Patriotism And Xenophobia
©Prakash João Maskaren. 7th January 2003.
Patriotism is defined as the love of one's land, of one's country. Xenophobia is defined as the hatred or hostility towards strangers or persons who do not belong to one's own social community.
Are Patriotism and Xenophobia inevitably linked? Obviously, this is not so. Yet, the opponents of the Goan Resistance, both the Enemy Within and the Enemy Without, are fond of alleging that Goan patriotism is Xenophobia. In matter of fact, this takes the shape of a deliberate Campaign of denigration and disinformation against us.
The charge is always based on our rejection of the illegal immigration under the Occupation's auspices into, and overwhelming of our country by, the alien immigrants, whether economically well-off or indigent.
However, the charge is not logical. As a matter of fact, this charge is based upon nothing more than the most brazen hypocrisy, for the people of the Indian Union are notoriously the most Xenophobic people on the face of the earth, a thing cultivated in them by their religion and exalted to the level of a virtue!
But it was that everywhere, in the history of men, societies have had to regulate the inflow of aliens and of their naturalisation. This has been the history of the Indian Union as much as of any other society.
If this charge against us is true, then, logically, the so-called 'freedom-fighters' who procured the independence of the Indian Union from England too were xenophobes! Further, since this movement was and is about culture and about who is 'ours' and who is 'not ours', the Indian Union not only was, but continues to be Xenophobic!
Is this what our Enemy wants to imply? As a matter of fact, it IS true, for the main motive force of the Indian Union's so-called 'freedom-struggle' was the absolute inability of the Manuwadists, not excluding the Sophaster Gandhi, liberator and rehabilitator of Hindu Pride, to be reconciled to and digest the fact that they, the Dvijas, high-born sons of the exalted Aryans, should be ruled by foreigners and alien barbarians! Does not the Vedas and the Pauranas teach that the people outside of this 'holy land' of the exaltation of cows and other animals, besides mute, dead idols, to divinity and of the degradation of their fellow-humans to a level lower than vermin, are foul, uncultured, degenerate barbarians and unbelievers - Malecchas, more foul and polluting than even the unfortunate Pariahs of India?
Let us look carefully and hard at the Indian Union. In Bombay, we have the Marathi, refugees and immigrants from the 'Desh' (Bombay is in the Konkan) aggressively targetting newcomers - whether it is the Maloo, the Bong or (Pramod Navalkar's new fave target of xenophobia) the Nepcats. Actually, these 'Nepcat' women — 'prostitutes' being targetted by Herr Navalkar, are by and large victims. Ever since the Gorkhas conquered their neighbours, these conquered people have been socially disrupted and made the free target of rapine and bootification. Their women have been kidnapped or otherwise lured to the cities and sold into sexual slavery. Certainly they are not voluntary prostitutes. Therefore to target them as a threat is to perpetrate double victimisation! But this is the Shiv Sena — typical Hitlerwad; Rakshashwad; Anthropophobia!
Are we like that?
Twice before, have we absorbed the poor, the lost, the broken, the abandoned: The abandoned emancipated African slaves when Slavery was finally abolished worldwide, and again, the poor Chinese coolies — labourers who were imported to build the Marmagoa-Belgaum Railway and then shamelessly abandoned. Christians unashamed of all mankind, heedless of the monstrous myth of racial pride, we took them into our homes and mingled with them, becoming one people.
Once more, one day, when we have thrown out the invaders and regained our freedom, we will take up the indigents who came in and see what we can do of them - rehabilitate and absorb the larger part, in charity and mercy. For, unlike our proud and haughty Enemy, we are Christians, the sons of St. Francis Xavier, of Dom Albuquerque, of Padre Juze Vaz, of Padre Agnel!
As before: We will free the sexual slaves, rehabilitate them and find them husbands and homes, for we are not ashamed of our common humanity. We will find homes and loving foster parents for the poor abandoned orphans from the Dalits of Karnataka and Andra Pradesh that the Occupation has imported into our land to provide sex and entertainment for the paedophile foreigners. Excepting the Manuwadists and the Hindutvawadists, robbers and untermensch the whole lot of them, we will provide place for all the others: honest, indigent immigrants. We will share our bread, our homes, our land with them, knowing that when we come before the Most Awful Judge, He shall gladly say unto us: "You had found me captive, and freed me; you found me hungry, and you fed me; you found me homeless and orphan and exploited and you adopted me, housed me, healed my wounds, became a father unto me."
