Vijayvaani - Tamil Nadu Politics: Cancerous Church Eats into Dravidian Parties - II Radha Rajan

Vijayvaani.com: "

Tamil Nadu Politics: Cancerous Church Eats into Dravidian Parties - II

Radha Rajan

At the time of independence in 1948, a peculiar situation prevailed in Sri Lanka where the politically assertive section both among the Sinhala and Tamil people were Christians, a situation which continues till the present day. This was the result of the almost total control of education and state patronage extended to Christian missionary schools and colleges by all colonial powers – Portuguese, Dutch and then the British.

Church-run schools, which received colonial state patronage and government funds, provided education in English as compared to the education in the vernacular languages in Sinhala and Tamil provided by temples and Buddhist monasteries. English education was mandatory for admission to institutions of higher learning which in turn led to employment in government institutions.

The Church in Sri Lanka, in an extension of its rice-bowl conversion in Africa, made admission to their schools and colleges conditional upon religious conversion to Christianity in what may be termed blackboard conversion. The Church in South India targeted the Tamil Nadar community similarly; thus within the same family those who opted to send their children to missionary schools converted to Christianity and were given alien foreign sounding Christian names.

Not surprisingly, in the early years of the twentieth century only those Sri Lankans - Sinhala and Tamil - who were English-educated were employed by the British administration in government jobs and the same section emerged as frontrunners in the country’s polity too. Bandaranaike, Jayawardene, Lakshman Kadirgamar, Chelvanayakam and even Ranasinghe Premadasa, son of Richard Ranasinghe, were all Christians. The Church had never had it so good; except that the notion of Tamil People which the Church had sown in society rebounded on the Church in an unexpected turn of events.

While the Church fabricated the Tamil People/Tamil Nation fiction in India vis-à-vis the Brahmins, its work to plant the cancerous cell in Sri Lanka was made easier because the Tamil language and its culture/people had to be presented as being separate only vis-à-vis the Sinhala language and its culture/people. The fact that both the Sinhala speaking people and the Tamil speaking people were civilisationally, culturally and religiously bound to Hinduism and bound by the umbilical cord to the Hindu bhumi in equal measure was pushed to the margins of their collective consciousness; and identity of language was privileged over civilisational identity.

The Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka, like the non-Brahmins of Tamil Nadu, was a willing customer for Church peddled separatism.

The success of the Church propaganda that the Tamil speaking people of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu were a separate nationality can be gauged from the fact that while the Buddhist clergy, reacting strongly to Tamil separatism which had reared its head even before independence in 1948, wanted to push the Tamil speaking people of Sri Lanka to the margins of national life, it remained sanguine to the fact that every President that the country elected was Christian; Sinhala Christian. The Buddhist clergy was prepared to accommodate an Abrahamic religion into its conception of Sinhala nationalism, while refusing to reach out to the civilisationally related Tamil Hindus who constituted 15% of the population.

Pitting brother against brother is classic Abrahamic/Christian war tactics going back to the Old Testament.

Christians who constitute 7.5% of the population were tactically distributed among the 74% Sinhala, 12.6 % Tamil and 5.19% Indian Tamil populace, thus giving the Church a powerful leverage among all sections of the language divide.

Every penny and paisa that the Church spends, it spends as investment towards realizing its core objective – control of communities leading to control of polity leading ultimately to control of government culminating in bloody or bloodless conquest of territory. The path to this objective is religious conversion; what was achieved solely through enculturation in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, through the Church’s missionary educational and medical institutions in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries is now being achieved through NGOs, through an aggressive political discourse in religious freedom and human rights which always work only to the Church’s advantage to facilitate penetration, conversion and conquest.

