Non-Western Worldview

[svinayak]

The Germans have translated the Indian texts and have imbibed the thought process in their own way.
One can see how they read the world view using this world view.

The concept of independency and life force is explored here

http://www.hschamberlain.net/arischewel ... dview.html

Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Aryan World-view


Because truth is layn beyond
the reach of the intellect,
we can't use words for it.
(M a h á b h â r a t a)

4

Translation from the German, based upon the 8th edition of
Arische Weltanschauung,
published by F. Bruckmann A.-G., Munich 1938
5

Dedicated to the indologist
Leopold von Schroeder
in admiration and grateful friendship



Index


The idea of humanism 11
Historical overview 14
Paul Deussen 27
The significance of Aryan thinking 33
Characteristics of Aryan thinking 36
Racial purity 37
Buddhism is un-Aryan 42
The thinking of an entire people 47
Organic thinking 51
A-logic thinking 55
The substance of Aryan thinking 59
The shape of Aryan thinking 69
Hellenes and Indo-Aryans 72
Thinking and religion 77
Epilogue 87
Bibliographic supplement 89

The above link is largely reflective of the mindset of various aryanists, like "Savitri Devi" (and Himmler would fit the pattern) who were interested in 'Hinduism' solely "because it must have been the aryan religion, belonging to their (earliest) aryan ancestors", not because of the truths in Hindu scriptures (which they could not recognise nor understand, it was alien to their mind which was so preoccupied with thoughts of racial superiority and could never see that HDharma speaks of elevation of character).
It shows how *they* projected their own ideas onto 'Hinduism' - it is *their* view of the religion. It is no Hindu Dharma of reality, no HDharma any of our kind ever knew.

That's why many racist Europeans - which would then include the nazi - believed Hindu Dharma is aryan (even today, Europeans whose beliefs are centred on IE, claim Mahabharata's Pandavas were Europeans - see Elst - here, look for the name "Peter Brooke" on this page).
From there, the rest of the same sort of nonsense then followed:
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/article...avitriDevi.html
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/article...sm/savitri.html
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/article...h/savitri2.html

For them, it was/is all about blood, about race - about genetics, and about the urheimat, etc. Those are what brings about their initial interest, what their admiration is based on. In their fantasies their ancestors were the originators of Hindu civilisation. Hindus actually need to take note that FOR EUROPE, IT IS MOST CERTAINLY ABOUT RELIGION, since they do regard that language, civilisation are intricately related to religion. (The same motivations among today's western "vedicists/vediks/whatever" - includes not just pseudo-scholars but some indologists).



That is why many a religious reconstructionist movement leading into the nazi-era (like the Thule Society) were racist: they all tended to be *aryan* reconstructionist religions on these lines. This sort of weirdness is there in several reconstructionist movements today. It is their initial conditioning that causes perversions everywhere, even after christianism is abandoned.

The racist indologists who were supposedly interested in Hindu Dharma, therefore never even knew the *Hindu* worldview, which is the ONLY view in which the Gita/all Hindu literature can be read and understood - the only view in which it exists and the only understanding in which its insights and intents are delivered.
Of course, their perverted views on Hindu Dharma says nothing about HDharma itself, but only of the racist motivations driving these motivated western people.

By their great perversion - they started off on the wrong foot itself - they had completely missed everything in the Hindu scriptures; literature which they could only "read" without understanding anything. (Same problem with IE Studies' west reading the Vedas. They will simply not get it. And among those of them who pursue the matter for other reasons, the Gita is dumped as later-day and the Vedas is claimed. But nothing else has changed. The same motivations drives their claims - via IE: *their* ancestors, *their* ancestral right.

[ramana]

X-posted...

ramanaji's suggestion on the Partition thread made me reread Blunts collection of essays published in 1882 on the "Future of Islam".

Revisiting after almost 10 years, I have a much wider perspective on Blunt. Blunt's intellectual motivation can now be traced to two different but possibly interconnected anxieties of the Anglo-Saxon.

I will start with the following postulates. First, that there was always a dichotomy between the Germanic tribal conception of civilization and the Roman/Mediterranean concept of civilization. The Germanic remained a pastoral, atavic/forest based, simplicity loving ideal, whereas the Romano-Mediterranean one remained an urban, complexity loving one. The result of this was a constant struggle by the Germanic against urban, sophistication and centralization at the hands of the urban powers. In the philosophical realm this manifested in a struggle against the Roman centralized Church, whose power lay in the urban centres.

When the Reformation started, we know that this coincided with the Renaissance - and both came after some significant historical events. First the fall of the Fatimid caliphate in Al Andalus dispersed a lot of Islamic scholarship which had copied and maintained classical knowledge suppressed by the Roman church, back into Europe. While Islam was being displaced at least formally from the west, in the east, the Byzantine's fell and another face of Islam advanced into Europe - the Ottomans.

From the Germanic viewpoint, the Ottomans within Islam represented the analogue of the Roman Church within Christianity. The common distrust and hatred of the urban philosophies of the Roman orthodoxy and the Ottoman Islamic orthodoxy, would lead to creation of a space in the point of view of the Germanic where they would sympathize with the Sunni/Wahabi/Arabic interpretation of Islam. This would explain the convergence of political sympathies within the Protestants and the Wahabis - a common perception of the urbanized "imperial" theocracy as corrupt, and deviants from the "simpler/purer/true" "path".

Once this process started, and geo-political considerations come into place, the paradoxical German imperial love for the Ottomans is not difficult to understand - as they would be worried at the diasporic Germanic "protestant"'s activities to arouse the Arabic and Wahabi strains.

I would be inclined to believe that this original trend in the diasporic Germanic still remains, and hence their continuous fascination with the Wahabi versions of Islam. A lot of the Anglo-Saxons may not find it wrong in fact to convert formally into Islam.

For the future, India has a lot of lessons to learn from this process. First, the "Aranyak" component of the Bharatyia civilizational formulations should not be completely displaced as that can accommodate those who would feel disconnected and out of place in the increasing complexity of the urban. This should be promoted so as the Abrahamic atavistic memes do not gain more destructive capacity in increasing numbers. On the other hand, civilizational alliances with other long-term urbanized cultures should be actively explored.

We should have a much more intensive cultural charm offensive and even philosophical explorations of commonalities with the Chinese and Japanese civilizations (not the CCP) for example all the while we prepare for PLA assault.

1) Somewhere once the English colonialism started to triumph the English/Anglo-Saxons started becoming new Rome.

2) Mohammed's Islam was an urbanising culture.

3) I had said in the UK thread that eventually Al Britainistan will come about for Anglo-Saxons will find it the only way to retain influence.

[ramana]

X-posted from Geo-political thread.....

The Judaic identity has been constructed and reconstructed many times by both those call themselves Jews as well as non-Jews. This was done for political and military aims. But we have to accept the historical connections of "Judaism" to a variety of European identities, and more imprtantly as a kind of key node between ME and Europe. Hence the tug of war over "Juadism" and the "Jews". Many concrete socio-economic conditions made the "Jews" what they became. But it is important to note, that such socio-economic conditions have also destroyed communities and identities - while it reshaped and strengthened the "Jewish" identity towards achieving intellectual and financial clout.

From the Indian viewpoint, where we see consistently, that Muslim majority countries are usually hostile to the non-Muslim aspect of Bharat, or at best neutral, we should not say or discuss things that are hostile to the current nation of Israel. By deconstructing Israel or its founding motivations, we may indulge in historical "purity", but strategically alienate the only friendly nation we have in the ME. There is a lot of lessons to be learnt about how to make crucial leadership choices and leadership decisions in the national interest from Israel and its founding fathers. If even a fraction of such determination could be shown by our own founding fathers, the nation today would be on a different footing.

