Non-Western Worldview

[brihaspati]

ramana ji,
look at Cyprian of Carthage's comment : God as the "father", and church as the "mother". In this sense, the Greek influence on Christianity in philosophical abstraction is openly trying to reach the "mother". Allegories often reflect other deep seated obsessions in the mind of the framer.

[Agnimitra]

^^ It is interesting that these guys are also trying to co-opt certain Indian "scholars" from the Maadhva sampradaya in order to push their own b@stardized version of "monotheism" and justifying cannibalization and selective digestion of Indic memes. Recently folks like Koenraad Elst were also complaining of the Gungadin duty of "scholars" like Deepak Sarma.

For all this time the Western academics boxed all Vedanta and popular Hinduism under a neo-Advaita rubric. Now that a deracinated generation of Maadhvas has cropped up and stepped forward for service, one notices books being published on Maadhva Vedanta, but with the above slant. I have seen such books slip onto the racks of universities here in the US over the last few years, where resources on Maadhva were hitherto scarce.

Now I myself greatly admire Acharya Maadhva, but I can see how his legacy can be used or abused, and can cut both ways. I have noticed that some DIE type Maadhvas have been working to publish some of his works with a highly distorted and shrill commentary berating most popular Indic forms, including many forms that go back to the demotic Daasakoota tradition unleashed by Madhvacharya himself. The fact is that they have distorted the ideas of the Acharya by imbibing an Anglicized semantic of several crucial terms of Vedantic monotheism and becoming allergic to most Indic streams. I notice also a marked tendency in their works to ingratiate themselves, juxtapose Madhva's words with Biblical and Zoroastrian themes, and insinuate a "we're on the same team" plea, while being coarsely critical of other popular Indic traditions.

I think its alright and even necessary to be critical of other schools of Vedanta, or to critique the watering down of core concepts in popular bhakti traditions - but then one also expects them to take pains to differentiate Maadhva's understanding of monotheistic memes from the Abrahamic spin on the same. After all, this is even more crucial to preventing a total misunderstanding of Maadhva. But this is conspicuous by its absence! Either these guys are not-too-bright, or they are willing defectors.

As I have said here before, it will soon become very important for proper Indic strategists to move rapidly towards this Maadhva "bridge" and occupy and control the discourse there. Maadhva Vedanta can become a very powerful tool to digest Abrahamic traditions and spit out the "a", leaving only the Brahmic. But if we are not pro-active, then the reverse will happen. The Abrahamics will cannibalize this great Acharya's legacy to show that Veda was always meant to be like the Abrahamic, but it became encrusted and lost its message.

[ManishH]

was watching History Channel episode on Axes. The guy claims axe is a Western Civilization achievement!

Wonder if the idiot ever heard of Parasurama avatar of Vishnu.

Is Parasurama the inventor of axe ?

[Atri]

It is interesting that I have not seen a philosophical attempt at deconstructing them as guerrilla strategists - and none probably from an Indic viewpoint. A non-western viewpoint may throw an alternative light on the current Naxalite moves, and perhaps directions for the future we have not thought about.

Evolution of Guerrilla Warfare in India since medieval times

Upasanhaar

Ganim-i-Qavvait is without any doubts an Asurik and Adharmik way of resisting. However when left with no chance, Indic mind took it up and institutionalized it. At times, it worked for benefit of India (Shivaji and Marathas, 1857, Sanyasi, Santhal, Phadke et al) whereas as after 1947's transfer of power, it has been working against republic of India's interests. The fault lies with Government of India machinery as well which has modeled itself along the lines of Mughal and British Predecessors forcing many groups to do what Shivaji did. Since Indic ideological pool could not provide any alternatives which could motivate and justify the Indic resistors to overcome the scruple-barrier required to outlast the British Empire, the resenting population sought elsewhere and found the answers in Marxism and Maoism. So far, it does not look like GOI has found an anti-dote to this "astra".

There are two ways ahead. Either one has to present an alternative to Maoism which is more effective. We have traditions and legends of "Parshurama" which can be the ideological source of the subsequent iteration of future Indian Guerrilla fighters from Indian narrative.

OR

GOI takes sincere measures and drastically reduces corruption and delegates more power to people, bringing in a genuine decentralized democracy in the country, taking it nearer to the golden times of Sri Raama and Vikramaditya.

In both cases, India will preserve her "Swa-tantra" (Self-system). Else, bondage under foreign system is assured.

[johneeG]

was watching History Channel episode on Axes. The guy claims axe is a Western Civilization achievement!

Wonder if the idiot ever heard of Parasurama avatar of Vishnu.

Is Parasurama the inventor of axe ?

Parashu is one of the weapons of Lord Shiva. It seems Parashurama obtained the Parashu(along with several other weapons) from Lord Shiva.

[ManishH]

He did receive it from Lord Shiva, but the legend of Parashurama is against the backdrop of city states already having risen in gangetic valley. Well past bronze age.

Whereas evidence for hand axes go back to paleolithic times. Hafting of axes began in middle paleolithic in Africa. If the question of whose achievement is the axe, one has to look at archaeological data.

[Sushupti]

He did receive it from Lord Shiva, but the legend of Parashurama is against the backdrop of city states already having risen in gangetic valley. Well past bronze age.

Whereas evidence for hand axes go back to paleolithic times. Hafting of axes began in middle paleolithic in Africa. If the question of whose achievement is the axe, one has to look at archaeological data.

why we try to fit Puranic stories in linear time framework?. Aren't Puranic characters eternal and "Annadi", existing in human psyche (Chitta)?.

This what Goswami Tulsidas wrote on the occasion of Marriage of Shiva and Parvati.

मुनि अनुसासन गनपतिहि पूजेउ संभु भवानि।
कोउ सुनि संसय करै जनि सुर अनादि जियँ जानि॥

"At the direction of the sages Sambhu and Bhavani paid divine honours to Lord Ganapati. Let no one be puzzled to hear this for one should bear in mind that gods have existed from time without beginning"

[johneeG]

He did receive it from Lord Shiva, but the legend of Parashurama is against the backdrop of city states already having risen in gangetic valley. Well past bronze age.

Whereas evidence for hand axes go back to paleolithic times. Hafting of axes began in middle paleolithic in Africa. If the question of whose achievement is the axe, one has to look at archaeological data.

why we try to fit Puranic stories in linear time framework?. Aren't Puranic characters eternal and "Annadi", existing in human psyche (Chitta)?.

+1, Sushupti ji.

I think frequently people mix the western linear time concept and Indian circular time concept. And create new interpretations. The best thing is to keep the 2 things separate.

We shouldn't try to fit Vedas and Puranas into the linear time frame(or linear human development) model of West. It just doesn't fit. The same applies vice versa also.

The modern science(influenced by christian west) has a model. According to it, the human civilization started as barbaric(nude, living under the trees and hand to mouth). Then, from there, it slowly developed into a civilization. The epitome of this civilization is represented by the western countries. The human civilization will continue to develop in this manner, led by the west, until by some incident the human civilization becomes extinct. This is a linear time frame model and linear development model.

The ancient India had a diametrically opposite model. According to it, the first human beings were exceptionally civilized and perfect. As the time passed, the civilization eroded due to the spiritual degradation. This degradation will continue until it reaches a low point, when the whole system will be reset. It is a cyclical model. According this model, ancient India represents the epitome of the civilization.

As we can see, both the models just do not agree with each other. So, there is no point in trying to fit the narrative of one model into another. Because it gives rise to weird interpretations.

