India/western Sociology

dhu · (This post was last modified: 08-03-2008, 04:55 AM by dhu.)

QUOTEHindu RenaissanceÂ - by Ram Swarup

India has been under attack for a thousand years. The new attacks were not like the old raids known before; these were buttressed by an ideology of heavenly sanction, a permanent motive and system of ideas. Long before Europe of the "white man's burden" appeared on the scene, Asia wasÂ witnessing in the birth of Islam an ideologically fortified imperialism commanded by Allah. Any economic and political gain - and it was in on very small - was merely a just reward for an activity which was essentially religious.

In a way, Islamic imperialism was nothing new. It had a model to follow in Christianity which had a similar mandate, but it too made significant contribution to the doctrine of imperialism. It gave us the concepts of darul-harb (non-Muslim world) and darul-Islam (Islamic world), the former subject to permanent jehad (holy war), subjugation, enslavement and even slaughter of the latter, other important concepts were booty (al-ghanimah), zimmi and jazia, etc. Islam believed that the world belonged to the believers and the infidels were mere squatters, it had to be repossessed.

Then came the Europen Era. India's contact with Europe was not negative. Through it, India came to know a world it had to know. It also received from this source unintended political help.Â Islamic powers in the middle-east and Central Asia and denied them sea lanes; this weakened Islamic encirclement of India gave local freedom forces a better chance to assert themselves.

India's first major contact began when Vasco da Gama landed with gunboat and priests. The newcomers were not only pirates and merchants but also believing Christians; they had the pope's mandate to convert heathens in the lands they took possession of. They found that the natives had a flourishing religion of their own. They took to destroying their temples in earnest.Â Within decades of their occupation of small coastal parts, they had destroyed according to their own records 601 temples in 131 villages - all important Christian Orders taking part in this pious work. Franciscan friars destroyed 300 temples in Bardez, Jesuits 280 inÂ Salcete. St. Francis Xavier who fully participated in this meritorous work wrote back home: "As soon as I arrived in any heathen village ..... When all are baptised I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken to pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done."

Hindus got relief from the active religious persecution when the British came. But they too were not without a powerful missionary lobby of their own whose aims were no different from other Christian missions. Though the missions were not allowed to apply their usual muscular methods, they were free to propagate their religion. Their aim was conversion of heathens to the true faith and to that end they began to attack Hinduism in different ways. They attacked it for having too many gods, not one of them the right Biblical God; they attacked it for being idolatrous; they attacked all its leading ideas - karma, incarnation, moksha, compassion for all being, etc.

The attack on Hindu religion was supported by attack on the Hindu people and society. Hindu rites, customs were all evil, and their morals and manners even worse, if that were possible. With so much depravity around and and with such fine and disinterested teachers at hand, they looked forward to a Christian India in not too distant future.Â The colonial administrator was not unsympathetic to the missionary attack. Though he discouraged its excesses, he found it useful. He knew that Hinduism was India's definition and its deepest and also its principle of unity and regeneration and unless this principle was attacked, India could not beÂ necessarily ruled; he knew that what upheld Hinduism also upheld India and its political struggle. A people who had lost pride in themselves, who were demoralised were welcome to him.

Colonial scholars reinforced the missionary attack by their own from another angle. They taught that India was not one country, that it was a miscellany of people, that it had never known independence, that it had always been under the rule of foreign invaders. The rulers had a clear motive, a clear goal. They wanted an India which had no identity, no vision of its own, no native class of people respected for their leadership. They were to be replaced as far as it lay in their power by a new class of intellectual comparadores. Meanwhile, the concerted attacks succeeded. They were internalised and we made them our own. There was a crop of "reformers" who wanted India to change to the satisfaction of its critics. Above all, there appeared a class of Hindu-hating Hindus who knew all the bad things about Hinduism.Â Earlier invaders ruled through the sword. The British ruled through "Indology".Â The British took over our education and taught us to look at ourselves through their eyes.Â They created a class Indian in blood and colour, but anti-Hindu in its intellectual and emotional orientation. This is the biggest problem rising India faces - the problem of self-alienated Hindus.

The missionary-colonial attack was reinforced by another attack - Marxism.Â Its source too was Europe and it was even more Eurocentric than regular Imperialism. It used radical slogans but its aims were reactionary. It taught that Europe was the centre and rest of the world its periphery - not by chance but by an inherent dialectics of History. Marx fully shared the contempt of British Imperialists for India. He said: "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of succesive intruders."Â He also said that India neither knew freedom nor deserved it. To him the question was "not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Briton." This also became the faith of his Indian pupils.

In India, Macaulayism prepared the ground for Marxism - early Marxists were recruited from Macaulayites. Marxism in turn gave Macaulayism a radical look and made it attractive for a whole new class. While Marxists served European Imperialism, they also fell in love with all old Imperialist invaders, particularly Muslim ones. M.N. Roy found the Arab Empire a "magnificient monument to the memory of Mohammad." While the Marxists found British Imperialism "progressive", they opposed the country's national struggle as reactionary. They learnt to work closely with Muslims both during and after Independence.

It is widely agreed that India's independence struggle derives from Hindu Renaissance, but it is not equally realised that it can also only be sustained by it. Hinduism is the principle of India's self-renewal. Anything that hurts that principle hurts India, hurts its civilisational role, therefore, hurts future religious humanity.

"Organiser", Dec. 10th, 1995

dhu · 08-05-2008, 09:28 AM

The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Review)
John Hobson

**acharya** · 08-09-2008, 06:50 AM

http://ia311540.us.archive.org/2/items/asi...963mbp_djvu.txt

K.M. Pannikar's book:

Asia and Western Dominance- A survey of Vasco DA Gama epoch of Asian History

There are pdf versions etc.

QUOTE
1HE Hindu Reformation of the nineteenth century is one of the great
I movements of the age which by its inassiveness and far-reaching
-* significance takes its place with the most vital developments of
modem history. As it was a slow process and took place under the cover
of British authority and was not always obvious to the outsider, it has so
far escaped attention. A further reason why, in spite of its tremendous
import, it passed unnoticed is that, by its very nature, it was an internal
movement which did not touch or influence outside events. But India's
independence and emergence into the modern world would hardly have
been possible without the slow but radical adjustments that had taken
place within the fold of Hinduism for a period of over 100 years.

In order to appreciate this movement fully it is necessary to under-
stand what the position of Hinduism was in the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. 700 years of Islamic authority over the Indo-Gangetic
Plains from Delhi to Calcutta had left Hinduism in a state of depression.
It was the religion of a subject race, looked down on with contempt by
the Muslims as idolatry. It enjoyed no prestige and for many centuries
its practice had been tolerated only under considerable disadvantage in
various areas. It had no central direction, no organization and hardly any
leadership. When the British took over the rulership of Northern India,
Hinduism for the first time in 700 years stood on a plane of equality with
Islam. But a new and even more dangerous portent appeared on the
stage. The missionaries, feeling that there was almost a virgin field here
in a society which appeared to be on the point of dissolution, took up
the work of conversion. Islam, though it proselytized by fits and starts,
had no separate machinery for carrying its message to the people. The
Christian missionaries were different. They used no physical force, which
Islam did not hesitate to do at intervals and in limited areas. But they
came armed with propaganda. In a later chapter we will narrate the

1 This chapter is a summarized statement of a section from the author's book,
The Indian Revolution. Bombay, 1951.

INDIA 241

story of missionary activities. Here we shall describe only the reactions it
caused within the folds of Hinduism itself. The first result of the Chris-
tian attack on Hinduism was a movement among educated Hindus in
favour of a social reform of religion. The leader of this was Ram Mohan
Roy (1772-1883)3 who may be called the father of the Hindu Reforma-
tion. Born in a Brahmin family. Ram Mohan was brought up as a strict
Hindu, but educated, as all Hindus who hoped to enter public service
had perforce to be at that time, in Islamic culture. He was a deep student
of Arabic and Persian when he entered the East India Company's
service, where also he rose to some distinction. During this period he
took to the study of English, which opened to him the whole range of
Western liberal thought. It was the time when the mellowed glow of the
Great European Enlightenment had cast on European intellectuallifean
amazing serenity and sense of certainty. The light of D'Holbach, Con-
dor?et, Diderot and the great Encyclopaedists had not died down and
the dawn of the great nineteenth century thinkers, especially Bentham
and the Utilitarians in England, which was destined to have so powerful
an influence in the development of ideas in India, had not begun.

What Ram Mohan witnessed around him, in India was a scene of
utter devastation and ruin. The old order of Muslim rule had disappeared
overnight, leaving behind it utter chaos in every walk of life. Hinduism
in Bengal, once the centre of a devotional Vaishnava religion of great
vitality, had sunk to a very low level of superstition, extravagance and
immorality. A seeker after truth, Ram Mohan turned to the new religion
which the missionaries were preaching. He studied Hebrew and Greek
to understand Christianity better. But his scholarship was taking him at
the same time to the well of European liberalism. Ram Mohan Roy was
in fact the last of the Encyclopaedists. Thus he came to reject Christ,
while accepting the wide humanism of European thought, its ethics and
its general approach to the problems of life. His book, The Precepts of
Jestis, the Guide to Peace and Happiness, is an interpretation of Christian-
ity in this new light, a reply to the missionaries rather than a call to
Indians*

While Ram Mohan Roy thus rejected the Christian daims, he
realized that Hinduism had to be re-interpreted. That interpretation he
attempted in the Brahmo Samaj > a new reformed sect of Hinduism,
which he founded. The Samaj was not in its essence a Christian dilution
of Hinduism, as has often been said, but a synthesis of the doctrines of
the European Enlightenment, with the philosophical views of the
Upanishads. As a religion Brahmo Samaj was based firmly on the
Vedanta of genuine Hindu tradition, but its outlook on life was neither
Christian nor Hindu, but European, and derived its inspiration from the
intellectual movements of the eighteenth century.

242 ASIA AND WESTERN DOMINANCE

Thus it may be said that as early as 1820 India had come into the
direct current of European thought and had begun to participate in the
fruits of Europe's intellectual quest. The Brahmo Samaj lived up to this
ideal. Its social message was Westernization, to purge Hinduism of the
customs and superstitions with which it was overlaid, to raise the status
of women, to bridge the yawning gulf between popular and higher
Hinduism, to fight relentlessly against caste, social taboo, polygamy and
other well entrenched abuses. To the educated Hindu, who felt un-
settled in mind by the attack of the missionaries, the Brahmo Samaj pro-
vided the way out.

The Brahmo tradition has become so much a part of the Indian way of
life now, that one is inclined to overlook its distinctive contribution. It
does not lie primarily in the fact that it enabled Hinduism to withstand
the onslaught of the missionaries, but in that it introduced the modern
approach to Indian problems. India started on her long adventure in
building up a new civilization as a synthesis between the East and the
West in the 18208, and in that sense Ram Mohan is the forerunner of
new India. It has been well stated that c he embodies the new spirit, its
freedom of inquiry, its thirst for science, its large human sympathy, its
pure and sifted ethics along with its reverent but not uncritical regard
for the past and prudent disinclination towards revolt 5 .

The spirit of reform was entering Hinduism from other sources also.
In 1835 the Government of India declared that c the great object of the
British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature
and science among the natives of India*, and embarked on a policy of
Western education, the effects of which will be considered separately. It
was the devout hope of Macaulay, who was the champion of the scheme,
and of many others, that the diffusion of the new learning among the
higher classes would see the dissolution of Hinduism and the widespread
acceptance of Christianity. The missionaries were also of the same view,
and they entered the educational field with enthusiasm, providing
schools and colleges in many parts of India, where education in the
Christian Bible was compulsory for Hindu students. The middle classes
accepted Western education with avidity and willingly studied Christian
scriptures, but neither the dissolution of Hindu society so hopefully
predicted nor the conversion of the intellectuals so devoutedly hoped for
showed any signs of materialization. On the other hand, Hinduism
assimilated the new learning, and the effects were soon visible all over
India in a revival of a universalized religion based on the Vedanta.

It is necessary to remember that, though the Hindu religion has in-
numerable cults and sects, the philosophic background of all of them -
including Buddhism - is the Vedanta. The doctrine of the Vedanta is
contained in three authoritative texts - which are not scriptures - the

INDIA 243

Brahma Sutras, the Upanishads and the Gita. Every orthodox sect in
India derives its authority directly from these and, as has been stated in
the previous chapter, the protagonists of each new religious sect have
had to demonstrate how their own teachings flowed directly from these
three sources. Thus it was that Sankara, the reformer of Hinduism in
the eighth century, had to write his commentary on all the three. It is to
the doctrines of the Vedanta, as embodied in the Upanishads, that Ram
Mohan Roy turned when he also felt the need of a new religious inter-
pretation.

The Vedantic reformation which was thus in the air found its most
widely accepted exponent in Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda was a
Western-educated Bengali who came under the influence of Rama-
krishna, a mystic whose personality had made a deep impression on the
Bengali society of his day. Vivekananda was fired by a desire to revive
Hinduism and purify its religious and social teachings. Initiated a San-
yasi, he toured the length and breadth of India spreading the gospel of
Vedanta. A prolonged visit to America and a tour in England inflamed
his patriotism, his desire to rejuvenate Hindu society and to give Hindu-
ism a social purpose. His fervent declaration that he did not 'believe in a
religion that does not wipe out the widow's tears or bring a piece of bread
to the orphan's mouth' expresses clearly the changed temper of Hindu-
ism. His own mission he described as follows. Answering the question:
'What do you consider to be the function of your movement as regards
India?' the Swami said: 'To find the common bases of Hinduism and to
awaken the national consciousness to them.* That common basis he
found in the Vedanta which he interpreted in popular phraseology and
preached untiringly all over India. 

He not only preached this gospel, but trained up a body of mission-
aries, men of education, pure life and religious zeal to carry this message
to the villages.

There were innumerable other Sanyasis and learned men who,
though belonging to no particular sect, were preaching the same prin-
ciples all over India. In fact, the revival of Vedanta in Hindu thought at
the end of the nineteenth century constitutes a religious movement of
national significance. It was at the end of this period that Aurobindo
gave what may be called the classic exposition of the entire Vedanta
doctrine in his Essays on the Gita and later in his Life Divine. By this,
Vedanta may be said to have been restored to its place as the common
background of all Hindu religious thought.

The unifying doctrine was the Vedanta, but the abstract conceptions
of this philosophical approach could only appeal to the elite. Popular
Hinduism continued in the old way, sectarian, devotional and based on
daily rituals. But is also underwent extraordinary changes. The gnarled

244 ASIA AND WESTERN DOMINANCE

branches of this ancient tree either fell away by themselves or were
chopped off by legislative action promoted by the reformers. Child
marriage, which many Hindu communities considered as an essential
part of their religion., was abolished by law through the insistence of
popular agitation. The remarriage of widows was permitted. Social
disabilities based on caste vanished by themselves, and the occupational
basis of caste-communities was weakened. Temples were thrown open
to the untouchables, and in the most orthodox province of Madras,
Hindu religious endowments were placed under the control of public
bodies. The movement for the regeneration of the depressed classes
assumed a national character, and their participation in social and
political life became a major factor in the last days of British rule.
Popular Hinduism had a more vigorous life than it ever had in the im-
mediately preceding times, but it had in the course of a hundred years
changed its character and temper, though it had kept much of its form.
The major difficulty of Hinduism which had made it a wild jungle
growth of widely varying customs, usages and superstitions was its lack
of a machinery of reform and unification. The institutions of Hinduism,
which in a large measure got identified with the religion itself, were the
results of certain historical factors. They were upheld by law and not by
religion. Vivekananda put the point well when he wrote: 'Beginning from
Buddha down to Ram Mohan Roy, everyone made the mistake of hold-
ing caste to be a religious institution But in spite of all the ravings of

the priests, caste is simply a crystallized social institution, which after
doing its service is now filling the atmosphere of India with stench. 5

The caste organization, the joint family, the rights of inheritance and
the relationships arising out of them, which in the main are the special
features of Hindu society, are legal and not religious. They are man-
made institutions which do not claim Divine origin or religious sanction,
and are upheld by man-made laws and not by any church or priesthood.
It is a truism to say that legislation of today meets the social needs of
yesterday and, unavoidably, law, as a conservative force, lags one step
behind social necessities. When the great codes of Hindu Law were
evolved, no doubt they represented the social forces of the time, but
soon they had become antiquated. The succession of authoritative com-
mentaries would show that the urge for modifications was widely felt
and, in the absence of a legislative authority, the method of a progressive
interpretation in each succeeding generation was the only one available
to Hindu thinkers.

The immutability of Hindu law and customs was never a principle
with the authors of the great codes or their commentators. In fact, the
monumental volumes of Dr Kane's History of Dharma Sastra would
demonstrate clearly that in every age social thinkers tried to adjust Hindu

INDIA 245

institutions to the requirements of the time. If the laws are changeable it
follows that the institutions which are based on such laws are equally
changeable. The great weakness of Hindu society was not that the laws
had remained immutable, but that the changes introduced had been
spasmodic, local and dependent to a large extent on the ingenuity of
individual commentators. They were not in any sense a continuous
renovation of legal principles, nor a legislative approximation to chang-
ing conditions.

The reason for this lack of direction of social ideas and the failure to
prevent the growth of anti-social customs was undoubtedly the loss of
political power. Not only was India as a whole never under a single
sovereign authority, but even the political unity of North India which
existed with occasional breaks from the time of the Mauryas (320 BC)
to that of Harsha (AD 637) was broken up by the political conditions of
the eighth century and lost for a period of 700 years with the Muslim
invasion of the twelfth century. As a result, the Hindu community con-
tinued to be governed by institutions moulded by laws which were
codified over 2,000 years ago and which were out of date even when they
were codified.

**acharya** · 08-09-2008, 07:06 AM

QUOTEThe Muslim State had no legislative machinery, and when for the first
time India was united under the British and the entire Hindu com-
munity lived under a common administration., the authorities of the East
India Company after a first effort at social reform withdrew, under the
pretext of religious neutrality, from activities which they thought might
cause popular upheaval. Perhaps it was a wise step, as the motive force of
large-scale social reforms must come from the people themselves and
legislation can only give statutory sanction to principles which have
already gained wide acceptance. The reformation of the Hindu religion
was therefore an essential prerequisite of social legislation.

It was only after the Great War that the legislating State came into
existence in India. Under the scheme of partial self-government intro-
duced in 1921, there was established a central legislative authority with a
majority of non-official elected Indians, which was both competent to
change the laws of Hindu society and to enforce obedience to such laws
through the length and breadth of India. In the provinces the direction of
government passed in a large measure to elected legislatures. The
legislative achievements of the Central and Provincial Governments in
the field of social reform have been fundamental, though they did not go
anywhere as far as the public demanded. The Civil Marriage Act and the
Age of Consent Act (raising the marriageable age of girls to 14) were
among the more important pieces of legislation which the Central Indian
Legislative Assembly enacted. The Civil Marriage Act validates mar-
riages between men and women of different castes of Hinduism. It strikes

at the very root of the orthodox Brahminical conception of caste, and
annuls the laws of Manu and the other orthodox codes of Hinduism.
'The immutable law 5 , prohibiting Varna-Samkara or the mixture of
castes, ceased by this single piece of legislation to operate through the
length and breadth of India. The Age of Consent Act was equally
revolutionary. It was the custom for over two thousand years at least for
large sections of people to have girls married before the age of puberty.
There was not only long tradition behind the custom, but it was con-
sidered compulsory at least for Brahmins in the light of certain authori-
tative texts. The Indian legislature made this custom illegal, though
it had so much religious authority behind it, and the performance of
such marriages became a penal offence.

Thus by the end of the third decade, the Hindu reformation had made
enough progress to enable the new society to direct its social forces
towards general betterment.

The reformation of Hinduism has been treated in some detail, because
without an appreciation of its consequences the effects of Western
education on Indian society will not be fully clear. The first educational
attempts of the East India Company were, it should be remembered, in
the direction of reviving Sanskrit and Arabic studies. The study of
English had for some time been a voluntary pursuit, and a few mission
colleges, notably the college at Serampore, had helped to popularize
Western knowledge. But it was only in 1835 that, under the inspiration
of Macaulay, the decision was taken to promote English education in
India as a Government policy. Macaulay laid down a few propositions
which he considered as axiomatic. He held 'we ought to employ them
(our funds) in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better
worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic; that it is possible to make
natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars and to this end
our efforts ought to be directed 5 . Accepting this view, the Government
of India laid down that the object of the British Government ought to be
the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of
India. This had long been demanded by the progressive Indian thinkers
of the time, and it is necessary to emphasize a fact which has often been
forgotten in recent criticism, that the demand for Western education had
come primarily from Indian leaders themselves.

