Friday, August 21, 2009

1

Bharat Rakshak
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/

Non-Western Worldview
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3887


Author: ramana [ 17 Mar 2008 04:36 pm ]
Post subject: Non-Western Worldview

The format of previous thead was beyond repair. Lets start a fresh.

Last page of previous thread

Author: mayurav [ 17 Mar 2008 05:38 pm ]
Post subject:

Quote:
The European civilisation may be likened to a piece of cloth, of which these are the materials: its loom is a vast temperate hilly country on the sea-shore; its cotton, a strong warlike mongrel race formed by the intermixture of various races; its warp is warfare in defence of one's self and one's religion. The one who wields the sword is great, and the one who cannot, gives up his independence and lines under the protection of some warrior's sword. Its woof is commerce. The means to this civilisation is the sword; its auxiliary — courage and strength; its aim enjoyment here and thereafter.


In the following paragraphs Aryan = Hindu

Quote:
The loom of the fabric of Aryan civilisation is a vast, warm, level country, interspersed with broad, navigable rivers. The cotton of this cloth is composed of highly civilised, semi-civilised, and barbarian tribes, mostly Aryan. Its warp is Varnâshramâchâra, (The old Aryan institution of the four castes and stages of life. The former comprise the Brâhmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, and the latter, Brahmacharya (student life), Gârhasthya (house-holder's life), Vânaprastha (hermit life), and Sannyâsa (life of renunciation).) and its woof, the conquest of strife and competition in nature.


Quote:
The object of the peoples of Europe is to exterminate all in order to live themselves. The aim of the Aryans is to raise all up to their own level, nay, even to a higher level than themselves. The means of European civilisation is the sword; of the Aryans, the division into different Varnas. This system of division into different Varnas is the stepping-stone to civilisation, making one rise higher and higher in proportion to one's learning and culture. In Europe, it is everywhere victory to the strong and death to the weak. In the land of Bhârata, every social rule is for the protection of the weak.


Edited: Oops! Link is here..

LINK

Author: ramana [ 18 Mar 2008 04:40 am ]
Post subject:

map Of Roman Empire Invasions

Those Vandals from Carthage became Arabised and Islamized during the first 100 years of Islam. In a way Gaddafi is surely a Vandal.

Author: csharma [ 18 Mar 2008 05:05 am ]
Post subject:

Ramana, Romans used to call any non Romanised people barbarians. Goths etc were called barbarians by the Romans. So, Romans calling the Carthagians vandals should not be taken seriously. Calling them vandals would be conforming to the western view. JMT.

Author: Keshav [ 18 Mar 2008 05:21 am ]
Post subject:

csharma wrote:
Ramana, Romans used to call any non Romanised people barbarians. Goths etc were called barbarians by the Romans. So, Romans calling the Carthagians vandals should not be taken seriously. Calling them vandals would be conforming to the western view. JMT.


What was the word the Romans used for "barbarians"? Did they have a "mleccha" equivalent?

And, it doesn't make sense that "Vandal" would be an insult unless it came to be an insult under Roman rule, otherwise calling someone a Vandal would be no different than calling them by any other ethnicity.

Author: Raju [ 18 Mar 2008 05:28 am ]
Post subject:

Indian Chandal ~ Vandal

both words have same root.

Author: csharma [ 18 Mar 2008 05:46 am ]
Post subject:

From Wikipedia. Interesting, note the Sanskrit connection.

[b]The word "barbarian" comes into English from Medieval Latin barbarinus, from Latin barbaria, from Latin barbarus, from the ancient Greek word βάÏ

Author: ArmenT [ 18 Mar 2008 06:36 am ]
Post subject:

csharma wrote:
Ramana, Romans used to call any non Romanised people barbarians. Goths etc were called barbarians by the Romans. So, Romans calling the Carthagians vandals should not be taken seriously. Calling them vandals would be conforming to the western view. JMT.

Vandals (note the capitalization) were a Germanic tribe that later moved around to Spain and later North Africa. Calling them Vandals is perfectly fine, because that was the name of their tribe and they even spoke a language called Vandalic. One of their kings later ended up sacking Rome.

In fact, I remember reading a theory somewhere that the Arabic word for Spain (Al Andalus) is derived from the way that the Arabs pronounced Vandal.

Author: csharma [ 18 Mar 2008 06:45 am ]
Post subject:

The capitalised version provides a different meaning, I agree.

Author: Paul [ 18 Mar 2008 03:18 pm ]
Post subject:

This link revealing the ostensible alliance between the Sunnis and the protestants against common enemies was the rationale behind this thread.

Quote:
One notable example of such an alliance was Suleyman's outward support of Lutherans fighting the Pope in the Holy Roman Empire. Suleyman considered the Protestant rejection of icons and papal authority to be closer to Muslim belief than either Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, and his support of Protestantism was one of his key policies in Europe. By encouraging the disunity of Christianity, the Ottomans hoped to decrease the chances of Christian Europe uniting in a Crusade against the Muslim Ottomans. It has been suggested that Ottoman pressure played a decisive role in persuading the Habsburgs to grant several concessions to the Protestants. The Ottoman Empire was thus vital to maintaining the European balance of power in the 16th century.


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

Author: ramana [ 18 Mar 2008 04:55 pm ]
Post subject:

ArmenT is right in his description. Thanks, ramana

Also interesting is that the Berbers are curly haired! And in US carpet stores there is form of carpet called berber that has short curled fibers. Wonder if all this is related.

Author: ramana [ 18 Mar 2008 07:11 pm ]
Post subject:

x-posted...

Quote:
dhu, was Arianism a midway point to Muhammed's Islam? In other words did Muhammed use the theories of Arianism while crafting his version of Islam for the Arabs? i was struck by the fact that many of Islam's practises are similar to pre-Reformation Christianity or hard line Old Testament.


Reply

Author: ramana [ 19 Mar 2008 05:00 pm ]
Post subject:

peter wrote:
Once read "Races of Afghanistan" by Walther Belew who lived in NWFP and he says most afghan last names are of Hindu origin. Your point about wolves is interesting but I still do not follow that a singular defeat at Tours and multiple defeats in India of Arabs (Turks/Afghans etc) had different consequences. France was never attacked again but India was.



Peter, Charles Martel was able to stop the Moors/Berbers at Tours in 732 AD, when the leader Abdul Rehman Al Ghafi was killed in the fight. It took them another couple of generations to rid France upto the Pyrennes of Moorish outposts till Charlemagne.

Wiki on Charles Martel

and Charlemagne

Author: Johann [ 19 Mar 2008 05:30 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
x-posted...

Quote:
dhu, was Arianism a midway point to Muhammed's Islam? In other words did Muhammed use the theories of Arianism while crafting his version of Islam for the Arabs? i was struck by the fact that many of Islam's practises are similar to pre-Reformation Christianity or hard line Old Testament.


Reply


Christianity had two *huge* problems when Constantine chose to elevate it to state religion alongside Roman paganism.

- it was essentially apolitical and pacifist, which did not suit Roman state needs at all. State religion in Rome was intensely political in nature.

- it was divided in to a bewildering number of churches and doctrines, which did not suit Constantine's need for a single church and single doctrine that would serve the emperor.

Constantine not only militarises Christianity, but imposes conformity within Christianity through coerscion.

I find it interesting how few Christians realise that Constantine a pagan (until he was on his deathbed) soldier-politician made so many of the final decisions on what constituted 'true' (Nicene) Christian doctrine

Constantine's orthodox, conformist and militant church-state was the model for many elements of Mohammed's Islam, although many of the 'thou-shalt-nots' of Islam are borrowed from Rabbinic Judaism with which Mohammed had more direct contact.

But in general Mohammed, and the Arabian Peninsula were surrounded by manichean belief systems - Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.

Author: SwamyG [ 19 Mar 2008 06:51 pm ]
Post subject:

'If India wants, it can sacrifice Tibet issue'
I post the above link because of the following lines in the linked article:
Quote:
That is true but money and trade is not the totality of life. Humanity needs money. Humanity needs facilities. But humanity needs satisfaction, peace of mind and self-respect.

The essence of modern Western views are: trade, trade and trade. Business houses first, then people. My take on eastern view point of life is well articulated by the monk and the Prime Minster of the Tibetan Diaspora - Samdhong Rinpoche.

Author: ramana [ 19 Mar 2008 07:07 pm ]
Post subject:

I cried when I read the dork's question to the Monk. What a 400% Macaulayite.

India cannot let go of Tibet issue. If it does so it will lose its civilizational basis.


SwamyG post in full and highlight his remarks.

Author: sanjaychoudhry [ 19 Mar 2008 07:21 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
I cried when I read the dork's question to the Monk. What a 400% Macaulayite.

India cannot let go of Tibet issue. If it does so it will lose its civilizational basis.


This lady Sheila Bhatt is a rabid Macaulayite and a part of the liberal / leftist mafia that infiltrated in large numbers in India's English media and academia during Nehru's and Indira's time. Look at the questions she asked. They are accusatory, insulting and pro-China, while the monk comes out full of wisdom and patience.

Author: ramana [ 19 Mar 2008 07:25 pm ]
Post subject:

Exactly the reason for my discomfiture. Folks we ahve a very big job cut out for us but need to take it on one by one.

Author: SwamyG [ 19 Mar 2008 09:34 pm ]
Post subject:

Posting the interview in full. The highlighted sentences in Blue appealed to me looking at the recent troubling times in economy.

The Monk's amazing clarity of thoughts and his communication shows great deal of wisdom and understanding of the state of affairs. He is so clued in what is happening around the region.

It is little sad to note that he considers being a refugee in India being the same as being a refugee anywhere else. Well it could be owing to the love of his land.

Quote:
Tibetans living as refugees in India and elsewhere have a democratic system to govern community affairs outside their motherland. While spiritual leader Dalai Lama [Images] heads the government-in-exile from the headquarters in Mcleodganj near Dharamshala, it is 69-year-old Samdhong Rinpoche, who as prime minister heads the administration of the Tibetan Diaspora.

According to the Dalai Lama, Professor Rinpoche 'knows more about the Tibet issue' than he does. Rinpoche is considered reincarnation of the Samdhong lineage of Buddha. On matters related to diplomacy and politics of Tibet and China's control over it, Rinpoche's views are the most important after that of the Dalai Lama.

