Non-Western Worldview

[SwamyG]

I am posting here as the author goads us to think from an Indian perspective and not just from an Western angle.

It is very very good, so I paste the entire blog. In the interest to generated traffic to WSJ I will only link Part 1 as a linky Kamal Nath, a feisty guy, talks about 'jugaad' too in his book "India's Century".

And don't forget to read the comments on both blogs.

The comments on Part 1 of this article highlighted a variety of innovations by Indians that many of us, myself included, were not even aware of. Such is the brilliance and breadth of India's innovation!

Sadly, a large number of our innovations don't become more widely known because the exposure for smart innovations centers around Western and Japanese inventions. Our simple, everyday innovations [or jugaad – an interesting word with various connotations] are something we must find a way to capitalize on. The current pitiful economic state is an opportunity for that.

So what are the missing ingredients for Indians to take our innovative ideas and products to the world?

For it to happen on a sustainable basis and to attract development investment, it needs to have a profit motive. We already know that profitable models do exist, but there isn't yet a thriving venture capital industry around this here as there is in the U.S. around the technology industry.

The problem is not lack of capital or brilliant people -- the problem is the lack of deeper understanding. We don't know and appreciate the opportunities that are in front of us. This lack of deeper understanding appears at the level of businessmen and entrepreneurs who have largely looked to the West for viable business models and have been content creating an "Indian version." And it appears at the level of investment firms, capital markets, and venture funds who do not realize or are sometimes downright skeptical of Indian innovation opportunities. Why so?

For a very simple reason: The people who work in these funds (be it fund managers or analysts) have studied case studies of western companies in their MBA classes but would have never looked at Amul as an example of sheer creative genius in decentralized manufacturing.

The lack of general awareness about such examples is widespread especially among students and the younger workforce of the country – take a poll of those who want to join Coca-Cola, IBM, McKinsey after their graduation compared to working for a potential Indian startup company creating innovative products. (Full disclosure: At Vu, we just hired five product design graduates from IIT who want to be part of a smaller company and contribute to its innovation.)

Innovation is a product of entrepreneurship, passion and experimentation. We can't blame the government for letting us down in this arena as we normally do in others. Rather, our minds and hearts need to fundamentally change. Among business leaders, we need to allow for an "experimentation fund" within our companies and involve ourselves deeply in getting new ideas to market.

Let's work with an example. How many of us know that the Jaipur Rugs Company has built a very successful enterprise by making entrepreneurs out of 40,000 carpet weavers and artisans? It is now a world class business which exports carpets, durries, and mats to countries the world over in their "own brand."

Within our secondary education and business schools, instead of students reading up on case studies about "Coke vs Pepsi" and having summer internships at Sony, we must attempt to have students study the Aravind Netralaya model and intern at Amul and Jaipur Rugs. This will create a pool of talent which then understands the vast business opportunity in "constraint-based innovation" and creates the investment and management talent to make this opportunity a reality.

Within our media, we need to regularly lionize efforts like the Tata Nano and plenty of others so that more Indians know about the kind of great innovation work that happens in our country. Lastly, among ourselves, we must learn to give Indian products and innovation its respect and its price rather than automatically assuming that something coming from an American or Japanese company is automatically superior. Remember, a country that does not respect its heroes is soon left with none.
—Devita Saraf is CEO of Vu Technologies and Executive Director of Zenith Computers in Mumbai

[ramana]

Anybody figured what is a "New World Order"

Here is an x-post realted to above question.

Some interesting clues to the European mindset now about India vis-a-vis UNSC is the following:

http://www.cer.org.uk/pdf/bn_india_cg_26sept08.pdf

Perhaps, when India is – as it must be, one day – admitted to the UNSC and the body that replaces the G8, it will start to take on a greater sense of responsibility for global governance. In the long run, India would benefit from a stronger and more effective rules-based international system.

The author's stance is obviously his visualization of what he terms the "new world order". His other writeups worth fishing about to get a profile of the current EU thinking, is about Russia's "role", China's "role", and a curious giveaway article speculating about whether "EU+PRC" can provide a model of global "governance".

This is the gist of the envisioned "new world order" : a framework that ensures that the world runs according to the European model and preserves perceived European interests. In this India, China to be coopted as client/agents. This is basically an attempt at reviving the heyday of the "British colonial empire" and hence its most persistent proponents are likely to represent British interests. It is possible, that UK and EU no longer have full reliance on the USA to maintain their interests. So they are thinking of an arrangement that can replace the existing arrangement based on US, but still continue UK or EU interests - primarily abnornally high energy and other economic consumption levels.

Obviously the US has its own vision of a "new world order", but that still sees Europe as "culturally" reliable but "weak" and dependent agent. The USA is also aware that the Europeans can switch boats if necessary and hence in the US vision also India and China are important client agents.

For both "visionaries" Russia has to be kept on a tight leash. It is the Russia and the "Islamic" factor which are undetermined variables in both their equations. And the swings in policies and initiatives that we see stem from this nervousness. Both China and India are going to be pricked and cajoled and "loved" until they fall in line - at least that appears to be the plan. Once these two are on-board, the task is to use these two to tackle Russia and the Islamics.

There is an Italian American journalist who has written two books"The Europeans" and the "Italians". In his first book he considers US as an extension of Europe especially Western Europe. He doesnt think much of US intellectual prowess as its tied up with Biblical dogma. The US is still getting out of the Bibilical formulation of races etc.

[svinayak]

Deleted. Not for this thread.

