A couple of months ago, a user on discord who I was speaking with informed me that Freedom House had labeled India as Partly Free from so-called democratic backsliding and yet Tunisia was labeled as Free despite only being a democracy since late 2014. This user from Europe proceeded to mock India due to this arbitrary rating system downgrade from a non-profit that exists in a country that shouldn’t even qualify from the criteria that Freedom House itself set forth. Examples in the UK include the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006 (and put in effect around October 2007 in the UK) which is anti-Free Speech, the connectedness of the UK government and the Church of England, the fact the upper house of their parliament (the House of Lords) are determined by peerage and a special unelected committee and not by democratic process, the government can issue threats of lawsuit via D-Notices to the British press, the fact they’re still officially a monarchy as a government with British people officially recognized as subjects of the British crown and not as citizens, and the fact that the Royal family still holds wealth by an organization that classifies itself as neither government nor part of the monarchy which is unelected. I bluntly and firmly rebuked that person on discord by responding that any organization that thinks a more than 70-year-old democracy is somehow weaker than a country that has only been a democracy for roughly 7 years is obviously destroying their own credibility. The problems with such claims were obvious to me, especially since India had no issues with its free and fair election process unlike voter suppression in idiocracies like the US. It truly was a no-brainer to me; I thought through the ramifications of such claims, I recognized that it couldn’t be credible, and I spent 5 minutes of thought on it at most. Lo and behold, the US mainstream media, the US government, and soon enough US Think Tanks kept creating two disparate talking points about India’s score being lowered and backsliding from democratic norms without sufficient evidence and Tunisia held as an example of the lone success of the Arab Spring and gaining full freedom status as a landmark of what Muslim civilization can achieve in the Middle East. Multiple US institutions kept trumpeting these two talking points and placing US credibility firmly on these claims with Freedom House and other “democracy indexes” held as the closest to objective standards to follow in understanding the wellbeing of democracies across the world. As of a few days ago, with Tunisia falling into a coup, and probably half or most the Policy wonks in US Think Tanks arguing for the Biden administration to prioritize security concerns above support for Tunisia’s democracy as is typical of their behavior, we’ve almost certainly seen the complete erosion of US credibility and possibly most of US soft power. Because if supporting a democracy index that claims to observe the trajectory of countries relationship with liberal democracy on an annual basis doesn’t do it, then what on earth could be considered dumber than this in terms of Foreign Policy soft power blunders? Perhaps more to the point, how could any person in the US government, among US Think Tanks, and the US mainstream media be genuinely so stupid that they rated a 7-year-old fledgling democracy as more secure than a more than 70-year-old democracy? All it took me was 5 minutes of rational thought to realize why one shouldn’t risk backing Freedom House. This can’t be construed as a minor misstep or a small blunder after the Trump Era and the Capitol Hill insurrection on the part of US elites. The US government, US mainstream media, and US policy Think Tanks appear to be moronic in the eyes of anyone who took Freedom House and other democracy indexes seriously. After all, if it doesn’t accurately predict which countries are slipping away from democracy, then what use does it actually serve? To continue using them as an index when they’re not accurately showing which countries are backsliding away from democracy is delusional and a waste of time. At best, the only defense could be that the US Think Tanks are genuinely so corrupted by foreign influences after putting US Foreign Policy for sale to the highest bidder that these US Think Tanks are no longer reliable at all for coherent, effective, and realistic policymaking.
