India banned Salman Rushdie even before the mullahs in Iran got their act together. The Indian government is holier than the mullahs of fundamentalist Islam. After all, how else can India be a “secular” state if it cannot pander to Islamic fundamentalism, eh?

The reason is not yet known. I fear that it did so because of some religious group was offended by the JREF’s rational argument. Can’t really blame them since even governments are bending over. Recently the UN was the site of an unsightly scene where it was decided that any expression that offends the followers of one particular religion was to be banned. In India, they jailed a newspaper editor because thousands of violent thugs demanded his death for offending them by publishing an article that pointed out that certain beliefs are silly.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Thankfully, Fitna is available on the web and this idiotic attempt to shoot the messenger will only make the message more compelling.

Pat Condell is one of the most articulate and outspoken commentator on the present degeneration of the Western world and its consequent abject surrender to Islam. Here’s Pat Condell’s take on it.

It is worth noting that it was 20 years ago that the Indian Congress government banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and thus compelled the ayatollah Khomeini to call all Muslims to murder Rushdie and others associated with the book:

“I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses – which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the prophet and the Koran – and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”

Publishers and translators of the book were attacked and some killed. Many people died in Muslim mob fury. The Indian government has blood on its hands. But that is par for the course and it is not going to stop anytime soon. The colonial government of India — by which I refer to the government of India post 1947 — continues to strangle free speech as a way of pandering to the most vicious and ruthless of its constituency.

I conclude this with an excerpt from an opinion piece in The Australian — How the West was Lost for Free Speech — Sept 2008:

. . . where self-censorship is deemed insufficient, there is a battery of laws to enforce state censorship, from legislation against hate speech to the demand by the UN that every member take a stand against the “defamation of religion”. It is not just critics of Islam who are being silenced. British laws against the “glorification of terrorism” and moves in the US to alter the first amendment so that it no longer provides protection for Islamic radicals show that Islamic critics, too, can no longer say the unsayable.

Twenty years on from The Satanic Verses it is time we took a stand against this trend. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” wrote 17th-century poet John Milton. “He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”

Freedom of expression is not just an important liberty; it is the very foundation of liberty, for without such freedom we cannot define what those liberties are.

. . . It is everybody’s business to ensure that no one is deprived of their right to say what they wish, even if what they say is seen as offensive.

As George Orwell once put it, “If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

I note an important deviation: usually, India is the follower and it apes the West in many matters, but in the case of denying freedom of expression to its citizens, the West is rapidly aping India’s regressive moves.

Related posts: All posts under the category Freedom of Expression. You may wish to read “Ridiculing Religious Insanity” also.

I hereby repudiate and withdraw my post dated November 27, 2008 titled “Shoddy Journalism” and, more specifically, the following allegations / statements made in the post titled “Shoddy Journalism” namely:

* a lack of ethics, responsibility and professionalism by Ms. Dutt and NDTV Limited;

* that Ms. Dutt and NDTV’s reporting at the scene of the Mumbai attacks during November 2008, resulted in jeopardizing the safety and lives of civilians and / or security personnel caught up in and / or involved in defending against the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008;

* that Ms. Dutt was responsible for the death of Indian Servicemen during the Kargil Conflict.

I don’t know for sure but it could be that NDTV and Barkha Dutt threatened to sue Kunte for defamation. A blogger cannot possibly afford to fight the mighty NDTV and Barkha Dutt. The latter have deep pockets. Deep pockets because their programs are watched by millions of people and therefore have big advertisers and that’s that. The power of NDTV to squash those who oppose it arises from “We the People.”

Item: Christopher Hitchens:

In the hot days immediately after the fatwa, with Salman himself on the run and the TV screens filled with images of burning books and writhing mustaches, I was stopped by a female Muslim interviewer and her camera crew and asked an ancient question: “Is nothing sacred?”

I can’t remember quite what I answered then, but I know what I would say now. “No, nothing is sacred. And even if there were to be something called sacred, we mere primates wouldn’t be able to decide which book or which idol or which city was the truly holy one. Thus, the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression, because if that goes, then so do all other claims of right as well.” [Emphasis added.]

