The media has put out the idea that somehow Ron Paul isn’t right for our national security. Really? I wonder how much these critics know about Al Qaeda, our real interests, strategy or world politics.
Contrary to the obfuscation, Ron Paul’s non-interventionist principles are the only ones that are going to work for terrorism.
Why? Because, unlike the other candidates, he is not a pawn of transnational financial interests.
And he is also the only candidate who seems to understand that the real terrorist threat does not emanate from Iraq but from further east, from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We need someone who will be seen as credible and disinterested and with whom the Pakistani AND Indian government will be able to work closely if we are going to be able to deal effectively with terrorism. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with another government welfare program for the defense department. And there is no chance for peace in the Middle East at all, without the help of governments in the part of the world.
How is a Ron Paul candidacy perceived by knowledgeable people in Asia?
Think about this: India, just happens to have also created more billionaires than anywhere else in the world in the last decade — and those billionaires just happen to be richer than any others, except the ones in the US… Meanwhile, large sections of the country are slipping backward.
Does that sound familiar? Does it make you think a bit? Now, who’s the billionaire’s candidate? You can bet its not Ron Paul.
Yet, it is Paul’s ethical libertarianism and not the unethical neo-liberalism of the financial elites or the corrupt bureaucracies of the socialist past that is the ONLY solution in India…and Asia… to sustained growth. And without a strong Asian market, there is no stable global growth there or here.
As one Indian economist, Dr. Subroto Roy, writes,”Dr Ron Paul, Republican Party Congressman from Texas, is running to be US President in 2008. He is a principled libertarian/classical liberal by political and economic philosophy. That is enough for him to have many new friends in India and Pakistan — both enormously large countries which are sorely in need of libertarian/classical liberal political and economic philosophy to develop themselves. Moreover, Dr Paul advocates a non-interventionist American foreign policy in the world, and he was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from long before it started. That too is something that people in India and Pakistan appreciate.
The aim of this blog is merely for Indian and Pakistani friends of Ron Paul half way across the globe to meet in cyberspace and cheer him along the way.
There are rich Indian-Americans paying big bucks to get close to people like Hillary Clinton. They need to stop being so opportunistic and instead look to what is truly in their adopted country’s and the world’s best interests: that is a Ron Paul Presidency.
If you would like to contribute articles or comments or to upload files, please write to me at drsubrotoroyAThotmail.com. These could have to do with libertarian/classical liberal economic and political philosophy for the subcontinent, the Ron Paul candidacy, the US elections of 2008, or any other topic you think may be of interest….”
That’s from Indian and Pakistani Friends of Ron Paul. Please send articles, links and letters to them and keep them rooting for this campaign.
Lila Rajiva: The Mind-Body Politic 
Wow – we in NH are proud to have so many abroad that are rooting for Ron!
By: NH on July 28, 2007
at 11:01 pm
Yes. Actually, I think it would be a smart move to get the message out to newspapers abroad….the media here will be forced to cover him.
By: L on July 29, 2007
at 12:24 am
Hello, Thanks for this link to my work. As Contributing Editor at India’s The Statesman newspaper, I have had an opportunity to write on Dr Paul and US politics and the election campaign in general in recent months. My articles there are republished at the blog mentioned above as well as at http://www.independentindian.com. (Of course, I should add that I count myself as a classical liberal/libertarian too, and the letter I received from FA Hayek in 1981 when I was in the USA might be of interest.)
Dr Subroto Roy
Kolkata, India
By: drsubrotoroy on July 29, 2007
at 3:51 am
Yes. You’re very welcome.
And I would be very interested in your comments on an exchange I am having under the comment section of “Noah Feldman on tradition and modernity among conservative Jews” (see the right side for the post) — which is actually not about Noah Feldman but about issues of racial difference and economic success…I think your thoughts as a scholar would be very valuable
By: L on July 29, 2007
at 3:57 am
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By: University Update - Ron Paul - Ron Paul: respected around the world on July 29, 2007
at 7:59 am
Hello,
Please look at my article Racism: Old and New published in The Statesman last year and republished at http://www.independentindian.com after which I may be able to make a useful comment on your interchange.
Also, I would appreciate being named rather than being “one Indian economist” (small point). Finally, I am intrigued by your interest in Va Tech; I happened to teach there 1980-1985; the Hayek letter referred to in my previous note was in fact addressed to me at the time. SR
By: drsubrotoroy on July 29, 2007
at 10:14 am
Sorry, the title was “Racism New and Old”. Here it is below. You will also find an article on “Mob Violence and Psychology”.
Racism New and Old
Subroto Roy
First published Editorial page, The Statesman September 8 2006, http://www.thestatesman.net
republished http://www.independentindian.com
When Iraqi Sunni terrorists killed 11 Pakistani and three Indian Shia pilgrims on the same bus to Karbala the other day, they did not check passports or wait to hear discourses from their victims about the validity of Jinnah’s Two-Nations Theory or the RSS’s views on Akhand Bharat and Bharat-Mata. All Indians and Pakistanis of whatever religion are pretty much “Hindis” to the average Arab. If Pakistanis (much to their own chagrin) are indistinguishable from Indians in many Arab eyes, Hindus and Sikhs are (much to their own chagrin) indistinguishable from Muslims in many North American and British eyes. Matthai Chakko Kuruvila, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Religion Writer (and whose own splendid ethnicity may appear obvious to us from his name), reports Paul Silverstein, an American anthropologist, saying “Muslims are the new Jews… They are the object of a series of stereotypes, caricatures and fears which are not based in a reality and are independent of a person’s experience with Muslims.” Kuruvila says: “The Muslim caricature has ensnared Hindus, Mexicans and others” across the USA “with violence, suspicion and slurs”, giving new form to America’s “age-old dance around racial identity”.
