Indian Interests

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Indian Interests

Post by Rakesh »

Paul
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Post by Paul »

X-post from the Nepal thread. I believe that the monarchy's demise is in India's interests. Now we need to make sure that Prachanda does not make another Prabhakaran and create trouble for us. The RNA can be brought into the picture at a later date.

++++++++++++++++++++++
The news of the Nepali Congress agreeing to the abolition of the Hindu monarchy is an important milestone for the Indian subcontinent. This prompted me to read up more on what is going in this neighborhood. India needs to make sure that the events here are not overshadowed in the North Block by the happenings in Myanmar and Pakistan.

The loyalties and objectives of the different parties have been a hazy to me for some time now. A multitude of players jockeying through their proxies and trying to get into a position where they can exert maximum influence. However taking the long view of Nepal has helped me crystallize my understanding and helped me work with some assumptions.

My interest in Nepal started when I last read Kuldip Nayyar’s book “Between the Linesâ€
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Post by Paddington »

As bad as the Monarchy was, the Maoists coalition running the show now is about 10 times worse.

10 million people in Bihar were displaced this year in floods, in part because there was no cooperation from Nepal. The Maoists pulled back on the dams to flood Bihar on purpose. :twisted:

There needs to be some stability in Nepal, at least a government that India can do business with. And the Maoists are not that government. Quite frankly, if you support them you're a traitor.
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Post by Rye »

There needs to be some stability in Nepal, at least a government that India can do business with. And the Maoists are not that government. Quite frankly, if you support them you're a traitor.
A "stable govt." with the Koirala types will be even more of a problem as the Nepali congress sucks up to Pakistan and China, as they always have. But this is OT for this thread and conversation needs to move to the Nepali thread.
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Post by Arun_S »

CH-I-MEA no chimera
Image
by Arnaud De Borchgrave
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UPI) Dec 21, 2007
Below Washington's geopolitical radar screen, where Iraq and Iran tend to blur out the rest of the world, momentous events are in the making. Among the most significant:

CHIMEA is not a chemical formula, but the emergence of the new growth hub of China, India, Middle East and Africa. There are now large areas of what the developed nations of the North still call the developing South that now see themselves as the new fulcrum of something bigger and potentially richer.

At a recent "CEO Retreat" in Dubai organized by A.T. Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, CHIMEA was all the buzz. A reshuffling of the global deck of cards is under way. The Middle East and the wider Islamic world are no longer locked into the traditional (and for 300 years dependent) relationship with Europe and the West. In Dubai, the world's new Hong Kong, the big planetary players see the new hub of global economic growth as a crescent that stretches from the Red Sea and East Africa through the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to the Straits of Malacca and China.

As the dollar is knocked off its pedestal, partly through the recent manifestations of short-sighted naked greed, better known as the subprime mortgage fiasco, at root a global criminal enterprise, CHIMEA emerges as a new engine with extraordinary potential. The ingredients of this explosive growth are Arab energy and hundreds of billions of dollars in "sovereign investment funds," Chinese manufacturing, India's information technology skills and services, and "a vast and young regional workforce with East Africa's agricultural potential."

CHIMEA also encompasses half the world's population, which will rise to two-thirds by 2050. Today, the new geopolitical construct produces 11 percent of global gross domestic product; by 2030, current projections show it at 50 percent. China's Industrial and Commercial Bank recently dropped $5.5 billion to acquire 20 percent of South Africa's Standard Bank -- the single largest amount ever invested in sub-Saharan Africa. Beijing is even helping bail out some of America's most prestigious financial institutions, guilty of subprime management skills in the subprime housing bubble.

All the pieces of CHIMEA are showing dramatic rates of growth -- e.g., North Africa at 7 percent; Egypt 8 percent; even sub-Saharan Africa above 5 percent for the past three years, due to Chinese and Indian trade and investment. South-South commerce is gradually displacing the North-South relationship born some 600 years ago when Portugal annexed Macau during the Ming Dynasty.

UNCTAD -- the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development -- was launched in Geneva in 1964 to address what was then called "The Scandal of the Century," the growing chasm between rich and poor nations. Che Guevara was the Cuban representative at the inaugural conference. Today, the gap is narrowing rapidly. The North's wealthy club no longer monopolizes the list of the world's billionaires. The Middle East, India, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have produced scores of billionaires out of the world's total of more than 1,000 (up from 350 since the beginning of the decade).

Multinational corporations have morphed into TNCs -- genuinely transnational where flags are meaningless. Those nations that once held all the cards still have most of these behemoths. But Fortune's 500 now includes 52 from "developing" countries. India's Tata Steel giant recently took over Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, in a $13.4 billion deal.

Oil and gas producers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are providing the fuel for the rapid emergence of CHIMEA. Revenues have tripled in four years -- from $210 billion to an all-time high of more than $700 billion this year, most of it to OPEC's Arab countries. Qatar, a small progressive country of half a million and one of the world's largest natural gas producers, is setting aside $100 billion a year for investments abroad.

Unquenchable oil thirsts in China and India drove up prices -- and propelled CHIMEA from chimera to reality. These two giants of more than 1 billion people each saw their oil needs doubling and trebling in the last four years. China is now a bigger oil importer than Japan.