I also think that human life has its sacrosanct aspect, and though I can think of many circumstances in which I would take a life, the crime of writing a work of fiction is not a justification (even in the case of Ludlum) that I could ever entertain. Two decades on, Salman himself is thriving mightily and living again like a free man. But the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force. And, by the way, the next time that Khomeini’s lovely children want to make themselves felt, they will be armed not just with fatwas but with nuclear weapons.

Item: Robert Spencer — Defend Free Speech

Related posts: Freedom of Expression. Note especially Hitchens on Free Speech.

Thomas Jefferson claimed over 200 years ago that “it is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” I agree only partly. I don’t think that without courageous people truth has a chance. Truth, in the abstract, of course exists. But for it to triumph, surely it has to be expressed by humans and be part of the mental makeup of at least one human being. The world is spherical is a truth in the abstract. But at some point in the history of human civilization it became a concrete truth. But it required courage to express a truth that in some parts of the world was considered against god and morality.

Truth would have a hard time prevailing in a nation of people cowed down from fear and threat of violence. A recent example of violence shutting out an attempt at finding the truth occurred in Chennai. A bunch of people shut down an exhibition which revealed Aurangzeb to be a tyrant. The police were also involved in the vandalism. The state was involved in suppressing the expression of a viewpoint that some considered unpalatable. Most of the newspapers did not report this.

Isn’t it true that India’s motto basically pokes fun at India’s public actions?

Link: Details of what happened and Kanchan Gupta’s opinion piece.

[Follow up post: B Raman on "Aurangzebs of Today."]

On a related note, the Guardian.co.uk reported that (as of Feb 17th), “180,000 demands to remove images of the Prophet” from the Wiki page on Muhammad have been made. I assume that these were followers of Islam who made that demand. Islam forbids the depiction of Muhammad because it could lead to idolatry — that is worshiping of Muhammad — and Islam calls for the death of all idolaters.

Yes, the followers of Islam if they so choose should not depict Mohammed or any other living creature. But demanding that non-Muslims follow the dictates of Islam is patently idiotic, and ridicule and derision should be heaped on attempts at controlling others.

Here’s a clue to those clueless retards that want to control others. You are not required by law — human or physical — to go check out any material that is not consistent with your ridiculous belief system. If you don’t like to read something or watch something because it offends you, then don’t do it. Just read or watch or listen to what you don’t find offensive. Don’t like a novel? Don’t read it. Write your own which suits your taste and follows your religion’s dictates.

Let me remind you. I find your belief system offensive and inhuman. (Don’t thank me. I am merely returning the compliment. Check out what your “holy” books say about my belief system.) But I would not presume to tell you not to practice it in the privacy of your own home. I don’t call for the ban of your “holy” writings that the majority of humanity finds offensive. Yes, however millions of Pastafarians exist, there are more non-Pastafarians. And that goes for the followers of every other religion — including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Let me also remind you that the world is a pretty big place. It is much much bigger than could be conceived by the writers of the “holy” books who lived and died their whole miserable lives in a desert in the Middle East a couple of thousand years ago. They thought that what they could see from the top of their camels is all that the universe was. Nope, the world is much bigger. Other people have other ways of living and thinking. Believing that the entire world was just a huge freakin’ desert where everyone must do everything exactly the same way is retarded and unimaginative.

It is stupid and dangerous insanity to want to dictate to others how they should live under your religion’s prohibitions. Let me give you an example. To most Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists, killing cows and eating them is offensive and against their religion. Would you support a worldwide ban on the slaughter of cattle? If not, why not? What makes your ban any more reasonable than the ban on something that most Indians find offensive?

Grow up. It is way past the 7th century and we are no longer in the Arab peninsula, Toto.

The Wikipedia team told the wackos who want to control what is published on the web to shove it but did it very politely.

Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.

