Pop the Culture Pill #1

Propaganda, hate and heroism: Political currency of choice

Dear reader,

It brings me great joy to present the first newsletter of the long-gestating and, to be honest, quite frivolous blog Pop the Culture Pill. When I first started the blog, it was merely an exercise in showcasing my love for films. An exercise I grew tired of, not because I stopped loving films (I watched them more frequently than ever), but because I had started performing it like, well, an exercise. I am not a fan of exercise or routine.

So, what befalls projects with erratic leads with anarchic tendencies befell my blog — it languished in the internet oblivion, covered in digital cobweb (if you may), wanting for better consistency and commitment.

The pandemic provided me time to think and plan. Encouraged by the privilege ensured by my parents’ hard work, I said to myself, “The pandemic did a lot of good,” and I began on the path to redeem my creative efforts.

Yes, you might be thinking, “So, I subscribed, or (if you haven’t yet) wasting my time so that some guy could exploit his male privilege at getting another shot at making his voice heard?” Absolutely right! We are already getting to know each other.

However, if that idea didn’t cross your mind, well, props to my self-deprecating humour.

This is a long newsletter, so I won’t take more of your time. Just a word of caution: the following content is a breakdown of recent political and social developments, and my thoughts on them. It might trigger some. To them I would say, “Please direct the bang to the comments.”

Thank you,

Ankur Animesh Surin

Propaganda, hate and heroism: Political currency of choice

What do forced puns and aggressive videshi taakaton ka haath (external forces) rhetoric have in common?

Both of them are used to derail a conversation/dialogue. But while such puns do not bring much harm, except to the speaker's chances of ever being invited to a party, rhetorics as the one mentioned above manipulate people and divert attention from what is actually important, to some vague external threat that probably doesn't even exist.

A handy tool for denying accountability, videshi taakaton ka haath rhetoric can become a sustainable source of power in the hands of governments and leaders who overcompensate their lack of administrative competence with aggressive marketing and sloganeering. And if you thought that there's nothing wrong with a little bit of marketing, know that there is always a price associated with buying into an ad campaign and becoming a consumer. Besides, I am sure seasoned consumers such as we all are, we understand that administration is performance based, and the only marketing it needs is results.

Art by Ankur Animesh Surin

What does a government do when it does not produce the promised results? It makes fresh promises — so fresh, they put farm produces to shame and farmers at unease. But promises can only go so far (which is how they work, but in comparison to how far Delhi Police is willing to go to demonstrate brutality, promises do fall short). People in authority know this; so they complement outlandish promises with a far simpler yet effective form of deception — diversion.

The diversion manoeuvre

“We need a diversion,” goes one character in every heist movie ever made. Come to think of it, managing to get one more term in office even after a dismal performance in the first is kind of pulling off a heist albeit on a huge scale. And diversion is all they have got. Politics and people’s love for spectacle and need for escapism at the end of a back-breaking day have a close relation. The ancient Romans understood that, and as a result, today, popular culture remembers Ancient Rome for lavish gladiator fights more than its art, architecture, philosophy, politics and social life.

Today, we have spectacles galore, from soft propaganda enabled by the media machinery (movies included) to tactless hate speeches from political stooges as well as their masters. At the centre of it all is the show of patriotism on public forums and trial of the “agents” of outside forces apparently determined to destabilise the economic and social harmony, even more than it already is.

Rising unemployment, crime against women and minorities, corruption both fiscal and moral, environmental degradation all find a safe haven for perpetuation, even as the safety of the citizens is being compromised and the social safety nets for them are being done away with, steadily. These issues cannot be seen in isolation and have to be attributed to the establishment’s incompetence, indifference, bias and greed. However, the establishment has always had tricks up its sleeve that are effective in diverting attention to something more spectacular, something more immediately frightening and sinister than the rising price of petrol and diesel.

Politics of paranoia and hatred

From Nazis in Germany to the McCarthy era politicians in the U.S. and everything before, in between and after, establishments have been practising a politics of hate and paranoia since people tasted power. From justifying wars, slapping own citizens with charges of sedition and treason to simply saving face by way of drawing comparisons, establishments have always stoked hatred and exploited paranoia to hold on to power, avoid criticism and discredit opposition.