In the January 2008 Wilson Quarterly, CHIMEA scholar (and UPI Editor Emeritus) Martin Walker quotes the Hedge Fund Research Group as estimating Middle Eastern oil and gas capital available for investment at $4.1 trillion -- almost the size of Japan's annual GDP. Saudi Arabia alone is building six new cities. Morgan Stanley estimates Abu Dhabi's Investment Authority's fund at $875 billion. By way of contrast, the final reckoning of U.S. bank losses in the subprime scandal will be close to $100 billion.

Unnoticed in the U.S. media are the comings and goings of heads of state and government from South to South, from the Gulf to India and China and vice versa.

CHIMEA is redrawing the global landscape for mergers and acquisitions.

Top U.S. law firms are opening offices in Dubai (where the slogan is "Do buy in Dubai"), the freest city in the Gulf, where there are no Islamic restrictions on liquor and where Russian hookers ply their trade.
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Post by Qan Payle »

While there is an ongoing thread discussing the dangers of Islamic extremism in India, there are some wider issues which can also be discussed.

India, and its mainly Hindu citizens are facing economic cultural competition from four major sources. And discussion is certainly warranted. Note that I am distinguishing between West secular pop culture(which has Greco-Roman and Enlightenment, and some Christian influences) and purely Christian culture.

1. Economic & Socio-cultural Competition from Western secular popular culture:

While the West has some good ideas about civil liberties, social justice, let us not forget that absolute and utter liberty is not good for all citizens who then can not be cared for by the State. Liberty and Welfare should go together. We should be more like Scandinavia then say some right wing states in the US, without state mandated health insurance, etc.

2. Economic & socio-cultural Competition from Christianity:

Christianity has some good aspects to it, no doubt, like emphasis on charity and caring for one's fellow human being, but Christianity in competition with Indian ideologies in India is a pre-Enlightenment(European development of ideas of liberty, social justice) ideology which is anti-secular and anti-liberal. They oppose separation of Church and State, Women's rights to Abortion, and have a dated social and cultural view.

3. Economic & social-cultural competition from Political Islam:

Political Islam seeks to replace the existing Hindu dominated political and cultural landscape with a purely Islamist one. There may be more tolerant streams of political Islam, but they are not as strong in numbers as the more maintstream orthodox Wahabbi inspired thought-groups.

4. Economic & socio-cultural competition from Sino-Marxism:

Marxists and their Chinese compatriots want to weaken the dominant Hindu mindset of India to make room for a mindset which acknowledges Chinese pre-imminense in Asia, and makes room for the cultural desert of Marxism.

--------------

The above four are acknowledged sources of competition and have been spoken about by thinkers such as B. Raman, etc. My request to the moderators: In the interests of an enlightened debates on these Please allow a _genuine_ debate on these serious issues.

Thanks,
Qan Payle

--------

Posted as reply to Sanku, from previous thread 'Economic Cultural Competition', in which I encouraged further open debate:

As a former moderator on this Forum I have to say that BRF has really matured so well under the supervision of Dr Shiv, Ramana, etc, but there needs to be more active debate, I would suggest. When you pigeonhole the debate into a particular slot, say India-China, Red Menace, and ask others to stop posting new threads then you are asking them to limit the scope of open and free exchange of ideas. This is not a fish-market of ideas, but is certainly a place where ideas can be exchanged in a civil way, on whatever strikes the mind of the poster as an interesting thought, provided it is relevant as a Strategic issue facing India. Why seek to limit that, so robustly?

---------
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Post by ShauryaT »

Qan Payle wrote:While there is an ongoing thread discussing the dangers of Islamic extremism in India, there are some wider issues which can also be discussed.
These wider issues have to include, what I call the natural evolution of Hindu society and its own structures thereof.

Hindu society as we know it, has been badly damaged by both the Islamists and colonialists. The advent of Industiral society along with the depraved state of Hindu society has led to the utter subjugation of a people in all its dimensions.

The rout was intense enough that the British had the audacity to wipe the slate clean and impose a complete new education system. Make its own interpretations of its social system and reforms thereof and last but not the least the complete dominance of its economic and political systems.

The constitution of the new republic of India, incorporated large parts of this state of dhimmitude and an utterly macuaylized notion of the idea of India. It went further to incorporate articles and structures of governance, which seeked to “reformâ€
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Post by Adrija »

Addressing questions of this nature, will allow a constructive debate and will seek to evolve the Indian/Hindu/Dharmic thought at a societal level.

Questioning the basis of existing structures in the light of Dharmic thought would be an appropriate level of debate and learning. IMO.
What exactly does that mean in plain, simple English, please?

Much as we would like, the Indian State cannot (and IMVVVHO) should not be "Hindu" (whatever that means- Hindusim does not have edicts on political structure I think, unlike Islam at least).......... Indian society could be Hindu in flavour given that that is what the vast majority of its people profess (or rather, will, once the de-Macaulayization is done, Inshallah :D )

JM2 p and IMVVHOs, of course

The dilemma, of course, is that the basis of any durable state is a common identity, and that identity unavoidably is rooted in at least one of a common language, common culture, common history or common religion..... and the shared Indic/ Bhartiya history, culture, religion, metaphysical thoughts of Indian society form that basis for the Indan state.... so its a nice balancing act which one has to perform...... don't know how and where those boundaries are drawn. Would welcome thoughts from the members here.