The choice is simply to accept the model or reject it.

[Agnimitra]

The choice is simply to accept the model or reject it.

No, the choice is to understand the psychological coordinates of each model and reconcile them in a larger reference frame. What you call the "Western linear time" model is a component of the full ontology of time as given in the Puranas. It is cyclic, but has a linear component also.

This idea of a past "golden age", and the aspiration for a future "reset" that would usher in a repeat of the golden age has its own place in the memory-process of returning, which is a part of purification of the being. It has its own place. However, the hard facts of the actual forms and instantiations that different golden or iron ages took on Earth is another matter.

Important thing in this "returning" process is to return to present time and work constructively from here, IMHO. There is no need to get stuck in false dichotomies of Indic versus Western, etc.

[svinayak]

But we need to highlight that linear model is limited and works within the cyclical model.
The current run of the western model is comning to an end and it will reset.

[Sushupti]

The choice is simply to accept the model or reject it.

No, the choice is to understand the psychological coordinates of each model and reconcile them in a larger reference frame. What you call the "Western linear time" model is a component of the full ontology of time as given in the Puranas. It is cyclic, but has a linear component also.

This idea of a past "golden age", and the aspiration for a future "reset" that would usher in a repeat of the golden age has its own place in the memory-process of returning, which is a part of purification of the being. It has its own place. However, the hard facts of the actual forms and instantiations that different golden or iron ages took on Earth is another matter.

Important thing in this "returning" process is to return to present time and work constructively from here, IMHO. There is no need to get stuck in false dichotomies of Indic versus Western, etc.

Let me give an example. Today we have left hand drive rules here in North America and goal of following these rules is to keep everybody safe. Right hand drive would have achieved the same goal. Suppose 1000 years from some one decides to conduct an objective analysis in scientific manner and find out the scientific fact/reason behind left hand drive rules, what is he going to find?

[Agnimitra]

Acharya ji, I agree.

Sushupti ji, that's not an equivalent analogy. A better example would be like this: For a century the classical world thought that Newtonian laws defined physics. Then a Joo called Einstein proposed a relativistic model. How would historians explain the difference? Did one abrogate the other? Answer: Not really. By finding that the former still holds as a special case of the latter, at speeds much much less than the speed of light. ||ly, Vedic paradigms have several frames of reference, each one telescoping into a bigger one. Not knowing the correct precedence and appropriate application of each scope is a problem according to Veda - moha-kalilam - rather than any particular scope itself.

[ramana]

The so called rise of West from 1600-1900 is really the rise and decline of merchant economies. It was the merchants that created the West's colonial empire in its various forms. The fall of West is due to the decline of the merchants and the revival of trade in Asia.

[svinayak]

During that time there is western intellectual revolution and also creation of western 'civilization'
Dont you think so?

[ramana]

They are veneers. Check the US move to create a Defense Clandestine Service!

[ManishH]

why we try to fit Puranic stories in linear time framework?. Aren't Puranic characters eternal and "Annadi", existing in human psyche (Chitta)?.

Sure the values they represent are eternal. So the value here is when evil increases beyond threshold, a revered being like Parasurama, Indra etc came into the world. This is an eternal value.

But the question here is specific : whose contribution was the axe ? The determination must be made by archaeological data.

One poster posited that it cannot be a western invention citing Parasurama. But my contention is that even solely by Indic tradition, axes existed before Parasurama. Unlike Purāṇa, the Rgveda did not even call the Kuṭhāra. It was earlier called Svadhiti. So textual tradition itself tells us axes are an achievement of people who precede Parasurama.

[ramana]

The point is the axe was known to Indics before the West was still tribal. The History channel guy made it look like the West invented the axe.

[Rudradev]

The so called rise of West from 1600-1900 is really the rise and decline of merchant economies. It was the merchants that created the West's colonial empire in its various forms. The fall of West is due to the decline of the merchants and the revival of trade in Asia.

Yes. What has happened is that the Western financial elites have "caught" the infection of the very same mercantile memes which, by virtue of their existence among some classes in India, once enabled the West to colonize India.

Western "mercantiles" have internalized the characteristic outlook and behaviour of those deracinated, disinvested, profit-motivated dalaal classes whom Brihaspati talks about. It is kind of like "Montezuma's Revenge"

[Sanku]

The so called rise of West from 1600-1900 is really the rise and decline of merchant economies. It was the merchants that created the West's colonial empire in its various forms. The fall of West is due to the decline of the merchants and the revival of trade in Asia.

Yes. What has happened is that the Western financial elites have "caught" the infection of the very same mercantile memes which, by virtue of their existence among some classes in India, once enabled the West to colonize India.

Western "mercantiles" have internalized the characteristic outlook and behaviour of those deracinated, disinvested, profit-motivated dalaal classes whom Brihaspati talks about. It is kind of like "Montezuma's Revenge"

Delicious.

===================================================================

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... atrocities

Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them
New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it

George Monbiot

Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press.

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

[ManishH]

The point is the axe was known to Indics before the West was still tribal. The History channel guy made it look like the West invented the axe.

That's a valid point. Hand axes were known to even archaic homo sapiens (before homo erectus). That far back in human evolution, there's no scope for differentiating between west and indic etc.

Hafting of axe was another milestone that allowed larger force to be applied and aided in warfare and raiding. The earliest evidence for hafting is found in Africa, Levant and Australia. So it's not improbable that this technique developed independently in many regions of earth.

[brihaspati]

^^^Or that these so-called "isolated" communities were in regular touch - probably by shore-hugging maritime communication-transport channels. People are always thinking of migrations only over the land from India or ME to the north-west. But how come people who managed to apparently plan a pre-decided colonization of Oz over a stretch of sea that could not have shown land over the horizon or from further offshore on even small fishing trips - would not use the much faster sea-based transport along the coasts back towards the areas they had once ancestrally passed through?

We have neglected the northern shore of Indian Ocean and the Red-Sea route to Levant and Mediterranean in the west and to Australasia in the east.

[Atri]

B ji, please find an attempt to analyse "guerrilla warfare" from indic lenses.. have pasted the link above..

[brihaspati]

Yes. noted. Maybe take it to GDF? Its an wild and untamed horse out there now. Not the rider - the horse. We have to get the horse to dash its rider down and accept our cue. But what the horse wants - is legitimate, and this was the legitimate demand of the horse that Shivaji acknowledged in his early career.

But why did the Marathas afterwards abandon his line? And why is maha relatively free now from the same horse?

[ramana]

The so called rise of West from 1600-1900 is really the rise and decline of merchant economies. It was the merchants that created the West's colonial empire in its various forms. The fall of West is due to the decline of the merchants and the revival of trade in Asia.

A book that supports my views!




Western Power in Asia: Its Slow Rise and Swift Fall, 1415 - 1999 By Arthur Cotterell
2009 | 448 Pages | ISBN: 0470824891

For centuries, the major poweres of the West were seduced by the allure of the countries of "the Far East". Spices, textiles, silk and tea were the staples of East- West trade. But competition between Western traders eventually caused military intervention in Asian affairs and the establishment of colonial empires. These actions have shapred the history of mankind and left a legacy that still reverberates throughout Asia.

Western Power in Asia is a unique contribution to the understanding of present- day Asia. Essential reading for anyone interested in world history, Arthur Cotterell offers fascinating insights into five hundred extraordinary years of power and influence by the West, which disappeared spectacularly after the Second World War. The author's ability to tell both sides of the story, with the aid of contemporary illustrations as well as quotations, makes this book a tremendous resource for students of Asian history. And because the entire colonial experience is covered for the first time within a single volume, Western Power in Asia also provides the general reader with an unusual and invaluable perspective on East- West relations.