[ramana]

Paganism without Idols

Indeed, this neo-paganism helps explain the Western fascination with the only remaining ancient pagan system still extant, Hinduism. Hindus have been under Western rule, but it is only now that they have started taking to capitalism in large numbers. They too have adopted as the new god Science, which Westerners have set up in place of the idols of tradition. Hindus have as an advantage their retention of a vast number of idols, which increases the Western fascination with them, where once it fuelled disgust, when as occupiers they were still Christian.

[ramana]

Very perceptive article by a Paki!

Paganism without idols
By M. A. Niazi | Published: July 17, 2009

One of the abiding misconceptions of the War on Terror is that it is a war on Muslims as a continuation of the Crusades, which were definitely a war of Christianity with Islam. This is because the West of today is essentially pagan with a Christian veneer, and wishes Muslims to complete their conversion to the same paganism, and is now struggling to make that conversion complete. It should not be forgotten that the faith of Judaism and Christianity are the same as Islam. Indeed, according to devout Muslims, all three faiths are identical, and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was merely the Last Messenger in a chain that had previously been among the Jews. So had Jesus, only he was rejected by the Jews themselves, and accepted by the Gentiles, to the extent of being accepted by the Roman Empire itself, and adopted as the Empire's religion.

The West was still Christian when it embarked on its imperialist enterprise, which engulfed the Muslim world. However, before decolonisation, it moved. It had already adopted capitalism as its economic system, and it thereupon adopted pagan values to live lives according to. The ideas of paganism had long been present, especially after the post-Renaissance revival of classical learning, but it was only at the turn of the 20th century, just before the First World War, that they were widely adopted, at about the same time as socialism or communism won so many supporters.
While the Christian West had certain shared values with the Muslim World then, it jettisoned these values now. It set-up as the measure of all things Man, and made humanism the ultimate good. Though there was no reversion to the idol worship of the ancient pagans, there was the setting up of untouchable shibboleths, in the form of the freedoms. These were ultimately borrowed from the French Revolution, from its Rights of Man, so that Revolution, even though it was predated by the American, became the seminal Western Revolution, with all of its rigmarole of a new calendar and a new religion, with its virulent anti-clericalism. Western man no longer was willing to be judged by the Almighty, as was Islamic man; and that was the main difference. The Afterlife might have been foretold, but it included a Judgement according to a code, which had been revealed through the Prophets. That this code had included a number of direct instructions was only accepted by Orthodox Jews and Muslims, but not Christians, who had not followed the laws of Moses for centuries before they finally left the teachings of Jesus. The code was also abandoned by the Jews, as they attempted to assimilate and abandoned orthodoxy, and decided to take a national homeland in the Middle East, ignoring the rights of those who were settled there before them.

The 20th century saw the full flowering of Western paganism, and the attempt to impose it on Muslims, who not only followed the code of the Almighty as was revealed to Muhammad (PBUH), but also believed in the Afterlife and the Judgement. Pagans on the other hand did not believe in this, and held belief to constitute something which retarded in the enjoyment of the here and now. This may have been paganism with a new twist, as it did not have any of the ancient gods in attendance, and was buttressed by one of the revealed religions, in the shape of Christianity. This was perhaps inevitable, as young pagans, for various reasons, ended up as ministers of the Church, and played the crucial role of making their Church support the neo-imperialist enterprise.
One thing the new paganism did do, and that was make capitalism possible. Now with no more restrictions, the neo-pagan could seek profits that were unlimited both in amount and location, and in the lives that were lost. Within the Muslim scheme of things, which explicitly includes Jews and Christians (though not necessarily Judaism or Christianity), this is not how to approach life, which is a test, with Judgement at the end. More important, life itself is not significant if a favourable Judgement is to be obtained. This refusal to join in the capitalist game has made Muslims fair targets nowadays, apart from the downing of the Twin Towers. This has led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the implied threat to the rest of the Muslim World.
Muslims should realise that the invasions are not about security for the West against terrorism, or about access to energy sources, but about belief systems. The West wishes for Muslims to become pagan in the same way, while nominally subscribing to a revealed religion. Islam should no longer be a barrier to the full plunge into modernity, which is another name for paganism.
Indeed, this neo-paganism helps explain the Western fascination with the only remaining ancient pagan system still extant, Hinduism. Hindus have been under Western rule, but it is only now that they have started taking to capitalism in large numbers. They too have adopted as the new god Science, which Westerners have set up in place of the idols of tradition. Hindus have as an advantage their retention of a vast number of idols, which increases the Western fascination with them, where once it fuelled disgust, when as occupiers they were still Christian.
However, what the West seems to have omitted from its calculations is the truth or otherwise of the belief systems. Islam is squarely in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, it has placed itself firmly there, both by the manner and the content of the revelation to Muhammad (PBUH). The West is now working on the assumption that there will be no judgement. If there is, and Muslims know there will be, the followers of capitalism will be asked why they did not follow the code revealed to them by the Almighty through His Messengers.
Paganism is the religion people invent for themselves when they turn away from the Revelation. All the ancient paganisms, like the Graeco-Roman or the Norse, were attempts in this direction. But paganism, even the modern, even when clothed in one of the revealed religions, as the modern West, is obviously in opposition to the Almighty. Therefore all involved in the War on Terror, not just the Muslims, need to ask themselves where they are going. Indeed, perhaps a more relevant question is whether they want to go there at all.