Yes they probably had a lot of support from various quarters within the then dominant Anglo-Saxon global empire, each such quarter pursuing different objectives and saw opportunities in promoting the line of the WJC. But credit should be given to people like Ben Gurion or Golda Meier (who supported Gurion in that crucial meeting for declaration of foundation - while her children were at the front) who seized the opportunity provided and took decisions that were by no means assured of positive foreseeable outcomes.

Bolsheviks or otherwise, it is quite reasonable to see that any resurgent "Jewish" identity seeking to re-establish a homeland of their own, would search for and get involved in any political movement that has some potential in future political bargaining. I do not see anything wrong or condemnable in that, since there are no absolute values in the world that can judge all - given that there is no consensus about values. Especially if I see that there are identities opposed to mine, who will never give up trying to destroy me and my culture - I have the right to drop even my own stated principles of fairness and justice in dealing with my destroyer.

and

Pranav,

Not to worry, I'm not assuming that was what you said.

Its just that although the early Marxists and Bolsheviks were often Jewish, it can not be forgotten that they represented an isolated splinter of not only the Jewish community as a whole, and that they never led the Jewish community.

Its just that without the context of the diversity of Jewish responses to modernity in the West, it becomes easy to forget just how divided the Jewish community was. The secular Jew wasnt even regarded as Jewish anymore by traditional Jews.

There were many secular European Jews who were initially attracted to Marxism because it seemed like the best way option for peace, security and integration (particularly for Jews) by moving Europe (that's including Russia) beyond medieval religious and modern ethno-nationalist prejudices. They were often highly educated, but with few resources and from mdest backgrounds, struggling both against what they regarded as irrational Jewish traditions and cut off from their extended families, while simultaneously struggling with the prejudices of wider society and sometimes state. Unfortunately Marxism was soon infused with nationalism under Stalin with all of its old prejudices, and that dimmed the attraction of communism.

There were also many liberal Jews who rejected Marxism, prefering instead moderate nationalism, falling in the spectrum between social democrats and capitalists. Like the Marxists they embraced assimilation, but they weren't interested in class warfare, or the abolition of nation-states. These were the people who did their best to be good Germans, good Austrians, good Frenchmen, good Russians, etc. Some were secular, most followed Reform Judaism that looked a lot like Protestantism (not surprising since it came out of Germany). These were often the wealthiest Jews - people who had succeeded in business, in professional and public life and had acquired real status, and in some cases real envy. The Dreyfuss affair in France and the 1905 pogroms in Russia undermined the attraction, and the way Germany, France and Poland turned on their Jewish populations under the Nazis destroyed faith in national assimilation in continental Europe.

There were secular Jews, particularly in the Russian, and to a lesser extent the Austro-Hungarian Empires who gave up on Marxist revolution, gave up on national assimilation, and instead became Jewish nationalists. They often came from exactly the same backgrounds as the struggling lowe rmiddle class Jewish Marxists, but their leadership often came from secure, established liberals.

Then there were also many Jews who rejected the atheism of Marxism and Zionism, and had not moved to the big cities where comfortable middle/upper class assimilation seemed possible. They retained conservative religious practices and views - these were the actual Jewish community leaders for the most part.

They might be in the ghetto in cities, or out in the Jewish villages you found throughout Poland, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. These people were not much for political ideology, but rather the preservation of history, tradition and identity, mutual aid while making as decent a living as possible and surviving the disasters that had always periodically hit Jews since the beginning. Its these people who were the bulk of Jewish community, and whose survivors accepted Israel and America as the only safe places left to live.

The traditional Jewish community had always maintained a strong welfare network for the poor and the sick - it was one of the things that allowed Jews to survive in the many difficult times, and thrive after they passed.

Most secular and liberal Jews also valued that kind of mutual support and believed in a welfare state to support Jews and non-Jews alike, but that didn't make them proponents of Marxist class warfare, the export of revolution, enforced atheism, etc.

[svinayak]

Man vs. God
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... SecondNews

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.
[GOD_cov2] Nippon Television Network
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

[ramana]

Man vs. God
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... SecondNews

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.
[GOD_cov2] Nippon Television Network
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

Thats what Hindus figured out after a few centuries of Buddhist mileu. However they made him one of the avataras.

[Karna_A]

Man vs. God
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... SecondNews

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive.

The definition of God itself is largely misunderstood. Before the question of whether God exists or not, the question that needs to be answered is What is God? If the God definition itself is incorrect, than obviously the question of whether God exists or not it'll go against the logic. The philosophy that defines God in Eastern religions is very closely tied with Spinoza's God.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza

Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view (Weltanschauung). Einstein, in a telegram response, answered he believes in "Spinoza's God."[26] Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings

A Unified Field Theory or Theory of Everything may be as close as science gets to God and it's not defined yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Everything

[ramana]

When the Westerners came to India they were from very poor and bigotted countries. Shah Jehan's India was the wealthiest state of thosee times. they got trade concessions and parlyed that into political power. Along they way they learnt Sanskrit and got the Enlightenment bug. Here they combined the consequent scientific revloution with their monoply on the high seas to leapfrog their economic status. So much so that by the beginning of the 20th Century other civilizations felt unless they modernized they would be left behind in the race for advancement.

The path taken by different civilizations was different as the local circumustances were different. The Orthodox Russians tried violence to change the social order and failing that they used the defeat of the Tsarist Army in WWI to usher in Communism. What this did was to bring about the required decimation of old order. The way the Russians did was to make it Orthodoxy Communism and discarded it when it was no longer giving returns.

Mao and his band adopted their version of Communism to usher in the new order which again required horrofic deaths in the Great Leap Forward. The Germans and Italians adopted the other totalitarina systems and got their populations culled in World Wars. As you can see all these countries still retained their nationalism which was the core ideology.

In India the INC leaders and other freedom struggle leaders ushered in modernity thru the Constitution as they were afraid that left alone the nation would be left bhind. However they alos worked to kill and defang nationalism inside India. The dilemma for India is how to retain the nationalism in the Modern world.

[SK Mody]

Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study

Indian ancestry revealed

[svinayak]

http://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/20 ... ory-again/


A principle component analysis using a panel of 93 ancestry informative SNPs. Modified from :BMC Genetics 2009, Nassir et al. It shows how with these markers one can distinguish races such as African, Western Eurasian, Eastern Eurasian, Oceanian and Native American. But Indian are difficult to separate from Western Eurasians.

As of 2009 CE more than a decade of molecular studies has been completed on the Indian genomes. We shall briefly look at these findings to see if they can be reconciled with linguistic and archaeological data.

The genetic affinities of Indians as currently understood can be succinctly presented thusly:
1) The Indians as a whole form a rather distinctive group of humans that are well differentiated in genetic terms from Western (e.g. Europeans) as well as Eastern Eurasian peoples (e.g. Chinese, Japanese etc).
2) Yet, if we look at total ancestry based on the resultant signal from biparental markers we observe the Indians to be closer to Western Eurasian than to Eastern Eurasians.
3) However, if one looks at uni-parental markers we see the following pattern:
3.1- The Y-chromosomal affinities of Indians are greater to Western-Eurasian than Eastern Eurasians.
3.2- The Mitochondrial DNA affinities of Indians are greater to Eastern Europeans than Western Europeans.
4) Amongst Indians, irrespective of whether one looks at uniparental or biparental markers, the upper castes have greater affinity to Western Eurasians than to Eastern Eurasians. But this effect is most pronounced for Y-chromosomal data. Amongst Indians, highest affinity to Eastern Eurasians is seen only amongst tribals.

[ramana]

If you take the long view, the Russian nationalists adopted Communism and Russified it and force marched pre-feudal Russia into modernity at great cost and finally dumped it after collapse of Soviet Union. They have reverted to a Orthodox driven Russian nationalism.

In PRc we see a similar trend of adopting Western ideas to force march the pre-feudal soceity into modern times. Currently this modernity is leading to several strands of centrifugal tendencies- TIbet and Uigher nationalisms, divide between rural and urban etc, religious movements-Falun Gong and Christianity.