Investing in political parties is the Church’s latest venture in Tamil Nadu. The Church’s investment, besides the time-tested and highly successful strategy of planting Christians in important ruling families through the love angle or as close confidants to politicians, is three-pronged –

The Church is not going to invest money into their parties and the state only to have Karunanidhi and family, Jayalalithaa and baggage to enjoy the fruits of power. The Church wants the whole of Tamil Nadu and a large part of Sri Lanka. If the DMK, AIADMK and the BJP do not see this even now, it may well spell their doom. The Congress in Tamil Nadu is recruiting Christians into the party at all levels – educated, poorly educated, as leaders and as cadre.

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Centre mulls ban on live telecast of Baba Ramdev's programmes in Aastha TV

Centre mulls ban on live telecast of Baba Ramdev's programmes in Aastha TV

HYDERABAD: Justice L Narasimha Reddy of the High Court on Tuesday sought the response of the central government to a petition that charged it with blocking live telecast of programmes being conducted by yoga guru Baba Ramdev. The petitioner contended that apart from teaching yoga, the baba was enlightening people about the ill-effects of black money and money stashed away in foreign banks. The judge was responding to a petition filed by B Rammohan Reddy, an advocate, who said he was aggrieved by the sudden cancellation of Ramdev Baba's early morning programmes being regularly telecast by Aastha TV channel. Because the Centre was not happy with the speeches of the baba on black money, it ordered the channel to stop live telecast of his yoga camps with effect from March 21, K Ashok Reddy, the counsel for the petitioner, told the court. "By following Baba Ramdev's instructions, I was able to do yoga exercises. Now, that facility is gone. My diabetic problem and other ailments were controlled to a large extent because of my regular exercises and now I fear they may return owing to my inability to do this exercise in the absence of any guidance from the baba," the petitioner said. When the judge sought to know the response of the Centre, Ponnam Ashok Goud, assistant solicitor general, assured the court that he would get back soon.

aussies knew it was racism, but pretended otherwise. now aussies shoot up temple.

aussies knew it was racism, but pretended otherwise. now aussies shoot up temple.: "

mar 30th, 2011 CE

http://www.thehindu.com/news/the-india-cables/article1582571.ece

the wikileaks cable makes it clear what everybody knew: indians were being attacked for being indians; i have always suspected that it was possibly lebanese toughs -- who have made some parts of oz no-go areas for police -- who were behind it, seeing as they had religious prejudices anyway, and also viewed the indians as less likely to hit back. they wouldn't attack chinese, i suspect, because of 'soft power' -- all those kung-fu films have convinced thugs that chinese will do karate or something. and there are chinese triad gangs and vietnamese gangs in australia, so the criminals have a healthy respect for east asian looking people in terms of whether they will hit back.

but hindus, ah, they know hindus are weak and soft.

ergo, the answer for all this is for indians to go out and buy some guns. yes, seriously. deterrence. kill a couple of racists, the rest will think twice.

i guess this is also part of the gandhi legacy ('soul force') and the jawaharlal legacy ('chinese beat up on india in 1962) and the sonia legacy ('pak terrorists kill indians at will -- see mumbai 11/26').

so, of course, they decide to shoot up the oldest hindu temple in australia, just days after an 'inter-faith' meeting. i suppose the 'inter-faith' meeting made it clear there were no weapons inside the temple (which may or may not be true for some other 'faiths' that i could name).

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/Hindu-temple-attacked-in-Australia/articleshow/7825416.cms

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Behind the Arab revolt is a word we dare not speak

Behind the Arab revolt is a word we dare not speak: "http://johnpilger.com/articles/behind-the-arab-revolt-is-a-word-we-dare-not-speak

24 February 2011

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “western civilisation”, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy”.

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone”, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market”, according to Britain’s official arms “procurers”, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.
Source : http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

"

Behind the Arab revolt is a word we dare not speak

Behind the Arab revolt is a word we dare not speak: "http://johnpilger.com/articles/behind-the-arab-revolt-is-a-word-we-dare-not-speak

24 February 2011

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “western civilisation”, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy”.

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone”, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market”, according to Britain’s official arms “procurers”, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.
Source : http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

"