A renowned scholar of Sanskrit and Hindi, Rinpoche is fluent in English and heads a movement to preserve ancient Indian sciences and literature preserved in the Tibetan language but lost in the original. More than 100 precious Tibetan books have been translated in which the ancient Indian wisdom was buried or lost many centuries back. In 1959, when Tibetans took refugee in India, they brought many of those books with them.

Professor Rinpoche's mission to give back something to India when he was heading the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath near Varanasi has earned him respect amongst scholars in India. He was elected twice for the highest post in the exile government, garnering around 90 per cent votes of Tibetans. He is a popular monk; a simple man known for his sthitpragnya (unmoved by happiness or sorrow) attitude.

In an exclusive interview to rediff.com's Managing Editor Sheela Bhatt, Professor Rinpoche talked about the dynamics of the Tibet issue and about China and India's stand on his motherland.

Tell us something about yourself. What do you remember about Tibet?

I was born in a village in the south-east of Tibet, now called Tibet Autonomous Region, just behind Burma (now Myanmar). I spent 20 years in Tibet. At the age of 12, I left my village to join a monastery in Lhasa. It is not easy to describe what Tibet meant to us then.

Our life was governed by local traditions based on Buddhism. We were very happy people. We were self-sufficient. We had good food to eat and good clothes to wear. The best part of my life was in Drepung Monastery in Lhasa. I studied Buddhism till 1959. When I was a child, I liked monks. One of my uncles was a monk and lived in a native monastery. He insisted that I should live with him.

When I was four-and-a-half, he insisted I should be allowed to go with him. My family thought that next day, I would return home. My father came to pick me up. I refused. Since small children were not allowed inside a monastery, special permission was taken for me.

Few months later, I was recognised as the fifth Smadhong and then I went to another monastery. I never ever thought that one day we would be in India like this. Of course, we had a dream to visit India once in our lifetime to make a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya and Sarnath. We never thought that we would flee to India.

Today, the protests in Lhasa is making news around the world. Was it a surprise to you?

Yes, absolutely. We were surprised.

The Chinese government thinks that the government-in-exile helped them in Lhasa.

There is no sense in their charge. Few months ago, one of my friends, Gagan Gill, visited Lhasa. After coming back, she told me people are so frustrated and discontent that they would speak out anytime.

What is the political message that you are getting from Tibet?

They have been under a very repressive regime for nearly 60 years. They are economically marginalised; politically absolutely marginalised. They have a no role to play in the current society. They are deprived of their culture and language. Most dear to their heart is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

The Chinese authorities even prohibit keeping the Dalai Lama's picture. It hurts them the most. Since May 2006 there has been a huge campaign going on against the Dalai Lama. It is considered a political crime to keep his picture. Monasteries have been asked to change their education system. The resentment was building up and there was no outlet.

Tibetans have welcomed development and prosperity that came with airports and railways provided by the Chinese. Obviously, with Chinese money came Chinese military, police and other things. When development comes, culture gets affected. You can't welcome one and reject the side effect. How can you pick and choose?

That is true but money and trade is not the totality of life. Humanity needs money. Humanity needs facilities. But humanity needs satisfaction, peace of mind and self-respect. The development of Tibet is not dependent on China. If Tibetans would have been separate from China, Tibet would have developed by much more than what Chinese have done now. That is because we have so many resources. See the huge development of Bhutan and Nepal in last 49 years. If Tibet had remained free, by now it would have been another Singapore.

The authorities of People's Republic of China are taking all the resources of Tibet away. Nothing is being given back. More than 100 gold mines are active and exploited by Chinese authorities. Copper, aluminium and uranium is taken out of Tibet. The PRC was able to pay back a huge loan taken from the USSR due to finds of high quality uranium deposits.

China is surviving on Tibet's water, timber and what not! Nothing is coming back. Although, they have given huge statistics of cost of railways and all that, but this infrastructure is for themselves and not for Tibetans, who are absolutely marginalised.

The beggars on the streets of Lhasa are all Tibetans not Han. It reflects the fact that Tibetans have not benefited by progress.

You have been living here since 49 years. You were given a refugee status with the condition that you will not indulge in any political activity. Why do we see so many political activities in Dharamshala?

You might be seeing it for the first time, but we are doing all kinds of politics.

Nobody has stopped us from doing politics. We are doing everything that Indians are doing. Only thing we are refraining from is that we should not use Indian soil for indulging in anti-China activities. We are not doing anything anti-China.

Asking for freedom for Tibet is considered by Chinese as the anti-China activity.

Asking for freedom is not an anti-China act. It's a pro-China activity. We are trying to have more freedom for the Chinese people. We are trying to have more respect for human rights and we want them to have more respect for different cultures. How does it become anti-China activity? We are not seeking separation. We are not seeking independence. We are only seeking freedom. And, freedom is a birthright of every human being.

Is it true that elderly Tibetans living in Dharamshala are not in sync with younger generation? Younger Tibetans disagree with the Dalai Lama's "middle path" approach as they want a free Tibet.

I don't think so. The 'middle path' also seeks freedom. Independent Tibet and free Tibet are two different things. We live in a democratic society. Everybody can have different political ideas, but that does not mean that we have serious differences.

In India too, you have political parties with different views. It does not mean that India does not have unity. If you have met young Tibetans who think that Dalai Lama is soft, it is perfectly alright. It is okay for them to have their views in a democratic society.

But here a leader is being questioned by the followers.

That is real democracy. If leaders are not questioned then how can you serve under democracy? The basic fact is that the 'middle path' approach was not decided by a single person or only by His Holiness.

It was decided through process of referendum in 1997, wherein 64 per cent people favoured the 'middle path'.

The Tibetan Parliament, which represents the whole of Tibet, has twice unanimously adopted the resolution supporting the 'middle path' approach. It is official and a majority agreement. If majority of the people want otherwise, they will have the right to change it. However, right now the majority have agreed to the 'middle path'.

India is in a difficult situation. India and China's relations are growing, but they are vulnerable due to the border issue. China's power in South Asia is growing. Then there are dynamics added to it due to America and Pakistan. The scenario is balanced precariously. When you get politically hyperactive in Dharamshala, don't you think you are harming India's interest?

I don't think so. India is not at all vulnerable. India is more powerful than China if she really realises her own strengths. The problem is India still suffers from the psychological defeat of 1962. India is unable to come out of it. That year is far behind. Now, China is much less powerful than India.

How? Just have a look at China's GDP.

Gross Domestic Production is not a reality. It is merely a figure cooked up in Beijing [Images]. If you go to the northern part of China, go to villages, you will know more about China. You have visited Shanghai and Beijing, but not my village in Tibet; not the remote areas of China.


How does that make India more powerful?


Why do you think India is so weak? When you say China has better focus than India in other words it means that it is the totalitarian regime. In India, diversity ensures that it remains a free and democratic country. Of course,
Western people, who are only concerned with economic development, invest in China and not in India because India is a free country; India has a free press; India has democracy; India has an independent judiciary.

Therefore, they cannot do whatever they want to, but in China they can by meeting just one powerful party member. You have visited China but not met the real people, who are poor and suffering. No Tibetan is willing to take Chinese money, but they have no option. Chinese money is thrust on them. Development is thrust on them. People have not participated in the development of Tibet.

I asked you about India's position on the issue. Many people think Tibetan refugees should keep quiet and silently go on living here. When you raise the political pitch on Indian soil, it creates tension in the region.

I have never heard such a comment from anyone here. I and His Holiness Dalai Lama have made it clear several times that if India thinks that Tibet issue is a hindrance or an irritant for the normalisation of Sino-Indian relations, India must sacrifice the Tibet issue and ask His Holiness to shift somewhere else.

Let Tibetan refugees migrate to West or send them back to Tibet. In such case, can you guarantee that Sino-India relations will be perfectly okay? If that is so, then we are ready to obey. We are ready to go away from India.

In India, we are refugees, in London [Images] or in Washington, we will be refugees. It will make no difference to us because we are not living on our own soil. We can be refugees anywhere.

But, I don't think any Indian leader is thinking in this direction. If they are thinking in this direction, they should not have any hesitation in telling us. His Holiness and the Tibetan leadership never wants to cause any inconvenience to the Indian people or to the Indian government.

Secondly think about this: Unless you solve the Tibet issue how you will resolve your border issue? How will you grow your relationship with China? All these things will have to be thought out keeping in mind a long term solution and strategies. Therefore, many Indians think that free Tibet is India's real defence. This is not a hypocrite thinking.

Do you believe so?

It is not a question if I believe or not. Since time immemorial till 1951, did India spend a penny to secure its border? Was a single military man was ever deployed on the Tibet border? And, now, how much are you spending hourly to defend the Indo-Tibet border? How much problems are you facing on this border? What is the Sino-India border issue? This needs to be analysed.

As long as Tibet was a free and sovereign country, there was no border issue. In 1914, the Simla agreement was signed between Tibetan government and British government of India. The border issue was completely resolved. It was resolved in the manner that the Indian government of that time wanted. Tibet had agreed to it.

We had a trade agreement to be renewed after every 10 years as it was done by Tibet and India in 1924, 1934 and 1944. There was no trade issue. Then came 1954 when the trade agreement was duly renewed in Beijing instead of Lhasa. Then five very beautiful sentences called Pansheel were prefaced to it.

Panchsheel is not an agreement. Panchsheel is a renewed agreement of trade with Tibet and a new preface was put on this. It was decided that it will be renewed after every eight years and not ten years. The eight years were to be completed in 1962. The 1962 war was planned long back in 1950s. They had calculated that in 1962, they will be able to plan an aggression. All this was pre-planned and people know about it.

In some sections, it is perceived that the Dalai Lama himself diluted his demand for Tibet and agreed for autonomy. Second, on the issue of Tawang, political lines are quite blurred.

His Holiness' struggle is giving concrete results. The issue of Tibet has not disappeared from the world scenario. World-over people are supporting the cause of Tibet because of its right direction and commitment to non-violence.

Therefore, majority of people are looking at His Holiness as a great moral force and a spiritual leader. Tibet cause is a just cause and not a power struggle. It is neither a political struggle nor a battle against the system. It is the struggle between truth and falsehood; justice and injustice.

This is established in the world and this is the consistent policy of His Holiness of 'middle path' approach.