What will be the future of China if PRC reverts to a Buddhist state? Is this a reversal of history as West interprets it?

[svinayak]

Stephen Oppenheimer, a,
aSchool of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE, UK

Available online 26 July 2008.
Abstract

During the Late Pleistocene, anatomically modern humans (AMH) dispersed out of Africa across the continents. Their routes obeyed the limitations placed on any large terrestrial mammal dependent on daily drinking water, following certain climate-permissive corridors. AMH first spread north, with game, across the Sahara to the Levant during the Eemian interglacial (c.125 ka), but failed to continue to Europe, then occupied by Neanderthals. The savannah ecosystem in North Africa and the Middle East then dried up, and AMH vanished from the Levantine fossil record, being replaced there by Neanderthals. Later, AMH successfully left Africa as a single group by the southern route to India. The added ability to make short but deliberate open water crossings allowed them first to cross the mouth of the Red Sea from Eritrea, and subsequently Wallace's Line to reach the isolated Sahul continent at least by 48,000 years ago and possibly by 60–50,000 years ago. They only finally arrived in Europe from South Asia around 45–50,000 years ago, probably linked to climatic amelioration during OIS-3.
Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. Regional setting
3. Materials and methods used in review of genetic phylogeography
3.1. Phylogeography
3..2. Complete sequence data: sources, phylogeny and dating
4. Review of out of Africa models
4.1. How many AMH exits from Africa? The genetic evidence
4.1.1. Single exit models
4..1.2. Models with multiple exits: the Cambridge model
4.2. Quo vadis?
4.2.1. Southern rather than northern exit: genetic evidence
4.2.2. Climatic considerations: constraints and imperatives for an exit route
4.3. Dating migrations
4.3.1. Possible dates of exit
4.3.2. Delayed migration to West Eurasia
4.3.3. Dating arrival of AMH in India and Southeast Asia
4.3.4. Dating Pleistocene arrivals of humans in Sahul and near Oceania
5. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References

[ramana]

Two items

A map of Eurasia with India at center
http://www.mapshop.com/Raised_Relief/Co ... asiaRR.jpg

and
a x-post...

perceptive..

I don't have any problem with accepting the wogginess of R1b i.e its Asian origins. It is a young haplogroup judging from its spread of SNPs and developed near or the same locales as its confreres in Asia, which are more common in non Caucasoids. Humans may be made in God's image but essentially they are just stupid animals and they do what they do without much rhyme or reason. R1b ventured into Europe from Asia as Asia was already heavily occupied and full of large well defended populations. Europe was relatively unoccupied, heavily forested, had fertile soils and congenial climates. Who in their right mind would go to Siberia, India, the deserts of Araby or Iran? Think of Europe's history. How many invasions has it endured from the East? India had its famous Aryan invasion, and the later Muslim push. China its Mongolians, Huns, Manchus - mostly minor players. Europe experienced it all, even Jews and Gypsies. How many Jews and Gypsies went East? Hardly any, most got thoroughly assimilated. In Europe there are still Jews and Gypsies, despite the efforts of the Final Solution. Look at what is happening in Europe now with many Africans and Asians illegally migrating there.

In other words R1b carrying men did the same as the Etruscans, Phoenicians, Jews and Gypsies after them. Go West Young Men was their motto.

And the reality is Europe is a genetic sinkhole that attracts people from all over.

[Yayavar]

http://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/20 ... ory-again/

I've posted this before...but shows clearly, or at least one view of human migration with India as the primary migration point into Europe and rest of Asia. Y

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

[svinayak]

I've posted this before...but shows clearly, or at least one view of human migration with India as the primary migration point into Europe and rest of Asia. Y

Check this discussion. This is one of the best.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index ... 849&st=270


http://www.nature.com/jhg/journal/v54/n ... 082t3.html
http://img24.imageshack.us/i/21183012.jpg/

[SwamyG]

Parts of the video addresses the Indian way of thought, business, mythology etc. It contrasts it with Western.

[Jarita]

His arguments are not really new

[svinayak]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... c_ev=click

David Brooks: Asians place emphasis on context while Westerners place more emphasis on individuals. This seems like a gross generalization but it is robustly supported by hundreds and hundreds of studies. Richard Nisbett’s book, “The Geography of Thought” summarizes some of the evidence.

If you show Americans a fish tank, they’ll talk about the biggest fish in the tank. If you show Asians a tank they will make, on average, 60 percent more references to the context and the features of the scene. Western parents tend to emphasize nouns and categories when teaching their kids, Korean parents tend to emphasize verbs and relationships. If you show Americans a picture of a chicken, a cow and grass, they will lump the chicken and the cow, because they are both animals. Asians are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass. They have a relationship.

The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed.

Avoid giving too much credence to theories about how any group is particularly well adapted to anything.
Gail Collins: David, you may be the one who understands how the brain works but I am so far ahead of you on doom that you will never catch up. I was educated by nuns. My classroom had a map in which countries were only red (communist) or pink (leaning communist) or white (free — for now). The only white countries were the United States and Ireland.

[ramana]

The period after 1756 to 1775 is crucial years for Western Europe. The Seven Years war from 1756 to 1763 led to rise of Russia and Prussia. The peace treaty ended French ambitions and made the GB the biggest colonial power and also saw the rise of German states and consolidation of Russia. And the start of the American Revolution in 1774.

It is the events of this decade that dominated the next two centuries the world over.

[ramana]

X-posted from Global Economic Prespectives thread....

Hari, GD and Katare, I realised today that less developed economies have revolutions and wars to change their societies. Modern economies have massive recessions. The unfortunate have both.

I think I should patent this as it summarise three hundred years of world history in three lines.

If you start from French Revolution -> US Civil War-> First World War-> Tsarist Russian Revolution-> Great Depression -> World War II -> FSU Collapse-> Crash of 2008 the above maxim is true.

Look at the words from common people and not the leaders. How did they change before and after the event.

[ramana]

Another thought is can we apply Caroll Quigley's model of evolution of civilizations to the three religions that developed to modern age.

I mean if we take ancient Near East as the starting point we see a lot of core and periphery interactions going on in among the three religions at different times.
And the core and periphery changes with time so much so the ancient core appears to be a wasteland and uncivilzed!

[V_Raman]

In India the INC leaders and other freedom struggle leaders ushered in modernity thru the Constitution as they were afraid that left alone the nation would be left bhind. However they alos worked to kill and defang nationalism inside India. The dilemma for India is how to retain the nationalism in the Modern world.

if nationalism was fanned in post-independence india, it would have split. we are slowly getting ready for fanning of nationalism. i watched a tamil comedian vadivelu interview the other day. he mentioned how India is not looking for a fight and china/pak are always looking to picking a fight with us. he also mentioned that there is a limit for india's patience. if that guy can see india and its security, i think india is getting ready for fanning nationalism.

beware! if indics nationalize, they will bring down the world order as it exists.

[V_Raman]

And the core and periphery changes with time so much so the ancient core appears to be a wasteland and uncivilzed!

the only ancient core that has survived to the present over millenia is the indian civilizational core.

[gandharva]

A sentence in today's (Sunday, December 13) New York Times caught my eye.

"Belief systems in which the categories of Western religion are reproduced in
the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most
rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist."

URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weeki ... ading.html

Full context:

"Today The Times Magazine looks at ideas that made an impact this year. But in
The New Statesman, John Gray looks at influential ideas that faltered across the
decade now ending — from neoconservatism to liberal interventionism to the
neoliberal "Washington consensus" about debt-fueled free markets. And in them he
finds a common denominator."