We did have a fairly long discussion on those very issues in some previous avatar of this thread IIRC
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Post by ShauryaT »

Adrija wrote:
Addressing questions of this nature, will allow a constructive debate and will seek to evolve the Indian/Hindu/Dharmic thought at a societal level.

Questioning the basis of existing structures in the light of Dharmic thought would be an appropriate level of debate and learning. IMO.
What exactly does that mean in plain, simple English, please?
For starters, please follow the posts in tackling Islamism in India thread.
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Post by svinayak »

Adrija wrote:

Much as we would like, the Indian State cannot (and IMVVVHO) should not be "Hindu"
Indian state at the top of the list should not be anti-Hindu.
This critieria itself is not fulfilled.
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Post by Adrija »

Indian state at the top of the list should not be anti-Hindu.
This critieria itself is not fulfilled.
Acharya- garu, neti-neti alone will not be sufficient, don't think anybody disagrees with that....... the question is not just about nirguns, one must define the gunas as well, no?

ShauryaT, hope that answers your post as well?
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Post by vsudhir »

Adrija wrote:
Indian state at the top of the list should not be anti-Hindu.
This critieria itself is not fulfilled.
Acharya- garu, neti-neti alone will not be sufficient, don't think anybody disagrees with that....... the question is not just about nirguns, one must define the gunas as well, no?

ShauryaT, hope that answers your post as well?
Adrija,

Seems to me what you're saying is that the Indian state should not be called 'Hindu'. But it can (and IMVVVHO) should be Hindu (or Dharmic, rather) in the sense that the state should be fair, just, egalitarian, duty-bound, benefit citizens, society and mankind as a whole in the sustainable long term.

Drawing from Shiv's marvellous posts in the Tackling Extremism thread, Hinduism as religion needs to be separated frm Dharma as philosophy or a bedrock of (eternal of Sanatan) values. We need to adequately emphaize the former in society to successfully fend off predatory raids from the adharmic religions and adequately emphasize the latter in governance for sustainable progress.

JMTs etc.
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Post by ramana »

Paul, One of the reasons for th ehostility of the Nepaleses royal family is the fear that they will get integrated inot mainland India a la the Princely states. It is another matter that INC never clearly stated that hisotric Nepal was never considered part of the Bharatakanda and that there is no plan to integrate Nepal int mainland India. An ambiguity was kept. The many democracy movements in the Himalayan movements invariably led to Indian integration. The West - UK and then US and puppies like TSP fed these fears all round the region. Remember the Westphalian state concept is quite new even in Europe and these newly decolonised states were wary of letting anoter hegemon takeover their 'independence'.

Th future trend for the reagion is towards economic integration while keeping the sovereignity intact or else the region will become a hotbed for failed states.
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Post by JwalaMukhi »

The glory of 'Benevolent Brits'. Sorry if posted earlier.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto ... 78,00.html
As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used ....
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Post by ramana »

JM the article deserves to be posted in full and a copy sent to MMS care PMO
The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities


It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27, 2005
The Guardian


In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.


As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.


Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.

These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.

In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".

There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.

www.monbiot.com
And they honor those who affirm this 'benevolence" eg MMS.
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Post by pradeepe »

:( :evil:

This is what they have gotten away with and the only thing the worthies talk about is railways and babudom.

They get away because the entire edifice of european "enlightenment" is built on it. So, the holocaust since it was outed is "entirely" a Hitler problem. The millions murdered in India by the British, would for the most part even in India get stares of disbelief (on a good day). I was there myself.

All built on the edifice of "enlightenment". My VHO is that the "Enlightenment" movement and all that was a late charade to hide away the grotesque. Same poison needed a new face in the modern world as the world was shrinking. A few sweeps here and a few sweeps there, a nip here and a tuck there, just to take care of the obvious....

Added-

Again very humble opinions only.

Its not that the "enlightenment movement" did not happen. I cant rationally say Oirope today is the same as that of the medieval times, but the whole movement has been craftily accorded a time to deflect and discredit later tragedies as being totally beyond its capacity.
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Post by svinayak »

Adrija wrote:
Indian state at the top of the list should not be anti-Hindu.
This critieria itself is not fulfilled.
Acharya- garu, neti-neti alone will not be sufficient, don't think anybody disagrees with that....... the question is not just about nirguns, one must define the gunas as well, no?

