Rudradev wrote:SwamyG wrote:
quote "Acharya"
---------------
But the question is why in the first place would they want to give false information about India and Indians/Hindus for the last 50 years. Or Even for 100 years
-------------------
As I understood based on my reading, Americans inherited their views of Indians from the British and the Missionaries. You are one of the very well read BRFites and would have a good grasp of the entire relationship. It would be tough to get something worthy of say Wikileaks, but the Liberals/progressives/ultra leftists who scorn at the religious right could (or would have) unearth some of the information. There should be no room for doubt that there has been and still is an institutional bias against India. We have material to support that conclusion. As you are aware, all countries have been changing or evolving; so which direction is USA heading and how much role does religion play and how does it affect India are issues that some of BRF members, who have the ability to see further than people like me, could (and have been) analyze or elaborate to us.
In my younger days, when I had even less info on hand, I knew USA aligned with Pakistan. I would think if anything were to happen to India, USSR would step in to help. I never knew the background information or the "whys". Now with the information available on the Internet and days at BRF, I have been able to read some of the reasons and actions. Knowing the underlying motives would be very interesting and informative.
Swamy,
Congratulations on your scholarship... your write-up is definitely a keeper and goes some way towards illuminating possible connections between the West's civilizational attitude to India, and the foreign policy practiced by the pre-eminent Western power towards modern India.
Going on to root causes, though... I have only glimpsed scattered evidence of what may lie beneath all of this. I don't claim to be an expert at all... with all humility, let me say that the search is only beginning for me, and that I feel privileged to belong to BR, a community with several individuals who may contribute to its advancement.
Here is what I think I have uncovered so far. No citations, references etc. yet... those are a long way off. But just to begin with.
When we think of Western schools of thought in the modern world, many of us are wont to group them into essentially two categories. The Capitalist and the Socialist is what we could call these in the context of social, political and economic outlook. The Anglo-American and the Slavic, (loosely speaking) in terms of ethnic or civilizational perspective. The Judeo-Christian and the Post-Orthodox, (again loosely speaking) in terms of religious perspective.
The Anglo-American school of thought we all know very well... it is what most of us refer to as the "West" in terms of primary civilizational identity. Their economic attitudes were shaped by the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Adam Smith; their political attitudes by such figures as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill; and their ideological attitudes by a compact between Protestant Christianity and Judaism (not always easy, but it hangs together well enough for most purposes.) The Roman Catholic Church is largely aligned with the Anglo American school, and its adherents have considerable influence especially in the United States; however, we must needs see the RCC here as a sort of subsidiary power. Since the days of German and Italian reunification, the Papacy lost any semblance of real political or military power; a decline in fortune that began with the collapse of Spain under Philip II, and continued to completion with the wars of Garibaldi (the Pope was the most fervent opponent of Italian reunification, and prevailed upon all manner of monarchs from Napoleon III of France to the Austrian Hapsburgs to fight the unificationists on his behalf, but failed to retain any temporal power for the Vatican eventually.)
The other school is in disarray following the end of the Cold War, but easy enough to recognize. Its economic attitudes in the last century were shaped by Marxist dialectical materialism; its political attitudes by Leninist Bolshevism; and its ideological perspective by a series of thinkers from Engels to Mao. There is currently a struggle within this camp as to how to redefine itself and its purposes for a new century, but its key ideology-- socialism-- is very much alive in Europe as well as in present-day Russia, though it takes variously libertarian and authoritarian forms in different societies and political entities.
These schools are both well known to us, and broadly occupy the "right" and the "left" of the Western economic, political and ideological spectrum today. It's easy to forget that in the modern era, there had ever been any other.
However, at the turn of the last century, there were in fact three schools of thought in the West. The third "school" was still inchoate at the time it was bludgeoned into comatose hiatus by the other two around the middle of the last century; it still had not consolidated itself, indeed it had never found a powerful enough state to speak for it until the 1930s, and when it did, that state turned out to be on the wrong side of history for a variety of political reasons.
