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      Right Think: Jane Austen Against Terrorism

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      A creative British judge has demonstrated how judgments in criminal cases need not be about meting out humiliating, painful punishment to the guilty. In the case of 21-year-old Ben John, accused of acts identifying him as a “terror risk,” the punishment prescribed by Judge Timothy Spencer QC consists essentially of reading works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy. John will return to court three times a year “to be tested on his reading.”

      Ben John’s crime consisted of downloading exactly 67,788 documents that appeal to right-wing terrorists. Call it downloading with intent to read. According to the BBC, “He was arrested in January 2020 and later charged with offenses under the Terrorism Act, including possessing documents on combat, homemade weapons and explosives.” To be clear, he didn’t actually possess weapons and explosives, merely documents about them. According to John’s attorney, even the prosecution didn’t believe he was planning a terrorist attack. 

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      Understanding the diminished nature of the threat, alongside the fact that he technically did violate a modern law that some complain encourages abuse by law enforcement, the judge gave this account of John’s taste in downloading: “It is repellent, this content, to any right-thinking person. This material is largely relating to Nazi, fascist and Adolf Hitler-inspired ideology.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Right-thinking person:

      Someone who understands the importance of limiting their thinking not only to approved topics but also to approved takes on those topics while accepting to make a concerted effort not to let their thinking wander into unsavory areas

      Contextual Note

      Britain is a nation and a culture that lives and breathes through its awareness of its centuries-old traditions. The idea of “right-thinking” cannot be defined by any law, but instead of being discarded, as it would be in the US, thanks to the British perception of the weight of its inherited culture, the concept can be credibly invoked in a courtroom and even figure in a verdict. Judge Spencer apparently believes the key to becoming a right-thinking citizen is to practice being a right-reading citizen. A clear-headed judge in the US applying the same logic would impose reading the law, not works of fiction.

      Judge Spencer understands that knowing the law isn’t enough. Thinking like a good Englishman requires familiarity with great English writers of the past. And it must be the past. In his list there is no Martin Amis, Ali Smith, Ian MacEwan or even 20th modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Joyce Cary or D.H. Lawrence. Right-thinking English society reached its pinnacle more than a century ago.

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      It stopped evolving at the beginning of the 20th century, by which time all British citizens were expected to understand at least that part of a dying empire’s heritage. This judgment reveals that the nostalgia for a society of the queen’s right-thinking subjects remains a powerful cultural force in British society.

      John’s lawyer described his client’s character as “a young man who struggled with emotions; however, he is plainly an intelligent young man and now has a greater insight.” Perhaps the judge expects that John’s reading of great works from the past will inspire him to become a writer himself, making him not only right-thinking but even an active contributor to the perpetuation of the literary tradition that defines the nation’s greatness. John may even be inspired to take up writing his own dramatic story. Instead of engaging in the crime of downloading with intent, he may start uploading with creative ambition. 

      This legal episode may leave the reader of the article with the impression that the judge regrets not having pursued a vocation in academia and is using the opportunity to hone his skills as a literature teacher. On that score, Judge Spencer may risk falling into the trap of the great British tradition of imitating a cast of despotic, if not sadistic headmasters and superintendents, on the model of Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in “Hard Times.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      There is a hint of Dickensian severity in Spencer’s formulation of the young man’s sentence: “On 4 January you will tell me what you have read and I will test you on it. I will test you and if I think you are [lying to] me you will suffer.” But unlike Gradgrind — who condemned “fancy” (“You are never to fancy”) and promoted “fact, fact, fact” — by imposing fiction, Spencer may even be encouraging the development of John’s fancy, so long as it stays close to what right-thinking people fancy.

      John’s barrister, Harry Bentley, reassured the judge: “He is by no means a lost cause and is capable of living a normal, pro-social life.” The term “pro-social” should be taken as a synonym of “right-thinking,” which means not “Nazi, fascist and Adolf Hitler-inspired.”

      Historical Note

      The judge mentioned some specific titles of works that John will be expected to read, all of them works that belong to the prestigious history of English literature. Judge Spencer gave this specific instruction: “Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.” Apart from Shakespeare, these are all 19th-century writers. In their works, they describe the material, social and economic conflicts that concerned people living in a world that has little in common with today’s reality.

      These novels reflect in different ways the impact of the momentous change as a formerly rural society was overturned by industrialization. Is it reasonable to think a young extremist of the 21st century will be able to learn from such examples?

