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Art, Culture Society, Baroda offensive paintings

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By: Dr.Dipak Basu
July 24, 2007
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(The author is a Professor in International Economics in Nagasaki University, Japan)

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In India recently a debate was created by a student in M.S.University in Baroda drawing offensive paintings and his resultant expulsions by the university. The so-called English speaking intellectuals class of India is supporting the student as obvious from their publications in various magazines and newspapers. Their support is rest on the concept of the freedom of expression. The question should be raised what really makes people think that offensive and disgusting type of paintings can be an object of art. Recently the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London has exhibited a bucket of water, dried human excrement and a dirty bed full of used condom and blood as objects of modern art. Apparently inoffensive piles of wire were exhibited as an example of modern architecture. Indian artists are only copying their Western counterparts; they are not demonstrating any original expressions of art. Is it a natural expression of an artist or a deliberate conspiracy to destroy what is decent to impose an counter-culture as modernity?

Modern abstract art was first created by the Russian artist Malevich. His objective was to free art from narratives. A synthesis of geometric forms and the spirituality of icons were meant to eliminate the subject in favor of the pure painting. "All past and recent painting before Suprematism (as sculpture, verbal art, music) has been subjugated by the shapes of nature, waiting to be liberated, to speak its own language, independent of reason, common sense, logic, philosophy, psychology, laws of causality, and technological changes." (Malevich in "From Cubism to Suprematism", 1915, from Art of the 20th Century, ed. by Jean-Louis Ferrier and Yann Le Pichon, 1999). Subsequent abstract artists, whether Marcel Duchamp or Picasso or Jackson Pollack, all derived their ideas from Malevich that behind the world of appearances there is a higher reality. Art serves a vehicle in the communication between realities. The purpose of the modern artists who have deviated from the traditional expression as demonstrated by artists like Turner, Manet, Picasso, Greco, Van Gaugh, is to express differently to capture these realities. However, still their main purpose was to create beauty because art is an expression of beauty.

If there is no beauty in a creation there is no art. Culture cannot promote anything, which is disgusting. Art as an expression of culture also must not include anything, which is disgusting. Thus, what is the origin of this bizarre form of art, which can create only shocks and horrors but not any appreciation as these works are devoid of any beauty? Unknown to the artists and the so-called guardians of culture in India, this bizarre art is the product of a cultural war designed in Western Europe to destroy European classical culture and replace it with a culture of perversity, bestialization and pessimism. This was done under the guise of preserving and enhancing freedom of expression against any authoritarian or totalitarian regime. Its purpose is to create a culture of perverse conformity and abnormal sensual gratifications in the name of creativism. The high priest of this doctrine is the British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Russell wanted to create a world government dominated by the Anglo-Americans through terror of nuclear weapons. He wrote a book in 1951 entitled The Impact of Science on Society, describing his idea about the future society and its culture.
Russell wrote, “The subject which will be of most important politically is mass psychology. Social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that ‘snow is black". The opinion that ‘snow is black" should be treated as a morbid taste of eccentricity. This science will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated”.

One of the pet ideas of Russell is to control the population of black-brown races. His solution was that “A bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a black death could spread throughout the world once every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full”. This Russell became the chairman of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization created by the secret services of USA and UK to spread the appropriate culture with the help of a galaxy of Anglo-American literary and journalistic circle. Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Arthur Koesler, Malcolm Muggeridge, Kingsley Amis, Edward Shills, artist Jackson Pollack, sculpture Henry Moore and India"s Jayaprakash Narayan were enlisted to serve this purpose to create a world opinion that snow is black indeed.

They have started a magazine Encounter in London and The Quest in India directly funded by the British secret services through Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office, managed by Richard Conquest, then a MI6 officer now a Professor in Stanford University.