As countries such as China and India become key players on the world stage, Western Power in Asia provides a timely reminder of the path that led to their present positions, while allowing a poignant opportunity to reflect on how they might in future treat their Western trading partners.

[ArmenT]

Sure the values they represent are eternal. So the value here is when evil increases beyond threshold, a revered being like Parasurama, Indra etc came into the world. This is an eternal value.

But the question here is specific : whose contribution was the axe ? The determination must be made by archaeological data.

One poster posited that it cannot be a western invention citing Parasurama. But my contention is that even solely by Indic tradition, axes existed before Parasurama. Unlike Purāṇa, the Rgveda did not even call the Kuṭhāra. It was earlier called Svadhiti. So textual tradition itself tells us axes are an achievement of people who precede Parasurama.

The oldest axes known to man are found in Ethiopia and Central Africa. Apparently, the spread of axe technology is traceable from there on to the Middle East, Europe and India

[Arav]

Capitalist Race Means Less Human Rights Talk by SOE WIN LATT

Since the 2010 general elections, Burma’s political reform has speeded up rapidly. President Thein Sein has artfully won the trust of the international community by releasing political prisoners, encouraging opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to run in the April by-elections and negotiating peace deals with ethnic armed groups.

Of course, there are visible changes such as a more open media, return of political exiles, civilian MPs raising questions and criticisms in Parliament, new foreign investment laws, currency reforms, the return of international financial institutions, and so on.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit in December signaled a global policy shift on Burma, officially known as Myanmar. The US, Britain, Australia, Norway and the EU have all relaxed economic sanctions. These countries, as well as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank, have all promised financial assistance.

Canada also announced on April 24 that it is lifting sanctions on Burma. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird sought to “congratulate” the Burmese president and his colleagues on the nation’s recent program of reform.

As a close observer of Burmese politics, it is disturbing to see that the exclusive international focus on human rights abuses in Burma over the past 20 years has so suddenly disappeared from the diplomatic language of these countries. The announcement of the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, largely praised the changes in Burma, but only minimally mentioned continued conflicts and human rights abuses.

Saying that supporting current reform is to encourage further positive change is rather deceptive. What is actually happening under such a façade is a competitive rush into Burma for economic exploitation. The Burmese government knows this very well, and the nation’s natural resources are what Naypyidaw wants to sell to the world. Being aware of Burma’s spoils, Western countries are now jostling with each other, as well as leading Asian economies such as China, to secure access to Burma.

In the name of Burma becoming an “Asian Tiger,” or aiding such an aspiration, the West’s terms of relations with Burma have become all about money—financial aid, foreign investment, economic growth, and so on.

Since 2011, diplomats, experts and business people from Europe, North America, Australia and Japan have been busy traveling back and forth to Burma. They visit Rangoon and other major cities to forge alliances and networks while trying to secure land, houses and offices.

Their governments, in the name of democracy and development, are supporting investors by extending their relations with Burmese government agencies, business communities and experts.

The fact that 13 businessmen accompanied UK Prime Minister David Cameron for his visit to Burma in mid-April reveals the clear financial motivation behind the current engagement agenda. According to the Burmese ambassador to Canada, some Canadian energy firms are already planning to invest in the energy sector.

Hugh Stephens, from the Asia Pacific Foundation, has also recommended mining resources as a key area for Canada. Likewise, European and North American companies are already warming themselves up for investment in the energy and banking sectors, waiting for their governments to give the green light.

For the Burmese, including mainstream opposition groups, lifting sanctions and attracting foreign investment is seen as the way out of economic hardship. Various expert conferences, public events, official meetings and business forums are all geared towards fiscal liberalization. Surprisingly, the return of the World Bank/IMF, currency reform and sudden economic liberalization are all uncritically welcomed.

Even more troubling, some activists have chastised President Thein Sein for not ensuring a “favorable” business climate for foreign investors including long-term property ownership and concession rights. This shows the weak state of civil society groups that are not yet fostering a critical social movement to scrutinize the potential exploitation and abuses of multinational corporations.

Being disallowed in the past, Western companies will be competing with Chinese, Indian, South Korean, Thai and Singaporean investors in key sectors—agriculture, mining, energy, banking and telecommunication. This means turning Burma into a battleground for foreign investors in trades that are already infamous for fraud and negative human rights implications.

But no one wants to talk about human right issues such as the conflict in Kachin State in which an estimated 100,000 civilians have been displaced since 2010. Likewise, issues such as the demolition of mosques and looting of civilian properties in Hpakant Township, Kachin State, and Kamma Township, Magwe Division, early this month, as well as an ethnic Rohingya beggar beaten to death by a police officer in western Burma, are completed ignored.

Such life-threatening human rights violations occur continuously in remote locations and border areas, but are overshadowed by the shifting focus towards rosy political events in urban centers.

In order to establish relationships with the Burmese government, Western countries are now diverting financial support previously given to human rights victims on the Thai-Burmese border to inside the country. This has already resulted in the closing down of refugee schools, poorer healthcare services for the displaced plus reduced funding for ethnic news agencies and human rights groups.

In short, the trend of Western politics on Burma is moving away from humanitarian issues and towards supporting capitalist penetration where multinational corporations from powerful countries are central players. If this is a new chapter in the history of Burma, then the nation’s future as an economic battleground of capitalist competition will entail hidden, yet high, human costs.

The western nations standard template. Label a nation as rogue if not allowed to exploit, cry about human rights, finance them, create instability, Put Economic Embargo. Once nations bows down praise false democracy, human values, pressurize for NGO's to control nation, Lift sanctions in return for exploitation.

[ramana]

Two key events in formation of the West are:

- Alexander's invasion of Egypt and the replacement of the Pharoahs with Greco-Roman Hellenism which allowed the emergence of Judeo-Christianism.
- Justinian's invasion of Rome was thwarted by plague which devastated his plans and led to the early ideas of Western Europe.

[Sushupti]

Marxist Racism: in theory and practice

By Aravindan Neelakandan (of breaking India fame)

It is a subject that has been little discussed. And whatever that has been discussed has been confined in the guarded portals of the academic realm. It was never taken into public memory. This unspoken dark secret is the embedded racism that resides at the core of Marxist ideology and practice. While in the case of Nazism its evil is explicit. It is easy to dismiss its pseudo-scientific racist claims. But even then the common psyche of Europe needed a Second World War to realize and dismiss the evils of racial constructs, that too only in European context.

But in the case of Marxism this explicit identification has never happened. In the minds of both ordinary persons as well as educated intellectuals, Marxism stands for raceless internationalist equality of all humanity. There is a considerable section of critics of Marxism who would say thus: Perhaps a failed utopian dream, but what Marxism conceptualized was worthy of dreaming and striving for… it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all…a grand failed experiment but it nevertheless it is a goal aimed at common goodness unlike the evil Nazi idea of future…is it not?

Or is it?

A study of the literature of Marxism at its formative stage through the writings of Karl Marx and Engels, reveal something contrary. Of course today we know that Marx and Engels were Euro-centric. But a third-world Marxist scholar would tell you, nevertheless despite their conditioning by the time and clime they lived in, Marx and Engels gave us tools to understand history and society with which we can understand humanity and its development scientifically. Individual pathos of scientists like Darwin or Einstein seldom come in our way of accepting their scientific discoveries and the same rule applies to Marxism – the science of human society.

