Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Double Down News"
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@Thefloristgang4pf I don't know if I would term Modi a fascist. He has been called a fascist for a long time by the press, because when he was a mayor, his town had some bad riots, but he seems more to me like a would-be Garibaldi, who wants to create a unitary Indian national identity - which is an ambitious goal, given people in the subcontinent traditionally see themselves as part of a specific subcaste first. For instance, Modi did not respond with the instincts of an authoritarian to the farm protests. He met with the demonstrators repeatedly, and conceded to several of their demands in way of compromise. Naturally some aspects of this are not intended for consumption by outsiders - all nationalist historiography is a bit nonsensical, and given India's records were so bad Guha and Spivak had to invent subalternism in order to do social history, it may be an extreme case - but if India is not headed to a system of "all for the state, all within the state, none against the state" then one can not really call Modi a fascist. I doubt he will fully succeed, but given the alternative to nationalism is internationalism, as an antiinternationalist, I can not be fully opposed to a nationbuilder Prime Minister. I don't have a granular understanding of Kashmir - I have a vague sense of the aesthetics and equipment of the First Kashmir War, and I understand it's a contentious issue between India and Pakistan, but I would not be able to say who is right and who is wrong, nor am I up on the ins and outs of Pakistan's internal conversation.
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If one takes an extended view of the breakup of the old empires of the east - Russia, Austria, Turkey - starting with the Greek Revolution - then Israel fits as the final result of this breakup, as a successor state for a group defined by blood and faith which administered its own laws to itself on that basis within the Ottoman system i. e. a dhimmi. I don't think criticizing these sorts of countries from the perspective of liberal democracy is really intellectually honest, because liberal democracy relies on relevant chance similarities with what had been the West prior to the War on Terror which are somewhat present with societies in many parts of Asia and Africa - Latin America and the Western Pacific might as well be regarded as the former extended West by this standard, if there is some new set of shorthands that replaces what was the West, it will be distinctly influenced by the Western Pacific and Latin America - but not so much the Middle East. Population exchange was always the norm. Putting the ethnic and religious group represented by the state first was always the norm. There's nothing exceptional about Israel with respect to its fundamentals as an Ottoman successor state, with the exception perhaps that the Ottomans made the Jewish dhimmi out of nothing, appointing a Grand Rabbi for the purposes of their administrative convenience, whereas the Armenian Orthodox Church had an Armenian Orthodox Patriarch over a defined hierarchy, ditto the Syrians, Greeks, Copts, Nestorians, etc., and that it took so long for this dhimmi to coalesce into a definite successor state.
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