It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a
single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past
decade. With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a
directional process whose end point — after many unfortunate detours — will be
the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves. At the end of the
decade, opinion formers in Britain, the United States and Continental Europe
still imagine that the normal pattern of historical development leads eventually
to an idealized version of Western society, just as Francis Fukuyama forecast 20
years ago.

But whereas this confidence-boosting notion was still genuinely believed a
decade ago, today it is a kind of comfort blanket against an unfamiliar world.
The reality, which is that Western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is
insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new
great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century —
neoliberalism just as much as Communism — are obsolete. Belief systems in which
the categories of Western religion are reproduced in the guise of
pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing
nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth
defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be
only one of several versions of tolerable modernity."

---

One can go to the New Statesman:
http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/ ... ld-western

It continues:

"For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of
meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells
them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development
that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance. Religion is resurgent in many
parts of the world, not least emerging powers such as Brazil and China, but for
the secular intelligentsia this is just an unfortunate lag, a temporary setback
in humanity's slow march to join them on the sunlit uplands of reason. The
hysterical stridency of evangelical atheism - one of the most characteristic
phenomena of the Noughties - is symptomatic of a pervasive cognitive dissonance.
Like everyone else, these intellectuals assert their beliefs all the more
adamantly when the only reason for holding them is a well-founded suspicion that
they are not true."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathe ... ssage/4963

[ramana]

X-posted...
This an EJ magazine but the article captures the role of Church of England in its body politic.

This is no exaggeration. “The Church of England has been the religious expression of [Britain’s] independent national identity which signaled the rise of Britain as a significant world power,” observed Wilson, a British liberal whose revisionist skew on history underpins his praise of Benedict’s assault on the Church of England. “It will formally bring to an end the idea of the Established Church, and of the monarchy as that Establishment’s symbol and head” (Oct. 24, 2009; emphasis mine throughout).

Wilson—despite his reveling in what he sees as an attack on the Church of England, the British monarchy and the institution at the heart of Britain’s “independent national identity”—recognizes the central and historic role of the Anglican Church in British history. Even revisionist liberals don’t deny this history; Britain’s existence as a sovereign state and global power is inextricably linked to the Anglican Church.

The Church at Britain’s Heart

It is generally known that the Church of England was born, with Henry VIII acting as its midwife, in the mid-16th century. Less widely known, however, is that it was conceived in the 5th century. “One of the reasons why the Reformation was successful in England,” writes British historian Paul Johnson, “was that there was absolutely nothing new about it. All its elements—anti-clericalism, anti-papalism, the exaltation of the Crown in spiritual matters, the envy of clerical property, even the yearning for doctrinal reform—were deeply rooted in the English past” (The Offshore Islanders).

Even from its conception, “British Christianity,” with its spirit of independence, played a central role in the establishment of Britain as an independent power distinct in many features from its Catholic neighbors on the Continent. Early British leaders, explains Johnson, wielded English Christianity as a force for legitimizing decisions, enforcing law and establishing the credibility of government. “The church became the principle instrument of civil government; the bishops were the king’s chief advisers, his chapel servants as well as spiritual ministers. The church codified the law, and put it in writing. Even before the church came, English society was developing a definite structure: But the church supplied the literate manpower and expertise to build a state machine” (ibid.).

The contributions of “British Christianity” went beyond the fundamental yet stoic establishment of English law and government. Britain’s distinct breed of Christianity infused Englishmen, on an emotional and religious level, with a profound, enduring sense of national identity. After the Act of Appeals in 1533 established the monarch as the titular head of the church, the sworn “defender of the faith,” English kings and queens enjoyed the loyalty of English men, women and children whose “Christian” devotion inspired a willingness to sacrifice blood, sweat and tears for “God, king and country.”

“The Anglican Communion is one of the last vestiges of the old British Empire,” observed the Wall Street Journal. “Faith followed trade and the flag, planting the Anglican Church in far-flung places such as Singapore, Tanzania, Canada and South Africa” (Oct. 22, 2009). It would be hard to overstate the impact of the Church of England on Britain’s history—not only its distinct religious and moral existence, but even the establishment and evolution of its laws and government, and Britain’s expansion as a global empire.

This is the core of Britain that is not understood by our educated elite who read Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith and hum "Abide with me"

The core of British system is Church based. And the Indian system shuns Hinduism!

LINK : Britain

[ramana]

Op-ed in Hindu:
LINK

Thanks to the grand national debate on French identity, a section of society is giving free rein to sentiments that diminish France and the ideals of fraternity and brotherhood it has striven to defend.

By launching “a grand nation-wide debate” on what constitutes French national identity last November, President Nicolas Sarkozy has opened up a veritable Pandora’s box of ill-feelings and hatred bordering on xenophobia.

The move was prompted by purely electoral calculations. Regional elections are to be held in March and the Socialists and their Left-wing allies control all but two of France’s regions. Mr. Sarkozy was hoping to widen his electoral base, wooing backers of the extreme Right, anti-immigrant National Front which, polls indicate, has recently rebounded after its last election defeat. By enlarging his constituency in the first round of the two-round vote, Mr. Sarkozy hopes to give his candidates a better chance of carrying off the second round run-off.

Ironically, by accident or design, the debate was launched with great fanfare on November 1, the 55th anniversary of the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence which kicked off on Toussaint Rouge (Red All Saints Day) in 1954 and lasted till 1962, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Algerian community in France saw this lack of sensitivity as being in poor taste.

France is home to Europe’s largest community of Muslims, an estimated five million, most of whom come from former French colonies and protectorates in Africa such as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali and Ivory Coast.

At the behest of Mr. Sarkozy, the debate was initiated by Eric Besson, Minister for Immigration, Integration and National Identity, a former Socialist who changed sides to become the President’s hatchet man in all matters concerning immigration and the crackdown on asylum-seekers and economic migrants. Most of his former Socialist colleagues understandably disapprove of Mr. Besson and even new fellow travellers from the President’s Right-wing UMP party look upon his gung-ho attitude to expulsions (including those of Afghan asylum-seekers whose country is currently under occupation by French soldiers as part of the international coalition) as truly distasteful.

The Ministry’s website has received several hundred thousand hits and many of the messages are shocking in their virulence. The debates are organised by prefects in public places such as town halls and schools, and have, more often than not, produced an outpouring of xenophobic hate and anti-Islamic sentiment. Over 80 per cent of those expressing themselves say they feel that the French national identity is “weakening” or being “diluted” by foreigners and foreign influences including “alien religions.”

The question whether or not to ban the burqa, now under discussion in Parliament, has added another ugly dimension of Islamophobia to the already strident debate. Undoubtedly, Europe is going through a phase of xenophobia as is evident from the outlawing of construction of minarets in Switzerland and the repeated attacks on foreigners in Spain, Italy, Denmark and other nations. France, it appears, is no different, although one has always hoped it would be the one exception, given its revolutionary past and strong republican values.

{So Modernism is on retreat!}

The debate has come in for such zealous criticism from academics, thinkers, social activists, and members of the Left-wing Opposition as well as a few members of the President’s own governing coalition, including the former Prime Ministers Alain Juppe and Dominique de Villepin, and caused such an upheaval that it was hoped Mr. Sarkozy would allow the matter to die a quiet, natural death. But the President, whose personal political ambition is total and unbounded, recently declared that he had every intention of continuing the debate.

Several groups of academics have signed petitions calling for the scrapping of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity, saying it brings back shameful memories of the persecution of Jews during various periods of French history, including the sordid episode of Dreyfus and the hounding of Jews during World War II. Other groups of academics and thinkers have published articles and pamphlets against what they see as the stigmatisation of foreigners and French citizens of non-white origin.