Of course, compounding this laughably avoidable failure of rational thought by the US government, US Think Tanks, and US Mainstream media is the fact that other “Democracy indexes” reported the same lowering of points on India and raising up Tunisia as more secure. The 2021 Democracy Report by the V-Dem Institute from the University of Gothenburg largely backed-up the fallacious reasoning of Freedom House. Although, in fairness, they lowered the US rating too, but their indexes did not lower it enough to provide an accurate picture given what happened with the Capitol Hill riots over the Presidential certification process, the stock market debacle regarding Gamestop stock, the continued corruption scandals that are repeatedly ignored by the US government with the most recent being the FinCEN Files, and continued State and Federal acrimony related to COVID-19 mask policy. In other words, these many “democracy indexes” failed to give an accurate picture of Tunisia’s precarious position, the strength of Indian democracy, and the thoroughgoing incompetence and inferiority of the US Republic. We should probably just refer to the US Republic as an idiocracy from now on, because that provides the most accurate and fitting picture of US politics, both domestic and international. Somehow the exceptional nature of US stupidity never ceases to amaze me. US Exceptionalism – the belief, without evidence, that the US is invulnerable to all of its problems and that the US stands as the endpoint of human civilization that must be modeled after by every other contemporary human civilization – is leading my country down a path of absolute ruin. Far from the bygone days where US Think Tanks claimed Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Great Powers was disproven; it seems few, if any, truly took the time to read their criticisms and apply it to the real world. If they had, Paul Kennedy would look prescient by contemporary US Think Tanks and Samuel P. Huntington would be called a new-age Prophet and God whose predictions should be worshipped as a 21st century religion due to its stunning accuracy. The thesis for Huntington’s groundbreaking work was rather simple: Western Civilization will fall and there is nothing we can do to stop it because the West had a 500-year blip of technological progress due to its geography and resources and it’ll thoroughly decline until the world goes back to the pre-Western rise with China as the number one country in the world, India as number 2, the US as number 3, and Brazil as a possible number 4. The fact the Realist Theory of International Relations is explicitly deterministic on principle makes this inevitable. And, just like Alexander the Great and the British empire in the past, and the USSR; the US has failed in its vague aims in the graveyard of empires known as Afghanistan. Furthermore, if the US didn’t even have vague aims, then it failed by default.
The Unvarnished Anti-Hindu Bigotry
At one time, when the nascent Ex-Muslim Enlightenment movement had my interest, I had foolishly believed values-driven democratic norms and freedoms would be able to change some of this trajectory down a path of absolute ruin, but I’ve grown older and more cynical. I don’t believe it anymore, because whether it be the Ex-Muslim non-profit groups or the US Think Tanks or US Journalists, the truth of the matter is that none of these people care at all about Hindus being killed by anyone and thus their claims about being defenders of human rights ring hollow. The only lives they care about are in the Abrahamic category. Any explicit murder of a Hindu is reframed as anti-Indian racism within the US in an effort to remove the Hindu logo, any deaths in which Hindus have also been killed such as the 2020 Delhi Riots will categorically remove the mention of Hindus murdered, Wall Street Journal in fact did lie about a Hindu being murdered by claiming that he was a Muslim, and Foreign Affairs will publish and proliferate deliberate lies about Hindu-majority parties or leaders who formulate politics based on Hindu identity as if that is somehow “fascist” when the US GOP has been very blunt and public about its Christian identity since the 1970s. In fact, these supposedly Anti-BJP groups even in Academic circles willfully admit they support violence and hatred of Hindus and justify it by saying Hindus haven’t been killed enough to the extent of the Holocaust of innocent Jews by the German Nazis. This is the so-called “liberal” and “left” group supporting the Indian National Congress party:
I’m not the only Hindu to witness and be disgusted by this behavior and yet anything we say is ironically claimed to be pre-emptively supporting bigotry and hate. I’ve had enough, the truth of the matter is that the United States, US Think Tanks, the US Government, and especially the US Mainstream Media are incurably asinine and unworthy of being listened to or respected by anyone in the world. They’re too stupid to take seriously. Too stupid to get their own COVID-19 cases under control while mocking other countries like Russia, too stupid to trust the foreign policy of since everything for nearly the past twenty years has been a cascade of failures and post-failure rationalizations that their willful stupidity in making a mess isn’t so bad or it has been bought out by foreign countries who influence the discourse, and so on.