Coming to the question on Twang, who told you that His Holiness is not clear on the issue? His Holiness was the first person to say that McMahon Line is the border and we have treaty obligation to respect it. Most recently, he made a statement in Tripura and Kolkata. I have also said that we were party to the agreement on the Mcmahon line. Then how can we back off?

We have continued the legitimate government of the Dalai Lama, which is now 367 years old. That government has agreed to McMahon line and Tawang and other issues were agreed on basis of the watershed principles. The watershed principle said that whatever water comes to this side belongs to India. It was very clear demarcation. So, Indian people, at least people like you, should not show ignorance of actual position of Tawang.

Why should there be any tension on the Tawang issue between India and China? India should stand up and say that you (China) have no business to talk about it. Tawang belongs to India. Why is this issue lingering on?

If Chinese say that because the sixth Dalai Lama was born in Tawang, it belongs to Tibet then if one Dalai Lama was born in Mongolia can I say Mongolia is a part of Tibet?

When you look back, do you feel Tibetans had a good time in India?

Absolutely! All our children received a good education. Our monks and nuns have a good monastic life. Everyone has a good livelihood and enjoys freedom. All of us have tasted democracy in exile. We have complete freedom in our refugee status.

The attention of the world is on Olympics [Images] 2008. How important is the event for you? Has the turning point come for Tibet?

Year 2008 is the same for us. What's the difference? The Olympics are held every four years. This is not the first and last time the Olympics are being held. It was held during Adolf Hitler's [Images] rule too.

How long will the protests in Lhasa continue?

It will depend on the China's behaviour and their handling of the situation. The uprising will continue if their repressive policy goes on. If they deal with them with compassion and have a dialogue to find a permanent solution in accordance with people's aspirations, there will be no problem.

The Rediff Interviews

Author: ramana [ 19 Mar 2008 09:42 pm ]
Post subject:

Look at all the complex issues the monk deals with and look at the headline that B(u)hatt has put up.

Author: Shwetank [ 19 Mar 2008 11:50 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
Exactly the reason for my discomfiture. Folks we ahve a very big job cut out for us but need to take it on one by one.


hats off to you for still being able to retain some optimism about the future, especially considering you probably have seen much more than me. I view it as almost a lost cause, with nothing less then major catastrophe, world order collapse, break-up or collapse of current Indian political union giving any hope for rebuilding. The current ones are so firmly entrenched that simple individual efforts will do too little too late. There is only hope if a some organization with dedication works at it. Without organization and power group looking out for our interests we'll at best coast to mediocracy. Already changes are happening in the world at fast pace and it's accelerating. Humanity might change into next stage. And we lose more and ability to have our name in history or making some contribution, instead we can't even catch up. There has to be some focused Indian-centered & based group with clear goal, even for just increasing that group's own wealth and power, because this group will as sideffects atleast casuse some progress. Every successful civilization and country in past few centuries has had this (W. Europe is prime example, they had group of very smart group of elites guiding, engineering society and keeping their country's interests above those of others). Just having having good will is not enough.

Bottom line, when history is written and future generations look back, Western Europe's place is forever garunteed in human history and from now on in any changes that take place the East Asians are going to make sure they are a major part of it as well. What about India, will we be just another footnote, (we have been one for too many centuries now), which at best just got along and merely survived? Even if we manage to get prosperous, just being that isn't enough. We should be making contributions, can we produce anything with an effect coming anywhere clost to what Western Enlightenment did to the whole world and human species. Well I'm not sure if anyone can come close to that again but something atleast.

Author: G Subramaniam [ 20 Mar 2008 01:26 am ]
Post subject:

Johann wrote:
ramana wrote:
x-posted...

Quote:
dhu, was Arianism a midway point to Muhammed's Islam? In other words did Muhammed use the theories of Arianism while crafting his version of Islam for the Arabs? i was struck by the fact that many of Islam's practises are similar to pre-Reformation Christianity or hard line Old Testament.


Reply


Christianity had two *huge* problems when Constantine chose to elevate it to state religion alongside Roman paganism.

- it was essentially apolitical and pacifist, which did not suit Roman state needs at all. State religion in Rome was intensely political in nature.

- it was divided in to a bewildering number of churches and doctrines, which did not suit Constantine's need for a single church and single doctrine that would serve the emperor.

Constantine not only militarises Christianity, but imposes conformity within Christianity through coerscion.

I find it interesting how few Christians realise that Constantine a pagan (until he was on his deathbed) soldier-politician made so many of the final decisions on what constituted 'true' (Nicene) Christian doctrine

Constantine's orthodox, conformist and militant church-state was the model for many elements of Mohammed's Islam, although many of the 'thou-shalt-nots' of Islam are borrowed from Rabbinic Judaism with which Mohammed had more direct contact.

But in general Mohammed, and the Arabian Peninsula were surrounded by manichean belief systems - Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.


Johann, I beg to disagree
Intolerance is the keystone of the old testament and any religion derived from the old testament is by definition, intolerant, and Constantine is not the root of this

The old roman pagan religion was tolerant, hundreds of sects flourished in the roman empire, before Theodosius forcibly converted the roman empire

Another pointer that shows the intolerance of xtianity pre-constantine
In 304, Armenia was converted to xtianity by St.Gregorius, who promptly destroyed the local hindu temple

Author: shyamd [ 20 Mar 2008 01:29 am ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
Look at all the complex issues the monk deals with and look at the headline that B(u)hatt has put up.

Man WTF!! What is wrong with the press?

Jap and Indian experts reckon China has given up its support of Naxals as of 2006, and people who were on the task have been re-assigned. There may have been intelligence co-operation on the issue. Are we repaying a debt?

Author: Tilak [ 20 Mar 2008 02:30 am ]
Post subject:

shyamd wrote:
ramana wrote:
Look at all the complex issues the monk deals with and look at the headline that B(u)hatt has put up.

Man WTF!! What is wrong with the press?

Jap and Indian experts reckon China has given up its support of Naxals as of 2006, and people who were on the task have been re-assigned. There may have been intelligence co-operation on the issue. Are we repaying a debt?


The other worthy, I've noticed is Indrani Bagchi [Times News Network].. in her recent article "Turkey offers alternative to Iran pipeline" sounds too patronizing.. and is making me believe only a true blue Foggy Bottom junkie could have written/shadow written it for her.

Quote:
Politically, the most important consideration here is it offers India a golden opportunity to significantly upgrade ties with a major Muslim country like Turkey. This could offset whatever ambivalence India might feel about Israel. India already has very deep relations with Israel, so this would not be a political challenge.

Author: sanjaychoudhry [ 20 Mar 2008 07:08 am ]
Post subject:

Quote:
The old roman pagan religion was tolerant, hundreds of sects flourished in the roman empire, before Theodosius forcibly converted the roman empire

Another pointer that shows the intolerance of xtianity pre-constantine
In 304, Armenia was converted to xtianity by St.Gregorius, who promptly destroyed the local hindu temple


The Roman soldiers and traders used to worship the god Mithras. Many temples of Mithras have been found all over the Roman empire, including one in London. Mithras is nothing but the Vedic diety of Mitra (friendship).

Quote:
Vedic Mitra is the patron divinity of honesty, friendship, contracts and meetings. He is a prominent deity of the Rigveda distinguished by a relationship to Varuna, the protector of ṛtá. Together with Varuna, he counted among the Adityas, a group of solar deities. They are the supreme keepers of order and gods of the law.

Varuna and Mitra are the gods of the oath, often twinned or identified as Mitra-Varuna (a dvandva compound). In the Vedic hymns, Mitra is often invoked together with Varuna, so that the two are combined in a dvandva as Mitra-Varuna. Varuna is lord of the cosmic rhythm of the celestial spheres, while Mitra brings forth the light at dawn, which was covered by Varuna. Mitra together with Varuna is the most prominent Asura, and the chief of the Adityas, in the Rigveda. It should be noted, however, that Mitra and Varuna are also addressed as Devas in Rigveda (e.g., RV 7.60.12), and in the only hymn dedicated to Mitra, he is referred to as a Deva (mitrasya...devasya) in RV 3.59.6.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithra

Ancient Druidic European culture was based on Hindu culture with similar dieities and rituals. Even the language borrowed heavily. The colonials invented the Aryan invasion theory to explain this linkage and claimed it was actually Europe which give India its culture. How can that be, when till 500 AD, most of Europe was living in caves.

Author: pradeepe [ 20 Mar 2008 07:09 am ]
Post subject:

shyamd wrote:
ramana wrote:
Look at all the complex issues the monk deals with and look at the headline that B(u)hatt has put up.

Man WTF!! What is wrong with the press?

Jap and Indian experts reckon China has given up its support of Naxals as of 2006, and people who were on the task have been re-assigned. There may have been intelligence co-operation on the issue. Are we repaying a debt?


Hey bhagvan. The distinction between them is like between two species. One light years ahead of the other.

Author: SwamyG [ 20 Mar 2008 04:11 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
India cannot let go of Tibet issue. If it does so it will lose its civilizational basis.

Ramana: Can you elaborate on the losing civilizational basis? I did not understand. thanks.

Author: shiv [ 21 Mar 2008 01:23 am ]
Post subject:

Keshav wrote:
And, it doesn't make sense that "Vandal" would be an insult unless it came to be an insult under Roman rule, otherwise calling someone a Vandal would be no different than calling them by any other ethnicity.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism
Quote:
Vandalism is a conspicuous defacement or destruction of a structure, a symbol or anything else that goes against the will of the owner/governing body, and usually constitutes a crime. Historically, it has been justified by painter Gustave Courbet as destruction of monuments symbolizing "war and conquest". Therefore, it is often done as an expression of contempt, creativity, or both. Vandalism is only a meaningful concept in a culture that recognizes history and archaeology. Like other similar terms (Barbarian/barbary, and Philistine), the term Vandal was originally an ethnic slur referring to the Vandals, who under Geiseric sacked Rome in 455. The Vandals, like the Philistines, no longer exist as an identifiable ethnic group.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandals
Quote:
The verb vandalize is first recorded in 1800. The term "vandalism" has come to mean senseless destruction as a result of the Vandals' sack of Rome under King Geiseric in 455.


The term "Vandal" refers to an ethnic group that no longer exists, but the word itself is perjorative.