So long as they are relevant to the article and do not violate any of Wikipedia’s existing policies, nor the law of the US state of Florida where Wikipedia’s servers are hosted, no content or images will be removed because people find them objectionable or offensive.

See, there is a place outside of the desert and it is called Florida and there is a time called the 21st century that is not the 7th century. Sweetie, if you are offended by something that you have no reason to be able to control, then it is your problem, isn’t it? Can’t you get it into your pointy little head that YOU are the one who is taking offense — others have better things to do than go around offending you.

Live and let live, my preciouses.

This ends my little rant. But wait, there is more. Here’s Christopher Hitchens on YouTube. It is part of a debate on free speech in Canada in November 2006.

Hitchens (the author of “God is not great: How religion poisons everything”) is great. An Englishman who became an American citizen a few months ago. What is with these Englishmen? You have Hitchens, and Dawkins, and Pat Condell. Condell’s rants on religion are amazingly lucid and hard-hitting. Here are two for your watching pleasure. As Condell says, “Peace.”

NOTE NOTE

Follow up to this post is here.

The Indian government is only too eager to ban stuff — with votes in mind, of course. It was the first to ban the Satanic Verses and thus provoked the mullahs in Iran to call for the murder of Salman Rushdie. Banning books and other information related goods is shameful, insulting and cowardly.

It is insulting because it means that the people are idiots and do not have the maturity to decide for themselves what to see or read. When a ban is imposed because of fear that some people may go on a violent rampage, then it is cowardly. If the attempt is to conceal the truth by banning something, it is shameful and on self-respecting people should stand for such a government.

{Continued from part 1.}

Taslima Nasreen got hounded out of Kolkata by rioting Muslims. The state of West Bengal displayed its spinelessness and instead of providing protection to a visitor, gave in to intimidation and violence. She was packed off to Jaipur. The fear of murderous mobs compelled the Rajasthani government to kick her out. She is now hiding somewhere in New Delhi, the capital of India. One does not expect state policy to be dictated by rioting mobs but it appears that Indian policy is.

To be fair, no government of the civilized world is quite equipped to deal with the menace of Islamic extremism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s case illustrates the weak-willed incompetence of even governments of the so-called first world countries.

Like Taslima Nasreen, Ayaan too became the object of Islamic anger because she began writing against the repression of women sanctioned by Islam. She’s become a fugitive. Here’s what Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (no stranger to being the object of murderous threat) wrote in an Oct 9th International Herald Tribune article:

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world.

The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.

Read the whole article.

Harris and Rushdie don’t mince their words in their condemnation of the Dutch government’s broken promises of protecting Ayaan.

It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

. . .

There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for Parliament, and to become the world’s most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Gerrit Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands, while refusing to grant her even a week’s protection outside the country during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?

At least in the case of India it is clear that speaking too frankly about Islam is forbidden. And the disturbing thing is that the prohibition does not arise out of respect for someone’s sensibilities but rather out of fear of being killed.

I think that the first thing that has to be admitted is that we are afraid of Islam. I know that I am and I openly admit to being a card-carrying Islamophobe. Fear is natural and is a good first response for self-preservation. If you are not afraid of that which threatens your life, you are unlikely to leave too many descendants in the Darwinian game of life.

What I am afraid of is that the supporters of Islam are not inclined to engage those who criticize Islam in debate or rational inquiry. The first impulse is to respond violently and often the call for the murder of those who question Islam.

Sometimes the race card gets pulled out, especially in the US. If you criticize Islam, you are a racist. Sam Harris puts paid to that charge:

Especially unscrupulous critics of my work have claimed that my critique of Islam is “racist.” Such criticism is almost too stupid to merit a response. But, as prominent writers can sometimes be this stupid, here goes:

My analysis of religion in general, and of Islam in particular, focuses on what I consider to be bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior. My antipathy toward Islam–which is, in truth, difficult to exaggerate–applies to ideas, not to people, and certainly not to the color of a person’s skin. My criticism of the logical and behavioral consequences of certain ideas (e.g. martyrdom, jihad, honor, etc.) impugns white converts to Islam–like Adam Gadahn–every bit as much as Arabs like Ayman al-Zawahiri. I am also in the habit of making invidious comparisons between Islam and other religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Need I point out that most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are not white like me? One would hope there would be no such need—but the work of writers like Chris Hedges suggests that the need is pressing.