The Nazis exploited people’s prejudice against the Jews, the U.S. politicians benefitted from demonising communists or any leftwing thinkers and, more recently, islamists, and Indian politicians are still holding on to relevance by playing communal politics. The one thing common throughout this history of propaganda politics is the presence or creation of a common enemy, who is foreign, is the other, and out to destroy the way of life we are so used to and the values we hold so dear.

This enemy does not have to be a foreign country; it can be an organisation, a person, a people, or a thought, whatever and whoever can be conveniently called the other. Everyone and every thought is a foreign aggressor that does not comply with the rules, no matter how despotic, of the establishment.

At the outset, paranoia is different from fear. Worrying that a valuable object might get stolen is fear; placing an X-ray scanner at the doorway at your housewarming party to protect that object is paranoia. Everybody has fears, rational or irrational. Paranoia, let’s say, is a party killer, unless it’s a political party — it thrives on paranoia.

Paranoia is fear exaggerated, to the point of creating conspiracy theories as well as measures to defend one from threats. The people in power validate these theories, endorse the measures and amplify the fear. But they don’t pat their backs just yet. The real cherry on top of their cake of deceit is the ability to curate and pool the most relevant paranoia to suit their purposes. While a person may develop a conspiracy theory that competitors are after their business, the government or a similar authority can channel that paranoia to create a more generalised picture of the threat and label it accordingly, say communists, anarchists or anti-nationals. On a more personal level, the establishment invokes the patriarchal order of proprietorship, for instance the ownership of a woman’s body. Hence, come theories such as Love Jihad and countermeasures follow to quell these supposed threats to the patriarch’s “property.”

When one subscribes to these generalisations, the authority gives one the right tools to identify those labelled threats — among other identifiers of threats, including an “offensive taste in meat,” is a critical stance toward the establishment. All one’s got to do is spot negative adjectives in a speech or social media post on the people in power. And in some cases, such as the ex-U.S. President Trump demanding people’s support to overturn the results of the “undemocratic elections” and the Government of India’s cries of “attack on sovereignty” in the recent Toolkit case, the people in power take the lead in conducting public trials and show the subscribers the way forward. The customer support here is as good as the private sector. Only if the the Government of India could inspire similar efficiency in the public sector, rather than selling PSUs to private groups.

Hatred is one of the stronger offerings from the people in power and one of the easiest to handle or rather mishandle. Like paranoia, hatred is organic; meaning, it’s like BYOB — one only has to be a bigot, the free playing field sans the consequences would be provided by the authorities.

While paranoia can and does breed hatred, one does not have to be paranoid to be a bigot. Many people can claim to be pure-blood bigots high on weed-the-inferiors-out dose of logic, although bigotry still seemingly stems as a counter to a perceived threat. Crimes of racism, misogyny and casteism among many others can be attributed to hate.

When Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” he was not only wrong in exaggerating the finality of blindness (there would still be one person with one eye left), but also quite lenient in affording vengeance to the oppressed who cannot even afford representation and voice in the mainstream media. While hate is for everyone to revel in, who benefits from it is very much a matter of social and political privilege.

The spread of Nazism and its horrific culmination in concentration camps, the countless wars between cultures throughout history, religious riots and ethnic cleansing in India and other Asian and African countries are all direct results of hatred borne in people’s hearts. Sadly, in this regard, the key to people’s heart seems to be lying around unattended for anyone with an agenda to take advantage of. All it takes for common, everyday office-going, wage-earning people to bare fangs and claws out is speech filled with venom. Leaders have brought down monuments, triggered genocides and caused wars with just a microphone and a podium. What they are capable of doing with the internet and media at their disposal should scare us.

