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Showing posts with label Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Show all posts

RACISM AND CASTE BIGOTRY IN THE HARE KRISHNA MOVEMENT

Re-enslave black people? Call them ugly and uncivilized? Reinforce caste stereotypes treating sudras and Dalits  (“untouchables”) like stupid beasts of burden? ISKCON’s founder openly professed these beliefs and his devoted followers have never denounced them. In fact, the aura surrounding guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami “Srila Prabhupada” (1896-1977) has never been brighter, as attested by the 50th anniversary celebrations of his founding the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York City back in 1966.[i] 

Bhaktivedanta Swami
ISKCON FOUNDER A.C. BHAKTIVEDANTA SWAMI

Such blind adoration of the man and his teachings is also evident in the academic sphere, where followers of the self-promoting swami treat his legacy as an unparalleled visionary gift to the West. Just last month, for example, Yale University’s Dept. of Religious Studies held its “Hinduism and Ecology” conference at the ISKCON Goverdhan Ecovillage in Polgar, Maharastra (India) from December 11-14th, with many attendees from major universities worldwide, most of whom would cringe and run for cover if they knew their hosts’ repulsive racial ideology.[ii]

In a supremely ironic twist, on 7 December, Prime Minister Narendra Modi—himself born in a sudra family—celebrated the grand opening of the Babasaheb Dr. B.R. Ambedkar International Center, dedicated to the memory and work inspired by the principal architect of the constitution of India and a founding father of the Republic itself.[iii] Despite obtaining doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) had first-hand experience of the indignities those born into Dalit (“untouchable”) families suffer throughout their lives.  In his commitment to wiping out the caste system and its multifarious injustices, Ambedkar’s life and legacy show what a true mahatma is and why we need to cast a cold eye on so-called saints who promote regressive practices in the name of religious orthodoxy.  
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar

ISKCON FOUNDER’S RACIST COMMENTS ABOUT BLACKS

Let me start with a famous quotation from Bhaktivedanta Swami’s commentary (“purports”) from the 1964 edition of his translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam[iv], which, for obvious reasons, has been omitted from subsequent editions. I will refer to the swami as “Prabhupada” for the rest of this essay. (My comments are in blue.)

The cupid, therefore, throws his arrow upon the living being to become mad after his opposite sex never mind whether the party is actually beautiful or not. Such action of the cupid is going on even on the negroes and beastly societies who are all ugly looking in the estimation of the civilized nations. Thus cupid’s influence is exerted even in the ugliest forms (of living being) and-what to speak about the most perfectional stage of personal beauties.
 SB 1.11.36, purport (1964 ed.)

What is truly ugly here is Bhaktivedanta’s degraded view of human sexuality and his monomaniacal belief that “the civilized nations” all share his fierce and ill-informed bigotry. His venomous hatred of and personal disgust with the appearance and behavior of what he calls “the negroes and beastly societies” reveals a coarseness of character his disciples should have recognized as far from his self-described status as a “pure devotee” fit for serving as the absolute moral and spiritual guide for each and every one of his disciples (and I might add, their disciples). Even his own editors—slavish and gullible as they were and still are--recognizing the damage it would do if the swami’s bigotry were made public, omitted it from subsequent editions. This decision, an obvious public relations ploy designed to hoodwink readers, shows how the Hare Krishna movement was from its very beginnings indisputably a cult.
Treating his absurd racist views as private, esoteric morsels of divine wisdom fit only for circulation among his disciples was a cheap maneuver intended to both insult their intelligence and that of the public:
Certainly we are not going to say these things about the negro people publicly… So, you can understand that these talks are not for the public, as they have not got the ability to understand.
 Letter to Satsvarupa, 9 April 1968, San Francisco
Evidently our revered guru truly resented the progress made by “a third-class negro” in Western countries, and regarded them with the contempt usually associated with white supremacists and other disgruntled malcontents:
This is Vedic civilization: plain living, high thinking. And poor thinking, poor in thought, poor in behavior, and living with motorcar and this, that, nonsense. It is all nonsense civilization. A first-class Rolls Royce car, and who is sitting there? A third-class negro. This is going on. You’ll find these things in Europe and America. This is going on. A first-class car and a third-class negro.
Room conversation, 5 October 1975, Mauritius
First-Class Success!
Judging from his disciples’ expertise in cheating and harassing the public that characterized Bhaktivedanta Swami’s book-selling scams—who can forget those saffron-clad nuisances who annoyed passengers at airports for so many years!--he was clearly an expert at hurling unfounded accusations against black people:
And especially in your country it will be dangerous because these blacks, if they don’t get employment, they will create havoc, these blacks. And they are not civilized. They want money, and if they don’t get money, then they will create havoc.
Room conversation, 21 January 1977, Bhuvanesvara, India
The following conversation, which I have quoted in full, between Prabhupada (Bhaktivedanta Swami) and a number of his disciples, shows just how he advocated racial segregation. Here he equates blacks with crows and states that they “naturally” prefer to live with their own kind:
Rāmeśvara: In regards to brainwashing, they claim that our life-style tends to take the devotee and isolate him from the world.
Prabhupāda: Yes. We hate to mix with you. No gentleman tries to mix with loafers. In England still, the rich quarter is different from the poor quarter. Is it not?
Hari-śauri: Not so much. It was though, formerly, very strongly.
Prabhupāda: Yes. Aristocratic will never live… Even in America, they don’t like to live with the blacks.
Rāmeśvara: No.
Prabhupāda: … So that separation… Crows will not like to live with the ducks and white swans. And white swans will not like to live with the crows. That is natural division. “Birds of the same feather flock together.”
Jagadīśa: And honest men don’t like to associate with thieves and criminals.
Prabhupāda: Yes, that is natural. We are not interested even with these daily newspapers. We are interested Bhagavad-gītā. We don’t keep any news. We know the dogs are barking. That’s all. But that does not mean we have to mix with the dogs.
11 January, 1977, India

