Bible thumpers
The Public Affairs Magazine- Newsinsight.net
Americans are being increasingly stereotyped as stupid.
By Arvind Kumar
An email that did the rounds recently in Hungary claimed that an American tourist had rented a car and ruined it by driving in first gear for over two hundred kilometres not realising that it was not equipped with automatic transmission. The email claimed that the barom (idiot) American had driven from Budapest to Pecs at a speed of eighty kilometers per hour burning the engine in the process. Although the story in the email turned out to be a hoax, the number of people who believed it illustrates the point that the stereotype of Americans being stupid is easily accepted outside the US. How true is this widespread stereotype? Is the usage of this sobriquet warranted? An analysis of the behaviour of Americans will throw light on the causes for the existence of this stereotype.
The main reasons for the existence of this stereotype can be traced to the region in the US known as the "Bible belt". Comprised mostly of the southern states, where Christianity has deep roots and the culture spread by evangelical Christians is all-pervasive, this region has an undue share of influence on American polity and the establishments that control political and intellectual discourse in America. So powerful is the region that it has become the norm for the two main political parties to make sure that at least one of the presidential candidate or his running mate is from this region.
A large section of the media, government bodies, universities, and non-profit organisations operate in the framework created by, as the noted American journalist, H.L.Mencken, termed them, the "Bible thumpers". As the rest of the world mostly encounters only these American institutions apart from the American corporations, a look at the ideas and actions of these establishments will give an understanding of the causes that shaped the opinion about Americans in the rest of the world. Not always are the employees of these institutions Christians, but since their agenda has been set by the Christian fundamentalists, even non-Christian employees are forced to further this agenda.
The religious nature of the American government has never been under question. The president and other office bearers take the oath of office on the Bible, utter the words "So help me God" as they take oath, their currency notes and coins have the words, "In God We Trust", their pledge of allegiance has the words, "One Nation Under God", and chaplains read prayers in the Congress and at presidential inaugurations.
While these points can be dismissed as either harmless or minor issues, it becomes worrisome when the government starts interfering in others' lives and forces them to live according to the Bible. Thus, it is truly a matter of concern that the American politicians base several policies based on Biblical teaching.
For example, opposition to cloning is a direct result of the religious right's opposition to violating the second commandment in the Bible, which says that one should not make an image of anything that is in the heavens above, on the earth, or in the waters. The fact that cloning would threaten the monopoly their god holds over creation agitates them.
Another ongoing controversy in the US is the issue of stem-cell research that could potentially find cures for many medical disorders. While it is not surprising that those opposed to stem-cell research thump the Bible in their defense, a less known fact is that even some of those who support stem-cell research quote the Bible and seek to interpret it in their favour. A supporter of stem-cell research, senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, quotes a verse from the second chapter of Genesis to buttress his claim that creation is a two-step process. According to him, god first created man, and in the second step, god breathed life into man. He claims that embryonic stem cells are like the finished product of the first stage, and placing them in the womb breathes life into them. He argues that it should therefore be okay to allow embryonic stem-cell research!
Influence of the Bible on American policy is not limited to areas that collide with scientific research. It affects almost every aspect of decision-making, including its foreign policy. For example, both the left wing and the right wing hate Jews. While the Left blames the "Jewish conspiracy" for almost any disaster or unpalatable event, the Right is guilty of anti-Semitism. Yet, the US supports Israel because many Americans believe that the land considered holy by Christians ought to be in the possession of Jews in order for Jesus Christ to return. This belief is so strong that they seek to fulfill the "prophecies" made in the Bible. Thus, in order to make true the "prophecy" that an all-red heifer will be sacrificed at the site of the Temple at Jerusalem, Christian fanatics, who normally object to anyone other than their god playing the creator, reversed their position on genetic engineering and decided to fund the creation of a red heifer using genetic engineering.
Perhaps, Indians who feel irked by the constant hostility of many Americans towards India, may have more luck in convincing them to be friendly if they pointed out that the ninth chapter of Revelation in the Bible states that those with the seal of god on their foreheads will be spared of torture by the locusts that will supposedly arise from the bottomless pit described in this chapter. After all, many Indians apply Tilak on their foreheads.
Two recent cases in the US Supreme Court that captured the attention of the nation were both related to Biblical concepts. The first one was to decide whether it is acceptable to have the words, "One nation under God", in the pledge of allegiance. Those who wanted the phrase removed argued that it violated the idea of separation of church and state, and that the god in the phrase was the Christian god. Eventually, the case was dismissed on a technicality and the court left the phrase intact. The second case was about the display of the Ten Commandments in a Texas courthouse. The Supreme Court gave a mixed ruling on this case, allowing the display if the motive was secular. Cases such as these, in which the Supreme Court does not rule against Christianity, give an idea of its real stance on the issue of separating Christianity from the state.
The US Supreme Court is a controversial body with its judges appointed for life by politicians. The rulings of its judges are usually aligned with the ideology of the political party that appointed them. The appointment of a Supreme Court judge can be a contentious affair with an intense struggle between the two dominant political parties and the religious views of the candidate coming into focus.
In addition to motives for several domestic policies, justifications for wars waged by the US can also be traced to Christian theology. Soon after the 9/ 11 attacks, Ann Coulter, a right-wing rabble-rouser who is not exactly known for high intellect, wanted to convert Muslims into Christians. In the din of the cheers that her comments elicited, what was lost was the irony that such thinking on her part is the result of Arab influence on the minds of her ancestors who were converted by the original Arab Christians, and the converted Christians in turn passing on the indoctrination down the generations.
Religious discrimination is rampant in the US armed forces. In a recent survey, many non-Christians in the training institutes of the US armed forces reported being discriminated against. During the bombing campaign in Iraq, a chaplain in the US army blackmailed soldiers and refused to give them water unless they underwent baptism.
Prejudice is so deep-rooted in the US that American officials routinely refuse permission for setting up Buddhist or Hindu temples, often citing frivolous reasons. There are several churches in every neighbourhood, but American officials place innumerable hurdles when Buddhists or Hindus, who between them number a few million in the country, wish to set up temples.
In South Plainfield, New Jersey, a borough zoning board voted against the construction of a temple claiming that it would cause traffic congestion. No such excuse is heard for churches that dot the New Jersey landscape. What was really noteworthy was that the township council of the neighbouring town of Edison, which has nothing to do with the town of Plainfield, expressed its hatred through official channels by passing a resolution against the construction of the temple.
The behaviour of many American people is no different from that of their officials. A few years back, white supremacist arsonists in Sacramento in so-called "liberal" California attacked three synagogues causing material and emotional damage to Jews. A proposed Vietnamese Buddhist temple in California has drawn protests from residents who oppose it on specious grounds such as "environmental impact" and chanting being "noise pollution". Hindus who wished to construct a temple in Chino Hills, California, faced protests from fanatic Christian residents, and a proposed Hare Krishna temple in Escondido, California, faced similar protests from Christian residents in the city.
The weird ideas of Christian fanatics are by no means limited to people of a specific ethnicity. "Bobby" Jindal, son of Indian immigrants and a member of the US Congress, is a staunch Christian and wrote in a descriptive article how he chanted "Hail Mary" and exhorted "all demons to leave in the name of Christ" in order to cure a person afflicted with cancer. Jindal has held important positions in the health departments of his home state, Louisiana, and the federal government, and seems to have ambitions of running for president of the United States. Imagine the possibilities if Christians like Jindal wield absolute power; they could decide to shut down hospitals and replace them with centres to beat the devil out of sick people.