Following the decision of the Government, schools and colleges began
springing up in provincial capitals, but a co-ordinated system on an all-
India basis was put into effect only in 1854. The broad objective of this
policy was enunciated in a memorable dispatch in the following words:
c lt is neither our aim nor our desire to substitute the English language
for the vernacular dialects of the country It is indispensable, there-
fore, that in any general system of education, the study of them should

be assiduously attended to, and any acquaintance with improved Euro-
pean knowledge which is to be communicated to the great mass of people
can only be conveyed to them through one or other of these languages.*
Following this, the universities were started in the major capitals of
Indian provinces, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Allahabad and a vast
field was opened for missionary effort.

The Macaulayan system, under which a systematic effort was made
by a powerful government to educate in a foreign language the upper
classes of a vast country, has now continued for over a hundred years.
India even after her independence, has not radically altered the system,
for in most universities and colleges English still continues to { be the
medium of instruction.

The weaknesses of the system are many and can easily be summarized.
It created an impassable chasm between the English educated cksses and
others, including those educated in the traditional way. The wastage of
effort involved not only in acquiring mastery in a different language but
in studying all other subjects through it was immense. A wholly dispro-
portionate emphasis was placed on literary studies. Also the attempted
transplantation on Indian soil of what was an altogether alien culture
took many decades to get acclimatized, and at least in the case of the first
two generations there was a noticeable tendency to create a class of men,
no doubt with competent knowledge of English, but uncertain of their
values, barren in their thought and unadapted to their surroundings. 
But when all this and more has been said and the truth of the criticism
accepted, the credit balance of this unique experiment still remains
substantial and impressive.

In the first place, the system of higher education in English provided
India with a class imbued with social purposes foreign to Hindu
thought. The continuity and persistence of those purposes achieved the
socio-religious revolution on which the life of modern India is based.
While British administration did little, if anything, to emancipate the
spirit, to extinguish the prejudices, to eradicate the ravages of ignorant
custom and pernicious superstition, to encourage and stimulate thought,
the New Learning which came to India through its introduction to the
English language on a nation-wide scale undoubtedly did all this. In-
deed, it may be argued that the essential contradiction of the British rule
in India lay in this: the constituted government upheld the validity of
customs, maintained and administered laws which denied the principles
of social justice, refused to legislate for changes urgently called for by
society, watched with suspicion the movement of liberal ideas, while the
officially sponsored and subsidized educational system was undermining
everything that the Government sought to uphold. The schools and
colleges taught young men the idea of liberty while the Government did

everything to suppress It. In the educational system the Government
created and maintained an opposition to itself on a plane where its own
methods were ineffective.

**acharya** · 08-09-2008, 07:15 AM

QUOTE
The mining of the ancient fortress of Hindu custom was a major
achievement, for the reason that it was uniformly spread all over India.
Had the new education been through the Indian languages, the emphasis
of the movement would have been different from province to province,
according to the development, flexibility and character of the language
used. No doubt the reformation of Hinduism would still have come
about, but it would not have been on an all-India basis. There would
have been no 'master plan' of change and, instead of the Hindu com-
munity being unified, it would have split into as many different units as
there are languages in India, and would have repeated the pattern of
Europe with its conglomeration of mutually hostile units within the same
Christian community. From this development India was saved by the
common medium of education which Macaulay introduced into India.

In the second place, it is a point of major significance in the evolution
of India as a single nation that this uniform system of education through-
out India through a single language produced a Uke-mindedness on
which it has been possible to build. That it gave to India a common
language for political thinking and action is of less importance than the
creation of this like-mindedness, this community of thought, feeling and
ideas which created the Indian nationality. The mind of India is united
spiritually by Hindu religious thought, by the binding force of the great
tradition which Sanskrit embodies and which, through the Indian lan-
guages that still reflect and convey that tradition, continues to be a
living factor, and by the new community of ideas and approach which
English education has spread among the dominant classes. Of these
three factors, the one which unites India politically, and makes it possible
for Indians to act as a single nation and build up a new society, is the last.

The first two are the permanent basis of Hindu civilization. They need
not and could not have by themselves created a unified nation without
the cementing force of like-mindedness in politics. The unity of Hindu
life and the common tradition of a Sanskrit culture are analogous to the
Christian religion and Latin tradition in Western Europe, and yet by its
emphasis on regional languages and the absence of a cementing factor in
secular life, Europe's development was through fragmentation. Except
for a hundred years of uniform education through the English language
the result would have been the same in India. 

Further, this education through the English language enabled India
to share, not derivatively or second-hand but directly, the results of the
great movement of Enlightenment in Europe. The historic and truly
magnificent work of the eighteenth-century thinkers of Europe had,Â
after a period of revolution and unsettlement, become the living thought
of the nineteenth century. Through a hundred channels it was fertilizing
the life of Europe at the very time that English education was spreading
in India. From explosive revolutionary slogans, 'liberty, equality and
fraternity' had become transformed into the respectable creed of
liberalism. Even in traditional England, law was undergoing a reform
which was soon to affect India also. The greatest good of the greatest
number had become an acceptable formula in a country to which an
exclusive Whig oligarchy had given prosperity, security and an Empire
spread over the four corners of the world. To this thought India became
an adopted heir, and though English administrators spoke contemp-
tuously of natives talking the language of their masters and aping the
manners and mannerisms of their betters and not understanding the
inner significance of the words by which they were swearing, it is un-
deniable that as time went on and one generation after another grew up
on these principles, the apparent contradiction of a Brahmin talking
about equality and fraternity became reconciled. The Hindu middle
classes had become acclimatized to European thought in a way that few
people had anticipated.

India emerged by a peaceful revolution as a modern society mainly
because the gradual penetration of ideas was through education spread
over a fairly large and representative class. It is often alleged against the
Indian system of education that it failed to filter through to the masses.
On a careful examination, this criticism will be found to be unjustified.
It is true that the authors of the scheme had hoped that, as a result of
infiltration, Hindu society, which was then considered to be in a process
of dissolution, would disappear and the population of India would be
saved for Christ. This was the Grand Design which made the mission-
aries ardent advocates of the scheme. That hope did not materialize. In
fact, far from India turning Christian, the progress of English education
only led, as we saw, to a large-scale reformation of Hinduism and a more
rational interpretation of its dogmas* It led to a remarkable strengthen-
ing of the hold of Hinduism on the masses and its own emergence as a
leading world religion. In that sense the theory of filtering down had the
very opposite effect from what Macaulay and his friends in their com-
placency had imagined. It is therefore no matter for surprise that the
missionary educators should consider that the object on which they had
spent so much money and energy had failed.

The extent to which the theory of infiltration succeeded can best be
seen by the extraordinary growth of the vernaculars of India during the
last half-century. Few European scholars have tried to understand the
literary activity which transformed these languages into great and living
vehicles of thought and artistic creation entitling most of them to places

of honour in the literatures of the modern world. Languages like Hindi,
spoken by over a hundred millions; Bengali, the mother tongue of
seventy millions; Gujerati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kanarese and
Malaydam theleastof themspokenby a population of more thanfifteen
millions, have all, during the last half-centime witnessed an immense
amount of literary activity, the echoes of which have only very occasion-
ally reached the West. It will hardly be denied that this activity, which is
the genuine reflection of the new humanism which India has developed,
is the result of the infiltration of Western ideas and thought. Indian
intellectual effort has so far been judged by the work of Indian writers in
English. Insignificant in number and not too original, and with very
little distinctive quality to contribute, the poets, essayists and literateurs
of Indo-Anglian literature, as it is called, cannot claim to represent
either the modern Indian mind or be considered the examples of India's
creative capacity. The genuine results of English education in India, the
reaction of the Indian mind to the vital movements of European culture
introduced to them through English, are to be seen in the work of Tagore,
Iqbal, Buddha Deva Bose, Sarat Chandra Chatterji, Prem Chand, K. M.
Munshi, Vallathol, Sankara Kurup and a host of other great writers who
have enriched the literatures of modern Indian languages. Some idea of
the quality of their work reached the West through the popularity
achieved in Europe by the translations of Tagore's work; but, generally
speaking, it has been a closed book to European scholars.

Three stages may be observed in the development of these languages.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century each one of these languages
could boast of a literature which contained some of the masterpieces of
poetic inspiration. There were in Hindi the great works of Tulsidas,
Surdas and Kesavadas; in Bengali of Vidyapati, Chandidas and Krittibas.
In Tamil there was a classical literature which claimed to rival the glories
of Sanskrit. In Marathi, Gujerati and the rest the position was similar.
There was a poetic literature of undoubted excellence, which was greatly
cherished by the people; but all the same they were vernaculars, for
education was through tie classics, Sanskrit or Persian. Learning and
scholarship had relation only to the classical languages. It was therefore
true of all these languages that they had no books which could be used as
textbooks in the new educational scheme.

This period also witnessed the secularization of the vernacular
literature. As mentioned before, the development of literature in these
languages was almost exclusively in the realm of poetry and the themes
of such poetry were predominantly religious. All the great names in the
different vernacular literatures before the nineteenth century - Tulsidas,
Surdas, Kabir, Mira, Vidyapati, Chandidas, Tukaram - were of those
associated with devotional religion. In fact, historically, the revival ofÂ
religion in the Middle Ages and the growth of vernacular literatures
were two aspects of the same development. The popularization of the
Rama and Krishna cults, which constituted so important a feature in the
life of medieval India, was achieved through the work of vernacular
poets, and as a result the literatures of what became modern Indian
languages started in the nineteenth century, heavily overladen with a
religious tradition. The secular tradition in these literatures was confined
mainly to erotic poetry.

The secularization of literature was the work of the first part of the
nineteenth century, mainly as a result of the infiltration of English ideas.
For this development essential preparatory work, such as the production
of authoritative dictionaries and grammars, was done in most cases by
missionaries and other foreigners who had scientific training in other
languages. For example, it was the German missionary Gundert who, at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, wrote an authoritative diction-
ary of the Malayalam language. It is Bishop Caldwell's Comparative
Grammar of the Dravidian Languages that formed the groundwork of
linguistic studies in the south. The work of the Serampore missionaries
in laying the foundation of the modern developments in Bengal is
generally accepted.

dhu · (This post was last modified: 08-10-2008, 08:42 AM by dhu.)

QUOTEBibliography about Asian Interactions with Europe

âIndia and Europe: an Essay in Understandingâ Wilhelm Halbfass. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.

âRome and Indiaâ Begley, V. and de Puma, R.D., eds. University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

âGreeks in Indiaâ Woodcock, G. London: Faber: 1966.

"Before European Hegemony â The World System A.D. 1250-1350," Janet L. Abu-Lughod. Oxford University Press, New York.

"Asia in the Making of Europe. Volume III," Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley. University of Chicago Press. 1993.

âThe East in the West,â Jack Goody. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

âThe Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,â John Hobson. Cambridge University Press. 2004.

âAryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Scienceâ, Stefan Arvidsson (Author), Sonia Wichmann (Translator). University Of Chicago Press (September 15, 2006)

"White Mythologies: Writing History and the West," Robert Young. Routledge, London, England. 1990.

"Explorations in Connected History." Sanjay Subrahmanyam. (2 vols.) Oxford Univ Press, 2005.

--"Connected Histories: Notes toward a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia." Modern Asian Studies, Vol 31 no 3. Special Issue: The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400-1800. July 1997. 735-762.

âIndia in early Greek literatureâ, Karttunen, Klaus. 1989. Helsinki : Societas Orientalis Fennica. Karttunen,

âIndia and the Hellenistic Worldâ Klaus. 1997. Helsinki : Finnish Oriental Society. Studia Orientalia.

âProvincializing Europeâ. Dipesh Chakrabarty. Princeton University Press, 2000

Asian Philosophy and Religion and Europe

âJung and Eastern Thoughtâ , Harold G. Coward. SUNY Press, 1985.

âInfluences: Ancient Hinduism Dramatically changed Early Christianityâ, , A.L. Herman, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

"Oriental Enlightenment," , J.J. Clarke. Routledge, London and New York, 1997.

"The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies," , Thomas McEvilley. Allworth Press. New York. 2002.

âThe Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanujaâ, Anne Hunt Overzee. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

âReligion and Nothingnessâ, Nishitani Keiji. UCLA Press, 1983.

Asian Trade Links With Europe

âCommerce between Roman Empire and Indiaâ Warmington, E H. Cambridge Univ Press, 1928.

âReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age," Andre Gunder Frank. University of California Press. 1998.

"Poverty From the Wealth of Nations: Integration and Polarization in the Global Economy since 1760," , M. Shahid Alam Palgrave Publishers Ltd., Hampshire, Great Britain, 2000

Asian Literature and West

âT S Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Beliefâ,Â Cleo McNelly Kearns Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Asian Science and Mathematics and Europe

âCultural Foundations of Mathematics : The Nature of Mathematical Proof and Transmission of the Calculus From India to Europe in the 16th c. CE.â Raju, C.K. 2007. Eastern Book Corporation

âThe Crest of the Peacock: The Non-European Roots of Mathematicsâ, George Gheverghese Joseph. 2000. Publisher: Princeton University Press

âLost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Mayaâ , Dick Teresi. Simon & Schuster (October 1, 2003)

âTowards a Global Science," , Susantha Goonatilake. Indiana University Press. 1998.

Asian Arts and Europe

âThe Indian Styleâ , Raymond Head. Univ of Chicago Press (September 1986)Â

âEncounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800.â London : V&A ; New York : Distributed in North America , Harry N. Abrams, 2004.

âSelected lectures of Rudolf Wittkower : the impact of non-European civilizations on the art of the West.â Wittkower, Rudolf.Â Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1989

âDramatic concepts Greek & Indian: a study of the Poetics and the NÄá¹yaÅÄstraâ, Gupt, Bharat. New Delhi : D.K. Printworld, 1994.

Indo-European Languages
..

Prichard, James Cowles. The eastern origin of the Celtic nations proved , a comparison of their dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic languages: forming a supplement to researches into the physical hist Published London, Houlston and Wright

**acharya** · (This post was last modified: 08-25-2008, 11:29 AM by acharya.)

QUOTE("ramana")I think the defining moment was the defeat in the 1857 war. With it the idea of old India died. The old India was the one that thought that as long as the English allowed the Mughal Emperor his place in Delhi, they were their own masters. With the Mughal Emperor went the old India.

The Brahmins who had hitherto fore resisted the old invaders decided to take up the NewÂ Education (naya talim) and joined the British system and did very well. Taking up New Education by the Brahmins devalued the old system as nothing else could.
It was not enough the menfolk took up new education but actively disparaged the old system. It is this that has given the Brutus blow and not the Macauleyite education.
However some folks retained the old values in their homes but accepted the new system outside their homes. Mark Tully remarks on this in his book "Forty Years of Independence" how modern educated Indians revert to traditional values in their homes. But others do not and they are the core of the earlier Well Off Modern Indians(WMI Of Naipaul) and a superset of them became the DeRacinated Indian Elite(DIE) of present day.

Since Independence others too took up the new education as there was more access and dislodged the Brahmins from their primacy. There is double jeopardy now for the old adherents of the New Education- they cant go back as they have successfully disparaged and devalued the old system and thanks to the new education the masses think they are the oppressors and should be denied any say. A true Trishanku swarga situation.

one of my uncles, a highly placed bureaucrat agonised in the early 90s about the IPR issues- that it was contrary to the ethos of Indian culture. A Indian/Hindu learned man is supposed o acquire all the knowledge that he can and give it away to his shisyas and in return he is given token guru dakshina for his merit is in how much he has transferred to his shisyas and he is known thru them. So how can he put limits on the knowledge that was given to him by Goddess Saraswati?

He retired way before the WTO came into effect.

Good report.
You have omitted what happened After Independence . This is crucial to understand.
At independence there was a chance to change the education to recover all the old tradition which was degraded and bring out the best into the system. But the generation at independence was already into the modernism culture and neglected the Indian traditional system. The western groups were able to influence the Indian intellectuals to disparage the Indian traditions and thought process deeply. India in true sense did not get real independence since the ruling elite was still connected to the colonial thinking and identified with the western elite.

This debate inside the Indian intellectual elite is still raging and has not ended. But the decline of modernism and failure of post modernism to reconcile with multiculturalism is making sure that grip of the marxist/modernist in the Indian intellectual space will wither away.

http://www.indiastar.com/wallia19.html
QUOTE"Eminent Historians," the ironic title of his latest book comes from the self-description a group of Marxist historians, most of them academics, arrogated for themselves while signing a newspaper petition during the Ayodhya controversy. Although the group is not large in number, (42 is the maximum), the same set has also preempted for itself the titles of "prominent social scientists" and "leading intellectuals" in similar public petitions. The Marxist party line is to project Hindus as exploitative feudalists and Muslims as liberators! Arun Shourie's major thesis: During the past fifty years, "this bunch of Marxist historians have been suppressing facts, inventing lies, perverting discourse, and derailing public policy" by seizing control of institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT), large parts of Indian academia, and nearly all of the English-media newspapers and publishing houses.

Included as principals in this group of Marxist historians are Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, K.M.Pannikar, R.S. Sharma, D. N. Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, and Irfan Habib. This group has, Shourie charges, "worked a diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion [Hinduism], the pluralist spiritual search of our people and land, they have projected as intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory religions and ideologies -- Islam, Christianity, Marxism-Leninism-- they have made out to be the epitome of tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy, secularism!" By promoting each other's publications and puffing up their reputations, this group has long been "determining what is politically correct." One measure of the insidious control these "verbal terrorists" have been exercising over the English-medium publishing industry in India is that Arun Shourie, despite his huge readership, had to self-publish his books.

For several decades, these "eminent historians" have striven hard to continually denigrate Hindu cultural history, the oldest surviving civilization in the world, by "blackening the Hindu period and whitewashing the Islamic period." Indeed, Shourie should have challenged them to refute American historian Will Durant's assertion in hisThe Story of Civilization:Â "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." Or that of French historian Alain Danielou's statement, in his Histoire de l' Inde : "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races."

As the book's subtitle promises, Shourie succeeds in unmasking these self-proclaimed eminents of "their technology, their line, their fraud" by focusing on specifics as exemplified below: his own television debates with some of these "eminent historians"; their failures to respond to published challenges by historians and scholars of persuasions other than Marxist; their documented efforts at distorting established historical evidence.

The timing of the year 1857 is very important since that is the beginning of the modern age and also middle of the intellectual revolution in the western world. Educated Indians after that were caught up in the modern age and by 1947 the entire elite educated in the western world was 'modern' and was ready to discard the traditional system. Into this situation the marxist philosophy and socialism/leftism etc was added to create an entire generation which started believing in all these manufactured perception. Several writers and 'intellectuals' still show their education and world view even today.

**acharya** · 10-05-2008, 12:05 PM

http://www.easas.org/?q=panel39
Home
PANEL 39: Nationalisms and their Impact in South Asia

Panel Organizers:

Dr. James Chiriyankandath - Department of Law, London Metropolitan University, UK
Dr. Pritam Singh - Oxford Brookes University Business School, Oxford, UK

Abstract

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries South Asia underwent a far-reaching political, social and cultural metamorphosis as a consequence of the impact of modern nationalism. Inspired by anti-colonial, religious, cultural and ethnic impulses, and shaped by the changing political economy, nationalism resulted in the creation of new states and the recasting of ideas of political community. The purpose of this panel will be to enrich our understanding of the multidimensional impact of nationalism in South Asia through exploring different aspects of the changes that it contributed to. It will be interdisciplinary in its approach, seeking to draw together understandings and insights into nationalism furnished by the application of different perspectives in the social sciences and humanities.