The Vandals, having been eliminated, are now commemorated in anglophone phraseology as an evil entity because of their destructive attacks on the cultural forbears of the people who now survive. What is interesting to me about this situation is that if you wipe out a culture entirely, the people who remain can refer to that culture in any which way without anyone seriously worrying about accuracy or history.

If Hindus get eliminated from this earth, all that remains of Hindus as a civilizational record is likely to be remembered as something evil - like Caste, Sati, Thuggee etc.

On the other hand, the Hindu civilizational memory of Islam as it stands is one of "vandalism"

Author: Johann [ 21 Mar 2008 03:26 am ]
Post subject:

Christianity until Constantine was not much more than a splinter sect of Judaism.

As far as religion in pre-Constantine Pagan Rome went, religion was an intensely political matter, an indicator of loyalty to Rome.

Any conquered people who refused to worship Roman gods in addition to their own were treated as subversives.

Who do you think laid waste to the Druids? It was the *Pagan* Romans.

Julius Caesar *personally* cut down the sacred grove outside what is now Marseilles

In 39 AD Tiberius outlawed *all* Druidic practices.

Mithraism was not threatening to the Roman Empire because it allowed emperors to be worshipped as gods. Zero political threat, and plenty of political benefit there.

Druidism on the other hand was the nucleus of Celtic resistance to Roman political and cultural colonisation. It had to go as far as the Romans were concerned.

When you combined Imperial Rome's already restrictive and dominating concept of state religion with a manichean (absolute good and evil) belief system, then we are all in trouble.

Author: G Subramaniam [ 21 Mar 2008 04:13 am ]
Post subject:

Johann wrote:
Christianity until Constantine was not much more than a splinter sect of Judaism.

As far as religion in pre-Constantine Pagan Rome went, religion was an intensely political matter, an indicator of loyalty to Rome.

Any conquered people who refused to worship Roman gods in addition to their own were treated as subversives.


When you combined Imperial Rome's already restrictive and dominating concept of state religion with a manichean (absolute good and evil) belief system, then we are all in trouble.


For pagans in general, adding a few roman gods to the hundreds of other gods is no big takleef

The jews did not worship roman gods and yet except when they undertook open revolts as in 70Ad ANd 120AD were not persecuted

Emperor Julian the Apostate was in fact in the process of rebuilding the Jewish temple

Mainstream judaism had by 150AD turned bitterly anti-xtian
- Panthera in the Talmud

And as late as 125 AD, Justin martyr was importing the concept of the Virgin birth from greek mythology

Even Diocletian's wife and daughter were xtians

And as I wrote earlier, even before Constantine, when Saint Gregorius converted Armenia, his first act was to destroy the local hindu temple in 304AD ( xtian intolerance predating Constantine )

Author: Johann [ 21 Mar 2008 04:50 am ]
Post subject:

GS,

- The original Christian movement as an apolitical, pacifist movement refused to join in the revolt of 70AD. Hellenised Jews (both in the diaspora and in Palestine) also refused to join in - they too, like the Christians were bitterly condemned by Orthodox Jews because of their lack of solidarity.

- The point is that religion was always first and foremost *political* in Roman conception.

Toleration was not a principle embraced for its own value - it was a function of whether a group accepted Roman power or resisted it.

That is why the Druids, who maintained continuous resistance were exterminated, and the Mithraists who enhanced imperial power were tolerated.

Sometimes too minority groups simply became useful scapegoats and object lessons.

Jews for example were twice banned from Pagan Rome before the revolt of 70 AD.

The *very same* Roman political thinking used to exterminate Druidism and persecute Jews and Christians in the Pagan era was used to supress Paganism and persecute Jews after Constantine.

Roman emperors often had short lives - the praetorian guard, popular discontent, family intrigue, senatorial/court intrigue meant that no individual could impose their will and make long lasting changes without deeper consensus.

The Christianisation of the Roman state was a drawn-out affair that ocurred because their was *consistant* support from the majority of the Roman elite.

That support was based largely on political calculations.

Interestingly, the Greeks who dominated the eastern Roman Empire (the centre of the empire from Constantine onwards) and Northern Africa, which had been in longer contact with Israel were far more enthusiastic and hardcore about Christianity than the Italian peninsula, Gaul, Britain, etc.

It is no accident that both the push for the dilution of bonds between church and state, intellectual freedom even when it clashed with religious belief, etc came from Western Europe rather than Greek-Orthodox Europe.

Author: G Subramaniam [ 21 Mar 2008 05:09 am ]
Post subject:

Johann wrote:
GS,

- The original Christian movement as an apolitical, pacifist movement refused to join in the revolt of 70AD. Hellenised Jews (both in the diaspora and in Palestine) also refused to join in - they too, like the Christians were bitterly condemned by Orthodox Jews because of their lack of solidarity.

-

The Christianisation of the Roman state was a drawn-out affair that ocurred because their was *consistant* support from the majority of the Roman elite.

That support was based largely on political calculations.

I.



The original Christian movement as an apolitical, pacifist movement refused to join in the revolt of 70AD


Josephus who wrote the definitive history of the Jewish revolt of 70AD, makes no mention of xtians ( except for the one paragraph which is a later interpolation )
He does write about John the baptist
The earliest official mention of xtianity is Pliny the younger in 114AD, where he decrees that they may be tolerated

The judaism of 70AD is remarkably similar to islam
religious fanatics etc

Celsus, Galen, and Porphyry mention xtianity as the religion of the underclass, - sailors, slaves, women etc

At the time of Constantine, xtianity was 4% of the roman empire
And Constantine himself was of lowly origins - son of a shepherd
The Roman senate was till a very late date a pagan stronghold

And finally the point I am trying to make is that any religion derived from the old testament has a very strong tendency to intolerance, without any Roman input

Author: Johann [ 21 Mar 2008 05:47 am ]
Post subject:

GS

- There is exclusivity in the Jewish Tanakh (what Christians call the 'old testament').

But if Judaism really was like Islam, they would have conquered the entire Middle East and kept going.

Christianity's most important divergence from Judaism didnt start until Constantine mixed a basically Jewish sect with Roman Imperialism.

Mohammed's model for expansion, dhimmitude, and combining religion with politics was not Jewish, but Roman. Mohammed's borrowings from Judaism were mostly in the realm of ritual, prayer, diet, etc.

- Until about 100-150 AD Christians were not commonly distinguished from Jews, Christianity being treated as a Jewish sect. But the emerging sense of distinction came very much as a result of the failure of the revolt - those Jews who refused to support the uprising were shunned. Josephus was a highly Hellenised, far more Roman than Jewish in his perspective.

- You are correct that the old Senatorial families, based around the city of Rome were the ones who slowed the transition from Constantine to Theodosius. However by that point the very definition of 'elite' had fundamentally changed

a) the elite were increasingly Greek and centred around Constantinople, not Latin around Rome.

b) In Casear's time the army emerged as a power base, but only men from the hereditary patrician families could command as officers. By 235 when Maximinus the Thracian becomes Emperor that bar no longer existed. The real elite were the families of the equestrian order (knights), the bureaucracy, etc.

c) the Senate was powerless - Diocletian (who preceded Constantine but had launched the most comprehensive suppression of christians in Roman history) in 293 had formalised the empire and ended the fiction of republic.

The story of Rome's Christianisation is really the story of the Christianisation of the Greeks, both diasporas within the Empire. The Jewish-Greek fascination went both ways. Just as many Jews were Hellenised, many Greeks were Judaised, and later Christianised.

Author: ramana [ 21 Mar 2008 02:53 pm ]
Post subject:

So what exactly is at the core of the arguments between GS and Joahnn? Sorry I dont have the time to go thru all the posts but there seems to be an exchange of facts without a thesis. I think the forum would appreciate what is the thesis of the two series of psots. Thanks, ramana

Author: G Subramaniam [ 22 Mar 2008 02:31 am ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
So what exactly is at the core of the arguments between GS and Joahnn? Sorry I dont have the time to go thru all the posts but there seems to be an exchange of facts without a thesis. I think the forum would appreciate what is the thesis of the two series of psots. Thanks, ramana


1. Johann's view is that the intolerance of xtianity is a result of Constantine's input at the Nicean creed
My view is that any religion derived from the old testament is inherently intolerant, case in point, in 304 AD, before Constantine, St.Gregorius converted the king of Armenia and pronto the local hindu temple was demolished

2. The next issue is that Johann dates xtianity to before the first jewish war of 70AD, my take is that Josephus the noted historian, died 95 AD, wrote in detail about every jewish sect in palestine. Josephus mentions in detail, John the baptist but has no mention of JC, nazereth or xtians

3. The next issue is Johann places the xtians inside the Roman elite
whereas I pointed out that the Roman senators were pagan till the end
Also the military caste were followers of Mithra.
Galen, Celsus and Porphry-( Roman critics of xtianity ), describe xtianity as the religion of the underclass,superstitious slaves, hysterical women
and note the frequent changes in the gospel which only an illiterate following could swallow. Emperor Julian the apostate 360AD, attempted to kick xtianity out of the elites and back onto the rabble by banning them from teaching anything except the gospels ( madrasa ) and banning the teaching of the greek and roman classics in xtian schools

4. What we can agree on is this
The Nicean creed was heavily influenced by Constantine for political purposes and Constantine was still a Mithraist

Archeology shows that most of early xtianity was gnostic
wherein JC had no earthly existence whatsoever

Author: ramana [ 22 Mar 2008 03:53 am ]
Post subject:

G Subramaniam wrote:
ramana wrote:
So what exactly is at the core of the arguments between GS and Joahnn? Sorry I dont have the time to go thru all the posts but there seems to be an exchange of facts without a thesis. I think the forum would appreciate what is the thesis of the two series of psots. Thanks, ramana


1. Johann's view is that the intolerance of xtianity is a result of Constantine's input at the Nicean creed
My view is that any religion derived from the old testament is inherently intolerant, case in point, in 304 AD, before Constantine, St.Gregorius converted the king of Armenia and pronto the local hindu temple was demolished

2. The next issue is that Johann dates xtianity to before the first jewish war of 70AD, my take is that Josephus the noted historian, died 95 AD, wrote in detail about every jewish sect in palestine. Josephus mentions in detail, John the baptist but has no mention of JC, nazereth or xtians