ShauryaT, hope that answers your post as well?
Lame excuse for bad policy. Unless this is taken care of gunas are not appreciated.
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Post by svinayak »

http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/15/stories ... 400900.htm

On the eve of his official visit, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány spoke to Amar Kumar Sinha, an Indian journalist based in Budapest, exclusively for The Hindu. Mr. Gyurcsány spoke on a wide range of to pics covering Hungarian-Indian relations and international issues. Excerpts from the interview:

[quote]
Finally, your predecessor Péter Medgyessy told this correspondent in an interview in 2003 that in many ways he considered “India as a model for our present age.â€
Paul
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Post by Paul »

ramana wrote:Paul, One of the reasons for th ehostility of the Nepaleses royal family is the fear that they will get integrated inot mainland India a la the Princely states. It is another matter that INC never clearly stated that hisotric Nepal was never considered part of the Bharatakanda and that there is no plan to integrate Nepal int mainland India. An ambiguity was kept. The many democracy movements in the Himalayan movements invariably led to Indian integration. The West - UK and then US and puppies like TSP fed these fears all round the region. Remember the Westphalian state concept is quite new even in Europe and these newly decolonised states were wary of letting anoter hegemon takeover their 'independence'.

Th future trend for the reagion is towards economic integration while keeping the sovereignity intact or else the region will become a hotbed for failed states.
Ramana: We need to revisit the events in the 1950s to see why Nehru did not consider Nepal's integration into India. In those days, relations were benign and Nehru probably thought that things would remain the same. It is not fair to completely blame Nehru for this….Sardar Patel was still there when the Chinese took over Tibet, so why did we wait till 1970 to take over Sikkim. It must also be remembered that this policy of allowing these Himalayan Kingdoms to remain independent has worked with Bhutan (till now) and Sikkim (till 1970).

The trouble started after the Ranas were ejected and the Koiralas came into the picture. After that things started going downhill. After the Ranas left, the window of opportunity to merge Nepal with India closed. The Koiralas (analogous to the Nehru dynasty) are the next obstacle for India to take care of after the monarchy’s abolition. They need to be removed from the Nepali congress if India is make real progress in improving security on it’s borders.

IMO Prachanda still has his uses...

Lord Ramachandra’s wife Sita, Lord Buddha were all from the region that is Nepal, so I do not see why Nepal should be excluded from the Indian sphere of influence.
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Post by Paul »

Ramana: Something else to chew on. Some time ago you had posted a Telegraph piece by Swapan Das Gupta. He was lamenting the demise of the princely states who were supposedly (according to him) Indpendent India’s only link with the past. If the Nepali monarchy is a sample of India’s princes who used to bend down before the Brits then all more reason for them to be kicked out before they cause more damage. Should an Islamic caliphate come to power in delhi some day, this monarchy will be the first one to send a dola to Osama’s harem. The monarchies caused significantly law and order problems after india’s independence and maintained gangs of dacoits to cause problems for the Indian state.

The recipe for rejuvenation of Nepal has to come from the peasantry, as happened with the Sikhs and Marathas. Guru Gobind Singh ji had made a similar observation when he saw the Rajputs sending their women to the Mughal harem.
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Post by shiv »

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Post by sanjaychoudhry »

shiv wrote:I received this SMS today
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a11/cy ... 120052.jpg
sounds like an output from the "persecution industry" run by the church. Fabricated stories like this are quite common. These are then shown in churches and collection plate moved among the faithful. This is just a way to drive up collections into Church coffers and is an old trick.

This is why conversions are dangerous for India. The more people are converted, the more the Goras become involved in our internal affairs by claiming a stake in the matter. ("It is our duty to protect fellow Christians anywhere in the world.")

The Western countries may have become secular within their own borders, but for the rest of the non-White world, the church and Western governments work as a close team and both help meet each other's strategic interests. When one moves, the other is only a step behind.

For example, when the Americans want to break up India, the missionaries are told to make their move and start converting locals who will then come under their control. As Indians move to block conversions, the Gora governmens create a huge din internationally about freedom of religion getting violated in India and HIndu fundamentalists running amock. This is to force a defensive posture on the Hindus.

IN other cases, the Gora army makes the first move and the missionaries follow. Like in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nepal. All three heathen countries have got thier armies destroyed and missionaries have begin to infiltrate in all three.

In a nut shell, when the missionaries make thier first move, the Gora army is just a step behind, waiting. When the Gora army makes the first move, the church is just a step behind, waiting. Both constitute a two-wheeled chariot that moves like a phalanx throughout the world creatiing death and destruction in heathen lands and subjugating people. When you spot the first wheel rolling in (like missionaries in central India), be sure that it is only a moment before the second wheel also moves in and stake claim on the land.
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Post by svinayak »

shiv wrote:I received this SMS today
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a11/cy ... 120052.jpg
The same thing here
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/200 ... -42.0.html

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliv ... _bobb.html

The fervency of Hindu nationalism is no secret; it helped gave birth to Pakistan and later Bangladesh. And India has had quite the history of violence against Christians, which sprang up again last month.
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Post by pradeepe »

Apologies if already posted. Got it in the mail.
Ignoring his simplistic message, still a good read and a nice towel.


12/9/2007

Twenty-five thousand years ago, haplogroup R2 characterized by genetic marker M124 arose in southern Central Asia. Then began a major wave of human migration whereby members migrated southward to present-day India and Pakistan (Genographic Project by the National Geographic Society; http://www.nationalgeographic.com/). Indians and Pakistanis have the same ancestry and share the same DNA sequence.
Here's what is happening in India:

The two Ambani brothers can buy 100 percent of every company listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) and would still be left with $30 billion to spare. The four richest Indians can buy up all goods and services produced over a year by 169 million Pakistanis and still be left with $60 billion to spare. The four richest Indians are now richer than the forty ri! chest Chinese.