DUAL EVILS: CASTE HATRED AND RACIAL STEREOTYPES

Now I will introduce a set of Prabhupada’s comments showing his belief in the hereditary, race-based hierarchical caste system and how it should be introduced to and practiced by his followers world-wide.[v]
The following—in which he openly states his belief that blacks should be returned to slavery--is possibly the most notorious of the swami’s racist statements:
Sudra is to be controlled only. They are never given to be freedom. Just like in America. The blacks were slaves. They were under control. And since you have given them equal rights they are disturbing, most disturbing, always creating a fearful situation, uncultured and drunkards. What training they have got? They have got equal right? That is best, to keep them under control as slaves but give them sufficient food, sufficient cloth, not more than that. Then they will be satisfied.
Room conversation 14 February, 1977, Mayapura, India.

Never Again! You Can Keep Your "Sufficient Food and Cloth."

 It is hard to believe that Prabhupada wished to import the evils of the caste system to wherever had followers established temples, but these statements make it indisputably true:

The varnashrama college has to be established immediately. Everywhere, wherever we have got our center, a varnashrama college should be established to train four divisions.
                                                           Morning Walk, Vrindavan, India, 12 March, 1974.
Once the populace is situated in the varnasrama-dharma, there is every possibility of real life and prosperity both in this world and in the next. [Sure, as long as you’re not a sudra!!!]
Srimad Bhagavatam 4.14.19, Purport

 The following two quotations reveal how Prabhupada equated skin color with caste. Predictably enough, because he claimed sudras have a “black” complexion[vi] because they are allegedly “non-Aryan” Dravidians (so-called indigenous people from Southern India), they are imposters even when they have obtained a higher social status. In this way, caste bigots treat the “black” blood of a sudra as a pollutant:

So here, this man was cheating. . . . He was dressed like a king. Just like king is very gorgeously dressed. But his bodily feature, he was a black man. The black man means śūdra.
Lecture on Srimad Bhagavatam 1.16.4 1 January, 1974, Los Angeles, CA.

Dravidian culture. Dravida. They are non-Aryans. Just like these Africans, they are not Aryans. Now they are mixing up with Europeans and Americans. In India, it was, one from the higher section, brahmana, ksatriya, vaisya, they will be fair complexion. Sudras, black. So if a brahmana becomes black, then he’s not accepted as brahmana. . . .And if a sudra becomes fair, then he’s to be know that he’s not pure sudra. 
                                                  2 August, 1976, ISKCON farm in France

In the following, Prabhupada extends his disgust with sudras to Native Americans, by simply hurling more insults accompanied by his typical unsupported oversimplifications:

Sudras have no brain. In America also, the whole America once belonged to the Red Indians. Why they could not improve? The land was there. Why these foreigners, the Europeans, came and improved? So sudras cannot do this. They cannot make any correction.
Room conversation with reporter, 3 June 1976, Los Angeles
OPPORTUNISM:  THE WORM AT THE CORE OF THE CASTE SYSTEM
By now, some of you might be thinking, “why didn’t somebody tell me about this nonsense before?” Well, in what began as a flirtation in the 1960’s and in a few decades, blossomed into a full-blown romance, many Western countries have embraced Eastern mysticism with incense-clouded glasses. Savvy marketers of yoga, meditation, and various sorts of guru-worshipping cults insist that each of them has a proven method to achieve “transcendental” results fast and easy. Voila! You have achieved enlightenment. Now everything you are and have is subject to a spate of rules and regulations designed to keep you orbiting around their star. Our guru Prabhupada used to call it “spiritual communism” and he wasn’t kidding.
Scandals abound in these neo-Hindu organizations, but threats and hush money virtually guarantee that only a very few instances are made public. Those who are deeply involved in these enlightenment-is-easy scams are deluded fools who see what they want and choose to ignore the rest. For all the talk about spirituality, it has never ceased to amaze me how most of these people seem to have lost their souls as they retreat into an alternate reality where empathy and common decency have little to no value.

