Patriotism has a big win in India

Now a worldwide trend?

When Narendra Modi won office in 2014, it was referred to as the Modi Wave. What happened in India's general elections this year can only be described as a Modi Tsunami. Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a second term with an increased majority.

That has stunned political commentators who were expecting a reduced majority or a minority and Coalition government.

Instead, the BJP won about six times the number of seats as India's main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, even winning districts where it has never held sway before. It's a thumping mandate.

It's also a tidal wave of populism, trumping policy. Mr Modi spent his campaign giving fierce, theatrical speeches and his team has dominated the narrative on social media, where most Indians get their news and information.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi failed to make an impression in the physical or digital world, with critics calling him lacklustre.  His routing was so complete he even lost his seat in Uttar Pradesh state to a former TV actress who ran for the BJP.

While Mr Gandhi appeals to parts of India's established elite and intellectual classes, Mr Modi has the common touch. He sold himself as a man from a poor background who was strong and loud enough to defend India against the world. He calls himself 'Chowkidar', which translates to something akin to a watchman or security guard.

Perhaps the nation's faith in 'Modi the Protector' is best summed up by a woman who danced at celebrations at BJP offices in New Delhi. "We as women and housewives need a strong husband to protect the family. Likewise, Narendra Modi is only leader who can protect India," she said.

Mr Modi's government has failed to protect India from disastrous unemployment levels, the highest in 45 years, according to government data leaked to the press earlier this year. While the economy is growing, millions are out of work despite Mr Modi's 2014 pledges to create jobs, reform taxation and boost India's manufacturing sector.

In a country where agriculture employs more than half of the entire workforce, farmers are suffering from low prices and crippling debts.

But Indians believe their Prime Minister has protected them from a far greater danger than economic woe: Pakistan.

When the two countries spiralled towards the brink of war after a terror attack in Kashmir in February, Mr Modi sent warplanes to bomb Pakistan.

Even though there were no casualties — and no proof the bombs hit their targets — Indian nationalism was masterfully stoked by Mr Modi at every turn. In a narrative that echoes the style of US President Donald Trump, Mr Modi reassured that they were "winning".

When Mr Modi declared election victory on Twitter, he didn't even mention his party or portray the election as a contest between two sides. "India wins yet again!" he tweeted.

Mr Modi now heads what is probably the strongest government India has seen since independence in 1947, and can claim one of the strongest mandates ever bestowed on an Indian prime minister.

With so much power in the hands of one man, there will be no room for losers in the world's biggest democracy.

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Black is not beautiful in India



The winners of a recent Indian beauty contest were all very "fair", in a country of mostly brown people

The worldwide beauty ideal is Northern European -- and the closer you get to that the more beautiful you are.  All other clains are pissing into the wind.

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Political correctness in the arts

It would appear that the infection of identity politics has spread from the creatives to the critics. Praise for Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk was offset by those who complained that he had not included a sufficiently diverse cast, in spite of the historical fact that the overwhelming majority of those evacuated were young white men. It seems to me that if your initial reaction to a work as arresting as Dunkirk is to appraise the degree to which its auteur has fulfilled diversity quotas, then you are not well equipped to judge his artistry.

That is not to say that total objectivity is either possible or desirable when it comes to criticism. But the best critics are able to appreciate a piece of work on its own terms, whereas the worst seem to believe that success should be measured on the basis of how closely the artist reflects their own ideological perspective. Consider the reaction in the left-wing press to Morrissey’s new album California Son. The Guardian’s one-star review offers very little insight into the music itself, and might best be paraphrased as ‘I despise Morrissey’s politics’. A critic for the Independent was at least able to admit the quality of the album, but could muster no more than two stars for ‘an old hero who’s broken our hearts’. It is dispiriting to see critical faculties so easily overwhelmed by the intolerance of moral certitude.

Recent examples of this kind of shoddy analysis are myriad. One Guardian critic was so offended by Chris Lilley’s new series Lunatics that he admitted to feeling ‘personally insulted’. There was the BBC article which rated Game of Thrones episodes as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on the percentage of female dialogue, seemingly promoting the false correlation of gender representation and artistic merit. A similar approach was taken by the journalist who last week took Quentin Tarantino to task for the number of lines assigned to Margot Robbie’s character in his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. If this trend is to continue, critics may as well be replaced with computer algorithms producing pie charts instead of reviews.

This kind of philistinism has its origins in academia. Many literary critics have made a name for themselves by scouring canonical texts for evidence of homophobia, sexism and racism. The late Kate Millett, for instance, is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics, in which she denounced the likes of DH Lawrence and Norman Mailer for their supposedly sexist and patriarchal tropes. This kind of activism masquerading as criticism has since become mainstream. There’s a good reason why Camille Paglia once described Millett as the woman who ‘made vandalism chic’.

