The many wars a self-serving West fights

Since Communism as an ideology is mostly defunct in the ‘free’ world, Russia is now being portrayed by extremist politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as the leader of the global Christian right.

If anything, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the white Christian nationalism that is currently sweeping across Europe and the US have shone the spotlight on a colonial mindset that properly belongs in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

This mindset was on full display when a set of high-ranking politicians and diplomats from Western nations and Japan (ah, those ‘honorary whites’, a special category created by South Africa in the apartheid era) descended on Delhi a couple of months ago to bully India into changing its stance on the war in Ukraine but encountered unexpected pushback. Contrast this with India deferring to the US and UK demands that Indian troops be pulled back from the border during the India-Pakistan stand-off in 2001 so that the West’s ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan could proceed without any distractions. Some wars are more important than others.

While media these days promote poisonous perspectives on the spread of Islam in general but radical Islam in particular, this hasn’t always been the case. In an interview with the Washington Post in March 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated that investments in mosques and madrassas overseas were rooted in the Cold War, when Western allies asked oil-rich Saudi Arabia to use its enormous financial resources to prevent the former Soviet Union from making inroads in Muslim countries. In the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the very same madrassas were targeted for the spread of radical Islam. The Western definition of religious freedom and human rights has long been a matter of political expediency -- mutable and country-specific. And very self-serving.

In his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington posited that in the post-Cold War era, wars would be fought between country blocs defined by shared cultural identities rather than political ideologies, with ethnicity and religion constituting the fault lines. He later expanded on this theme in his 2004 book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, by calling on the US to turn to Protestant religions to save itself against the threats “of Latino and Islamic immigrants.” Huntington also viewed China as the biggest long-term threat to US interests. Judging by recent newspaper reports, the drumbeats of a potential war between the US and China have already started.

Huntington’s writings are frequently referenced by politicians, mainstream media and social media in the US and Europe whenever the conjoined issues of terrorism and immigration are discussed. Less well known are the legal briefs prepared by the Immigration Restriction League (another Harvard product) in support of the Immigration Act of 1917 which banned all immigration from Asia, except the Philippines (then a US colony), and placed strict limits on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. There were no Ukrainian flags or blue and yellow lights adorning the skyscrapers of New York at that time, I am sure.

Speaking of immigration, did you know that a major segment of the beef cattle industry in the US owes its success to just two immigrant bulls from Gujarat, which, upon arriving in Texas in the 1880s, were used for crossbreeding purposes to create the American Brahman bull? McDonalds burger outlets the world over owe the state of Gujarat big time.

Yoga and Brahman bulls. Two ‘immigrants’ from India are on a roll.