In an article, a group of researchers calling themselves The Collective For a Real Debate says: “No references are included [on the Ministry website] to those communities residing in French overseas departments or territories or in underprivileged suburban housing estates … Hidden behind this “debate on national identity” lies another one that has to do with France’s colonial history and its legacy, and the unspoken question is not “What is it to be French?” but rather: “Can one be black, Arab, Asian, or from a French overseas department or territory and be French?” … And we’re not just talking about any immigrant here; the most “coloured,” the “inheritors” of colonies, the most fervent advocates of “ethnic factionalism,” and those who refuse to assimilate. In other words, “those who don’t love France,” who are heard booing the national anthem or who demonstrate in the streets when Algeria qualifies for the World Cup, cause havoc in the suburbs, destroy the economy in “our” exotic overseas paradises, and seek to diversify the “ethnic” and religious profile of the republic. The same people who are weakening “our” soul, our “essence” and who force their women to wear the burqa…

“Ignoring, worse, even stigmatising these components of French society means that the debate on identity is flawed from the outset. Rather than advancing thinking, Eric Besson’s initiative offers an opportunity to steal the thunder from a shaky extreme right on the eve of a strategic election, at the midway point of the President’s term in office …”

Historian and political scientist Patrick Weil, author of the award-winning study France And Her Foreigners, is an authority on questions of immigration and identity, and has served on the commission that recommended a ban on the “ostentatious” wearing of religious symbols in state schools. He is a signatory to a petition that calls for the dismantling of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity. Signed by several prominent public personalities, the petition states: “It is time to publicly take a stand on this nationalistic grabbing of the idea of the nation, of our universal ideals which are the foundation of our republic.” Posted on the web on January 7, it has already attracted over 25,000 signatures and won the backing of leftist and centrist parties.

Mr. Weil, who is speaking on national identity at a seminar in New Delhi today told The Hindu in an exclusive interview: “This debate was a presidential initiative. By nature the question of identity is a complex issue anywhere and immediately becomes controversial. Why did the government and the President of France launch that debate? The main reason is clearly linked to immigration with an implicit prejudice that French citizens whose roots are in Africa or in North Africa, whose parents, grandparents have come from these foreign countries, might represent and I quote “a problem because they don’t adapt very well.” It is a way of marginalising the minorities and the government’s calculation is that by stigmatising the minorities it will get the majority vote. This is a manufactured debate in order to shift the focus from questions such as unemployment, taxes, the economic crisis or inequality.”

National identity should never be the business of governments, Mr. Weil said. “It can be a topic of academic research, of discussion in civil society. It is not a matter for governments because a nation’s identity is a social and historical construct that cannot be defined by law or decree.”

Most of the so-called “foreigners” (read ‘coloured’ and Muslim) are, in fact, second or third generation French citizens, who have been relegated to the margins of society. Their marginalisation and ghettoisation in underprivileged semi-urban housing estates often lead them to crime, gang warfare, social failure and, more recently, religious extremism, especially Islamic fundamentalism. Statistics show an over-representation of these populations in the country’s prisons. They show unemployment rates that are three times the national average.

{Similar problem in India. The question is relevant to India too. I think we are at the cusp of the post Westpahlain state.}

“The majority of the French “issued from immigration” [as the rather distasteful term goes] are, in effect, French in the sense they have a French nationality. So if these French persons are in fact French, why pose the question of French identity? It presupposes that there is something called “Frenchness” that lies in certain predetermined behaviour patterns, mores (dress, food, religion, culture) and customs and that a person can claim to be French only if he has submitted to these cultural dictates,” explains philosopher Constance Beth.

President Sarkozy’s grand national debate has given the genie the freedom to come out of the bottle. His narrow political ambitions have unleashed long bottled feelings of insecurity and hatred. And a certain section of society, with the highest political unction, is giving free rein to sentiments and acts that diminish France and the universal ideals of fraternity and brotherhood it has striven to defend.

There will be repercussions of the debate world wide. Recall that the French and English identity was created during the 100 year war between the two. And this led to the creation of modern Europe. Added to this is the effect of EU formation which in a sense is the culmination of earlier efforts of unification in various powers over the centuries: Roman conquest, Charlemagne, Charles the Fifth, Napoleon, Hitler, and now EU.

[svinayak]

Op-ed in Hindu:
LINK


{Similar problem in India. The question is relevant to India too. I think we are at the cusp of the post Westpahlain state.}

It presupposes that there is something called “Frenchness” that lies in certain predetermined behaviour patterns, mores (dress, food, religion, culture) and customs and that a person can claim to be French only if he has submitted to these cultural dictates,” explains philosopher Constance Beth.

There will be repercussions of the debate world wide. Recall that the French and English identity was created during the 100 year war between the two. And this led to the creation of modern Europe. Added to this is the effect of EU formation which in a sense is the culmination of earlier efforts of unification in various powers over the centuries: Roman conquest, Charlemagne, Charles the Fifth, Napoleon, Hitler, and now EU.

In French and in western countries it is about race and also cultural values.
But in India it is the colonization of the mind and the culture for the last 200 years which is still inside the country. Roadblocks are being put when decolonization is being done.

[brihaspati]

Don't the academics realize the horrible paradox they are themselves creating? If identity is not the business of the government, which in turn is the supertsrructure of the nation, what is the nation based on - if not on identity? If there is no distinctions in identity from the Germans or the British from the French - what is the justification of retaining any separate French nation?

In a way, what Sarcozy has done in his uniquely brusque manner, is a reaction to the impossible stress on any government specifically created by academics who deny and destroy the formal role of pre-existing identities. But those very same identities were the basis on which the nation was created. In running the business of the nation, the government comes to face the myriad effects and expressions of that identity and has to deal with it. Because it is part of a wider society-wide culture, the national identity does not have to be spelled out formally - but can be relied upon to guide social behaviour and reactions of relevance to the state. Cultural aspects are so complex and so intricate that it is practically infeasible to give them the form of a law-book/constitution. When academics destroy or deny or jeopardize that identity, they do not realize that it will be impossible for them to recreate that identity or replace it with something new.

What they leave in their magnificient obsession is a trail of ideological and cultural destruction - with the state paralyzed and in a limbo. The state can no longer rely on the unspoken, unwritten assurances of behaviours and reactions guaranteed by a commonly recognized culture as guiding the reactions of its citizens.

Sarcozy may be playing "enfant terrible" - but he is gripping the bull by its horns. He may fail and get badly mauled as a result, but the bull will no longer remain sacrosanct.

[ramana]

Those academics are thinking beyond borders. End of Cold War and War on Terror are creating new fractures to old ideas.

[ramana]

Two x-posts from Nukkad!

Didn't know where else to post.

Interesting article from livemint.

http://www.livemint.com/2010/01/3121281 ... inity.html

Posted: Sun, Jan 31 2010. 9:28 PM IST

Economy and Politics

Decoding the Hindu trinity
In Hindu mythology, there are three worlds, three goddesses and three gods
Devdutt Pattanaik


In Hindu mythology, there are three worlds, three goddesses and three gods.

The three gods are Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, who create, sustain and destroy, respectively. What is most baffling about this triad is that the sustainer and destroyer are worshipped, never the creator.

The root of this perplexity lies in a template that spellbinds the modern mind. It is the Western template, informed greatly by the Bible, where god is the creator, making the devil the destroyer. To understand the Hindu trinity, one needs to break free from this Western template.

and

Very interesting article, published in a Paki newspaper of all places:
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=221779

In 480 BC, Persia's emperor Xerxes attacked and defeated Greece. He bridged the Hellespont, the slim neck between Europe and Asia now called the Dardanelles, and marched his army of Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians and Indians across to Macedonia and then south into Greece. Most Greek states on his path surrendered to him. Sparta lost one skirmish against his army and then refused to fight. The people of Athens abandoned their city to Xerxes and fled to an island in the south called Salamis.

Xerxes had invaded in anger, after Athens interfered militarily in one of his colonies on the west coast of Turkey. Reaching Athens, he burnt all of it down, including the Acropolis. Then, realising that the Athenians would not defend their state, took his army back to Asia.