In this third school I include parties that were given neither to the ways of the Anglosphere nor the Russosphere; and more importantly, had limited if any ideological affinity to either Judeo-Christianity or Socialism. I include movements as diverse as Norse Paganism, Gardnerian Wicca, the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society. All these movements hinged around the search for a deeper, lost truth and source of identity that had been suppressed by the post-Constantinian rise of Christian Imperialism. Yet many remained on the fringes of their respective societies, marginalized and trivialized as occult absurdities by the far more powerful adherents of Judeo-Christianity or Socialism. Even today, anyone bandying these names around is considered to be some kind of conspiracy theorist... so I list them here with the utmost temerity. Hear me out though.
As it happened, there was a time when this third alternative to the two pre-eminent schools of thought, began to acquire the degree of ideological momentum required to coalesce into a materialistic or political philosophy. Importantly, this process was driven by the work of several German thinkers of the 1800s and early 1900s... Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger... all of whom were influenced to some degree by the writings of Friedrich Max Muller.
Max Muller began as an orientalist of the pre-Modern colonial tradition, but soon found himself genuinely fascinated by the living body of knowledge represented in Dharmic civilization. It is important to note that many other "third-school" movements also looked to Indic traditions as a source of inspiration, wisdom and even memetic/civilizational ancestry, including the Theosophists and the Golden Dawn.
What emerged from this...and this is why I consider it a distinct, third school set apart from either Judeo-Christian Anglo-Americanism or Socialism...was a realization among sections of Western society that Sanatan Dharm might indeed be the key to the further evolution of human society; and that they, in the European West, had ancestral links to the civilizational cradle of Sanatan Dharm that far predated either the ideological tyranny of Judeo-Christianity or the historical negation innate to Socialism.
In other words, the Third School I am referring to looked neither to Jerusalem nor to Rome as the ideological urheimat of the West... much of it looked, instead, to India.
This was complete anathema to both the Anglo-American Judeo-Christians, and the Marxists. As long as these third-school movements remained scattered at the fringes of society, they were easy to malign and ridicule. However, as it happened, the third school came to influence a political movement powerful enough to gain mastery over a pivotal European country.
A very extreme form of third-school ideology, albeit highly distorted through the prism of an autocratic cult of personality, found a dramatic political manifestation in the National Socialist Workers' Party.
It is not easy to trace the connections between Indic civilization and Hitler's Nazism. For one thing, both the Judeo-Christians and the Socialists of the West have relentlessly bludgeoned Hinduism with the threat of demonization by association... so that we have become fearfully apologetic of even trying to draw a connection. That is not our Swastika, we say; those are not our Aryans. For another, India was not in a position to assert herself politically or even ideologically over those European movements that might have looked to her for inspiration; we were abject, a British colony. So it was only prudent, if ironic, that we sent our strongest and brightest to fight against the National Socialists on behalf of our British oppressors.
Nonetheless, the connections do exist. Read Savitri Devi's "The Lightning and the Sun" for clues.
Following the utter destruction of Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War, the two victorious schools of thought... Anglo-American and Russian Socialist... took every measure to ensure that nothing resembling Nazism would ever gain enough ideological currency to become a serious contender for Western political power again. The Holocaust of Jews proved a useful pretext for the stamping out and systematic demonization of everything Nazism was associated with... it enabled the Anglo-Americans to claim moral superiority, implicitly by virtue of a solidly Judeo-Christian and "democratic" ethic, over the crazy mass-murdering occultists who had dared to venerate heathen symbols and ideas in righetously Christian Europe. For their part, the Russian Communists went about negating the historical context of everything associated with Nazism just as Communists and Socialists will distort and negate any piece of history inconvenient to their worldview to this day.
Ultimately, the philosophical contribution of Germany to Western thought was cauterized and summarized by the elegant and non-threatening trifecta: "Godel, Escher, Bach." A sanitized version for the Anglo-Americans to appreciate in the twentieth century; though the Russian Communists even rejected these three figures as elitist emblems. Meanwhile, the industriousness, innovation, and genius of the German people are ascribed (in the Judeo-Christian narrative) to their "Lutheran work ethic." Period. No hint that they ever had any other civilizational influences besides.