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      We are left wondering at what the chosen titles mean for the judge himself and what impact he expects them to have on the man accused of terrorist tendencies. Will the preoccupations of a destitute gentry in the early 19th century in “Pride and Prejudice” provoke some epiphany for the young man? Will the absurdly melodramatic pseudo-political events Dickens situates during the French Revolution in “The Tale of Two Cities” clarify his ideas about radical politics?

      Does the judge expect that the subtle confusion about a twin playing at reversing her gender role in Shakespeare’s sublime comedy will effectively educate John on the subtleties of sexual identity and help him to nuance his opinions on homosexuality?

      Depending on how he conducts the discussion sessions around the convicted man’s readings, the magistrate may be creating a precedent that is worth imitating in other cases of individuals with terrorist inclinations. Calling great writers of the past as witnesses of what right-thinking people believe will at least rob such individuals of the time they would dedicate to reading downloaded extremist literature. It’s a question not of fighting fire with fire, but with comforting warmth. 

      There is a problem, however. Understanding what Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and others had to say requires delving into the history of their times and the modes of thought that accompanied those times. We might even wonder how right-thinking these authors were. Shakespeare in particular left hints that he wasn’t very fond of the oppressive order he was living under. His form of protest was not to download instructions provided by Guy Fawkes (who did attempt to blow up Parliament), but the texts of his tragedies that indirectly express his doubts about the existing political order.

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      For Shakespeare, something was rotten in England as well as Denmark, and the time was clearly out of joint. He carefully avoided appearing too subversive from fear of the temporal power that would inevitably accuse him under the Elizabethan version of the Terror Act.

      Judge Spencer has nevertheless defined a noble course of action in this particular case. Let us hope that he is up to the task as a teacher. If he does succeed, we should recommend his example for handling future cases of intelligent individuals so disturbed by the reigning hypocrisy that they become ready to embrace ideas pointing in the direction of terrorism. Given the constant degradation of our political culture and of the trust people are willing to put in our political leaders and the justice system itself, such examples in the near future are likely to be legion. 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Critical Race Theory: A Dictatorship of the Woke?

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      In Washoe County, Nevada, parents protest critical race theory (CRT), while a conservative group is pushing for teachers to wear body cameras to make sure they aren’t indoctrinating students. In Loudon county, Virginia, home to Leesburg, a town named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee, wealthy white parents scream in school meetings. Across the US, mostly white parents picket school board meetings, holding up “No CRT” signs as though it were 1954 and their schools were about to be integrated.

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      This demonization of an academic theory is supported by virulent media discourses. Fox News says that the teachers’ unions support CRT and will push it on your schools at a cost of $127,600. Breitbart takes it further, suggesting that CRT is going to set up “a dictatorship of the anti-racists.” On Twitter, opponents compare CRT to anti-white racism and the far-right conspiracy of white genocide.

      Undoing Racism

      So what is critical race theory? Is it a radical anti-racist Marxist program bent on overturning power structures for an amount equivalent to what Tucker Carlson earns in a week? Scholars say CRT is in fact a framework from critical legal studies emphasizing not the social construction of race but the reality of racism, in particular racism’s deep roots in American history and its perpetuation in legal and social structures. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term, emphasizes that it is an ongoing scholarly practice of interrogating racism.

      Is it being taught in your schools? Nobody is teaching CRT to kindergarteners. Critical race theory has become part of education studies, one of many frameworks influencing researchers and instuctors who want a framework for understanding, and undoing, racism in education. Some link CRT in schools to The 1619 Project launched by The New York Times that seeks to center black history and slavery in the story of America’s founding.

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      So why does your uncle who spends too much time on the internet think this is a dictatorship of the woke? The moral panic over CRT is the brainchild of Chris Rufo, who began using the term to refer to a catch-all, nefarious force behind all kinds of social change, from Joe Biden’s weak liberalism to Black Lives Matter. Conservatives link CRT to trans rights and communism, the Heritage Foundation compares it to Marxist critical theory. The Trump administration launched a counter to The 1619 Project, the 1776 Commision, to elevate whiteness and fight “critical race theorists” and “anti-American historical revisionism.”