3. The next issue is Johann places the xtians inside the Roman elite
whereas I pointed out that the Roman senators were pagan till the end
Also the military caste were followers of Mithra.
Galen, Celsus and Porphry-( Roman critics of xtianity ), describe xtianity as the religion of the underclass,superstitious slaves, hysterical women
and note the frequent changes in the gospel which only an illiterate following could swallow. Emperor Julian the apostate 360AD, attempted to kick xtianity out of the elites and back onto the rabble by banning them from teaching anything except the gospels ( madrasa ) and banning the teaching of the greek and roman classics in xtian schools

4. What we can agree on is this
The Nicean creed was heavily influenced by Constantine for political purposes and Constantine was still a Mithraist

Archeology shows that most of early xtianity was gnostic
wherein JC had no earthly existence whatsoever


Never mind Johann. Can you back up each of your points with quotes from the cited folks?
Thanks, ramana

Author: G Subramaniam [ 22 Mar 2008 03:54 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
G Subramaniam wrote:
ramana wrote:
So what exactly is at the core of the arguments between GS and Joahnn? Sorry I dont have the time to go thru all the posts but there seems to be an exchange of facts without a thesis. I think the forum would appreciate what is the thesis of the two series of psots. Thanks, ramana


1. Johann's view is that the intolerance of xtianity is a result of Constantine's input at the Nicean creed
My view is that any religion derived from the old testament is inherently intolerant, case in point, in 304 AD, before Constantine, St.Gregorius converted the king of Armenia and pronto the local hindu temple was demolished

2. The next issue is that Johann dates xtianity to before the first jewish war of 70AD, my take is that Josephus the noted historian, died 95 AD, wrote in detail about every jewish sect in palestine. Josephus mentions in detail, John the baptist but has no mention of JC, nazereth or xtians

3. The next issue is Johann places the xtians inside the Roman elite
whereas I pointed out that the Roman senators were pagan till the end
Also the military caste were followers of Mithra.
Galen, Celsus and Porphry-( Roman critics of xtianity ), describe xtianity as the religion of the underclass,superstitious slaves, hysterical women
and note the frequent changes in the gospel which only an illiterate following could swallow. Emperor Julian the apostate 360AD, attempted to kick xtianity out of the elites and back onto the rabble by banning them from teaching anything except the gospels ( madrasa ) and banning the teaching of the greek and roman classics in xtian schools

4. What we can agree on is this
The Nicean creed was heavily influenced by Constantine for political purposes and Constantine was still a Mithraist

Archeology shows that most of early xtianity was gnostic
wherein JC had no earthly existence whatsoever


Never mind Johann. Can you back up each of your points with quotes from the cited folks?
Thanks, ramana


My personal anti-xtianity website
http://www.jesus-and-bible-debunked.freewebsitehosting.com/

also visit hamsa.org for online books by sita ram goel

Author: Stan_Savljevic [ 22 Mar 2008 08:45 pm ]
Post subject:

I think this one is important and has to be retained for posterity, not to be lost.

A few days back, Beeb had come up with this.
The Conquistadors raped and pillaged America and took the women as slaves, and loads of them.

Here is the original paper from the source. Also look at other papers from here for more studies on population genetics of "Hispanic" communities.

Author: sanjaychoudhry [ 22 Mar 2008 09:09 pm ]
Post subject:

Quote:


http://www.jesusneverexisted.com is also good.

Author: Sanjay M [ 22 Mar 2008 09:31 pm ]
Post subject:

Stan_Savljevic wrote:
I think this one is important and has to be retained for posterity, not to be lost.

A few days back, Beeb had come up with this.
The Conquistadors raped and pillaged America and took the women as slaves, and loads of them.

Here is the original paper from the source. Also look at other papers from here for more studies on population genetics of "Hispanic" communities.


That's why I think it's rational for Indians to support socialist movements in Latin America, as they are opposed to European-aligned forces on their continent, which owe their origin to colonialism

The Brzezinski types only worry about large Eurasian powers coming together to oppose the West (ie. Russia, China, India), but I think India could create viable alliances with Latin American countries, as they too are powers in their own right.

Indian ingenuity coupled with Latin American natural resources could achieve a lot.

Author: G Subramaniam [ 23 Mar 2008 03:57 pm ]
Post subject:

sanjaychoudhry wrote:


This site shows idols of JC with the face of Constantine

Author: Tilak [ 23 Mar 2008 04:25 pm ]
Post subject:

Bhai log..

How justified is the topic being discussed above ?, personally I am not interested if XYZ existed or not.. and frankly it's not my business. "We" have more than a plateful, and should worry about the mortal "believers" and how they they use XYZ's name to achieve their narrow "less than divine" goals, which might/could affect me..

2 Cents..

Author: ramana [ 23 Mar 2008 04:28 pm ]
Post subject:

Folks I do not want to turn this into a bash other religions thread. So no more religious refs.

Thanks, ramana

Author: shiv [ 24 Mar 2008 04:09 am ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
Folks I do not want to turn this into a bash other religions thread. So no more religious refs.

Thanks, ramana

Ramana I see your viewpoint here and concur fully.

But since this is the non western world-view thread I must make a point about religions in general. I now realize many people in the world have a completely secular and completely non-theist viewpoint from which they are able to see all the problems that have come into being (and continue to be created) by religions.

It is increasingly beginning to appear to me that if you are a white American of Christian ancestry living in the US, or a white European of Christian ancestry living somewhere in Europe and you choose to be critical of Christianity - you are given space to be critical as having an atheist viewpoint. You can be similarly critical of Islam (or any other religion) as an atheist although you are likely to be dubbed an Islamophobe by the US/European equivalents of "misguided seculars"

For Indians the situation becomes more complex. We come from a social background in which you can be secular or atheist, but you are not allowed to be critical of religion because of a very Indian tendency to hide your true thoughts and not say certain things for fear of hurting someone's sentiment. The Indian is less likely to be "up front" about his thoughts and more likely to have his sensitivities offended by the discussion of religion. There is a very Indian tendency to live and believe that every religion must be given respect because of a pluralist Sanatan Dharmic belief that all gods are equal,But this does not allow any space for people who do not believe in religion or god.

This then sets up a very unequal situation in debate because religion is allowed to say anything, while anyone who sees any fault in religion is unable to have a say for fear of upsetting some raving religionist.

I admit that debate in this regard is complicated by the worry that criticism of a religion is always at the expense of one, while trying to prove that the other is correct.(My god is bigger) Debates between religionists have always been this way. And the avoidance of the nastiness of such a debate makes us balk at the idea of discussing religion

But a debate between those who are secular and atheist on the one hand and a religionist on the other hand will not give religion a chance to escape the criticism it deserves in being responsible for a lot of the flaws set up by history as well as a lot of geopolitical strife today.

Author: Keshav [ 24 Mar 2008 05:35 am ]
Post subject:

shiv wrote:
But a debate between those who are secular and atheist on the one hand and a religionist on the other hand will not give religion a chance to escape the criticism it deserves in being responsible for a lot of the flaws set up by history as well as a lot of geopolitical strife today.


Maybe we should talk about how Sanatana Dharma relates to secularism. My own take is that secularism is primarily a Western concept against the Church in an attempt to remove the Church from government because religion was heavily part of the state.

... but if religion never played that big a role in government, what's the need for secularism (that is, to actively attempt to separate them)?

"Hinduism", for example, was far ahead of its time in terms of science and religion because it never stifled the former, and it dealt with criticism with debate akin to any other philosophy (thus removing the falsity that society gives a free pass to religion, according to atheists. Charvaka was dealt with in the same manner, I believe, and not violently).

Also, because dharma is primarily a "secular" idea based on principles (and not particular laws or commandments) and not hampered by trivial laws designed only to distinguish oneself from another, it is functional. The ambiguity of ideas such as compassion, justice, etc. coupled with karma seemed to work well to create order.

Honestly, I think much of the rigidity in caste came about because of the Islamic invasion and British occupation to stop converts, but I think its silly to say it started with Shankaracharya. Much of the reason we advanced was due to the peace brought about by the Mauryas (excepting Kalinga, of course) and later on, the Guptas. Even political upheaval afterwards didn't stop ingenuity, but it did isolate ideas that may have been closer had there been an active central power and information city. The idea flow would have been greater had people from different parts of India congregated in one place.

Author: Raju [ 24 Mar 2008 07:51 am ]
Post subject:

M. J. AKBAR
23 MARCH 2008

Quote:

Bush has financed this colossal misadventure with IOUs on history and debt from the world economy, setting off a sinful (as opposed to virtuous) cycle.

Debt and war have destroyed perpetrator and victim alike in the past. They are doing so again. Bush's wars cost $33.8 billion in 2002; they have ballooned to $171 billion by 2007. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel for Economics, has estimated that the cost of the Bush wars could cross three trillion dollars by 2017, that is, in another ten years. Go figure, as they say in America. Where has the money come from? Debt.

Debt has helped weaken the dollar. Producers who sell oil in dollars, seeking to keep their income constant in real terms, and oil companies who profit in whichever direction the wheel spins, have kept raising the price of oil. A spiral effect has driven prices into the stratosphere. Oil was $23 a barrel when the Iraq war began; it is over $110 now. The pressure of prices has induced an impassioned chorus for alternative energy. Bush decided to subsidise the production of ethanol to produce this alternative energy.

American farmers switched from food-for-the-stomach to crops-for-cash. There is now a critical shortage of wheat and rice around the world. The temptation of cash and higher prices impact on the pattern of agriculture. Cash crops replace staple crops. The prices of basic edibles join the spiral. India is now on the cusp of inflationary pressures that could go ballistic, even as the government has no solution in mind except a series of sops that will be throwing a bucket of water into a desert. Prices of basic food and oil in the Indian bazaar are rising at a dramatic pace. For the poor, this is a kick where it hurts most, in the stomach. Their pain will be reflected in the vote in the next general elections.

This too is globalisation, a chain of sequence and consequence that is linked across the world.
The managers of 'globalisation', a vast and varied array of vested interests that may not necessarily be in harmony on some issues but always closes rank to protect its core interest, take care to cohere globalisation to good news. It is a brand that needs protection in order to get promotion. Bad news, even when it becomes a worldwide epidemic from a single virus, is never called globalisation. No one uses the term when the New York Stock Exchange sneezes and Mumbai catches a cold. This would tarnish the image of globalisation as the panacea in a post-Marxist age, a libertarian answer to socialism's impenetrable dogma. Very few — although Stiglitz is famously among the few — wonder about the tipping point, when the liberty of this philosophy morphs into license into virtually printing money.