We know all this because it was recorded by a Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born a few years before the invasion. It's a simple and conclusive story. But over the centuries, one part of the invasion, that skirmish with the Spartans, has been used by Europeans to tell a different story. This is the story of freedom-loving individuals (Europeans) defending themselves against slavish barbarians (Asians). And this brave stand of the Spartans, according to the movie '300' and a recent BBC Radio 4 programme called 'In Our Time', "saved civilisation".

It is a bold claim to make, because it assumes that civilisation is entirely European and there was no civilisation on the Persian side. It is also a factually untrue claim on two counts. The first that the skirmish, the battle of Thermopylae, was fought between 300 Spartans and 5.2 million Persians. The second that Xerxes lost the war.

Xerxes is Greek for the emperor's Old Persian name, which was Kshayarsa, from the same root as Sanskrit Kshatriya and the modern caste name Khatri.

I think similar stuff has been successfully pulled off by the Euros in:
1> Claiming Democracy and equality to be products of western civilization
2> Denying credit to Indian and other non-European accomplishments in math and astronomy
3>Painting Genghis Khan as some kind of vicious, retarded, barbarian rather than the ruler of an empire larger than Rome, and skilled military tactician. Genghis Khan was not even close to being as barbaric as most Europeans.

[SwamyG]

^^^^
In the first article by Dev he writes the following:

Lakshmi matters, because she is wealth, health and fortune. She is critical to our survival. But survival alone is not motivation enough. Besides “L” we seek Durga, emotional gratification. We yearn for significance; we yearn to feel good about ourselves, we want to believe we matter. That is why we are not content acquiring and securing food, clothing and shelter. We want to feel important in the social order of things, in our family, among friends and peers. Hence, the desire to enhance our careers, increase our influence in society and expand our business empires.

The parts I italicized is listed by Dale Carnegie his book "How to influence people and make friends" as one of the fundamental things humans desire. Was it @ BRF or IF where I saw a link to an article that discussed Maslow's theory drawing inspiration from Indic Chakra concepts (Kundalini)?

[shaardula]

Don't the academics realize the horrible paradox they are themselves creating? ...

for me what is troubling is the way these guy make people problematic, without trying address the issues that make people air incovenient expressions in the first place. #1. they theorize. #2. use that to make people in their eyes. #3 when people donot conform, not in defiance, but as a matter of natural outcome, they hold the people as problematic without ever trying to go back to their theories. it somehow never occurs that theories exist bcoz of how people live, people dont live according to theories.

How Free Are We?
Yes, the rise of Hindu nationalism is indeed a major threat to intellectual freedom in the study of India, but it's also time to confront a climate of implicit censorship that leads to its own pathology
Jakob De Roover
http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264014

According to Tripathi, the rise of Hindu nationalism is indeed the major threat to intellectual freedom in the study of India. In his essay, all Indians concerned about the representation of India and its traditions come across as bigots and prudes. The goondas who burned M.F. Husain’s paintings and ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute are presented as the extremist fringe of a ‘long arm of fundamentalism’ that also embraces NRI professionals and Western Hindu sympathisers. On the other side, Tripathi places historians like Romila Thapar and religion scholars like Wendy Doniger, who (so he claims) go as far as ‘the facts’ take them and are attacked for doing so (75-87). These scholars are presented as spirited fighters ‘arguing for academic freedom and the spirit of open inquiry in India’ (86). This way of presenting things is flawed. Like most journalists, Tripathi ignores another threat to intellectual freedom in the study of India—one that may be less manifest, but is all the more insidious.

A climate of implicit censorship has long dominated this field. Not quite as spectacular as the rise of ‘Hindu’ censorship, this is not the stuff of juicy journalism. But this kind of censoring is as harmful: it also moulds people’s minds in particular ways; it constrains their speech; it compels them to show compliance to certain dogmas in their writings; and, for the unlucky few, it may even end their careers. The difficulty is to identify the modus operandi of this form of censorship. Much like racism, it is only in certain blatant cases that one can say with certainty that it has occurred. Nonetheless, we have to try and circumscribe this obstacle standing in the way of a much-needed rejuvenation of the study of India. What follows are some impressions of the situation in contemporary Europe, India and the USA. Sometimes these may seem caricatures, but caricature is required to make the implicit explicit.

Historically, the situation in India has grown from much the same set of equations. The colonial state nourished an intellectual class that was expected to spell out and justify its 'civilising mission'. The intelligentsia had to show how western political theory had laid down the way forward for India and how the state was the guide on this road. It sought to demonstrate that Indian history and society—and ‘Hindu religion’ in particular—embodied the negation of western liberal norms: inequality, irrationality, tyranny (at a later stage, patriarchy was added). The postcolonial state inherited the institutional structures and conceptual framework of its colonial predecessor and also its tendency to treat the human sciences as instruments of the state’s project to reform society. Crudely put, academics in these disciplines could play two roles: ideologues were to show the significance of some western political theory to India and characterise Indian history and society in such a way that the implementation of this political theory became the only option; fact-gatherers had to collect the data related to some problem for the state’s project of reform.

Over the years, the fashionable theories shifted from liberalism to Marxism and back again. Generally, the adherents of this approach to Indian society called themselves ‘secularists’ and shared one central attitude: they were allergic to ‘Hinduism’. In the first five decades following Independence, these secularists dominated the Indian universities and established an intellectual and institutional hegemony. They wrote the textbooks and dominated the UGC, ICSSR or ICHR. By the 1980s, when orthodox Marxism had worn out in most places, the hegemony was so entrenched that it allowed a few universities and research institutes in Delhi and Calcutta to perform a role very similar to that of the colonial master. They imported the latest ‘radical’ fashions from Paris and New York to couch an old story in the newest jargon: they used Foucault’s ‘discourse’ and ‘capillary power’ or Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ to repeat that the Indian culture promoted inequality, patriarchy and moral bankruptcy. Social scientists in the hinterland were expected to imitate the secularists from the metropolis. If they did well, they could end up in JNU or perhaps even be invited to the West. This hegemony of the secularists reproduced itself through different forms of implicit censorship: it determined what was published, where the funding went, and who got appointed.

At the same time, there was a growing sense of alienation between these intellectual classes and substantial layers of Indian society. The rise of Hindutva produced a backlash against the academic allergy to Hinduism. When the BJP came to power in the late 1990s, Hindu nationalism tried to displace secularism by attempting to take over the institutional hegemony and modes of censorship that the secularists had created. Now, Hindu nationalists took it upon themselves to write the textbooks and control the universities and the relevant government bodies. However, these people had neither the education nor the sophistication to do so in the (relatively) subtle ways of the secularists. The crudeness led to outcries in India and the West about ‘rewriting history’, ‘the end of academic freedom’ and ‘the return of censorship’. The message to the Hindu nationalists must be clear: learn from the secularists how to practice the art of censorship in more implicit and subtle ways. Whatever the future may bring, the humanities in India have now been hijacked by this struggle between secularism and Hindutva.

[ramana]

X-posted by prad....

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:d6A ... clnk&gl=us

from stratfor:

Turkey's Challenge

TWO EVENTS OCCURRED ON THURSDAY that involved Turkey. In the first, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs forwarded a resolution to the House floor for full debate, which called for the condemning of Turkish actions in what many Armenians refer to as the 1915 genocide. The response from the Turkish Foreign Ministry was vitriolic, complete with an ambassadorial recall and threats to downgrade Turkish-American relations at a time when the Americans sorely need Turkish help in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the second development, which preceded the events on Capitol Hill by several hours, the Turkish government announced it would host its own version of the World Economic Forum (WEF) this October in Istanbul. The WEF gathers several hundred business and political leaders every year to discuss pressing global issues in Davos, Switzerland. Invited are all of the leaders from the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Arab world.