      Moral panics position one idea, process, identity or group as evil, a threat to public order, values and morality, but they align institutional power with popular discourses to enforce the social positions and identities behind them. As of July, 22 states have proposed bills against teaching critical race theory and five have signed them into law. These bills ban teaching CRT, which they insist makes white students uncomfortable and introduces “divisive concepts.” For the right, the vision of US history is one that teaches color-blind unity and pride in being American. Of course, it also teaches that the KKK was OK.

      Anti-Anti-Racist Panic

      This is far from the first moral panic over education. Historian Adam Laats compares the fight against CRT to the fight against the evolution of teaching. This first moral panic led to widespread distrust in public schools. More recent moral panics also led to divestment in social institutions. In the 1980s, a panic about satanic kindergartens in the US led to the reinforcement of dominant gender and racial power structures, but also to the withdrawal of support for daycare and early childhood education.

      Panics over sex education, from Australia to Aabama, called for defunding these programs, shrinking already limited school budgets while increasing conservative opposition to public education. In the UK, the Conservative Party wants to ban teaching white privilege because it hurts working-class boys — while at the same time dismantling the free school meals program.

      What will the effects of this anti-anti-racist panic be? Will they curb the freedom of teachers to share the truths of history or push them to teach a still more nationalist version of the American story? Will history classes explicitly celebrate white masculinity, full of heroic founders fulfilling a holy promise for freedom and capital? Or might it also serve as another push to demonize public schools, painting them not as (unequally funded) shared democratic institutions but as anti-American indoctrination centers?

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      Even if the bills do not reshape education standards, the dramatic language around CRT and white genocide continues the longstanding push to defund and privatize public schools. As education scholar Michael Apple notes, the right’s education reform has long linked neoliberal privatization with neoconservative curriculums, something that continues with the opposition to CRT.

      Breitbart mentions Utah’s Say No to Indoctrination Act that will “keep taxpayer dollars from funding discriminatory practices and divisive worldviews,” linking cost and curriculum. It is not a coincidence that conservative media mention the price of anti-racist interventions and the dog whistle of “taxpayer dollars.” Fighting CRT might mean bills to change curriculum standards, but it could equally mean a push to cut funding for public schools reframed as cutting funding for CRT — as Senate candidate J.D. Vance suggests on Twitter — or a call for greater support for private, religious and home education.

      Both increased nationalism and privatization of education were key issues for the right. Donald Trump’s 2020 education platform’s first point was to teach American exceptionalism; his second was to have school choice. With this panic over critical race theory, far-right drama serves to reinforce the more banal nationalism of capital and conservatism. Painting schools as cultural-Marxist madrassas makes it a lot easier to stop paying for them.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      9/11: Inside the President’s War Room review – astonishing and petrifying