How correct is this apologist argument? What we shall explore here is the connection between what Marx and Engels wrote as part of Marxist perception of history and how that correlates with the implementation of Marxism as a state ideology by latter day saints of major denominations of Marxist creed.

Justifying the Colonization of India

That both Marx and Engels were Euro-centric is well known. They were convinced that non-European cultures could not possess anything of innate value. And whatever of value non-European cultures might have had, they had been surpassed in the march of history by Euro-American culture. However in the writings of Karl Marx, one finds a soft corner for Indians when compared to what he thinks of Slavs. The reason is not far to seek. Marx finds Indian communities to be racially connected to dominant European nations. Writing in 1853 Karl Marx stated:

The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country, whose gentle natives are, to use the expression of Prince Soltykov, even in the most inferior classes, “plus fins et plus adroits que les Italiens” [more subtle and adroit than the Italians], a whose submission even is counterbalanced by a certain calm nobility, who, notwithstanding their natural langor, have astonished the British officers by their bravery, whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin.[1]

The sympathy Karl Marx has for Indians is essentially because he perceived them to be a fallen European master race. But even that sympathy would not stop Marx from envisioning the destruction of Indian industry by British colonialism as a much needed progressive march of history. So in the same article Marx wrote:

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.[2]

Earlier the same year, in a letter to Friedrich Engels Marx rejoiced the destruction of Indian industry. He saw Indian villages as ‘idyllic republics’ offering ‘solid foundation for stagnant Asian despotism’ and hence the native industries should be destroyed to pave way for ‘Europeanization’ of Indian society:

I do not think anyone could imagine a more solid foundation for stagnant Asiatic despotism. And however much the English may have hibernicized the country, the breaking up of those stereotyped primitive forms was the sine qua non for Europeanisation. … The destruction of their archaic industry was necessary to deprive the villages of their self-supporting character.[3]

Marx was well aware of the human misery including repeated ravaging famines that the collapse of Indic system by British colonialists, wrought on Indians. Yet the civilizational devaluing of India made him accept such human miseries as necessary price to be paid for the societal evolution on European lines. Marx showed nothing but contempt for Indian religion:

We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.[4]

Yet paradoxically in the very same essay, Marx acknowledges that these very Indian weavers living ‘undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life’ had produced such ‘admirable textures ‘ and had sent them to Europe making Europe to send ‘in return for them her precious metals’.[5]

In other words the denunciation of Indian villages come from a civilizational bias rather than from an objective analysis based on economic productivity. Curiously, overlapping the period of observation made by Marx, in the span of just ninety years -from 1765 to 1858- India, coming under the grip of East India Company, had experienced twelve major famines and four ‘severe scarcities’ and for the first time India started experiencing famines not limited to small geographical regions but affecting a wider area and taking a heavy toll of life.[6] Ultimately Marx pronounces the historic verdict:

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.[7]

Theoretical Devaluing of non-European Humanity

So it does not matter to Marx that a few million Indian might get wiped out by famines. With the devaluing of the civilization, comes the devaluing of human lives. Famines and brutalities do not matter anymore if Indian civilization could be destroyed and Europeanisation of Indian society could be achieved. Marx was not alone in this perception.

Civil Rights activist and sociologist Joyce Ladner, points out that the idea of European superiority to non-European societies was axiomatic in the writings of Engels as well:

Holding to this same axiomatic basis, Engels regarded the conquest of Algeria by the French as “an important and fortunate act for the progress of civilization.” “And after all,” he continued, “the modern bourgeois, with civilization, following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.”[8]

Marxist theorizing of the Western society as endowed with “civilization” and the non-Western cultures as being in “barbarian state of society”, justified colonialism and all its miserable effects on colonized humanity as “important and fortunate act for the progress of civilization.”

This devaluation of India and her culture by Marx continues to exert profound influence on Indian Marxists and explains some of the otherwise inexplicable behaviour of Indian Marxists like making themselves willing puppets in the hands of Communist Party of Great Britain, and then Communist Party of Soviet Union and now Maoist China. Their willingness to sacrifice Indian interests in the altar of international communist movement, whether during ‘Quit India’ movement or Chinese aggression of India can be traced to this devaluation of India by the founding fathers of Marxism.

The same devaluing of human lives of non-European societies can be found in Marx’s approach towards trans-Atlantic slavery. Prof. Cedric Robinson, political scientists and Black Studies scholar notes:

The cargoes of the slave ships were real human beings… However, Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or decultured Blacks – men, women, and children separated from their previous universe.[9]

Here it should be emphasized that Marx was radically opposed to slavery in the then contemporary United States. But he saw slavery of Africans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade as necessary tools in the development of history. So leaving aside the ‘bad side of slavery’ treating it merely as an ‘economic category’, Marx pointed out the ‘good side of slavery’. The slavery he was dealing with was ‘direct slavery’ which was ‘Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.’ It was this slavery that formed, ‘the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc.’ Marx goes on to explain:

Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.[10]

Thus it was decreed in Marxist theological view of human history. In Asian continent, Indian society had to be ‘Europeanised’ even if it meant millions of human lives destroyed by famines. Africans could be dragged out of their communities in millions, as human cargo in trans-Atlantic slave ships, and that was merely a necessary ‘economic category’ for the West to become ‘progressive’.

This utter disregard for any innate values in non-European cultures can be traced to the core belief system of Marxism. Founding fathers of Marxism viewed race also as an ‘economic category.’ Marx considered non-European humanity as biologically inferior to European stalk. Of course they could be improved if they allowed themselves to be ‘Europeanised’ either through colonialism or through ‘direct slavery’. But as such they were a fallen race.

Anti-Black

Karl Marx was initially impressed by Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species through natural selection. However soon he favoured the ideas of Pierre Trémaux, a French architect and an orientalist. He considered Trémaux’s speculations on evolution, published in 1865, as ‘a very significant advance over Darwin’. In his letter to Engels written in 1866, Marx explains:

In its historical and political applications far more significant and pregnant than Darwin. For certain questions, such as nationality, etc., only here has a basis in nature been found. E.g., he corrects the Pole Duchinski, whose version of the geological differences between Russia and the Western Slav lands he does incidentally confirm, by saying not that the Russians are Tartars rather than Slavs, etc., as the latter believes, but that on the surface-formation predominant in Russia the Slav has been tartarised and mongolised; likewise (he spent a long time in Africa) he shows that the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one.[11]

Marx thus created a dangerous cocktail of biological racism camouflaged in the jargons of political economy. Engels theorized on this aspect further. He wrote in 1894:

We regard economic conditions as the factor which ultimately determines historical development. But race is itself an economic factor.[12]

Engels extended this analysis further with an erroneous notion of Lamarckian theory of acquired inheritance expanded to humanity – dividing races as if they were biological classifications- with a clear scale of ascending intellectual capacity. Of course Europeans were placed at the top:

By recognising the inheritance of acquired characters, it extends the subject of experience from the individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experience is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this is solely the result of “accumulated inheritance.” It would be difficult to teach them by a proof to a bushman or Australian Negro.[13]

Anti-Semitism

Marxism also had a ‘secular’ justification for anti-Semitism. Marx himself was born in a Jewish family converted to Protestant Christianity. Marx should have imbibed all the anti-Semitic prejudices of Lutheran Protestantism throughout his student life when he was an ardent Christian. He was as anti-Semitic as any other German Protestant of his times. His biographer, Saul Kussiel Padover points out:

In his ‘Theses on Feuerbach (1845), a brief compilation of pithy sayings, he thought it necessary to drag in his bias, referring to the ‘dirty Jewish’ aspect of Christianity. His private letters are replete with anti-Semitic remarks, caricature and crude epithets: “Levy’s Jewish nose,” “usurers,” “Jew-boy,” “nigger-Jew,” etc. For reasons perhaps explainable by the German concept Selbsthass [self-hate], Marx’s hatred of Jews was a canker which neither time nor experience ever eradicated from his soul.[14]

But what marks him apart is that he could provide a convoluted theoretical justification to his hatred and this is true for every Marxist dictator. They could provide rational ‘scientific’ egalitarian justification to the worst horrors they enacted upon humanity based on their dark prejudices and power-hunger. As a secular philosopher Marx rationalized anti-Semitism through what he considered as secular scientific arguments. In an article written in 1843, Marx emphasized the need to find solution to the ‘Jewish question’ in scientific terms.