E-mail: [email protected]

[Johann]

What the author misses is that the 'paganism' he describes never ever went away after the Christianisation of Western Europe.

Roman Christianity went far deeper in replacing the thought patterns of the Eastern Roman Empire (Greece, Balkans, Egypt, Syria, etc) than it did in Western Europe.

The patrician families of the city of Rome were some of the last to convert - it was in fact their opposition that led Constantine to establish a new capital at Constantinope, intended to be Christian from foundation.

As with Iran, semitic religions did not replace the pre-existing civilisations, but rather co-mingled. That is why Christmas for most westerners is not Jesus but the Christmas tree of the winter solstice, and Easter means fertility symbols of bunnies and eggs, not the cross despite Christian attempts to coopt the ancient festivals, and why Nowruz remains the new year for Iranians .

[ramana]

I am reading about the formation of German identity through the German language in the 12th thru 14th centuries. A big factor was the feuds among the various little royal houses.

[ramana]

There is a key book called "Warfare in the Ancient Near East" by William Hamblin. It discusses warfare from early antiquity till 1600BC. Its 544 pages long and is a good read to understand the difference that normative religion brought to the lives of the Near Eastern people.

[ramana]

In the Near East societies the idea of Priests (who speak for gods) and Kings (who fight for the gods) came about and eventually the roles merged into the Priest King figures. In ANE(Ancient Near East) the idea was that gods fought through their human representatives and not vice versa ie humans fighting invoking the names of gods. Normative religions removed the plurality of gods and made them non existent to one God. And further developments/tinkering with these religions separated/bifurcated the Priest King roles. This led to dissonance aka jahilya. Then came along Muhammed who recombined the roles. The Europeans adopted all these ideas from the Near East: Divine rights of kings and all that much. Yet they say they are civilized when its only copied and that to partially. The English also combined the roles under Henry the 8th.

[ramana]

New York Review of Books : Knossos: Fakes, Facts and Mystery

[RajeshA]

I am reading about the formation of German identity through the German language in the 12th thru 14th centuries. A big factor was the feuds among the various little royal houses.

Ramana garu,
What's the name of the book?

[ramana]

Its dated article from the magazine "History Today" from UK. I will post the refs from the article for further study.

[Hari Seldon]

Dinno where else to post these. From another forum, a set of mighty interesting quotes indeed.

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups." Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time (Macmillan Company, 1966,) Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University

"The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established." Dr. Carroll Quigley

"I know of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years in the early 1960s to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies ... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

-Dr. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

"As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student, I heard that call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley."President Clinton, in his acceptance speech for the Democratic Party's nomination for president, 16 July 1992

[R Vaidya]

New Indian Express
Soft power to ‘conquer and dominate’
R Vaidyanathan
First Published : 29 Jul 2009 12:18:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 29 Jul 2009 12:56:04 AM IST

Religion is no longer derided in China. The keynote speech by Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao to the 17th party congress in October 2007, devoted a paragraph to religion. He stressed that religious people including priests, monks and lay believers played a positive role in the social and economic development of China. Hence religion is no more the opiate of the masses.
The state-controlled Xinhua stresses freedom of belief. It says religion could play an important role in realising a ‘harmonious society’, which is the new political role of the party. That is the main issue we in India should note. A study by two professors of China Normal University based on more than 4,500 people in 2007 concludes that more than 300 million people, namely 31 per cent are religious, and more than 60 per cent of those are in the 16-40 age group. The number of followers of Christianity has increased to 12 per cent from less than eight per cent in the Nineties.
This last fact is interesting since a huge underground church has developed in China and Zhao Xiao, a former communist party official and convert to Christianity, thinks there are up to 130 million Christians in China. This figure is much higher than the official figure of 21 million — 16 million Protestants and five million Catholics. If the former figure is true, then there are more Christians in China than Communist Party members, 74 million at the last count.
The major change in China is not related to growth rates or the Three Gorges dam, shopping malls and Olympic stadia. That is a typical Western way of viewing China. The main change is in religious affiliation, and the assertiveness of Islamic followers and development of a large-scale underground church. The middle classes have given up rice (perceived to be for the illiterate poor) and are embracing Christianity as it also helps job mobility, particularly in global companies where the heads could belong to the same church.
The Muslim population is more concentrated in specific locations like the western parts. But there is also a growing interest in China about its past. The white marble Ming dynasty tombs in Beijing were painted red during the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties. Even today labourers are trying to restore the white, without success. The guides are not reluctant to talk about it. The 10-handed Buddha in the summer palace of the Qing dynasty near Beijing has many similarities with Vishnu, and even this is mentioned clearly. More importantly China is opening ‘Confucius Institutes’ in more than 50 countries, similar to British Council efforts, but more focused on China’s ancient wisdom. The first thing we should learn is to stop looking at China with Western glasses.
Economic growth bereft of spiritual underpinnings in the context of the death of Marxism will be a great challenge for China. India as an elder brother should facilitate an orderly transformation based on our common shared ancient wisdom. Let us remember that China too is a multi-cultural and multi-religious society but interested in our shared past. In the words of Hu Shih, a former ambassador of China to the USA (1938-1942) “India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without having to send a single soldier across her borders.” We should be using our soft power to ‘conquer and dominate’ China.
We need to print million copies of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and start some 50 Bharatiya Vidya Bhavans in China. This is the only way to destabilise our younger brother, by de-legitimising communism. Actually China needs this more than USA even though all our soft power is currently on show in the USA.
We should recognise China’s weak point and the need of its masses in the absence of communism. Many Chinese even today believe that their next birth should be in India to reach salvation. Culture and religion are not taboos any more.
There are other issues. Officially China recognises or permits only five religions, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Protestantism and Catholicism. Hence we should take steps to include Hinduism as well. The point is that our soft power in culture is interwoven intimately with religion. You cannot separate it however much you try it. Carnatic music without Bhakthi is neither music nor art. The strategy should be to encircle China with music, dance, art, yoga. ayurveda, spiritual texts, etc, and capture the hearts of the middle-classes as we have done for centuries.
The second issue is related to our own mindset. We tend to look at China either through Western spectacles or through local Marxist spectacles — which have thicker glasses. We need to come out of it. Policy formulators are still living in the Sixties and Seventies while China is undergoing a gigantic social crisis due to material prosperity and spiritual vacuum. The foreign secretary-in-waiting was India’s Ambassador to China. She should send someone to China who grasps the strategy and fashions the responses and our actions. Unfortunately, as a Chinese colleague of mine commented, “both our countries are ruled by rootless deracinated foreign educated wonders that do not have any idea of the civilisational roots or the cultural richness of our lands.”
But this is an opportunity too good to pass up, especially as there is every likelihood that the next two superpowers will be from Asia. In the process we would be destabilising the current dispensation and the remnants of communism. Are we ready to undertake such an ‘invasion'