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      TV reviewTelevision9/11: Inside the President’s War Room review – astonishing and petrifying This remarkable documentary shows exactly how 9/11 unfolded for George W Bush, from the multiple prayer breaks to the anti-anthrax pills – and the vow to ‘kick ass’ before he knew whose ass to kickJack SealeTue 31 Aug 2021 17.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 31 Aug 2021 17.26 EDTThere is a particular kind of political documentary that tries to put us “in the room”, to tell us how historic decisions were made and how the fallible humans who made them felt. But on 11 September 2001, when planes hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists destroyed the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and took the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans, the chaos was such that there was no single “room”. President George W Bush and his advisers, afraid for their own safety and constantly searching for information, were on the move all day and had to conduct their business in airbase bunkers, the back room of a school and aboard the president’s jet, Air Force One.Nevertheless, 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room (BBC One) gives the sensation of being in the room in a way that few documentaries ever have. That day has often been described as a disaster movie no screenwriter would dare imagine. Here, it is a horrifyingly tragic but also propulsive story, with twin narratives following the president’s movements and the developing carnage on the ground, minute by minute.The film’s archive footage has plenty of Adam Curtis moments, such as Bush killing a fly on the Oval Office desk, seconds before giving the gravest speech of his life, to underline that every moment of 11 September had something odd or terrifying in it. But as every relevant government official shares their recollections on camera, the vivid pictures are outstripped by personal anecdotes. We hear from the situation room captain, who recalls having to brace herself against the president’s desk as Air Force One made a steep emergency takeoff – “I went partially weightless. I was petrified” – and the deputy communications director, who got flustered when Bush’s doctor handed out anti-anthrax pills and took his whole week’s ration in one hit.Chiefly, though, this is an insight into the mind of the star interviewee: George W Bush. At first, we see his notorious folksy simplicity, apparent in his eerily counterintuitive decision to ignore, for several long minutes, the news about the second tower being hit, for fear of being impolite to a class of Florida seven-year-olds having a presidential visit. Bush also called for those around him to stop and pray, more than once, while still in the eye of a storm of unknown lethality and proportion. “Prayer can be very comforting,” he says here.Such reactions could be read as bizarre in the face of doom, or natural responses to a situation where what could immediately be achieved was unclear. One interviewee says that, while analyses of Churchill or Roosevelt in wartime look at actions that took weeks to complete, Bush on 9/11 is a study of a leader being forced to make epic choices on the hop.This is where Inside the President’s War Room is most revealing. We hear how anger became the strongest of Bush’s conflicting emotions: fear and sorrow and a determination to safeguard US citizens had to make room for the desire to, in Bush’s words, “kick their ass”, before it was known whose ass or how. By that evening, the president had publicly formulated the “Bush doctrine”, which said harbouring terrorists was to be treated as the equivalent of perpetrating terror. A new American pathology, the “war on terror”, was born in haste.The consequences of this are clear from the fact that this documentary, marking 20 years since 9/11, airs just as the ensuing military intervention in Afghanistan concludes. The thought of that war and, moreover, the US and its allies’ 2003 attack on Iraq, hangs over the whole piece, making the simplest emotional moments complex. The politician expressing the helpless horror of seeing the twin towers fall on TV is Karl Rove. The bowed head, overcome by the emotion of remembering the dilemma over whether or not to shoot down United Flight 93, belongs to Dick Cheney.Are those moments still affecting, knowing that those men went on to wreak horrors of their own? Yes, but to its credit, Inside the President’s War Room makes sure that context is explicit. Being in the room doesn’t stop us looking beyond.TopicsTelevisionTV reviewUS politicsSeptember 11 2001George BushreviewsReuse this content More

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      TV tonight: what President George W Bush really did on 9/11

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      TV tonightTelevision & radioTV tonight: what President George W Bush really did on 9/11 In a new documentary, the former US president and his team recall the 12 hours after the September 2001 terror attacks. Plus: Daisy Haggard returns in Back to Life. Here’s what to watch this eveningAmmar Kalia, Phil Harrison, Jack Seale, Ali Catterall and Paul HowlettTue 31 Aug 2021 01.20 EDT9/11: Inside the President’s War Room8.30pm, BBC OneWhere Monday night’s Surviving 9/11 told the story of some of the civilians who found themselves in the midst of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, this documentary analyses 12 hours in the US presidency as the news and its aftermath unfolded. Former president George W Bush recalls hearing of the attacks at a primary school, while members of his team revisit their unpreparedness for an attack like that, as the press records their reactions. Ammar KaliaSaving Lives at Sea8pm, BBC TwoMore heroics from the volunteers of the RNLI, the charity that became a political football earlier this summer for rescuing refugees in trouble at sea. Tonight, they plunge into a rip current to save a mother and son and help a man who has fallen off a cliff. Phil HarrisonThe Secret Life of the Zoo8pm, Channel 4This week at Chester Zoo, the keepers are trying to create a romantic atmosphere to encourage a pair of Kenyan antelopes to mate. Meanwhile, there’s potential danger in store as keepers try to get blood samples from the crocodiles, and George, a Malagasy giant rat, undergoes major surgery. AKLong Lost Family9pm, ITVIt’s never too late to reconnect with family. Tonight’s searcher is Roy, 86, who lost touch with his daughter nearly 60 years ago, when his ex-wife moved without warning. All this happened in New York, so his hopeful quest for a reunion is now a transatlantic task. Jack SealeBritannia 9pm,Sky AtlanticIt’s gone from bad to worse for Queen Antedia after being sold into slavery, as the brilliantly mad druids’n’drugs drama continues. Her new home is a hovel and her owners are the pits. But there is an escape route on the cards … Meanwhile, an unwitting Cait meets the man who blinded her father. Ali CatterallBack to Life10.35pm, BBC OneDaisy Haggard’s ingenious comedy-drama about ex-convict Miri Matteson’s return to her small-town home after an 18-year sentence begins its second season. We pick up six weeks on from Miri’s release as she tries to fend for herself, although she is still avoiding her mum and best friend Mandy. AKFilm choiceGran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008), 10pm, ITV4Recent widower and embittered Korean war vet Walt Kowalski only cares about his car, a pristine Gran Torino. He reserves his meanest snarls for the Hmong family next door, until violent local hoods cause him to befriend and defend them. It’s a wry, elegiac drama, with Eastwood magnificent as the old curmudgeon. Paul HowlettLive sportParalympics 2020 9am, Channel 4. Coverage of the swimming finals.Cricket: Saint Lucia Kings v Trinbago Knight Riders 2.40pm, BT Sport 1. T20 match from Warner Park Sporting Complex.Baseball: Tampa Bay Rays v Boston Red Sox 12midnight, BT Sport ESPN. American League match from Tropicana Field.TopicsTelevision & radioTV tonightDocumentaryFactual TVTelevisionUS politicsTV comedyDramaReuse this content More