Contributors to the panel are invited to offer papers on a variety of aspects, whether historical or contemporary, of the nationalisms that have emerged in the subcontinent. As well as the diverse currents in the Indian national movement (Gandhian, Nehruvian, Hindutva etc.), pan-Indian in scope but rather different in their emphasis, and the Pakistan movement, this encompasses a multiplicity of ethnically based and regional sub-nationalisms. Papers mapping the differences and similarities in the rise of these competing nationalisms and the responses of the new nation states to the challenges posed by regional sub-nationalisms will be welcome. These could include critical treatment of the application of different theoretical paradigms to the competing nationalisms in South Asia, the exploration of different ideological currents within nationalist movements, comparative studies drawing on regional nationalisms in other parts of the world, consideration of the influence of the process of globalisation on the rise of regional sub-nationalisms in South Asia and intimate studies of the transformation of the lives of individuals. The selection of papers will aim to address the broad impact of nationalism, ranging from the ideology, politics and symbolism of nationalist movements to the reconstitution of individual and communal identity, the problem of minorities, and the implications for the current and future politics and economics of South Asian countries.

Session 1:

James Chiriyankandath, London Metropolitan University (City campus),London, United Kingdom

Imagining Nations, Creating States: Zionism and Indian nationalism

This paper explores the phenomenon of "religious nationalism" with particular reference to the experience of an individual and his community. Just nine months separated the bloody partitions of the Indian subcontinent and Palestine in 1947,48. As the subcontinent was being partitioned by competing nationalisms marked by religion, Zionist efforts bore fruit in the partition of Palestine and the displacement of the Palestinian Arabs. Juxtaposing the two stories illustrates how religion and nationalism served to unravel and transform long held notions of identity, political loyalty and geographical attachment. The paper compares the Zionist and Indian nationalist uses of religious identity as a constitutive factor in nationalism before considering the experience of one community caught up in the cross currents, the Jews of Cochin on the south,western coast of India. It then examines the career of A.B. Salem, an Indian nationalist and Zionist from Cochin. It concludes by highlighting the disruptive consequences of utilising religious identity to underpin modern nationalism and the need to rediscover pluralistic and accommodative notions of state and communal identity.

Yaqoob Khan Bangash, Keble College, Faculty of Modern History, Oxford, UK

The Awakening of Baloch Nationalism 1933,48

Balochistan has recently become the toughest internal challenge for the federal government of Pakistan. The current insurgency in the province, however, is of a very old birth having been launched at least three times in the past. This sixty year old conflict can be very easily traced back to 1933 and the assumption of full ruling powers by Mir Ahmed Yar Khan as the Khan of Kalat-the most important princely state in Balochistan. Ahmed Yar Khan was a young, educated and dynamic ruler, who unlike his predecessors, had the vision of transforming Kalat into what he termed as âGreater Balochistan'-a country comprising of parts of the British Empire, Iran and Afghanistan. This vision and the British induced modernization of this tribal area led to the creation of a political movement very aware and proud of its strategic position and tribal traditions. This movement soon gave birth to organized political parties which were peculiar in their tribal allegiances and leftist and secularist ideology in this very conservative and religious society. Increasingly vocal and powerful, the politicians of Kalat managed to attain a measure of self government just a few months after the British Transfer of Power and the declaration of Independence by Kalat. Very nationalistic and suspicious of any foreign influence, these Balochis were the bulwark that kept Kalat from acceding to Pakistan well into 1948, and then too only after a clear threat of military action.

With the above as historical background this paper will trace the early development of the Baloch national movement. Taking the person of Ahmed Yar Khan as critical in the formation of pan,Baloch identity and notions of self rule, the paper will study the motives and strategy behind the creation of the Kalat State National Party (the first political organisation of its kind) in September 1937 under the patronage of several important tribal leaders. The paper will also delve into the comparative study as to why religious nationalism failed to develop in Balochistan, as well as the NWFP, as compared to the other regions where Muslims were in a majority especially when the former regions were among the most conservative religiously. The rapid social change and interaction with foreigners, the recognition of its importance viz. the Soviet Union and Iran, and the forceful assertion that Baloch were ânon,Indian' will form major themes in the paper. The paper will conclude with an assessment of the first Baloch insurgency in 1948, led by the princes' brother, especially focusing on questions on national identity, national grievances and self government among Baloch nationalists together with its immediate and long term impact on stability and national cohesion in nascent state of Pakistan.

Roland Kulke, UniversitÃ¤t Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
The Indian Controversy on the History Schoolbooks: Civil,Society, a New Hegemonic Ideology and âPathological' Learning Processes Concerning Deliberations in the Public Sphere

Hindutva can be understood as an attempt to re,establish a commonly accepted idea for what Â´IndiaÂ´ stands for, after the declining hegemonic position of Nehruvian nationalism. It is no longer possible to accuse the Sangh Parivar of âfascism'. It is time to analyse the positive possibilities which lie in a movement which had proved that it can integrate large parts of the (Hindu,) population of India , comparable to European Christian parties in the 19th century which integrated vast parts of the people in the process of modernisation who did not accept the offer of class based politics.

Not only is the imposition of the new âgrand national narrative' important, but the way in which this happens has to be examined because periods of intense âideological warfare' are times in which long lasting social learning processes take place.

This question I pose in my paper in which I examine the way in which different civil,society organisations, parties and parts of the public administration are engaged in a battle concerning the question what kind of Nationalism should be taught to the children in school.

Arguments:

1. The textbook controversy is part of the wider struggle between secular and Hindu,nationalistic forces for cultural and political hegemony in India.

2. The struggle of intellectuals belonging to different social groupings for the establishment of their paradigm (how to perceive the Indian nation) as hegemonic leads to conflicts in the public administration. With the help of established research and academic institutions, they try to establish (respectively preserve) a lasting institutionalisation of âtheir' paradigm.

3. The toughness of the mutual contestation amongst leading intellectuals of the Indian elite is a threat to the emergence of an autonomous civil society with a working public sphere.

4. However the Textbook Controversy also reveals certain similarities of Hindu national and Secular leftist perceptions in regard to the threats against the Indian culture.

5. The Textbook Controversy reveals a deficit of the Indian civil society in terms of the emergence of a coherent self,perception. One has to admit that there is up to now no space where citizens deliberate upon common objectives outside the sphere of state,power.

Session 2

Dibyesh Anand, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom

Lethal stereotypes: Hindu Nationalism in India and its enemies

For movements that can be classed as politically Right, a hagiography of the Self is based upon the representations of Other as threatening. The Hindutva in India is no exception. Its claims of representing a Hindu nation, while at the same time acting to construct a coherent Hindu nation, has at its core a conception of threatening Others. These Others are the two numerically significant minority communities in India - the Muslims and the Christians. As the developments throughout the last century in general, and 1990 onward in particular, show, the figure central to the imagination of Hindutva is âthe Muslim' - a version of Muslim masculinity deriving its danger from a mix of stereotypes of religion (Islam), history (a violent history), physicality (virile), and culture (backward, corrupt and immoral). The paper argues that it is particular stereotypical representations of âthe Muslim' that helps us make sense of how extreme collective violence against Muslims is normalised, underplayed, and legitimised in the collective imaginary of many Hindutva followers. My argument is not that cultural representations of the minorities directly contribute to their killing, but that these representations facilitate particular forms of violence (such as the extreme use of sexual violence), mask instrumentalist aspects of violence, and often allow the business,as,usual attitude for many within the majority community of Hindus in India. The victims (in most case minorities) are cast as the instigators, while the Hindu Self comes out as tolerant. The paper examines the lethality of stereotypes through the site of anti,Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. It foregrounds gender politics as central to understanding violence against minorities. Rather than focusing on the role of women as victims as well as perpetrators of violence, the paper brings into relief the role of men and competing masculinities.

Raminder Kaur, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Bordering the Impossible:The Crisis of identity and nationalist utopias in contemporary India cinema

This paper investigates the resurgence of nationalist imagery through a consideration of Indian popular cinema from the 1990s. It does so in a context of heightened antagonism with Pakistan, the prominence of nuclear armament, the rising popularity of Hindu nationalism and the effects of validating once's national status against cross,currents of globalisation. The legacy of Partition and the unresolved issue of Kashmir also continue to raise their heads in this turbulent mixture. Whilst attention has been focused upon the romance movies of the 1990s (Dwyer, Uberoi), the rise of âwar/battle movies' in this decade has received little scholarly commentary.

By considering films such as Border, Mission Kashmir, Terrorist, and Kohram (Chaos), I highlight the factors that have led to the prominence of such movies. Demonisation of Pakistan, extolling the virtues of brave Indian soldiers (jawans), the sacralisation of Indian national territory and populations (âthe common man'), and their implications for romance and family values are some of the features that characterise these movies. Claims for coherency in representations become more pronounced at times of worldly crisis. As Kobena Mercer argues, âIdentity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty'. I look at what strategies are deployed to mitigate âdoubts and uncertainties' in the imagistic quest of such films for what might be deemed the impossible - fixity, coherency, and national integrity.

Pritam Singh, Oxford Brookes University Business School, Oxford, United Kingdom

The political economy of conflict between centrist Indian nationalism and the state,based regional nationalisms

This paper argues that in the shaping of the Indian political economy and the Indian nationhood in the post,1947 period, the conflict between the Centre,supported unified Indian nationalism and the aspirations of state, based regional nationalisms for decentralisation/autonomy/secession has played a key role. This conflict between unitarist Indian nationalism and diverse regional nationalisms is analysed in the context of tendencies towards centralisation and decentralisation in India. The paper examines the political economy of the conflict between centralising and decentralising tendencies in India.
The paper takes a historical perspective in examining this conflict. Though the pre,1947 political and economic forces are taken into account, the focus of the paper is on the post,1947 period. The paper concludes by examining the likely consequences of the neo,liberal policies pursued by the Indian government from 1991 on the tendencies towards centralisation and decentralisation. The likely impact of the 1991 policy paradigm on the relationship between the unitarist Indian nationalism and multiple state,based regional nationalism is briefly explored by way of an attempt to monitor the current and possible future scenarios for contesting nationalisms in India.

dhu · (This post was last modified: 10-25-2008, 07:11 PM by dhu.)

The Enlightenment as propaganda (or how to genocide 80 million Native Americans and "never bat an eye":

The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity

QUOTEThough it restates many of the boilerplate critiques of Eurocentrism, this book-delivered as lectures in Frankfurt in 1992-also offers some different angles on the European discovery of America. Dussel, a Mexican philosophy professor, articulates the grievance of Latin America, arguing that the conquest of America is essential to modernity as its "other face," the skeleton in the Enlightenment's closet. This survey of intellectual history can be heavy going and rhetorically stiff, but Dussel's corrective is clear: while the dominant Latin American classes like to speak of an "encounter" between two worlds, that approach conceals "the genocidal shock that devastated indigenous culture." Looking through the eyes of the conquered, Dussel intriguingly offers an alternative reconstruction of the achievements of indigenous Americans and an analysis of the psychic impact of the "foreign invasion." He doesn't advocate a return to the past, just a recognition of the often unhappy effects of modernity on his home region and culture.

dhu · (This post was last modified: 12-23-2008, 05:05 PM by dhu.)

QUOTESecular anti-Nationalism vs Cultural Nationalism - Part I
By: V Sundaram, IAS, Retd.
Nov-19-2008

I have just finished reading masterpiece of a book titled "INDIA A Cultural Decline or Revival"? by Bharat Gupt. The so-called educated people in India-usually pseudo-secular Indians with Western Education-take it for granted that Independence from the British Rule also ushered an era of cultural and social freedom in India. Bharat Gupt in this beautifully conceived and written book has carefully examined as to whether this is true or whether a dark age of cultural decline and barbarism descended on India after Independence.

To quote the brilliant words of Bharat Gupt from his preface: "It is further imagined that in spite of its poverty, India is admired by the richer nations of the West as a culturally evolved nation. This self-congratulation, lingering from the euphoric days of our freedom struggle, sounds now like the thunder on distant mountains shedding not a glimmer of hope on our present lives. For most of us our memory is enough to be a lived-through account of the cultural decline that set in barely within a decade after freedom. Any analysis is sufficient to counter the smug belief, still fostered in schools and political speeches about the superiority of our culture, once voiced in Iqbal"s song, "Saare Jahaan se acchaa Hindustan hamaaraa". Very insidiously this rhyme nurses a misplaced conviction that while many other ancient civilizations were wiped out in time, India alone is indestructible.... The song takes special pride in stating that while the Greek and Roman civilizations, the so-called predecessors of the West, lost to ravages of time, Indian civilization alone remains immortal".

According to Bharat Gupt such headiness was excusable during the struggle for freedom but is hardly justified after half a century of self-misrule. Our name and significance (naam-o-nishaan) are now "under gradual but marked erosion, fading faster than anything witnessed in the last millennium". The ravages of technology are greater than even those perpetrated by Islamic misrule for more than thousand years. Bharat Gupt argues and proves with force that in every sphere of life it is now obvious that India has not been able "to internalise European technology to march its own civilization concepts, the foreign techno-kaayaa into its traditional dharma-kaayaa".

Bharat Gupt, Reader (Associate Professor) in English, at the College of Vocational Studies, University of Delhi, holds two Master"s degrees, one from St. Stephen"s College, Delhi and another from Toronto. He did his doctoral research at the M.S. University of Baroda. His Doctoral Dissertation was on "A Comparison of Greek and Indian Dramatic Theories as given in the Poetics and the Natyasastra". Bharat Gupt was taught Sitar and Surbahar by Pandit Uma Shankar Mishra and musicology and classics by Acarya Brhaspati. Trained both in modern and traditional educational systems, he is also on the Visiting Faculty of National School of Drama, Delhi. For his interest in media studies he was awarded a fellowship to work at the McLuhan Program, University of Toronto. Author of several research articles, he has presented many papers at various international seminars. He has also published critical editions and translations of ancient Indian books on music and drama (Natyasastra, Chapter 28: Ancient Scales of Indian Music, Natyasastra, Chapter 17: A Critique of Theatrical Polyglossia., Natyasastra, Chapters 29 - 36, and Dibbuk).

In a breezy manner, in his preface, Bharat Gupt has traced the process of cultural and spiritual decline of India after Independence from decade to decade. He argues that after Independence, each passing decade, excepting perhaps the first (1947-1957), ushered in an uncomfortable, dislocating and deranging change. Only the decade of the 1950s was characterised by hope and optimism, within India, and as well in the minds of her well wishers in India and abroad. She was expected to perform by leaps as a developing nation by the international community. The optimism of this decade was symbolised by our first Prime Minister, called "Chaachaa Nehru" by his sycophants who spent his every Birthday, November 14, with school children as a State ritual. He projected the expectation that the nation was going to grow big and strong like its children. To quote the caustic words of Bharat Gupt "Every year in the capital of the reborn nation, international exhibitions connected its people to the big and small nations of the world. Perhaps in the fifties only the country like its kids and their Chaachaa could smile hopefully".

In the sixties, things continued to take some shape as schools and colleges expanded. "Temples of modern India" - a term coined by Nehru to describe the New Factories and Dams-gave employment to many. Yet the less lucky but more enterprising started moving away to far off lands in large numbers. The present prosperous lot of the Indian diaspora in North America and Europe left the country at this time. By now the stagnation in the economic growth of Socialist Order imposed upon the country in a dictatorial manner began to extract its price. Nevertheless, on account of strong nationalism, in spite of strong bullying by China in 1962 and a grievous injury by Pakistan in 1965, India was able to defend most of its territory and reaffirm its identity.

The seventies, in their first half, witnessed another triumph of nationalism when "Indira Gandhi played midwife to the birth of Bangladesh terminating a horrendous genocide of the Bangla Muslims and Hindus by the Punjabi Muslim army of West Pakistan. But giddy from her success, Indira Gandhi unheedingly consolidated the Socialist agenda to prune it of all liberal intellectual and democratic vitality that Nehru would not have liked to disappear". By the mid seventies, darker days set in. Indira Gandhi introduced emergency. External support to terrorism and internal regional factionalism cast their net around the nation. As Bharat Gupt puts it, "Both were promoted under many garbs by a pernicious propaganda masterminded in the bastions of Western subversive agencies and academics as well. To contain the politically centrifugal forces, Indira Gandhi, flushed with her earlier success, made the pendulum of State governance swing from the dictatorial Socialism at the Centre to conspiratorial manipulations in the regions, thus seriously eroding democracy".

The period from 1970 to 1980 was marked by a great illusion of all at the Left of Centre. They imagined that Socialism could be poured from the top like flowing river waters and that changes at the grassroots would automatically follow. This kind of make-believe Socialism created a class of corrupt and unscrupulous politicians who acquired total control over national wealth and perpetuated a licence-permit-control-quota Raj that killed personal enterprise and initiative, while very little from the State percolated to the poor.

Bharat Gupt rightly concludes that on the cultural front, in the name of Secularism, religious regression was promoted not only among minorities, but more so in the Hindu majority. Under the shadow of nurturing parochial minions for Centrist manipulations, regional outfits were promoted to such an extent that they went out of control. By the end of the decade in 1980, both the Socialist State and Nationalism came to be discredited.

The period from 1980 to 1990 was marked by the escalation of terrorist wars, caste polarisation and withering of Socialist State that revealed the himalayan corruption operating beneath. A proxy war against us was started by Pakistan in Punjab and Kashmir. A section of Indian policy-makers from Tamilnadu, started sympathising with the terrorist and separatist outfit of LTTE in Sri Lanka. But the final blunder of sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to eliminate LTTE was beyond belief and gave a severe blow to nationalism. The consolidation of the middle castes, which had acquired enough economic muscle to translate their cultural identity into a political clout, was subverted by cheap politicians like V P Singh, "under the impact of Western notions of ethnicity and compensatory discrimination under the garb of affirmative action for the so called OTHER BACKWARD CLASSES". Thus V P Singh gave a deathblow to the process of integration of Hindu society. The slogan of "social justice" has become another name for Social stagnation riding rough on the backs of the lowest castes. Reiteration of the caste identities has subverted Indian Nationalism. Every political party, for a handful of votes or a momentary alliance, pampers the regional, religious, or caste identities.

Thus Bharat Gupt rightly concludes that the new millennium has opened with glaring entropy in the Indian political system and social institutions. The ruling elite of legislators and bureaucrats is unable to handle even every day governance let alone crisis situations that are routine as sunrise. National interest seems to have been totally sacrificed at the altar of power struggle and corruption. In such a scenario there is a temptation to throw cultural matters into the background and focus on enforcement of law and defence of national territory. As Bharat Gupt brilliantly puts it: "But this is not an age of territorial invasions. It is the age of cultural invasion and subversion. Political territories are altered after the cultural landscape has been reordered from within. There are three distinct forces that have at present laid a strong siege of India after the Cold War and the fall of her politically supportive though hardly economically beneficial ally, namely the Soviet Union. They are, COMMERCIAL GLOBALISM, JEHADI ISLAM AND EVANLEGICAL CHRISTIANITY. India needs a new leadership to counter these three. This requires strategies born of a cool and analytical mind and least of all an emotional retaliation of the momentary kind that seems to be the fashion of the day".

Bharat Gupt is indeed a renaissance man in every sense of the word. He clearly brings out the fact that the levelling down of the first rate, the excellent, and the noble has been a very crucial part of the destruction of our national life after our Independence. Destruction of cultural history has proceeded, step by step, with the destruction of all the traditional, social, cultural and familial institutions in our ancient country. Bharat Gupt"s brilliant book brings to my mind the following words of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):

"Culture is nothing but sweetness and light. Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that as been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human sprit".

In the Mahabharata there is a shloka, which was perhaps incorporated into later day classical texts. The meaning and message of the shloka can be summarised as follows: "Give up the individual for the family, the family for the habitat, the habitat for land. But for the Aatman, give up the whole earth". According to Bharat Gupt this shloka offers a Neeti or practical ethics for organising a humane social order that provides as much for the single person as for its larger units. In the above shloka, Eka, Kula, Graama, Janapada, Prithvee and Aatman make up the mental and terrestrial shelves for the inner and outer being of an individual in the cultural context in Indian terms. Bharat Gupt brilliantly observes that the changes that have taken place in these areas can and do index the decline or revival in cultural life.

The same conceptual framework can also be seen in a verse in the Panchatantra. The Panchatantra, was originally a canonical collection of Sanskrit (Hindu) as well as Pali (Buddhist) animal fables in verse and prose. The original Sanskrit text, now long lost, and which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BC, is attributed to Vishnu Sarma. However, based as it is on older oral traditions, it illustrates, for the benefit of princes who may succeed to a throne, the central Hindu principles of Raja niti (political science) through an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales.