In November, Bombay Stock Exchange's benchmark Sensex flirted with 20,000 points. As a consequence, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries became a $100 billion company (the entire KSE is capitalized at $65 billion). Mukesh owns 48 percent of Reliance.

In November, comes Neeta's birthday. Neeta turned forty-four three weeks ago. Look what she got from her husband as her birthday present: A sixty-million dollar jet with a custom fitted master bedroom, bathroom with mood lighting, a sky bar, entertainment cabins, satellite television, wireless communication and a separate cabin with game consoles. Neeta is Mukesh Ambani's wife, and Mukesh is not India's richest but the second richest.

Mukesh is now building his new home, Residence Antillia (after a mythical, phantom island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean). At a cost of $1 billion this would be the most expensive home on the face of the planet. At 173 meters tall Mukesh's n! ew family residence, for a family of six, will be the equivalent of a 60-storeyed building. The first six floors are reserved for parking. The seventh floor is for car servicing and maintenance. The eighth floor houses a mini-theatre. Then there's a health club, a gym and a swimming pool. Two floors are reserved for Ambani family's guests. Four floors above the guest floors are family floors all with a superb view of the Arabian Sea. On top of everything are three helipads. A staff of 600 is expected to care for the family and their family home.

In 2004, India became the 3rd most attractive foreign direct investment destination. Pakistan wasn't even in the top 25 countries. In 2004, the United Nations, the representative body of 192 sovereign member states, had requested the Election Commission of India to assist the UN in the holding elections in Al Jumhuriyah al Iraqiyah and Dowlat-e Eslami-ye Afghanestan. Why the Election Commission of India and not the Election Commission of Pakistan? After all, Islamabad is closer to K! abul than is Delhi.

Imagine, 12 percent of all American scientists are of Indian origin; 38 percent of doctors in America are Indian; 36 percent of NASA scientists are Indians; 34 percent of Microsoft employees are Indians; and 28 percent of IBM employees are Indians.

For the record: Sabeer Bhatia created and founded Hotmail. Sun Microsystems was founded by Vinod Khosla. The Intel Pentium processor, that runs 90 percent of all computers, was fathered by Vinod Dham. Rajiv Gupta co-invented Hewlett Packard's E-speak project. Four out of ten Silicon Valley start-ups are run by Indians. Bollywood produces 800 movies per year and six Indian ladies have won Miss Universe/Miss World titles over the past 10 years.

For the record: Azim Premji, the richest Muslim entrepreneur on the face of the planet, was born in Bombay and now lives in Bangalore.India now has more than three dozen billionaires; Pakistan has none (not a single dollar b! illionaire).

The other amazing aspect is the rapid pace at which India is creating wealth. In 2002, Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh and Anil Ambani's father, left his two sons a fortune worth $2.8 billion. In 2007, their combined wealth stood at $94 billion. On 29 October 2007, as a result of the stock market rally and the appreciation of the Indian rupee, Mukesh became the richest person in the world, with net worth climbing to US$63.2 billion (Bill Gates, the richest American, stands at around $56 billion).



Indians and Pakistanis have the same Y-chromosome haplogroup. We have the same genetic sequence and the same genetic marker (namely: M124). We have the same DNA molecule, the same DNA sequence. Our culture, our traditions and our cuisine are all the same. We watch the same movies and sing the same songs. What is it that Indians have and we don't?

Indians elect their leaders.
=========

....The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance columnist. Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com
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Post by nkumar »

Indians and Pakistanis have the same Y-chromosome haplogroup. We have the same genetic sequence and the same genetic marker (namely: M124). We have the same DNA molecule, the same DNA sequence. Our culture, our traditions and our cuisine are all the same. We watch the same movies and sing the same songs. What is it that Indians have and we don't?
Less Islam.
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Post by JE Menon »

We have technicolour external and internal worldview. They have black and white. They have the perfect solution to the challenges of life. We strive for perfection, but do not describe it. They are absolutists. We are relativists. They have no way of resolving life's paradoxes without undermining their worldview. Our worldview is based on an acceptance and internalisation of these paradoxes. Some call it fatalism.

Guess, whose worldview is going to come out on top... :twisted:
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Post by AjayKK »

My 2 cents on the Indian and Pakistani views:

Here is an explanation by someone, if it can be called so
Islam - When it evolved, it claimed that it was the true religion for peace .

Lets say, in mathematics, the power value ( not truth value) of this statement is infinite ∞.

But, it is generally taken that ' this religion differentiates itself , its peelievers on the 'purest of the pure' criteria

So we have one sect trying to prove their supremacy over others.

To put this differnetial

d/dx (x^n) = nx^(n-1)
On continually differentiating, we get
n(n-1)(n-2)....d/dx (Konstant) = O

On the other hand, the Indian world view is the unity of the creator, the created and all else that is all is integrated into ONE.