Dalit Woman Cleaning Feces Off Train Tracks

Back to our subject.  If you want to get an idea of how the caste system poisons India to this day, just go to Twitter or Google and search for the term “Dalit.” You will find a multitude of hair-raising accounts of everyday abuse—domestic terror, really--suffered by these “untouchables” at the hands of higher caste Indians. Such outrages are modern day vestiges of those Ambedkar fought against so courageously and detailed so unforgettably in his 1936 unpublished speech, Annihilation of Caste.[vii] To better appreciate his contributions to eradicating the injustices perpetuated by the caste system, readers need to get their facts straight regarding its origins and methods of operations. First, Ambedkar’s correction regarding the issue of race and caste:
As a matter of fact the caste system came into being long after the different races of India had commingled in blood and culture. To hold that distinctions of castes are really distinctions of race, and to treat different castes as though they were so many different races, is a gross perversion of facts.
Annihilation of Caste  5.2 pp.237-238.

So much for the caste origin myths and their relation to the skin color gradations in some sort of primordial caste structure![viii] The fact is that all natives of the Indian subcontinent share DNA markers, regardless of the percentage of ancestral sources and their geographical locations.[ix] What the institution of the caste system did (around 1,500 C.E.) was to artificially restrict interbreeding by restricting intermarriage between castes, resulting in gradations of skin color that have been mistakenly associated with each caste. However, as Ambedkar states, India was already a mixed population racially before the caste system took hold.

We already know about the racism and caste bigotry ISKCON founder Prabhupada taught his disciples, virtually all foreigners whom Hindus strictly following the dictates of the Manusmriti would have torn limb from limb had they the audacity to presume that they could preach to them about the Vedic scriptures, enter a temple, what to speak of wearing the sacred thread and actually declaring themselves to be Brahmins! Yet this is precisely how our guru taught us to regard ourselves, using the reputed caste egalitarianism of the Bengali Brahmin Chaitanya (1486-1533) as warrant for his actions. Keep in mind that Prabhupada’s many references to the Manu Samhita (Manusmriti) as the lawbook of mankind, are meant to be taken literally:
Manu-Samhita is the law, Hindu law, still accepted, they have made many amendments. But it is not to be amended.
Lecture on Bhagavad-Gita 7.3, 18 February 1974.
 
As the saying goes: you can’t have it both ways! Yet this is precisely what Prabhupada tried to do; in fact, his racist statements about sudras are only the tip of the iceberg when compared to the prohibitions from the Manu-Samhita aimed at sudras who dare to aspire to improve their lot in life:

A once-born man (a Sudra), who insults a twice-born man with gross invective, shall have his tongue cut out; for he is of low origin.
 If he mentions the names and castes (gati) of the (twice-born) with contumely, an iron nail, ten fingers long, shall be thrust red-hot into his mouth. 8.271. 
If he arrogantly teaches Brahmanas their duty, the king shall cause hot oil to be poured into his mouth and ears. 8.272.

From these quotations from the Manu-Samhita (there are many more just as terrifying), there is no doubt that keeping the sudra caste from protesting their condition and obtaining education requires subjecting potential and actual violators to threats and horrible punishment. Worse, it uses its scriptural authority to approve the severe punishment of those who violate its rules. Prabhupada tried to skirt dictates of the Manu Samhita against sudras and the social stigmas Dalits suffer to this day by linking caste to the guna-karma theory, in effect claiming that one’s guna, or nature, determined caste, not birth.[x]

This was merely a ploy to justify his preaching activities in the West to people who he himself stated would be classified as the lowest scum of society in Vedic culture, mlecchas (impure persons) and yavanas (foreigners). Perhaps these views might partially explain why he insisted that his disciples live in extreme penury, eating on the floor with one’s hands, sleeping on the floor in crowded, vermin-infested ashrams, slaving all day selling his books on the street, and other indignities that haunt ex-devotees to this day. Prabhupada told us to believe that initiating us as his disciples and then investing us—many of whom were once a bunch of former drug addicts and hippies--with the sacred thread made us genuine Brahmins, a joke that was made at our great personal expense.