Based on the framework of a verse in the Panchatantra, Bharat Gupt"s book has been divided into six parts: Eka (person), Kula (family), Graama (habitat), Janapada (land), Prithvee (earth), and Aatman (self). Eka is the individual, male or female that makes up the unit of cultural consciousness and the fulcrum of creative ability. Bharat Gupt says that if the Eka breaks either due to a hostile social environment or due to lack of inner ethical or moral strength, the social order that depends upon individuals will also collapse. The same disastrous result will follow if the individual is unable to give up one"s selfish interest for the larger unit of kula (family), the kula (family) for Graama (habitat), the Graama (habitat) for Janapaada (regional kingdom/political unit/nation) and the Janapaada (land) for Prithvee (earth) and all material interests of the earth for the Aatman (self). According to Bharat Gupt the mode of this non-selfish action varies with time and place but as a principle of action it is none other than what Socrates called the Supreme Good (ton agathon) and what the Indian philosophers have called DHARMA.

Bharat Gupt has divided his book into six sections based on the Panchatantra framework referred to above. He says that he has chosen the six terms in the Panchatantra as they "not only define the Indian cultural experience more accurately than the Western categories like the "individual", "society", "nation" and the "global order". The ancient Janapaada was neither synonymous with the modern nation state or raashtra, nor with the present day provinces of a nation state. It was a local cultural space with community governance that enforced a moral and financial discipline that mattered much more for a person than the distant court of a de jure Emperor or the de facto Emperor. In the age of nationalism and globalisation in India, it has been virtually replaced for the time being by the nation state and will be further replaced by a newer entity".

Bharat Gupt states with conviction that beneath the present "regional states" and the nation state of India, the Janapaada is still very much alive as a cultural force that has a pervasive influence on the behaviour of the rural India. With telling effect, Bharat Gupt observes that Janapaada as a cultural force offers even today the rural Indian a sustenance through festivals, dress and cuisine, colour and designs that are more rewarding than the "week-end" is to metro-Indian. The six categories - Eka, kula, Graama, Janapaada, Prithvee and Aatma-seem more natural not only to understand the Indian identity of the past, but also to develop a healthier framework for personal, social and cosmic organisation for the future. As Bharat Gupt puts it "More than anything else, as indicated in the verse from the Mahabharata, they provide a well tested way (marga/pantha) to progress from the PERSONAL TO THE UNIVERSAL".

In Part I of his book Bharat Gupt deals with Eka: The Uprooted Individual in five chapters. After August 15, 1947, modernity came to be concretised in India as "print culture managed space in which the symbolic and imaginative were replaced by functional reality". A great change of attitude towards the very value of ancient and sacred ritual set in after Independence. In the State manipulated intellectually enervating climate that prevailed during Nehru"s rule, reality and truth came to be defined in Newtonian terms of European Physical Sciences. Rationality was reduced to a sterile scientific positivism which in its turn was hyped as "scientific temperament". Bharat Gupt declares that this state sponsored scientific temperament was privileged as a curative for the earlier "non scientific Hindu vision" of the Universe. Bharat Gupt laments the fact that this fascination for "scientific temperament" did not take into account the post-classical developments in Physics and their profound implications for philosophy and Hindu vedanta. Thus not only were some of the most rigorous and original Hindu traditions of native reasoning disregarded, even the latest views of modern science were blatantly ignored. Nehru was the leader of this anti-Hindu movement.

Thus Bharat Gupt gives a very just estimate of the petrified adolescence of Nehru in these words: "As a result, modernity in India, to this day remains a 19th century construct weighed down by notions that Nehru imbibed in his days in Eaton and Cambridge ossified in his adulthood into a Fabian atheism that he foisted upon the Indian educational system being the First Prime Minister".

In the name of development of a "scientific temperament" and "scientific temper", that the whole of India was de-Hinduised in a systematic manner by government after Independence. Bharat Gupt highlights the following facts to illustrate this point of view:

a. Replacement of the Vedic Model of Purusha as Angin with Angas by the Guttenberg-Newtonian Model of objectivity. All Hindu ritual was conceived as a sacred way of asserting a complete unity of the individual with the Universe. There is a great difference between this age-old Vedic method of performing an act before the Universe which is witnessed by the community, the Gods and the demi-Gods alike and the modern method of doing an act as a private action not witnessed by anybody. The first is ritual (Savana/Anushtaaanalsatra) while the second is personal consumption or "eating" alone (bhukthi). The first was the prescribed (Vaidha)way of life in traditional India and the second a forbidden (Nishidda) way. With the rise of Western individualism, the second has become esteemed and normal while the first is viewed as backward, abnormal and even suspect.

b. Replacement of Orality with Writing Philosophies and beliefs of a society depend on its educational system and the technology of their transmission and dissemination. Right from the dawn of history India used the aural as the main mode of knowledge preservation, although plastic, graphic and symbolic methods were not lacking. Right from the days of Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization, writing was kept subsidiary to oral composition. Now-a-days, there is an irrational and wrong presumption that Indian elevation of orality was caused by ignorance of writing.

As Bharat Gupt puts it "This is again based on the prejudice that graphicity once achieved can never allow orality to dominate. Hence the presumption that the Sarasvati-Sindhu script once lost, the very concept of a script was forgotten till reintroduced into India by the Greek and the Phoenician influences. The truth seems otherwise. ORALITY, which was comprehensive enough to be a combination of speech (vaacika), gesture (angika), mental concentration (saattvika) and symbolic dress (ahaarya) was preferred to other technologies of preservation as a cultural choice. This kind of orality keeps thought, speech and action in a unity for performance in education, arts, rituals and life in general. Whatever is to be done may thus be done by mind, speech and body (manasaa, vaacaa, karmanaa) together".

This paradigm has operated on all aspects of Indian life. Hence the role of writing was made supportive not performative in our culture. This paradigm also patterned India"s educational systems. These systems have been destroyed in a systematic manner by Government and Nehru acting together in post-Independent India.

In my view, after Indian Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru promoted his concept of false nationhood under the label of "secularism". According to this concept, all the people who happen to reside on the soil of India form a nation, whether he follows the culture of this country or not, whether he is loyal to this country or not. It does not matter if the state-aided minorities dismiss the time-honoured culture of this country "Sanatana Dharma" as abominable and as a path of the Devil. Thus in a mischievous way Nehru turned the concept of nationhood into a soulless geographic entity and bade good-bye to the established principles of nationhood founded on emotional unity and all that it implies. According to this

Nehru"s notion (a dead substitute for a live Hindu nation), Hindus of India in absolute majority have to lose the inheritance of their traditional homeland. Nehru used his political might to propagate this soulless philosophy and this became the corner stone of all his policies that proved to be disastrous for the Hindus of India.

(To be continued...)
QUOTESecular anti-Nationalism vs Cultural Nationalism - Part II

By: V Sundaram, IAS, Retd.
Dec-19-2008

Bharat Gupt seems to tell us that the seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel right. Reading his highly sensitive and revealing book with never sagging zest and delight, I am reminded of what the great Greek Poet and Writer Aeschylus (524-454 BC) said in his Agamemnon in 458 BC:
"Wisdom Comes alone through suffering"

Bharat Gupt vividly brings out the saga of suffering undergone by him in the context of cultural degradation that is taking place in a ruthless manner in the disgusting India of today.

With the advent of British Rule, they ushered in the new technology of print that played havoc with the systems of oral transmission, which was the basis of Indian (Hindu) culture. Two fundamental prejudices were established by the Europeans and the colonial State in British India while assessing the value of Indian cultural products. One was that as a technology of communication, orality was inferior, inaccurate and untruthful. The second was that the content of the Indian cultural messages of oral traditions was heathen and erroneous. Thus for the print oriented English vision of the Universe, orality was synonymous with pagan ritual. This wrong perception became more pronounced under the anti-Hindu and anti-national secular educational system established by Nehru and his Congress party in post-Independent India. As Bharat Gupt puts it, "...the best way to declare one"s Indian modernity is still to condemn ritual as deceit. This censure pervades not only the speeches of chest thumping social reformers, writers, poets, academics and journalists but just about anybody who is anxious to be called a citizen of his times. The habit stays strong".

In this context he quotes the "adolescent" (my perception!) and "infantile" (my assessment!) observations of Khushwant Singh about Kumbha Mela of 2001 "I fear crowds.... I have met people who had been to such pilgrimages: they looked very pleased with themselves. But I did not notice any changes for the better in them. If they were prone to lying, cheating, back biting, scandal-mongering, using bad language before they left for their holy cities or reverse, they came back and resumed lying, cheating, back biting, scandal-mongering and using bad language". Bharat Gupt dismisses this assessment of Khushwant Singh by saying that this is the stock response of the ENLIGHTENMENT FANATICS of the NEHRUVIAN GENERATION.
I cannot help quoting the rapier-like words of Bharat Gupt here: "They are out to denigrate ritual of any kind in the style of the British Utilitarians and Fabian Socialists. The malady is not restricted to the English medium expression but pervades a good deal of writing in Indian languages. Tomes can be found on elevating Kabir"s verses against Saguna upaasanaa and sundry cultural bureaucrats have lavishly rewarded musicians singing such showpiece bhajans (pseudo-secular songs-these words mine!) thronging to which is a hallmark of progressive spirituality".

Then Bharat Gupt goes on to expose the layer upon layer fraud and hypocrisy of the so-called progressives. While they condemn the rituals of Hindu religion (though they choose to remain silent on the rituals of Islam and Christianity!), they celebrate the rituals of a secular State like Parades, Prizes, Ceremonies and Celebrity parties with untiring addiction. Nehru set the example for this "progressive hypocrisy" by willing in his Last Testament that his ashes be not consigned to the Ganges after a traditional Hindu cremation but to be taken in air and released all over India. Bharat Gupt concludes in the manner of a Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): "It is doubtful if what Nehru lost in the poetry of Mantras was gained by that grandiose ritual.... Nothing reveals the duplicity of "scientific temper" devotees shared and promoted by the government of India than the show of ritual obsequity at the "samaadhis" or memorial shrines for the Indian Prime Ministers that stand in a long line at the banks of Yamuna in Delhi. Samadhi burial sites have been made for Hindu saints or Muslim Sufis in India but never for KINGS.... The Indian ritual of cremation, unlike for other Indo-European ancients, contradicts the creation of a memorial building".

Bharat Gupt scientifically argues and proves that ritual is transformation and not repetition. The rightly conducted traditional ritual brings about a change in the doer"s mental state, which is predictable, well tried, and permanent and not merely an autosuggestion or a hallucination. Right from Vedic times, controlling the mind in the entirety of its thoughts and feelings has been demonstrated and regularly applied in India in various fields like the Arts, Inter-personal Relationships, Social work and spiritual pursuits. Very unfortunately, modern consumerism infesting Capitalist Societies or Marxist States, use the same principles of mind control for serving the commercial interests of greedy business corporations or tyrannical bureaucracies.

Bharat Gupt argues that under the cultural onslaught of Islam and Christianity, Hinduism has undergone a special phenomenon, which he calls as the "COMMANDMENT-ALISATION OF HINDUISM". In India this trend continues even today because of the fact that the Anglophonic ruling class has stayed under the sway of Neo-colonialism. Most of the deep rooted prejudices against Hinduism that were in the fore-front among the Islamic and Christian peoples when they first came into contact with Hinduism centuries ago, continue to prevail to this day. Against this background Bharat Gupt states with clarity that: "Hinduism now needs to strongly resist this commandment-alisation of Hinduism in order to save its original genius. It also means restoration of the unity of thought, speech and action which was broken by the other-worldly religiosity (loka-paraangamukha Bhakti), Euro-modernity, Protestant, Catholic and Islamic iconoclasm, and Gandhian dryness/rasaheenataa, but is found as the ambrosiac kernel in the universe of pagan rituals".

What needs to be done is to revive the activity of the informed and conscious rituals and karma yogas. The modern illiterate average urban Hindu is often heard saying, "I believe in God, but I don"t go to temples, I don"t believe in rituals". He is also under the mistaken impression and even delusion that all that old stuff called Dhyaana, bhajan, daana, sevaa etc. is all part and parcel of ritual to be duly discarded! According to Bharat Gupt this is the illusion fostered by the print culture and the bookish education of the Macaulay-Nehru era!

In my view, the chapter on Education without Art must be prescribed as a compulsory text for the first year students in all our Teacher Training Colleges in India. Bharat Gupt makes a frontal attack on the Sahitya Academy, the Lalit Kala Academy and the Sangeet Natak Academy and their boorish, pusillanimous and niggardly approach towards the recognition and promotion of Literature, Art and Fine Arts. Our business corporations are no better as they have not woken up to the idea that the mercantile world has a duty towards arts. They are not even aware that the Vaishyas of yore were no less patrons of the arts than the Kings.

I fully endorse the view of Bharat Gupt: "The biggest prejudice against the arts in India has been generated by its modern educational system that inculcates a diametrically opposite attitude to their worth as posited in the traditional Indian psyche. So-called makers of modern India assiduously preserved the schooling system left by the British even after August 15, 1947 and only allowed the American educational jargon (propagated mostly by P L 480 money financed Professors!) to modify the shape and size of text books leaving the content untouched. They have also maintained the hegemony of the printed word, the paper exercise book and the written examination over all other means of instruction and evaluation. Reading print and reproducing it in examinations remains the hallmark of our educational methodology".

Our modernists have been so enamoured of it that they are scared to consider another method, such as vocal expression, capacity to conduct reliable work projects, teaching of junior students by senior students and so forth. Consequently in our traditional educational system and great ancient culture where the spoken word, intonation and gesture, signs, symbols and rituals had been developed as superb media of communication for thousands of years, we now have mere reading, cramming and reproducing as the only method of passing routine examination from nursery classes to the IAS. Bharat Gupt gives this biting verdict: "If the arts, except for music that still rests upon traditional training and Hindu ethos, have not touched great heights in free India, the sin lies at the doors of our Education Ministers".

The following are the important points made by Bharat Gupt on the decadent system of education we are having in India today:

1. Under the impact of Nehruvian scientific rationalism, the government agencies responsible for making policy, curriculum as well as textbooks, like the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) have been promoting a wooden version of science. There is an excessive emphasis on mugging "objective facts" about the physical world instead of imparting the skill of inductive logic. Consequently our allopathic Doctors have generally no dialogue with Ayurvedic or Unani Practioners, very few legal luminaries have any acquaintance with ancient codified or customary laws, and very few physicists have studied ancient astronomy or music. Thus the dichotomy between art and science, ancient and modern, is made complete.

2. The challenge before the Indian Policy Makers is how to create educational TV channels that provide attractive alternatives to crass commercialism. So far there is no thinking about it as the Indian political and intellectual elite is too colonised to depart from Western models of development.

3. A concerted effort needs to be made to re-instate the arts as a creative, therapeutic and moral force in our educational system, print and electronic media. In our schools, the arts should be among the main subjects of study and not mere extra-curricular activities.

I fully agree with the view of Bharat Gupt: "When will we stop thinking of art as a handmaid of business, diplomacy, or infotainment and recognise it as an elevating experience that distinguishes humans from animals?"

"Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it", so wrote Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) in his famous novel "Siddhartha" in 1923. Bharat Gupt is endeavouring to show that wisdom can also be communicated with telling effect.
"Wisdom is to the mind what health is to the body". -Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) Bharat Gupt in a Chapter titled "Shelving a Heritage, Sanskrit from Macaulay to M-Tv" quotes the great Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari who

nearly 2000 years ago commented on the Indian scene: "Intellectuals are engaged in envious quarrels, rulers are intoxicated by arrogance, the people are burdened with lack of education and so Good Speech is weak and emaciated" (boddhaaro matsaragrstaah prabhavah smayadooshitaal Abodhopahataashcanye jeernamange subhaashtitam ).Of course there have been repeated moments of darkness in our history. Vexatious mornings of needless and fruitless debates in the shameful Indian Parliament over the pseudo-secular riddle whether it is secular or communal to perform sarasvati vandana, are not the first such spells of darkness. Bharat Gupt brilliantly sums up "Else the lines of Bhartrihari as given above would not seem to be so contemporary".

Bhartrihari could make do with the word subhaashtitam, which means "Good Speech". Good Speech was accepted in his time as a synonym for "learning", "knowledge", "vani", "vak", or even "sarasvati". In Bhartrihari"s India, there obtained enough poetic taste to personify or deify speech, music or wealth. Many centuries after Bhartrihari, Turkish, Mongol, Afghan and Mogul Rulers enthralled themselves by patronising court musicians singing Sanskrit and brijabhasha songs in praises of Sarsavati, Naad or Shabda. But all this was before the 19th century when "Enlightenment" came to us and we were bitten by the bug of secularist iconoclasm.

A great uproar was created a few years ago when in a conference of Education Ministers of the various provinces, an invocation song in praise of Sarasvati was sung. This was viewed as a preferential treatment to a Hindu Goddess. I agree with Bharat Gupt when he declares that Indian Secularism has taken the form of turning away from one"s own heritage and disregarding the spiritual and ethical commitments that ancient and medieval vehicles of all religions and cultures symbolize. Sanskrit is the biggest casualty under secularist milieu. In actual practice, secularism now means wallowing in easy consumerism of the day and neglecting religious and cultural values. That is why we have the disruptive and not additive protests by the secularists. Unfortunately, the anti-religious approach of the State Policy has resulted in hurting us deeper.

Saxon English or Norman English is not belittled in England. Ancient French is not belittled in France. Latin is not belittled in Italy. Hebrew is not belittled in Israel. India alone excels in belittling its classical heritage and classical Sanskrit language as both are codified as belonging to a dead "Hindu past". This classification began during the British colonial period and very unfortunately this tradition was not only continued but also enriched by Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress successors in Office for 60 years after Independence till today.

There is no doubt that a few English and European Orientalists of British India contributed to the discovery of the East by the West. At the same time Macaulay forged for India an education system which had little place, not only for Sanskrit literature, but for all the traditional arts and sciences like music, poetry, dance, theatre and painting, Ayurveda, Rasaayan, Jyothisha, Metrics etc. This dichotomy continues even today. On the one hand we have Indologists, South Asian Experts, Asian Anthropologists, (White, Brown, Black and Yellow, native and foreign) who would like a special treatment, almost protectionist, to be given to Indian native cultures; and on the other hand we have the socialists, rationalists, scientificists, pluralists and globalists assured of the auto-built resilience and auto-generative capacity of native Indian cultures. Bharat Gupt observes with sardonic wit and wisdom: "But neither side thinks that a formal educative system should have any role to play in the formation of culture. For them, as for Macaulay, culture can be extra-curricular. Indeed, it could be so for the English colonisers who did not require culture for clerical/babu-work". Nehru and his anti-Hindu successors of Independent India also wanted only clerks and babus for their administration and governance in post Independent India.

We have to give Sanskrit its due place in Indian education. It is not just a matter of giving concession to a particular language. It is the task of using 5000 years of all the textual wealth produced in this sub-continent. I endorse the view of Bharat Gupt that all who believe that these texts, the bulk being in Sanskrit, are not required for maintenance of cultural identity have little knowledge of civilizational rise and decline in history. Is it not a matter of national disgrace that the fundamentally anti-Hindu Jawaharlal Nehru University did not have a Sanskrit Department till 2002 although it boasted of having known Marxists and Islamic Historians on its faculty?

Bharat Gupt says that Sanskrit can happily be revived by enhancing the present day utility of ancient and medieval texts. The aim should be of bringing them in original and translation into the curriculum at all levels from school to college. This means a revision of the present curriculum and expansion of resources for inter-disciplinary participation.

The Chapter titled "Conversion: Sin or Sincerity?" is a fascinating chapter which brings out the ground level truths rooted in reality about conversion and evangelical agenda. Many clichÃ©s about conversion are kept alive by vested interests that prevent a proper evaluation of the evangelical agenda. The foremost clichÃ© being that conversion controversy is not a religious issue but a vote-catching device. It is projected as a Hindu Conservative Right versus Progressive Left confrontation. As Bharat Gupt puts it in a clinching manner: "But the whole of India today knows that proselytisation is not a battle for votes, but a battle for souls with a long history of cultural beliefs and behaviour patterns that goes far beyond the smaller fortunes of the Nehru or the Sangh Parivar".

