Propaganda: An Art of War

Kashmir and the World’s Conscience:

By

Waheeduddin Ahmed Ph.D.

“Kashmir in a Cage”, an Op Ed article written by Mohammed Hanif, that appeared in the New York Times of August 8, 2019, is an excellent analysis of the issue. Not many Pakistanis have articulated the case so eloquently. Also, the paper’s editorial under the heading “India Tempts Fate in Kashmir” is deserving of appreciation. With a couple of exceptions, no such journalistic clarity is manifest in the so called friendly (Islamic) countries. On the contrary, they have demonstrated a worrisome bias towards India’s narrative that Kashmir is its internal matter. If their morality deserts them in such a clear cut case of dishonesty and deceit, quite similar to the plight of Palestinians, then all moral values go out of the window. They may as well return to the times of jahiliyyah. However, it is incumbent upon us to take this phenomenon seriously because this perfidy is the harbinger of the tectonic shift that is occurring in all basic international relations. Trump, Sisi, MBS, MBZ, Orban, Matteo Salvini, Narendra Modi and others are not accidents of history but logical progression of history.

Groupings of countries do not occur at random. They occur on the basis of commonalities, such as, geography, language, culture and religion. Most importantly however, they are goal oriented. NATO, SEATO, CENTO and Warsaw Pact all had certain goals in mind. The organization of Non-aligned nations formed in Bandung in 1955 had goals. The Arab League had a goal of defeating aggressive plans of Israel. In 1974, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, using his immense charisma and political acumen held a summit of the leaders of the Islamic countries in Lahore. The goal was to cement solidarity between Muslim countries to safeguard their common interests.

So, are those goals in focus today? Hardly! The Soviet Union has been dissolved. Nato is a charade, used now for gangsterism such as to kill Qaddafi. The Arab League is a wanderer in wilderness trying to find a definition for who is Arab. Moreover, the member states have decided that Israel is invincible, so if you cannot fight him join him for some material gains. We have recurring feasts of  sacrifices; the Palestinians are healthy sacrificial lambs. As for the Islamic solidarity, it is by far an oft repeated empty slogan. The solidarity, if there was any, is melting and yielding ground to liquidity. The concept of Ummah, which the Qur’an introduced in the Seventh century is being buried in its birthplace after one and a half millennia. Islam sits lightly in the capitals of Arab countries now, especially those inhabited by the casino princes. So, welcome to the tectonic shift!

The global conflict of today is not between the military powers capable of launching nuclear warheads across nations but commercial juggernauts who can launch trade vessels across oceans. The USA and China fit the definition. China today is not an ideological monolith but a giant commercial enterprise, working tirelessly to gain new markets and outlets for its goods and building transportation lines. It is no longer interested in barren and frozen lands like in 1962 but in naval bases and in political landscapes that can yield benefits. So, if it cold shoulders Pakistan in the case of Kashmir, don't be surprised. If you have been rudely awakened from your dreams, don’t keep rubbing your eyes forever. Get up, gather your wits, reorient and rearrange as the smart ones are doing. The fittest will survive in this world of Darwinian competition.

In view of these hard facts how can we step into the future? Honestly, the future does not seem to be so deterministic as the philosopher’s dream. In order to be clear about it, we have to dispel the smog of the present, which nullifies logical arguments. Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history or Hegelian dialectics fail to provide clear answers. When Samuel Huntington wrote: “Clash of Civilizations”, we all criticized him but he was right, except that his choice of the word “civilization” was perhaps inappropriate. Let me remind you that a clash has already occurred, which resulted in the destruction of many established political entities in the Middle East and North Africa, a region which has been the core of the Islamic civilization for many centuries. It now lies in ruins. 

Clashes may occur in various modes. One such mode is prejudicial viewpoint, which is being played out in Europe and America today. Such a clash feeds on the ignorance of a class of people, a class, of which there is no dearth in the West. Ignorance is a pestilence which spreads due to misinformation and miseducation, a process which is now facilitated by the electronic media. It claims lives, like millions who died due to the great plague in medieval Europe. Plague does not discriminate between intellectual and nonintellectual victims, so neither does cognitive dissonance, the blockade of truth by the conscious mind. 

The great industrial civilizations, which nurture scientists and artists, if inflected by such disease, lose their resilience and become antithetical to reason. The specter of worldwide amnesia of enlightenment on the part of the enlightened, is a terrifying prospect. Germany was full of scientists, inventors, philosophers and artists in the first half of the Twentieth century. It took only the rise of National Socialism to knock Germany out of enlightenment. The Right is rising again in Europe, America and India and a new brand of Fascism is revealing itself. The voices of caution and cognition are mute, making it possible for history to repeat itself. Logical progression of history is being falsified. 

Narendra Modi is not one who is making history; he is a symptom of a disease. There is a god in the Hindu pantheon with a human body and an elephantine head. When Modi declares that the god was the handiwork of Indian surgeons who performed “plastic surgery” (what he meant was body transplant) to produce this creature, millions of scientists and students graduating in science from India’s prestigious universities kept silent, giving credence to such Hindutva absurdity. Antiscience has carried the day in India to the utter shame of millions of bright scientists. The rape of Kashmir is a landmark in international criminality. The political pundits and righteousness preachers are hiding their faces in saffron.  

In summation, I would have to say that Kashmir was a test case. Do ethics and morality still matter? Does humanity have a future? Shall the Hindu men from the Indian state of Haryana be given license to kidnap Kashmiri girls, as they are promising to do --- they have a shortage of women due to the abortion of female fetuses? Are you prepared to sacrifice your Christianity, your Judaism, your Ahimsa and your Nirvana at the altar of your Islamophobia? The big question is: can the possibility of nuclear war between India and Pakistan be ignored?

August 12, 2019