CONCLUSION

Today the caste system remains hereditary in nature and, as Arundhati Roy points out in her introduction to Annihilation of Caste, its upper caste members include many fabulously wealthy business owners and others occupy a vast majority of government positions.[xi] A relatively few Dalits—Mayawati comes to mind--have risen to positions of influence in politics, but the vast majority remain deeply and stubbornly impoverished. To make matters worse, most of the caste-related outrages today are committed against Dalits, whose protected status as beneficiaries of the “reservation” system sparks continual outrage from the higher castes due to its quotas and other forms of government sanctioned affirmative action.[xii]

Furthermore, the hereditary nature of the caste system is another reason why Hinduism—unlike other major world religions—does not seek converts. Ambedkar’s straightforward analysis of this issue is worth remembering and repeating:
The law of caste confines its membership to persons born in the caste. Castes are autonomous, and there is no authority anywhere to compel a caste to admit a newcomer to its social life. Hindu society being a collection of castes, and each caste being a closed corporation, there is no place for a convert.[xiii]
This is a major reason why Indian gurus who are actually preaching in the West prefer terms referring to meditation, yoga, and the like. Gullible people with deep pockets are favorite targets. However, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada introduced his Krishna Conscious (ISKCON) sect to the West by actively proselytizing to and accepting as disciples multitudes of grossly uninformed and under qualified Americans and Europeans for the express purpose of opening temples and selling his books. His dictates about our personal lives cost us our relationships with our families and in most cases, damaged our health and emotional well-being. The crimes and controversies that arose shortly thereafter and continue to this day are direct byproducts of these irregular practices. If Prabhupada wished to teach his followers about the Gita and his Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnavism, fine, but using them as means to his ends was morally repugnant.   

Finally, the words of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar on the irrational and immoral nature of the caste system:
Reason and morality are the two most powerful weapons in the armoury of a reformer. To deprive him of the use of these weapons is to disable him for action. How are you going to break-up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with reason? How are you going to break-up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with morality?[xiv]
Amen.


[iv] Generally known as the Bhagavata Purana. For more information about this epic poem, see the note at the end of my blog essay: https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2017/12/new-sex-starved-idiots-slaves-how.html
[v] “Varnashrama” refers to the four-fold caste system in a pyramidal social structure consisting of the priestly Brahmins at the top, followed by the warrior Kshastriyas, then the merchant class Vaishyas, and finally, toiling at the bottom and supporting all three “twice-born castes, are the lowly sudras. The caste system is the varna part of the system. It is also refered to as “chaturvarnya” or the four-fold caste system (a term popularized by Dayananda Saraswati; see note below) to condense what had grown by the modern age into an intricate set of castes and sub-castes. Women born into these families assume its hereditary caste. The ashrama part refers to the religious orders for the three upper classes; sudras have no part in it and neither do women (who are expected to follow the dictates of their families regarding choice of husband and at what age). Under the tutelage of a guru, a boy in the brahmachari ashram is a celibate student; after marriage in his early twenties, he becomes a grihasta (householder or married man), after his sons are grown, he leaves home with his wife and retires into the forest for penance as a celibate vanaprastha, and afterwards, if he wishes, returns his wife to the care of their sons, vows lifelong celibacy, and becomes an itinerant preacher, or a sannyasin.
[vi] Referring to lower caste natives of India as “black” in this context is just a pejorative term with no basis in reality.
[vii] Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste. Intro. By Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint. Ed. and Annotations by S. Anand. Verso: NY, 2014. Hereafter referred to as “AoC.”
[viii] See indiafacts.org/aryan-invasion-myth-21st-century-science-debunks-19th-century-indology/ for a summary of controversies regarding this matter.
[x] The source of the guna-karma theory is the Bhagavad-Gita 4.13, where Krishna states that the four castes are his creation and their classifications and duties arise from the guna [innate quality] dominant in each. It is interesting to note that this information has been used as pretext by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arya-Samaj and others (including Prabhupada) to claim that birth does not determine caste, whereas a straightforward reading of it is an unmistakable affirmation that the guna-karma theory only amplifies the claim that caste is hereditary because the qualities that typify each caste are innate in the denotative sense that they are innate.
[xi] “The Doctor and the Saint,” pp. 23-33.
[xiii] AoC, 10.3, p. 254.
[xiv] AoC. 22.16, p.303.
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EASTERN CULTS AS INCUBATORS OF EXTREMISM: THE HARE KRISHNA MOVEMENT

ISKCON Founder A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami on Killing Non-Believers:
Practically speaking, Vaishnavas are killers. . . It is not that because Mohammed used a sword, we also must use a sword, No! --we can use a Gun. We will ask-...You like Krishna?? No--Booom..You like Krishna? No--Booom. We can use everything for Krishna, we can use the ATOM BOMB FOR KRISHNA!! We have to kill this civilization of mudhas [fools] . . .those who are mudhas, we have to kill them. This is our business. Kill all the mudhas. . . Not now but later when we are more powerful.

 Morning Walk, Vrindavan: 15 March 1974. 


To my readers: if you are new to this blog or one of my regulars, it is almost certain that you or a member of your family has been manipulated at some time by the tactics of the Hare Krishna cultists. It is also safe to assume that you wonder how the Islamic terrorists ravaging the Middle East attract so many youthful followers despite their death-loving ideology. In fact, you already know why and how such quasi-religious cults operate based on your experience within ISKCON. Now is the time to retrieve this knowledge out of the dustbin of the past and put it to practical use. 