Bharat Gupt also demolishes the theory that conversion is the shortest, sweetest and surest way of achieving social equality. He makes it clear that caste has little to do with conversion. No Muslim or Christian convert of low caste forgoes his caste and gains a status of even workable equality with upper caste Christians or Muslims. If it were so, Churches of all denominations would not be demanding reservation for Christians on caste basis. The truth is that the motive to become Muslim or Christian was seldom freedom from caste hierarchy. For vast populations it is always either force or allurement of economic uplift. In a caustic manner, Bharat Gupt observes: "For stray individuals, it has been anything from philosophy to sex".

The most important chapter is titled "Bring Back the Teacher". Bharat Gupt rightly states that for almost a millennium, India maintained a system of higher education, which was availed of by many neighbouring civilizations, including China. This traditional system, of Guru and Gurukul,centered entirely on the teacher and his direct relationship with his disciples. It was rigourous and demanding and yet flexible. It used emotional ties to create long-term obligations and accountability. In spite of its hierarchy, it had an admiration for the individual excellence (pratibhaa) on the basis of which sometimes very young persons were elevated as Head-Teachers or Acharyas. Recognition of merit and talent is a phenomenon that seems to have disappeared in modern India. In the traditional system, the teacher was a free decision maker in his realm. He was trusted and left alone.

Western pedagogy brought in two major changes. It not only brought in print technology to replace the oral Indian tradition (method), it also removed the teacher from the centre and brought in the academic administrator. This colonial tradition has been institutionalized after our Independence. From appointments of Vice Chancellors and promotions of teachers, setting admission policies and student fees, the functioning of the Universities have fallen exclusively into the hands of political lobbies.

Against this dirty background, Bharat Gupt makes out a strong case for decontrolling education. To quote his beautiful words in this context: "The first step towards freeing higher education is to establish that the State is obliged to support but not to define education. Neither legislators nor administrators are trained to select and appoint educators or to prescribe the content of education. The powers of mass persuasion, once the domain of the intellectual class, are being used in the name of democracy by the legislature. The intellectual class must now free value and opinion making institutions from the clutches of legislators. The philosopher must check the King".

The sensitiveness, the range, the acuity, the profundity of perception and intuition that we see in Bharat Gupt"s book puts him quite apart from, if not, above all the writers of today. The extraordinary gifts-large and varied-displayed by Bharat Gupt makes him a great literary artist. By "artist" I do not mean that he is a laborious planner and polisher. What I mean is that he is greatly gifted as an artist, that he possesses a most delicate and most passionate sensibility allied to a native power of written eloquence and living vivid language-a faculty that has become a rare phenomenon today. His is essentially an art of spontaneity, of fresh quick-flowing untiring creativeness. His most eloquent and faultless pages in this book seem to come as easily to him as those, which are most careless. The most precious thing about this book is that Bharat Gupt gives his unique vital experience.

India today presents a general picture of cultural, ethical and spiritual malnutrition if not starvation. Vast sections of our population have lost all touch with the strengthening, invigorating and purifying spiritual traditions of our timeless culture. This is bad enough. This is sad enough. But what is worse and sadder still is that we have also failed to get ourselves ethically and spiritually re-nourished and re-strengthened by our own consciously chosen socio-political actions, consequent upon the attainment of our Independence as a free nation during the last five decades. The current malady in our society, if allowed to grow unchecked and uncontrolled, will only lead this country to an irretrievable chaos, turmoil and confusion.

(Concluded)

dhu · (This post was last modified: 12-23-2008, 05:02 PM by dhu.)

QUOTE02 Dec 2008
Hindu Nationalists:Indigenous Resilience
By Brannon ParkerÂ Â

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/26990&Itemid=1 [[[also see comments]]]]

I am currently in Mumbai, India and have been here in India for the past three months. I am here doing research on the tribal cultures of India. I actually arrived in Mumbai about 4 hrs before the terror attacks took place. The mood is quite somber and the people are frustrated. Despite all that, the Indian people continue with their lives. I would compare it to the mood most Americans have when they hear about or see a horrific car accident. The fact is terror has been feasting on India for quite some time now. Approximately 70,000 Indians have died due to this onslaught of terror.

It is disheartening to see alternative news portals broadcasting the Main Stream Media's vilification of the Hindu Nationalists. In sync with the Globalists agenda, they have latched onto the Hindus as the new whipping boys. It is also strange that despite India being hit by terror for decades, only now the suddenly concerned Westerners are paying attention. What is unfortunate is that these same people are bandying about theories of Indian involvement.

Maybe if this were the first and only attack, people such speculation would have merit. Out of ignorance of the reality in India they pass arround anti-Indian propaganda that suits their mistrust of media and understandable interest in knowing the truth. Recently on Dec 2nd, another terror attack occurred in Assam, India. Now why didnt that get any play in the world media. Where are all the theorists on that attack?

Anti-Indian Propaganda is making the rounds claiming that Hindu Nationalists were involved in the Mumbai attacks.Please consider. If such people were an all powerful group capable of International terrorism or even domestic terrorism why do the very same corporate media outlets attack them? The same corporate media that gave us Obama and Osama, the lies about 9/11, Iraq, Iran, Georgia etc spend a disproprotionate effort in demonizing the Hindu Nationalist groups. A majority of Indian media is owned by the very same corporates that control the Western media. Rupert Murdoch owns about 6 TV stations here. The Indian media is blatantly hostile to the RSS, BJP, VHP and all other Hindu Nationalist groups.

It is because these Hindu Nationalists are dedicated to an India that is based on Indigenous traditions and the Indian way of life. Contrary to the media and Communists-Islamic-pseudo-secular propaganda machine's claims these Hindus do not see themselves as a religious based group. They thus consider any Indian, regardless of their way of worship as Hindus. The fact is nearly all Indian Muslims and Christians have always been Indians. They merely changed their methods of worship and are thus considered as Muslim Hindus and Christian Hindus.

This is evident from the fact that Naqvi, the Chairman of the BJP, the Hindu Nationalist Party is a Muslim. During the Gujarat riots, that are used as proof that the BJP pursues a genocidal anti-Muslim idealogy, the BJP Prime Minister of India, Vajpayee appointed a Muslim, Dr. Kalam as the President of India. Time magazine responded by declaring Vajpayee as a drunkard, unfit to rule such an important nation like India. The testimony of prime witnesses used to blame Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, for the riots, revealed that they were pressured and coerced by Teesta Setalvaad to lie in court. The case collapsed.Â Yet still the anti-traditionalists continue to point to these very claims that have been repudiated by the Muslim witnesses. When people depend on lies to make their case, one is wise to question their credibility.

The Nanavati Commision, after years of investigation, has given a clean chit to the BJP administration.The only 'proof' used to discredit the BJP comes from its political enemies and the Pakistanis. If you want to accept that as proof go ahead. Yet if one believes it is unbiased they are only fooling themselves and throwing fairness and justice out the window. Another lie that is constantly bandied about is that the Sangh Parivar killed Gandhi. This is based on the fact that the assasin had been a member of the RSS 20 years earlier. He had also been a member of the Congress party yet none attempt to link the Congress party to the killing. In fact the RSS has repeatedly taken media outlets to court over these attempts at defamation and won every time. For those who discount this, being biased against the Indian judicial system, the UK courts also agreed that the RSS had nothing to do with the assasination of Gandhi. In fact the whole effort to tie the RSS to the crime is reminicent of the Cointelpro operations done against the American Indian Movement. AIM.

As far as Indian Muslims and Christains are concerned, they are considered just as much Indian as any Hindu. The Sangh Parivar's Rashtriya Muslim Manch is proof of this. This group is a dedicated group of Muslim Indian Nationalists. They recognize they are Indians first, above and beyond any other identity.Â According to the Sangh leadership, the only authentic minority groups in India are the Parsis and Jews who migrated here from Iran and areas in West Asia .

Indian Nationalism

Efforts to defame the Hindu Nationalists as anti-Muslim and anti-Christian have been proven to be part of Pakistan 's ISI operations. In 2000, Christian churches were bombed throughout South India. The media went into a frenzy blaming the BJP and other Hindu Nationalist groups. The blasts were, in reality, masterminded by a Pakistan-based Deendar Anjuman group. The group had planned a series of attacks on churches in Bangalore , Hubli and Gulbarga . Some people, led by key person Ibrahim, were caught by the city police when the bomb, which they were carrying to plant in a church, exploded. As a result two people died and Ibrahim seriously injured. Anti-christian and anti-hindu pamphletsÂ used to enrage public sentiment were also found in the van. The accused believed that blasts at churches in India would trigger a civil war between Hindus and Christians. A religious leader from Afghanistan would invade and conquer India , which would be converted into an Islamic country. On November 30, 2008, 11 of these terrorists were given the death sentence.

The Hindu Nationalists are authentic Indian Patriots. They are demonized as racists and fascists merely based upon their Love of country and culture. Attempts are being made to blame Hindus for the Mumbai terror attacks. The ludicrous 'proof' of the attackers being Hindu is based on a photo of one terrorist. He is displaying a red string on his wrists. The Chinese Government media was the first to float this theory and Pakistan is spreading it. How difficult is it for the terrorists to intentionally wear and display such an identifying marker? In my opinion this is part of the campaign to demonize the Hindu Nationalists. The intention is quite clear. India 's enemies have Think tanks dedicated to this kind of psychological warfare.

Muslims Love the Koran and their Whiskey too

As for the claims that the Mumbai Attackers drank beer at Leopold's cafe, just before they began their massacre, the employess and owner who were there, stated the rumor to be a total fabrication. There are also claims that they rented rooms at the Nariman House and ordered liquor. These claims appear to be false as well. Yet the fact is when a Jihadist is on a mission, they are allowed to use any means, including acts considered haram (forbidden) to Muslims, such as drinking, lying and killing in the cause of Islam.Â As for Muslims and drinking, a friend of mine, who happens to be from a well to do Indian Muslim family frequently drank alchohol and partied hard. I actually first met him at a night club/hooka lounge. I asked him about his drinking and smoking. He said as long as his parents dont know about it, its no problem. He also said that he knows many people who worked in Saudi Arabia and in the Palaces of the Saudi princes. They all have bars installed in the cellars and they love hard liquors like Whiskey.

American Indians and Indians 

The Hindu Nationalists are very similar to American Indian traditionalists such as Tecumseh, Pontiac, and Sitting Bull etc. It is disappointing to see, that in the zeal to expose Israeli agencies like Mossad, people are gullibly accepting the propaganda of those dedicated to the destruction of India. As the Western and Corporate powers conquered the world they destroyed any and all Indigenous based power structures that they encountered. India survived this onslaught due its vast population and vibrant culture. China was conquered and basically sterilized by the British agent Mao. India is currently reeling under the onslaught of these same Maoist forces in a silent war that has killed thousands. The Hindu Nationalists are the only people resisting the Maoist take over of the rural areas. Their success in this regard is a primary reason that they are being targeted.

Red Corridor of Terror 

At this moment a vast red corridor stretches across India . If the Hindu Nationalists win the upcoming 2009 elections, these forces will begin a massive campaign to destabilize the Nation. With the Western backed Maoist conquest of Nepal, the Maoist now have a dedicated supply line for support and tactical backup. During the Maoist insurrection, three members of the North Korean mission to Nepal were caught attempting to smuggle 100Kg of gold ingots into Nepal . This was the second such instance that the North Koreans were caught smuggling gold into Neal. (North Koreans are the agents of the London based Globalist Powers used in the same capacity of Pakistan in order to keep South Korea and Japan in check.)

The Indian Maoists have frequently been discovered with top of the line satellite communication gear and weaponry. For an alleged group of disgruntled farmers allegedly driven to violence by their economic desperation, it is quite strange that they have somehow amassed such expensive equipment.

Another smoking gun is the implicit silence of the alleged human rights groups and pseudo-secularists regarding the Maoist carnage and atrocities. These same people that repeatedly scream and holler about the great danger of Hindu extremists have never called attention to the Maoists. Why would they? They are Maoists and Marxists themselves. They represent the Overground voice for the Terrorist underground.

America Threatens India with China 

Pakistan invaded India 5 times, China invaded twice. Not once has India invaded a neighbor. The West's refusal to support India as Pakistan and China attacked and terrorized India pushed India into the Soviet Russian sphere. In fact India 's entire nuclear program was developed as a result of former US President Nixon's attempt to attack India during the 1971 Bangladesh war. US Documents exposed that the US President had secretly entreated China to menace India by moving Chinese troops to the Indian border. During the 1971 crisis Russia supported India forcing Nixon to back down. The quote below reveals this forgotten chapter of US-Indian relations.

"General Tewari was present at a briefing the three defense services held for Indira Gandhi. She was seated at a large table. On one side was General S H F J Manekshaw, the army chief, and on the other Admiral S M Nanda, the navy chief. During the course of the presentation, the admiral intervened and said: 'Madam, the US 8th Fleet is sailing into the Bay of Bengal .' Nothing happened; the briefing continued. After sometime, the admiral repeated, 'Madam, I have to inform you that the 8th Fleet is sailing into the Bay of Bengal .' She cut him off immediately: 'Admiral, I heard you the first time, let us go on with the briefing.' All the officers present were stunned. Ultimately, their morale was tremendously boosted by the prime minister's attitude. She had demonstrated her utter contempt for the American bluff.

On November 10, Nixon instructed Kissinger to ask the Chinese to move some troops toward the Indian frontier. 'Threaten to move forces or move them, Henry, that's what they must do now.' This was conveyed to Huang Hua , China 's envoy to the United Nations. Kissinger told Huang the US would be prepared for a military confrontation with the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union attacked China ." 1971 War: How the US tried to corner India by Claude Arpi

Pakistan Prepares it's Nukes 

In 1999, Pakistan prepared its Nukes for an attack on India . It was Clinton who forced the Pakistanis to back down. This can be verified on the documentary "Countdown to Armageddon". 'Pakistan was actually preparing to use its nuclear missiles.' Avoiding a Nuclear Catastrophe: Arms Control after the 2002 IndiaâPakistan Crisis by Carranza M.E Some have theorized that Kennedy countermanded British demands to let India fall to China during its 1962 invasion. However Kennedy sent weapons and assistance to India further angering the powers in London.

The tragedy is that those committed to truth have been infiltrated by those committed to conquest. Pakistan has been repeatedly defeated by India, despite having the benefit of surprise on its side. Its use of the tactic of 'a thousand cuts' is meant to bleed India. The grafting of its agenda and propaganda to forums and groups dedicated towards freedom in the West, has allowed it to gain sympathy from those who would normally despise such agents of oppression.

Israel-Pakistan:Saudi-British Creations 

The British created Pakistan for the sole purpose of suppressing India and its eventual growth as a major world power. It is also important to note that Saudi Arabia agreed to the creation of Israel in exchange for the creation of Pakistan. At the time the main source of Saudi income was Muslim Haj pilgrims. India was its largest source of such pilgrims. Fearing its loss of revenue upon the freedom of India, the Saudis negotiated the creation of Israel with the British. A vast chunk of India (Pakistan) for a minute albiet crucial portion of West Asia (Israel).The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection: Steven Emerson

British Erase Indian History 

The Empire erased the history of the Hindu Maratha Confederacy founded by Chatrapati Shivaji. These Marathas liberated India from Islamic rule and planted the Maratha Flag from Afghanistan in the NW to Orissa in the East and Kanya Kumari in the South. For nearly a century, the Marathas ruled most of India. They successfully defeated the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and the British in repeated engagements. The Marathas, both Hindu and Muslim, accomplished one of the most successful indigenous military campaigns in history. Their targets were the foreign Moghuls and the European powers.

Modern Islamic scholars, British historians and Indian Leftists joined together to erase these facts from the history of India. Time magazine recently quoted a Muslim scholar;s claim that the British cheated Islam when they failed to give all of India to Islam upon their departure. He alleged India was taken from the Muslims by the British so it should have been returned to the Muslims in 1947. Either through ignorance or an intentional effort at disinformation, some Indian Muslims ignore history. A majority of Indian Territory was ceded to the British by the Marathas after they had succumbed to the political intrigues of the British 'Divide and Rule Policies' and had suffered massive defeats in the three major wars known as the Anglo-Maratha wars. The very simple and basic reality is that Britain signed treaties with the Marathas in order to gain control of most of India. This proves that, rather than the Muslims, it was the Marathas that were in control of much of 18th century India. The British would not waste time signing treaties with a power of no consequence.

The First Anglo-Maratha War (1775-1782) was the beginning of the end of the Maratha Empire. It ended with the Treaty of Salbai.

The Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803 - 1805) was the second conflict between the British East India Company and the Maratha Empire in India . On 12/17/1803, Raghuji Bhonsale (II) of Nagpur signed the Treaty of Deogaon with the British after the Battle of Laswari and gave up the province of Cuttack including Balasore.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817-1818) was a final and decisive conflict between the British East India Company and the Maratha Empire in India , which left the Company in control of most of India . Defeat was swift, followed by the pensioning of the peshwa and the annexation of his territories, thus completing the supremacy of the British in India . The Muslim ruler Nizam'Ali Khan was a British ally in the second and third Maratha Wars (1803-05, 1817-19) The British were quick to succor a built-in and vengeful minority group in their conquest of India. This pattern continues with its use of Pakistan .

Sikh Liberation of Kashmir

The Sikhs, another Indigenous group, were also successful in freeing many parts of India from Foreign rule. These foreign administrations were led by Afghan, Turkish and the Moghuls (Indian for the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan). Both the Marathas and the Sikhs represented Indic based communities and cultures. For them their holy land was India itself rather than far-off Mecca or Jerusalem . These Native groups had been successful in pushing back 600 years of foreign rule. We see the evidence of this by the fact that Kashmir was taken by the British from the Sikhs and then allegedly sold by them to the Dogras. The Afghans established their rule over the territory of Kashmir in 1752. In 1819 the Sikhs from the Punjab replaced the Afghans as the rulers of Kashmir . The British defeated the Sikhs in 1846 and forced them to relinquish control. However, instead of extending British colonial rule over Kashmir , it is claimed that the British sold the territory to a Kashmiri Dogra prince who they maintained as a vassal. Yet Dipak Basu has revealed that the 'sale of Kashmir' story is a fabrication.

"After the defeat of the Sikh Empire by the East India Company, The Treaty of Lahore and later the Treaty of Amritsar between the defeated Sikh Empire and the East India Company was signed by Gulab Singh, a commander of the Sikh Empire Ranjit Singh and the grandfather of Hari Singh, and great grandfather of Karan Singh. As a part of the Treaty of Surrender in Lahore, Jammu & Kashmir was given to the father of Hari Singh, who would be treated as independent ruler allied to the East India Company. Then the Maharaja gave a huge sum of money to the British to take revenge on the Muslim rulers of Afghanistan, who previously declared independence from the Sikh Empire. If you go backward, the ancestors of the same Maharaja was appointed as the Mughal Governor of Jammu by Emperor Akhbar himself. Thus, it is just a Pakistani and British propaganda that Hari Singh was just a Dogra businessman with a lot of money purchsed Jammu & Kashmir."

Verifiable History Denied 

These are verifiable historical facts. Unfortunately the establishment academia, specifically Leftists, Marxists, Muslims and others deny the history of India 's successful Indigenous Pre-British era freedom struggle. They are continuing the British policy of denigrating India 's sense of Nationhood. When Pakistan first invaded Kashmir in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, the Pakistanis were led by British Generals. British officers helped the Pakistanis plan the attack. British officers on the scene led the revolts of the Islamist factions of Kashmir forces, arresting and murdering Pro-Indian Kashmiri Dogra officers especially in the Gilgit region. They acted as a backbone for the mass of Pakistani tribal militias and coordinated their attacks. The British have maintained these connections to this very day.

India's Hindu:The Last Indigenous Power Base 

Today's Hindu groups represent the very same Indic based Indigenous groups of the 1700s. They had reclaimed India for the Indians. The British defeated them and usurped India and its wealth for the bankers of London . They soaked up the treasures of India from the banks of the Ganges and squeezed them out on the banks of the Thames . They have never given up their control of India and have merely adapted their methods of control. India 's Hindu Nationalists represent the greatest threat to their continued hegemony. Pakistan is fulfilling its role as the local Agent Provocateur on behalf of the Empire. Buying into Anti-Indian Pakistani propaganda supports these schemes.

