"The Media Is The Enemy" Also in ISKCON (PADA)

PADA: Had a nice discussion with a prabhu about how various world wide news media are considered as the "enemy" -- especially in places ruled by a few self-serving elites like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and similar other imperious ruled states. And we compared how some of our alternate medias have similarly been "the enemy" of the ISKCON GBC, as well as a number of other devotees post 1978. 

Many times in these imperious empires the poor media reporters / newspaper owners / and other people connected to media outlets -- disappear, are jailed and are punished in various ways, or even executed -- often under propped up legal charges. And thus, we were having a discussion on how this sort of out cropping evolved in ISKCON, and how us "alternate media" folks became targets.

Early on, after 1978 the GBC controlled ALL of the ISKCON media including: Back to Godhead Magazine, the BBT newsletter, ISKCON World Review, Danavir and Vipramukhya's "Bhakta Program Newsletter," New Vrndavana's "Brijabasi Spirit" newsletter and so on and so forth. The opposition was scattered and had no real media footprint at all at that time. And all of the GBC's controlled media promoted the idea that their 11 conditioned soul acharyas are the "appointed successors to Krishna," and we had to accept them as Krishna's "living guru successors" or face shunning, banning, expulsion, excommunicating -- even beating -- or worse. Writing opposition media papers was definitely a forbidden program. 

Anyway, I made a small two page opposition "position paper" about the "sahajiya tendency" to combat the Jayatirtha program around 1979, but it was only a few pages and it was almost impossible to distribute on ISKCON property due to the fanatical mood the GBC had orchestrated. Meanwhile Kailash Chandra, Jadurani, Mrgendra and a few others made a small booklet "The Bona Fide Spiritual Master," which was pretty good with lots of nice quotes. They also addressed that Sridhara Maharaja is not a bona fide person and his advice is harmful to ISKCON.

Yet again, they had the same problem, how can their literature be distributed in the fanatical atmosphere of the GBC realm? So it was a very limited edition publication, with very little ability to be distributed widely. Of course, we also never knew who was funding their printing, or if the authors had to pay to print their own writings (like we had to do most of the time). In other words, their document lacked support for printing and distribution, whereas the GBC's mass media had all sorts of funding and support.

Later, around 1982, some of us started putting together a few more small papers, but again our printing was small scale (we had limited funds for printing and no internet at the time) and so our papers were only distributed to maybe less than 100 people. And then around 1984-5, we made a few chapters of "Our Living Guru" and started printing and distributing, again on a small scale. Later on we made a pretty much completed version, which is still on the Harekrsna.org web site.

Then Sulochana das came to Berkeley to work with me, and he began writing "The Guru Business." Of course we had the same problem, his was also not a welcome publication in and around ISKCON. Sulochana began to publish a number of the unpublished "letters from Srila Prabhupada." And he had a copy of the 1977 "appointment tape" and he began to address flaws in the "guru appointment" idea. For these reasons he was seen as a serious threat to the GBC's regime and so they hired a hit man to come and assassinate him. 

According to the police, I was also a target and was "hours away from being assassinated" myself, because they found a note in the pocket of Sulochana's hit man with a description of my vehicle. In others words, making written counter documents to the GBC's guru process was very much being suppressed. And even suppressed with violence and murders.   

After Sulochana was assassinated, the regular public media people (like CBS news) wanted me to tell them who else was writing ISKCON internally circulated media or "protest papers" apart from me and Sulochana? They wanted to interview more "dissenting" position paper writers. Yet we could not recommend any more writers at the time, because we did not know of any, and neither did they. Then the writers of the book "Monkey On A Stick" interviewed me and many others, and this publication had a lot of impact on the GBC's regime, basically they lost thousands of followers who were disgusted with the bogus guru's system that the GBC was producing.