[ramana]

One key insight to understand Western critiques is they look at the world thorugh their own social structures and then thru Christian framework. This is what we came to conclusion yesterday in a talk. So it colors all their views even if they profess ot be not normatizing.

--

To continue with my German identity studies, a key question is what took them so long to create a state after language was their identifier as a nation? It took the French and Norman English the hundred years war to form nation states during the same period. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 was essentially a way to settle the German question. Yet it took another 200 years to create their nation state. And another 100 years and two World Wars to make them peaceful. So what we see in Europe are two large states: France and Germany that form the core and all are at the periphery. Russia is both European and Asian as the situation warrants.
---------
concept of Heimat a key to understanding German identity.

[ramana]

There is tussle between Old World post-Refromation Christianity and the New World Puritanism.

Post Refromation Christianity evolved into/ secularised as paganism without the idols. the tussle is to renormatize the secualrised non idolatorous pagans.

[ramana]

X-post...

One has to sudy Nazism in its true meaning to understand what it is. Its a new Islam for Europe. Its about de-Judaizing Western civilization. This includes de-Hebrewising the Bible and take Jesus out of Mary.

Absolutely

And it was Roman Catholic Church project.

The RCC initially supported it because they believed Fascism was a conservative project that would fight godless communism amongst the middle and working classes.

The two fell out at the top about halfway when the Catholic Church realised Fascism was not against 'the excesses of modernity', but was in fact just as much a part of the threat of radical modernisation as communism.

Particularly when it became clear that Himmler and SS, which was the nucleus of Nazi philosophy believed that the only way to de-Judaise Europe was to give up Christianity entirely for a revived old Germanic paganism combined with borrowings from both Islam and Dharmic religions.

Fascism as a whole ultimately aimed to replace god with nationalism, the state, and the will of Nietszche's superman. Religion was for the most part seen in Marxist terms (opiate of the masses, etc), but with a twist, which Stalin adopted in 1941, ie rather than ban religion, make sure that it is tightly controlled and serves the state rather than the other way around.

In addition I think it was a way to create a new covenant for Europe outside of the Ancient Near East.

[brihaspati]

ramanaji,
German nationalism was formed in a tussle between two colliding forces - Roman imperial centralization versus Germanic, tribal, confederationist regionalism. Germans did not need to be a German nation, they were forced to become one by Rome. Throughput Europe we will see this struggle to maintain tribal centrifugal forces in the northern passages against centralization based around the Mediterranean. The Saxons, Nordics, Danes stubbornly resisted Christianization, and Christianization was deliberately adopted as an imperialist centralization tool by the later Romans and their successor regimes of the Franks (ironically one of the Germanics displaced by the Romans).

This was also why Christianity, a faith basically alien to the European, had to be deliberately brought in by Rome - and edited/reconstructed as per requirements of the empire to overrule and erase the indigenous "pagan", so that regional, local identifications did not survive. To rise again as a German nation, the roots had to be therefore discovered or invented in the pre-imperial past of indigenous beliefs and culture.

Linguistic revival only paves the way to search for common roots, and therefore a common geographical origin of the various components of the loose tribal confederation. The Catholic Christianity would hamper the process in trying to blur any such potential distinction from the imperial heritage. Thus they would need to assert their regional, indigenous, version of the prevailing faith as a first step. But the very need to use Christianity itself againt Christianity, creates problems in the absence of an alternative equally centralizing philosophy that helps in the formation of a homogeneous German identity.

Typically fractious collections of identities, who fail to recognize their own inherent commonalities, need an external enemy or inavder who does not recognize those differences and sees some commonality. Being equally treated or humiliated, the smaller quarrels of identities break down. The Germans therefore had to wait for the Napoleonic wars to do the final melding.

[shaardula]

paging all...

Prof. SN Balagangadhara talks to Dr. R Ganesh about indian approaches to problem solving. the discussion has many ends. but very engaging and provocative. not the type of things you hear these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQ2EkrXBy4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25AsxRRQvAQ


(ramana, part two has a discussion about the living traditions of avadhana in andhra, also a discussion on the contrast between TE, MA poetry to KA, TA poetry.)