…the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.[15]

And what was this ‘scientific resolving’ of Jewish question? Conclusions of Marx become indistinguishable from the rant of a Nazi pamphleteer in the long article titled ‘Jewish Question’. Marx comes up with a very negative caricature of Jews:

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.[16]

Though he criticizes Christians for becoming like Jews, he considers Christianity to be ‘too noble-minded, too spiritualistic’ to deal with the problem which it had transferred to the heavens. The final solution which Karl Marx offers antedates Auschwitz and theoretically confines Jews to annihilation.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. … Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society…. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.[17]

Here what Karl Marx achieves is remarkable compared to what Hitler could achieve in terms of theoretical justification for anti-Semitism. Marx had mapped all societal evils to an archetypal Jew – a product of social history and theology. He sees Jewishness of Christian world causing the phenomenon of alienation – one of the cardinal themes in Marxist theology. In an accomplished act of sleight of theoretical hand, Marx portrays Jew as personification of all evils of capitalism. Jew becomes the symptom of a deeper disease plaguing Europe and he needs to be annihilated completely – the Jewish identity, Jewish religion, Jewish mind.

From Hatred to Annihilation

Consistent devaluing of non-European humanity is a recurring theme in the writings of Marx and Engels. With respect to those events in Europe where smaller European nationalities were struggling for survival, the sympathies of Marx and Engels were clearly with the dominant definers of European supremacy. They saw the smaller nations in Europe as irritants to the progress of Europe towards the coming Marxist utopia. The irritants needed to be removed. They needed to be completely wiped out – not just defeat of the smaller nation but destruction of entire people. Engels wrote:

But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat, which Louis Napoleon is striving with all his might to conjure up, the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.[18]

Here we also see a justification for anti-Slavism – another xenophobic prejudice endemic in the common psyche of the West. Again Engels justifies the prejudice and hatred. He provides an action plan – not just subjugation of Slavic nations but complete ‘disappearance from the face of the earth …of entire reactionary people’. Marx too had expressed with derision, the same desire for ‘annihilation’ towards ‘Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum.’[19]

The very next month Engels further elaborated on the topic:

We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians, and at most the Turkish Slavs, no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability. Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which from the time when they achieved the first, most elementary stage of civilization already came under foreign sway, or which were forced to attain the first stage of civilization only by means of a foreign yoke, are not viable and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs….The same thing holds for the Southern Slavs proper….[20]

Engels also vehemently denounced the appeal of Mikhail Bakunin, a socialist-anarchist from Russia who called for Slav emancipation. Here Engels replies to Bakunin:

…hatred of Russians was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans; that since the revolution hatred of Czechs and Croats has been added, and that only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution…. there will be a struggle, an “inexorable life-and-death struggle”, against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and ruthless terror — not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution![21]

The irrational xeno-phobic hatred Europe in general and Germany in particular has for Slavic people, becomes transformed into an expression of “primary revolutionary passion” and the use of “annihilation and terror” against Slavic people – not just their political defeat- becomes necessary to safeguard the interests of revolution. In other words, Marxist founding fathers had provided how to justify hatred with theory and execute crimes against humanity all the while professing to advance the cause of humanity.

A Marxist blueprint for Hitler and Stalin

In 1849 Engels grudgingly accepted Poland as one of the three Slav nations that might have a future. But by 1851 he was convinced that Poland should disappear as a nation. He proceeded to provide a blueprint for the dissipation of Polish nation:

Conclusion: To take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses, especially Posen, with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way…. A nation which can muster 20,000 to 30,000 men at most, is not entitled to a voice. And Poland certainly could not muster very much more.[22]

History shows that the blueprint Engels expressed in his letter to Marx in 1851 was given a shape within the next hundred years. Stalin signed the notorious Munich agreement with Nazi Germany in 1939. The party line apologist argument in defense of this act of Stalin is that Stalin was being strategic and he prevented the Western powers trying to pit Nazi Germany against a newly developing Soviet Union. However a study of Soviet literature then, suggests a deeper cooperation between Nazis and Soviets particularly with respect to Poland despite Hitler’s visceral hatred for Communists.

The treaty between Nazis and USSR was signed on August 23 1939. On September 1 1939 Germany invaded Poland. On September 17 1939 Govt. of USSR sent a ‘note’ to Poland ambassador in Moscow. The content of the ‘note’ was published the very next day in Soviet propaganda magazine Izvestia:

Mr., Ambassador, The Polish-German war has highlighted the internal bankruptcy of the Polish state….In view of this situation, the Soviet Government has instructed the Supreme Commander of the Red Army to order its troops to cross the border and to protect the lives and property of the Western Ukrain and Western Byelorussia. Simultaneously, the Soviet Government intends to take all the measures to save the Polish people from the ill-starred war into which they have been plunged by their unwise leaders and to enable them to live a peaceful life. [23]

There are striking similarities between the logic used by both USSR and Nazi Germany to justify their entering of Poland. If USSR was using the logic of ethnic minorities of Ukrainian and Byelorussian origin within Poland to justify its aggression, Nazi Germany to justified its invasion of Poland. Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Die Wehrmacht’ wrote of ‘the brutal suppression of ethnic Germans in Poland’. If Soviets blamed the ‘unwise leaders’ of Poland and not Hitler for the war, Nazis were more Marxist in their justification. ‘Die Wehrmacht’ reminding the Poles that they ‘were the only remaining Slavic vassal in Eastern Europe’ accused Poland of ‘desire to play the role of the big man’.[24] Engels would have definitely empathized with the logic of ‘Die Wehrmacht.’

On September 28 1939 Soviet-Nazi treaty of friendship was concluded in Moscow. Izvestia reported the next day:

The Government of the USSR and the German Government following the disintegration of the Polish state … have come to an agreement with regard to the following: they establish as their boundary between their mutual state interests on the territory of the formal Polish state a line traced on the map…The necessary state restructuring on the territory west of the said line shall be carried out by the German Government, on the east of this line by the Government of the USSR.[25]

In other words, it was the same plan Engels wrote to Marx in 1853 regarding the deconstruction of Poland, which was now getting executed by Hitler and Stalin. However it did not stop with simply the dismembering of Poland and its occupation by Soviet Union and Nazi Reich. Both Hitler and Stalin used their occupied territories to execute their enemies – the annihilation of ‘scum’ and ‘reactionary people’ as a whole as envisioned by Marx and Engels.