In the Indian Union's province of Jammu & Kashmir, only citizens of that province are permitted to purchase real estate. The result is that, today, fifty years and more down the line, refugees from the Partition who reside in that province still cannot own their own homes!
In the provinces of Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya, the natives are stirred up because of the huge influx of Bengalis, mainly Muslim settlers and colonists. Today, in Tripura and in Assam, the natives are in a minority. The native nations have been forced to recourse to armed agitation against this situation, against even the Indian Union. And this by largely Hindu nations - e.g. the historic Hindu nation of the Asomese!
Recently, after Osama bin Ladin's attacks on the USA, and the resulting celebrations by Muslims throughtout the world, the government of England was forced to demand that immigrants assimilate (see David Blunkett). Is this Xenophobia?
Is it logical for any society to NOT regulate the entry of aliens, of hostiles and even of persons whose very social, moral, ethical, religious, cultural, etc., makeup is at sharp variance with that of the host community?
If any society should follow this logic, it will soon be bruited abroad that this society and its lands is up for grabs, and this will attract all the dregs of human life in to attempt to rob and displace that people. Therefore, logically, such an attitude can only be described as profoundly assinine and insane, fundamentally suicidical or a death-wish.
If today, being subject to an illegal occupation of our state, the Estado da India Portuguesa, which is, by the way, the most ancient of the existing states of South Asia, dating from 1510, and being subject to a concommitant effort at 're-demographization' by the Occupation, so that our population has been gravely diluted by the colonists, if we object to all this, are we Xenophobes?
If we derogate the perpetrators of this criminal and illegal Occupation as 'Paan-chewing' and 'dhoti-wearing' barbarians, is it not by and large true? Is this not what the people of the Indian Union are famous, or rather infamous, for? And is this not the case all the world wide? In Fiji, in Malaya, in South Africa and East Africa, in the British and Dutch Guianas and in Trinidad and in Jamaica and in the British Honduras, etc., etc.? Or are the people of the Indian Union all innocent bholas, subject to a miraculously automatic and globally consistent rudicule?
If we complain of their avarice and of their clannishness and of their concerted endeavour to dispossess us, the sons of the soil, how different are our complaints from those voiced in the South Pacific, in the Indian-dominated sections of London, England and Scotland? Or from that heard from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe? Or from the Guianas and from the Caribbean? Have they not monopolized or attempted to monopolize the Motel industry in the USA?
All around the world, the people of the Indian Union are known by the same characteristics. They carry their caste-heirarchies with them, maintain them and try to impose them in their new homes. But worse of all, they try to reduce the original or earlier peoples to a reduced, inferior state. They are avaricious, grasping, clannish, concerted in their moves to corner the land and all its fat. They are mendaciously conceited in their hypocritical, inhuman, misanthropic traditions, to which they will adhere triumphantly and thoughtlessly.
Today, from New Zealand, Australia, to the Diamond markets of Belgium to the Software industry of the USA and England, in South Africa, Brazil, etc., etc., they openly, shamelessly and triumphantly celebrate their Racial Superiority over the white nations and Societies that have so graciously given them freedoms and opportunities that they could never have had in their own country: they talk derogately of these self-same whites as if they were acially inferior!
Hypocrites! They denounce White Racism and happily enough practice their own! At least the white man has unlearnt his errors, apologized for them and makes recompense, but when will they?
What evil is it, then, to raise the alarm at their approach, to raise barriers at the sight of the approach of this plague of locusts who devour the land before them, to restrict their numbers or to put those who have come in under the strictest regulations and watch?
What evil is it, then, to demand and to work to pry off their greedy, grubby hands off our country, our homeland, and to have them thrown out and their entries and numbers the most strictly regulated?
To do otherwise is suicide.
And suicide, whether by individuals or by Societies, is never legitimate!