Koenraad Elst Quotes

Further, it says that the religious minorities must "not claim any privileges", something with which any democrat and secularist would wholeheartedly agree: privileges on the basis of creed are against the equality principle which is fundamental to the law system of a modern state. It is one of the absurdities of Indian "secularism" that it contains a number of communal inequalities in law: · Separate family law codes for Muslims, Christians and Parsis, epitomized by the Muslim right to polygamy; this constitutes the denial of the very first defining principle of the secular state, viz. legal equality of all citizens regardless of religion;
· exemption of mosques and churches (as opposed to Hindu temples) from intervention in their management and appropriation of their funds by the secular authorities;
· special safeguards of the communal character (in recruitment of teachers and students, in the contents of the curriculum) of Christian and Muslims schools all while retaining their subsidies, which are denied to Hindu denominational schools (Art. 30 of the Constitution);
· a large number of occasional advantages for the minorities in everyday political practice, e.g. subsidies for the Muslims who perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, as contrasted with pilgrimage taxes to be paid by Hindus going to Amarnath and other Hindu places of pilgrimage.

But Marxism has conditioned the Indian history discourse, even through many who would reject the “Marxist” label for themselves. It will take time to undo its influence.

But the word “Hindu” is a favourite object of manipulation. Thus, secularists say that all kinds of groups (Dravidians, low-castes, Sikhs etc.) are “not Hindu”, yet when Hindus complain of the self-righteousness and aggression of the minorities, secularists laugh at this concern: “How can the Hindus feel threatened? They are more than 80%!” The missionaries call the tribals “not Hindus”, but when the tribals riot against the Christians who have murdered their Swami, we read about “Hindu rioters”. In the Buddha’s case, “Hindu” is often narrowed down to “Vedic” when convenient, then restored to its wider meaning when expedient.

In a sociological sense, I am still part of the Catholic community,... Nevertheless, I am no longer a Roman Catholic. I am a secular humanist with an active interest in religions, particularly Taoism and Hinduism, and keeping a close watch on the variegated Pagan revival in Europe... The Sangh Parivar is disinclined to educate its cadres on the illusory nature of Christianity, possibly because this would entail the tedious job of clearing the superstitious deadwood from Hinduism as well. It avoids polemicizing against Christianity as such and prefers to focus on the historical and contemporary misbehaviour of Christian missionaries: the Goa inquisition, the destruction of the Mylapore Shiva temple near Chennai, the expulsion of Riyang tribals from Christian-dominated Mizoram... Another mistake often made in Hindutva polemic against the missionaries is to deny that their motive is Christian religion. It is said that their real motive is political, that they serve the interests of a secular entity, typically European colonialism or American hegemonism. There is a historical basis for this suspicion, e.g. the militantly secularist French Third Republic (1870-1940) encouraged the missions as de facto French outposts and agents d'influence in the colonies. Conversely, tribal anti-British rebellions in India typically started with attacks on mission posts. It is also likely that during the Cold War, the CIA supported attempts to set up a Christian state in India's Northeast as an American foothold in Asia. Yet, apart from being largely anachronistic now, such scenarios simply don't represent the main thrust of missionary activity.

Many Christian beliefs and practises, as well as the reflexes of the Christian apologists, are explained by such concepts as “confirmation bias”, “cognitive dissonance” and “selective attention”, the findings of evolutionary biology (which finds traces of morality even among the higher animals, independent from any divine revelation of the Ten Commandments) and the notion “meme”.

The strange thing about the BJP is that its voters consider it a Hindu party, its enemies denounce it as a Hindu party, but the party will call itself anything except a Hindu party.

Even Harvard professor and Aryan Invasion Theory champion Michael Witzel admits that no material evidence of Aryans moving into India has been found “yet”, that is after two centuries of being the official hypothesis sucking up all the sponsoring... I have verified at several specialist conferences, most concerned linguists do not work on the problem of the origins, which has an aura of obsoleteness, and blindly follow the dominant theory because it happens to be what their textbooks contained.

However, all the deductions that had to buttress any of these non-Indian Homeland hypotheses, can be shown to be either immature and superseded by newer insights or linguistically illegitimate: they combine legitimate linguistic categories with non-linguistic assumptions or leaps of faith. Thus, the linguistic distance between reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Vedic Sanskrit, very small but not negligeable, does not imply anything firm about the geographical location of the Homeland,-- save for making close proximity to India very probable.