[shaardula]

an interesting question from Ganesh. india discovered english, like the west discovered sanskrit. india has produced many english works, (aurobindo even wrote poetry in greek and latin). what about west's contribution to indian poetry & thought?

i think they are stuck at the level of purva paksha and have not moved beyond it. that would be angeekaara. and that comes from the common notions about gnyaana. basically the west and we see knowledge in completely different terms.

i think loosely it is this: our attitude to gnyaana is more like a mathematicians attitude to mathematics. their approach to it is not. even if they constantly market and remarket themselves as scientific. something about it is black magic.

[svinayak]

i think loosely it is this: our attitude to gnyaana is more like a mathematicians attitude to mathematics. their approach to it is not. even if they constantly market and remarket themselves as scientific. something about it is black magic.

I assume that you are refering to the west. The western mind has to morph its mind to scientific thinking from its Christian roots. This is not permanent.

[ramana]

People asked me to provide links to my pontifiacting about Hitler and roots of Nazism.

Here is one website

Hitler and Christianity

And his own notes Hitler-Bible: Monumental History of Mankind

The latter has a handwritten note before his assuming power.

[svinayak]

Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Modern West, A Culture of Death
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/


From the early 1800s, the West, in an affront to God, has moved ever more rapidly into a culture of death and destruction, away from the teachings of Christ. At its present state, the most significant thing that the West is bringing to humanity is a culture of totalitarianism and death, one on such an nuanced level as would only be celebrated by the most brutal of Pagans and Lucifirians and would even be an affront to the most blood thirsty of the Mohammadens.

The foundation of this was laid by the Augustinian theories of Just War. This created an atmosphere that condoned murder, even if under strict circumstances. Do I say that the Eastern Church has not gone to war? Of course not, or rather the Church has never gone to war but the people have. However, these were never Jihads or their lesser versions: Crusades. Indeed the wars that the Orthodox peoples have fought have always been viewed as a sin, as the shedding of human blood is a grave sin, regardless, but in a fallen world is often necessary to prevent an even greater evil. To that end, an Orthodox soldier who has shed blood is unclean and thus must cleanse himself through prayer and fasting, seeking the forgiveness of God for what was done. Conversely, this may also explain why our wars are so vicious. As the Orthodox soldiers know they are committing a sin, they are repulsed by what they do and seek to end it as fast and as permanently as possible, which in itself becomes a much more bloody affair. Do not confuse this with the actions of the Red Army, in WW2, which was under the control of the Western Marxist import and its subsequent ideology of death.

Contrast this to the West, and Augustine's misplaced concepts of Just War. Often, in the Crusades, the crusaders, as with their Mohammedan enemies, were taught that to die in the process or to even take place would be the forgiveness of sins. This built a foundation that was later used in crusades against fellow Christians, such as the Basque and the Hungarians and later in France. It also set the stage for the Inquisition and Church sanctioned mass murdered, even if those numbers have been inflated over the years. Similarly, when Protestant movements broke out, they, under the influence of the Renaissance, took these extremes even further, as was witnessed by the atrocities of the Ana-Baptists in northern France and western German, Cromwell's Round Heads in England and the Calvinists under the despotic and murderous reign of John Calvin in Switzerland.

Again compare this the Orthodox Church, which not only has never waged a holy war, but has never had an inquisition. For the most part, heretics are never burned or otherwise murdered but are exiled and prayed for. This is a far cry from the Albigensian Crusades where the catch phrase was: "Kill them all, God will know His own", and this in reference to the murder of fellow Christian women and children.

So, it is only natural that when Humanism appeared, with its bent on atheist science, as opposed to science as the handmaiden of religion, explaining the Maker's great creation, the foundation of death was greatly built upon.

The range of who should die was widened. Starting in the 1800s and reaching full strength in the first half of the 1900s was the eugenics movements, out to breed the perfect human being...perfect being under the eye of the particular beholder, of course. Abortion, the sin of sins, the murder of God's most precious gift, became a standard into getting the unwanted races residing in the West, to self terminate their future. America's Planned Parenthood led the way and spread quickly through out Western Europe. A greater evil is hard to imagine, this being even something the most psychotic Jihadist does not stoop to against his own children. Honour killings are a some what different issue, though just as evil.

Many of these Luciferian groups have gone so far as to even create abortion ships which travel to just beyond the waters of conservative, Christ fearing nations that ban abortions, such as Poland or Ireland, and ferry women in to have the Gift of Life butchered from them. All to prove the power of man over life and thus spit in the eye of God.

Remember, that during the various colonizations by the Western Europeans, whole peoples were exterminated, after being branded as savages. Often even when they adopted their cultures to the Wests, such as the Creek or the Iraqua, they still, in the end, faced extermination as little more than savages, sitting on valuable land. Again, compare that to the Russian crown's conquest of Siberia, which was taken in 3 battles, one over a misunderstanding and a second with the Chinese. All of the original peoples who inhabited Siberia and Alaska were still and are still present, at least in Siberia.

Homosexuality, too, was brought in as an affront to God, destroying the traditional family, mutating the moral standings of children and breeding a hedonistic, self destructive life style. Both the Catholic Church and its Protestant offshoots, as well as the societies they serve, have become not only tainted but fully perverted by this and by the weakened Western Christians' desire for inclusiveness.

