Imagine being in the Italy of the mid-1600s. Galileo Galilei has just come out with a pathbreaking idea which has literally turned the world upside down. His heliocentric model suggests that Earth is after all not stationary and itself rotates around the Sun and so do the other planets. Unfortunately, this idea is not acceptable to the authorities that be in the Catholic Church; who for long have held that all the planets and stars revolve around the stationary planet Earth (geocentric model). Not only does the all-powerful Church hold Galileo guilty of heresy but also sentences him to house arrest and forces him to retract his words.
Now cut to the 2020s. Abraham Lincoln, as we all know was the former President of the United States who led his country through a bloody civil war which was triggered (among other things) by a call to free slaves (mostly of African origin) from plantations. A few years back some ultra-liberal student organisations called for his statue to be removed because they felt, hold your breath….that he was a symbol of ‘white supremacy’. Closer home, a few weeks back, the dot.dot.dot.dot.dot. alliance (of convenience) put out a list of journalists whom it is going to publicly boycott in the coming months. One of the very reasons this alliance has come together is to fight the fascism which is supposedly being unleashed by the Government of the day; and the perfect way to fight fascism is how else but by putting out Naziesque fatwas ostracising those who do not toe your line. Irony must have died more deaths than the number of zeroes behind 186 in the 1.86 lakh crores of the 2G scam.
To compare the situations nearly 400 years apart, the attitude of intolerance to alternative world views remains consistent. What’s more is that the Church never claimed to be a protector of liberal values in stark contrast to the so called ultra-liberal wokes of today. Voltaire once said, ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.’ While today’s woke brigade lives by the motto of ‘If I disagree with what you have to say, I will try my best to make sure you regret saying it for the rest of your life.’ The high priests of wokeism may not have the power (as yet) of their medieval clergy counterparts when it comes to ordering dissenters to be put to death, but they sure can take away your job, your friend circle and social life. It is a common sight on social media to see mobs of wokes raining relentless abuses on social media handles which said something which they disapproved of and many a time attempts have been made to tag the employers of the person in question and ask for him or her to be sacked from their jobs.
In many senses, wokeism is no different from organised Abrahamic religion. It has its set of unquestionable beliefs to which one must swear their allegiance and the slightest attempt to question or challenge them is met with fierce resistance from its fanatical adherents. Like petro-dollars fund radical Wahabi maddarsas in different parts of the world, billions are spent by people like George Soros in propagating wokeism. While soldiers of Boko Haram held hundreds of innocent females as hostages, the soldiers of ‘Woko Haram’ sow doubts in the mind of countless females as to whether they are actually female or are they ‘people who menstruate’?
The woke virus has already begun wreaking havoc among the younger generation in the West and ominous signs are already on the horizon of it spreading like a wildfire in Bharat as well. Balladeer Sambhaji Bhagat in one of his performances said about Godmen- ‘these Godmen are dangerous pick-pocketeers for they don’t pick the purse full of money which lies in your pocket, but rather pick the pocket of thoughts which lies in your brain’. While I may have my strong disagreement on multiple other issues with Shri Bhagat, I think if you replace Godmen in the above quote with ‘Woko Haram’ it still fits perfectly well and it is high time we roll up our socks and protect the future generations of Bharatiyas from getting inflicted by this dangerous bug of wokeism.