As I regularly point out when attacking Islam, no one is suffering under the doctrine of Islam more than Muslims are—particularly Muslim women. Those who object to any attack upon the religion of Islam as “racist” or as a symptom of “Islamophobia” display a rather nauseating insensitivity to the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, forced marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” This is a crime to which otherwise well-intentioned apologists for Islam are now accomplices.

I think it would be good if people agreed to examine ideas without feeling offended if their ideas are seen to be silly and idiotic.

Enough for now but there is more to come.

The answer is absolutely clear to me: she may stay or go depending on what the law of the land says. Rule of law is something that I consider non-negotiable. So the deeper question is whether India at large, and West Bengal more specifically, is a nation that is governed by laws? Or is it that those who carry the largest sticks, those who can inflict punishment on the nation can dictate what the rules should be?

The more fundamental question is who makes the laws. In a strict sense, ultimately people decide what the law should be under which they will govern themselves. This is true generally and universally, I think. It is a “revealed preference” argument – the people explicitly or implicitly agree to be governed by the laws. For if it were not generally acceptable by the people, there would be mass disobedience and the law will not apply in fact. That certain people persist over long periods of time, often centuries, to allow themselves to be subject to certain laws is sufficient reason for concluding that that is what they want.

The laws of the land therefore reflect the distilled wisdom of the people of the land. If for some reason they have evolved a good set, they prosper; if the set is flawed, they suffer. I make this argument partly to shield myself from the distress I feel when I hear of the horrors that people commit around the world which are based on the law of the land.

Taslima, as a Muslim, is guilty of criticizing Islam and its holy book the Koran. She is guilty of pointing out that women are treated unfairly in Islam. The law of her land, the Islamic state of Bangladesh, finds her guilty. Moreover, her compatriots would murder her for what she believes in, has spoken and written about. That is the law of that land and there is nothing much one can do about it. That is the law and it is non-negotiable.

Recently, a case in Saudi Arabia attracted some attention. A woman was gang-raped 14 times. Her attackers were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging up to five years; she was sentenced to six months in jail and 100 lashes for being in a car with an un-related male when the attack happened. Her lawyer appealed her sentence, but the judges increased her punishment to 200 lashes.

Saudi Arabia is governed by Sharia, the Islamic law, which requires segregation of the sexes. It must be that the Saudi courts do understand Sharia and can rule competently that the woman who was gang-raped does deserve to be punished for violating the Islamic law.

I am all for Sharia for Islamic countries. What I am against is Sharia being imposed on India now. If the people feel that Sharia should be the law of the land for India, then so be it. But India is not yet an Islamic state. Imposing Sharia by threat of violence should not be tolerated. More specifically, in this case, just because someone’s religious feelings are hurt by some author’s writings, it is not sufficient reason for killing the author.

Freedom of expression is something that some people grant to themselves, and some don’t. The people of the developed nations grant themselves that freedom. A case can be made that development is in a sense an outcome of that freedom. Support for it is provided by noting the strong correlation between how free a society is and how prosperous it is. Societies that forbid freedom of expression are insecure, cowering, fearful, and cowardly.

Taslima Nasreen is not alone in being the object of fearful cowardly people threatening her with violence and death. Another women, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, faces the same. She wrote the script of a documentary called “Submission“. The producer of that documentary, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam and a note pinned to his chest with a knife threatening Ayaan. She went into hiding and then had to leave the Netherlands because of the constant danger to her life.

Here’s her story, as she related it at a recent conference. It is a story of uncommon courage. It is hard not to be moved by her story.

The following question/answer session is below:

[Here is the Google video of the same presentation. It can be downloaded.]