INTRODUCTION

Why is the sight of a youth being recruited on the street by a member of ISIS so eerily familiar? That describes my feelings exactly as I recently saw a video clip from Australia of one of these fanatics in action. The pattern is unmistakable: the target is approached by a person whose appearance and fervor declare an allegiance to a call to arms that transcends the rule of law and any obligations to family or the homeland. This call to brotherhood—complete with handshakes and hugs--is nothing more than an invitation to join a gang whose core ideology and practices reveal that it is really nothing more than a cult. Worse, the signs pointing to cults as incubators of extremism have been glaringly obvious in the West for more than 40 years.


Now that youths from these countries are joining ISIS in droves, the news is rife with accounts about how they should be punished upon their return and thus prevented from importing terrorism back to their homelands. Such policies are necessary, of course, but they are also politically expedient smokescreens for an inconvenient truth: some of our young adults are ignorant, lazy parasites eager to secure an easy future for themselves at any cost to others.

 Those of us with years of experience in ISKCON should use the valuable insights we possess to teach such would-be miscreants how to avoid the cult indoctrination process altogether. They might have mutated over two generations, but the diseases afflicting both cultists and terrorists have one symptom in common: at their core they are cults of personality with only a thin veneer of religiosity. 

Before I continue with my essay, I would like to thank two great souls--each in their own way the pride of India--who have inspired and instructed me in various ways. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar for his inspiring critique of the caste system, Annihilation of Caste and for his incomplete gem, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India. The life and teachings of Swami Vivekananda have also illuminated my solitary path in many ways and for that I am deeply grateful.

ISIS: OLD WHINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

 How does an otherwise unremarkable young man, usually from a working class family, turn into a hero- worshiping jihadist? At first glance, it appears that the new recruit has been illuminated by a sudden blast of piety: he becomes immersed in studying the Koran and quits drinking, whoring, and drug taking. So far, so good. However, when he travels to meet with his ISIS brothers, the pious cloud disperses, revealing just another gangster with a penchant for murder, rape, and pillaging. Instead of teaching its new recruits to assume responsibility for their own actions, terrorists preach a doctrine of victimization by Western culture and add to it a criminal sense of entitlement. In practice, it is a license for seeking out non-Islamic minorities and using them as scapegoats for their ill-conceived rage and insecurities.

 Most recently, Graeme Wood, in his now famous article, "What ISIS Really Wants," has traced the impetus for its followers' practices to a literalist, millenarian interpretation of the Koran. These practices include eliminating any Muslim who does not subscribe to the Islamic State's reactionary, simplistic world view. Muslims who depart from what Wood calls a "seventh-century legal environment" are infidels who must die, whereas all others must be subjugated, acknowledge the supremacy of ISIS, and pay fines to ensure their continued existence. Bernard Haykel (whose authority on ISIS Wood cites many times in his article) adds elsewhere that the Islamic State's back-to-basics mentality sidesteps a tradition of diverse, learned Islamic interpretation that spans more than a thousand years. The reason for this pitiful state of affairs, according to R. Rumi of the Hudson Institute, is "the weakened state" of that tradition today stemming from the Islamist misuse of ideology in the pursuit of their political aspirations.

 One of the most persistent fallacies plaguing religious fundamentalists of all denominations is the idea that scriptures are products of divine inspiration, usually originating from oral recitations of great antiquity that were codified by one or more holy scribes who tradition holds merely functioned as mouthpieces of a prophet. Modern scholarship avails itself of textual, archaeological and linguistic research to provide a more historically accurate picture of how scriptures developed, but the fanatics bent on insisting that everyone read with the literalism of small children need to offer incentives to their would-be followers that appear to put them on a fast track to enjoying adult goods and services they have done absolutely nothing to legitimately acquire.

 The reformation Islam needs at a minimum is therefore two-fold: its members must repair its image world-wide, beginning with condemning the terrorist model of rape and plunder as economic and political suicide; in addition,private and public educational institutions must endeavor to create an atmosphere where Islamic interpretation is encouraged and its scholars protected. Needless to say, implementing these changes will entail considerable risk since it requires freedom of speech and other individual liberties that gangs such as ISIS and the Taliban have systemically denied to all in their reach in their frenzied race to oblivion.

 Moreover, the naked opportunism that characterizes ISIS--for all of its appeal to a medieval Prophet-centered worldview--is expressed using methods that are quite technologically adept. It is as if their black-clad followers have emerged out of an Islamic-themed version of the Call of Duty video game, smartphones and computers at hand, using the latest social media to urge the gullible to regress to a tribalist existence filled with mayhem and slaughter. Unfortunately, but for a change of religion and attire, the practices now associated with ISIS have been used repeatedly by any number of cults that began to infiltrate American and European society beginning in the counter-culture ("Hippie/New Age") era of the mid 1960's and continuing to the present. What follows will establish beyond a reasonable doubt that religious fanaticism, much like an antibiotic-resistant plague, is capable of adapting to find better ways of breaking down the resistance of its hosts. 