The Philosophy of Modern Music, a book written by Theodor Adorns gives us the design of that psychological warfare against classical high culture. According to him, “all forms of beauty had to be purged. Instead there should be a steady cultural diet of pop music and other degenerate forms of mass culture which over time would tiger various form of mental breakdown on a mass scale”.
Adorno got teamed up with Aldous Huxley to propagate the use of brainwashing and psychotropic drug to create ‘concentration camps without tears". His friend Christopher Isherwood promoted the Weimer culture of Berlin of drugs and perversion. Herbert Marcuse promoted 1960"s counter culture. Adorno"s book ‘Philosophy of Modern Music" is intended to produce a society of necrophiliacs through perversion of music, art and culture. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote a book, The Authoritarian Personality, which has narrated the method suggested by Bertrand Russell to brutalize the flock of human being into a sheep-like psychological impotence.

For them “fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism. Eros belongs to democracy”. Meyer and Stenberg wrote ( in ‘Making the post war world safe for kultur kampf", Executive Intelligence Report, June, 2004): “ Eros was the weapon used by these members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the entire intellectual class in the Anglo-American and Western European world to transform Western culture towards an erotic, perverse system which promotes drug abuses, sexual perversions and glorification of violence”.

The ultimate aim was to tear down civilization by turning out generation of necrophiliacs for whom idealism is subversive, social consciousness is irrational, religion is outdated and public services must be eliminated altogether to make room for a reformed efficient economy where only those who are rich and successful should be promoted and those who are poor should be removed from the Special Economic Zones and would be classified as underclass.

In 1952, Congress for Cultural Freedom has organized in Paris a grotesque modern art and sculpture exhibit organized by the Museum of Modern Art of New York. In 1955 it has organized Young Painter"s exhibit in Rome and in 1960 a European show of abstract impressionism, which expressed mental schizophrenia and counter-culture through art and literature. Leading members of the CIA, Allen and John Foster Dulles, George Kenan has supported both the Museum of Modern Art and Congress for Cultural Freedom through front organizations like Fairfield Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. C.D.Jackson, special adviser to President Eisenhower on psychological warfare, assisted them. They together have promoted the concept of ‘post-industrial society", a perfect vehicle to promote drug-rock-sex infested counter-culture to breakdown all idealism, which are against the promotion of the free enterprise efficient economy.

The promotion of degenerate art, drug, sex, rap music with foul language create an atmosphere in which a cultural person in the classical sense would be considered as uncultured. Using counter culture as the opium it would be possible to control the psychology of the population so that any person who would promote decency and morality would be called a ‘fanatic lunatic Hindu saffron brigade" by those who really think that ‘snow is black". That is the reason why the English-speaking journalists of India are all supporting this perverted art. They are proving what Bertrand Russell wrote in 1951 that ‘it may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the state with money and equipment”

The real purpose of the counter-culture to promote what is disgusting as modern artistic expression and to hypnotize the general population so that they will be deprived of any social and ideological purpose of life but would consider, “lust is the origin of our birth”, “pleasure is the only thing life deserves”, “greed is good, greed motivates people to achieve” and “competition not cooperation brings efficiency”. These are all well known slogans of the ‘reformed economy" propagated by the journalists of the English language press in India. That is the reason we can see article after article in Indian newspapers trying to prove the virtues of the British Raj in India and the madness of the Muslim fanatics in the ‘Sepoy Mutiny" as if Tatia Topi, Nana Sahib, Mongal Pandey and Rani of Jhansi were all Muslims. A number of writers, Priyadarshi Dutta and Ram Gopal in The Organiser, Kamala Sarkar in The Statesman and Rudranshu Mukerjee in The Telegraph, wrote that India was fortunate that these wicked Sepoys were defeated otherwise we would not get the Indian renaissance.

