A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-the-sooner-woke-dom-dies-the-better/20220211.htm
Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau is hiding “in an undisclosed location” after a huge convoy of truckers demanding relief from Covid mandates, joined by farmers with their combine harvesters and other heavy equipment, made steady progress towards the Canadian capital. Poor man, he now has caught Covid, too.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who boasts one of the strictest zero-Covid regimes in the world, is under fire for refusing to allow pregnant citizens living abroad to return home, under some quota called MIQ (Managed Isolation and Quarantining). She herself had to cancel her wedding, poor thing.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on the verge of losing his job: being impeached or whatever the Brits do to unpopular PMs, because it has come to light that he partied several times at his official residence in violation of strict Covid quarantine rules in his country.
US President Joe Biden now has some of the worst approval ratings of any POTUS in history, and faces the certainty of a drubbing for his party in the midterm elections late this year, mostly because of poor handling of the Covid pandemic, as well as high inflation resulting from the generous printing of money in an ineffective economic band-aid. He is now beating the war drums and may drag the US into an unnecessary war in Ukraine.
What do all these have in common? First, Covid, and second, the Anglosphere, which is reeling. And, third, they are darlings of the Woke Left crowd, especially Ardern and Biden.
I’m reminded of the old song, “Video killed the Radio Star”. So Covid is killing the Woke left star?
In a sign that we are living in Internet Time, time scales are being accelerated. In the old days, centuries used to mean something, like a hundred years at least. But ‘centuries’ are getting awfully short these days. Consider:
The European Century of domination was over 200 years, from the Industrial Revolution to World War II.
The American Century was only about 60 years, from World War II to the Financial Meltdown.
The Chinese Century is going to be about 30 years, from WTO Accession till… well, we are yet to see how their empire will end, one hopes, as TS Eliot said, “not with a bang, but a whimper”. Chances are Xi will not go gentle into that good night.
The Woke Century began with the Biden accession to the throne (some, including me, think it was tainted with irregularities) and the celebration of the Millennium, as it were, by the luminaries of Wokeness. That was just a year ago, although it feels like it was much longer, given the endless debacles. Afghanistan. Build Back Better. The Fauci-Daszak-Collins circus re Gain of Function research.
And coming soon to a TV screen near you, war! Rejoice, Deep State! Let’s ignore the $80 billion worth of weapons abandoned in Afghanistan, a good bit possibly in Chinese hands now. And the signal of US fecklessness that the retreat broadcast.
There’s a word for it: degringolade. No, it has nothing to do with gringos.
What has (I hope fatally) damaged Wokeism? In the ponderous tones of op-ed writers, it is collapsing under the “weight of its own contradictions”. Wokeism has brought us unedifying spectacles: the cancellation of those whom you don’t like (see Joe Rogan over on Spotify), the ascent of (white) privileged Karens, the relentless rebranding of propaganda as Science(™).
Wokes are into “defund the police” and high tolerance to theft, mugging, drug abuse and squatters defecating on the street, which has effectively erased my beloved San Francisco.
Wokes pretend not to understand that China has deindustrialized the West, and that their supply chains can be turned off at a moment’s notice.
As far as Hindus are concerned, the eclipse of Wokeism cannot come soon enough. There is a determined assault on Hindus (there are frequent conferences on Dismantling Global Hindutva, and the California State university system has just included caste as a marker of discrimination, like race).
This means that, like Jews earlier, Hindus are being made scapegoats in the West: declared mad dogs, and then shot. This project has gathered momentum in global media. The full-throated baying in the NYTimes, FT, Economist, NPR, Reuters, etc. has been going on for some time: they want regime-change. TL;DR: The Mudi sud rejine.
Their latest target is Netaji Subhas Bose. He is a complex and flawed hero. There is a lot to decode about him, as I wrote in 2016 in The abuse of Indian history.
But a recent series of Twitter exchanges by ex-Reuters journalist Myra Macdonald, ex-Financial Times India stringer Edward Luce, and others, was instructive: according to these Woke types, Bose is guilty by association with Hitler, but Churchill is blameless in the Bengal genocide, and is not a war criminal. And oh, according to Luce, Indian business schools teach Mein Kampf. That must be in some alternative Woke universe.
This is what Woke-dom is all about: the willing suspension of disbelief. The sooner it dies off, the better. It has already infected some Indians, for instance those who ‘took the knee’ for Black Lives Matter. They should abandon this silly Woke-ness and aping of the West. Just as India, correctly, abstained from the UN Security Council vote over Ukraine, a fight in which we have no dog.
880 words, 1 Feb 2022
Ep. 57: Did the Woke Century come and go in a heated rush?