Nazism itself, for all its anti-Semitic rhetoric, very much fitted into the Semitic tradition. As Girilal Jain has convincingly argued, Nazism was an extreme realization of the 19th century secular nationalism in Europe. This secular nationalism was in its general attitude towards mankind a direct heir to the Semitic legacy carried into Europe by Christianity. There is a straight lineage from Moses' Chosen People to Hitler's Herrenvolk (superior people). The radical division of mankind into the chosen insiders and the lost outsiders is very much present in this secular nationalism.... If we look at the basic points in the Nazi programme, we do not find anything there that can be traced to Germanic Paganism. ... Authoritarian political thought has nothing whatsoever to do with the Germanic tribal organization, which was largely democratic, with an elected king and a regular all-tribe assembly meeting. It had more to do with the secular organization of the Roman empire (which model had loomed large over the European polity all through the Christian period), which has also influenced the Church organization. ... The Nazi kind of nationalism was also of the Semitic kind. Rather than seeing the nation as one step on the ladder in the organizational hierarchy, below civilization and humanity, and above regional, tribal and family units, it denied this gradedness. Instead, it divided the world in outsiders and insiders, thus in principle opposing itself to the rest of the world, and imposed uniformity on the nation, discouraging all subnational groupings. Again, this exclusivistic and uniformist nationalism is opposed to the Pagan outlook...The dominance of monotheism has strongly promoted that single most essential trait of the monotheistic mind : simplistic crudeness. ... Their only concept of unity is to raze everything flat, then there will be no more difference and disunity, so that will be the realization of unity, equality etc.

The Muslim electorate massively voted for Partition in 1945, drove most Hindus from West Pakistan in 1945 and the same more gradually in East Pakistan or Bangladesh, but kept India as a joint account where Muslims were not only welcome but even enjoyed certain privileges.... In the last and only de facto referendum, the last election before independence, 87% of the Muslim electorate voted against India and in favour of the Muslim League and its programme: the Partition of India. While the Hindus voted for a multicultural India, the Muslims voted against India and against multiculturalism. That is a historical fact, and Meera Nanda cannot alter it.

The enemies of Hindu Dharma and of India can get away with any lie or distortion because they have the media and the India-watching academics and movie directors at their disposal. They will exploit any mistake the Hindus make, knowing fully well that they do not have the same luxury of getting away with missteps. Any sin against the canon of scholarship will be used to create an impression of an “anti-science” mentality, of “amateurism” at best, but more likely of “superstition” or “jingoistic history distortion”. In fact, even in the case of utmost Hindu conscientiousness, they will still throw all these swearwords at the Hindus and thereby still condition numerous mediocre minds against the Hindu position (or more precisely, against the historical truth), at least in the short term; but in that case, at least knowledgeable and discerning people will come over to the Hindu side of the argument, and they will make the difference in the long run... The mass killing of Hindus by Islamic Mujahedīn (Arabic: “those who strive [on the path of Allah]”) is a historical reality, costing many millions of Hindu lives. A recent Nehruvian-cum-Marxist current in Indian and India-watching historiography tries to deny this fact, but the evidence is plentiful, much of it from the horse’s mouth: the Muslim chronicles that take great pride in being able to describe the destruction of Pagan people and Pagan culture. This Negationism is an interesting topic, both for refuting it as a matter of correct history-writing and for analysing its psychological and political determinants.

It is also instructive to see for oneself what Eaton’s purported “eighty” cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton’s list, we find “Delhi” under Mohammed Ghori’s onslaught, 1193, or “Benares” under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb’s temple-destruction campaign, 1669. On each of these “three” occasions, literally hundreds of temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble.

Today, this reluctance to posit a central indebtedness of Indian culture to European conquerors (for that is how the Greeks ended up in India) tallies well with the Zeitgeist in the West, where the European element in every form of progress or achievement is downplayed and the contributions of others emphatically highlighted or magnified. But then again, regarding India, there is a Zeitgeist within the Zeitgeist: even within the existing ‘down with us’ atmosphere in Europe, there persists a secondary agenda borrowed mainly from India’s Nehruvian secularists, viz., belittling Hinduism.

The balance-sheet is that some branches of the IE family have no memory of any migration, some have vague memories of their own immigration into their historical habitat, the Iranian branch has a distinct memory of migration from India to Iran, and only the Indian branch has a record of emigration of others from its own habitat.

https://twitter.com/Koenraad_Elst/status/1141946362612867072 In NYC I heard of a campaign by a group called Sadhana: "Hindus against Hindutva". But whenever anyone, highlights the injustices against Hindus, he is at once called: "Hindutva!" They themselves conflate the two concepts. They hate Hindutva only because they hate Hinduism. 2019