You can integrate ONE and obtain higher powers :twisted:
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Post by Harish »

nkumar wrote:
Indians and Pakistanis have the same Y-chromosome haplogroup. We have the same genetic sequence and the same genetic marker (namely: M124). We have the same DNA molecule, the same DNA sequence. Our culture, our traditions and our cuisine are all the same. We watch the same movies and sing the same songs. What is it that Indians have and we don't?
Less Islam.
Cuisine? I protest this baki's perfidy. We have more flavors of sambar than they have dishes in their cuisine. We have rasmalai, rasam, aviyal, poriyal, payasam et al, and they have kabab, kabab and more kabab. We have 100+ varieties of dosa and they have goat-head soup. There is no comparision here, baki.

Regarding the other differences, last we heard from the old coot, he had this to say about the differences between India and bakistan:
quaid-e-bakistan wrote:They also say that Muslims were Hindus at one time. These nonsensical arguments are advanced by their leaders. They say, supposing an Englishman becomes a Muslim in England, he does not ask for Pakistan. Have you got not eyes to see and don't you have brains to understand that an Englishman, if he changes his religion in England, he, by changing his religion, still remains a member of the same society, with the same culture, same social life and everything remains exactly the same when an Englishman changes his faith? But can't you see that a Muslim, when he was converted, granted that he was converted more than a thousand years ago, bulk of the, then according to your Hindu religion and philosophy, he becomes an outcaste and he becomes a malecha (untouchable) and the Hindus cease to have anything to do with him socially, religiously and culturally or in any other way? He, therefore, belongs to a different order, not only religious but social, and he has lived in that distinctly separate and antagonistic social order, religiously, socially, and culturally.

It is now more than a thousand years that the bulk of the Muslims have lived in a different world, in a different society, in a different philosophy and a different faith. Can you possibly compare this with that nonsensical talk that mere change of faith is no ground for a demand for Pakistan? Can't you see the fundamental difference? Now, therefore, I do not think really that any honest man can possibly dispute the fact that the Muslims are a nation by themselves, distinctly separate from the Hindus. Suppose they are, and I have no doubt in my mind. There are hundreds of Hindus who honestly think so and there are hundreds of Hindus who believe in this and who have come to me and who have often said that this is the only solution, viz., the Lahore resolution. Therefore, it is no use arguing this point any further. But how is the propaganda carried on against it? The propaganda is carried on and, as I have told you, I have tried to understand the arguments against it, without any prejudice as far as possible for a human being to do so. What is the argument?

...

Next we are told that it is not in the interests of Muslims themselves. I say to my Hindu friends, please do not bother about us. We thank you most profusely by pointing out to us our interests. We are prepared to take the consequences of our considered resolution. Please look after yourselves.
The old pork-eater knew exactly what he wanted, and was pretty eloquent about it too. Arguments based on haplowhatsit don't hold relevance anymore. FYI, o baki, we all descended out of a common fish-like ancestor. How important is that to anyone?
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Post by bart »

The quaid-e-bakistan was actually not as eloquent nor his argument as well thought out and presented as one would expect. He seems to repeat the same thing over and over again, stoops to abusing people (have you no brains, yada yada), and doesn't really argue his viewpoint effectively.

No different in thinking and style than most of his countrymen on the Pakfora IMO.
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Post by svinayak »

Vivek K
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PostPosted: 16 Jan 2008 02:25 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
India is reconciled to the festering infection on its Western Border. Look at our economic growth today. While Pakistan kills its leaders and blows up soldiers and innocent civilians, India launches new cars, builds one of the world's largest telecom industry, raises billions of dollars for power, buys large steel plants and automobile plants, launches satellites, etc., etc., (the list is endless).

It is Pakistan that must reconcile to its reduced role in Global realpolitik. Their prominence in Global affairs as a rented state for defeating the Soviets is over. India has moved on (rapidly)!


India has moved on (rapidly)!


Not enough. India has to politically integrate with the major powers in a systematic way.
This book already talks about why.

India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status (Contemporary South Asia)
by Baldev Raj Nayar (Author), T. V. Paul (Author)


Everything is explained about what Pakistan did for the last 60 years and how rest of the major powers used Pakistan against India.
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Post by Prem »

Indian Middel Eastern Identity ?

Where exactly is the Middle East, anyway, and why is this term being used?


There are no precisely defined borders for this region.

In addition, it is a Eurocentric term originally meant to demarcate the region between the Far East and the Near East, with all these terms defined based on the regions’ geographic location in relation to Europe.

Along these lines, in relation to Mecca, Palestine could be called the Near West.

The people of Southwest Asia and North Africa should not use the appellation Middle East to describe their home region because it was coined by European imperialists.

The use of such non-indigenous terms only serves to reinforce mental slavery and subjugation.

Geographers have never liked the terms Middle East and Near East and have always used the more precise designations Southwest Asia, West Asia, and North Africa.

The Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary gives the following definition for the Middle East:

1. Also called Mideast. (loosely) the area from Libya E to Afghanistan, usually including Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Arabian Peninsula.

2. (formerly) the area including Iran, Afghanistan, India, Tibet, and Burma.

The Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines the Near East as “an indefinite geographical or regional term, usually referring to the countries of SW Asia, including Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and the other nations of the Arabian Peninsula
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=161335
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Post by svinayak »

Instead of blaming the govt of the day he is trying something else

http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/18/stories ... 381100.htm

The idea of India is under assault statecraft

Harish Khare

A dangerous imbalance has crept in between the Centre’s political capacity to govern and its constitutional responsibility to ensure the welfare and progress of all sections.