It is peculiar that the very same poststructuralist ideology that produced Roland Barthes’ concept of ‘the death of the author’ should now have spawned a generation of moral detectives who are seemingly obsessed with the behaviour of writers and other artists. Much has been made of Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitism, for instance, but his works remain essential reading for children. As Christopher Hitchens once observed, Dahl’s inherent unpleasantness was probably the very thing that enabled him to produce such twisted classics as The Witches and The Twits in the first place. If we were to consign all works by morally dubious writers to the memory hole, the Western canon would be so flimsy it would hardly be worth reading at all.

The novelist Anatole France once remarked that it is just as well that the heart is naive and the mind is not. If the angels were to write, he opined, they would doubtless produce bad literature. Oscar Wilde put it another way in The Critic as Artist when he noted that ‘all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling’. One need only visit a graveyard to see that he is right; some of the most mawkish epitaphs I’ve ever seen have clearly stemmed from profound sorrow. Critics, in other words, should be grateful that not all artists are decent people.

Good criticism is able to balance the subjectivity of personal temperament with the objectivity of professional experience. To put it another way, a critic who is offended is unlikely to offer much in the way of insight. According to Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s second son, his father’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was universally condemned by critics on the basis that it was ‘prurient, immoral, vicious, coarse, and crude’. When the novel was republished, Wilde added a preface as a form of rebuttal, which should be required reading for all critics today. In it, he explains that vice and virtue are simply ‘materials’ for artists, reminding us that the depiction of immorality is not necessarily an endorsement of such behaviour. Even if it were, why should it matter? ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’, Wilde proclaims. ‘Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’

Art in and of itself is a form of criticism; it is the ultimate expression of individuality, the interpretation of life through a singular lens. Just as there is artistry in criticism, there is a critical component to all forms of art. This is why the critic deserves our respect as much as the artist does, but it is also why he or she should be held to account when failing to live up to the high standards of the craft. A critic who is driven primarily by their politics, who is blinded by their own sense of moral superiority, or who cannot temporarily surrender to the worldview of their subject, can barely be said to be a critic at all. And those who fall into this category should not be surprised to hear themselves compared to eunuchs.

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Australia: Footballer's faith compelled him to shout a warning: repent

Israel Folau criticised several groups in his Instagram post, but only one of them has complained.  Guess which one.

On April 10, Israel Folau posted on his Instagram account the following message: “Warning: Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolators: Hell Awaits You. Repent! Only Jesus Saves.” Next to this big, bold statement was the message: “Those that are living in Sin will end up in Hell unless you repent. Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him.”

This eye-catching text was from the Bible, a loose paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

If someone else had posted this it would almost certainly have slipped under the radar. But Folau was being watched. Partly this is because of his brilliance as a footballer. He holds the record for the most tries scored in Super Rugby. In 2007 he won rugby league’s Dally M Rookie of the Year award for having scored the most tries in his debut year. In that same year he was the all-time youngest international player (he was 18 at the time).

But it looks as though Folau was also being watched for an opportunity to punish him for being a Christian; indeed, for being a blunt defender of the classic, conservative Christian faith.

The attack on Folau provoked an unexpected reaction: many Aussies were unhappy. They flooded open-line radio with calls in support of the right of Folau to hold and express his faith. This support was not limited to the 52.1 per cent of Australians who called themselves Christian in the 2016 census. A bucket load of callers took the line of “I don’t support what he said or the way he said it, but, hey the bloke’s obviously sincere so why is he being bashed up like this?”

Whether articulated or not, the underlying feeling of much of this response was: Australia is a free country. There was a distinct unease about the possibility of losing at least some degree of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief and freedom of religion in this wide, brown land.

Tone deaf to the electorate Bill Shorten came down on the wrong side of this debate in the election campaign. Ignoring section 116 of the Constitution, which says there shall be no religious test for public office, Shorten demanded to know where Scott Morrison stood on the “gays/hell” issue. This blunder won him no friends (apart from the inner-city crowd, who were already on his side).

For Rugby Australia this is a lose-lose debate. The religious test they applied to Folau’s employment looked so unfair to him that he bypassed their internal appeal process as pointless and announced his intention to test them in the courts. So Rugby Australia now will either lose the court battle or lose its major sponsor. It has already lost its best player.

This is no storm in a tea cup: this is central to Australia’s character as a nation and raises three questions:

 *  Why should there be penalties for defending classical Christianity?

 *  Why do the rights of one group trump all other rights?

 *  What is the actual content of the view he is defending?

Let’s tackle them. First, why should there be penalties for defending classic, conservative Christianity? It’s not as though Christianity is an eccentric, minority belief system. It’s the largest faith on earth with 2.3 billion followers.

Some will say people can believe what they like in private but the views of classic Christianity do not belong in the public arena. The problem is that Jesus ruled out that option when he said: “Everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 10:32-33)

So according to Jesus there is no such thing as private Christianity — there is only whole-of-life Christianity (public and private). Being a Christian means speaking about it. The Christian faith is part of our community and not a private matter.

Some politicians will say, “Well, we have to balance the rights of Christians to speak their faith aloud with the right of homosexuals not to be offended.” But from the words of Jesus it is clear that telling Christians they are not permitted to speak their faith aloud is telling them they are not permitted to be Christian.