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      Are Online Spaces Safe for Queer People in India?

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      Indian queer cyberspace has evolved drastically over the years. The internet arrived in India in 1995, and high-speed broadband technologies started only in 2004. Before that, queer mobilizing mostly took place through informal and clandestine channels. It was only in 1991 that the first Indian queer organization was formed in London, the Naz Project, which eventually established a presence in Delhi through its sister group, the Naz Foundation, in 1996.

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      The late 1990s were a time when offline contact between Indian queers for non-sexual purposes was largely unimaginable, possibly because homosexuality itself was still a crime back then. Moreover, public attitudes toward homosexuals were fiercely negative, even among liberals. “When I was active in the women’s movement in Delhi from 1978 to 1990 as founding co-editor of Manushi, India’s first feminist journal, homosexuality was rarely if ever discussed in left-wing, civil rights, or women’s movements, or at Delhi University, where I taught,” recounts historian Ruth Vanita.

      Globalization of Gay Rights

      With time, things began to change. The policies of globalization, liberalization and privatization of the late 1990s opened up sections of the Indian economy to the world market in novel ways. These policies, which were a part of India’s overall structural adjustment program, marked a tectonic shift from old dirigiste ways of working and heralded a new era of sweeping economic reforms.

      A chief consequence of these changes was the information technology boom of the 1990s. Starting in the 1970s, it eventually led the way for the proliferation of new technologies on the Indian market throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. These included Nokia smartphones, desktop computers like the famed HEC-2M, black-and-white television sets and so on. Over the years, not only did these technologies evolve, but so did their ownership patterns. In 2012, Neilsen reported that the number of smartphone users in urban India was approximately 27 million. That number shot up to 76 million in 2013 for urban and rural India, and has been rising steadily ever since. By 2025, India is projected to have approximately 974 million smartphone users.

      These economic changes, however, weren’t merely restricted to urban areas. A 2019 report by the Internet & Mobile Association of India and Nielsen found that with 227 million active internet users, rural India had already surpassed urban India’s 205 million users. With 504 million active internet users over five years of age in 2019, India was the second-largest internet-user market in the world, just behind China with its 850 million users. The United States, by comparison, has 280-300 million users.

      Embed from Getty Images

      What did the changing contours of the digital landscape in India mean for queer people? The late 1990s were a time when the Indian government finally allowed certain sectors of the economy like IT and telecommunications to engage private investment. As the strangleholds of the erstwhile permit-license raj began to loosen, queer activism also witnessed a genesis of sorts. In 1994, AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) filed the first-ever petition in the country’s history against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, an infamous British-era law that criminalized homosexuality in postcolonial India.

      Various lesbian support groups also emerged during this time in response to widespread protests by Hindu right-wing groups that displayed violent disdain over the screening of Deepa Mehta’s lesbian romance film, “Fire.”

      These changes were intimately related to the economic transformations of the time resulting from the transnational circulation of capital, ideas, people and funding that helped give the queer movement the impetus it needed to thrive and survive. The advent of gay rights mobilization in India, for instance, arose as a consequence of international funding for HIV/AIDS prevention in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

      The easing of certain regulations in the Indian economy and the greater flow of capital and people from abroad also paved the way, directly and indirectly, for the eventual scrapping of Section 377. As one scholar succinctly put it, “queer politics in India has come to be embroiled in the politics of globalization, and many believe that this history of queer politics is inseparable from the rise of neoliberal agendas in the Indian sub continent.”