One reason — of course, not the only one — why share markets today are as flat as the globalised world is because the meaning of capital has changed, shifting in the process the original goalposts of capitalism. Capital was the means necessary for the production of goods and services that could be sold for a profit, creating jobs and higher-standard lifestyles. Profit, of course, has always been an elastic word, stretching as far as the market will bear. Hence, marketing became a tool by which a need was enhanced into an illusion in order to raise prices and maximise profits.

Thus soap, a need for the elimination of dirt, was elevated into a magic wand that would make you into a filmstar. Perfume is no longer a discreet veil over body odour, but a sex accessory. A handbag is no longer a convenience; it is a photograph of your bank statement. A watch no longer merely tells the time; it is a status symbol. But all this is acceptable because, at the core, there is a product, created out of capital.

But we have now moved into share markets and a world economy where there is illusion without a base, and value is attached to a fiction; and when the principal purpose of money is not to add to the quantum of goods and services but merely to make more paper or plastic money. The Sensex keeps rising in increasingly thin air, crossing peaks that are not made of rock but are arbitrary niches in the financial ozone layer. Even in the best of times, turbulence in the American economy, by far the most powerful, would have sent shudders. But connectivity now honed to marginal shifts in value, a sub-prime crisis in America wipes out bank profits in India. There is little insulation.

Author: pandey [ 24 Mar 2008 03:27 pm ]
Post subject:

**admin deletion**
see note by ramana above

Author: shiv [ 24 Mar 2008 03:41 pm ]
Post subject:

[quote="logicnote"][/quote]

The name logic note is not acceptable as per forum guidelines. Please read them. I have changed your name to pandey.

Author: ramana [ 01 Apr 2008 04:53 am ]
Post subject:

What is the origin of the double headed eagle of the Tsars, the Kaisers and other imperial powers in the West? I read that the Tsars picked it up from the Byzantium after it fell to the Turks.

In India that kind of double headed bird is called ganda berunda pakshi.

Here is a Hoyasala symbol

Image

Author: Pulikeshi [ 01 Apr 2008 06:01 am ]
Post subject:

Hittite use of Ganda Berunda

I've heard that the origin of this myth is from the Vishnu Purana if not earlier. Many ancient cultures have used some version of this symbol. The rulers of Vijaynagar Kingdom, Hoysala, Kadamba, etc in India/Karnataka included.

Also remember seeing the depiction of a two headed bird lifting four-five elephants with its beaks and talons - but dont remember the temple now.

Currently, the symbol is used by Karnataka Government.

PS: There is some claim that the single eagle rendered during Roman times and current used by the U.S. can be traced back to this symbol. But, it is hard to substantiate these claims with the current evidence at hand.

Author: Murugan [ 01 Apr 2008 06:06 am ]
Post subject:

ramana:

an interesting coin with double headed bird from probably karnataka region, appeared at an auction in Ahmedabad last month:

Vijaynagar, ½ Pagoda, Gandabarunda

also look at this

http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/prani/ganda.htm

Author: JwalaMukhi [ 01 Apr 2008 08:38 am ]
Post subject:

The Gandaberunda form is quite ancient and is associated with Narasimha. The Yadagirigutta Laxmi Narasimha temple also associated with this form. Question for gurus to shed light on this? Gandaberunda is a derivative of Garuda form. What about the etymology of this word? (Ganda has several meanings in samskrit and one of it refers to face.)

http://www.yadagirigutta.in/history_temple.htm

Quote:
Sri Yada Maharshi son of Sri Rushyashrunga Maharshi with the Blessings of Anjaneya Swamy had performed great penance for Lord Narasimha Swamy (an incarnation of Lord Vishnu) in a cave on the hill currently known as Yadagirigutta. Pleased with his deep devotion, Lord Narasimha appeared before him in five different forms as Sri Jwala Narsimha, Sri Yogananda Narasimha, Sri Ugra Narasimha, Sri Gandaberunda Narasimha, and Sri Laksmi Narasimha.

Quote:
It is believed that the Lord Initially appeared as Jwala Narasimha Swamy (Lord as a flame). Yada Maharishi was unable to face the intensity of this form of appearance. Later the Lord appeared in a peaceful form as Yoga Narasimha (Lord in a Yogic Padmasana posture with open palms on the knees). Not satisfied with the Lord appearing alone, Yada Maharshi sought to see him with his consort, so he is said to have appeared with Lakshmi on his lap', known as Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy.


Interestingly, another form "Makara", which is composed of attributes of seven(?) different animals "Tusk of elephant, Mouth of crocodile, Talons of eagle, torso of lion, (do not remember rest)" also flanks the Ugra Narasimha over the mantapa dwara, in the famous Belur temple (makaratorana). See image link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Belur2_retouched.jpg

Author: mayurav [ 01 Apr 2008 02:32 pm ]
Post subject: Ulan bator Garuda

The Garuda is widely used in Mongolia. I didn't know that Garuda is an important Buddhist symbol !?!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulan_bator#Symbols

[quote]The official symbol of Ulan Bator is the garuá¸

Author: mayurav [ 01 Apr 2008 02:50 pm ]
Post subject: Ganda Berunda

The Karnataka emblem also has the Sharabha - half elephant, half man.

Image


Also Albanian coat of arms has a symbol very similar to Ganda Berunda

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Alba ... emblem.svg

Author: ramana [ 01 Apr 2008 06:07 pm ]
Post subject:

Here is google link on Double Headed Eagle

Looks like Byzantium adopted it and made it legitimate European symbol which got adopted by anyone caliming to be successors of the Roman Emperors!

The freemasons also adopted it and now its a Non Indian symbol! But what does the double headed eagle mean to Byzantium? Did they get the idea from Alexander's time as an imperial symbol?

Author: Acharya [ 01 Apr 2008 06:08 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
Here is google link on Double Headed Eagle

Double headed eagle is different from Gunda Berunda bird.

Image

Author: gashish [ 04 Apr 2008 01:27 am ]
Post subject:

continuing discussion from Tech Forum started by this BBC survey:

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/apr/03survey.htm


rachel wrote:
India's image would be much more positive if India was not so closely associated with terrorism. In Canada, Sikh Khlaistan terrorists blew up AI jet, so the word 'India' is associated with turban wearing people who blow up planes! In UK and Australia too, with these Muslim Indian doctors being implicated in terrorist plots, India's image takes a beating.

I have spoken to people in States who think India is a Muslim nation, they dont even know it is majority Hindu!




Once on hearing my rather harsh criticism of pakistan, one of my american collegues innocently asked:"Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Hindi a sub-sect of islam like shia and sunni?" :roll:

frankly..i didnt even roll-eyes..i was just dumbfounded, because I considered him one of those better educated and smart americans. This guy was a ex-navy fighter pilot...had been on bombing missions to iraq during desert storm! I can only imagine how ignorant average joe who has never been outside States can be!


Quote:
The World Service survey, released on Wednesday, also shows that the views about India are divided in Spain-- 35 per cent positive and 31 per cent negative; and on the whole lean towards being negative in Central America with 33 per cent negative, 21 per cent positive.


this attitude has seeped into Latin America from their civilisational masters.

Brazilians sometimes refer to their country as Belindia-to refer that their country is rich like Belgium in South and poor like India in North. Most of of this can be attributed to lack of exposure to Indian culture and our current progress. During my interactions with Brazilians, I used to find them totally perplexed to see me-a brown-skinned guy who doesn't speak either Portuguese or Espanol-lecturing on circuit design. They just didn't seem to grapple the fact a poor country like India can produce quality engineers and become a IT powerhouse.

Spain and its ba$tard civilisational offshoots in Americas in not worth caring for.

But, Brazil,IMO, is a heavyweight and so perceptions here has to be changed. And they can be. Brazil is huge country with developing economy-their market, problems and needs are very similar to us. Brazil is not racist in traditional european sense. 45% of the population is non-white called Mulatos(mule-like, mixed breed-a derogatory term not used officially now). An Indian fluent in Portuguese can pass of as Brazilian easily. Business relations in IT,Pharma,agriculture and automobiles are potential sectors for co-operation. TATA has already taken up the lead in auto sector by starting a joint venture with Marcopolo to manufacture buses. Pharma and IT Cos have started to trickle in;inshallah in few more years the place shall be swarmed by IT warriors from India and forever change perception of India among Brazilians.

When it comes to culture they borrow everything from Europe or America;I see huge market for Yoga and Bollywood. In fact, lots of Brazilian women that show off in dental floss bikinis on Rio's beaches have potential to become item song dancers in our movies.. :wink:

Author: Acharya [ 04 Apr 2008 01:38 am ]
Post subject:

gashish wrote:


Once on hearing my rather harsh criticism of pakistan, one of my american collegues innocently asked:"Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Hindi a sub-sect of islam like shia and sunni?" :roll:

frankly..i didnt even roll-eyes..i was just dumbfounded, Pharma and IT Cos have started to trickle in;inshallah in few more years the place shall be swarmed by IT warriors from India and forever change perception of India among Brazilians.


Stop using words highlighted and you would be fine being identified with muslim/Pakis.

I have talked to Christian fundamentalists and they have similar views.
But if they are educated and involved in conversion then they would know who we are.

Now there is another category of people who are trying to not acknowledge Hindus at all deliberately even if they know of Hindus. Some of them think Hindus are sympathetic to Muslims and hence should be called Muslims. One of the person asked me how muslims were in India and the difference between Hindus and Pakis.

Author: Murugan [ 04 Apr 2008 05:45 am ]
Post subject:

Garuda was a symbol of mighty gupta kings too:

Image

Image

Chandragupta - II Kshatrapa Type
Denomination: Drachma
Metal : Silver
Weight : 2.3 g

Reverse : Shows stylized Garuda (first image) with brahmi legend around

Obverse : Portrait of Chandragupta-II
Date : Saka 321 (in Brahmi) (AD 399) behind the hairs of the kings portrait

Chandragupta-II minted this coin after defeating kshatrapa Rudrasimha by AD 395. In this coin of AD 399 Chandragupta-II adopted the type and era of the conquered.