In less than two weeks we shall be performing in New Delhi and the various State capitals the all familiar Republic Day ceremonies and rituals, presumably reaffirming our collective national persona. In the context of the institutional disarray in our immediate neighbourhood, we may permit ourselves to feel satisfied, even superior, about the durability of the Republic and the depth of the republican sentiment. Yet, we will find our joy somewhat soured if we take a real ha rd look at the balance between the shrinking national sentiment and the expanding regional assertiveness. The signs of an imbalance are all too visible.

The weakening of the Central authority has a way of encouraging unhelpful external players to crowd in on New Delhi. The onus to arrest the decline of the Central authority is on all those who think they have a stake in India transforming itself into a global player abroad and a sensitive arrangement at home. Neither partisanship nor narrow ambitions would help produce the much-needed transformative leadership to resuscitate the idea of India.
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Post by ramana »

I could have psoted in Psy-ops thread but I think this is where it belongs. I was struck by the gnawig fact that something is worng in the Bhaji controversey in Ozzie land but could put my finger on it.

Well here it is. From Pioneer, 18 Jan., 2008
The race to transfer guilt
Ashok Malik

Writing in London's Daily Mail after the controversy-ridden Sydney test match, a particularly over-the-top sports columnist said, "Here is the latest news from Down Under. A Black cricketer claims he was called a 'monkey' so the authorities have dumped a black umpire to appease the team accused of harbouring a racist."

Paul Hayward, for that is the writer's name, had more to add: "'Monkey' relegates the object to the animal kingdom and instantly evokes slave ships out of Africa, lynchings in America's deep South and the worst ramblings of white supremacists." The point he was trying to make was that calling a Black cricketer a monkey was different from 'conventional' or even 'legitimate' abuse and sledging.

While he's clearly unknown and unheard of in India, Hayward has put forward an argument that others have echoed too. By allegedly calling Andrew Symonds a "monkey", Harbhajan Singh, they charge, has crossed the Rubicon.

It is the sort of high-minded rhetoric that would leave most Indians completely bewildered. "Slave ships out of Africa"; "lynchings in America"; "ramblings of white supremacists": All very well, but what's it got to do with Harbhajan Singh's Sikh/Punjabi ancestors? The Indians weren't the ones running the slave ships, so why should they be guilt-tripped?

There are some intriguing questions amid the acrid post-Sydney debate. Does racism in sport (or in any field) only become an issue when the cultural commentators of the West -- not to speak of pompous cricket writers in London and jejune cricket captains in Australia -- discover it?

Begin with first principles. After Sydney, the usual hand-wringing has begun among sections of the Indian intelligentsia. They insist Indians live in glass houses and are actually quite racist. For evidence, sales figures of 'skin fairness creams' have been cited. One newspaper has diligently compiled a list of which Indians hate other Indians: From Delhi residents who ridicule students from the North-East to Bengalis who despise Marwaris.

All of this is beside the point. It is nobody's argument that Indian society doesn't have prejudice; that is, regrettably, a part of the human condition. Yet, racism -- in the manner in which it is being discussed after the Sydney test -- refers to a specific political belief that Black people are inferior. It is about the oppression and brutalisation of those of African origin by, predominantly, Western nations.

In this narrow-focus framework India as a society has far less to answer for than, say, Australia or, indeed, the forefathers of apoplectic newspaper columnists in London. Correctly or incorrectly, the Indian establishment and middle class see their country as a strong voice against racism -- a society that backed liberation movements in South Africa and Namibia, for example, and led the crusade against racism in sport when race was really a global problem, rather than the newbie multi-culturalist's hobby horse.

{India spent a lot of money annually to give support to ANC when it was banned by the West. Ask Mandela}

Despite the holier-than-thou nonsense of Cricket Australia's apologists, the fact is racism in international sport is far less of a menace today than it was 20 years ago. It was a fault-line from, roughly, the 1950s, when newly independent nations in Asia and Africa felt White countries weren't giving them their due. India suffered too, if only collaterally. First-grade English cricketers routinely skipped tours to the sub-continent. Between 1947 and 1980, India was invited to visit Australia only three times -- 1947-48, 1967-68 and 1977-78.

Was this racism or merely distance, discomfort and mutual suspicion? It usually depended on your passport.

Africans or those of African descent had a more combustible encounter. Apartheid was a hot button especially when some nations insisted sport and politics could not be mixed. It led to an African boycott of the 1976 Olympics. As far back as 1976, then England captain Tony Greig welcomed the West Indies cricket team by promising to make them "grovel". As Clive Lloyd pointed out in his autobiography, Living for Cricket, this brought to mind images of African slaves in sugar plantations and inspired his team to smash England 3-0. Even so, there was no indignant columnist waiting to admonish Greig, no Ricky Ponting complaining to the International Cricket Council (ICC), no ICC referee who cared a damn.

Since the 1990s, racism has, for the most part, ceased to be an issue in international sport. Perhaps making up for lost time, the moral custodians of Western culture have suddenly woken up to it, and are promoting a war against a phantom enemy. There is a word for this phenomenon -- political correctness.