Academia sets the tune
The influence of "Bible thumpers" has taken such deep roots in America that they are influential in the academia which is a very important aspect of America as it shapes the minds of Americans. The "Bible thumpers" are so well entrenched that they force science textbooks for schoolchildren to teach what they call "creation science". According to "creation science", god created the world around six thousand years ago, exactly according to descriptions found in the Bible. The argument goes that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is taught in schools even though it is just a theory, and so "creation science" too merits being taught to schoolchildren in science classes.
In any other country, "creation science" would have been termed as idiocy and its proponents laughed at in their faces, but not in America. Instead of the derision they deserve, the creation-theorists actually find people in the mainstream media and academia to debate their points and thus gain legitimacy as their ideas share a platform with scientific ideas. Such debates discuss "both sides" of the issue, as Americans consider it a sacrilege not to have a "balanced" debate that discusses "both sides" of the question.
After the courts ruled against the proponents of "creation science," they turned their attention to discrediting science, and recently came up with the bizarre idea of implementing a rule whereby it would be required to affix stickers on science textbooks with disclaimers stating that scientific theories were not necessarily facts. They now peddle creationism under a new label - "intelligent design." The result of it is that the education boards of several states require textbooks to be revised in order to accommodate the advocates of "intelligent design." Such actions by Christian fanatics only strengthen the common stereotype of Americans being stupid.
Christian influence in academia is not limited to school textbooks, but also extends to universities. Many American universities began as divinity schools run by churches, whose agenda the humanities departments continue to push. Recently, Harvard university appointed a Jesuit priest, Reverend Francis X.Clooney, as a professor for comparative theology. Professor Clooney has written that the souls of those who lack union with Rome are in peril. With such preconceived notions, it is a matter of curiosity what he intends to compare between various theologies.
Elsewhere, Bob Jones University in South Carolina states, "While most secular biologists are committed to evolution as the basic principle of biology, Bob Jones University trains Christian biologists who see the living world indelibly marked with the fingerprints of a God of limitless wisdom and power." Needless to say, in their pre-med courses, they teach Biblical "creation theory".
In late 2002, an article by Sankrant Sanu, an Indian thinker, about the Microsoft Encyclopedia Encarta entry on Hinduism authored by Professor Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago, spurred Indians to petition Microsoft to replace the biased entry. Sanu's piece pointed out that the entry on Hinduism was of poor quality, had factual inaccuracies, and was hostile in tone. He further pointed out that it was written by an "outsider" (that is, someone who was not a Hindu), while the corresponding Encarta entries for other major religions like Christianity and Islam were not only appreciative of those faiths, but had been authored by people who belonged to them.
To Microsoft's credit, after Sanu's criticism spurred an outrage and widespread accusations of poor scholarship on the part of Professor Wendy Doniger, it replaced the entry by a scholarly piece on Hinduism.
Sankrant Sanu's analysis of the Encarta piece holds true about American academics in general. While professors studying Christianity are usually Christians sympathetic to Christianity, professors who study Hinduism are usually Christians who are hostile to Hindu culture. If they happen to be Indians, they are usually Marxists who are hostile to these cultures. Even the top universities are not exempt from this malaise. As we will see later, this is also true of journalists in the media.
One of the reasons for this situation is that humanities departments are usually short of funds. Unlike their counterparts in science and technology departments, faculty members in humanities departments do not easily get grants. This also means that humanities departments do not attract the best brains resulting in poorer quality of research and as a result, even fewer grants. Thus, it is a vicious circle of poor brains not attracting grants and lack of grants keeping away the good brains. Christian fundamentalists, who have deep pockets, step in to fill this void by setting up endowments, and cash-strapped departments and professors are easy prey for them.
Though the Christian tilt is rampant in humanities departments and the quality of research in science departments is generally of high quality, the latter are not immune from the influence of Biblical ideas. Recently, Johns Hopkins university (JHU) announced the results of a "study" that can only be termed as pseudo-science. Apparently, they had conducted a "joint" study with Indian scientists and concluded that circumcision is an effective weapon against AIDS! The Bible requires human males to undergo circumcision, and this "study" did nothing but provide fodder for those who claim that the idea is backed by science. It is not uncommon to come across "scientific studies" in America suggesting that human males are quirks of nature and imperfect creations needing correction in a manner described in the Bible.
What really raised the suspicion about this "study" is that the JHU "scientists" seemed more than eager to give credit to their Indian collaborators and term the "study" as an international project, even though it is unusual for American scientists to involve others and share credit with them when they are on the verge of discovering something important. A closer look at this "study" is revealing. While the Indian scientists were in charge of data collection and manuscript preparation, the JHU folks were the ones who interpreted the data. Reaching conclusions by linking two separate events without an explanation of cause and effect may be acceptable in voodoo practices, not science.
Media blows the trumpet
American journalists and most of the media in the US are products of their education system, which moulds their thinking. Unlike in other countries, the American education system is such that it largely determines the way people think. This has resulted in the phenomenon of most Americans having predictable views on almost every issue. Mainstream American thinking can also be considered subliminally racist in nature, that is, they are racist without realising that they are racist. Even the media is not free of this attitude. Captions on photographs covering the disaster in New Orleans illustrate this point. While desperate white victims who helped themselves to food from grocery stores were described using positive words and were supposed to have "found" food, blacks in a similar predicament were supposed to have "looted" the grocery stores.
In a similar display of double standards, Amy Waldman of The New York Times (NYT) asserts the identity of the London bombers and repeats the claims of the London police without providing evidence. In her report on the terror bombings in Mumbai in 2003, she sought to rationalise the blasts as retaliation for the events in Gujarat the previous year, and wrote, "The Bombay police commissioner, R. S. Sharma, said on Monday night that law enforcement authorities suspected that so-called jihadi groups were also responsible for the blasts, although he offered no specific evidence for that assertion." In the same article, she justified the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 that killed hundreds of innocent people as retaliation for riots that occurred in 1992. No one can be blamed for viewing this attitude of Amy Waldman as racism and concluding that NYT considers terrorism to be terrorism only when there are white Christian casualties.
Amy Waldman may or may not be overtly racist, but there is no denying that many American journalists are subliminal racists. This is due to the values they imbibe from their environment, and much of what they say is actually sincere conditioned response fitting in with the framework of mainstream thinking. Thus, when Amy Waldman tries to obfuscate the issue of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis being violent by lumping them together in the non-existent group called "South Asians", she is most likely not being deliberately racist. It is due to subliminal racism that almost every description of Native Americans involves mention of their mystical beliefs and projects them as far removed from modernity, while Christians are treated with reverence even if they indulge in laughable behaviour. For instance, people in New Jersey recently claimed that a Sacred Heart of Jesus statue in a church blinked, and the American media gave the impression that it might be a miracle.
The prejudice of the media folks in considering American thinking as the only acceptable form of mainstream thinking results in a curious phenomenon; they end up behaving like cheerleaders of their mainstream establishment. Despite its stated claims of being the watchdog of democracy, the American media acts as the propaganda arm of its government. This point was on display during the bombing of Iraq when the media faithfully parroted the false claims made by the US government. Instead of being watchdogs and indulging in critical analysis, the media behaved like lapdogs seeking to be petted by Uncle Sam.