Our first big break in terms of a devotee helping with funding and assisting opposing media publications was from Nityananda das, who launched the "Vedic Village Review" around 1987. This was being printed and distributed (by mail) to many devotees and it started quite a lot of reaction from the GBC. Myself, Yasodanandan, Rupa Vilas, Karnamrita and Nityananda became the main contributing writers. And the articles from the VVR became pretty much the standard citations that everyone else quoted later on, like Krishna Kanta's ISKCON Reform Movement's publications. The IRM simply copied and pasted what had already been written many times over in the VVR.

Unfortunately, Nityananda's business was raided by the police and that caused a lot of problems for his work. Then Rupa Vilas started having doubts about attacking the GBC's biggest gurus like Satsvarupa. I recall Rupa Vilas talking to me on the phone once, and when I said "Satsvarupa is one of the master minds of the bogus GBC guru program -- because he writes most of their position papers," Rupa Vilas drifted off and went silent.  

Rupa Vilas just could not accept that his good old pals were totally rotten apples. He thought that this was all a slight grammatical problem, and he would get the GBC's gurus to remove their "diksha guru" title, and put on the "ritvik hat" (to say they were not gurus but priests) -- and all would be well. Wait, what about all the crimes against ISKCON and its devotees that had already taken place, and the suppression of devotees that was ongoing? We should just give the violent dictator a new title, and that will make everything fine?

We should just forgive and forget all these crimes -- and make the existing GBC's gurus the new managers of the new ritvik program, which would be like giving police badges to the bank robbers and expecting them to act like good cops. That is not realistic. So later on we had the same problem with Krishna Kanta, he thought we could "reform" the GBC's gurus and give them a new title, and all would be fine. 

So all of these people -- like Rocana, Rupa Vilas, Krishna Kanta, Kamsahanta, the IRM and so on, they thought that the GBC's gurus should stay in charge as the leaders of ISKCON, and we should work out some sort of "reform" with them. Yes, despite the bogus guru's bad track record everything will become better simply by changing their title. Instead of calling them "the imperious emperor" they will be called "the moderate president," then everything will be operating smoothly, hee hee. Like a change of their title is going to fix everything? If we call the bank robbers "angels from heaven," will that really fix the problem? Maybe not! 

That is why many devotees did not like me and Sulochana's more vociferous writing style, they had the idea that somehow the GBC's guru program could be reformed, mended, repaired and fixed, and we would need to be acquiescing and accommodating with them in order to obtain this reform process. And if the "moderate reformers" adopted the abrasive writing style of me and Sulochana, then there could not be a cooperative reform.

Of course none of these moderate reform efforts ever amounted to much of any actual reform inside the walls of ISKCON, with the main exception of Bangalore. Except its hard to say if they were relying exclusively only on the moderates, we think the Sulochana murder and other criminal exposes might have helped convince them they needed to bail out of the deviant acharya's camp, just like many of us had done already. 

Unfortunately, the writings of many of these "moderate reformers" reflected their compromised mood, their media attempt was not really attacking the root issue, that self-appointed gurus were orchestrating a criminal regime, which is more or less what me and Sulochana were trying to say in our writings.    

FAKE NEWS!

Of course the biggest problem me and Sulochana had all along was -- most of the devotees simply did not believe that our information was true. So we were often branded as crack pot "National Inquirer" news, not to be taken seriously. Rather oddly, meanwhile many police, public media, professional writers, scholars like Dr. Stilson Judah, some of our associates who are residents of Vrndavana -- and many others -- did believe us. 

So this was another issue altogether, even if we could get our information organized, collated, and printed; And even if we could survive the gauntlet of getting the information out while facing off with the GBC's violent goonda's process; And even if we could finally get our information into the hands of various devotees -- they may not believe or accept that our literature is factual. I recall one prominent GBC looking at one of our booklets saying "Oh yes, we have seen all these quotes before." OK, and nothing was done? 

Even more oddly, when we said there is a child abuse issue, many people told me simply -- that is not really happening. Its ALL fake news! Yet when the Windle Turley lawsuit proved conclusively that there are in fact hundreds of victims or more (as we had been reporting), then many people said the lawsuit is "trying to destroy ISKCON." Notice! Not much emphasis has been placed on how the abuse was "destroying the lives of the ISKCON children citizens" i.e. the victims. 

