Empire

Power groups have always used myths to suit their ends. Take those spun by the Empire, for the Empire. In Inglorious Empire Shashi Tharoor points out one of the biggest and most blatant. He writes: “Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of ‘India’ as one entity... is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.” Remember Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden? 

Rebuttal? That year (1899), a Henry Labouchere penned The Brown Man’s Burden. “Pile on the brown man’s burden/Compel him to be free;/Let all your manifestoes/Reek with philanthropy/And if by heathen folly/He dares your will dispute/ Then in the name of freedom/Don’t hesitate to shoot.” The bigger retort is still unravelling.

The Führer

After Hitler was appointed chancellor, he created the propaganda ministry. As its head, Joseph Goebbels, controlled every last piece of news publication, poster, broadcast, even children’s literature. It all fed the “Hitler Myth” and helped the Führer (the leader) control the people and also the “enemy” during the initial years of World War II.

Rebuttal? In Last Train from Berlin, Howard K. Smith wrote: “...of all the millions on whom the Hitler Myth had fastened itself, the most carried away was Adolf Hitler, himself.” Uh oh!

Gas

According to a section, global warming is a myth upheld by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol. In his 2004 novel State of Fear, Michael Crichton calls it a conspiracy by scientists. American atmospheric science expert William M. Gray once said global warming was conceived for want of an enemy after the Cold War. In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted that the concept was created by the Chinese “in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.

Rebuttal? You read Mandarin?

Poppycock

By now you cannot not have heard about the judge and his theory of a celibate national bird and its fanciful reproductive ways. (Incidentally, he was arguing for the cow.) More recently, RSS’s Indresh Kumar talked about the Prophet never consuming meat. He suggested Muslims keep a tulsi plant in their homes. Assumption being, Hindus are born pot in hand, and the other communities — what other communities? The RSS, too, has also been telling us how to copulate in order to populate India with “uttam santati”. The PM does his bit, invoking Ganesha as outcome of plastic surgery, and such other instances, to enforce a narrative about a maha Bharat drawing entirely on Hindu citations.

Rebuttal? Only on Twitter.

Upala Sen