It is a fact that there have been some contacts between Israel and some Hindu Nationalists. Just as in History some American Native groups allied with the French against the British and vice versa. However to lump them all into one great conspiracy is not credible. It would be the same as blaming Chief Pontiac for every act of the French.

Westerners have now become more cognizant of India and its place in the world. However it is important not to buy into the agit-prop of the forces dedicated to the destabilization of India . They are attempting to graft themselves unto the legitimate efforts of those dedicated to the exposure of the Globalists. The anti-Hindu agenda is an important aspect of the New World Order's campaign. India represents one 6th of humanity. The Globalists are pushing for the final conquest of India . To succeed they must first destroy the world's last remaining Indigenous power structure, the Indian Hindus.

IMF and the Globalists Attack on India and Pakistan

The most likely culprits behind the Mumbai massacre appear to be connected to the ongoing Globalist scheme to create a one world economy. The IMF is pushing for the creation of a common global regulator. India has been actively fighting against the IMF. It is also notable that on November 30th India 's Prime Minister took control of the Finance Ministry. India 's former Finance Minister Chidambaran was appointed to become Home Minister after the resignation of Shivraj Patil. By taking control of the Finance Ministry Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appears to have taken the IMF head on.

IMF Set to Ruin Pakistan

As for Pakistan and the IMF, The IMF loan of $7.6 billion might result in 3 million job cuts, rendering more people jobless and increasing the poverty level of the country in the next 2 years. This was predicted by the RBS bank analyst in a discussion held on the recent IMF loan to Pakistan. The discussion was titled 'IMF: pain or panacea." Caymanmama.com - Pakistan News

Think Global and Follow the Money 

This allows for the development of accurate conclusions. Terrorists are the chaos troops for powerful vested interests. The basic foundation of terrorism began with the British development of the Pirates that attacked the superior Spanish fleets back in the 1600s. It allowed the British plausible deniability while they ruthlessly savaged the Spanish Armadas and robbed them of their gold. Secretly the British controlled the pirates and gained control of vast hordes of Spanish wealth. Of course the Spanish gold was looted from the Native Americans and mined by slaves. The British continued their proxy war by the use of pirates. Today's Terrorists are the direct descendants of these same forces. The British powers that waged the Opium wars against China have never relinquished their power or control of the black market trade. Believe it or not most terror is still controlled by forces based in London .

Norway: The Terrorist Nation 

Norway is also involved in its support of the LTTE in Sri Lanka as revealed by Norwegians against Terrorism http://www.svik.org/nat.pdf (Frequently taken offline)

heres google's html cache

http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:QTQR9A....pdf.&hl=en&ct=
clnk&cd=1&gl=in26

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) is deeply involved in East Timor. In fact East Timor is the location of the longest lasting Norad-financed project coordinated by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. After East Timor's Independance from Indonesia, which was granted after much ethnic strife, Norway successfully took control of a majority of East Timor's oil production.

Slamming Wahhabi Islam upon the Islamic World 

OPEC nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and its promotion of radical Wahhabi Islam are complicit partners as well. Thus after NATO 'liberated' Kosovo the Saudis poured millions of petro dollars into the region, destroyed the ancient Turkish mosques and rebuilt them into modern Wahhabi Mosques. So what do I have to say about terrorists? I say they are controlled at the highest levels. The recent efforts of Pakistani President Zardari to make peace with India are a serious threat to continued British machinations against Peace in South Asia . The Mumbai attacks are a direct attempt to instigate a massive war between India and Pakistan . India 's obstinate refusals to give up control of its financial institutions to a common global regulator and become indebted to the IMF are also a factor. Indian PM's men resist IMF influence. India 's sound economy allows it to resist the IMF. The powers behind the IMF are the powers behind terror.

PM's men resist IMF influence 

Many of us have been opposing the growing influence of IMF here as they would soon begin to dictate terms on policy formulation," a senior government official said.

16 Nov 2008, 0353 hrs IST, Shantanu Nandan Sharma, ET Bureau NEW DELHI: A section of key policy makers in India are strongly resisting attempts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to resume an active role in the country as they believe Asia has always remained at the bottom of IMF's priority list.

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, dated November 11, PM's Economic Advisory Council (EAC) member Satish C Jha termed IMF's response to the present crisis as "strange and worrisome" and accused the international body of indulging in "ethnocentric and geographical bias".

"What we find strange and worrisome is that the IMF has once again relegated Asia to the bottom of the priority list in terms of assistance and has been far more focused on Eastern Europe and Russia . This is a repeat of 1997, when the IMF was late and reluctant to offer funds to Asia claiming that market forces should sort out the crisis. There is a certain degree of ethnocentric and geographical bias within the IMF, which is negative for Asia ," he wrote. SundayET has a copy of Mr Jha's letter to the PM. The IMF has influenced India 's approach to the crisis, according to officials in the finance ministry and the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

In fact, the appointment of former IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan as honorary economic adviser to Prime Minister just two weeks before the G-20 meet is believed to be a well-designed approach before the meet. EAC member Mr Jha further argued that IMF-led approach won't help much. "It has become apparent, as was witnessed in the Asian financial crisis of 1997 that Asia may once again be at the bottom of the list of assistance from the IMF in times of crisis. This must be halted," he further added.

In fact, IMF has made attempts to have full-fledged operation in the country, according to Indian government officials. When contacted by Sunday ET, an IMF spokesperson from Washington said; "The IMF works closely with the Indian authorities through the annual Article IV review, as we do with other member countries. It is the member country, not the IMF, that decides whether additional advice or assistance by the Fund should be requested. We stand ready to respond to their needs."

"Ultimately, it was included in the deal that India must have an IMF programme to draw 20% of the stipulated amount ($3 bn) for swapping. Many of us have been opposing the growing influence of IMF here as they would soon begin to dictate terms on policy formulation," a senior government official said.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/Economy/

PMs_men_resist_IMF_influence/articleshow/3718373.cms

Strauss-Kahn smiles from afar Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund is a leading French Socialist. Recent Headline from Financial Times, UK - 27 Nov 2008

'Standards global, regulation national': FM

On Board Prime Minister's Special Aircraft, November 14, 2008First Published: 09:29 IST(14/11/2008)

New global regulatory standards, prudential norms, greater surveillance mechanism and reform of the IMF are among the key points that the Indian contingent will raise on November 15 at the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy in Washington DC, Finance Minister P Chidambaram told reporters. Most important among these, in terms of having a widespread impact, will be the setting up of common regulatory and accounting standards across the globe or at least for G20 nations. "We must have convergence of accounting standards," Chidambaram said. 'Not taking an election-constricted view': FM The politics of a process that will be put in place in the November 15 Summit will not be restricted by the soon-to-change leaderships in the US and India , said Finance Minister P. Chidambaram."The resolution of this crisis will take us to a point of time well beyond January 20, 2009 (that's when President-elect Barack Obama will take charge as President)," he said. "Likewise, it will take us to a point of time well beyond May 22, 2009 (when a new government takes charge in India ). So I don't think we are going to take a election-constricted point of view.He pointed out that US President George Bush and Obama are reported to have talked about these issues are great lengths only two days ago. "I think Obama inputs will be there in whatever President Bush presents."Briefing reporters on the impact of the crisis on India , Finance Minister P. Chidambaram repeated what is now getting to be a somewhat permanent government line: "We will be indirectly impacted. Our growth, our exports and currency flows will be affected. We can weather the crisis and still return a decent growth in 2008-09," he added."Even the IMF's last week's assessment places India 's growth rate in the current fiscal at 7.8 per cent."

But he dismissed the idea of a common global regulator saying, "I don't think regulation can be raised to a global regulator. That's too ambitious, and perhaps not possible in today's circumstances. Regulation must be national."The need for global standards goes hand in hand with IMF reforms. "IMF," Chidambaram said, "was unable to provide the early warning signals to the crisis." That does not mean the creation of new multilateral agencies and financial institutions, informally being called Bretton Woods II, he added. "But surely IMF must begin to discuss within itself governance reforms.""We need to put in place a surveillance mechanism that would have identified the huge risks being taken by some financial entities," Chidambaram said, adding that an "agreeable entity" is needed. "This is what we talked about in Sao Paulo and this is what we'll talk about in the Summit ."Coming four days after finance ministers and central bank governors of G20 countries met in Sao Paulo and two days before the US President George Bush-initiated Summit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has the Indian agenda laid out."I will put forward our views on the need for greater inclusivity in the international financial system, the need to ensure that growth prospects of developing countries do not suffer, and the need to avoid protectionist tendencies," Singh said in a November 13 departure statement."Today there are only a handful of economies that are driving global economic growth," Chidambaram said. "These include China , India and few others. It is very important that the few countries that are able to drive economic growth should not suffer. More resources should be made available to these countries."On that front, he clarified that India did not seek IMF funds. "We don't need an IMF programme," he said. "We need a development programme. So if World Bank is willing to give us more, we will be happy to take it."The new financial order, the seeds for which will be laid in the Summit , needs to become more inclusive, Chidambaram said. "G7 is too small. It must expand." G20, perhaps, represents the new grouping.Among the new prudential norms that are needed, Chidambaram listed common norms for capital adequacy, risk assessment and risk weights.Taking Singh's anti-protectionist agenda forward, Chidambaram said the crisis should not lead to the creation of "protectionist cocoons. We must now try to ensure free flow of goods and services, capital." Which echoes one part of what George Bush wrote in his October 22 letter inviting the...http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=92a574ce-e43c-446b-91f9-3721d6884220&MatchID1=4858&TeamID1=1&TeamID2=5&MatchType1=

1&SeriesID1=1224&PrimaryID=4858&Headline=Standards+global%2c+regulation+national%3a+FM

dhu · (This post was last modified: 12-23-2008, 05:21 PM by dhu.)

QUOTEAncient Struggle Continues, Scholars Remain Clueless
By Brannon ParkerÂ Â

The past 515 years have seen a continual struggle between indigenous Traditionalists and indigenous âProgressivesâ. Unlike India, Native Americans did not have a massive population base to sustain their culture. Still it took nearly 400 years to destroy the Native civilization. Tribes were torn apart, families separated and lives lost in the struggle between those Natives committed to their Traditional culture and those Natives that rejected the old ways as useless. Traditionalists were targeted simply for practicing their ancient traditions, speaking their language and worshipping in their native way.In the USA, not until 1978 were American Indians allowed to legally practice their religion.

Not until 1978 were American Indians guaranteed custodial rights to their own children. These facts are widely known and verifiable. Curiously, despite all this information being common knowledge, despite the fact that billions of dollars have been spent on research, books, documentaries and films regarding the Native struggle, many leading PhDs, Scholars and Researchers such as Witzel, Farmer, Courtright etc. continue to pursue a campaign of cultural genocide. They cannot recognize the fact that history is being repeated and that they are prime movers in this ongoing brutalization of the Traditionalistâsâ sense of self-worth. They forget that behind every genocide one can find a scholarly rationale. These allegedly logical minds can not recognize the fact that while the ancient traditions and cultures of India have a proven track record in sustaining and maintaining the Worldâs largest and ongoing cultural paradigm along with a massive population base, the modern paradigm is constantly changing and failing.

The modern paradigm is unsustainable and can not fit into the natural law of the universe. This is because it is basically artificial, disconnected and unsustainable. On one hand we have an obviously successful, credible and sustainable reality based on the Traditional outlook. On the other hand we have the views of those representing a paradigm that is unsustainable and thin on credibility. They represent a paradigm that has absolutely failed to maintain or even develop a balanced civilization.

A society that can not support its own birth rate is a failure at a very fundamental and foundational level. So these idiots, blinded by their own âscholarly knowledgeâ want to foist this failed civilization on the world. They attempt to package their failed civilizationâs academic outlook as scientific and authoritative and bury the modern day Traditionalist outlook. Traditionalists are not allowed to own their past. Attempts at outreach are painted in the darkest colors of racism, hate and violence. Any efforts to promote traditional values and historical perspectives are brutally savaged.Â

Paradoxically, in many so-called Democracies most motivated Traditionalists are denied access to mainstream society. The level of commitment to oneâs Traditional Culture is used as a gauge to qualify or disqualify one from participation in day to day life. A committed Traditionalist is therefore labeled a fundamentalist and a fanatic and thus perceived as unsuitable and unstable. Meanwhile the opposite lack of Traditional commitment and opposition to Tradition is not equally perceived as fanatical nor unstable.

The Native American Traditionalists have united, battled, bargained, sued, protested and exposed the lunacy of the Native Progressivesâ betrayal of the culture. In the same way the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has fulfilled this role as guardians of Indiaâs indigenous Tradition and Culture. The RSS is constantly being attacked by so-called progressive secular Indians. To counter it the RSS is doing the same for Hindus, in the same way that Native Americans in the past stood their ground and organized themselves in order to counteract this corrosive impact.Â

As an example, if we superimpose the RSS into the American Experience, it becomes obvious that all the great Native American leaders would have naturally supported such an organization. The same dedication and commitment that inspired Crazy Horse, the Cherokee leader Sequoyah, Pontiac, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Roman Nose, Little Turtle, Metacomet, Chief Joseph, Black Hawk, among many other great American Indian leaders, is the same commitment to indigenous tradition that embodies the RSS. In other words, if they were here today these noble souls, who gave their lives to protect their traditions, would naturally, support the Hindu Traditionalist cause. Let the Hindus, the current champions of the ancient worldâs traditions and culture, not die out before the world realizes they are worthy of honor.

Namaste and Mitakuye OyasinÂ

Accessing the history of the US governmentâs war against the American Indians allows us to get a clear perspective of the propaganda war being waged against the RSS and Hindu Nationalists groups. The exact same methods are being used for the exact same goals of obliterating Humanityâs last remaining Indigenous power structure. Amongst the remaining Indigenous groups only the Hindus are in a position to control a major seat of power. All good people of conscience should unite behind them. Indiaâs Hindu are the only people capable of standing up to the tyrants of Corporatism, Communism, Fascism and the Religious Supremacists represented by the Abrahamic radicals of Christianity and Islam.

AIM, American Indian Movement is basically the RSS for the American Indians.Â "The movement was founded to turn the attention of Indian people toward a renewal of spirituality which would impart the strength of resolve needed to reverse the ruinous policies of the United States, Canada, and other colonialist governments of Central and South America. At the heart of AIM is deep spirituality and a belief in the connectedness of all Indian people. The philosophy of self-determination upon which the movement is built is deeply rooted in traditional spirituality, culture, language and history...

Indian people live on Mother Earth with the clear understanding that no one will assure the coming generations except ourselves. No one from the outside will do this for us. And no person among us can do it all for us, either. Self-determination must be the goal of all work. Solidarity must be the first and only defense of the members."Â "we are criticized meticulously for our right to be who we areSimilar to the efforts in India and elsewhere to demonize the RSS as a racist violent organization, the US Govt and media attempted to destroy AIM.

See links below.http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/USvAIMbackground.htmlhttp://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096413635

The Propaganda War In pursuing such a policy the U.S. power elite has replicated the tactics and conditions more typically imposed on its colonies abroad. First, there is the matter of "grey and black propaganda" through which U.S. covert agencies, working hand in glove with the mainstream media, distort or fabricate information concerning the groups they have targeted. The function of such a campaign is always to deny with plausibility public sympathy or support to the groups in question, to isolate them and render them vulnerable to physical repression or liquidation.Â As concerns AIM, grey propaganda efforts have often centered upon contentions (utterly unsubstantiated) that the "Indian agenda" is to dispossess non-Indians of the home-owner, small farmer or rancher type living within the various treaty areas. [This flies directly in the face of the formal positions advanced by the AIM and associated groups working on treaty land issues.

AIM has consistently held that it seeks lands held by the U.S. and various state governments (such as National and State Parks, National Forests and Grasslands, Bureau of Land Management areas, etc.) as well as major corporate holdings within the treaty areas. Small landholders would be allowed to remain and retain their property under "landed immigrant provisions" or, in some cases, naturalization.] In terms of black propaganda, there have been a number of highly publicized allegations of violence which, once disproven, were allowed to die without further fanfare. This has been coupled to "leaks" from official government sources that AIM is a "terrorist" organization. [This is based on testimony of a single informer at a hearing at which the AIM leadership was denied the right to cross-examine or to testify.]

The propaganda efforts have, in large part, yielded the desired effect, souring not only the average American citizen's perception of AIM, but-remarkably-that of the broader U.S. internal opposition as well. The latter have been so taken in upon occasion as to parrot the government/corporate line that Indian land claims are "unrealistic," "not feasible," and ultimately a "gross unfairness to everyone else."Â Some books on the subject:Blood of the Land:

The Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement, by Rex Weyler.New York: Everest House, 1982. Loud Hawk: The United States Versus the American Indian Movement, by Kenneth S. Stern.Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. http://aimovement.org/mckiernan.htmlhttp:/...m/siege.htmlThe Role of AIM Leaders in Indian Nationalism

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0095-182X...B2-C&size=LARGEÂ

The revolutionary fervor of AIM's leaders drew the attention of the FBI and the CIA, who then set out to crush the movement. Their ruthless suppression of AIM during the early 1970s sowed the seeds of the confrontation that followed in February, 1973..

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history...93aim.html âPledged to fight White Man's injustice to Indians, his oppression, persecution, discrimination and malfeasance in the handling of Indian Affairs. No area in North America is too remote when trouble impends for Indians. AIM shall be there to help the Native People regain human rights and achieve restitutions and restorations.

âhttp://www.aimovement.org/store/index.html 

Marxism channels the rebellious impulses among native colonized into a format congruent with the dominant western/abrahamic genocidal culturicidal and colonizing paradigm. Nothing else explains how people otherwise sympathetic to native american struggles can be so overtly hostile to Hindus.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 12-24-2008, 10:38 AM by Husky.)

QUOTE(dhu @ Dec 23 2008, 05:17 PM)<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEAncient Struggle Continues, Scholars Remain Clueless
By Brannon ParkerÂ Â

[...]
First, there is the matter of "grey and black propaganda" through which U.S. covert agencies, working hand in glove with the mainstream media, distort or fabricate information concerning the groups they have targeted. The function of such a campaign is always to deny with plausibility public sympathy or support to the groups in question, to isolate them and render them vulnerable to physical repression or liquidation.Â As concerns AIM, grey propaganda efforts have often centered upon contentions (utterly unsubstantiated) that the "Indian agenda" is to dispossess non-Indians of the home-owner, small farmer or rancher type living within the various treaty areas. [This flies directly in the face of the formal positions advanced by the AIM and associated groups working on treaty land issues.

AIM has consistently held that it seeks lands held by the U.S. and various state governments (such as National and State Parks, National Forests and Grasslands, Bureau of Land Management areas, etc.) as well as major corporate holdings within the treaty areas. Small landholders would be allowed to remain and retain their property under "landed immigrant provisions" or, in some cases, naturalization.] In terms of black propaganda, there have been a number of highly publicized allegations of violence which, once disproven, were allowed to die without further fanfare. This has been coupled to "leaks" from official government sources that AIM is a "terrorist" organization. [This is based on testimony of a single informer at a hearing at which the AIM leadership was denied the right to cross-examine or to testify.]

The propaganda efforts have, in large part, yielded the desired effect, souring not only the average American citizen's perception of AIM, but-remarkably-that of the broader U.S. internal opposition as well. The latter have been so taken in upon occasion as to parrot the government/corporate line that Indian land claims are "unrealistic," "not feasible," and ultimately a "gross unfairness to everyone else."Â Some books on the subject:Blood of the Land:

The Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement, by Rex Weyler.New York: Everest House, 1982. Loud Hawk: The United States Versus the American Indian Movement, by Kenneth S. Stern.Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. http://aimovement.org/mckiernan.htmlhttp:/...m/siege.htmlThe Role of AIM Leaders in Indian Nationalism
[right][snapback]92136[/snapback][/right]</div>The dispossessed native American Traditionalists may not even ask for their "5 villages" (in a continent that is actually entirely their own) without it being decried an offense equal to blaspheming against the christian gawd, and having as consequence that the US punishes them for this "intolerable blasphemy".
How do those traditionalists bear it? How can the rest of the world bear such infuriating injustice? Oh, but I overlooked that much of the rest of the world holds to the same jeebusjehovallah as the US and therefore sees nothing wrong in this at all.