Every hero needs a conflict

When there are enemies, there must be allies. There must be saviours, heroes, who would protect the people from external threats. The establishment is that wall between a nation, its culture, its people and sinister forces. This sounds reassuring, doesn’t it? Makes one feel one is on the right side of history. And it deserves a selfless hero. Makes one want to forget ones woes and for once think of something greater than worldly worries pertaining to a “selfish preoccupation” with sustenance. These heroes direct our attention to the “real” threat and then proceed on to do what heroes do. Just like gladiators, these heroes draw our cheers, applauds and admiration for the show of sheer human wlll and courage to persist in the face of adversity. Except, the heroes, who actually lay claim to the title, today are no gladiators. Their adversity is nothing compared to what common people go through everyday. Cushioned by privilege and emboldened by a seat in the ivory tower, they scare off consequences with armed bodyguards and the power their position holds. What they do have in common with the gladiators is they create a spectacular diversion.

These heroes are so powerful they are not relatable, and so they thrive on creating a sense of awe. When they feel the need to appear relatable, they create their own Martha-moment. Their only kryptonite is people talking about the real issues — of economy, of social and political justice, of freedom of speech, of equality, of right to earn a respectable income, of right to be not discriminated on the basis of caste, religion and sex — the solution to which the heroes don’t have or won’t give for fear of exposing their complicity in perpetuating some of those issues.

When prime time news presenters ambush students, turn debates into pro-establishment monologues, take a moral high ground and snipe people’s characters, deny stories from the margins a platform, become middlemen instead of a medium, and run fake news; when celebrities suddenly become woke and support BLM but fail to speak up against caste-based atrocities, take selfies with political leaders, appropriate stories of minorities and the marginalised in lieu of taking their stories to a broader audience; when politicians become saviours of culture and identity, take podiums and instigate riots, direct ethnic cleansing, bolster fringe elements to attack opposition or any detractors, make bold statements of aggressive action and false promises, they are not your heroes. They do not speak for you. They are not concerned with what the nation wants to know; they are only concerned with what you can’t know.

It is important to be concerned about ones nation’s sovereignty, but what matters more is ones own sovereign status and well being. The independence to think critically, speak freely, criticise fearlessly, disagree passionately and protest wherever one wants to cannot be curtailed in the name of protecting a nation’s sovereignty. In a democracy and a republic, personal freedom doesn’t harm the social and political harmony, rather they are indicators of a successful nation.

Students, activists, farmers, poets, comedians, and weed-smoking celebrities are not your enemies. You worry about your taxes funding ungrateful, dissenting, anarchist students and farmers? Well, you should be more worried about the establishment using your, my, our money to blind our own people with rubber bullets, wrecking havoc in educational institutions, aiding rioters, and suppressing the voices of dissent. This isn’t the democracy I know of, nor the one, I am sure, you would want the next generation to inherit.

For your eyes only

In case you were wondering, this is the end of my rant. If you managed to plod through it, congratulations! Thank you for your time and patience. You can now enjoy the internet in all its glory. But before you go, here are some more links and recommendations that you might enjoy.

Movies

—In keeping with the theme of paranoia, propaganda and hate, here’s a recommendation for a rare propaganda movie, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1972). An evangelical outreach film, this Ron Ormond “what-if” propaganda effort hammers down the idea that only Christianity can save America from the hell that communism would bring. The movie is available for free on byNWR.

—Fuck UK (2012), a short film by Benoit Foregeard, is a hilarious take on a person’s pathological hatred for the French people. The film is available on Mubi.

—River Song (2018) is an indigenous film from Arunachal Pradesh. It is the second feature from Sange Dorjee Thongdok, the director of National award-winning feature Crossing Bridges (2013). Watch it on Mubi. Read the review here.

Reading list

—Commie Scum by Andrew Male (byNWR)

—Poems by Danish Hussain (Kindle Mag)

—A few poems by Namdeo Dhasal (translated and introduced by Laurie Hovell, Routlege)

—”The poets had words; the government had guns.” — Salil Tripathi, chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee, on the killing of poets Myint Myint Zin and K Za Win by the military junta in Myanmar.

—In China’s Grip by Yuen Chan (Mekong Review)

—This final link is a bit random. I was listening to and reading about the music in Wong Kar-wai’s movies, and I came cross this article. It covers the music recommendation too! (Mubi)

Hope you had a good time reading the newsletter!

Until the next issue, stay healthy and kind.