(the above coin is from your's truly's collection)

Image

Gold Heavy Dinar of Skandagupta (8.x gram)

on the left side of the image a garuda standard is visible (Garuda sitting on a pillar in front of King Skandaguta standing)


Skanda is written in Brahmi under the left arm of the king

Author: Murugan [ 04 Apr 2008 06:04 am ]
Post subject:

btw,
garuda dhvaja (a flagstaff/flag pillar or sthambha with Garuda) is very old in indian tradition.

Purana, mythology mentiones garuda dhvaja as lord Vishnu's symbol.

mangalam pundarikaksha, mangalam garuda dhvaja....

Author: Murugan [ 04 Apr 2008 03:45 pm ]
Post subject:

The most beautiful and national bird of India is close to every Hindus since ages:

here is one beautiful example depiected on one of the skandagupta drachma:

Image

with couplet written in Brahmi around the peacock:

Vijitavanir avanipati jayati dim skandagupto' yam

arthat:

This Skandagupta, having conquered the world, [as] world-lord, wins heaven

(silver coins of all gupta emperors are very scarce and very rare in better condition, though gold coins are profusely available and they are splendid!!! No numismatic art of that period can match their execution. they are innovative and versatile)

Author: Murugan [ 04 Apr 2008 04:02 pm ]
Post subject:

Kumargupta-I Lion Slayer Type :twisted:

Gold Dinar (In gupta time this denomination was known as Suvarna)

Image

Obverse :King shooting lion which is falling backward

Kumargupto yudhi sinhavikkramah

arthat=

Kumargupta, who has the valour of a lion in battle :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:


Reverse: Goddess Ambika-Lakshmi(!) seated on a lion, holding fillet and lotus

There are many varieties of Gupta emperors killing attacking lion, tiger, rhino either standing or riding a horse or elephant

Author: Murugan [ 04 Apr 2008 04:27 pm ]
Post subject:

Samudragupta, Asvamedha Type

A depiction of the "Asvamedha," or horse sacrifice, marking a successful military campaign.


Gold Stater (also, Suvarna or Dinar)
approx 7 grams

Image


Probably, the First example of abbreviation used on Indian Coin : Brahmi Si under the horse's belly. Si for Samudragupta.

Couplet:

Rajadhirajah prithvivijitva divam jayatya hrtvajimedhah

arthat:

The king of kings, having conquered the earth, wins heaven, being the Restorer of Asvamedha

Rev:
The queen standing left, holding chouri and cloth; filleted suchi to left.

Author: ramana [ 04 Apr 2008 05:23 pm ]
Post subject:

Thanks for all the posts about ancient coins but how is it relevant to this thread? Please exercise some restarint. Thanks, ramana

I admit I asked about the possible links about the Hoysala symbols and the regnal symbols of the Western European kings. That has been answered and does not mean open season to post gifs of coins in this thread unless you can show some linkage of those coins to Western Europe. Or what world view they represent.

And congrats on acquiring that Gupta coin!

Author: Paul [ 04 Apr 2008 05:46 pm ]
Post subject:

Acharya wrote:
gashish wrote:


Once on hearing my rather harsh criticism of pakistan, one of my american collegues innocently asked:"Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Hindi a sub-sect of islam like shia and sunni?" :roll:

frankly..i didnt even roll-eyes..i was just dumbfounded, Pharma and IT Cos have started to trickle in;inshallah in few more years the place shall be swarmed by IT warriors from India and forever change perception of India among Brazilians.


Stop using words highlighted and you would be fine being identified with muslim/Pakis.

I have talked to Christian fundamentalists and they have similar views.
But if they are educated and involved in conversion then they would know who we are.

Now there is another category of people who are trying to not acknowledge Hindus at all deliberately even if they know of Hindus. Some of them think Hindus are sympathetic to Muslims and hence should be called Muslims. One of the person asked me how muslims were in India and the difference between Hindus and Pakis.



If this happens they should be reminded of the debt they owe to the Muslims

Quote:
One notable example of such an alliance was Suleyman's outward support of Lutherans fighting the Pope in the Holy Roman Empire. Suleyman considered the Protestant rejection of icons and papal authority to be closer to Muslim belief than either Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, and his support of Protestantism was one of his key policies in Europe. By encouraging the disunity of Christianity, the Ottomans hoped to decrease the chances of Christian Europe uniting in a Crusade against the Muslim Ottomans. It has been suggested that Ottoman pressure played a decisive role in persuading the Habsburgs to grant several concessions to the Protestants. The Ottoman Empire was thus vital to maintaining the European balance of power in the 16th century.


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

Author: ramana [ 04 Apr 2008 05:51 pm ]
Post subject:

Wiki Link on Caroll Quigley

Please read his lectures to get an idea of what makes the Russians tick according to Quigley.

Author: Acharya [ 04 Apr 2008 05:55 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
Wiki Link on Caroll Quigley

Please read his lectures to get an idea of what makes the Russians tick according to Quigley.


Quote:
I want to begin, not
by going back to Russia's childhood or to the womb, but to Russia's
parents. Russia has two parents, just like most of us.
lye might say that the mother of Russia was the Byzantine civilization,
the great civilization of the Roman Empire ~n the East,
centered around the Capital City of Byzantium. You will recall that
the Western Empire ceased to exist about 476 A. D., but the Eastern
Empire continued for almost another thousand years~ until 1453. During
that thousand-year period of Byzantins history, it adopted certain

characteristics which are not found in the V~estern Empire and certainly
not found in western culture. It is that Byzantine empire
which is the mother of Russia.
But Russia's father was the Vikings, In Russian history they
are generally known as the Varangians. Tl~at is to say, about the
year 800 or so, the Northmen, whom we know as the Vikings, were
spreading out from Norway and Sweden in every direction. You will
recall perhaps that they are supposed to have come out from this
area to Iceland, through Greenland, even to North America. They
established Normandy in 911. They invaded England under Canute.
Eventually they came down and established the great kingdom of
Sicily about the year 1050 or so and a little later they established
the Norman kingdom of Syria.

Author: Murugan [ 06 Apr 2008 03:50 am ]
Post subject:

Ramana:

I posted first three images showing use of Garuda standard in non-western India, which i am afraid was part of the discussion. Use of Garuda/Eagle as a regnal symbol/standard/emblem is found with many dynasties. But the use of Garuda emblem is ancient to India and the oldest general example is found on gupta coins/arts.

This is also true with the symbol of elephant - which was adopted by Indo-greek/Indo Bactrian and roman emperors. Which they profusely used on their coins. (will not post any image till i establish the imporatance of numismatics in understanding the Socio-Economical conditions, art, monetary system and technolgy which will help in having some worldview!).

the other three images i shared was for the sheer joy one will derive looking at non-western numismatic art and non-western imagination! :-?
History is a study of our past which and coins contributed a great deal to it. World-views are the impressions of the past !?!

It may be pertinent to point out that our ancient Indian script Brahmi was deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837 AD on the basis of study of Indo-Greek bilingual coins, the same way the Egyptian hieroglyphic script was analysed by French scholars after studying the multilingual inscription found on Rosetta stone.

You might be aware that roman currency (especially gold coins) were legally accepted in India. We still find many hoards in Bharuch (broach or barygaza and in Madurai) containing roman gold coins which were slashed (a long gash across the bust of roman king on the coins) in the middle as a test mark and as approval. Large hoards of gold roman Coins found in madura establishes the fact that south india was having a very strong link with Romans. These coins dates back to 2nd century BC to 5th Century AD

As far as art is concerned general perception is everything beautiful and generally accepted are considered western/greek/roman etc and cruder examples are from east especially from india. Those extra three images were just a small effort to nullify such belief.

Coins or posting coin images here was not for fun, they are, most of the time, only source of establishing and ascertaining historical facts! A piece of History. Sometimes they help confirm non-wesern worldview in Indian context, they will continue to be in future :)

if the above justifies relationship with the thread subject, i will try to share few more - only if reference is required.

neways, thanx!

Author: Shwetank [ 06 Apr 2008 03:24 pm ]
Post subject:

Murugan, what's your view on the assertion that coins and the art of making them were introduced for the first time in Indian region by the Greeks?

Author: Murugan [ 07 Apr 2008 06:22 am ]
Post subject:

Shwetank:

here also the western historians have goofed up.
they always give example of lydia, according these historians the first coins of world were minted in lydia. ugly metal pieces with some obscure mark on it without any standard weight.

As far as India is concerned It has been established beyound doubt that the monetary system and coinage is typically Indian.

there have been references of Nishka, Karshpana and pana currency in vedic/upanishadic literature, this is the earlier reference.

Punch Marked Coins (PMC)

India developed some of the world's earliest coins sometime around 600BC. The coins were made by taking a flat, though often irregularly shaped, piece of silver, cutting it to the proper weight, then applying a series of punches to the front of it, indicating where and when it was made.

The punches covered a wide variety of symbols. As the coin circulated, additional punches were sometimes put on the back, verifying the weight and fineness of the coin. The coin, known as the Punchmarked Karshapana, continued to be issued until about the second century BC. Today the coin is one of the least expensive early coins available, and represents one of the earliest approaches to the development of coinage.

The greek came by the river indus around 325 bc.

Earliest punchmarked coins is at least 600 bc of gandhara janapada which are available with reputed seller at a price between Rs. 600-1500 per piece today. they are still found in excavation sites in afghanistan and pakisatan regions.

Here is a link, which shows few of the earliest punch marked coins - one is Shatamana - silver bent bar of Gandhara Janapada. there are other interesting PMC images of other janpadas and mahajanpadas. the bent bars are typical. a long bar of certain weight 11.10 to 11.40 gram having two similar images punch on either sides and sometimes small marks in the middle of the coin.

http://www.rbi.org.in/currency/museum/c-ancient.html

In nutshell, to keep the western historian happy - indian coinage is as old as (i strongly believe it to be older than) western coinage. moreover indian coinage has standard weight, symbols and Bankers' marks on reverse. proves that there were certifying agencies who authenticated the metal and weightage.

You will also notice a common symbol - sun with rays - on most of the different janpada/mahajanpada and city state coins.

Indian coinage is Unique, Older and Precise compared to oblong metal pieces of lydia, IMHO.

Greeks started minting their coins with image of the ruler and that was probably new to india. Kushana kings started minting coins with images of rulers but they are totally different from the greek coins! metal, execution and imagination.

No doubt, greeks have used better devices and imagination in their coins and they are really beautiful!