12-24-2008, 11:26 AM

The dispossessed native American Traditionalists may not even ask for their "5 villages" (in a continent that is actually entirely their own) without it being decried an offense equal to blaspheming against the christian gawd, and having as consequence that the US punishes them for this "intolerable blasphemy".
How do those traditionalists bear it? How can the rest of the world bear such infuriating injustice? Oh, but I overlooked that much of the rest of the world holds to the same jeebusjehovallah as the US and therefore sees nothing wrong in this at all.
[right][snapback]92164[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]

The strange facts of the current world is that people have a very short memory.I would rather say select amnesia .Geo politics has overtaken the value system of justice and equality .Twisted versions of religious sanctions and perceptions have taken the driving seat.

You are very right in your statement on the native Indians asking for their rights being considered as "intolerable blasphemy" . Simply becasue they have no political or economic clout in the senate.

They it in the 1800s and would not hesitate to do it now again .They seem to be carrying the same British philosophy of "the white mans burden" across the world.

The pain we see in the Native american Indians displacement is so very same as compared to the Tibetan and there people will forever be haunting for justice passively .

dhu · 12-25-2008, 06:48 PM

Children & The Psychology of White Supremacy (video)

dhu · 12-29-2008, 09:09 AM

The prof. quigley mentioned here is caroll quigley.

QUOTECHAPTER FOUR
BANKROLLING THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

The establishing of the Federal Reserve System provided the "conspiracy" with an instrument whereby the international bankers could run the national debt up to the sky, thereby collecting enormous amounts of interest and also gaining control over the borrower. During the Wilson Administration alone, the national debt expanded 800 percent.

Two months prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the conspirators had created the mechanism to collect the funds to pay the interest on the national debt. That mechanism was the progressive income tax, the second plank of Karl Marx' Communist Manifesto which contained ten planks for SOCIALIZING a country.

One quite naturally assumes that the graduated income tax would be opposed by the wealthy. The fact is that many of the wealthiest Americans supported it. Some, no doubt, out of altruism and because, at first, the taxes were very small. But others backed the scheme because they already had a plan for permanently avoiding both the income tax and the subsequent inheritance tax.

What happened was this: At the turn of the century the Populists, a group of rural socialists, were gaining strength and challenging the power of the New York bankers and monopolist industrialists. While the Populists had the wrong answers, they asked many of the right questions. Unfortunately, they were led to believe that the banker-monopolist control over government, which they opposed, was a product of free enterprise.

Since the Populist threat to the cartelists was from the Left (there being no organized political movement for laissez-faire), the Insiders moved to capture the Left. Professor Quigley discloses that over fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Leftwing political movement in the United States. This was not difficult to do since these Left groups needed funds and were eager for help to get their message to the public. Wall Street supplied both. There was nothing new about this decision, says Quigley, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. He continues :

Â Â "What made it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes...." (Page 938)

Radical movements are never successful unless they attract big money and/or outside support. The great historian of the Twentieth Century, Oswald Spengler, was one of those who saw what American Liberals refuse to see- that the Left is controlled by its alleged enemy, the male- factors of great wealth. He wrote in his monumental Decline of the West (Modern Library, New York, 1945):

Â Â "There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, in the direction indicated by money, and for the time being permitted by money-and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact."

While the Populist movement was basically non-conspiratorial, its Leftist ideology and platform were made to order for the elitist Insiders because it aimed at concentrating power in government. The insiders knew they could control that power and use it to their own purposes. They were not, of course, interested in promoting competition but in restricting it. Professor Gabriel Kolko has prepared a lengthy volume presenting the undeniable proof that the giant corporate manipulators promoted much of the so-called "progressive legislation" of the Roosevelt and Wilson eras-legislation which ostensibly was aimed at controlling their abuses, but which was so written as to suit their interests. In The Triumph of Conservatism (by which Kolko mistakenly means big business), he notes :

Â Â the significant reason for many businessmen welcoming and working to increase federal intervention into their affairs has been virtually ignored by historians and economists. The oversight was due to the illusion that American industry was centralized and monopolized to such an extent that it could rationalize the activity [regulate production and prices] in its various branches voluntarily. Quite the opposite was true. Despite the large numbers of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests...."

The best way for the Insiders to eliminate this growing Competition was to impose a progressive income tax on their competitors while writing the laws so as to include built-in escape hatches for themselves. Actually, very few of the proponents of the graduated income tax realized they were playing into the hands of those they were seeking to control. As Ferdinand Lundberg notes in The Rich And The Super-Rich:

Â Â "What it [the income tax] became, finally, was a siphon gradually inserted into the pocketbooks of the general public. Imposed to popular huzzas as a class tax, the income tax was gradually turned into a mass tax in a jiujitsu turnaround

The Insiders' principal mouthpiece in the Senate during this period was Nelson Aldrich, one of the conspirators involved in engineering the creation of the Federal Reserve and the maternal grandfather of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. Lundberg says that "When Aldrich spoke, newsmen understood that although the words were his, the dramatic line was surely approved by 'Big John [D. Rockefeller]. . . .'" In earlier years Aldrich had denounced the income tax as "communistic and socialistic," but in 1909 he pulled a dramatic and stunning reversal. The American Biographical Dictionary comments:

Â Â "Just when the opposition had become formidable he [Aldrich] took the wind out of its sails by bringing forward, with the support of the President [Taft], a proposed amendment to the Constitution empowering Congress to lay income taxes."

Howard Hinton records in his biography of Cordell Hull that Congressman Hull, who had been pushing in the House for the income tax, wrote this stunned observation:

Â Â "During the past few weeks the unexpected spectacle of certain so-called 'old-line conservative' [sic] Republican leaders in Congress suddenly reversing their attitude of a lifetime and seemingly espousing, through ill-concealed reluctance, the proposed income-tax amendment to the Constitution has been the occasion of universal surprise and wonder."

The escape hatch for the Insiders to avoid paying taxes was ready. By the time the Amendment had been approved by the states (even before the income-tax was passed), the Rockefellers and Carnegie foundations were in full operation.

One must remember that it was to break up the Standard Oil (Rockefeller) and U.S. Steel (Carnegie) monopolies that the various anti-trust acts were ostensibly passed. These monopolists could now compound their wealth tax-free while competitors had to face a graduated income tax which made it difficult to amass capital. As we have said, socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, as the socialists would like you to believe, but a consolidate-and-control-the-wealth program for the Insiders. The Reece Committee which investigated foundations for Congress in 1953 proved with an overwhelming amount of evidence that the various Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations have been promoting socialism since their inception. (See Rene Wormser's Foundations: Their Power and Influence, Devin Adair, New York, 1958.)

The conspirators now had created the mechanisms to run up the debt, to collect the debt, and (for themselves) to avoid the taxes required to pay the yearly interest on the debt. Then all that was needed was a reason to escalate the debt. Nothing runs up a national debt like a war. And World War I was being brewed in Europe.

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected by a hair. He had based his campaign on the slogan: "He Kept Us Out of War!" The American public was extremely opposed to America's getting involved in a European war. Staying out of the perennial foreign quarrels had been an American tradition since George Washington. But as Wilson was stumping the country giving his solemn word that American soldiers would not be sent into a foreign war, he was preparing to do just the opposite. His "alter ego," as he called "Colonel" House, was making behind-the-scenes agreements with England which committed America to entering the war. Just five months later we were in it. The same crowd which manipulated the passage of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System wanted America in the war. J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, "Colonel" House, Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg and the rest of the Jekyl Island conspirators were all deeply involved in getting us involved. Many of these financiers had loaned England large sums of money. In fact, J.P. Morgan & Co. served as British financial agents in this country during World War I.

While all of the standard reasons given for the outbreak of World War I in Europe doubtless were factors, there were also other more important causes. The conspiracy had been planning the war for over two decades.

The assassination of an Austrian Archduke was merely an incident providing an excuse for starting a chain reaction.

After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.

As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a member of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood in War Time (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.

In order to generate war fever, the sinking of the Lusitania--a British ship torpedoed two years earlier--was revived and given renewed headlines. German submarine warfare was turned into a major issue by the newspapers.

Submarine warfare was a phony issue. Germany and England were at war. Each was blockading the other country. J.P. Morgan and other financiers were selling munitions to Britain. The Germans could not allow those supplies to be delivered any more than the English would have allowed them to be delivered to Germany. If Morgan wanted to take the risks and reap the rewards (or suffer the consequences) of selling munitions to England, that was his business. It was certainly nothing over which the entire nation should have been dragged into war.

The Lusitania, at the time it was sunk, was carrying six million pounds of ammunition. It was actually illegal for American passengers to be aboard a ship carrying munitions to belligerents. Almost two years before the liner was sunk, the New York Tribune (June 19, 1913) carried a squib which stated: "Cunard officials acknowledged to the Tribune correspondent today that the greyhound [Lusitania] is being equipped with high power naval rifles. . . ." In fact, the Lusitania was registered in the British navy as an auxiliary cruiser. (Barnes, Harry E., The Genesis of the War, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1926, p.611.) In addition, the German government took out large ads in all the New York papers warning potential passengers that the ship was carrying munitions and telling them not to cross the Atlantic on it. Those who chose to make the trip knew the risk they were taking. Yet the sinking of the Lusitania was used by clever propagandists to portray the Germans as inhuman slaughterers of innocents. Submarine warfare was manufactured into a cause celebre to push us into war. On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war. The American people acquiesced on the basis that it would be a "war to end all wars."

During the "war to end all wars," insider banker Bernard Baruch was made absolute dictator over American business when President Wilson appointed him Chairman of the War Industries Board, where he had control of all domestic contracts for Allied war materials. Baruch made lots of friends while placing tens of billions in government contracts, and it was widely rumored in Wall Street that out of the war to make the world safe for international bankers he netted $200 million for himself.

"Colonel" House (I) was front man for the International banking fraternity. He manipulated President Woodrow Wilson Â® like a puppet Wilson called him "my alter ego." House played a major role in creating The Federal Reserve System, passing the graduated Income tax and getting America into WWI. House's Influence over Wilson Is an example that In the world of super-politics the real rulers are not always the ones the public sees.

German born International financier Paul Warburg masterminded establishment of Federal Reserve to put con trol over nation's economy in hands of international bankers. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply which allows manipulators to create alternate cycles of boom and bust, i.e., a roller coaster economy. This allows those in the know to make fabulous amounts of money, but even more important, allows the Insiders to control the economy and further centralize power in the federal government.

While insider banker Paul Warburg controlled the Federal Reserve, and international banker Bernard Baruch placed government contracts, international banker Eugene Meyer, a former partner of Baruch and the son of a partner in the Rothschilds' international banking house of Lazard Freres, was Wilson's choice to head the War Finance Corporation, where he too made a little money.*

(*Meyer later gained control of the highly influential Washington Post which became known as the "Washington Daily Worker.")

It should be noted that Sir William Wiseman, the man sent by British Intelligence to help bring the United States into the war, was amply rewarded for his services. He stayed in this country after WWI as a new partner in the Jacob Schiff-Paul Warburg-controlled Kuhn, Loeb bank.

World War I was a financial bonanza for the international bankers. But it was a catastrophe of such magnitude for the United States that few even today grasp its importance. The war reversed our traditional foreign policy of non-involvement and we have been enmeshed almost constantly ever since in perpetual wars for perpetual peace. Winston Churchill once observed that all nations would have been better off had the U.S. minded its own business. Had we done so, he said, "peace would have been made with Germany; and there would have been no collapse in Russia leading to Communism; no breakdown of government in Italy followed by Fascism; and Nazism never would have gained ascendancy in Germany." (Social Justice Magazine, July 3, 1939, p.4.)

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was obviously one of the great turning points in world history. It is an event over which misinformation abounds. The myth-makers and re-writers of history have done their landscape painting jobs well. The establishing of Communism in Russia is a classic example of the second "big lie" of Communism, i.e., that it is the movement of the downtrodden masses rising up against exploiting bosses. This cunning deception has been fostered since before the first French Revolution in 1789.

Most people today believe the Communists were successful in Russia because they were able to rally behind them the sympathy and frustration of the Russian people who were sick of the tyranny of the Czars. This is to ignore the history of what actually happened. While almost everybody is reminded that the Bolshevik Revolution took place in November of 1917, few know that the Czar had abdicated seven months earlier in March. When Czar Nicholas II abdicated, a provisional government was established by Prince Lvov who wanted to pattern the new Russian government after our own. But, unfortunately, the Lvov government gave way to the Kerensky regime. Kerensky, a so-called democratic socialist, may have been running a caretaker government for the Communists. He kept the war going against Germany and the other Central Powers, but he issued a general amnesty for Communists and other revolutionaries, many of whom had been exiled after the abortive Red Revolution of 1905. Back to mother Russia came 250,000 dedicated revolutionaries, and Kerensky's own government's doom was sealed.

In the Soviet Union, as in every Communist country (or as they call themselves--the Socialist countries), the power has not come to the Communists' hands because the downtrodden masses willed it so. The power has come from the top down in every instance. Let us briefly reconstruct the sequences of the Communist take-over.

The year is 1917. The Allies are fighting the Central Powers. The Allies include Russia, the British Commonwealth, France and by April 1917, the United States. in March of 1917, purposeful planners set in motion the forces to compel Czar Nicholas II to abdicate. He did so under pressure from the Allies after severe riots in the Czarist capitol of Petrograd, riots that were caused by the breakdowns in the transportation system which cut the city off from food supplies and led to the closing of factories.

But where were Lenin and Trotsky when all this was taking place? Lenin was in Switzerland and had been in Western Europe since 1905 when he was exiled for trying to topple the Czar in the abortive Communist revolution of that year. Trotsky also was in 'exile, a reporter for a Communist newspaper on the lower east side of New York City. The Bolsheviks were not a visible political force at the time the Czar abdicated. And they came to power not because the downtrodden masses of Russia called them back, but because very powerful men in Europe and the United States sent them in.

Lenin was sent across Europe-at-war on the famous "sealed train." With him Lenin took some $5 to $6 million in gold (how ? if I may ask). The whole thing was arranged by the German high command and Max Warburg, through another very wealthy and lifelong socialist by the name of Alexander Helphand alias "Parvus." When Trotsky left New York aboard the S.S. Christiania, on March 27, 1917, with his- entourage of 275 revolutionaries, the first port of call was Halifax, Nova Scotia. There the Canadians grabbed Trotsky and his money and impounded them both. This was a very logical thing for the Canadian government to do for Trotsky had said many times that if he were successful in coming to power in Russia he would immediately stop what he called the "imperialist war" and sue for a separate peace with Germany. This would free millions of German troops for transfer from the Eastern front to the Western front where they could kill Canadians. So Trotsky cooled his heels in a Canadian prison-for five days. Then all of a sudden the British (through future Kuhn, Loeb partner Sir William Wiseman) and the United States (through none other than the ubiquitous "Colonel" House) pressured the Canadian government. And, despite the fact we were now in the war, said, in so many words, "Let Trotsky go." Thus, with an American passport, Trotsky went back to meet Lenin. They joined up, and, by November, through bribery, cunning, brutality and deception, they were able (not to bring the masses rallying to their cause but) to hire enough thugs and make enough deals to impose out of the gun barrel what Lenin called "all power to the Soviets." The Communists came to power by seizing a mere handful of key cities. In fact, practically the whole Bolshevik Revolution took place in one city-Petrograd. It was as if the whole United States became Communist because a Communist-led mob seized Washington, D.C. It was years before the Soviets solidified power throughout Russia.

The Germans, on the face of it, had a plausible excuse for financing Lenin and Trotsky. The two Germans most responsible for the financing of Lenin were Max Warburg and a displaced Russian named Alexander Helphand. They could claim that they were serving their country's cause by helping and financing Lenin. However, these two German "patriots" neglected to mention to the Kaiser their plan to foment a Communist revolution in Russia. The picture takes on another dimension when you consider that the brother of Max Warburg was Paul Warburg, prime mover in establishing the Federal Reserve System and who from his position on the Federal Reserve Board of Directors, played a key role in financing the American war effort. (When news leaked out in American papers about brother Max running the German finances, Paul resigned from his Federal Reserve post without a whimper.) From here on the plot sickens.

For the father-in-law of Max Warburg's brother, Felix, was Jacob Schiff, senior partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Paul and Felix Warburg, you will recall, were also partners in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. while Max ran the Rothschild- allied family bank of Frankfurt.) Jacob Schiff also helped finance Leon Trotsky. According to the New York Journal-American of February 3, 1949: "Today it is estimated by Jacob's grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia." (See Chart 6.)

One of the best sources of information on the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution is Czarism and the Revolution by an important White Russian General named Arsene de Goulevitch who was founder in France of the Union of Oppressed Peoples. In this volume, written in French and subsequently translated into English, de Goulevitch notes:

Â Â "The main purveyors of funds for the revolution, however, were neither the crackpot Russian millionaires nor the armed bandits of Lenin. The 'real' money primarily came from certain British and American circles which for a long time past had lent their support to the Russian revolutionary cause.... De Goulevitch continues:

Â Â "The important part played by the wealthy American banker, Jacob Schiff, in the events in Russia, though as yet only partially revealed, is no longer a secret."

General Alexander Nechvolodov is quoted by de Goulevitch as stating in his book on the Bolshevik Revolution:

Â Â "In April 1917, Jacob Schiff publicly declared that it was thanks to his financial support that the revolution in Russia had succeeded.

Â Â In the Spring of the same year, Schiff commenced to subsidize Trotsky ...

Â Â Simultaneously Trotsky and Co. were also being subsidized by Max Warburg and Olaf Aschberg of the Nye Banken of Stockholm . . . The Rhine Westphalian Syndicate and Jivotovsky,. whose daughter later married Trotsky."

FINANCING

BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

Paul Warburg Max Warburg

$6,000,000

Jacob Schiff Col. House

$20,000,000 N.E.P. TROTSKY Hitler

LENIN

$5,000,000 Harriman Alfred Milner

RockefeIler Rothschild

Vanderlip J. P. MORGAN & CO

ROCKEFELLERS

Schiff spent millions to overthrow the Czar and more millions to overthrow Kerensky. He was sending money to Russia long after the true character of the Bolsheviks was known to the world. Schiff raised $10 million, supposedly for Jewish war relief in Russia, but later events revealed it to be a good business investment. (Forbes, B. C., Men Who Are Making America, pp.334-5.) According to de Goulevitch:

Â Â "Mr. Bakhmetiev, the late Russian Imperial Ambassador to the United States, tells us that the Bolsheviks, after victory, transferred 600 million roubles in gold between the years 1918 and 1922 to Kuhn, Loeb & Company [Schiff's firm]."

Schiff's participation in the Bolshevik Revolution, though quite naturally now denied, was well known among Allied intelligence services at the time. This led to much talk about Bolshevism being a Jewish plot. The result was that the subject of financing the Communist takeover of Russia became taboo. Later evidence indicates that the bankrolling of the Bolsheviks was handled by a syndicate of international bankers, which in addition to the Schiff-Warburg clique, included Morgan and Rockefeller interests. Documents show that the Morgan organization put at least $1 million in the Red revolutionary kitty.*

Still another important financier of the Bolshevik Revolution was an extremely wealthy Englishman named Lord Alfred Milner, the organizer and head of a secret organization called "The Round Table" Group which was backed by Lord Rothschild (discussed in the next chapter).

De Goulevitch notes further:

Â Â "On April 7, 1917, General Janin made the following entry in his diary ('Au G.C.C. Russe"-At Russian G.H.Q.-Le Monde Slave, Vol. 2, 1927, pp.296-297): Long interview with R., who confirmed what I had previously been told by M. After referring to the German hatred of himself and his family, he turned to the subject of the Revolution which, he claimed, was engineered by the English and, more precisely, by Sir George Buchanan and Lord (Alfred] Milner. Petrograd at the time was teeming with English. . . . He could, he asserted, name the streets and the numbers of the houses in which British agents were quartered. They were reported, during the rising, to have distributed money to the soldiers and incited them to mutiny."

De Goulevitch goes on to reveal: "In private interviews I have been told that over 21 million roubles were spent by Lord Milner in financing the Russian Revolution."