Of course, the good news is that many ISKCON parents then pulled their children out of the GBC's camp after the lawsuit was filed, realizing that their children were in jeopardy there. In other words, they did not want to listen to us and our "fake news," so they were forced to wake up and deal with the abuse issue by the mundane courts and mundane media -- which exposed the issue widely. As one of the ex-gurukulis told PADA, our parents had to pull us out, or face being arrested for child negligence. The lawsuit forced the parents into action and exposed that they were compromised with a child abuse program. 

Sulochana said most of these devotees had become the GBC's "mindless zombies" and that is why they could not appreciate our media writing presentations, or understand how badly ISKCON people's lives were being impacted by the GBC's regime. 

Then again, some folks simply said -- so what? PADA is STILL the problem for "costing so much money to the society." In other words, even when the facts are proven, there is a reluctance to accept among a sector of devotees. That means it almost does not matter -- at least to these folks -- what our counter media is saying. Many people are simply not going to accept -- even if we have photographic evidence. And when forced to accept, many still blame the messenger. In other words, many folks were more inclined to accept the GBC's mass media version and not ours. And then many were angry that their program had been exposed instead of feeling remorse and helping our efforts to remove the evil doers. 

At the same time, many ISKCON devotees then became followers of "living gurus" like Sridhara Maharaja, Narayan Maharaja, Babajis and others, because they took the bait of the GBC's argument, "you need a living guru." This created a huge exodus from ISKCON, but lets not forget it was the GBC who introduced these living gurus into the ISKCON process. 

These "outside" folks then started making their own publications and medias, basically rationalizing how they were doing a good job by cheer leading the GBC's guru process. For example Sridhara Maharaja writes that acharyas can "go mad" after money, women and followers, and this has become one of the chief arguments used by the bogus GBC gurus to rationalize their conditioned souls gurus program. So now we have had to fight yet another battle front of another wave of bogus media publications, spawned by the GBC's propping up these various outside authorities. 

Anyway, many people said we are the fake news program for many years. We were called all sorts of names such as the National Inquirer false and distorted news, the junkyard dog writer, and so on. At this stage however, it seems the essential points of our publications are gradually being accepted as factual. For example, recently more devotees wrote to tell me they 100 percent accept the poison issue. So one by one, the points we raised are being accepted.  

There are still a few people like Kamsahanta saying that much of PADA is correct, but part of it is fake news. OK is he going to tell us which pages of PADA web sites are not accurate, and how the information needs to be updated or corrected? Apparently not. Can he support the claim that our news is false by providing contrary testimony from other eye-witnesses, or are the witnesses we cited not accurate? Or what? 

Most of what we write is testimony from others, and if they are all liars, then what is the factual account? Notice most of our critics do not make a "better version" web site where they explain the so-called correct facts. So our facts are false, but they are not going to save people by giving them the correct facts. Sounds like sour grapes? Yes PADA is misleading people on the wrong path, goody, what is the right path? We are not going to make our own site to tell you? Does that make a lot of sense? You path is wrong, but we are not going to give people the right one? Mayavada maybe? Neti neti neti, this is not right, but what is?

If there are people who really wanted to have "the real story" promoted and have PADA web site corrected, they would have helped us do that all along. In any case, at least we tried to fix a few things and a number of people have thanked us for so doing. Meanwhile, we have to admit that our medias may have gone overboard in some cases, made mistakes and so on, but that would happen to anyone else making any similar attempt to do anything like what we did. No one, except God's actual pure living representative, is perfect. And perhaps that is why most of our critics do not bother to make a web site to counter ours, they know they will have the same problems we did, its hard to do anything perfectly in the material world. 

Anyway, our basic idea is, that we have to worship pure devotees and not conditioned soul devotees, and its picking up steam. That means, our media attempts, either good, bad or ugly, have been effective and are working. Finally, suppressing media only works in the short term, eventually the real story sneaks out somehow or other anyway. ys pd