      Queering Cyberspace

      A lot has changed over the years. Most notably, in 2014, India’s Supreme Court recognized the third gender in its landmark NALSA judgment. In 2018, the same court decriminalized homosexuality. By constitutionally recognizing these hitherto delegitimized subjects, the very shape and form of queer politics had radically transformed. Today, queer identification in urban pockets is more common than ever before. Corporations have also joined the queer bandwagon by placating homocapitalist sentiments under the problematic guise of LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

      With the COVID-19 pandemic having haltered in-person queer events around the world, much of queer organizing, dating, socializing and networking has now shifted online. This is a space that continues to boom.

      On the one hand, online spaces can be liberating for those who can access them. These spaces promise queer people the possibility of digitally connecting with others with a mere click of a button. This is why the IT boom was so significant: It paved the way for greater internet access and made it possible for marginalized and discreet queer people to explore their identities in ways their geographic locations wouldn’t otherwise allow.

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      While no official government data on queer populations exist (for obvious reasons), and despite the police and the state actively harassing queer people over the years — even after decriminalization, they continue to do so — technology has ushered in what some are calling a “sexual revolution in India.” The technological boom has ignited and kindled a new generation of young Indians’ desires for sex, romance, intimacy, and even sex work in unimaginable ways.

      These desires and aspirations are being facilitated through chat rooms, instant messaging applications like WhatsApp and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Indeed, these changes have “teased the imagination of a young India, expanding her horizons and aspirations with the click of the button.”

      However, such spaces also feature as sites of discrimination, bullying and violence. Take, for instance, Rohit Dasgupta’s assertion in his 2017 book, “Digital Queer Cultures in India,” that “The concept of being ‘too transgressive’ is a growing issue within queer representations in India.” Thus, only certain queer bodies and identities are typically seen as normative in queer spaces; for example, gay men who pass as straight. Those who transgress cis-normative and heteronormative ideals — like effeminate gay men — are typically shunned by queer people (mostly gay men).

      Caste Supremacy

      It has been argued that even though the 1991 reforms had a positive impact on India’s economic performance, their uneven implementation exacerbated existing socio-cultural inequalities. We see these inequalities manifest in queer cyberspace today, where certain privileged queer voices (mostly dominant caste, urbanized and Westernized gay men) dominate, while others (mostly queer women, and queer people from marginalized castes and classes) are systematically silenced by those in power.

      On the issue of caste, for example, there is a deafening silence among queer activists in India to even acknowledge the presence of caste inequalities within the movement. This should come as no surprise because most queer activists in India (including the author of this article) belong to oppressor castes. Because of this, the issues, concerns and traumas of queer people from marginalized castes such as those from Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities are sidelined.

      While most of this marginalization is implicit, some of it also happens explicitly. Take, for example, writer-director Aroh Akunth’s account of how caste intimately shapes desires on gay dating platforms. Thus, “attractiveness,” skin color and a “good background” become ideas projected onto a caste, while politics of “respectability” becomes a politics of caste supremacy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Another pressing issue in queer cyberspace is the growing popularity of right-wing homo-Hindu nationalist aspirations. It should be noted that this problem plagued the queer movement long before the pandemic pushed everyone online. It’s just that these groups, like many others, have adapted to the new normal by moving online. They fashion themselves as advocates for queer rights while simultaneously peddling jingoism, Islamophobia anti-Black Lives Matter/Dalit Lives Matter propaganda as well as casteism.

      Take for instance, “hindu_lgbt,” an Instagram handle that affiliates itself with the right-wing Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which supports the decriminalization of homosexuality in India but not the legalization of same-sex marriage. As an ideology, Hindu nationalism is premised on the political and cultural construction of citizen-state relationships and subjectivities that are homogenized and in synch with orthodox notions of the Hindu faith, sometimes referred to as Hindutva philosophy.

      It should be noted that there are many social formations in India that support this ideology. The protests against Deepa Mehta’s film “Fire,” for instance, were spearheaded by the Mahila Aghadi of Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and others, while resistance to decriminalize homosexuality in India came, in part, from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and RSS ideologues.

      However, RSS views of gay rights have drastically changed over the years — perhaps more so than the views of orthodox Christian and Muslim organizations — partly due to the ruling BJP Hindu nationalist government’s relative silence on the issue, and partly because the RSS is itself trying to grapple with the ongoing social changes in India. In order to brand itself as an upholder of “inclusive” traditional family values, the RSS approach seems, on the one hand, to respect the Supreme Court’s judgment on Section 377 while, on the other hand, refuse to support any further legislation, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, that might radically challenge existing family structures in India.