It should be noted parenthetically that Lord Milner, Paul, Felix and Max Warburg represented "their" respective countries at the Paris Peace Conference at the conclusion of World War 1.

If we can somehow ascribe Max Warburg's financing of Lenin to German "patriotism," it was certainly not "patriotism" which inspired Schiff, Morgan, Rockefeller and Milner to bankroll the Bolsheviks. Both Britain and

Hagedorn, Herman, The Magnate, John Day, N.Y. See also Washington Post, Feb. 2, 19f8, p. 195.)

America were at war with Germany and were allies of Czarist Russia. To free dozens of German divisions to switch from the Eastern front to France and kill hundreds of thousands of American and British soldiers was nothing short of treason.

In the Bolshevik Revolution we see many of the same old faces that were responsible for; creating the Federal Reserve System, initiating the graduated income tax, setting up the tax-free foundations and pushing us into WWI. However, if you conclude that this is anything but coincidental, your name will be immediately expunged from the Social Register.

No revolution can be successful without organization and money. "The downtrodden masses" usually provide little of the former and none of the latter. But Insiders at the top can arrange for both.

What did these people possibly have to gain in financing the Russian Revolution? What did they have to gain by keeping it alive and afloat, or, during the 1920's by pouring millions of dollars into what Lenin called his New Economic Program, thus saving the Soviets from collapse?

Why would these "capitalists" do all this? If your goal is global conquest, you have to start somewhere. It may or may not have been coincidental, but Russia was the one major European country without a central bank. In Russia, for the first time, the Communist conspiracy gained a geographical homeland from which to launch assaults against the other nations of the world. The West now had an enemy.

In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world's richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans, and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international Communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense? Remember that for over 150 years it has been Lord Alfred Milner, wealthy English man and front man for the Rothschilds, served as paymaster for the International bankers in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. Milner later headed secret society known as The Round Table which was dedicated to establishing a world government whereby a clique of super-rich financiers would control the world under the guise of Socialism. The American subsidiary of this conspiracy is called the Council on Foreign Relations and was started by, and is still controlled by Leftist international bankers.

According to his grandson John, Jacob Schiff long time associate of the Rothschilds, financed the Communist Revolution in Russia to the tune of $20 million. According to a report on file with the State Department, his firm, Kuhn Loeb and Co. bankrolled the first five year plan for Stalin, Schiff's partner and relative, Paul Warburg, engineered the establishment of the Federal Reserve System while on the Kuhn Loeb payroll, Schiff's descendants are active in the Council on Foreign Relations today.

Home of the Council on Foreign Relations on 68th St. in New York. The admitted goal of the CFR is to abolish the Constitution and replace our once independent Republic with a World Government. CFR members have controlled. the last six administrations. Richard Nixon has been a member and has appointed at least 100 CFR members to high positions in his administration.

standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict. You must have an "enemy" if you are going to collect from the King. The East-West balance-of-power politics is used as one of the main excuses for the socialization of America. Although it was not their main purpose, by nationalization of Russia the Insiders bought themselves an enormous piece of real estate, complete with mineral rights, for somewhere between $30 and $40 million.

We can only theorize on the manner in which Moscow is controlled from New York, London and Paris. Undoubtedly much of the control is economic, but certainly the international bankers have an enforcer arm within Russia to keep the Soviet leaders in line. The organization may be SMERSH, the international Communist murder organization described in testimony before Congressional Committees and by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books. For although the Bond novels were wildly imaginative, Fleming had been in British Navy intelligence, maintained excellent intelligence contacts around the world and was reputedly a keen student of the international conspiracy.

We do know this, however. A clique of American financiers not only helped establish Communism in Russia, but has striven mightily ever since to keep it alive. Ever since 1918 this clique has been engaged in transferring money and, probably more important, technical information, to the Soviet Union. This is made abundantly clear in the three volume history Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development by scholar Antony Sutton of Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Using, for the most part, official State Department documents, Sutton shows conclusively that virtually everything the Soviets possess has been acquired from the West. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S.S.R. was made in the U.S.A. The landscape painters, unable to refute Sutton's monumental scholarship, simply paint him out of the picture.

At Versailles, this same clique carved up Europe and set the stage for World War II. As Lord Curzon commented: "It is not a peace treaty, it is simply a break in hostilities." In 1933, the same Insiders pushed FDR into recognizing the Soviet Union, thus saving it from financial collapse, while at the same time they were underwriting huge loans on both sides of the Atlantic for the new regime of Adolph Hitler. In so doing they assisted greatly in setting the stage for World War II, and the events that followed. In 1941, the same Insiders rushed to the aid of our "noble ally," Stalin, after his break with Hitler. In 1943, these same insiders marched off to the Teheran Conference and proceeded to start the carving up of Europe after the second great "war to end war." Again at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, they established the China policy . . later summarized by Owen Lattimore: "The problem was how to allow them [China] to fall without making it look as if the United States had pushed them." The facts are inescapable. In one country after another Communism has been imposed on the local population from the top down. The most prominent forces for the imposition of that tyranny came from the United States and Great Britain Here is a charge that no American enjoys making, but the facts lead to no other possible conclusion. The idea that Communism is a movement of the downtrodden masses is a fraud.

None of the foregoing makes sense if Communism really is what the Communists and the Establishment tell us it is. But if Communism is an arm of a bigger conspiracy to control the world by power-mad billionaires (and brilliant but ruthless academicians who have shown them how to use their power) it all becomes perfectly logical.

It is at this point that we should again make it clear that this conspiracy is not made up solely of bankers and international cartelists, but includes every field of human endeavor. Starting with Voltaire and Adam Weishaupt and running through John Ruskin, Sidney Webb, Nicholas Murray Butler, and on to the present with Henry Kissinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, it has always been the scholar looking for avenues of power who has shown the "sons of the very powerful" how their wealth could be used to rule the world.

We cannot stress too greatly the importance of the reader keeping in mind that this book is discussing only one segment of the conspiracy, certain international bankers. Other equally important segments which work to foment labor, religious and racial strife in order to promote socialism have been described in numerous other books. These other divisions of the conspiracy operate independently of the international bankers in most cases and it would certainly be disastrous to ignore the danger to our freedom they represent.

It would be equally disastrous to lump all businessmen and bankers into the conspiracy. One must draw the distinction between competitive free enterprise, the most moral and productive system ever devised, and cartel capitalism dominated by industrial monopolists and international bankers. The difference is the private enterpriser operates by offering products and services in a competitive free market while the cartel capitalist uses the government to force the public to do business with him. These corporate socialists are tile deadly enemies of competitive private enterprise.

Liberals are willing to believe that these "robber barons" will fix prices, rig markets, establish monopolies, buy politicians, exploit employees and fire them the day before they are eligible for pensions, but they absolutely will not believe that these same men would want to rule the world or would use Communism as the striking edge of their conspiracy. When one discusses the machinations of these men, Liberals usually respond by saying, "But don't you think they mean well?"

However, if you think with logic, reason and precision in this field and try to expose these power seekers, the Establishment's mass media will accuse you of being a dangerous paranoid who is "dividing" our people. In every other area, of course, they encourage dissent as being healthy in a "democracy."

dhu · (This post was last modified: 12-29-2008, 08:37 PM by dhu.)

More academic version of the above theme:

Wall Street & the Bolshevik Revolution - reviews
by Antony C. Sutton

http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/Wal...eRevolution.pdf - full text, pdf

dhu · (This post was last modified: 01-27-2009, 08:21 PM by dhu.)

xpost links given by Husky

http://www.portraitofindia.com/liberal1.htm
http://www.portraitofindia.com/liberal2.htm
http://www.portraitofindia.com/liberal3.htm
http://www.portraitofindia.com/liberal4.htm
http://www.portraitofindia.com/liberal5.htm

will post in full...

dhu · 01-29-2009, 05:12 AM

QUOTEThe original link to this article was http://www.hindu.org/publications/ramswaru...yondbelief.html

But the hindu.org is now redirected to hinduism.org and it does not seem to have the review. The cached page at google is at
Source

Review of V.S. Naipaul's
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
by Ram Swarup
In the Land of Converts: An Islamic Journey

Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in 1979 inspired Naipaul to undertake an "Islamic Journey" and visit Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, The result was an important book, Among the Believers (1981) on an important subject. He found the issues involved important enough and he revisited those parts and has now come out with another very thoughtful work, Beyond Belief.* The two books go together.

The second journey confirmed the observations and conclusions of the first. Though Khomeini's Islamic revolution failed, Islamic fundamentalism of which it was a projection continues to be an important ideology and to exercise a great political influence.

Though the two books involved some rough travel, they are not travel books; they are serious studies of an important ideology and area. They combine history, social criticism raised by larger reflections which place the author, already a celebrated literary figure in the English world, among major social thinkers of the age. In the new narratives, the author has created a new literary form which gives more scope for his reflective talents.

Thinking aloud, the author observes that the overthrow of the old religions--religions linked to the earth and animals and the deities of a particular place or tribe--by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history. In the two narratives, he occupies himself with this subject though he does not discuss it as such and directly, and limits himself to its Islamic expression in some important Muslim countries. He says that one main feature of these religions is that they take out sacredness from the land and environment of the converts. He remembers his own place of birth in Trinidad which knew no sacred places. Probably the aboriginal people knew them but they had been destroyed and instead of them there were in the plantation colony, "people like us whose sacred places were in other continents," to put it in the language of Naipaul. Enlarging on the observation, he adds that perhaps it is the absence of the sense of sacredness that is the curse of the New World. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover.

Later on, he met the same phenomenon in Goa where the Portuguese, representatives of another revealed religion, Christianity, had had time to do their work. Haters of idolatry, haters of all that was not of the true faith, levellers of Hindu temples and establishers of the Inquisition and the burning of the heretics, they created there "something of a New-World emptiness, like the Spanish in Mexico." But as one stepped out of Goa, one stepped into the sacred land again. It wasn't political history that made it so. Religious myths touched every part of the land outside colonial Goa. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on" (India: A Million Mutinies). In destroying the sense of sacredness, Islamic fundamentalism is true to its type. But it does allow to one peoples, and only one peoples, the original peoples of the Prophet, their sacred places, pilgrimage and earth reverences; and these sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples.

Closely connected with this is another phenomenon. The converts have also to strip themselves of their past. Nothing is required of them but the purest faith, Islam, submission. Islam, Naipaul adds, "is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism."

Naipaul finds Islamic fundamentalism at work wherever he goes: in Iran, in Pakistan, in Indonesia, in Malaysia. It has its stages and intensities, but there is one minimum requirement: that the converts learn to lose regard for the land of their birth, reject their pagan neighbours and regard them along with women of inferior breed; that they hold their pre-Islamic past and ancestors in contempt. The one unalterable principle is tabligh: that they give up their old identity in every thing, in their beliefs, customs, names, dress. But as one advances in piety, others things are added. There is demand for the enforcement of the sharia, introduction of Muslim penal laws like amputation of limbs, public lashing and stoning; introduction of Muslim rules of marriage and divorce, introduction of obligatory fasts and prayers. All this is often irksome to the believers and in the modern world sometimes also not always practical. This often invites opposition. Hence the need for the fundamentalists to capture state power and enforce Islamic laws, the need for whipping vans to see that men observe rules and regulations of prayer and fasting.

Wherever Naipaul goes, he finds two features very prominent. One is that the converts are trying to erase their past; the second is that though they were once victims of an aggression, they are now all for the aggressor, for the Arabs. Whether in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, their fundamental rage is against the past, against history, and all this accompanied with the "impossible dream of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy."

In Iran, he finds that things have gone pretty far, in fact too far. Its pre-Islamic past is irrecoverable. It has lost all memory of its past and ancestors and is ashamed of them. It was once a great power that had challenged Greece and Rome. But it was defeated by the Arabs in AD 637, practically as soon as Islam began. It never made up for that defeat again. Naipaul says that in Iran "people's consciousness began with the coming of Islam, began with that defeat. It gave a special edge to the faith in Iran, and a special passion to the people." He adds that "to be an Iranian was to have a special faith, a special version of the Arab faith."

One would have thought that this much of Islam should satisfy the Iranians and they should regard themselves as sufficiently Islamic. But not so. Khomeini's call for Islamic revolution had a wide appeal. Naipaul visits Pakistan and finds the same forces at work there too. Unlike Iran, Pakistan still retains important fragments of the past in its dress, customs, ceremonies, festivals and social organization. But it means no relaxation, no relief for the people. It only means that there is much more to do for fundamentalists, much more to deny and repudiate and change.

Similarly Naipaul finds that in Pakistan though most people are converts, to them their ancient "land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred." Their concept of history has completely altered and that alteration has inevitably diminished the intellectual life of the country. All the history of the ancient land has ceased to matter; in the school history books, the history of Pakistan has become only an aspect of the history of Islam. The Muslim invaders, and especially the Arabs, have become the heroes of the Pakistan story. Naipaul regards as "a dreadful mangling of history", a "convert's view" of history. He says that history in Pakistan "has become a kind of neurosis. Too much has to be ignored or angled; there is too much fantasy."

Salman, one of his interviewees, talks of this neurosis. He says: "Islam doesn't show on my face. We have nearly all, subcontinental Muslims, invented Arab ancestors for ourselves. Most of us are Sayeds... if you read Ibn Batuta and early travellers you can sense the condescending attitude of the Arab travellers to the converts."

"The invention of Arab ancestry soon became complete. It has been adopted by all families. If you hear people talking you would believe that his great and wonderful land was nothing but wild jungle, that no human beings lived here."

Naipaul meets the same phenomenon in Indonesia, almost at the limit of the Islamic world. The country was until recently a cultural and religious part of Greater India and Islam came late on the scene. As a result, the country is rich in the monuments of the pagan past but nothing outside or before the faith was to be acknowledged, not even a great Hindu-Buddhist monument like Borobudur, one of the wonders of world. While their objection to these relics is Islamic, some fundamentalists have learnt to clothe it in more acceptable, socialistic terms. One of them said that the money that was spent on Borobudur could be used to feed "hungry Muslims." One important criticism of the Government by the fundamentalists was that the Indonesian embassy in Canberra looked like a Hindu building.

The same wind blows in Malaysia. In the new climate, to be a Malaysian is to be a Muslim. Others, the Chinese Taoists, Buddhists and Hindus suffer many disabilities.

Islam is accompanied by Arabization. Previously Islam marched with the Arab armies, but now Arab influence marches with Islam in all matters, big and small. For example, in Iran, when a boy of fourteen, come under the influence of Islamic fundamentalism, he discarded his old Persian name Farhad, and gave himself a new Arabic name Maisson, one of the early follower of the prophet. In Malaysia, a young boy, son of a Chinese Taoist-Buddhist Bomoh, was converted by a Pathan girl he met. She asked him to read the Quran which he did in order to have some thing to talk to her about. Under her attraction, he became a Muslim and gave himself an Arabic name, Rashid, and changed his dietary habits. Later on, the girl and the Quran receded, but the name stuck.

"Islam as Arab Nationalism"--this idea was recently projected by Anwar Shaikh, from Pakistan but now settled in Great Britain. More recently it was mentioned by Ibn Warraq in his Why I am not a Muslim. The idea is true with certain qualifications. In point of fact, the Arabs were Islam's first victims. Under its sway, they lost not only their gods but also their history and ancestors. In their place they were burdened with an artificial history and ancestry. The Arabs first opposed Islam, but they were overwhelmed by the new Islamic forces. Very soon, they also found it economically and politically attractive. They adopted it wholesale.

Converts
Beyond Belief has a second title, Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. Though the author does not discuss the problem how Muslims came to be Muslims, he takes it for granted that we all know. Dr. K.S. Lal does it for us as far as the Indian Muslims are concerned in his Indian Muslims: Who are They?

The "convert" is more than a descriptive name. In the hands of Naipaul, it has become an important concept. Though on one side it stands for aggression, on the side of victims, it stands for self-alienation, for estrangement from one's own people--a more important component of the concept. The converts have a special psychology. They became converts under great pressure; but subsequently they solve the problem by pretending that their conversion was voluntary. Their forefathers were defeated and humiliated; but they overcome this feeling by identifying themselves with the victors and the aggressors. Even after conversion the pressure continues; they try to prove they are more loyal than the king himself; they become ardent champions and standard-bearers of Islam. In Iran, they think the Arabs are not sufficiently Muslim, and it is Iran's manifest destiny to keep Islam's flag aloft.

Close to the "converts" is the phenomenon of "secularists" we meet in India. Though they are not converts in the accepted sense of the term, they are close to them in their sympathy and antipathy. There is quite a tribe of them--historians, columnists, politicians. The marxist historians of JNU are close to Muslim Aligarh School. Their marxist and secularist hatred for "communal" Hindus has something of the passion and fervour of Muslim converts.

Beyond Belief discusses Islamic fundamentalism, not Islam's fundamentals which is the real source of the trouble. Islamic fundamentalism could not be that cruel if Islam's fundamentals were benign, less narrow and had more sympathy. Thus the failure is deeper. It is a doctrinal failure, the source of other failures. What could you do with a system of beliefs which denies divinity and even goodness in all fraternities (ummah) other than its own? What could you do with ideas like jihad, daru'l-Islam and daru'l-harb if they are part of the basic doctrines? Naipaul also omits to discuss Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism's elder sister who has been upon the scene over a longer period. Its face has been quite as ugly and its record pretty as bad in all places including Europe. In the two Americas, conversions were also accompanied with large-scale genocide.

We hope that Naipaul would undertake another journey among Indigenous Americans-Indians, the neighbours of his early days, and write another book on this theme. There he would meet the phenomenon of "conversion" in its full nakedness, and meet converts who have forgotten their past completely and have no pride left in it. When Huxley visited Guatemala in 1930 or so, he saw a ballet in which "Indians celebrate the defeat and enslavement of their own people at the hands of Alvarado... and have chosen to exalt the heroism, not of their own people, but of men who reduced them to peonage." Self-alienation has gone deep.

Cultural and religious degradation of these people followed their political and economic subjugation. Now their struggle for independence, or whatever they have in its name, must follow a spiritual and cultural revival. Men of good will and vision could help this revival. By writing the proposed book, Naipaul would pay his debt to his old neighbours. The book would also be a Hindu contribution to the cause of the cultural and political revival of indigenous Americas.

A New Struggle
In his concept of "converts", Naipaul has raised another very important question though he does not discuss it. Would the converts come into their own? Would they rediscover their roots both in their past as well as in their psyche? Would they be reconciled to their forefathers? Or are they doomed to continued enmity and historical self-amnesia?

The last two thousand years were years of revelatory religions. But the new era would see another struggle, the struggle of converts trying to rediscover their past and to regain ideological self-respect. It is going to be an important struggle, the struggle of the new era, struggle in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, in the two Americas. The struggle is already on. Though it does not have a name yet, it is the opposite of Christian or Islamic fundamentalism. It is for a natural religion, the word nature in the sense in which Greek philosophers used it, that with which a man is born, sahaja, that which is most essential and innermost in man--his atma.

The work has already begun at least on the external plane. In most European countries, there is now a conscious effort to rediscover their pagan roots. Goprun Dimmbla Hangantysdottir, an Icelandic thinker, writer in her Odsmal of an "ancient heathen civilization of the North which was suppressed, banned and distorted for centuries by threat-imposed Christianity and imported culture from the South."

"Beyond Belief" is not going to make its author popular with the current intellectual establishment in India. Here the acceptable thing is to admire Islam. To describe Muslims as "invaders" is a heresy. According to the current stereotype, they were not invaders, but "liberators" from religious superstitions and social injustice. Naipaul hurts this stereotype.

Ram Swarup
5th July, 1998

dhu · (This post was last modified: 02-08-2009, 02:01 PM by dhu.)

Multicultural? liberal??

The so-called West is only about enforced homogeneity. The traditional identities are divested and replaced with "filler" identities eg black, yellow. The entire western "liberal" facade is just a secularization of the heathen-baiting of the revealed ideologies, namely Christianity.

That is, the entire "Enlightenment" discourse is just a secularization of Christian theology. The Unbeliever and Heathen was transformed into the despotic, feudal, ignorant, communal, superstitious, irrational, refractory Oriental or Hindoo....

This facade will collapse in the future and some segments have already seen through it.

Capitalism, in turn, is just a euphemism for Colonialism.

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