Even the evils of the Marxists, in Russia, were a Western import. Compared to what those Marxists, such as Lenin and Stalin suffered from the Orthodox Christian Tsar, when they were sent to Siberia, it is an almost comical comparison. Both were exiled to live in a Siberian village, unable to leave but able take guests and write letters.

Following all of this was the next logical step: termination of the physically deformed, the invalids, the mentally ill. The first victims of Hitler, after all, were fellow Germans and not even the anti-Nazi aristocrats; they came second. The practice died off after WW2, only to return in force in the 1990s and fully in the new Devil's Western century. The so called Western democracies, the champions of so called human rights, though never of God's laws, are now screaming at the top of their lungs the "right" to a quality life, whose allegory is: if you are deformed, handicapped or old and infirm, your quality of life is low and thus you are better off dead. This vile, paganistic, Luciferian approach, again, even worse than anything that the Mohamedans thought up for their own people, is an affront to God of incredible degrees.

Further more, the drive to have the elderly person commit suicide, or as the agents of Lucifer prefer to call it: to self terminate with dignity, is to have the subject damn their soul for all eternity. Suicide is self murder and that is one murder that can not be sought forgiveness for. In Russian, our word for suicide is: Самоубийство or quite literally: self-murder. We do not have the right to terminate the gift of life that God gave us. Just because we live in pain does not mean that we do not live to fulfill some aspect of God's plan. The pain is a test of our faith in God, something to work through and to continue to seek to serve God. As such, suicide, self-murder, is an escape of our responsibilities before God. What ever good could still be done, is now terminated.

Many of these concepts are alien to our cultures, many others were imported with the Marxist revolution and we are still suffering their ill effects. On abortion, Russia, which still allows it, has curtailed it to the first 12 weeks and there is much pressure to end this murder fully. Euthanasia is illegal in Russia. Eugenics is also something that never took root and with the Orthodox Church the leading moral authority of the land, once more, it never will.

Now let us pray that the Orthodox Church will be powerful enough to restore Christianity to Europe and N. America, in the wake of the catastrophic failures of both Catholicism and Protestantism.

Sunday, July 26, 2009
Three Deadly Western Imports
Russia, as the cross roads between Europe and Asia, has been used for more than trade, but also for the exchange of ideas. Unfortunately this applies just as well to horribly bad ideas as to good ideas and if those horribly bad ideas ruin or weaken Orthodox Christian Russia, the West is all the more happy to export them with every ounce of its being.

Three horrible ideas have been planted in Russia to, if not destroy her, retard her growth, as much as possible. We, dear reader, will now explore each of them in detail.

[svinayak]

The West

I do not like the West, first and foremost, because in one way or another, they are an enemy to us and have been about enslaving, disenfranchising and destroying Russia, our faith, culture and even our very race, for 900 years. However, I also do not believe that 1. the "West" is an actual homogeneous unit, which is why I specify the Anglo-Sphere, so often and 2.
that we must be enemies and 3. that we can not learn or pickup key points to improve ourselves..

In the "West", we have much common ground with the Germans, Italians, and others, such as, possibly the Scots and Irish. Even in America, regional elements and possible future free nations such as the Texas, Confederacy and Alaska.

http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/

[ramana]

One way of looking at it is the West aka Western Europe since Reformation is on a trajectory to go back to paganism without idols. All the humanism they profess is really old time pagan values, but, since the Abrahamic immersion, they want to rid themselves of idols and gods.

What Soviet Commmunism did was to force march Tsarist Russia into the modern world. The angst of Orthodox Russians is instead of reverting to Orthodox Church as was expected with demise of SU, the Russians want to adopt the new Paganism of the West.


Every social engineering leaves it mark in unintended ways.

[rajsunder]

One way of looking at it is the West aka Western Europe since Reformation is on a trajectory to go back to paganism without idols. All the humanism they profess is really old time pagan values, but, since the Abrahamic immersion, they want to rid themselves of idols and gods.

What Soviet Commmunism did was to force march Tsarist Russia into the modern world. The angst of Orthodox Russians is instead of reverting to Orthodox Church as was expected with demise of SU, the Russians want to adopt the new Paganism of the West.


Every social engineering leaves it mark in unintended ways.

The praise should go to stalin for creating a industrialized USSR. heard on one of the documentaries on History channel that he made USSR into a industralized nation in 30 years to a level that which the European countries took about 150 years

[ramana]

Its not praise. Its to understand where they are coming from now. To praise or condemn is not my job. I am a seeker with an open mind till proven wrong.

[ramana]

Brishaspati and RayC, Over the top but both of you can relate to this.

In "Anand Math" the writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee tells the story in bits and pieces(vignettes) and not in a linear fashion. This in Literary Criticism theory is Modernist approach. What are you views?

[svinayak]

One way of looking at it is the West aka Western Europe since Reformation is on a trajectory to go back to paganism without idols. All the humanism they profess is really old time pagan values, but, since the Abrahamic immersion, they want to rid themselves of idols and gods.

What Soviet Commmunism did was to force march Tsarist Russia into the modern world. The angst of Orthodox Russians is instead of reverting to Orthodox Church as was expected with demise of SU, the Russians want to adopt the new Paganism of the West.


Every social engineering leaves it mark in unintended ways.

Protestant movement has taken the role of human rights movement and other values of eastern world. This is a direct result of colonialism for over three centuries.
Orthodox Christianity does not recognize the new Protestant and cannot identify with it.

[svinayak]

One way of looking at it is the West aka Western Europe since Reformation is on a trajectory to go back to paganism without idols. All the humanism they profess is really old time pagan values, but, since the Abrahamic immersion, they want to rid themselves of idols and gods.