What was the impact of the British Raj on India? Rabindranath Tagore wrote in his essay ‘Crisis of Civilization", “ Rudely shaken out of my dream I began to realize that perhaps in no other modern state was there such hopeless dearth of the most elementary needs of existence. And all the time before our eyes Japan has been transforming herself into a mighty and prosperous nation. I have also been privileged to witness the unsparing energy with which Russia has succeeded in steadily liquidating ignorance and poverty wiping off the humiliation from the face of a vast continent. I cannot help contrasting two systems of governance: one based on cooperation and the other on exploitation. Thus, while these other countries were marching ahead, India smothered under the dead weight of British administration lay static in her utter helplessness”.
However, today, in India, in the reformed economy we have accepted exploitation as the means of progress by driving out poor farmers from their mud huts to make room for the large corporations to create special economic zones. Cooperation became a dirty word spoken only by those ignorant Hindus who have not received American education. Swami Vivekananda asked us to say with pride poorest Indian, wretched Indian, illiterate Indians are my brothers. However, the high priest of modernity British philosopher Bertrand Russell had a different prescription for those poor inferior dark skinned social outcasts of the modern society; he has suggested their elimination so that the efficiency of the Anglo-American market system cannot be disturbed. In Sweden sterilization of the backward people was a common method until 1970.

Colin Powell, the former national security adviser to President Bush, recently proclaimed the supremacy of the American culture and declared openly that USA will not allow any alternative system to flourish. However the question is what kind of American culture does he promote?

It is not the high American culture of Emerson, Whitman, or Mark Twain, who were strongly influenced by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and messages of Upanishad. It is not the high European culture of Shopenhower, Gothe, Voltaire and Kant. This new American culture has its roots in the Kultur Kampf of Berlin of 1950 and Congress of Cultural Freedom of 1951 promoting degeneracy as modernity. Whatever is disgusting should be considered as ultra-modern artistic expression. For then snow is indeed black and anyone who would protest should be called uncultured.

Indian came late in this picture. Before 1985, when India was still trying at least as a slogan to pursue the" socialistic pattern of society", when vulgarity was not considered as modern. However, since 1991, when India has introduced ‘Economic Reforms" cultural reforms became the order of the day. Efficient market system, opposed to the planned socialist economy, demands maximization of self-interest, which according to Adam Smith, through the invisible hands of the market creates the rational efficient outcome. However, glorification of selfishness is opposed to the spirit of humanism.
Roman philosopher Cicero (106-43BC) promoter of classical humanism wrote in his book, ‘De Natura Deorum" or Nature of the Gods, “ In the heavens there is nothing arbitrary, nothing out of order, nothing erratic. Everywhere is order, truth, reason, and constancy. The orderly motion of the stars, which is constant through all eternity, cannot be attributed to natural processes alone. It is the expression of an inward purpose”. The inward purpose is explained in Hinduism and Buddhism as pure action devoid of any desire. Rabindranath Tagore in his letter to the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken on 1921 explained it further, “ …there are three ways of realizing the infinite: through knowledge, through love, and through action. Their respective paths are philosophy, religion and science. But owing to the distraction of selfish passions and want of detachment of spirit men almost everywhere have missed the chance and brought upon us continual series of disasters”.

While selfishness is the virtue of the market system, it is driving the sprit of humanism from the people and promote a rootless culture, in which a nude Sri Durga smoking cigarette (a painting by Bijon Mazumdar) or a bull trying to rape Sridevi (a painting by Fida Hussain) can be considered as art, although art in the classical culture is the expression of beauty not an expression of an ill mind intoxicated with vulgar manifestation of counter-culture. What Roman Rolland said in 1934 is still true:” Appeal to life against those ravages of humanity: the forces of money drunk with gold, the dictatorship of great companies drunk with blood”, because counter-culture in the name of modernism is against humanism.

In conclusion we should remember the message of Rabindranath Tagore (The Crisis of Civilization) once again, “A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers to win back his lost human heritage. By unrighteousness man prospers, gains what appears desirable, conquers enemies but perishes at the root” Counter-culture and vulgar expression in the name of art is the ingredient of a rootless society based on mindless efficiency of the market system.

Dr.Dipak Basu

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