Back To Prabhupada, Issue 61, Vol 1, 2019
BC-elected guru HH Sivarama Swami has had his disciples launch a project to promote him on social media and the internet in general. In a podcast dated 20/1/19, he explained about this project, stating that around 10 devotees have been working on it for about 2 years, with most of the financing "being done by the Hungarian yatra". He had one of the main leaders of this project, his disciple Radha-Damodara Dasa, also give a presentation on the project, and the quotes in shaded boxes below are from this presentation. As we shall see, Sivarama Swami's big internet project ran into an even bigger obstacle – the IRM!
"The first thing that Guru Maharaja [Sivarama Swami - Ed.] has said to me in India was that... actually this is an anecdote, if you don't mind I'll recall, but he said that he went to meet with the High Commissioner, I guess in Hungary, and on meeting with the High Commissioner, the High Commissioner said, ‘Oh, I have your new book, somebody sent it to me', and so he went and pulled it out – and it wasn't any of Maharaja's books. It was a ritvik book, 108 Deviations."
This actually refers to the book 100 Deviations: The Life and Teachings of HH Sivarama Swami, published by the IRM. This book gives Sivarama Swami's history and teachings by using only a compilation of verbatim quotes and pictures of Sivarama Swami. Thus, for a reader, it is non-different from "any of Maharaja's books", in that it simply contains Sivarama Swami's words (and those of Srila Prabhupada), just as a book by Sivarama Swami would.
Continuing on, Sivarama Swami's reaction to this incident is described:
"so Maharaja was saying, you know like, ‘We can't do anything, ‘cause this poison is spread everywhere'."
But, as we mentioned, the book in question contains Sivarama Swami's own quotes, along with some quotes from Srila Prabhupada. Thus, assuming, we hope, that Sivarama Swami is not referring to the words of his own spiritual master, Srila Prabhupada, as being poison, Sivarama Swami is claiming that his own words are poison. Hence, Sivarama Swami is saying that he is "poison", as he is objecting to his own words being distributed. If he feels that his words are so poisonous, then he should retract them and state that every single quote of his in that book, spread over a period of decades, he made in error, presumably because he was in ignorance and illusion during all that time. But he has not done so.
"And it's true, when you search "Sivarama Swami" on Google the first full page, three quarters of which was ritvik sites. So you know, the idea was that we can't really do anything until we deal with that problem, which was phase one."
This refers to many of our articles on Sivarama Swami from our website, which appeared when you searched for Sivarama Swami on Google, since we have over 50 such articles! However, our IRM website is basically like a library where we add papers and articles we have written over the years. We made no separate effort to advertise or push this website or the Sivarama Swami material, as it is basically just a database, a repository for reference rather than a daily news site. Thus, it was a pleasant surprise to find, as reported here, that our papers on Sivarama Swami were so highly ranked on Google, despite us having not taken any specific actions to make that happen!
"So, we're very happy to say that, you know, in a year, just over a year and half, that whole front page has been cleared now of any ritvik sites. [...] Radhanath Swami had the same problem, and they spent, you know, 150,000, 200,000 dollars in trying to rectify that problem. We didn't spend anything like that money, so Guru Maharaja was especially pleased about that."
1) We can note that in comparison to no effort having been made by us to get our material highly ranked on Google, Sivarama Swami has had to create a special project which had to expend men, time and money to combat us. As stated, it took them over 1 1/2 years to remove links to our papers on Sivarama Swami from Google's front page. And though they claim they did not spend "anything like" $200,000, even a small fraction of this is still thousands of dollars!
2) It is also interesting to note the spending by GBC-elected guru HH Radhanath Swami. He spent about $200,000, not on preaching Srila Prabhupada's message, but on trying to protect his reputation against people reading information about him! Useful information for his past and potential donors to know.
"We've also created a community of 280,000 English speakers online, English followers, 90,000 Hungarian followers, and 12,000 Turkish followers, so we'll start looking at 400,000 followers in two years, and the videos have amounted to over 50 million."
In our article in BTP 59, "Preaching about Krishna", we exposed that these many views for Sivarama Swami's videos have been achieved due to ensuring that the videos are about secular topics such as "guns", "plastics", etc., with no mention of Krishna. In addition, they also preach about "blood milk", which is against Srila Prabhupada's teachings on consuming commercial milk.
It is clear that ISKCON's leaders find the IRM a formidable opposition, and thus they have needed to make a concerted effort to try to prevent the truth presented by us from being made available. In the previous article about the Disciples Course handbook, we noted that ISKCON leaders had attempted to counter the IRM's arguments by lying about them. And here, they have used a different technique, and attempted to counter the IRM's arguments by simply working to hide them! There is absolutely no attempt made to actually answer the IRM's arguments. Thus, they have given up the fight of trying to rebut our arguments, and have instead effectively admitted defeat by simply focusing on how they can stop people reading them to begin with. When ISKCON's leaders respond with suppression rather than knowledge, it means they are already running scared, and the IRM has already won. As Srila Prabhupada states:
"If I say, "You are rascal, you are thief," and if you don't reply, that means you accept it."
(Room Conversation, 28/12/76)
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