Katyn – the Soviet Auschwitz

With Soviet-Nazi pact, Nazi Gestapo and its dreaded Soviet counterpart NKVD started an era of close cooperation. Again this was initiated by Stalin himself. Historian George Stanford explains:

It emerged after [the Soviet-Nazi pact] as part of their growing cooperation to destroy Poland. Stalin had already provided Hitler with a sweetener by returning some hundred German communists who had sought refuge in the USSR to the tender mercies of Nazi concentration camps. Their handing over at Brest-Litovsk provided early practice for the NKVD and Gestapo to work out the technique of prisoner exchanges.[26]

As soon as Soviet occupation of Poland with Nazi cooperation began in September 1939 14,500 Polish officers and policemen were taken prisoners by the Red Army and they continued to languish in three special NKVD run prisoner-of-war camps at three separate places. By mid-March 1940 all their contacts with outside world ceased and they disappeared without a trace. Another 7,300 Polish prisoners held in NKVD jails in the western regions of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic also similarly disappeared without a trace.[27] Soon the notorious Beria – Stalin’s killer hand, sent a detailed report to Stalin to segregate the Polish PoWs according to occupation zone and 33000 Polish prisoners were subject to exchange with the Germans.[28]

On 5-March-1940 Beria sent a top secret memorandum to Stalin. There had been a problem. In prisoner-of-war camps there were a great number of Polish prisoners who were “accursed enemies of Soviet power, filled with hate for the Soviet order.” So he suggested a solution in the memorandum:

The cases of the 14,700 former Polish officers, civil servants, landlords, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes and prison officers held in prisoner-of-war camps,….And also the cases of those arrested and held in camps in the western regions of the Ukraine and Belorussia numbering 11,000 people,… to examine them as a matter of urgency, with the application of the highest measure of punishment—shooting. To examine the cases without summoning those arrested and without presenting charges, stating the ending of the investigation and summing up…[29]

It was not a private note that passed between Stalin and Beria. But from the declassified documents now, it is clear that within the next two days, by 5th March, Politburo of CPSU agreed to all proposals submitted by Beria. 25,700 prisoners of war would be tried in the absence of the accused themselves and would be executed by shooting as agreed before the trials. Author Prof. Richard Sakwa notes:

From notes on the first page of the report we know that Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov and Mikoyan were directly involved in the decision, and from marginal notes that Kalinin and Kaganovich agreed to the action.[30]

It was an execution that would have pleased Engels.

Fortunately for Stalin, the massacre and mass graves were first discovered by Nazis. So it was conveniently dismissed as propaganda by Soviets and Communists for decades. Other allied powers also did not want to take up issues with Stalin as they were fighting the common enemy Hitler. But despite propaganda and denial, it was a well known secret among the Marxist power circles in Moscow. Yet they consistently denied Soviet authorship of this genocidal crime. It was only on April 13 1990, that Gorbachev admitted that Soviet NKVD was responsible for this mass murder which today goes by the name Katyn massacre. Even then he wanted to protect Communist Party of Soviet Union that he did not take the responsibility of Soviet government having ordered the murders of thousands of unarmed prisoners of war in cold blood. And the killing was a calculated genocidal step. Author Wesley Adamczyk points out, “…the Polish people “had lost about half of their homeland’s intellectual and military leadership”[31]

It was only on 14 October 1992, half a century after the Marxist crime against humanity was perpetrated, that the original Russian documents about Katyn massacre were handed over to Walesa by Rudolf Pikhoya as the senior archivist of Russia under orders from Yelstein.

It was a Marxist crime against humanity – a direct line connects the massacre of unarmed Polish prisoners of war by Soviets with the ideas put forth by Marx and Engels just as how the racism of Nazis connect with the victims of Auschwitz.

Theology of Hatred continues

Even today the embedded racism of Marxist theology continues to haunt humanity. In the third world countries, Marxism creates in its adherents, self-negation and derisional depreciation of their native cultural traditons. Then they develop a chauvnism of westernized modernity around the rootless native identity usually in confrontation with other neighbouring cultural identities which they label as inferior. Thus Communist Party of China as early as in 1927 passed an official resolution that China was not an Asiatic society.[32] This emotional uprootment from the spiritual and cultural matrix of China with decades of indoctrination in Marxism, paved way for ruthless destruction of all Buddhist monuments and treatises by Mao and his forces during the so-called cultural revolution.

Of course CPC does not officially and explicitly uphold Han nationalism. However the official policy is achieving a ‘final stage of integration’ where the nationalities should overcome their mutual alienation. Tim Oakes points out how this process effectively promotes Han superiority:

What would bring about this crystallization of the ‘collective body of the Chinese people’, the zhonghua minzu, was socialist modernization and cultural development, and in these the Han were the clear leaders.[33]

In a totalitarian state where such racio-cultural supremacy gets a theoretical justification, devaluing of the humanity of others is blatant. In 1957, Zhou Enlai proclaimed:

Without mutual assistance, especially assistance from the Han people, the minority peoples will find it difficult to make significant progress on their own.[34]

Educationists MacPherson and Beckett point out that such perceptions actively propagated by Marxist state, make ordinary Han Chinese think of Tibetians as a burden. This reflects exactly the sentiments expressed by Marx towards ‘Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum’, who he found deserving ‘annihilation’ for being thankless against the ‘civilizing mission’ of Germany. MacPherson & Beckett point out Han racism and Marxism reinforce each other:

This ethnic arrogance (Han chauvinism) is reinforced in the Marxist theory of progress by legitimating the subjugation of minorities to Han dominance in the name of “progress”.[35]

The destruction of monasteries in Tibet, devaluing of Tibetian culture and religion, ethnic cleansing of Tibetians and creation of Han settlements by Chinese State as alleged by Tibetians – all these are accepted methodologies in Marxist creed. In conclusion, Marxism is as dangerous and evil as Nazism if not more, for Nazism is visibly evil, Marxism camouflages its evil with the promise of an Utopia but sledom does one know that the Utopia Marxism promises necessitates countless humans massacred on its way up and in the end when the doors of Utopia shut behind the pilgrim-revolutionary he finds himself not in a socialist heaven but deep inside the womb of a totalitarian hell. [36]


[1] Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853

[2] Ibid.

[3] Marx letter to Engels, June 14, 1853: quoted in Joyce A.Ladner, 1998

[4] Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853

[5] Ibid.

[6] Dharma Kumar, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Meghnad Desai, The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, CUP Archive, 1983, p.477

[7] Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No. 856, August 9, 1853

[8] Joyce A. Ladner, The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture, Black Classic Press, 1998, p.230

[9] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, pp.121-2

[10] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Cosimo, Inc., 2008, pp.121-2

[11] Karl Marx letter to F.Engels dated 7-Aug-1866

[12] Engels letter to Borgius dated 25-Jan-1894

[13] Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of nature, Foreign Languages Pub. House, Moscow, 1954, p.353

[14] Saul Kussiel Padover, Karl Marx, an intimate biography, McGraw-Hill, 1978, p.171

[15] Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; February 1844: written in Autumn 1843

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 194, January 13, 1849

[19] Karl Marx, quoted in Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, ReadHowYouWant.com, 2010,p.131

[20] Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 222, February, 1849

[21] Friedrich Engels, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 223, February 16, 1849

[22] Engels to Marx: Letter dated 23-May-1851

[23] Izvestia, 18-Sep-1939: Soviet-German Treaty: Sputnik, Soviet Press Digest, August 1989

[24] “Warum und wofür?,” Die Wehrmacht, 3 (1939, Nr. 19), p. 2

[25] Izvestia, 29-Sep-1939: Soviet-German Treaty: Sputnik, Soviet Press Digest, August 1989

[26] George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet massacre of 1940: truth, justice and memory, Routledge, 2005,p.45

[27] Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S.Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski [Editors], Katyn A Crime Without Punishment, Yale University Press, 2007,p.1

[28] George Sanford, ibid.