The US government exploits this weakness of the media to its full advantage. During the bombing of Iraq, it figured that if secretary of state Colin Powell stood in the United Nations and claimed to have evidence of chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the media would believe it. All he had to do was to have a couple of CIA agents next to him and this would lend him credibility.
The next day, The Washington Post's editorial stated, "After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." It went on to claim that he "offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein's regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe."
While the rest of the world dismissed Powell's claims, the media in the US fell for this cheap trick. Leading Indian journalist Ashok Row Kavi terms this as "desperate disinformation" - apart from those spreading the disinformation (in this case Americans), no one else believes it.
The Washington Post was not alone in falling for the government propaganda about Iraq. Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV fell for it completely, and ended up having to make a humiliating apology admitting that his "analysis" was wrong. He blamed George Tenet of the CIA for his flawed claims, and in doing so, made the tacit admission that it was not his analysis to begin with; he was just parroting CIA's bogus claims.
For their part, a majority of Americans believed their government, and in a stunning response to directions from their government to stock up on plastic sheets and duct tapes to seal their homes and shield themselves from germ warfare, many of them created a mad rush at department stores. Robert Bartley, an editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal, even took credit for having "elaborated this threat" before the government had done it. For its part, the government used a colour-coded terror alert system to control the level of fear in the masses. Merely by changing the status from yellow to orange, the government could induce more fear in the minds of Americans. While this whole setup may seem amusing to those outside the US, it must be kept in mind that the government used fear as a mechanism to gain support from people.
Propaganda on behalf of the US government was also carried out by the so-called "embedded" journalists who were attached to the US army and had to get their reports about the war approved by the US army. That is, they were acting as typists for the press releases of the US army.
The American media has acted as the mouthpiece of its government for a long time. A prominent example is the coverage of the 1988 mid-air bombing of the Pan Am flight as it was flying over Lockerbie in Scotland. The American government claimed it was the handiwork of a Palestinian group in Syria, which was bankrolled by the Iranian intelligence agency, and the media faithfully carried these allegations. They even presented "evidence" of a wire transfer of several million dollars to buttress their claim. In 1989, after Libya's refusal to support the American response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, incensed Americans claimed to have found "new evidence" suggesting that the bombing was actually carried out by Libya. The American media obediently changed its tune and claimed that it was Libya after all that carried out the bombing.
The reason for the media's behavior is their lack of knowledge of things in general, and as a result, they look up to their government for authentication of facts. Complaints by American journalists that they are looked down upon by their peers from other countries for no reason are invalid. If other journalists feel superior and behave in an arrogant manner, Americans have only themselves to blame.
The media not only supports the government, but also the Christian evangelists. While the rest of the non-Islamic world has advanced, many Americans are still in a dilemma and have not decided whether women should be treated as human or sub-human. A Tennessee based newspaper, Knoxville News Sentinel, actually carried an exchange between those who wanted to keep women subservient and those who were against women being submissive. It is truly remarkable that they are still discussing this point.
Christianity also finds expression in the form of hateful articles about other religions. Some time back, Jon Carroll of San Francisco Chronicle made a factually incorrect and outrageous claim that Hinduism condones rape as a just form of punishment. Such ignorance is by no means an exception; it is rampant among Americans. Studies repeatedly find that many Americans are ignorant of geography and are unaware of the cultures of other countries. Thus, Carroll's hateful statements may have been sincere statements made out of ignorance about Hindus and India. However, what cannot be condoned is that even after Carroll's article was brought to the attention of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a self-proclaimed media watchdog group, it did not criticise the publication of this hateful article. There is definitely an unwritten rule among both conservatives and liberals in the US, to act as the foot soldiers of Christianity.
Denver Post, a newspaper in the state of Colorado where many staunch Christians live, published another shocking article. According to this article, the central tenets of Christianity and Islam were charity and love of one's neighbour, but Hindu gods were unconvincing and Hindus were despicable people. The article criticised Hindus for not surrendering their hard-earned wealth to the Christians and even termed their wealth as "commercial spoils."
Hatred against non-Christians, possibly subliminal like their racist attitudes, is rampant in the American media. A proposed Buddhist retreat at Berne in upstate New York resulted in a weekly magazine publishing a letter from a pastor, Jay T. Francis, inciting hatred against Buddhists and claiming that the "spiritual environment of our area and more importantly the destiny of our souls is at stake". Two weeks later, an editorial by Reverend C.W. Davis of Altamont was published in which he blamed Eastern religions for leading him into drug abuse in the 1960s, and mocked Buddha for not claiming to have the powers to cure cancers, broken bones, illnesses, and mental disabilities, powers that his god supposedly possessed. It is a well known fact that many Christian priests are recruited from drug rehabilitation centres and prisons and this is the reason for their continued errant behavior.
When a Hindu temple in St Louis was firebombed twice within days of each other in 2003, the media pretended that it was not motivated by hate and swept the news about it under the carpet. More recently, in a chilling reminiscence of Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, statues at a Hindu temple at Orlando, Florida, were broken and paint poured into shoes left outside, but most of the media has not even bothered to mention the attack.
The same racist attitude made the journalists react with horror when India conducted its nuclear tests. Not long before the Indian tests, the French carried out tests in the Pacific Ocean, and the media found those acceptable. As noted earlier in the context of American academics, this attitude is a result of the bias in the choice of journalists who write about Hindus. They usually do not have a Hindu background, or if they do, they are usually Marxists.
American journalists also believe that it is the right of Christians, Muslims or Jews to be politically active, but brand Hindus fighting for their political rights as "Hindu fundamentalists". So deep is the antipathy that they do not realise they are prejudiced and consider a Hindu to be a criminal merely for being politically active. A reward of $100 was offered to the members of a journalism related mailing list if they could name just one organisation that asks for the rights of Hindus and yet has not been branded "Hindu fundamentalist" or an equivalent term. The offer resulted in a stunned silence and put an end to a noisy discussion on the topic. The reward lies unclaimed to this day and is now open to everyone. The first person to name just one such group can send in their entry and collect the reward of $100.
Despite the fact that the media indulges in propaganda on behalf of the government and Christian fundamentalists, there is always hope. The New York Times has started charging a fee for letting readers access some of its content on the web. This means that at least some of its propaganda will no longer be distributed for free. Small mercies, these.
Dangerous results of mindless "experts"
A pertinent question that needs to be raised is why the US ended up supporting the very people who carried out the 9/ 11 attacks. The American government seems to have poor judgment and does not seem to care for morals when it comes to choosing allies or implementing its foreign policy. There seems to be a pattern in the kind of people it trusts and works with - Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the House of Saud, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and a whole bunch of dictators and terrorists.
Why is it that they consistently support terrorists? Is it not dense of them to lend support to those who end up attacking them? To answer these questions, we need to turn our attention to the so-called "think tanks" which advice the government.
People from the humanities departments of various American universities form the staff of these self-described "think tanks," and each "think tank" has its own agenda usually defined by powerful Christian fundamentalists. Much of the analysis by the "experts" at these "think tanks" is inaccurate and very superficial. Occasionally, they get something right about another country, but it is usually well known information easily available from newspapers published in that country. When they hit upon such ordinary information, they feel good about it and brand themselves "experts". A few years back, one such "expert" on hearing that the person speaking to him was an Indian, is reputed to have exclaimed that it was wonderful that India and Malaysia were building a bridge connecting the two countries. He had probably read about a joint project between the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia.