Here at STRATFOR these developments generated a bit of a “hmmm.” It is not that we are strident followers of the discussions in Congress (much less at Davos), or that we are blindly impressed or appalled by anything Turkey does. However, we are students of history, and seeing Turkey reaching for the position of a regional opinion leader at the same time it has an almost allergic reaction to criticism is something that takes us back a few hundred years to another era.

Much of Turkey’s rich history is bracketed within the period known as the Ottoman Empire — to date one of the largest and most successful empires in human history. But what truly set the Ottomans apart from the rest of history’s governments was not the size or wealth of the territory it controlled, but the way the Turks controlled it. We have to dive into a bit of a geography lesson to explain that.

The core territory of the Ottoman Empire of the past — as well as the Turkey of today — is a crescent of land on the northwest shore of the Anatolian peninsula, including all of the lands that touch the Sea of Marmara. In many ways it is a mini-Mediterranean. It is rich in fertile land, has a maritime culture and wealth that comes from trade. It is a natural birthplace for a powerful nation, and in time it became the seat of an empire.

But the lands to its east — what is currently eastern Turkey — are not so useful. The further east one travels, the drier and less economically useful the Anatolian peninsula becomes. So in the early years of the Ottoman expansion, the Turks pushed not east into Asia, but north into the Balkans — moving up the rich Danube valley into the fertile Plains of Hungary before being stopped by a coalition of European forces at Vienna.

This expansion left the Turks in a bit of a quandary. The size of their conquered territories was now larger than their home territories. The wealth of their conquered territories was potentially larger than that of their home territories. The population of their conquered territories was comprised of different nationalities and religions, and combined was larger than that of their home territories. The Turks very quickly came to the uncomfortable realization that they not only needed their conquered peoples to make their empire functional, but that they needed those conquered peoples to be willing participants in the empire. The Ottomans may have started out as Middle Eastern, but their early successes made them European.

This realization shaped imperial policy in a great many ways. One was the development of a Millet system of city organization where the Turks only control a portion of the city, leaving the rest of the population to live among, and police, their own. One was the establishment of the Janissary corps, an elite military force that reported directly to the sultan, but was stocked exclusively with non-Turks. Another was the simple fact that the chief vizier, the second most powerful man in the empire, was almost always not a Turk. And it was all held together by a governing concept the Turks called suzerainty: regional governments would pay taxes to the center and defer to Istanbul on all issues of foreign and military policy, but would control the bulk of their own local affairs. By the standards of the Western world of the 21st century, the system was imperial and intrusive, but by the standards of 16th century European barbarity, it was as exotic as it was enlightened.

But things change — particularly when borders shift. During two centuries of retreat following twin defeats at the gates of Vienna, the empire’s northern border crept ever further south. The demographic balance of Turks to non-Turks reverted to the Turks’ favor. The need for a multinational government system lessened, and by the Ottoman Empire’s dying days, the last threads of multinationalism were being ripped out.

But the Turks were not alone in what would soon come to be known as the Turkish Republic. There were also substantial populations of Armenians and Kurds. But unlike the Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians who dwelt in the fertile, economically valuable lands of Southeastern Europe — and whose cooperation the Turks needed to sustain a viable empire — the Armenians and Kurds called the steep, desiccated, low-fertility valleys of eastern Anatolia home. These lands held little value, and so the Turks had scarce need of its inhabitants. The Turks felt these lands held negligible promise, and that the need for an egalitarian governing system had passed: one result was 1915.

In our minds, today’s twin events highlight the challenge that Turkey faces. After more than 90 years of being in a geopolitical coma, the Turks are on the move again, and are deciding what sort of power they hope to become. Within that debate are two choices.

The first would herald a “Great Turkey” rooted in the founding of the Turkish Republic that celebrates its Turkish-ness. This is a very comfortable vision, and one that does not challenge any of the tenets that modern Turks hold dear. But it is also a vision with severe limitations. There are very few Turks living beyond the borders of modern Turkey, and even Turkey’s ethnic cousins in Central Asia and Azerbaijan are extremely unlikely to join any such entity. This vision would always rail at any challenge to its image. This is the Turkey that objects so strenuously whenever the 1915 topic is broached.

The second would herald a “Greater Turkey,” a multinational federation in which the Turks are the first-among-equals, but in which they are hardly alone. It would resurrect the concept of Turkey as primarily a European, not Middle Eastern, power. In this more pluralist system, Turkey’s current borders would not be the end, but the beginning. It is this version of Turkey that could truly — again — become not simply a regional, but a global power. And it is this Turkey that calls all interested, perhaps even the Armenians, to Istanbul in October to honestly and openly see what they think of the world.

Turkey hosting Central Asians, Arabs, Balkans, Caucasus all under one roof in an economic summit......this is a big news.

[Johann]

X-posted...

This is the core of Britain that is not understood by our educated elite who read Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith and hum "Abide with me"

The core of British system is Church based. And the Indian system shuns Hinduism!

LINK : Britain

The Church of England lost relevance as the institution that brought people together from the village to the national level once people stopped attending church in the mid 1960s.

Today the British public's relationship with the CofE is not unlike many middle and upper class Hindus relationship with churches in India - happy to take advantage of services like health-care and education when its available, vaguely respectful of it as a religious tradition, but not entirely comfortable with many specific things about the religion, or its history, and certainly not believers in its dogma.

Christianity isn't much more than a vague sense of identity - certainly for most people what football club you cheer for, or what sort of circles you socialise with are much more important. Churches just make nice settings for weddings and funerals.

[Jarita]

^^^ Johann,
You might want to read and listen to Balagangadhara to understand what is meant by a church based structure. This is not merely about people attending church, it is about the super structure of society - notions o fgood and bad, structure of government, concentration of weath, world view towards issues e.g., environment etc. I could go on and on but you probably get it.

Even so called liberal notions are structured in the context of this church worldview. They are the "other" but the "other" is essentially defined in context of the church worldview.

The worldviews and frameworks in India, Africa and South America have been replaced by exactly the construct described above. At a very gross level church sharia (the whole system of society). This is why Islamists want Sharia in western nations. Some might call it anti modern but in reality they are resisting the Church Sharia.

In India we essentially have church sharia. Our entire system and worldview is based on that i.e., notions of good and bad

[svinayak]

Jarita, There are more details here. Aryan Invasion Theory is a Church world view. Right now it is being super imposed with majority really rejecting it.

[nachiket]

In 480 BC, Persia's emperor Xerxes attacked and defeated Greece. He bridged the Hellespont, the slim neck between Europe and Asia now called the Dardanelles, and marched his army of Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians and Indians across to Macedonia and then south into Greece. Most Greek states on his path surrendered to him. Sparta lost one skirmish against his army and then refused to fight. The people of Athens abandoned their city to Xerxes and fled to an island in the south called Salamis.

Xerxes had invaded in anger, after Athens interfered militarily in one of his colonies on the west coast of Turkey. Reaching Athens, he burnt all of it down, including the Acropolis. Then, realising that the Athenians would not defend their state, took his army back to Asia.

Um, I think the article is wrong in its rendering of history. A quick look at wiki pages for the years 480 B.C and 479 B.C reveals this.

I'm just posting the relevant parts.

May—King Xerxes I of Persia marches from Sardis and onto Thrace and Macedonia.
The Greek congress decides to send a force of 10,000 Greeks, including hoplites and cavalry, to the Vale of Tempe, through which they believe the Persian army will pass. The force includes Lacedaemonians led by Euanetos and Athenians under Themistocles. Warned by Alexander I of Macedon that the vale can be bypassed elsewhere and that the army of Xerxes is overwhelming, the Greeks decide not to try to hold there and vacate the vale.
August 11—The Battle of Thermopylae ends in victory for the Persians under Xerxes. His army engulfs a force of 300 Spartans and 700 Thespiae under the Spartan King, Leonidas I. The Greeks under Leonidas resist the advance through Thermopylae of Xerxes' vast army. For two days Leonidas and his troops withstand the Persian attacks; he then orders most of his troops to retreat, and he and his 300-member royal guard fight to the last man.