Today everyone remembers Hitler the jew-hater, the madman, the warmonger. That is the legend that has been drummed into worldwide public consciousness at the behest of WWII's victors. Everyone thinks of Hitler as somehow especially evil, notwithstanding the fact that his Holocaust was dwarfed by the Americans in the process of seizing their continent from its natives; by the British many times over, in India and their other colonial possessions; and by an array of twentieth-century Socialist despots from Stalin to Pol Pot.
Hitler may have been a warmonger and a racist; but he was also a lover of animals and a vegetarian. These ideas did not come from any Bible or Torah. They came from something the Judeo-Christians and the Socialists alike fear far more terribly than they do one another (for indeed, Marxism is no more than an extension of Abrahamic/Semitic ideology, another "reformation" of Western social and political thought ultimately contrived to justify brute-force imperialistic expansion and the subjugation of other peoples.) They come from Dharma.
Was Hitler Dharmic? To some degree he was, although he did many Adharmic things and paid the price for them. It is true, of course, that much of WWII German military tradition remained imbued with Christian symbology, the Iron Cross and so on, hearkening back to the Holy Roman Empire and more recently reinforced after German unification under a Kaiser with quasi-spiritual "divine right". But that may only be because the full import of Nazi ideology, specifically its third-school aspects, had not had a chance to sink in to German civil society before the Germans went out to war. It is also true that the Church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, collaborated with his Holocaust; but let us remember that the RCC had been more or less a rentier power since the reunification of Italy, with the Pope hanging his hat on whichever power seemed pre-eminent in Europe in the hope of patronage.
But none of that is the issue here.
The issue here is
1) that a third school of thought existed in the West at the turn of the last century, distinct from both Anglo-American Judeo-Christianity and from International Socialism;
2) that the adherents of this school explored ideological foundations for European civilizational identity in Dharmic civilization... ideas that were extremely threatening to both Judeo-Christianity and Communism;
3) and that, with the end of the Second World War, it was demonized by association with Nazism and consigned to ideological oblivion. For the next several decades, at least.
When India became independent, it could not have been far from the minds of both the Anglo-American and Communist thinkers, how tremendous a fascination Indian civilization had exerted on their fellow White Europeans, not very long ago at all. It escaped the notice of neither the Christian Church nor the Jewish international business elite that even in an absence of temporal power, while India herself suffered the throes of slavery and misery, the power of Dharmic civilization to shape the imagination of the West had remained profound.
What would happen now if India were allowed to re-establish the social, the political, the economic power of that Dharmic civilization as well? Merely on the strength of her ancient philosophical wisdom and devoutly preserved spiritual traditions, India had managed to influence the West in the early modern age while still under the British jackboot. Now suppose she gained what the Capitalists and Communists alike understood to be *real* power... material power?
It has never been a secret to any sincere student of History that Dharmic civilization has been the pre-eminent cultural foundation of Asia, its influence immediately perceptible from Tibet to Indonesia to the Philippines and Japan, and historically discernible in regions of West and Central Asia despite the best efforts of Islamic marauders to scour it away.
The real secret that the West has been keeping from us is the degree to which Dharmic civilization had influenced a great diversity of spiritual, philosophical, social and even political institutions
in the West itself... from the Theosophical Society of Blavatsky and Annie Besant to the National Socialist Workers' Party of Adolf Hitler. Western "right" and "left", Anglo-American and Slav alike have no greater fear than that this will happen again; and that this time, there will be a Civilization-State with real temporal power seizing the helm of her destiny.
The Third School still has its adherents today... such intellectuals as Koenraad Elst, Francois Gaultier and David Frawley continue the tradition, though they are little known outside their circles of scholarship. If the Third School ever re-asserts itself in the West, it will be thanks to the tireless and dedicated efforts of men and women such as these, who carried the torch through the decades of obscurity.
I hope this begins to suggest the possibility of an answer for you, as it has for me. If you arrive at one, let me know... I'm a very long way from learning the whole truth myself.
Though a bit over the top, Simon Pegg's Hot Fuzz was also good take on the over the top situations and law enforcement imagery that America projects.