CULTS OF PERSONALITY

Who can forget the first time you set eyes on your guru and felt your heart leap in the presence of what you believed was a direct conduit to the spiritual realm? Surely his Vedic wisdom--the glory of Eastern spirituality--far surpassed the inferior Abrahamic religions. It all seemed somehow miraculous: the ecstatic mantra chanting and dancing, together with the immediate acceptance by the devotees in the temple, seemed to transport you to another sphere of existence, one in which the rules of your former life need no longer apply. What if your new life required you to sleep on the floor, rise at 4:00 in the morning to worship brass and marble deities, and then spend the rest of the day on the street or at airports hawking books you hardly read yourself? What if your guru--despite all scientific evidence to the contrary--insists that the "infallible" Vedic cosmology locates the Sun closer to the Earth than the Moon and states that this planet itself is a disk supported in the heavens by four elephants?

 Similarly, if you are a newly-hatched terrorist prowling about Syria or Iraq looking for anyone your self-appointed Caliph deems an apostate, what will you do when these so-called apostates beat your forces into submission? Whether you are committed to following an ISKCON guru or waving a black ISIS flag, sacrificing your rational faculties for an obvious ruse also means that you have unnecessarily sacrificed your humanity. Such a deluded state of mind and the actions necessary to sustain it typically require the new adherents' adoption by a leader or guru, who, together with his other followers, convinces them that salvation is to be found in retreating to another time and place where they are de facto reborn with new ethnicities and allegiances. ISIS, for example, is fiercely determined to build an Islamic society based on a seventh-century model derived from a literal reading of the Holy Koran. It is as if they are time travelers from the past who are given falsified passports that they somehow believe render them fully-functional members of a divinely inspired people destined to drive out infidels and subjugate all others.

 Wresting these lost souls from their delusions and bringing them back to reality will prove to be a challenge, as families and friends of cult members learned back in the hippie era. Their ideological grandchildren--both the Hindu would-be cultists and the Islamic terrorist imports from the West--cannot be saved until they learn to recognize the dangers of literal scriptural readings (especially in regard to apocalyptic themes) and begin to think for themselves.


SOPHISTRY AND SCAPEGOATING 

 Perhaps the most effective means of brainwashing the followers of either a cult or a terrorist gang is the use of violent propaganda lifted from religious texts that are both taken in a literal sense and presented as the bedrock of an ancient social order. To new adherents searching for a rapid-fire means to enlightenment, the ardent, blind faith in a few lines of a holy book taken out of context often seems like an easy way to feign knowledge of a scripture they lack the erudition and the inclination to study and read at greater length. In most cases, however, they slavishly follow and disseminate their leaders' commentaries on scripture without reading the original for themselves and seeking to educate themselves beyond what is strictly allowed by the cult. The following examples of scripture and commentary from sacred texts of Hinduism and Islam show what mischief can arise when they are taken literally:

 Founder/Acharya of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada:
Arjuna was a great Vaishnava, and he was killing. Bhima was a great Vaishnava, and he was killing. Dhruva Maharaja was a Vaishnava, and he was killing. Parikshit Maharaja was killing. Prahlada Maharaja was killing. Rama was killing. Krishna was killing. Practically speaking, Vaishnavas are killers. . . It is not that because Mohammed used a sword, we also must use a sword, No! --we can use a Gun. We will ask-...You like Krishna??No--Booom..You like Krishna? No--Booom. We can use everything for Krishna, we can use the ATOM BOMB FOR KRISHNA!!We have to kill this civilization of mudhas [fools] . . .those who are mudhas, we have to kill them. This is our business. Kill all the mudhas. . . Not now but later when we are more powerful. 

 Morning Walk, Vrindavan: 15 March 1974. 

Whatever Muhammad said that is authority. That we accept. We accept Muhammad as the representative of God. Whatever he says, we accept; that's all. What you mean, that is your business. But he is the authority; he said, This is the name of God. You chant, you pray. "Allah of God." That's all. This is authority. 

Room conversation. Tehran: 14 March 1975. 

 Manu Samhita (Oxford Edition):
Drinking (spirituous liquor), associating with wicked people, separating from the husband, rambling abroad, sleeping (at unseasonable hours), and dwelling in other men's houses, are the six causes of the ruin of women. Women do not care for beauty, nor is their attention fixed on age; (thinking), '(it is enough that) he is a man,' they give themselves to the handsome and to the ugly.Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal towards their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this (world).Knowing their disposition, which the Lord of creatures laid in them at the creation, to be such, (every) man should most strenuously exert himself to guard them.(When creating them) Manu allotted to women (a love of their)bed, (of their) seat and (of) ornament, impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad conduct. 9: 13-17. 