The battle of Thermopylae wasn't a skirmish by any standards. For one thing it was fought for 2 days where a a much smaller force held of a much bigger army. (It wasn't 300 vs a million like in the movie but the difference was great nevertheless.

August—The Persians achieve a naval victory over the Greeks in an engagement fought near Artemisium, a promontory on the north coast of Euboea. The Greek fleet holds its own against the Persians in three days of fighting but withdraws southward when news comes of the defeat at Thermopylae.
Breaking through the pass at Thermopylae from Macedonia into Greece, the Persians occupy Attica.
September 21—The Persians sack Athens, whose citizens flee to Salamis and then Peloponnesus.

September 28—The Battle of Salamis brings victory to the Greeks, whose Athenian general Themistocles lures the Persians into the Bay of Salamis, between the Athenian port-city of Piraeus and the island of Salamis. The Greek triremes then attack furiously, ramming or sinking many Persian vessels and boarding others. The Greeks sink about 200 Persian vessels while losing only about 40 of their own. The rest of the Persian fleet is scattered, and as a result Xerxes has to postpone his planned land offensives for a year, a delay that gives the Greek city-states time to unite against him.
An eclipse of the sun discourages the Greek army from following up the victory of Salamis. Xerxes returns to Persia leaving behind an army under Mardonius, which winters in Thessaly.

Now this is the most important part. The author from the Paki newspaper states that the athenians refused to fight and Xerxes went back because of this. He conveniently fails to mention the Battle of Plataea and Battle of Mycale.

The Persian commander Mardonius, now based in Thessaly, wins support from Argus and western Arcadia. He tries to win over Athens but fails.
{So the Athenians did try to defend themselves. They eventually failed however.}
Mardonius attacks Athens once more and the Athenians are forced to retreat, whereupon he razes the city. The Spartans march north to support Athens against the Persians.
27 August—The Battle of Plataea in Boeotia ends the Persian invasions of Greece as the Persian general Mardonius is routed by the Greeks under Pausanias, nephew of the former Spartan King, Leonidas I. The Athenian contingent is led by the repatriated Aristides. Mardonius is killed in the battle and the Greeks capture enormous amounts of booty. Thebes is captured shortly thereafter and the Theban collaborators executed by Pausanias.
27 August—Meanwhile at sea, the Persians are defeated by a Greek fleet headed by Leotychidas of Sparta and Xanthippus of Athens in the Battle of Mycale, off the coast of Lydia in Asia Minor.

[ramana]

X-post...

Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony: The World Order since 1500, by Jeremy Black

In Great Powers and the Quest for Hegemony, Jeremy Black, prolific student of grand strategy and war, takes a critical look at Paul Kennedy's 1988 classic, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Opening by noting that Kennedy's book not only manifests a rather extreme "Eurocentrism," but has a very pronounced Anglo-American bias, and a strong tendency toward a Mahanian and technocratic view of the nature of great power status, Black remind us that that beyond Kennedy?s Western ?universe,? several states attained and maintained great power status for protracted periods, such as China and the Ottoman Empire into the early nineteenth century, as well Safavid Persia and Mughal India.

He then goes on to review Kennedy's characteristics of Great Powers, comparing the Euro-American states with these empies. In the process, he critiques what is perhaps Kennedy's most cited concept, that "over reach" is the principal cause of the collapse of great powers, observing that, for example, during the French Wars Britain was arguably as "over reached" as any great power in history.

A valuable book for anyone interested in the rise and fall of the great powers.

The key to understand is the empires of non-normatized peolpe like the Hindus and ancient Chinese are not colonial empires of resource extraction. The quest for hegemony is a key ingredient in all normatized Empires whether they are Enlightened or not.

[Klaus]

Posting from the blog of a certain SDRE yum-bee-yaa

Of all the things I have pondered over death was never one of them, now I wonder why it wasn’t. Death is the most certain part of your life.

Life is adulterous harlot who only has a brief affair with you, death is your true love, finally you sleep in her inviting arms.

Do you think your life would have been better if you knew when were you going to die? Or you prefer the ignorance of not knowing? What if I knew I was dying in a week? That would have been better for me, I would have ran to every loved one and told them how much I loved them, did all the things I wished to do and so on. But what if I knew I was going to die in 5 years? I would have quit my MBA. Never would have taken a job, never marry, never do anything of permanence. The proverbial life on rent. Would I like that, certainly not. In this case I think ignorance is bliss.

The brevity of life is I think the whole essence of it, how much people love their lives and much mankind values life as a whole is amazing. I think that people knowing that this life wouldn’t be with them for long is the fact that they value it so much. Well, at least most people do. Some people go ahead and take their own. It is difficult for me understand why suicides are so frowned over in this world. It is supposed to be a coward’s way, who quit and took the easy way out. But isn’t our life all about taking the easy way out? And people are anyways inherently selfish. So why condemn suicide? Isn’t enduring a punishing life a much worse fate than death itself? Death is a release, it is not a punishment. When you are gone the things you did, things that you wanted to do, and things that others wished you would are not going to matter anyways.

I think the question was brilliantly pondered over by Shakespeare in ‘Hamlet’

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,
'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd.
To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”

There is no afterlife. No heaven or hell, nothing to be accounted for after you are gone. What we have is right here and now.

But still, we the people, dread death and disapprove of suicide.

Some people argue about their fear of death that they are leaving behind their loved ones who would be devastated by their death. Yes they will be, but you will no longer be around to feel their pain. None of it will matter anymore, none of anything will matter. I am sure they are children being murdered and people suffering through imaginable pain the very time you are reading this. But you do not know about it, and that makes it easy for you. So will be the pain of the people around you when you are dead. You won’t feel it, ever.

Moreover, suicide is illegal and punishable by law. People scream about liberty and freedom to live their lives as they see fit. What about the liberty to end it? I think making suicide punishable is the most ridiculous thing ever. It's like fining someone who did the mistake of being penniless. For me it only means one thing, that the society eggs you that if you attempt suicide, you better finish the job, otherwise we will punish you.

And what is the reason of our life anyways? Nothing but to aid the perpetuity of life itself. To make life easier for the people who are already here and to prepare for those who are expected to come. Life according to me has no higher purpose. I don’t condemn anyone who indulges in it. Maybe I am hedonist, but then so is everyone else. At least I am an honest one.

To end I will quote this quote which has always intrigued me.

“Balian of Ibelin: You go to certain death.
Hospitaller: All death is certain.”

The above blog has got elements of Viennese school of thought and I thought we could analyse it in terms of the Indic schools of philosophy.

[Sanku]

^^^^
Maut ant hai nahi to maut se bhee kyon dare ye ja ke asaman mein dahad do.

(Death is not the end, so why fear death, roar this to the Sky)

[D Roy]

Ramana,

Yeh turki ke liye global power shower kuch nahin hai.

Just like the european states with a tainted legacy of colonialism, turki is trying to see whether it can sucker enough post colonials to prop up its distinctive prosperity as compared to them

Like germany, france et al , turkey knows that in a world dominated by asian mega giants and the US gargantuan, a 70- 100 million man nation with internal divisions bakwaas hai.

After literally begging for decades to be let into europe, turki has now decided that - " WTF let's see if I can do a neo-turkic consolidiation".

And if for that Turkey has to start canoodling islamism - why not, what the hell..

For all the bullshit about Ottoman multi-nationalism, fact is the Ottoman empire always appealed to the pull of Islam. and that is precisely what this new turkey is trying to do to lure its own so called "ethnic brothers".


By the way- Stratfor is always big on Turki. I think GF's book identifies a very bright future for Turki. and Poland along with the United States.