To gauge the quality of scholars at these "think tanks," one just needs to look at the works churned out by them. In a remarkable piece, William Milam, former Ambassador to Pakistan and now attached to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, argues that Pakistan's rulers ought to be rewarded with F-16s in order to pacify them. In other words, the more violent they are, the more rewards they deserve. He also claimed that Pakistan was a "stable democracy." Even president Clinton, who appointed him ambassador, did not believe his cockamamie about Pakistan being a "stable democracy." During his official visit to Pakistan, Clinton ducked down, hid from public view, sent a decoy plane, and had a double walk out of it, before he quietly arrived by another plane and entered the country unnoticed.
Another "expert" familiar to Indians is Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, who was a policy adviser to the state department in the Reagan administration. Known for his pedestrian analysis, he goes by the title of "South Asia expert". In June of this year, Cohen argued before the House International Relations Committee of the US Congress that Pakistan should be supplied with weapons, and that it had been helpful in its "cooperation in revealing its clandestine support for the Iranian, Libyan, North Korean and other missile and nuclear programs". The terrorists must have got the message - all they need to do after supplying nuclear arms to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, is to call up the South Asia "expert" at Brookings Institution and reveal their transactions, and Cohen is sure to argue that they must be rewarded with more arms! In the very first sentence of his testimony, Cohen did not fail to announce that he was pleased to share his "expertise".
For its part, the state department has been led by people equally naïve about the state of affairs in other countries.
The previous secretary of state, Madeleine Albright - who is supposed to have risen high in the ranks of power due to her father's reputation and her marriage to a wealthy media magnate - supported the Islamist group Kosovo Liberation Army, a group that has ties to Osama bin Laden. Condoleezaa Rice, the current secretary of state who has a PhD in international studies, claimed that Iran was trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism to the Taliban, and that it was "doing all kinds of things with Pakistan". At the time she made this claim, Iran was opposed to Pakistan as well as the Taliban. The only country that continually does "all kinds of things with Pakistan" is the US. In another display of its famed stupidity, the US airlifted a number of Taliban fighters and evacuated them from the war zone.
US support for terrorist groups and dictators is not limited to Islamists. It also extends to Communists. It is for this reason that Stalin termed them as "useful idiots". That they still support Communists can be seen from the fact that both conservatives and liberals support the Bengali Bolsheviks and Nehruvian-Stalinists in India. In fact, the Indian Communists have American politicians wrapped around their fingers, and use them at will. That is how they managed to get the US Library of Congress to appoint a Marxist from India to one of its chairs. This control by Indian Marxists over American politicians was also on display when along with their Islamist allies, they got the American government to spew their propaganda about Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, and rescind his visa. Among those who were used by the Communists and Islamists to act on behalf of them in pushing this agenda were Congressman Reverend Joe Pitts, Congressman John Conyers, and the US department of state. Many clueless Congressmen, including Reverend Joe Pitts and Dana Rohrabacher, are part of the lobby group that lobbies on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Many of the politicians who act against India are also driven by Christian fundamentalism. Over the years, US governments have implemented the agenda of Christian fundamentalists in their foreign policy as well as their domestic policies. James Watt, who served as the secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, believed that the end of the world was imminent and allowed the pillaging of natural resources. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Watts said, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."
Christian fundamentalism in America is not limited to the right wing. The leftists too support Christianity. The number of religious people among their leadership over the years is revealing - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton. Liberals definitely seem more comfortable rallying behind a church leader. Liberal thinking is also conditioned by subliminal racism. They have a hierarchy according to which they view people of various races. During his 2003 anti-war speech in Washington D.C., Bill Fletcher of the Trans Africa Forum opposed Bush's policies and stated that Bush ought to deal with the problem between India and Pakistan. In other words, Bush was not good enough to be trusted with policies that affect Americans, but it was okay to leave Indians in the care of Bush.
An important "think tank" that politicians rely on is the Rand Corporation - an organisation that works for various intelligence agencies in the US - which routinely publishes policy reports that end up as fodder for right-wing Christian fundamentalists. From an academic standpoint, most of its reports are of poor quality and full of factual inaccuracies, but it provides the fundamentalists with propaganda material. For example, a recent report authored by Greg Treverton and a few others made the factually incorrect claims that India was a "Hindu State" and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) was a religious movement that based its philosophy on hate. It went on to liken RSS with Islamic terrorist outfits that hijack planes and plant bombs in marketplaces.
Greg Treverton, former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, who has also served on the National Security Council, runs the intelligence policy centre of the Rand Corporation. Had Treverton done his homework, he would have known about the RSS and not ended up with a shoddy piece of work.
RSS members who are part of the Bharatiya Janata Party at best indulge in a weasel war dance and make a lot of noise about restoring the rights of Hindus in India. When they were in power, they failed to liberate the Hindu temples from the control of the government, and actually helped the Islamic cause by increasing subsidies for Muslims. Gary Brecher, a writer for the website eXile.ru, made the perceptive comment about the term "Hindu militant", that burning Hallmark greeting cards does not qualify one to be classified as a "militant". It says a lot about American "think tanks" that an amateur writing for a website has a better understanding about India than the "experts" at various "think tanks" have.
The propaganda against the RSS is the result of Communists everywhere branding their opponents as fascists, and Rand Corporation seems to have swallowed the propaganda fed by Indian Communists. Privately, Indian Communists themselves admit that they use the label for political purposes and express surprise that Americans actually swallowed their propaganda. The ill-researched documents that the naïve staff members at Rand Corporation routinely come up with may explain why the CIA was caught by surprise over the 9/ 11 attacks, and believed that weapons of mass destruction were buried in the sands of Iraq.
Interestingly, Rand Corporation is headquartered in a building shaped like the "Jesus Fish". The "Jesus Fish" is a figure that consists of two intersecting arcs resulting in the shape of a fish, and many Americans place this figure on their cars in order to make the statement that they are Christian fanatics. Opponents consider it a badge of stupidity that advertises the backward thinking of those who display it. Early Christians, who had to go underground due to their violent activities, apparently used this figure as a secret sign to indicate their meeting place.
The view of Americans expressed here is not a judgment on the many hardworking Americans who have a scientific temper, are innovative, and whose contributions have benefited all of us around the world. Nor is it a judgment on media outlets like Frontpage Magazine, which has published insightful articles by writers such as Serge Trifkovic, or thinkers like Hugh Fitzgerald who have a good understanding about the world. It is a judgment on the Christian fanatics. The fanatics must take responsibility for the "Stupid American" stereotype.
Like their counterparts in the media and academia, those who work in the "think-tanks" have an inaccurate understanding of the world and feed wrong ideas to their politicians. While it is true that many Americans are intelligent and have a positive influence on the world, the establishments that form the power structure in America do not attract the best brains in the country. American policy is not scripted by the sharpest pencils in the box, and as a result, things have become dangerous for everyone in the world. Just as the stereotype of Americans being arrogant results from interacting with American corporations, the idea that they are stupid results from interacting with the American media, "think tanks," and policy makers. Between them, they have managed to make the world a dangerous place.
It is tough to watch the performers and ignore the dangerous fire started by their clumsy actions, but it may actually be exciting. After all, when geese dance and fools versify, there is bound to be sport.