I will be back with part 2 soon. But let me record here a bit of personal family history. My ancestors lived in what is today Bangladesh. About 100 years ago, the province of Bengal was partitioned. My grandfather was then a young boy. His family had to leave all their possessions and flee the land which had been their home for centuries to the western part of the state because the choice was stark: either convert to Islam or be killed. In a sense, we are displaced people, refugees. We have been made refugees once before due to Islamic intolerance. A few decades after that, India itself was partitioned because a large percentage of Muslims of undivided India could not bear to co-exist with non-Muslims. A bloody partition is in our history. I am not sure that it is the last one, though. It is quite possible that once again we may have to become refugees if Sharia indeed becomes the law in India. I, like my ancestors, would prefer not to live under submission.

Notes:

[1] I clarify that the state is in India so as to avoid any confusion, given the context, whether it is a place in India or not.

[2] A previous post on Naseen: Weep for Taslima, and Then for India. Other posts: On Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Exporting Islam.

[3] Here’s Submission on Youtube:

We are not equally wise. Some of us are smarter than others. All our ideas consequently are not equally good. Some ideas are wonderful and others stupid. Our rationality is bounded and no one among us is infinitely wise. Therefore it is hard for us to judge ex ante whether an idea is good or not. Ex post we can see the results of the idea and determine whether the idea is good or not. So it is better to let all ideas play in the marketplace. From among the diversity of ideas, the good ones will survive.

We not only don’t know in advance which idea is good but more importantly we don’t know who has a good idea. People don’t come with a label on their forehead which says that their idea is bound to be good. All we can do is to allow everyone to throw their ideas into the ring.

All this talk about ideas is rather abstract. Let me use “stuff” as a proxy for ideas, because in the end, all stuff is embodied ideas. I use the short word “stuff” to stand for “goods and services.” Goods such as an internal combustion engine or an MP3 player, and services such as provided by a search engine or surgery. Everything you see around yourself began as an idea, was embodied in stuff, and survived in the marketplace competition with other stuff.

Ideas build upon other ideas and they evolve. This same process is duplicated in the stuff that embody the ideas. Someone comes up with the idea of a steam engine; someone else comes up with the idea of mounting it on wheels to run around on roads; and another comes up with the idea of using it on rails; and so on.

It is easy to appreciate that good ideas are good because they lead to good stuff. But that is not all. Some humans just enjoy a good idea for itself. A nice poem, a good story, a philosophical flight of the imagination are all ideas which may not have any practical value other than that they make life enjoyable. Ideas are goods in and of themselves, aside from their instrumental value of producing stuff.

Any institutional arrangement which prohibits the free expression of ideas is not a good idea because it can be argued that it will suffer from lack of progress. Furthermore, societies that prohibit free expression are seen to be materially and culturally poor. Both theoretically and empirically one can defend the idea that free expression is good.

I am against monotheism because it prohibits free expression. A bunch of ignorant savages a thousand or two years ago motivated by bloodlust, greed and fear concoct a fantastical tale which they put together in a book and consider it the final word on every conceivable matter under the sun. The idea that all other ideas that do not conform to this narrow bigoted savage comprehension of the universe should be prohibited is an enormously stupid idea. Why? Because it produces stupid results.

Infected with the ideas contained in a hateful book of ignorant rubbish, people become stupid. They become incapable of generating new ideas. Society stagnates and the people get trapped into the mentality of the century that the ideas originated in. There is no progress. They become incapable of getting out of the trap on their own. In some cases, they drag others down into the hole with them. They fly into a murderous rage if their ideas are challenged, and routinely kill people for questioning their beliefs.

Bad ideas have to be confronted. Free speech and expression is important because it exposes bad ideas. Censoring of expression is bad because the censors cannot be infinitely wise because no one is.

My obsession with free speech and expression is not gratuitous on this blog. I am convinced that the freedom of expression has implications for economic growth and development. India will not be able to progress if it goes down the path that it occasionally treads—of censorship. The government often bans books and movies. That is purely idiotic and if I dare say extremely evil.