It is instructive that in the manner in which it is delineated and its concerns hierarchically laid out, political correctness is itself neo-racist -- only addressing those sensitivities the West believes worthy of protecting. There is also an inexplicable universalisation of its postulates. Why else would an Indian, with no slave ships in his family, no Gone With the Wind legacy, be expected to 'atone' in equal measure for Europe's or America's historical maltreatment of the Black man? Has political correctness become a civilisational transfer of guilt?

Such collective amnesia is not limited to racism. Consider how Europe and even the United States have blissfully whitewashed their record of anti-Semitism. Over centuries, European nations regularly demonised Jews. Even during the Holocaust, America was turning back German Jewish refugees.

After World War II, when the monstrosity of the Nazi regime was there for all to see, Europe and America changed their minds. Hitler now became the unmentionable one. Even a rational academic discussion on his relative achievements and failures -- without in any way mitigating the evil he institutionalised in his concentration camps -- became out of bounds.

India's Semitic encounter was very different. Successive waves of Jewish migration -- spread over hundreds of years -- resulted in no ill will. That is why it is sometimes strange when Western interlocutors lecture India on the need to excise even mild mention of Hitler from public discourse.

Indians see Hitler as no different a villain from Nadir Shah or Attila the Hun. The West insists he is in a league of his own. The strict anti-Semitism codes that the West has designed are its attempt to make up for a dubious past. Other countries, those with no history of violence against the Jews, don't understand why they should be spoon-fed these rules. Just like, one supposes, a working class Sikh youth can't understand why he should be a scapegoat for the Slave Trade.
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Post by pradeepe »

IMHO Ashok Malik nailed it!
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Post by Rye »

Brilliant piece by Ashok Malik...isn't it also highly convenient to the Christian nations to associate hitler with the "swastika" rather than the Cross? After all Hitler's inspiration was Christian mythology to support extermination of Jews worldwide.

And yet, even though the perpetrators of the holocaust were all christians and eminently supported by Christian countries like the USA and the UK, the symbol of Nazi germany is a effed-up version of the swastika. What's up with that?

So tur*s like Max Mueller make up some cockamamie story about how the swastika is "Aryan"...Hitler takes it up to the next level by pushing to eleiminate all non aryans...and the likes of Romila Thapar and Michael Witzel now lecture to us how the Aryans from Central Asia are the same aryans Hitler is referring to....how convenient.
Last edited by Rye on 18 Jan 2008 01:06, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ramana »

Rye, Now you understand why the Uty of Chicago is at the center of Nazifying Hindu politicians? Its a transfer of guilt to imply that Hitler was inspired by his Aryan inspirations and not the Pauline Bible, whereas he clearly states, before his My Jihad book, that it was the Pauline Bible that shaped his views. See his article "Monumental Work of History of Man"

And how Wendy's children are running their campaign to denigrate India and Hinduism.
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Post by Rye »

deleted. pointless.
Last edited by Rye on 18 Jan 2008 01:33, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by sanjaychoudhry »

And yet, even though the perpetrators of the holocaust were all christians and eminently supported by Christian countries like the USA and the UK
The then Pope openly collaborated with Hitler and refused to condemn genocide of Jews. The book "Hitler's Pope" by John Cornwell created a storm when it was published in 1999.

Wikipedia states: "According to Cornwell, Pope Pius XII facilitated the dictator's rise and, ultimately, the Holocaust." Can there by any more damning proof of Christianity's guilt in genocide of Jews than this?

Bascially, what happened was that the earliest Gospel writers wanted to curry favour with the Romans who were the rulers. So they cleverly shifted the blame of Jesus' crucifiction to the Jews rather than the Romans and accused the Jews of getting Christ killed through betrayal. This was the original "shifting of guilt" from the Romans to the Jews.

Since then, the Jews were a marked race in any Christian society. They were demonised as greedy and traitorous ("The Merchant of Venice: and its Shylock being a classic anti-Jew popaganda) and forced to live in ghettos away from the Christian society.

The word "ghetto" is derived from the name of the living quarter of Jews in Poland. Their final gassing by Hitler, supported by the Pope, was just the grand finale in the 2000 years of Jews' prosecution by the Christians.
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Post by ramana »

Sanjay, The born again or newly converted folks feel the urge to show their allegieance to the faith by attacking the jewish people. The Goths invaded Spain and subjected the Jews to a lot of atrocities. Read Benjamin Disraeli's book on Lord Bentinick.

And most Kings of England like Richard the Lion Heart's cronation saw quite a few slaughter. All swept under the rug of history.

Recall in "Ivanhoe" the Norman knight lusting for Rebecca and imprisoning the father.
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Post by Ardeshir »

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... /pius.html
Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews.

In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania. The papacy did nothing.(5)

Within the Pope's own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d'affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.(6)

In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. The response came that the Holy See wanted to remain "neutral," and that condemning the atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in German-held lands.(7)

In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to "bear adversity with serene patience."(8)

On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, "The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms."(9) Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, the Secretary of State responded on the Pope's behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews.(10)

Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII refused.(11)
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