Americans are being increasingly stereotyped as stupid.
By Arvind Kumar
An email that did the rounds recently in Hungary claimed that an American tourist had rented a car and ruined it by driving in first gear for over two hundred kilometres not realising that it was not equipped with automatic transmission. The email claimed that the barom (idiot) American had driven from Budapest to Pecs at a speed of eighty kilometers per hour burning the engine in the process. Although the story in the email turned out to be a hoax, the number of people who believed it illustrates the point that the stereotype of Americans being stupid is easily accepted outside the US. How true is this widespread stereotype? Is the usage of this sobriquet warranted? An analysis of the behaviour of Americans will throw light on the causes for the existence of this stereotype.
The main reasons for the existence of this stereotype can be traced to the region in the US known as the "Bible belt". Comprised mostly of the southern states, where Christianity has deep roots and the culture spread by evangelical Christians is all-pervasive, this region has an undue share of influence on American polity and the establishments that control political and intellectual discourse in America. So powerful is the region that it has become the norm for the two main political parties to make sure that at least one of the presidential candidate or his running mate is from this region.
A large section of the media, government bodies, universities, and non-profit organisations operate in the framework created by, as the noted American journalist, H.L.Mencken, termed them, the "Bible thumpers". As the rest of the world mostly encounters only these American institutions apart from the American corporations, a look at the ideas and actions of these establishments will give an understanding of the causes that shaped the opinion about Americans in the rest of the world. Not always are the employees of these institutions Christians, but since their agenda has been set by the Christian fundamentalists, even non-Christian employees are forced to further this agenda.
The religious nature of the American government has never been under question. The president and other office bearers take the oath of office on the Bible, utter the words "So help me God" as they take oath, their currency notes and coins have the words, "In God We Trust", their pledge of allegiance has the words, "One Nation Under God", and chaplains read prayers in the Congress and at presidential inaugurations.
While these points can be dismissed as either harmless or minor issues, it becomes worrisome when the government starts interfering in others' lives and forces them to live according to the Bible. Thus, it is truly a matter of concern that the American politicians base several policies based on Biblical teaching.
For example, opposition to cloning is a direct result of the religious right's opposition to violating the second commandment in the Bible, which says that one should not make an image of anything that is in the heavens above, on the earth, or in the waters. The fact that cloning would threaten the monopoly their god holds over creation agitates them.
Another ongoing controversy in the US is the issue of stem-cell research that could potentially find cures for many medical disorders. While it is not surprising that those opposed to stem-cell research thump the Bible in their defense, a less known fact is that even some of those who support stem-cell research quote the Bible and seek to interpret it in their favour. A supporter of stem-cell research, senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, quotes a verse from the second chapter of Genesis to buttress his claim that creation is a two-step process. According to him, god first created man, and in the second step, god breathed life into man. He claims that embryonic stem cells are like the finished product of the first stage, and placing them in the womb breathes life into them. He argues that it should therefore be okay to allow embryonic stem-cell research!
Influence of the Bible on American policy is not limited to areas that collide with scientific research. It affects almost every aspect of decision-making, including its foreign policy. For example, both the left wing and the right wing hate Jews. While the Left blames the "Jewish conspiracy" for almost any disaster or unpalatable event, the Right is guilty of anti-Semitism. Yet, the US supports Israel because many Americans believe that the land considered holy by Christians ought to be in the possession of Jews in order for Jesus Christ to return. This belief is so strong that they seek to fulfill the "prophecies" made in the Bible. Thus, in order to make true the "prophecy" that an all-red heifer will be sacrificed at the site of the Temple at Jerusalem, Christian fanatics, who normally object to anyone other than their god playing the creator, reversed their position on genetic engineering and decided to fund the creation of a red heifer using genetic engineering.
Perhaps, Indians who feel irked by the constant hostility of many Americans towards India, may have more luck in convincing them to be friendly if they pointed out that the ninth chapter of Revelation in the Bible states that those with the seal of god on their foreheads will be spared of torture by the locusts that will supposedly arise from the bottomless pit described in this chapter. After all, many Indians apply Tilak on their foreheads.
Two recent cases in the US Supreme Court that captured the attention of the nation were both related to Biblical concepts. The first one was to decide whether it is acceptable to have the words, "One nation under God", in the pledge of allegiance. Those who wanted the phrase removed argued that it violated the idea of separation of church and state, and that the god in the phrase was the Christian god. Eventually, the case was dismissed on a technicality and the court left the phrase intact. The second case was about the display of the Ten Commandments in a Texas courthouse. The Supreme Court gave a mixed ruling on this case, allowing the display if the motive was secular. Cases such as these, in which the Supreme Court does not rule against Christianity, give an idea of its real stance on the issue of separating Christianity from the state.
The US Supreme Court is a controversial body with its judges appointed for life by politicians. The rulings of its judges are usually aligned with the ideology of the political party that appointed them. The appointment of a Supreme Court judge can be a contentious affair with an intense struggle between the two dominant political parties and the religious views of the candidate coming into focus.
In addition to motives for several domestic policies, justifications for wars waged by the US can also be traced to Christian theology. Soon after the 9/ 11 attacks, Ann Coulter, a right-wing rabble-rouser who is not exactly known for high intellect, wanted to convert Muslims into Christians. In the din of the cheers that her comments elicited, what was lost was the irony that such thinking on her part is the result of Arab influence on the minds of her ancestors who were converted by the original Arab Christians, and the converted Christians in turn passing on the indoctrination down the generations.
Religious discrimination is rampant in the US armed forces. In a recent survey, many non-Christians in the training institutes of the US armed forces reported being discriminated against. During the bombing campaign in Iraq, a chaplain in the US army blackmailed soldiers and refused to give them water unless they underwent baptism.
Prejudice is so deep-rooted in the US that American officials routinely refuse permission for setting up Buddhist or Hindu temples, often citing frivolous reasons. There are several churches in every neighbourhood, but American officials place innumerable hurdles when Buddhists or Hindus, who between them number a few million in the country, wish to set up temples.
In South Plainfield, New Jersey, a borough zoning board voted against the construction of a temple claiming that it would cause traffic congestion. No such excuse is heard for churches that dot the New Jersey landscape. What was really noteworthy was that the township council of the neighbouring town of Edison, which has nothing to do with the town of Plainfield, expressed its hatred through official channels by passing a resolution against the construction of the temple.
The behaviour of many American people is no different from that of their officials. A few years back, white supremacist arsonists in Sacramento in so-called "liberal" California attacked three synagogues causing material and emotional damage to Jews. A proposed Vietnamese Buddhist temple in California has drawn protests from residents who oppose it on specious grounds such as "environmental impact" and chanting being "noise pollution". Hindus who wished to construct a temple in Chino Hills, California, faced protests from fanatic Christian residents, and a proposed Hare Krishna temple in Escondido, California, faced similar protests from Christian residents in the city.
The weird ideas of Christian fanatics are by no means limited to people of a specific ethnicity. "Bobby" Jindal, son of Indian immigrants and a member of the US Congress, is a staunch Christian and wrote in a descriptive article how he chanted "Hail Mary" and exhorted "all demons to leave in the name of Christ" in order to cure a person afflicted with cancer. Jindal has held important positions in the health departments of his home state, Louisiana, and the federal government, and seems to have ambitions of running for president of the United States. Imagine the possibilities if Christians like Jindal wield absolute power; they could decide to shut down hospitals and replace them with centres to beat the devil out of sick people.