[29] Document 6.11 Katyn, Beria’s Memorandum to Stalin dated 5-Mar-1930, in Richard Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union 1917-1991, Routledge 1999, pp.240-1

[30] Ibid.

[31] Wesley Adamczyk, When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p.xi

[32] Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism,Oxford University Press, 1983, p.13

[33] Tim Oakes, Tourism and Modernity in China, Routledge, 1998, p.103

[34] Quoted in Seonaigh MacPherson & Gulbahar Beckett, The Hidden Curriculum of Assimilation, in Cultural Education– Cultural Sustainability: Minority, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Ethno-religious Groups in Multicultural Societies (Ed. Zvi Bekerman & Ezra Kopelowitz), Routledge, 2008, p.105

[35] Ibid.

[36]

http://centreright.in/2012/05/marxist-r ... 61UVfQr2nA

[brihaspati]

Marx's critique of Judaism is actually a self-criticism. Without realizing it, Marx is actually criticizing Europe, Christianity and what both had converged to in the age of colonialism. Every criticism leveled at the Jew - the monetary obsession, the trading of social values, the ritual ossification of religion and complete failure of all attempts ate opening up the religious mind - all applies to Marx's contemporary European and Christianist society. The critique of religion applied to evangelist christianism too.

In this sense the much maligned - the icon to be adopted partially by the nazis and hence outshined by Marx - Nietzsche, was a more prescient and accurate critic of European Christianism. It is unfortunate that his criticism of contemporary christianism is neglected because of this vicarious aspersion due to Nazis [he died long before the Nazi ideology was born in Vienna out of borrowings from British colonial historiography].

[ramana]

X-post...

I am beginning to think linguistics and calculating the age of a language is a big farce, one can't know how old a language is, one can only surmise based on records, if no records exists,

This is a big fraud 'science'
But this is the foundation of the European languages and now the European identity
Before this Hebrew was considered the mother of all the European languages


link

Both because of a desire to read the Bible in its original tongue and a belief in Hebrew as "The Mother of Languages," it figured prominently in the Puritan movement in England, culminating in the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. A motion introduced into the House of Commons in 1649 sought to substitute Saturday as the "True Sabbath" in place of Sunday as the Lords Day. The poet, John Milton (1608-1674), was a devoted Hebraist and was appointed by Cromwell as "Secretary for Foreign Languages." John Selden (1584-1654) was a noted legal scholar whose study of the biblical and talmudic sources of ancient Jewish law (in Hebrew and Aramaic) helped reshape the British system of jurisprudence and establish the privilege of the individual against self-incrimination.


Our view of ancient history has been shaped by the enormous role Greece, Rome, and Christianity and their bias towards its Jewish origins played in the formation and development of what came to be known as Western Civilization. This term is actually a misnomer since many of its most important foundations - monotheism, the Judeo-Christian ethic, and the alphabet, originated in the heartland of the Ancient World which stretched from the Aegean Sea and the Nile Delta across the Levant, Phoenicia, Israel and Mesopotamia (including the kingdoms and empires of Akkadia, Assyria, the Hittites and Babylonia).

This view of history is wrongly compartmentalized into separate categories - Ancient Greece, Troy, Egypt, Rome, Israel and Carthage - without a proper understanding and appreciation of the common sources of the heritage which was eventually consolidated under the Roman Empire and identified as "western." It was not until the schism in the fifth century between the Orthodox Church based in Constantinople and the Catholic Church in Rome that it became common practice to separate "east" and "west."

It is now evident that many links existed between the Old Testament and the Hebrew language and the early civilization of Greece and the classic works of the Iliad and the Odyssey. More than 30 years ago, Prof. Cyrus Gordon pointed out in his epic work of scholarship, "The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations," that both drew on a common east Mediterranean heritage with many cross-currents between them. He pointed out that "only two of the ethnic groups that emerged historically in the eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium have enjoyed a historically conscious continuity down to the present: the Greeks and the Hebrews."

[ramana]

1494

In 1494, award-winning author Stephen R. Bown tells the untold story of the explosive feud between monarchs, clergy, and explorers that split the globe between Spain and Portugal and made the world’s oceans a battleground.
When Columbus triumphantly returned from America to Spain in 1493, his discoveries inflamed an already-smouldering conflict between Spain’s renowned monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Portugal’s João II. Which nation was to control the world’s oceans? To quell the argument, Pope Alexander VI—the notorious Rodrigo Borgia—issued a proclamation laying the foundation for the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, an edict that created an imaginary line in the Atlantic Ocean dividing the entire known (and unknown) world between Spain and Portugal.
Just as the world’s oceans were about to be opened by Columbus’s epochal voyage, the treaty sought to limit the seas to these two favored Catholic nations. The edict was to have a profound influence on world history: it propelled Spain and Portugal to superpower status, steered many other European nations on a collision course, and became the central grievance in two centuries of international espionage, piracy, and warfare.
The treaty also began the fight for “the freedom of the seas”—the epic struggle to determine whether the world’s oceans, and thus global commerce, would be controlled by the decree of an autocrat or be open to the ships of any nation—a distinctly modern notion, championed in the early seventeenth century by the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius, whose arguments became the foundation of international law.
At the heart of one of the greatest international diplomatic and political agreements of the last five centuries were the strained relationships and passions of a handful of powerful individuals. They were linked by a shared history, mutual animosity, and personal obligations—quarrels, rivalries, and hatreds that dated back decades. Yet the struggle ultimately stemmed from a young woman’s determination to defy tradition and the king, and to choose her own husband.

[ramana]

"Acharya"

The World Island: Eurasian Geopolitics and the Fate of the West (Praeger Security International) [Hardcover]
Alexandros Petersen

Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Praeger; 1 edition (February 18, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0313391378
ISBN-13: 978-0313391378

The 20th century was dominated by three visions of Eurasian geopolitics: "The World Island," "Containment," and "Prometheism." The World Island: Eurasian Geopolitics and the Fate of the West posits a fourth vision of Eurasian geopolitics: the 21st-century Geopolitical Strategy for Eurasia.

Through an original and comprehensive analysis and synthesis of the ideas of Sir Halford Mackinder, George Kennan, and Jozef Pilsudski, this title reestablishes fundamental Western strategic objectives. It analyzes the state of and potential for Western engagement with China, Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, and other Eurasian states and sets out what is at stake for the West in the Eurasian theater. Promoting a robust strategy to further and protect essential Western values, the author argues for the development of trade and energy links, coupled with the promotion of good governance and the facilitation of policy independence, integration, and Western-orientation among the Eurasian nations.