      Web Citizenship

      With the third COVID-19 wave expected to hit India in the coming months, online spaces will, in all likelihood, continue to facilitate queer networking for the foreseeable future. But with greater smartphone access and the increased democratization of content creation — what some scholars have called the rise of “web citizenship” — queer advocacy in contemporary India faces newer challenges.

      The first is an issue of privacy. In its 2017 Puttaswamy judgment, the Supreme Court of India recognized sexual orientation as an intrinsic part of privacy but was silent about its applicability in the online realm, where catfishing and identity theft are rampant. The second is an issue of legality. Digital spaces transcend the boundaries of nation-states, thereby calling into question the juridical purview of national privacy and security laws. How do queer people facing harassment, bullying and extortion from international actors report such crimes to the police in India?

      A contemporary example of this was the infamous gay marriage scam, as detailed in a UK-based investigation by VICE. This expose sent shockwaves through sections of the queer circles both in India and abroad, bringing to the fore the inadequacy of Indian laws, which, unlike those in the UK, neither recognize gay marriage nor extortion that specifically targets queer populations.

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      The queer movement in India is currently at a crossroads. On the one hand, it has to tackle the increasing popularity of right-wing Hindu nationalist sentiments; on the other, manage the tensions and contradictions associated with Indian law.

      Indeed, the challenges are many and the means to address them are few. One way of effecting change is by pursuing the law and lobbying lawmakers like Dr. Shashi Tharoor of the Indian National Congress, Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party and Tejasvi Surya of the ruling BJP, all of whom have expressed support for queer rights in India. While some scholars are skeptical of using the law as a vehicle for bringing about social change in India, others, like Arvind Narrain, are less skeptical. To date, this dispute remains unsettled — as does the inclusion of the BJP into this discussion.

      The other way of effecting change is by radically reimagining queer spaces as zones where people of all identities can be made to feel safer. This exercise is perhaps harder to carry out because it has no prescriptions and is contingent on the ability of privileged queers to self-reflect. Thus, would dominant-caste queer men be willing to cede space to marginalized-caste queer women and transgender people? We should hope so. All in all, queer cyberspace in India is both a stuffy and an expansive zone. Its contradictions and contestations make it an exciting site for further scholarship into queer mobilization in India.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after Trump

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      BooksOur Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpTom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within Lloyd GreenSun 22 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTLiberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes. Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box.The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaRead moreRepublicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted, allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not.Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the state of American democracy. Nichols grew up in a working-class home in Massachusetts and is now a professor at the US Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School. He is also a Never Trump conservative.In his eighth book, Nichols is pessimistic. “Decades of constant complaint,” he writes, “regularly aired in the midst of continual improvements in living standards, have finally taken their toll.”The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”.As if to prove his point, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, recently made light of Trump’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. Even with Trump out of office, Senator Lindsay Graham continues to play first golf buddy, Renfield to Trump’s Count Dracula. A majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election.In 2016, Nichols urged conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was “too mentally unstable” – far from the “very stable genius” he would later claim to be.In Our Own Worst Enemy, Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point.Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version.Nichols looks to ancient Greece for a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Admiringly, he quotes Pericles, the Athenian general and orator – but observes that Pericles was not around when his city state collapsed. He died two years earlier, behind “the besieged walls of Athens – from a plague”.History can repeat itself.In September 2016, writing in the Claremont Journal of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton declared the contest between Trump and Clinton the “Flight 93 Election”: a reference to the plane that came down in Pennsylvania on 9/11 when passengers attacked their hijackers. Clinton, he argued, simply had to be stopped. First principles of conservatism could therefore be jettisoned.“Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton thundered. “You may die anyway … There are no guarantees.”What, he asked, must be done “against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality and corruption?” To Anton, for the right, respect for “democratic and constitutional niceties” was ultimately a sucker’s game. Culture was stacked against them.After a stint as a Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, and other stops along the way, Anton joined Trump’s national security council.Later this year the Claremont Institute will honor Ron DeSantis. At a press conference earlier this month, the Florida governor asked: “Would I rather have 5,000 [Covid-19] cases among 20-year-olds or 500 cases among seniors? I would rather have the younger.”A few weeks later, the Sunshine State is getting the worst of both worlds.Simple decency, it seems, is for losers. Amid the last presidential campaign, comparisons between the US and the Weimar Republic were rife. The January insurrection was seen as our “Reichstag fire”. The attackers came from the right.Nichols absorbs and abhors it all. Not surprisingly, he takes particular aim at the populist right, which he says has been the “main threat” to liberal democracy over the past two decades. That is subject to debate, which Nichols acknowledges. Regardless, he writes that the populist right “is a movement rooted in nostalgia and social revenge”.As if to make Nichols’ point, Lauren Boebert, the hard-right, QAnon-adjacent Republican congresswoman from Colorado, recently trashed Biden for having left America’s friends in Afghanistan in the lurch – after voting last month against granting 8,000 immigration visas to Afghans who assisted the US military.‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisisRead moreOther GOP diehards who opposed the legislation include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar. Greene and Gosar were charter members of the de facto white nationalist America First caucus. After a bomb threat on the Capitol this week, Brooks tweeted: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.”Considering what ails America, Nichols offers limited prescriptions. He supports bridging the gap between civilian and military life. The progeny of the coastal elites opt for Ivy League colleges over the service academies, reinstatement of the draft isn’t likely and notions of national service all too frequently amount to “little more” than a paid internship, he writes.Concurrently, rightwing “Spartanism” breeds the unsustainable notion that “‘citizens’ and ‘soldiers’ are not the same people”.Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”.Indeed. America has become one nation separated by a common language.
      Our Own Worst Enemy is published in the US by Oxford University Press
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      Ted Cruz’s campaign may have spent $150,000 on copies of his book