Academia sets the tune
The influence of "Bible thumpers" has taken such deep roots in America that they are influential in the academia which is a very important aspect of America as it shapes the minds of Americans. The "Bible thumpers" are so well entrenched that they force science textbooks for schoolchildren to teach what they call "creation science". According to "creation science", god created the world around six thousand years ago, exactly according to descriptions found in the Bible. The argument goes that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is taught in schools even though it is just a theory, and so "creation science" too merits being taught to schoolchildren in science classes.
In any other country, "creation science" would have been termed as idiocy and its proponents laughed at in their faces, but not in America. Instead of the derision they deserve, the creation-theorists actually find people in the mainstream media and academia to debate their points and thus gain legitimacy as their ideas share a platform with scientific ideas. Such debates discuss "both sides" of the issue, as Americans consider it a sacrilege not to have a "balanced" debate that discusses "both sides" of the question.
After the courts ruled against the proponents of "creation science," they turned their attention to discrediting science, and recently came up with the bizarre idea of implementing a rule whereby it would be required to affix stickers on science textbooks with disclaimers stating that scientific theories were not necessarily facts. They now peddle creationism under a new label - "intelligent design." The result of it is that the education boards of several states require textbooks to be revised in order to accommodate the advocates of "intelligent design." Such actions by Christian fanatics only strengthen the common stereotype of Americans being stupid.
Christian influence in academia is not limited to school textbooks, but also extends to universities. Many American universities began as divinity schools run by churches, whose agenda the humanities departments continue to push. Recently, Harvard university appointed a Jesuit priest, Reverend Francis X.Clooney, as a professor for comparative theology. Professor Clooney has written that the souls of those who lack union with Rome are in peril. With such preconceived notions, it is a matter of curiosity what he intends to compare between various theologies.
Elsewhere, Bob Jones University in South Carolina states, "While most secular biologists are committed to evolution as the basic principle of biology, Bob Jones University trains Christian biologists who see the living world indelibly marked with the fingerprints of a God of limitless wisdom and power." Needless to say, in their pre-med courses, they teach Biblical "creation theory".
In late 2002, an article by Sankrant Sanu, an Indian thinker, about the Microsoft Encyclopedia Encarta entry on Hinduism authored by Professor Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago, spurred Indians to petition Microsoft to replace the biased entry. Sanu's piece pointed out that the entry on Hinduism was of poor quality, had factual inaccuracies, and was hostile in tone. He further pointed out that it was written by an "outsider" (that is, someone who was not a Hindu), while the corresponding Encarta entries for other major religions like Christianity and Islam were not only appreciative of those faiths, but had been authored by people who belonged to them.
To Microsoft's credit, after Sanu's criticism spurred an outrage and widespread accusations of poor scholarship on the part of Professor Wendy Doniger, it replaced the entry by a scholarly piece on Hinduism.
Sankrant Sanu's analysis of the Encarta piece holds true about American academics in general. While professors studying Christianity are usually Christians sympathetic to Christianity, professors who study Hinduism are usually Christians who are hostile to Hindu culture. If they happen to be Indians, they are usually Marxists who are hostile to these cultures. Even the top universities are not exempt from this malaise. As we will see later, this is also true of journalists in the media.
One of the reasons for this situation is that humanities departments are usually short of funds. Unlike their counterparts in science and technology departments, faculty members in humanities departments do not easily get grants. This also means that humanities departments do not attract the best brains resulting in poorer quality of research and as a result, even fewer grants. Thus, it is a vicious circle of poor brains not attracting grants and lack of grants keeping away the good brains. Christian fundamentalists, who have deep pockets, step in to fill this void by setting up endowments, and cash-strapped departments and professors are easy prey for them.
Though the Christian tilt is rampant in humanities departments and the quality of research in science departments is generally of high quality, the latter are not immune from the influence of Biblical ideas. Recently, Johns Hopkins university (JHU) announced the results of a "study" that can only be termed as pseudo-science. Apparently, they had conducted a "joint" study with Indian scientists and concluded that circumcision is an effective weapon against AIDS! The Bible requires human males to undergo circumcision, and this "study" did nothing but provide fodder for those who claim that the idea is backed by science. It is not uncommon to come across "scientific studies" in America suggesting that human males are quirks of nature and imperfect creations needing correction in a manner described in the Bible.
What really raised the suspicion about this "study" is that the JHU "scientists" seemed more than eager to give credit to their Indian collaborators and term the "study" as an international project, even though it is unusual for American scientists to involve others and share credit with them when they are on the verge of discovering something important. A closer look at this "study" is revealing. While the Indian scientists were in charge of data collection and manuscript preparation, the JHU folks were the ones who interpreted the data. Reaching conclusions by linking two separate events without an explanation of cause and effect may be acceptable in voodoo practices, not science.
Media blows the trumpet
American journalists and most of the media in the US are products of their education system, which moulds their thinking. Unlike in other countries, the American education system is such that it largely determines the way people think. This has resulted in the phenomenon of most Americans having predictable views on almost every issue. Mainstream American thinking can also be considered subliminally racist in nature, that is, they are racist without realising that they are racist. Even the media is not free of this attitude. Captions on photographs covering the disaster in New Orleans illustrate this point. While desperate white victims who helped themselves to food from grocery stores were described using positive words and were supposed to have "found" food, blacks in a similar predicament were supposed to have "looted" the grocery stores.
In a similar display of double standards, Amy Waldman of The New York Times (NYT) asserts the identity of the London bombers and repeats the claims of the London police without providing evidence. In her report on the terror bombings in Mumbai in 2003, she sought to rationalise the blasts as retaliation for the events in Gujarat the previous year, and wrote, "The Bombay police commissioner, R. S. Sharma, said on Monday night that law enforcement authorities suspected that so-called jihadi groups were also responsible for the blasts, although he offered no specific evidence for that assertion." In the same article, she justified the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 that killed hundreds of innocent people as retaliation for riots that occurred in 1992. No one can be blamed for viewing this attitude of Amy Waldman as racism and concluding that NYT considers terrorism to be terrorism only when there are white Christian casualties.
Amy Waldman may or may not be overtly racist, but there is no denying that many American journalists are subliminal racists. This is due to the values they imbibe from their environment, and much of what they say is actually sincere conditioned response fitting in with the framework of mainstream thinking. Thus, when Amy Waldman tries to obfuscate the issue of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis being violent by lumping them together in the non-existent group called "South Asians", she is most likely not being deliberately racist. It is due to subliminal racism that almost every description of Native Americans involves mention of their mystical beliefs and projects them as far removed from modernity, while Christians are treated with reverence even if they indulge in laughable behaviour. For instance, people in New Jersey recently claimed that a Sacred Heart of Jesus statue in a church blinked, and the American media gave the impression that it might be a miracle.
The prejudice of the media folks in considering American thinking as the only acceptable form of mainstream thinking results in a curious phenomenon; they end up behaving like cheerleaders of their mainstream establishment. Despite its stated claims of being the watchdog of democracy, the American media acts as the propaganda arm of its government. This point was on display during the bombing of Iraq when the media faithfully parroted the false claims made by the US government. Instead of being watchdogs and indulging in critical analysis, the media behaved like lapdogs seeking to be petted by Uncle Sam.
