Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Thu, 1 Oct 1992 11:38:02 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      CAU$E$ OF MOTIVATED $TUPIDITY

Look, you disgraced yourselves with that Taj Mahal/Shiva Temple business; you
do not care to put down your TV Guide (by which I mean the list your mail
program makes so you can unwatch this program, unwatch tat one, television is
television is escapist drivel) long enough to *bypass* the dead [and
putrefying] certainties of your Western Civilization long enough, often enough,
maybe never, to consider whether there might be a place, India, where the
cumulative consequences of sick US foreign policy in the Indian subcontinent
called "tilting toward Pakistan" (by Henry Kissinger) have created the
conditions for this issue and others equally weird to you are indicing
millions of people (not, in India, necessarily large percentagewise) to fight
in the streets and at this moment are the content of scheming and plotting of
the two biggest Indian political parties.

While an Indian delegation, at the time of those postings, was in Washington
DC, begging on bended knee for a trade deal with the US and for the end of US
stuffing war toys down the throat of Pakistan without even the Afghanistan
pretext. No dice, say the hedges on behalf of the Bush. Our pharmaceutical
industry finds your patent laws offensive to white decency: You reverse-
engineer our costly but attractively styled tranquilizers and antidepressants
during the five years of the patent, then you push your nonwhite generic pills
at prices which we do not like one bit. Screw you. The next sound you will hear
is a terrorist bomb going off in your Punjab state set off by an infiltrator
from our good Pakistani buddies.

You, out there, won the Cold War. I lost the Cold War, because the demise of
indecent socialism took all prospect of decent socialism along with it. There
are people out there suffering as before, only worse every year with the world
economy catching gangrene from the crumbling and insane US economy (and I will
say it again, outlasting Communism is no trick).

People are going to believe almost anything these days, and a fantastic number
do. Just because the President of Peru lucked out does not mean the lesson of
Shining Path has not been learned. The big mistake of Shining Path was, they
were not *strange enough*. They were too corrupted by Western ideas picked up
on by Chinese. Look at how *white* this Shining Path leader, Abimael Guzman
Reynoso, looks. Surely they could have found a real Inca prince or at least
made one up.

All praise be to the late Ayatollah Khomeini for proving that at least two of
your postulates are false: (1) secularization is irreversible; and
(2) demodernizers always lose. There are others equally false. Have fun finding
out which ones they are, that is one of the wonderful things about ideology,
the social scientist is always the last to know.

What have I got for all this e-mail, I have turned into a typical-armenian
watching *television* seven hours a day. <ugh>. I am going to go downstairs
like a good boy and read some books for a change today. (And I should point
out that for sentimental British reasons it should be Christopher Currie's
job to know Indian politics, not mine. Also Nigeria when that blows up. This
particular school is meanwhile great on Peru and even better on Bolivia.)

L'shana tovah tikatevu,
Daniel A. Foss
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