[Related posts:

The Freedom to be Offended -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

I titled my two previous pieces exploring the freedom of expression as “The Freedom to be Offended” deliberately. Everyone is free to take offense, which is the flip side of the individual right to free speech. If the speech of one has to be restricted because someone else is offended, then taken to its logical conclusion we would arrive at the absurd position where no one will have the right to express anything.

So here is what I would attempt to do here. First, I would argue that in a world which is a heterogeneous aggregation of people with diverse viewpoints, restricting the freedom to express one’s viewpoint leads to undesirable and absurd situations. Then I will argue why it makes immense practical sense to not proscribe free speech. The evolution of human civilization is critically dependent on this single right. Indeed, free speech is not just a consequence of a civilized society, it is a cause – if not the cause – of a civilized society. I argue that civilization itself is not possible without the freedom for individuals to express what they perceive as their truth. Note that I do not say “the truth” but rather “their truth.” Next I argue why development and economic growth itself is dependent on this right. I will justify why this topic is relevant in the context of India’s development.

The Pastafarians® happen to believe, among other things, that global warming is a consequence of the decrease in the numbers of pirates. They point out the inverse relationship between the number of pirates in the world and global warming. Their deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster™, has instructed them that all other explanations of global warming are blasphemous and therefore the Pastafarians® are mortally offended by so-called “scientists” who extend all sorts of sacrilegious arguments which involve green-house gasses and other pseudo-scientific theories. They point out that the so-called “scientific” theories are just that—theories not fact. The fact, according to Pastafarians®, is that fewer pirates leads to global warming. They insist that the threat of global warming can only be met by more people becoming pirates. They may soon launch a world-wide campaign to outlaw the publication of any explanation not consistent with their pirate dogma which they say their Prophet received when He was Touched by the Noodly Appendage ® of the Flying Spaghetti Monster ™.

“Yeah, yeah,” you may say dismissively, “but they are only a couple of million people who believe in that sort of silliness. They are not a real religion with hundreds of millions of followers.”

I am not sure that the argument by numbers holds much water. Here is what I mean. Just because a very small minority believe in something that the vast majority considers incorrect does not imply that the minority belief is wrong. Only a minority in the whole of Christendom at one time believed that the earth was not flat and they were right and the majority wrong.

So if one has to proscribe the freedom of expression of some based on the prejudices of a large group, there is no reason to not proscribe the freedom of expression based on the prejudices of a small group. The freedom to be offended has to be granted to all groups irrespective of size. In which case, we arrive at the absurd position where nothing can ever be expressed by anyone.

I am a non-monotheist. I am offended by speech which expresses a belief in a monotheistic vengeful cruel dictatorial meddlesome God as in the Judeo Christian Islamic tradition. So to suit my sensibilities, monotheists would be compelled to stop their profession of their belief in the One True God ™ . Not only will they be forced to stop their shouting on loudspeakers their beliefs several times a day, they will have to stop publishing them in their “holy books.”

Someone else may be offended by my expression of my belief that life arose on earth not from divine intervention but through natural processes and the diversity of life is explained by Darwin’s thesis of evolution through natural selection. Darwin’s theory will have to be outlawed, as they are attempting to do in the US, because some people find it offensive to suggest that there is no Big Daddy Up in the Sky™ .

The Amish believe that modern conveniences such as electricity and mechanized forms of transportations are not good. They could push to outlaw the industrial parts of our society. There are some Christian sects that believe that modern medicine is evil since it interferes with the will of the One True God™ and only the power of prayer should be brought upon illness and disease. We, therefore, will have to outlaw medical science research and stop the practice of medicine.

Name any thing or any idea, and I will show you a group which considers that thing immoral, or unethical, or evil and that it offends them. They are free to be offended and I support that freedom as much as I support the freedom of expression. But in a world which is diverse, it is absurd to move from the freedom to take offense to preventing others from expressing themselves, irrespective of whether that expression is artistic, scientific, cultural, or religious. Worse still is the use of violence to stop people from expressing themselves.