The US government exploits this weakness of the media to its full advantage. During the bombing of Iraq, it figured that if secretary of state Colin Powell stood in the United Nations and claimed to have evidence of chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the media would believe it. All he had to do was to have a couple of CIA agents next to him and this would lend him credibility.
The next day, The Washington Post's editorial stated, "After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." It went on to claim that he "offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein's regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe."
While the rest of the world dismissed Powell's claims, the media in the US fell for this cheap trick. Leading Indian journalist Ashok Row Kavi terms this as "desperate disinformation" - apart from those spreading the disinformation (in this case Americans), no one else believes it.
The Washington Post was not alone in falling for the government propaganda about Iraq. Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV fell for it completely, and ended up having to make a humiliating apology admitting that his "analysis" was wrong. He blamed George Tenet of the CIA for his flawed claims, and in doing so, made the tacit admission that it was not his analysis to begin with; he was just parroting CIA's bogus claims.
For their part, a majority of Americans believed their government, and in a stunning response to directions from their government to stock up on plastic sheets and duct tapes to seal their homes and shield themselves from germ warfare, many of them created a mad rush at department stores. Robert Bartley, an editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal, even took credit for having "elaborated this threat" before the government had done it. For its part, the government used a colour-coded terror alert system to control the level of fear in the masses. Merely by changing the status from yellow to orange, the government could induce more fear in the minds of Americans. While this whole setup may seem amusing to those outside the US, it must be kept in mind that the government used fear as a mechanism to gain support from people.
Propaganda on behalf of the US government was also carried out by the so-called "embedded" journalists who were attached to the US army and had to get their reports about the war approved by the US army. That is, they were acting as typists for the press releases of the US army.
The American media has acted as the mouthpiece of its government for a long time. A prominent example is the coverage of the 1988 mid-air bombing of the Pan Am flight as it was flying over Lockerbie in Scotland. The American government claimed it was the handiwork of a Palestinian group in Syria, which was bankrolled by the Iranian intelligence agency, and the media faithfully carried these allegations. They even presented "evidence" of a wire transfer of several million dollars to buttress their claim. In 1989, after Libya's refusal to support the American response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, incensed Americans claimed to have found "new evidence" suggesting that the bombing was actually carried out by Libya. The American media obediently changed its tune and claimed that it was Libya after all that carried out the bombing.
The reason for the media's behavior is their lack of knowledge of things in general, and as a result, they look up to their government for authentication of facts. Complaints by American journalists that they are looked down upon by their peers from other countries for no reason are invalid. If other journalists feel superior and behave in an arrogant manner, Americans have only themselves to blame.
The media not only supports the government, but also the Christian evangelists. While the rest of the non-Islamic world has advanced, many Americans are still in a dilemma and have not decided whether women should be treated as human or sub-human. A Tennessee based newspaper, Knoxville News Sentinel, actually carried an exchange between those who wanted to keep women subservient and those who were against women being submissive. It is truly remarkable that they are still discussing this point.
Christianity also finds expression in the form of hateful articles about other religions. Some time back, Jon Carroll of San Francisco Chronicle made a factually incorrect and outrageous claim that Hinduism condones rape as a just form of punishment. Such ignorance is by no means an exception; it is rampant among Americans. Studies repeatedly find that many Americans are ignorant of geography and are unaware of the cultures of other countries. Thus, Carroll's hateful statements may have been sincere statements made out of ignorance about Hindus and India. However, what cannot be condoned is that even after Carroll's article was brought to the attention of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a self-proclaimed media watchdog group, it did not criticise the publication of this hateful article. There is definitely an unwritten rule among both conservatives and liberals in the US, to act as the foot soldiers of Christianity.
Denver Post, a newspaper in the state of Colorado where many staunch Christians live, published another shocking article. According to this article, the central tenets of Christianity and Islam were charity and love of one's neighbour, but Hindu gods were unconvincing and Hindus were despicable people. The article criticised Hindus for not surrendering their hard-earned wealth to the Christians and even termed their wealth as "commercial spoils."
Hatred against non-Christians, possibly subliminal like their racist attitudes, is rampant in the American media. A proposed Buddhist retreat at Berne in upstate New York resulted in a weekly magazine publishing a letter from a pastor, Jay T. Francis, inciting hatred against Buddhists and claiming that the "spiritual environment of our area and more importantly the destiny of our souls is at stake". Two weeks later, an editorial by Reverend C.W. Davis of Altamont was published in which he blamed Eastern religions for leading him into drug abuse in the 1960s, and mocked Buddha for not claiming to have the powers to cure cancers, broken bones, illnesses, and mental disabilities, powers that his god supposedly possessed. It is a well known fact that many Christian priests are recruited from drug rehabilitation centres and prisons and this is the reason for their continued errant behavior.
When a Hindu temple in St Louis was firebombed twice within days of each other in 2003, the media pretended that it was not motivated by hate and swept the news about it under the carpet. More recently, in a chilling reminiscence of Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, statues at a Hindu temple at Orlando, Florida, were broken and paint poured into shoes left outside, but most of the media has not even bothered to mention the attack.
The same racist attitude made the journalists react with horror when India conducted its nuclear tests. Not long before the Indian tests, the French carried out tests in the Pacific Ocean, and the media found those acceptable. As noted earlier in the context of American academics, this attitude is a result of the bias in the choice of journalists who write about Hindus. They usually do not have a Hindu background, or if they do, they are usually Marxists.
American journalists also believe that it is the right of Christians, Muslims or Jews to be politically active, but brand Hindus fighting for their political rights as "Hindu fundamentalists". So deep is the antipathy that they do not realise they are prejudiced and consider a Hindu to be a criminal merely for being politically active. A reward of $100 was offered to the members of a journalism related mailing list if they could name just one organisation that asks for the rights of Hindus and yet has not been branded "Hindu fundamentalist" or an equivalent term. The offer resulted in a stunned silence and put an end to a noisy discussion on the topic. The reward lies unclaimed to this day and is now open to everyone. The first person to name just one such group can send in their entry and collect the reward of $100.
Despite the fact that the media indulges in propaganda on behalf of the government and Christian fundamentalists, there is always hope. The New York Times has started charging a fee for letting readers access some of its content on the web. This means that at least some of its propaganda will no longer be distributed for free. Small mercies, these.
Dangerous results of mindless "experts"
A pertinent question that needs to be raised is why the US ended up supporting the very people who carried out the 9/ 11 attacks. The American government seems to have poor judgment and does not seem to care for morals when it comes to choosing allies or implementing its foreign policy. There seems to be a pattern in the kind of people it trusts and works with - Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the House of Saud, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and a whole bunch of dictators and terrorists.
Why is it that they consistently support terrorists? Is it not dense of them to lend support to those who end up attacking them? To answer these questions, we need to turn our attention to the so-called "think tanks" which advice the government.
People from the humanities departments of various American universities form the staff of these self-described "think tanks," and each "think tank" has its own agenda usually defined by powerful Christian fundamentalists. Much of the analysis by the "experts" at these "think tanks" is inaccurate and very superficial. Occasionally, they get something right about another country, but it is usually well known information easily available from newspapers published in that country. When they hit upon such ordinary information, they feel good about it and brand themselves "experts". A few years back, one such "expert" on hearing that the person speaking to him was an Indian, is reputed to have exclaimed that it was wonderful that India and Malaysia were building a bridge connecting the two countries. He had probably read about a joint project between the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia.