Assimilation
The subcontinent’s Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and others are from pretty much similar racial populations, so when we wish to distinguish ourselves from one another as we tend to do on the subcontinent, we wear turbans, beards, long hair, veils, bindis etc ~ symbols about which the average New Jersey “dot-buster” or British “Paki-basher” cares not a hoot. London last year even saw Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician on his way to work in the morning, pinned down by an elite squad of Britain’s much-vaunted policemen and receive seven bullets point-blank in the back of his skull ~ merely for having “looked Asian”.
Subcontinental immigrant families in the West experience a defining moment when the wife first bobs her long hair and takes to wearing slacks, skirts or even shorts, just so she can leave home and assimilate better in the workplace or shopping mall. The saris, salwars and real jewellery are kept for the weekends when she meets people who will understand her as herself, namely, her friends and kith and kin in the immigrant community. When salwar or sari-clad women start fake-kissing one another in Western-style greeting at those weekends, the alternation of their identities (and confusion in their self-knowledge) may have become complete. A limiting point of such attempts at assimilation is reached perhaps when an Asian woman becomes a BBC or CNN newsreader, reading what she has been told to yet still narcissistically indulging in the extent of her external transformation.
Muslim-Hindu differences of religious and cultural beliefs and practices between racially similar peoples may be contrasted with the main fault-lines that have existed in Western societies in recent centuries: fault-lines of race and colour between European and African, and of race and religion between Jew and Gentile.
An eminent American legal scholar once said African slavery had been “the living lie” in America’s official heritage of democracy and individual freedom. Black America took one hundred years from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King Jr., to begin to overcome the impossible odds against it. Sports, music, show-biz and the arts were obvious arenas for public demonstration of individual genius. Athletes like Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Arthur Ashe, musicians like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt, “in-your-face” satirists like Sammy Davis Jr, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy upto and including modern rapsters and many thousands of others demonstrated that Black America was not going away anywhere, certainly not returning to Liberia, was going to stay in and permanently alter American life and culture, and wondered if anyone thought otherwise. The degree of assimilation into non-black cultures would be a matter of personal choice, not social or economic compulsion. During the Bush invasion of Iraq, Harry Belafonte re-ignited an old controversy when he referred to his fellow West Indian and perfectly assimilated Colin Powell in context of the “plantation slave”/”house slave” dichotomy: plantation slaves were externally oppressed but felt free within while house slaves had more comforts but were docile compradors inside their souls.
Immigrant communities from the subcontinent have had their share of the same. It has been all too easy for young people to reach academic highs in New Delhi or Kolkata only to escape to obscure corners of America and lead docile subservient unfulfilling lives forever afterwards, in exchange for material and ultimately meaningless rewards. It might be called the Madhuri Dixit Phenomenon of being transformed from celebrity-status in India to becoming a complete unknown in America.
Jewish-Gentile divide
The Jewish-Gentile divide in Western civilisation has been more insidious and damaging to mankind, and potentially remains so as the anger it generates has been transferred onto modern Muslims instead. At its unspoken roots is the frank Jewish theological assessment that Jesus of Nazareth was at most a wise and honest rabbi, not Christ Immanent ~ a veracious blow that seems to remove the corner-stone of all European culture and civilisation. The length of mutual recriminations and miscomprehensions as well as self-deceptions and cruelties over the millennia that have resulted on both sides, remains endless. On the Christian side there has been the vile persecution of Jews for centuries. On the Jewish side, there has arisen the vast myth that today’s Israel has something to do with the ancient Hebrews, when contemporary Jews likely descend mostly from the conversion to Judaism of the Khazar Khanate in the second half of the 9th Century (see e.g. Paul Meerts, “Assessing Khazaria”, International Institute for Asian Studies July 2004). In between Jewish and Christian self-deceptions and mutual misunderstandings has arisen Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and also Anti-Zionism (many thoughtful Jews having opposed the creation of Israel). As George Eliot, Hannah Arendt and many others noticed, the assimilation of 19th Century Jews into elite society in Vienna or London was only permitted where some exceptional individual genius was displayed, most prominently perhaps in case of Benjamin Disraeli who became Victoria’s Prime Minister. Even that acceptance of assimilated “exceptional” Jews came to disintegrate into the horrors of the 20th Century, from which we are yet to recover. Modern American foreign policy has been partly driven by the East and West Coasts’ understanding or misunderstanding of that history.
By: drsubrotoroy on July 29, 2007
at 10:18 am
Dr Roy –
Thanks very much. Very interesting. And I would like to move at least part of that into a new post so it will be read better.
Sorry about missing your name out (accidental). Corrected.
LR
By: L on July 29, 2007
at 11:19 am
thank you so very much for this article. I have started reseaching what the rest of the world is saying about Ron Paul and am very pleased. We know that Dr. Paul is exactly what the US needs.
I will speak for myself and say that I do not want what these “globalist” want. I want to have my country be respected and I want us to be friends and trade with everyone. Please help us spread the word.
Dr. Paul has finished the Jay Leno show and is headed off to a private hollywood fundraiser.
By: Kat on October 31, 2007
at 2:45 am
Thanks –
could you make a note that this blog has moved to http://www.mindbodypolitic.com?
Lila
By: L on October 31, 2007
at 11:39 am