EDITORIAL: DEMOCRACY VS HYPOCRISY AND FALSEHOOD
Vinod Mubayi
While patriotism may be, as the venerable Dr Samuel Johnson once said, “the last refuge of the scoundrel”, nation states that consider themselves democracies are often accustomed to uttering fine sounding words like freedom and human rights. However, they often turn out to be more adept at hypocrisy and falsehood, with a yawning gap between their pronouncements and their actions. The world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy that never tire of proclaiming their democratic virtues to the rest of the countries of the world are masters of hypocritical practices as a brief survey of their history and recent practice illustrates. In both countries, an ecosystem consisting of the mainstream media, legislators, bureaucracy, think tanks, and corporate hierarchies maintains, justifies, and sometimes amplifies this hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy in fact may be considered to have been baked into the soul of the settler-colonial United States at its very founding where the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man were penned by men like the much-venerated Thomas Jefferson who were slaveholders owning hundreds of slaves while the country they were creating would soon be in the midst of preparing to launch a genocide of the native American population. Nowadays, as it proclaims itself the “leader of the free world” and the protector of a liberal international order enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights but engages in unilateral military actions, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or even worse as an enabler of genocide, the hypocrisy is more palpable and visible around the world.
The most egregious example now is the hypocrisy and double standards being practiced by the US in enabling the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This has reached such a level that a senior analyst Emma Ashford at a leading US think tank the Stimson Center is quoted in the New York Times saying “The problem really is one of messaging — and of hypocrisy”. Ms. Ashford said the administration’s hypocrisy was exposed by “the split-screen much of the world sees on Gaza and Ukraine — with an administration who says one conflict is an unacceptable war crime, and the other self-defense.” The hypocrisy is more easily comprehended when one realizes that Israel would not be at all able to commit its crimes in Gaza or the West Bank or even Lebanon and Syria were it not for the United States, which supplies much of the weaponry and the finance needed to buy it that Israel uses to kill Palestinians. In fact, the US has its own law, the Leahy amendment, which mandates that a recipient of US arms aid has to observe certain human rights conditions and while everyone who reads newspapers knows that Israel is in blatant violation of this law, the US government simply ignores the issue.
While some mid-level bureaucrats in the US State Department have pointed out this hypocrisy in no uncertain terms, all they can ultimately do is resign their positions as their boss the Secretary of State and the President himself utter barefaced lies about Israeli behavior asserting falsely to the US Congress that Israel is not violating any law. The entire US political leadership, Democrats and Republicans, and the vast majority of the US Congress, Senators and Representatives, with only a very few opposed, is united in its support for whatever Israel does — not for nothing is Israel often described as America’s land-based aircraft carrier in the Middle East – so the hypocrisy continues at the highest levels of US politics. The upcoming change of administrations, from Biden to Trump, is unlikely to make much difference, although there is a possibility it may make the situation worse as the persons Trump has selected for his team in Israel are known to be hard line pro-Israel hawks.
On December 31, 2024 eight Israeli government coalition lawmakers on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Israeli Knesset wrote to Defense Minister Israel Katz, formally advocating ethnic cleansing (called the “encirclement and evacuation of the population”) followed by genocide of the remaining population in Gaza. They urged him to intensify the siege of Gaza all across the territory and shoot anyone remaining there after ethnic cleansing had been completed. In addition, they demanded “remote elimination” (a euphemism for aerial carpet bombing) of all sources of energy (like fuel tanks or generators), all food sources and water supplies, and anyone moving in the area who did not exit with a white flag. The US government has not sanctioned these Israeli parliamentarians or characterized the letter as a call to genocide. Instead, it has decided to reward the Netanyahu regime with another eight-billion-dollar gift of weapons to kill more Palestinians.
While many people in the US, especially among the youth, students in universities, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, are recoiling from this hypocrisy, the political and governmental leadership is heading in the opposite direction with another multi-billion dollar “aid” package of weapons for Israel on the eve of Biden’s departure from office. The US, being a global hegemonic empire, needs hypocrisy and falsehood to justify its enormous arms industry, which is much larger than the total arms budgets of all of its potential challengers put together, to maintain its global role. Trump, whose previous tenure in office had left him labelled as the champion of liars, is hardly likely to change that.
Meanwhile, the world’s largest democracy since the ascension of Modi and the right-wing Hindu nationalists to power over the last decade has its own hypocrisies and lies to contend with. The latest example is the crocodile tears being shed by sections of the mainstream godi (lapdog) media in India and the Modi regime over the “plight” of the Hindu minority in neighboring Bangladesh after the ouster of the dictatorial Sheikh Hasina from power to exile in India. The hypocrisy of these complaints is obvious as the treatment of the significantly larger Muslim minority in India by Modi’s acolytes and supporters shows. It is not just the obvious Hindu nationalist rabble roaming the streets terrorizing Muslims, and also Christians, by random acts of violence while the police look on. It is the organs of the state, the police and investigating agencies, as well as sections of the judiciary that have mounted campaign to “bulldoze” Muslim-owned properties, and give support to dubious claims of Hindu temples being destroyed many centuries ago by Muslim invaders and mosques built atop them. Various commentators have pointed out that for the BJP with its long tradition of anti-Muslim (and, on occasion, anti-Christian) politics to complain of communal politics in neighboring countries is outright hypocrisy.
Fake social media news of alleged atrocities on the Hindu minority and its cultural assets in Bangladesh is amplified by the godi media ecosystem in India. Adityanath, the fire-breathing BJP Chief Minister of India’s largest state has even alleged a connection between events in Bangladesh and a mosque related conflict in the small town of Sambhal in his state where four poor Muslims were killed, possibly from police firing. Hypocrisy and falsehood have a close connection and the Modi regime is adept at both.
In a hard-hitting article entitled “BJP, RSS and 99 Lies from Goebbels’ Grandchildren” published in The Wire on Jan. 4, 2025, one of India’s leading intellectuals Anand Teltumbde writes:
“The proponents of Hindutva – from V.D. Savarkar, B.S. Moonje, K.B. Hedgewar, and M.S. Golwalkar – to their contemporary successors, have long admired the methods of Mussolini and Hitler. Despite differences in time and circumstances, striking parallels can be drawn between them and their fascist predecessors in Europe. Perhaps the most telling similarity is their reliance on propaganda, particularly the distortion of truth and perpetuation of white lies – a technique famously associated with Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels articulated the mantra of converting untruth into truth by stating: “Tell a big enough lie, and repeat it often enough, and it becomes the truth.” Following this playbook, the current generation of Hindutva ideologues can be seen as the ‘grandchildren of Goebbels’, carrying forward the legacy of falsehood.”
These tactics of falsehood that Modi and his cohorts have been using to polarize the Indian electorate for a decade to buttress their rule are now being put into service into making hypocritical remarks about the plight of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh. Teltumbde ends his article by remarking “The lies factory of Goebbels’s grandchildren has worked wonders for them so far, but history shows that such deceit cannot sustain indefinitely. They would do well to heed the wisdom of their own scripture, Mundaka Upanishad, which says satyameva jayate (truth alone triumphs).”
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