A man, aged thirty years, shall marry a maiden of twelve who pleases him, or a man of twenty-four a girl eight years of age; if (the performance of) his duties would (otherwise) be impeded, (he must marry) sooner. 9: 94. 
 Holy Quran:
And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief or unrest] is worse than killing . . .But if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah and worship is for Allah alone.I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them. 8:12. 
 The "kill the mudhas" bluster A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada engaged in during the last years of his life shows how role-playing is an intrinsic part of the cult leadership mentality. Another is the practice of demonizing your real or imagined opponents and both exaggerating the threat they pose to you as well as your reaction to it. The fools our guru advocated killing would include anyone not a Krishna devotee, yet when he went to Tehran to preach, his absolutism shifted to relativism--"we accept Muhammad as the representative of God"--an obvious attempt to disarm his hosts. He would also use this trick on Christians and Jews: he claimed that Jesus was an avatar of Vishnu and praised Jewish intelligence on various occasions (many of his early American disciples were Jewish) and then praised Hilter and Lenin at unguarded moments or in private correspondence.

 Similarly, the Swami insisted that the (Laws of Manu) is "the law book for the entire human society"iii but departed from its treatment of castes as hereditary, claiming that by chanting the Hare Krishna mantra and "by accepting regulative principles, even Westerners (mlecchas and yavanas) become brahmanas"iv Regardless of what the Bengali reformer and Vaishnava saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu advocated, to regard the chaturvarna (four castes) system as anything but hereditary and rigidly hierarchical is to deny the scriptural foundations on which they rest and the fanatical way they have been maintained in the past and most certainly in the present. In her introduction to B.R. Ambedkar's, Annihilation of Caste, Arundhati Roy observes that unlike "contemporary abominations like apartheid, racism, sexism, economic imperialism and religious fundamentalism," the caste system gets a relatively free ride from international criticism The West's continuing flirtation with Eastern mysticism and exoticism in general might be a mitigating factor, but when a prominent organization of British Hindus can flatly state that "any form of discrimination is frowned upon by Hindu Dharma," it is clear to anyone even dimly aware of the caste-related violence that continues to roil India, that something more than mere denial is afoot. Of course, those of you who were ISKCON devotees are well aware of the kind of "Brahmins" our guru managed to create was as notorious in its own way as the abuses hereditary Brahmins and other upper caste Hindus heap upon the Dalits. These Hare Krishna brahmins were, in dress, laughable imitations of Gaudiya Vaishnavas in tilok and saffron garb, obsessed with controlling their sankirtan-funded temples and, after our guru's demise in 1977, a bunch of power-hungry businessmen fighting for guruship,embroiling themselves in various territorial squabbles.

PROPAGANDA BREEDS PARASITES 

  When a political party wishes to hide inconvenient news from the voting public, it will sanitize, expurgate,and sugarcoat as it sees fit and voila! Propaganda is born, an evil with more heads than the demon Ravana. Although it is an insult to reason, propaganda carries an emotional charge that causes the gullible to attach themselves to it like flies to honey. In turn, these human flies become carriers of the propaganda virus and act like parasites in spreading delusions saturated with emotional content. I remember chanting and dancing with other Hare Krishna devotees, awash in our exoticism-intoxication, only to discover in short order that our guru was far more interested in our selling his books. Sure enough, soon "sankirtan" no longer meant congregational chanting, it meant "hitting the street" and making nuisances of ourselves in airports. Our budding piety and enthusiasm became the tool of another person's desire to perpetuate himself.

This pattern also applies to religious-terrorist groups such as ISIS and the Taliban. Everyone knows, for example, that the puppet-masters without whose ideological and financial support terrorists could not survive would themselves be munching dates and fighting petty tribal skirmishes if not for the immense revenue stream flowing from their nationalized oil fields. The rise of tightly organized terrorist groups openly sponsored by either Saudi Arabia or Iran shows how "geography is destiny" insofar as their funding is concerned. As for their gun-toting pawns, they are fools to think that their economic and educational impotence can be cured by dressing like an assassin out of a video game and roving about butchering innocents. Until and unless they stop living off the largesse of others, they will find themselves unable to afford the typical appliances--not even a lowly microwave oven--they will need if they are to attempt to bribe a poor family to allow them to marry one of their daughters.

