By Prof. (Dr.) Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit
In the Israel-Hamas war, the left, the wokes, instead of discussing the war and the reason behind the terror are attacking the Other, the victims.
What greatly surprises anyone in the Israel-Hamas war is that Marxists/wokes are with the Islamists and using their tactics of cancel culture against those who dissent. Is there something much deeper to this collaboration between groups that ideologically can never come together. It is an oxymoron. How is an objective scholar to look at this collaboration? Karl Marx stated that religion is the opium of the masses and Raymond Aron that Marxism is the opium of intellectuals. Now the wokes support the terrorists who have hijacked religion to annihilate the Jews, forgetting Marx himself was Jewish. What a paradox. One is intrigued when there is a surge of demonstrations for ceasefire, which will benefit terror groups like Hamas which is on the defensive to recoup. Both Russia and China have fought Islamist terror with an iron hand and they have denied them their cultural rights domestically. Where were these wokes/and the Islamists then? This is doublespeak in a dystopic world.
Dystopia, also called a cacotopia or anti-utopia, is a speculated community or society that is undesirable or frightening. Dystopias are often characterized by fear or distress of tyrannical governments or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. According to Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, doublethink is “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against.” Doublethink may happen because of someone being willfully perverse or as a result of faulty logic. Doublethink is a word coined by George Orwell for the novel 1984. Doublespeak is the use of euphemistic or ambiguous language in order to disguise what one is actually saying. Orwell uses the irony of doublethink to show how manipulation and control can restrict one’s individuality and freedom and creates a mob psychology.
The unfortunate truth is that the in Israel-Hamas war, the left, the wokes, instead of discussing the war and the reason behind the jihadist terror are attacking the Other, the victims—the Jews, Christians and Hindus. In India the woke brigade in academia funded by international and national global corporate interests are attacking Jews, Hinduism and Hindutva. Is this not academic doublethink and doublespeak? Attacking Hindus is the easiest for they do not retaliate by beheading like in the case of the cartoons and Charlie Hebdo. It is fear of indiscriminate violence that nobody dares attack jihadist terror for the fear of retaliation. Hence, we see the glorification and legitimation of jihadi terror. For the Left, the means of Jihadi terror do not matter as long as the end is achieved by whatever means—loot, plunder, rape, murder. That makes them strange bedfellows. Why this doublethink and speak? Are we in an Orwellian world of Dystopia where war is peace, ignorance is strength. Doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory belief in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. Rape, loot, murder, torture and plunder, but the faith is peaceful. The left and the wokes are against religion but not the Islamists and jihadi terror. This is indeed doublethink, speak and dystopia.
In the land of the birth of Islam, Saudi Arabia there are no protests supporting Hamas terrorists, nor in many Arab states. Most of them do not take these Palestinian refugees. The journey of the Palestinian struggle is from the secular romance of Yasir Arafat of resistance and his PLO and Fatah party to the savage and fanatic edition of jihadi terrorism of the Hamas that many in the Arab states also condemn. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia, speaking at Rice University’s Baker Institute (Houston) stated, “I prefer the other option: civil insurrection and disobedience. It brought down the British empire in India and the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.”
Here is another glaring example of doublethink and speak. Moussa Abu Marzouk, head of Hamas’ international relations office in Doha, Qatar, speaking to Frontline and in response to the question on Hamas killing Israeli civilians on 7 October said: “There are also Israeli testimonies that those who killed Israeli civilians was their army because the army bombed the houses surrounding the fighters, killing dozens of civilians, and the extent of the destruction proves that it was at Israeli hands. Our fighters had light weapons and armoured vehicle shells. As for the music festival used by Israeli propaganda to claim that Hamas killed them [people attending it], we did not know that there was a festival in that area. The Israeli army and security services arrived at the celebration before the fighters arrived there to evacuate them, so the area became a military zone and clashes occurred. Also, according to the confessions of some Israelis who were witnesses, the Israeli army killed many civilians when it fired missiles.” Frontline, the mouthpiece of the wokes in India, did not even think of cross checking or contesting such statements as part of objectivity and fair-play.
In the age of the Hamas, morality has become a part of the progressive pieties in which the motif of victimization continues to be culturally updated, atrocity by atrocity. How the jargon of insensitivity pretends to be a moral position. The tyranny of phrases like Islamophobia seeks to divert attention from the fundamental right to life and land, and creates a doctrine of false consciousness and victimhood out of a staggering mathematics of the dance of rape, loot, murder and death.
Today the wokes and Islamists have been the party which is always right. Aron’s prediction can rightly be applied to the woke who is “convinced that it acts with a view to achieving the only future which is worthwhile, sees, and wants to see, the other merely as an enemy to be eliminated, and a contemptible enemy at that since he is incapable of wanting the good or of recognising it” as per its dystopia.
Originally Published : The Sunday Guardian, 5th November' 2023
Prof. (Dr.) Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India