Imagine that the neo-conservatives in the US gain absolute power and decide that Intelligent Design™ is the only permitted dogma and all societies that don’t believe in ID, are committing an offense and the US will nuke them since they have nukes.

The followers of one particular monotheistic faith have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to use violence as a response to perceived slights and insults arising from the exercise of free speech in parts of the world not governed by that monotheistic faith’s laws. This is particularly pernicious because there are signs that some people are caving in because of the natural fear of being killed.

The Western Civilization has been the most evolved in terms of the freedom they grant themselves with regards speech. If they start retreating now, they would lose their hard-earned victories. Next time I will argue why the freedom of expression is the cause and consequence of not just the Western civilization but the global civilization as a whole. Show me one society where speech is proscribed by religious dogma and I will show you a backward underdeveloped society.

[See also:

Why Free Speech.

On Being an Armchair Intellectual.]

It is tough only if that line is arbitrarily drawn according to the whims and fancies of mobs. In most societies, it is drawn after due consideration and enshrined in some institution often called the constitution.

The line between what is legal and what is not is drawn by the society in question. It is the law of the land and determining whether an act is legal or not is the job of the courts of the land. Each society has a some mechanism in place for deciding what is permissible and what is not. The important point to note is that laws vary from place to place. What is legal and permissible is local; there is no global standard that can (or even should) be applied. Problems arise when one does not appreciate that distinction.

For instance, the Danish society is governed by Danish law, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by Islamic law. The attempt by Danes to impose Danish law in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be as insane as the attempt by the Saudi Arabians to impose Islamic law in Denmark.

Let me repeat the last bit.

I would be as much out of place if I insist that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia discard the Koran as the constitution of the land as I would be if I insist that Denmark adopt Sharia as the law of the land.

The Saudis don’t allow the religious books of any other religion, including those of other monotheistic faiths, within their borders. That is what their law says, which is reflection of the will of their people. They are absolutely and fundamentally entitled to make their own laws and impose them within their borders. If you don’t like it, you are welcome to not live in Saudi Arabia. But if you live in Saudi Arabia, you have to live in accordance with the laws of that country. But if the Saudi Arabians wish to impose that same law in another society, they are absolutely and fundamentally wrong and should be put in their place with the greatest of haste and the least amount of fuss.

The freedom of expression is granted to the citizens of Denmark by the citizens of Denmark. If you don’t like the Danish exercising that right within the borders of Denmark, if you are offended by their freedom to read and write what they please subject to Danish law, tough luck. You are free to not associate with the Danes and their freedom to express themselves. In a liberal society, freedom of expression is a non-negotiable right. That right is a result of enlightenment and I will be damned if I do not speak up for that remarkable event. My only prayer is that one day — hopefully within my own lifetime — India would have the right to free expression.

One of the most specious arguments trotted out at this juncture is that there are limits to free speech and that shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre is an example of a practical and necessary limitation of free speech. First, shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre is dangerous only if the society consists of panic-striken idiots, as someone remarked. Second, if there is a fire in the theatre, that is precisely what one should shout. Finally in the absense of a fire, if shouting “fire” leads to panic and harm, the correct response is not to outlaw free speech, or to argue for limiting free speech, but to punish according to the laws of the land for false speech. Blurring the distinction between false speech and free speech does not get us too far.

Shouting “fire” any time the mood strikes you in a crowded theatre is no more an expression free speech than defecating in the conference room is an expression of the freedom to use the toilet.

The current spat is about an attempt to impose the narrow viewpoint of a particular people globally. It is an attempt to apply Islamic restrictions on non-Islamic people. Any compromise on resisting such a vile move is a dangerous and slippery slope. Today it is a cartoon, tomorrow it will be what I should read, and the day after what I should wear. For it could be argued in a few years’ time that people eating during a certain time is an offense according to Islam, and so no one should eat during those times.

Just to make it perfectly clear: I am all in favor of Islamic law in Islamic countries. More power to them. But when they attempt to impose their will on my land, I will fight them to the bitter end. The dhimmis may lower their trousers and bend over. Not me.