The Foreign Affairs critiques on India read as the same pre-processed and regurgitated garbage. They categorically ignore and trivialize Hindu deaths, they ignore and trivialize the rights of gays and Kashmiri women who gained more rights once the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir were rescinded to bring them back to the Indian Union, they explicitly ignore the BJP’s adamant demand to stop child marriage in the region, and – in the case of Milan Vaishnav – they’re now abetting sedition and terrorism against India by disingenuously labeling a woman who was found to be helping the Khalistani breakaway movement as some young Climate activist. This is sheer incompetence on a monumental scale. First and foremost, the BJP is the Pro-Environment party, secondly the farmers protest that the US mainstream media tried to portray as pro-environment were supporting the continued destruction of the environment. Farming creates environmental degradation and destruction; Indians have known this about the Farmers protest interests for over 50 years, so trying to portray it as pro-environment with Greta Thunberg’s face on it is a deliberate lie. The fact this was vetted and allowed to be published on Foreign Affairs speaks volumes of the incompetence and echo-chamber that US Foreign Policy “elites” are living in and it makes me question their basic knowledge of other countries and how reliable any of their articles are anymore. Perhaps I’ll just begin cancelling any future subscriptions given the lack of intellectual quality and rigor that they’re now displaying. I say this with full honesty; their portrayal of India is grossly incompetent to a degree that I am genuinely shocked to observe and read.
Christianity will no longer work as an imperialist tool because more of the world sees it for what it truly is
The US is still too stupid to see that Christianity cannot be used as a political weapon anymore because the only thing people across the world think of when seeing a male Christian Priest is questioning how many young boys that he’s raped. And if you think there is a shred of bigotry in stating that after multiple global scandals ranging from Jehovah’s Witnesses, to Anglicans, to Southern Baptists, to Coptic Christians, to Catholics, and probably every denomination of Christianity that you can think of, then you are not dealing with the reality of how the world perceives modern-day Christianity. Christians proportionally commit more crimes than Hindus and Muslims in India. US Foreign Policy organizations like Foreign Affairs go so far as to deny their own data showing religiosity increases crime whereas secular and atheistic societies have far less of it. Assertions about China having 100 million Christians have absolutely no methodological backing whatsoever and on the ground appearances of growing Churches doesn’t mean more adherents. Just as Walmart failed to sell their US garbage into more intellectual societies, the US selling child rape to China isn’t going to be anything more than a failure. Christianity is a glorified child rape cult and that is how anyone gazing rationally as an outsider of this cult would see it. If you think Christianity has any political weight to the extent of creating rebellion against China, you’re willfully ignorant of how this child rape cult is perceived. You want to know how an authoritarian government can stop a Christian rebellion in its tracks? Do an aggressive investigation of how many young boys the local priests have raped, because the teachings of Jesus Christ – the doctrine of which all sins including child rape are forgiven if you believe in his narcissistic and psychotic claims of being a god – obviously attracts potential child rapists. Nothing about that statement should be controversial or seen as bigotry given the overwhelming evidence across the world, but it will be if you’re remaining willfully blind to the very real harm that Christianity causes and its historic abuses against Jews, Native Americans, Muslims, and even Hindus such as the Goa Inquisition.
It is time for we Westerners, and especially we Americans, to acknowledge that we’re barbarians due to the acute narcissism propagated throughout Western culture. We Western Barbarians have done enough harm to Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, non-Western Christians, many Asian ethnic backgrounds not subscribed to the major religious faiths, and Hindus as it is. We must stop being incurably stupid with our barbaric, narcissistic ways.
Note of Apology: I seem to have conflated Freedom House with European Democracy Indexes in this article. Freedom House is based in the US, the others are based in the EU. Nevertheless, nothing about the critiques given was negatively impacted. It makes no sense for Freedom House to have labeled a 7-year old democracy like Tunisia as more secure than a 70-year old democracy like India, nor should these European Democracy Indexes have jumped on the bandwagon of US stupidity. Then again, that would require them to look in the mirror and see places like the UK aren’t exactly as “free” in terms of domestic laws as they falsely claim to the world.