Back To Prabhupada, Issue 30, Winter 2010/11
In the last issue we revealed, with video footage, how violence and death threats were used at the Hungarian Budapest Rathayatra festival against IRM devotees to prevent ISKCON devotees receiving the truth about Srila Prabhupada. A follow-up meeting was conducted between guru hoaxer HH Sivarama Swami (“SRS”), the leader of the Hungarian yatra (preaching mission), and some of SRS’s managers in Hungary to discuss the fallout from our presence at the Rathayatra. The transcript of this meeting reveals the guru hoaxers’ strategy for ensuring ISKCON devotees are kept in the dark, and hence, the guru hoax’s survival from exposure by the IRM. This strategy is based on the following 4 steps -
1. Hide
2. Mislead
3. Lie
4. Distract
- as we will now reveal. All quotes below, unless otherwise indicated, are from a meeting held in Budapest, Hungary on 14/10/2010. The meeting was conducted in Hungarian and, therefore, we provide the English translation here.
SRS: “Yes that is not a Hungarian thing. Someone has told me, they (the IRM) were following the Rathayatra, because they were there in France too.”
Hungarian Devotee 1: “They were foreigners and they have been chased away”.
Hungarian Devotee 2: “There was an Indian, and I met two English as well.”
SRS: “Yes, I can imagine they are trying…But our main protection is after Krishna and the reality, is the language here. This Hungarian language has protected devotees from many things so far. Only the Chinese language is harder than this in the whole world…(laughter). There was Braja, but he is not actively doing things until someone comes who can speak and translate things nicely. This is a serious obstacle, and we hope it will remain like this.”
SRS fully admits that their plan is to keep the devotees in the dark by hoping our papers will not be translated into Hungarian! (Incidentally, the above transcript was provided by the devotee mentioned - Braja - and we have translated dozens of IRM articles and papers onto a Hungarian IRM website - www.iskconirm.com/Magyar.htm - so we are not as inactive as he thinks!). Of course, such a “hide” strategy is only possible outside of the English-speaking world. In the English-speaking world, as we have previously reported in BTP, other measures, such as temple bannings, are used to deal with devotees who may make the mistake of discovering the truth.
Hungarian Devotee 1: “There is also one pamphlet we have given out to devotees two years ago, when this ritvik thing came out. That was a 44 pages paper we distributed to all devotees.”
SRS: “Oh yes, that contained materials, we picked from different places. I think the Plain Vanilla book was in that also. So eventually, I don’t think I have to convince someone here, to not become a ritvik. (Laughter) […] We also have to educate them, because the best protection is always the education, just like before this whole ritvik came, I spoke to devotees about it long before, that is why we printed this book Plain Vanilla.”
The publications SRS speaks about were answered long ago, and exposed as not actually even addressing what the IRM’s position is (as can be seen by going to our website www.iskconirm.com) and, therefore, are not relevant to the debate. By using such publications, SRS is deliberately misleading, rather than educating, the devotees.
SRS: “This is not the matter, rather, we have to communicate that, because their philosophy is without any basis, and unprecedented, their only way to preach is to destroy people’s faith in ISKCON by quoting what bad things happened in ISKCON.”
When our position is presented by the guru hoaxers, only blatant lies are offered. Leaving aside the fact that our philosophy is simply repeating verbatim Srila Prabhupada’s direct orders without change, our philosophy is that everyone can have a relationship with Srila Prabhupada in the same manner SRS did – getting initiated without ever having had any physical contact with Srila Prabhupada. Why doesn’t SRS honestly say that our philosophy is therefore actually based on what he did?! And the “bad things” we do mention are repeated verbatim from the GBC’s public news releases, so why doesn’t SRS therefore claim that it is the GBC which is destroying people’s faith in ISKCON?
Note that the last 2 steps may work only if they are combined with the first all -important step of ensuring the truth is always hidden from the devotees, and in this way the guru hoaxers can get away with any misleading and lies they wish to perpetrate.
Srila Prabhupada:
Guru hoax struggling
to justify his removal
|
“when you approach a guru, you should see, uh, see his behaviour, and if you see this founder of the apa-sampradaya, this Krishnakant Desai. I mean he’s, it’s a joke. He doesn’t have any spiritual life.”
(Bhakti Vikash Swami (“BVKS”), voted-in guru hoaxer, Lecture 9/6/2008)
Finally, when one can no longer hide the truth from the devotees, one has to resort to attacking the person presenting the truth, as an evasive tactic. This is a logical fallacy known as argumentum ad hominem, and is engaged in precisely when the merits of what is being presented cannot be challenged. Leave aside the fact that BVKS seems to have forgotten that it is he, and not I, who claims to be a self-realised guru, and that he has never seen my behaviour to be able to comment on my spiritual life. Even if such personal attacks were truthful, they could still not disprove the fact that Srila Prabhupada ordered a ritvik system and not guru successors. If the guru hoaxers could actually defeat the statements I was presenting, they would not need to resort to attacking me personally as a substitute for their inability to defeat them. |
The use of such survival tactics proves that the guru hoax relies on deception rather than truth for its existence. The hoaxers have no choice but to resort to such tactics, since one cannot challenge what the IRM is actually presenting head-on, as the truth, by definition, cannot be challenged.