[Continued in Freedom to be Offended -- Part 3.]

The story is pretty simple. A Danish newspaper, Jylland-Posten, published in September 2005 a dozen cartoons depicting Muhammad after a writer complained that nobody dared illustrate a book he was writing on Muhammad. The newspaper pointed out “that the drawings illustrated an article on the self-censorship which rules large parts of the Western world. Our right to say, write, photograph and draw what we want to within the framework of the law exists and must endure – unconditionally!”

It took some time but the predictable is happening.

“The editor of “Jyllands-Posten”, Carsten Juste, and the cartoonists who did the 12 illustrations have received several death threats, say RSF and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Juste has hired bodyguards to protect his journalists, and the cartoonists have gone into hiding. Similar threats have been made against “Magazinet”. [See the International Freedom of Expression article for some details.]

Many Islamic countries have withdrawn their diplomatic staff from Denmark, besides demanding that the Danish government apologize for the insult to Muslims and to punish the newspaper editor and the cartoonists. The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Rasmussen, declined to meet with the ambassadors from 11 Islamic nations saying that he had no control over what the Danish press published and further that he had no wish to have such control.

Mr. Rasmussen’s stand contrasts sharply with the craven lack of support from any of the leaders of the liberal democracies of the world who would talk very loudly about freedom of expression from the comforts of their own home.

Expressing oneself freely within the confines of the law and without duress is one of the cornerstones of liberal societies. That freedom, like the notion of self-ownership, is non-negotiable. There cannot be and must not be any attempt at censoring of any views and their expression provided it does not violate the law of the land.

The Danish government understands that point and as long as the newspaper has not broken any Danish law, they are powerless to censure those responsible for the publishing of the cartoons.

Now it is undeniable that millions of Muslims are offended. Just as it is the right of the Danish to exercise their freedom of expression granted to them by their society, the Muslims are free to be offended by whatever they wish to be offended by. Irrespective of how many people take offense at something, the right to express oneself within the limits set by the law of a society cannot be trampled upon.

Muslims have taken offense because Islam forbids the depiction of Muhammad or Allah. Muslims are bound by this restriction but non-Muslims living in their own liberal lands are not since they are not governed by Islamic laws. Attempting to impose Islamic restrictions on non-Muslims living in secular or non-Islamic states is silly and pointless.

My position is that the freedom of expression is an inalienable human right. Societies that deny this right are despotic, barbarian, and regressive. And people who don’t value the full exercise of the right to free expression are not fully evolved.

Societies impede their own progress when they tamper with the right to free speech and expression. The Christian church barbequed quite a few free-thinkers in its day and tried to shut up a lot more. Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilie come immediately to mind. What these two said was offensive to Christians.

Of course, one may argue that those matters dealt with views on the natural world, and not about artistic freedom to caricature religious leaders. I don’t see the material difference between the two. Freedom to speak and write freely cannot be based on the content of the expression.

Certainly, it is not hard to find someone who will be offended by the most innocuous of objects. Piglet (of Winnie the Pooh fame) is no longer allowed as a decoration on one’s desk in one county in the UK because it could offend Muslims who consider pigs to be unclean. Not just objects, even symbols offend some. Every now and then, some group or the other takes up a call to ban the symbol sacred to the majority of Indians, the swastika. Why? Because the Nazis had used it.

My advice to anyone who is offended by the lawful expression of free speech is simple: don’t watch, hear, or read whatever it is you find offensive. Nobody is forcing you to read or watch you find offensive. Reach for the remote and switch the channel. If you cannot find the channel you want, start your own channel. Or newspaper. Or whatever. But for the sake of sanity, keep your sensibilities to yourself if you find free expression offensive.

{Go to The Freedom to be Offended — Part 2}

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Related links: Where’s the anger? (Albion’s Seedling) The comments are revealing as well.

This cartoon about Piglet is priceless.

An old item from Nov 2003: “BC” cartoon seen as a slur on Islam. This one is pretty unbelievable.