To gauge the quality of scholars at these "think tanks," one just needs to look at the works churned out by them. In a remarkable piece, William Milam, former Ambassador to Pakistan and now attached to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, argues that Pakistan's rulers ought to be rewarded with F-16s in order to pacify them. In other words, the more violent they are, the more rewards they deserve. He also claimed that Pakistan was a "stable democracy." Even president Clinton, who appointed him ambassador, did not believe his cockamamie about Pakistan being a "stable democracy." During his official visit to Pakistan, Clinton ducked down, hid from public view, sent a decoy plane, and had a double walk out of it, before he quietly arrived by another plane and entered the country unnoticed.
Another "expert" familiar to Indians is Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, who was a policy adviser to the state department in the Reagan administration. Known for his pedestrian analysis, he goes by the title of "South Asia expert". In June of this year, Cohen argued before the House International Relations Committee of the US Congress that Pakistan should be supplied with weapons, and that it had been helpful in its "cooperation in revealing its clandestine support for the Iranian, Libyan, North Korean and other missile and nuclear programs". The terrorists must have got the message - all they need to do after supplying nuclear arms to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, is to call up the South Asia "expert" at Brookings Institution and reveal their transactions, and Cohen is sure to argue that they must be rewarded with more arms! In the very first sentence of his testimony, Cohen did not fail to announce that he was pleased to share his "expertise".
For its part, the state department has been led by people equally naïve about the state of affairs in other countries.
The previous secretary of state, Madeleine Albright - who is supposed to have risen high in the ranks of power due to her father's reputation and her marriage to a wealthy media magnate - supported the Islamist group Kosovo Liberation Army, a group that has ties to Osama bin Laden. Condoleezaa Rice, the current secretary of state who has a PhD in international studies, claimed that Iran was trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism to the Taliban, and that it was "doing all kinds of things with Pakistan". At the time she made this claim, Iran was opposed to Pakistan as well as the Taliban. The only country that continually does "all kinds of things with Pakistan" is the US. In another display of its famed stupidity, the US airlifted a number of Taliban fighters and evacuated them from the war zone.
US support for terrorist groups and dictators is not limited to Islamists. It also extends to Communists. It is for this reason that Stalin termed them as "useful idiots". That they still support Communists can be seen from the fact that both conservatives and liberals support the Bengali Bolsheviks and Nehruvian-Stalinists in India. In fact, the Indian Communists have American politicians wrapped around their fingers, and use them at will. That is how they managed to get the US Library of Congress to appoint a Marxist from India to one of its chairs. This control by Indian Marxists over American politicians was also on display when along with their Islamist allies, they got the American government to spew their propaganda about Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, and rescind his visa. Among those who were used by the Communists and Islamists to act on behalf of them in pushing this agenda were Congressman Reverend Joe Pitts, Congressman John Conyers, and the US department of state. Many clueless Congressmen, including Reverend Joe Pitts and Dana Rohrabacher, are part of the lobby group that lobbies on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Many of the politicians who act against India are also driven by Christian fundamentalism. Over the years, US governments have implemented the agenda of Christian fundamentalists in their foreign policy as well as their domestic policies. James Watt, who served as the secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, believed that the end of the world was imminent and allowed the pillaging of natural resources. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Watts said, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."
Christian fundamentalism in America is not limited to the right wing. The leftists too support Christianity. The number of religious people among their leadership over the years is revealing - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton. Liberals definitely seem more comfortable rallying behind a church leader. Liberal thinking is also conditioned by subliminal racism. They have a hierarchy according to which they view people of various races. During his 2003 anti-war speech in Washington D.C., Bill Fletcher of the Trans Africa Forum opposed Bush's policies and stated that Bush ought to deal with the problem between India and Pakistan. In other words, Bush was not good enough to be trusted with policies that affect Americans, but it was okay to leave Indians in the care of Bush.
An important "think tank" that politicians rely on is the Rand Corporation - an organisation that works for various intelligence agencies in the US - which routinely publishes policy reports that end up as fodder for right-wing Christian fundamentalists. From an academic standpoint, most of its reports are of poor quality and full of factual inaccuracies, but it provides the fundamentalists with propaganda material. For example, a recent report authored by Greg Treverton and a few others made the factually incorrect claims that India was a "Hindu State" and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) was a religious movement that based its philosophy on hate. It went on to liken RSS with Islamic terrorist outfits that hijack planes and plant bombs in marketplaces.
Greg Treverton, former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, who has also served on the National Security Council, runs the intelligence policy centre of the Rand Corporation. Had Treverton done his homework, he would have known about the RSS and not ended up with a shoddy piece of work.
RSS members who are part of the Bharatiya Janata Party at best indulge in a weasel war dance and make a lot of noise about restoring the rights of Hindus in India. When they were in power, they failed to liberate the Hindu temples from the control of the government, and actually helped the Islamic cause by increasing subsidies for Muslims. Gary Brecher, a writer for the website eXile.ru, made the perceptive comment about the term "Hindu militant", that burning Hallmark greeting cards does not qualify one to be classified as a "militant". It says a lot about American "think tanks" that an amateur writing for a website has a better understanding about India than the "experts" at various "think tanks" have.
The propaganda against the RSS is the result of Communists everywhere branding their opponents as fascists, and Rand Corporation seems to have swallowed the propaganda fed by Indian Communists. Privately, Indian Communists themselves admit that they use the label for political purposes and express surprise that Americans actually swallowed their propaganda. The ill-researched documents that the naïve staff members at Rand Corporation routinely come up with may explain why the CIA was caught by surprise over the 9/ 11 attacks, and believed that weapons of mass destruction were buried in the sands of Iraq.
Interestingly, Rand Corporation is headquartered in a building shaped like the "Jesus Fish". The "Jesus Fish" is a figure that consists of two intersecting arcs resulting in the shape of a fish, and many Americans place this figure on their cars in order to make the statement that they are Christian fanatics. Opponents consider it a badge of stupidity that advertises the backward thinking of those who display it. Early Christians, who had to go underground due to their violent activities, apparently used this figure as a secret sign to indicate their meeting place.
The view of Americans expressed here is not a judgment on the many hardworking Americans who have a scientific temper, are innovative, and whose contributions have benefited all of us around the world. Nor is it a judgment on media outlets like Frontpage Magazine, which has published insightful articles by writers such as Serge Trifkovic, or thinkers like Hugh Fitzgerald who have a good understanding about the world. It is a judgment on the Christian fanatics. The fanatics must take responsibility for the "Stupid American" stereotype.
Like their counterparts in the media and academia, those who work in the "think-tanks" have an inaccurate understanding of the world and feed wrong ideas to their politicians. While it is true that many Americans are intelligent and have a positive influence on the world, the establishments that form the power structure in America do not attract the best brains in the country. American policy is not scripted by the sharpest pencils in the box, and as a result, things have become dangerous for everyone in the world. Just as the stereotype of Americans being arrogant results from interacting with American corporations, the idea that they are stupid results from interacting with the American media, "think tanks," and policy makers. Between them, they have managed to make the world a dangerous place.
It is tough to watch the performers and ignore the dangerous fire started by their clumsy actions, but it may actually be exciting. After all, when geese dance and fools versify, there is bound to be sport.
Labels: California Textbook, Hindu Human Rights
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