Petersen has vast knowledge of Eurasia and displays his almost encyclopedic knowledge effectively to advance his case... A lively, diverse book about a lesser-known area of the world, it offers a challenging set of policy recommendations with the backup of the work of earlier realist thinkers. – Choice

A sweeping, succinct and convincing argument for Transatlantic unity. With Europe's energy needs increasing, the emergence of China, the uncertainty of Russia's future, and NATO's involvement in Afghanistan Petersen makes clear that we ignore Eurasia at our peril. For those who want to understand the vital importance of Eurasia Petersen's strategy could not have come at a better time. - Dr. Liam Fox, British Secretary of State for Defence (2010- )

The control of the Eurasian landmass and especially America's role in that formula will determine much of the shape of geopolitics for the next century. This book enlightens us to the nature of that challenge. - Dr. John Hillen, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs

Insightful and disconcerting analysis: essential reading for anyone concerned with Western security. - Edward Lucas, International Editor, The Economist; bestselling author of The New Cold War

Alexandros Petersen has clearly captured the 'new world order' that is evolving in the early years of the 21st Century. Alexandros' vivid description of the rise of the East in the global geo-strategic landscape offers Western policy makers a prescriptive for what must be addressed if Western powers intend to remain influential in a multi-polar world. - General Charles "Chuck" F. Wald, former Deputy Commander, United States European Command

With scholarly verve and a clear analytical eye, Alexandros Petersen revisits some of the great geopolitical theorists of the past two centuries. He shows why grand strategy and geography still matter in Europe and Eurasia and argues convincingly that the political tectonics of this part of the world continue to shape foreign policymaking. The World Island will be of interest to anyone who cares about the peoples and fractured polities of the former Soviet space. - Charles King, Professor and Chairman of the Faculty, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University and author of The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus

Its a joke to talk about Western values as highlighted above. West only learnt trade just around six hundred years ago. Before that it was all about killing people all the time.

[svinayak]

Promoting a robust strategy to further and protect essential Western values, the author argues for the development of trade and energy links, coupled with the promotion of good governance and the facilitation of policy independence, integration, and Western-orientation among the Eurasian nations


It means create client states of the west.

[abhischekcc]

Its a joke to talk about Western values as highlighted above. West only learnt trade just around six hundred years ago. Before that it was all about killing people all the time.

Isn't that still the same game? Iraq devastated for 12 years, Afghanistan for 33 years, Yugoslavia since the middle ages, not to mention entire populations wiped out in North and South Americas and Australia, the continuing genocide in Africa (where the Euros plan to settle if global warming continues and Europe falls to another ice age), and of course the annual famines in India that the British engineered to kill millions every year.

[devesh]

I could be wrong about this, but is it true that the Russians are the only Caucasian branch on whom Abrahamism wasn't enforced by foreign imperialists? I don't have a detailed picture of early Muscovite history, but I believe the Russians actually "adopted" Christianity and gave it the flavor of "Orthodox Church". unlike the Germanics, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, etc, the Russians didn't agree to Christianism under force and fear of genocide. this makes them unique among the "white" people. all other White branches were brought to subjugation and the desert theology forcefully imposed on them, except for the Russians. this makes them less susceptible to the behavior of the "new convert", which is often an aggression fueled by paranoia, insecurity, and need to "confirm" loyalty to the "new" religion. this is probably the reason why the Orthodox Church is much less focused on proselytizing than their neighbors to the West.

[ramana]

Yes. The Russian ruler sent emissaries to various capitals and they came back and said Orthodoxy was the most likely winner with staying power. So they converted enmasse. It helped that a couple of hundred years later Constantinopole fell to the Ottomans and the Tsar declared Moscow as the third Rome.
BTW they discarded Communism in same manner in late 80s.

[svinayak]

I could be wrong about this, but is it true that the Russians are the only Caucasian branch on whom Abrahamism wasn't enforced by foreign imperialists? I don't have a detailed picture of early Muscovite history, but I believe the Russians actually "adopted" Christianity and gave it the flavor of "Orthodox Church". unlike the Germanics, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, etc, the Russians didn't agree to Christianism under force and fear of genocide. this makes them unique among the "white" people. all other White branches were brought to subjugation and the desert theology forcefully imposed on them, except for the Russians. this makes them less susceptible to the behavior of the "new convert", which is often an aggression fueled by paranoia, insecurity, and need to "confirm" loyalty to the "new" religion. this is probably the reason why the Orthodox Church is much less focused on proselytizing than their neighbors to the West.

This is the reason that there is lot of pagan elements in Russian religious practices and also they have buddhists and islamic regions in their federations which they tolerate.
Their connection to the all of the people in the regions in far east and the down south in the central asia is based on their ethnic/race and social links and not based on religion.

[svinayak]

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/ ... art-1.html

Paul Weston’s latest essay is the first of a three-part series about the deliberate destruction of British culture, and of Western Civilization itself.



How To Destroy A Country — Part 1
by Paul Weston

“There is a revolution coming. It will not be like the revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the new generation.”

— Charles Reich. “The Greening of America.” 1970.

Every generation bemoans the slippage of standards and the “going to the dogs” of society, but history shows that civilisations and peoples really do collapse utterly. Some even become extinct. Great Britain, needless to say, is no longer as great as it once was, but has the degradation we see around us on a daily basis been caused by well-intentioned liberal stupidity, or by brilliantly-planned leftist malevolence?

Perhaps it is a mixture of both. It has long been known that the hard Left wished to transform the traditional Britain (and West) I was born into. Via a protracted campaign of brainwashing and propaganda they were able to recruit well intentioned liberals into an unknowing alliance. This was not particularly difficult, of course; liberals are easily duped by propagandised platitudes and fall very easily into Lenin’s denouncement of them as Useful Idiots.

But first, let us deal with some facts. During and after WWII the Soviet Communists gobbled up as much of Europe as they could. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, followed by Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and East Germany. In essence, any country within Moscow’s military strike capability fell into its clutches and became part of the Soviet empire.

The Communists really did have global aspirations, so countries outside their military sphere were not simply ignored and written off, they were earmarked for destabilisation and subversion, to be taken over at a later date. The Kremlin office assigned this task was the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, which worked with Western Communist parties, including the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

[Rony]

^^^

How does this constitute as a 'Non-Western world view' ?

[sudarshan]

I could be wrong about this, but is it true that the Russians are the only Caucasian branch on whom Abrahamism wasn't enforced by foreign imperialists? I don't have a detailed picture of early Muscovite history, but I believe the Russians actually "adopted" Christianity and gave it the flavor of "Orthodox Church". unlike the Germanics, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, etc, the Russians didn't agree to Christianism under force and fear of genocide. this makes them unique among the "white" people. all other White branches were brought to subjugation and the desert theology forcefully imposed on them, except for the Russians. this makes them less susceptible to the behavior of the "new convert", which is often an aggression fueled by paranoia, insecurity, and need to "confirm" loyalty to the "new" religion. this is probably the reason why the Orthodox Church is much less focused on proselytizing than their neighbors to the West.

This is the reason that there is lot of pagan elements in Russian religious practices and also they have buddhists and islamic regions in their federations which they tolerate.
Their connection to the all of the people in the regions in far east and the down south in the central asia is based on their ethnic/race and social links and not based on religion.

Wonder how this gels with the anti-semitism that Russia was renowned for? The word "pogrom" is of Russian origin, and more Jews were persecuted in Russia (and Poland) than in Nazi Germany. One Tsar even tried to segregate all the Jews in Russia into a single province (Birobidjan, also known as the Evreijskij - tr: Jewish - province). In general, the source of the EJ menace is restricted (kind of) to northern/central Europe, N./S.(?) America, and Australasia. Russia mostly seems refreshingly free of proselytizing sentiment, but why such hatred for the Jews?

Sudarshan

Edit: I might have put up my ignorance for display on Birobidjan - seems like it was a Soviet phenomenon, and rather more benign in intent than "segregating the Jews." However, Russia certainly was anti-semitic to a large degree.