 Similarly, cults, whether they are outgrowths of established religions or simply the product of a fevered imagination, survive by attaching themselves to productive individuals and draining their funds with the tenacity of leeches. Thus fattened, they invest these "contributions" in lavish temples, restaurants, and various elaborate functions, all of which serve to stuff their coffers to the bursting point. Your actual religious beliefs might be absurd and laughable, but if you open a nice vegetarian restaurant and flatter your patrons, who cares? ISKCON, in addition, has gotten into the practice of giving its temples names (e.g., ISKCON Cultural Center) in an effort to seek legitimacy and broader social acceptance by the Hindu community. So, on the one hand, you have pious Hindus making large pledges to support ISKCON and Akshaya Patra food for school children programs, while the history of the catastrophe its founder's single-minded focus on selling his books visited upon the children of his disciples has been conveniently swept into the dustbin of the cult's early history. What is the likely outcome when a parasite encourages others to become parasites? Ask any of the innocent Indian school children who have been fed vermin-infested dal and roti mid-day meals by ISKCON food relief and the better-known Akshaya Patra! It is maddening even to think of such indignities visiting the recipients of an act of charity, which, for many, is indignity enough.

 Little do they know that the carnival-like atmosphere of many of the temple programs is simply a means to direct attention away from the cult's ludicrous and contrived beliefs, what to speak of the abuses their internal hierarchical systems heap upon strict followers and dissidents alike. Chief among these beliefs is their insistence on perpetuating their guru's claim that he was the first Indian guru to bring the true wisdom of the Vedas to the West and that his translation of and commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita are uniquely authoritative. To believe these claims, one would have to be both gullible and suffering from a severe case of historical amnesia. In fact, by his own admission, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada never read the Vedas and openly plagiarized the translation of the text of the Bhagavad-Gita from the Gita Press edition.

 Today, the miasma of deception to which we once succumbed has long since dissipated, having taken with it our youthful idealism and in too many cases, the best years of our lives. Despite losing these years, many of us have triumphed over great adversity to raise our children, obtain stable employment, and, in many cases put ourselves through college and even graduate school. Life does indeed find a way. For others, adapting to society after spending years and sometimes decades in the alternate universe of a repressive and sadistic cult has been a never-ending struggle. The years spent with the Hare Krishna cult (or any other similar pseudo-religious group) inevitably will have a formative effect on one's life. So the interest in what the cult is currently doing to ensnare newcomers and keep its current members docile and deluded does resurface, often with alarming results.

 Imagine my horror in this regard, to learn that my guru--whose "four regulative principles" observed rigorously by his initiated disciples contained a ban on any form of tobacco--used snuff (powdered tobacco) to stay awake when he was working on his commentary of the Srimad Bhagavatam. This revelation hit me hard, bringing back memories of my habit of fiercely defending my guru when anyone would dare criticize him. I had no idea that we had been duped by a public relations scheme, any more than the lost souls who are streaming from all over the world to join the jihadists in the Middle East and now, parts of North Africa, eager to regress morally and intellectually in a tribalist quest for ill-gotten gains. Add to this the role of social media in disseminating a stream of half-truths and wild distortions to those without the education and common sense to separate fact from fiction and you have a toxic brew for which few antidotes exist. However, we must try.

 I submit that the antidote is education, beginning in elementary school where both boys and girls learn to compare and contrast the religious beliefs and associated cultural practices of major world religions. Teachers should be recruited, as they are in Finland and South Korea, from the top 10% of the college classes and be compensated generously. Students should progressively learn rhetoric and the fundamentals of argumentative reasoning. The basis of such education is to teach students--boys and girls--to develop their reasoning powers and intellectual prowess. A youth who has learned to recognize the ideological maneuvers of cults can easily demolish them and actually point out their deficiencies to the slack-jawed cultist who is trying to recruit him or her. But what about the unemployed youths who turn to cults the same way many of their friends turn to gangs? This is an issue too many choose to side-step, focusing instead on methods of deterrence and profiling.

 The answer is again to be found in the Nordic and South Korean models of education, where it is recognized that not all students are college-bound, and educated accordingly. Many of the social problems in the ghetto-like housing developments in the outskirts of major European and North American cities could be vastly diminished if youths starting high school entered apprenticeship programs where they learn a trade from mature professionals in various fields. Part of the job description for these educators involves encouraging and nurturing the talents of their young charges, many of whom lack a stable father figure at home. Believe me, if a young man or woman has the social and technical skills to earn a living upon graduating from high school, they will almost certainly look at gangs and cult recruiters as nothing more than a bunch of losers and parasites.

 Most of all, our children must be taught an unwavering respect for the integrity and fundamental human rights of the individual. This must include freedom to pursue one's own interests and happiness without degrading or enslaving another regardless of religious or cultural precedent. Freedom of speech, including the right (as in this essay and others in this blog) to present opposing arguments and share one's personal experiences in order to help secure the rights of others and embolden them to seek redress as necessary and in a lawful manner. Finally, we should keep in mind Swami Vivekananda's exhortation that we: 
Do not believe in a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe in a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.

  i. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980. ii ii.http://www.hudson.org/research/11172-the-prospects-for-reform-in-islam iii Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, 3.21 purport. iv Srimad Bhagavatam 6.5.39 "Purport" by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. v http://hfb.org.uk. "Caste within the Single Equality Bill 2010." vi Swami Nikhilananda. Vivekananda: a Biography. NY: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953.

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