German identity was created with discovery of sanskrit and development of philosophy based on the eastern text.
This new insight gave the Germans a new way to create an identity away from Hebrew and catholic Christian history.


Hitlers project was to create a new version of the NT and Germans would be important part of this history.

[shaardula]

i think loosely it is this: our attitude to gnyaana is more like a mathematicians attitude to mathematics. their approach to it is not. even if they constantly market and remarket themselves as scientific. something about it is black magic.

I assume that you are refering to the west. The western mind has to morph its mind to scientific thinking from its Christian roots. This is not permanent.

i am not sure i completely understand what your are saying. but if you are saying for all the pretensenses and projection of being scientific they are overwhelmingly guided by the one-book worldview, then i agree. there is nothing scientific about their working system. agents like Time and Newsweek etc., talk about all sorts of things in scientific terms, and say things scientists say this or that - without ever understanding what they are actually saying.

one of the major causes for this is the reductionist approach of the west to things like social interaction, psychology etc. They some how believe that by reducing it, these fields will yield to science. i have read some papers in these areas, but so far i found hardly any well posed problems, forget methdologies and solutions. its almost like they know that the blacksmith uses a hammer, and so they also take that hammer to everything that they come across.

[svinayak]

i am not sure i completely understand what your are saying. but if you are saying for all the pretensenses and projection of being scientific they are overwhelmingly guided by the one-book worldview, then i agree. there is nothing scientific about their working system. agents like Time and Newsweek etc., talk about all sorts of things in scientific terms, and say things scientists say this or that - without ever understanding what they are actually saying.

The church in America
By William Adams Brown
http://books.google.com/books?id=7EYaAA ... navlinks_s

Free download.
Gives a history of Scientific movement on Church in America.
They see a threat to their religion with the science. They have created a psuedo science to keep it from destroying their belief and belief system.

[brihaspati]

ramanaji,
Chatterjee's style is surprisingly modernist. His "Kamalakantar daftar", (from the desk of Kamalakanta) is a superb satirical commentary, but resembles more modern stream-of-consciousness style - like Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka, or Miller's Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn. Some say he was heavily influenced by Walter Scott, but "from the desk of Kamalakanta", and to a certain extent "Krishnacharitra" shows he was far ahead of his time.

[pandey]

paging all...

Prof. SN Balagangadhara talks to Dr. R Ganesh about indian approaches to problem solving. the discussion has many ends. but very engaging and provocative. not the type of things you hear these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQ2EkrXBy4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25AsxRRQvAQ


(ramana, part two has a discussion about the living traditions of avadhana in andhra, also a discussion on the contrast between TE, MA poetry to KA, TA poetry.)

In one of his Lectures he proposed that Indian society is without any religion and the word Hindu or Hinduism has been coined by Westerners (Muslims and Christians) to group the Indian behavior ( which they cannot understand, First because their Society makes them believe that Societies cant be without organized religions hence India have a religion.
They need to prove their own faith system or religion or god to be "right" to convert others , for this they have to prove that "other" is wrong and inorder to prove this they need to prove the existence of "other".
English as a Language is inadequate to express Indian cultural experience because it has been developed in a different society . it doesn’t have sufficient and appropriate words for Example Worship in Indian tradition is very different from Western Tradition as it serves totally different purpose .
Secularism is a Soft version of Christianity as it originated from a clash between Protestants and Catholics
Secularism starts with a belief and assumption that People have religions and all religious behaviors are equal (hence there has been and will be a clash between Indian world view and secular worldview .)
Secularism justify unethical religious behavior of Minorities on the ground that religions have to treated equally hence Polygamy in Muslims or soft Proselytisation in form of Minority educational institution has t be allowed.

[shaardula]

part 3 and 4 of Ganesh's interview. even better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUdrbAZJCEk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVQRYd3ArfE

R's assessment of what ails the study and practice of lit should have hit a raw nerve for B. B et al., wanted to test their seminal problem formulation - secularism's logical fallacies - with indian academicians. but the later were not interested in academic rigor, they ended up rejecting it because it was not what the "pamphlets" said. rofl.

in these parts discusses the myth of "brahminism" also.

also he correctly identifies the attitude of the vedas to their own authority & purpose. this is what distinguishes the vedas(or the approach of the vedas) from the rest of the pack.

[shaardula]

ps: turns out ganesh is a jingo.

kannada
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iNAk3h3rN0

talks about the manufactured memory of ashoka and the purging of vikramaditya.

[shaardula]

sorry folks again in kannada.

acharya, bhyrappa puts it best.

talking about the conflict between science and faith in the west and the contrasting approach in the east.

"yaakdandre, modalindaluve namage churche jignyaase"
since the earliest of times jignyaasa is our church.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3CMMpQewTg

[Paul]

I should point that it was this pointer on the starting point on the collaboration between the Ottoman sunni and the protestant movement that led to this thread in the first place.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/ ... eyman.html

Despite Suleyman's problems with the Safavids and Russians, he never ceased his involvement in European politics. He maintained his alliance with France, usually against Venice and the Holy Roman Empire, and he also allied the Ottoman Empire with dissident forces within the lands of his enemies. One notable example of such an alliance was Suleyman's outward support of Lutherans fighting the Pope in the Holy Roman Empire. Suleyman considered the Protestant rejection of icons and papal authority to be closer to Muslim belief than either Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, and his support of Protestantism was one of his key policies in Europe. By encouraging the disunity of Christianity, the Ottomans hoped to decrease the chances of Christian Europe uniting in a Crusade against the Muslim Ottomans. It has been suggested that Ottoman pressure played a decisive role in persuading the Habsburgs to grant several concessions to the Protestants. The Ottoman Empire was thus vital to maintaining the European balance of power in the 16th century.

