Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri...

In this blog post, the activist Paul Thistoll, the founder of Countering Hate Speech Aotearoa outlines what they see as the agenda of the Free Speech Union, to push the Overton window of political acceptability to the Right.  Although the FSU claims that it represents free speech interests across the ideological spectrum, Paul demonstrates through three key arguments that the FSU works continually to build the platform for far right-wing hate speech. I am providing the link to Paul's blog here .

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...

So Tova O’Brien was looking for a click-bait opportunity to draw in listeners to her podcast and she found the migrant activist and Green Party politician Dr. Sapna Samant to pick on. In a gotcha moment, Tova shared with the Green Party co-leader James Shaw a series of posts made by Dr. Samant on whiteness, Hindutva, and multiculturalism, asking him if the tweets were OK. We don’t understand from listening to O’Brien’s podcast if her research team actively researched Dr. Sapna Samant’s social media posts, or whether these selective screen captures of Dr. Samant’s tweets were sent to her by someone wanting to target Samant. The thoroughly unresearched piece is poor journalism, reflective of the mediocrity that is perpetuated by whiteness , the hegemonic values of the dominant white culture in settler colonies. If indeed her research team had discovered the tweets, it’s worth interrogating why the social media posts of a migrant woman activist on whiteness are of interest to O’Brien’s po...

Gandhi's experiments with truth offer a powerful register for resistance to the communicative resources of deception that form the essential infrastructures of Hindutva.  As Gandhi invites us to critically interrogate our own relationship with non-violence, peace, service, relationship with the community, and resistance to colonization, he offers anchors for life as practice, lived through struggles for truth.  These anchors of life as practice, realized through struggles for truth stand in resistance to the deceptions that shape the cognitive, affective, and material resources of Hindutva.  Consider the deception played by Hindutva propagandists in mobilizing violence targeting Gandhi, resulting in his murder, in the ongoing vilification of Gandhi within private spaces while simultaneously upholding Gandhi as an Indian cultural icon in its public messages to the world. As a fascist ideology, Hindutva thrives on the production and circulation of lies, continually at work ...

Globally, the information technology (IT) sector forms the core infrastructure for the accelerated production and proliferation of far-right extremism.  While regulatory frameworks responding to this global challenge often work with the assumption that the proliferation of hate is one of the side effects of transformations in information technology (IT), our research and policy advocacy at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) points to a far deeper problem, the intrinsically profitable nature of hate.  Particularly salient here is the collaboration between global tech and far-right extremism, with hate being an intrinsically profitable resource for the IT sector.  Hate multiplies exponentially on technologically mediated platforms, generating an ever-expanding audience base for advertisers and this forms the business model of big Tech. In the context of the far-right fascist ideology of Hindutva, the proliferation of the IT sector in ...

Author: Mohan J. Dutta ( Mohan Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor at Massey University ) The far-right's targeting of academics has gained exponential momentum with the rise of authoritarian populism . From fascist Hindutva politics to white supremacy to far-right Zionism , the targeting of academics through disinformation-based hate campaigns drives both political markets and profits. These campaigns, building up and amplifying conspiracy theories , are largely funded by dark money , and mobilized through astroturfs , think tanks , and media influencers  (digital).  The power of the disinformation campaigns is held up by the networked structure , generating swarms , mobilizing   email campaigns and complaints targeting academics . Such swarm-based campaigns are accompanied by wild conspiracy theories , propaganda messages inciting violence, death threats and rape threats . Having experienced the targeted attacks of the far right across the three key drivers of disin...