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      BooksTed Cruz’s campaign may have spent $150,000 on copies of his bookFollowing One Vote Away’s publication, the Republican senator’s campaign spent large sums of money at US chain Books-A-Million Alison FloodWed 18 Aug 2021 10.17 EDTLast modified on Wed 18 Aug 2021 10.25 EDTTed Cruz’s campaign spent more than $150,000 at US book chain Books-A-Million in the months after the Texas senator’s book was published, Forbes has reported.Cruz, who was prominent among the Republicans trying to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election, published One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History in September. A financial disclosure he filed on Monday, reported on by Forbes, shows he received almost $320,000 as an advance in 2020 from the book’s publisher Regnery Publishing.Ted Cruz threatens to burn John Boehner’s book over criticismsRead more“With a simple majority on the Supreme Court, the left will have the power to curtail or even abolish the freedoms that have made our country a beacon to the world. We are one vote away from losing the Republic that the Founders handed down to us. Our most precious constitutional rights hang by a thread,” says Regnery of the title. “In One Vote Away, you will discover how often the high court decisions that affect your life have been decided by just one vote.”The end-of-year report from Cruz’s committee, filed with the Federal Election Commission, reveals that two weeks after One Vote Away was published, his campaign spent $40,000 at Books-A-Million. Shortly afterwards, it spent a further $1,500, and in December, another $111,900. All of the purchases are described by the campaign as “books”, and Forbes speculated that they may have been used to boost his book sales, quoting Brett Kappel, a lawyer specialising in campaign finance, who said that “the FEC has issued a long series of advisory opinions allowing members to use campaign funds to buy copies of their own books at a discount from the publisher, provided that the royalties they would normally receive on those sales are given to charity”.Forbes previously reported what three other US senators had made from book deals in 2020: Elizabeth Warren earned $278,000, Tom Cotton $202,000, and Tammy Duckworth $382,000. All three used campaign funds to buy books, but Forbes said that their purchases were all under $20,000.A spokesperson for Cruz’s campaign told the magazine that the senator “has not received one cent of royalties in connection with any One Vote Away book sales”, but declined to reveal which books the campaign had spent more than $150,000 on.When Donald Trump Jr published Triggered in 2019, it made the New York Times bestseller list, but the newspaper’s charts included a dagger beside the book to indicate that “some retailers report receiving bulk orders”. The Republican National Committee denied making bulk orders at the time, and Trump Jr was angered by the suggestion that his sales had been artificially boosted, retweeting Republican strategist Andrew Surabian’s claim that “Don did multiple book signings where he sold 1,000+ books apiece. BookScan data will show he sold more books than the #2 and #3 books combined. Media/Dems want to pretend otherwise, but he was #1 on merit.”TopicsBooksUS politicsTed CruzTexasPublishingnewsReuse this content More