I was looking for the origin of the sunni-anglo saxon alliance which has caused untold grief and sorrow to humankind. It is possible that the Brits learning offshore balancing sitting on the lap of the Ottoman sultan.

Google results

[svinayak]

http://www.fpri.org/ww/0105.199808.gres ... ewest.html

A Newsletter of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West
The Idea of the West

My reformulation of Western identity for the twenty-first century turns on three basic claims.

First, the West did not begin with the Greeks. In the standard story, the Western civ story, the Greeks invented liberty and philosophy and thus laid the foundation of all subsequent Western identity. If that is true, why did it take so long to get from Athenian democracy to modern America? Something must have happened to delay the evolution of the West. My answer is that what happened was the West itself, which had to evolve by its own logic before the Greek ideas of democracy and philosophical investigation could reappear to inspire and shape modern politics, education, and science.

Turning the Greeks into the first Westerners is to misunderstand both the Greeks and the West. The Greeks were not modern democrats, not just because they denied the vote to women and kept slaves, but because their idea of democracy was unlike ours in critical ways. Common to both ancient and modern democracy is the idea of the equal right of all citizens to speak out and to participate in government. But the Greeks differed in defining democracy not just as the right, but the obligation to participate. Also, in Greece, democracy meant direct rule by all citizens. The idea of representation through universal suffrage which is the basis of modern democracy did not even begin to be formulated until the seventeenth century.

Second, the formation of the West was a centuries-long process that began when the Roman Empire became Christian in the fourth century and ended when the three legacies of Greece, Christianity, and the Germanic societies of northern Europe formed a symbiosis— which I call the Old West— by around the year 1000. Two features of this symbiosis remain essential to a substantive Western identity but are completely overshadowed by the contemporary emphasis on democracy and free markets and other universalist principles. The first was geopolitical pluralism: the West has always been about dividing power, so that no single person or entity could become supreme. This was not done by planning and foresight, as in the American Constitution. It happened by accident, because the balance of power in Europe never allowed a permanent empire to arise. It then appeared in hindsight — and this is the second feature — that dividing power was a condition of liberty. Democracy began to emerge in Europe in places where rulers could not exercise total control. These early and partial forms of liberty gave people incentives to work, save, and invest without fearing expropriation. Over centuries, these niches of freedom produced a new synthesis, which I call the New West: the synthesis of political liberty, property rights, and economic development.

A critical point in this analysis is that the West did not become free and prosperous because people in Europe were just lucky. Rather, Europe and later America benefited from an initially unintended side effect of political competition, namely that societies where power was less than total were also societies where people had property rights and therefore invested rather than consumed, which was the beginning of sustained growth. Growth, in turn, spurred interest in liberty as one of its preconditions, thus launching a positive spiral from which all could ultimately benefit.

Third, the New West of democracy, capitalism, and the scientific method grew out of the Old Western symbiosis and cannot survive if it does not keep its umbilical connection to the past alive. The Old West included elements that we today are tempted to regard as anachronistic or dangerous to liberty— Christianity and the Germanic ethos, for example. One purpose of my book is to revive the 18th-century idea that the Germanic societies contributed an original model of social liberty to the Greek, Roman, and Christian inheritance, the liberty of free tribes in which decisions were jointly made and that only joint decisions were binding on all. This Germanic liberty joined with Christianity to produce what I call Christian ethnicity, the loyalty of people to religion, king, territory, and personal honor that shaped the Old West in each of its many national and regional variants.

Western pluralism was not just a source of freedom and prosperity. It was also a source of conflict, because each ruler always feared losing ground to others. Many historians have condemned nationalism as the great vice of the West. I am concerned rather to account for the passions of nationalism by rooting them in Christian ethnicity, which is itself a kind of paradox— the paradox of a universalist religion in the guise of national ideology, whether English, French, German, Russian, or American. You cannot separate economic growth and democratization from political competition and war in Western history. They are all aspects of the same thing. The difference in our time is that Western societies have finally rejected aggressive war as a means of policy. One may hope that this leaves the other aspects— prosperity and democracy— to flourish.

This symbiosis in Western history of liberty and conflict brings us back to the blood and passion of history. It was not always pleasant for its victims and would not win many friends in today’s American academy. It led to holy war in the Crusades and to the ethic of sacrifice that launched and prolonged many later wars. But it also produced the energy necessary for the societies of freedom to survive the challenge of despotism in the world wars and Cold War of this century that is now ending. Therefore we need to recover these old con

[Paul]

Portuguese traders in Japan also intermarried with the local Christian women in the 16th and 17th centuries. [35] When the Portuguese first arrived, the local Japanese people assumed that they were from Tenjiku ("Heavenly Abode"), the Japanese name for the Indian subcontinent (due to its importance as the birthplace of Buddhism), and that Christianity was a new "Indian faith". These mistaken assumptions were due to the Indian city of Goa being a central base for the Portuguese East India Company and also due to a significant portion of the crew on Portuguese ships being Indian Christians. [36]

This linkShows the extent of Indian influence before the western invasion of India. None of the western novels about western adventurers such as Shogun ever refer to this