Which brings us to the second question: why should the rights of one group trump all other rights? In this case it appears that the right of homosexuals not to be offended trumps the right of Christians to be as Christian as Jesus intended. It is especially interesting to note that Folau included eight groups in his post — none of the others has complained.

Surely the issue is that none of those seven other groups is demanding approval from everyone. On the whole, drunks, adulterers and the rest don’t care whether you approve or disapprove of them.

The homosexual community, however, appears not to be willing to accept disapproval. They may say all they want is tolerance. But that’s looking increasingly like a dishonest claim. They won’t, it seems, settle for anything short of complete approval.

Devout Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Christians or Calathumpians don’t expect you to approve of them. They think they’re right, and if you believe differently you’re wrong — and they’re quite happy to debate this with you. But they don’t demand that you be legally compelled to approve of them, and legally silenced and punished if you disapprove.

Which brings us to the third question: what is the actual content of the view Folau is defending? Is it simply a system of morality? Folau lists eight behaviours that with the support of the Bible he says are proscribed — unacceptable to God — so it could certainly look like a question of morality.

In part this is a problem created by the brevity of social media posts, which don’t allow for nuance. But Folau himself is pointing beyond simple moral judgment when he writes that “Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him”.

He is drawing attention to the fact that classical Christianity is certainly about judgment, but it is also about sacrifice and forgiveness. For 2000 years Christians have been calling it “good news” because the news that God loves you despite your behaviour and offers forgiveness can only count as very good news, indeed.

This good news Folau is talking about addresses the fact of death. The Christian world view says “people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).

The point is that life is a journey and, like every journey, it has an end. It would be intelligent to give some thought to how and where the journey of life might end. You might protest: but we can’t know! It’s not possible to know what death will be like and whether we might survive it, and, if so, what that survival might be like.

Picture it as being like a group of travellers walking down a long country road. They fall into an argument about where the road will end. One of them may claim it ends at a steep cliff face and that’s it. Someone else may suggest it ends at a railway station where a train is waiting to take you back to the beginning so you can do the journey all over again. Yet another may suggest the road of life ends in a garden and, just like Christmas, everyone will get gifts and be happy. Another may argue there are two cities at the end of the road: a comfortable one (“heaven”) and a bleak one (“hell”) and that we can be switched from the bad option to the good option as a free gift because the lord of the road loves the travellers and has paid for the gift.

That is pretty much the state of the debate in the modern world, and that brings us back to Folau’s warning that we should avoid hell.

Cartoonists have had a lot of fun will hell through the years, picturing comic demons in red tights with pitchforks prodding hapless condemned souls into furnaces. However, all the amusing things, or silly things, that have ever been said about hell, or thought about hell, spring from our reluctance to seriously consider death — what it is and what it means.

Here’s a practical definition: death really means separation.

For a start, death is the separation of the mind (or soul if you prefer) from the body. Most human beings who have ever lived, from Plato to now, have believed that the mind (or soul) will survive this separation. If it doesn’t, then that answers our question of destination. But if it does it means we are on the right track in thinking about death as separation.

But there is another separation that counts as death: separation from God. In classical Christianity separation from God is spiritual death. This separation from God shows itself in a wide range of behaviours, including the eight behaviours listed by Folau in his Instagram post, but not limited to those eight. Because, according to the classically Christian world view, we are designed to function plugged in to God; once we are unplugged (separated) we are like an unplugged appliance — we don’t function properly or we don’t function at all.

That’s the danger Folau believed he was warning people against. He thought he was warning his followers that those people who ignore God, choose to be separated from God, are sending a message; are saying to God, “just leave me alone”. The danger is God will take them at their word: they will be cut off from God forever.

That being “cut off” is what hell is. Not the funny cartoons of demons with pitchforks but being cut off, isolated, exiled, expelled, separated. When Jesus himself pronounces judgment on people the words he says are “depart from me”, adding, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).

But as Folau’s short post indicates, there is more to the story. Here’s the completion of those words from the Bible quoted above: “Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:27-28).

There is the offer of God’s love and forgiveness and restoration: switching at life’s end from the bad option (separation, isolation, “hell”) to the good option (connection, community, “heaven”) as a free gift. From the point of view of classical Christianity, Folau saw people in danger and shouted out a warning. In other words, the intention of his message was the exact opposite to how it has been portrayed. And for that Folau is being punished.

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That's pretty good theology above. In Matthew 25:46 the word translated as "punishment" is in the original Greek "kolasin" and it simply means "cutting off". It is the word a Greek gardener might use to describe the pruning of a tree. So it would be a superior translation to say that the goats would be cut off and thrown away -- and maybe burnt -- like the unwanted branch of a tree. So, when properly translated, we see that Christ was, as usual, offering the alternatives of life and death, not heaven and hell -- exactly as he does in John 3:16. The sheep get eternal life and the goats get eternal death

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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