Author: ramana [ 25 Apr 2008 10:21 pm ]
Post subject:

From Rajiv Malhotra

LINK

Quote:

III. Cognitive Scientist Versus Yogi/Meditator:

The laboratory measurement of higher states of consciousness achieved by advanced yogis and meditators is at the cutting edge of transpersonal and humanistic psychology, mental health, neuroscience, and phenomenology. And some Indic theoretical models are at the center of the philosophy of quantum physics based emerging worldviews. But many ancient Hindu-Buddhist inner science discoveries are being mis-appropriated and/or plagiarized:


'Lucid Dreaming' is the western name for Indo-Tibetan nidra yoga, and Stanford's Stephen LaBerge is nowadays the acknowledged discoverer.
'Mindfulness Meditation' is Jon-Kabat Zinn's trademarked repackaging of vipassna.
Herb Benson repackaged TM into his 'Relaxation Response' and now runs a multimillion dollar business based at Harvard, claiming these as his discoveries. Numerous spin-offs in mainstream stress management and management consulting theories came from this source.
Rupert Sheldrake recently 'came out' in an interview acknowledging that his famous theory known as 'Morphogenic Resonance' was developed while researching in India's ashrams.
Ken Wilbur started out very explicitly as an interpreter of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy for the benefit of psychologists, but now places himself as the discoverer on a higher pedestal.
Esalen Institute appropriated J. Krishnamurti and numerous other Indic thinkers into what its contemporary followers regard as it own 'New Worldview'.
Thomas Berry, Brother Keating (successor to Bede Griffiths), and others have constructed the New Liberal Christianity, using Indic appropriations. Jewish scholars have likewise constructed the 'non-dualistic Kabala' based on Vedanta.

This is only part of a long list: the core of the emerging 'western' worldview and cosmology involving physics, cognitive science, and biology is being rapidly built upon repackaged Indic knowledge, but too frequently the source is being erased and over time. Yogis and meditators, who should be regarded as co-discoverers, usually remain anonymous 'laboratory subjects' and native informants.

Does this remind us of the way America is said to have been 'discovered' in 1492, as though the millions of Native Americans who lived here for thousands of years did not matter? It became a bona fide discovery only when Europeans registered it as such. Because land owned by the natives had not been recorded in European registration systems, their ownership was declared illegitimate. Much of the Renaissance and Enlightenment of Europe was based on the appropriation of Indic and Chinese civilizations, and yet these civilizations were demonized to justify colonialism.[4]

...
[4] See for example J.J. Clark, "Oriental Enlightenment"



And partial book review of Oriental Enlightenment at amazon.com

Quote:
Clarke argues, along with other scholars whom he cites, that in the West the Renaissance and the Reformation ushered in a philosophical restlessness and uncertainty which made Europeans be more inquisitive and open to other ways of thinking. This uncertainty was generated from within European culture, whereas in Asia it was only when Western technology and power irrupted into the area that the interest of Asians in European culture began, in response to a challenge from outside rather than from within their own culture. Clarke acknowledges this interest, but devotes only a small part of the book to the impact of Western thought on Asia.

He documents how in the 18th century the philosophes set up their rosy view of Confucian China in opposition to the religious and social criticisms they made of their own society; how, when this interest faded, it was replaced in the 19th century by the interest of the Romantics in Indian thought. We learn of Anquetil Duperron (1723 to 1805) who first translated the Upanishads (into French) and of William Jones (1746 to 1794), who showed that most European languages have an affinity with Sanskrit, which suggested that many of the peoples of Europe came originally from Asia. German nationalists, resenting French cultural hegemony, preferred the idea that their culture was rooted in the Aryan languages (and later, by a perversion of the word, in the Aryan race). Philosophically also, the most profound impact of Indian thought was on a line of German philosophers: Hegel, Schelling, Schlegel and Schopenhauer saw an affinity between the monism of the Absolute and that of Brahman, between their own metaphysical ideas that the world as we know it through our senses is not the real world and the Indian notion that we see the world only through the veil of maya. Both Confucianism and Buddhism were seen by many Europeans as a system of ethics which was independent of a belief in God, and was therefore espoused by many western thinkers in reaction to the claims that religion was the essential basis of ethics.

Towards the end of the 19th century and into the twentieth, at the very time when the West's cultural imperialism emphasized by Edward Said was at its height, there was also the countervailing current that the West's cultural hegemony was increasingly questioned in the West itself; and the interest in Eastern ideas became a broad stream with wide diffusion. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 to 1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817 to 1862) popularized Eastern thought in America on a scale that earlier thinkers had not been able to achieve. Edwin Arnold's poem The Light of Asia (1879), disseminated the Buddhist message and sold nearly a million copies. The Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Alcott in 1875, had over 45,000 members in 1920. It was strongly infused with oriental ideas, and even played a part in the revival of Hindu and Buddhist self-awareness and self-respect in Asia itself. Some Western actually thought that western civilization, with its frenetic materialism and its spiritual life eroded by rationalism, was worn out and needed to draw on Eastern thought to renew itself. Eastern influences have moved out of the academic and literary world to permeate the very life-style of many westerners.

So Zen and Tibetan Buddhism have found many followers in the West; there are now many practitioners of t'ai chi, yoga and transcendental meditation; the young have gone on the hippy trail to visited ashrams in India. From this point onwards, about half way through the book, Clarke produces so many examples of the interaction between East and West - on literature, on the arts, on religion, on psychotherapy, on holistic medicine, on ecological thinking, on non-violence, even on the philosophy of modern physics (though, curiously, only marginally on the mainstreams of western academic philosophy) - that a short review like this cannot do justice to them. There was even a strand in fascism which claimed an Oriental heritage. Clarke's range is truly encyclopaedic, and in this second half of the book that there will be found much detailed material and many names that are likely to be unfamiliar to the educated non-specialist.

The mainly narrative chapters are followed by two final superb reflective ones. In the first of these Clarke reflects on the philosophical traps into which Orientalism can fall and sometimes has fallen, but his defence of the value of Orientalism is eloquent and persuasive. In the second (more difficult) one he shows how deconstructive Post-Modernism challenges Orientalism but can also find an ally in it.

Author: ramdas [ 27 Apr 2008 05:54 am ]
Post subject:

Rajiv Malhotra's article in his article wrote 'Yogis and meditators, who should be regarded as co-discoverers, usually remain anonymous 'laboratory subjects' and native informants." A case in point in the recent times is that of Swami Rama. In the 1970's he travelled to the US and demonstrated under controlled conditions the ability to influence his heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and the like which were thought to be impossible by western medical science. His work generated considerable research and spawned among other things an entire area called bio-feedback. Apart from being treated as lab rat by western scientist in their fancy coats, he did not get any acknowledgement. It did not stop with that. He was vilified as being a sex offender. The end effect is that Swami Rama is hardly known today.

Contrast this with the case of street magician David Blaine. He recently fasted for 40+ days as a publicity stunt. A medical team studied him throughout this exercise and the paper they wrote listed David Blaine as a co-author. From New York Times(Apr 22, 2008, search using google news for David Blaine, and NYT):


"He'd fasted for 44 days in a box suspended over the Thames, a nutritional experiment that was written up in The New England Journal of Medicine (with Mr. Blaine listed as a co-author)."

The bias could not be any more explicit.

As Rajiv Malhotra writes, the west is busy appropriating yogic techniques like pranayama. It usually happens in two steps: first step is to give the technique a fancy western name (could be English, Greek, French etc). In the case of pranayama, the grab bags are "abdominal breathing", "deep breathing", "diaphramatic breathing". In the second step, credit western individuals as having discovered special or more powerful variants of "abdominal breathing". There are already some contenders for this: search for "Buteyko method", "Kussmaul breathing". I am sure there are many more such contenders floating around. One of these will slowly be accepted by the whole west (depending on power equations in the academia/media) and pranayama will be be tarred and discarded. This is already happening to yoga. Pilates, a simple variant of the physical aspect of yoga that is gaining ground steadily, is now treated as a separate method though it is known that the founder Joseph Pilates had studied yoga. Over the next 20-30 years, the whole western yoga crowd will move over to pilates, carrying with them the techniques they learnt from yoga and the appropriation will be complete. If Indians don't have control over Indian media by then, English educated crowd in India will then be shelling out money to join the latest greatest pilates studio.

Author: SwamyG [ 29 Apr 2008 01:44 pm ]
Post subject:

I read the following excerpt from Akira Kurosawa's book "Something like an Autobiography" in another book.
Quote:
On August 15, 1945, I was summoned to the studio along with everyone else to listen to the momentous proclamation on the radio: the Emperor himself was to speak over the air waves. I will never forget the scenes I saw as I walked the streets that day. On the way from Soshigaya to the studios in Kinuta the shopping street looked fully prepared for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million. The atmosphere was tense, panicked. There were even shopowners who had taken their Japanese swords from their sheaths and sat staring at the bare blades.

However, when I walked the same route back to my home after listening to the imperial proclamation, the scene was entirely different. The people on the street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. I don't know if this represents Japanese adaptability or Japanese imbecility. In either case, I have to recognize that both these facets exist in the Japanese personality. Both facets exist within my own personality as well.

If the Emperor had not delivered his address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Soshigaya probably would have done as they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.

I felt that without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be no freedom and no democracy. My first film in the post-war era, Waga seishun ni kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), takes the problem of the self as its theme.

Author: satyarthi [ 05 May 2008 11:22 am ]
Post subject:

Image
Quote:
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh receives a model of PSLV- C9 from its Mission Director George Koshy as ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair (R) looks on, during a meeting in New Delhi on Monday, May 5, 2008. PSLV-C9 has set a record with putting 10 satellites in orbit recently.

I am always fascinated by a display of such rituals in India. As far as I know no other country shows such a consistent penchant for such rituals.

It is not sufficient for scientists to actually have done the abstract deed of dedicating the rocket launch to the nation, but that abstract deed must be brought into a physical domain and a physical image must be made and ritually offered.

Indian religions have great abstract heights. But never have they relinquished the physical ritual worship. It seems something is thought to be amiss unless something worth adoring is not adored in all possible levels including the physical.

This character shows through many such non-religious rituals we see all around India, indulged in even by intellectuals and scientists and politicians.

This surely shows something distinct about the Indian world view.

Author: Acharya [ 13 May 2008 03:14 am ]
Post subject:

X-posted


ramana wrote:
vsudhir, A great con is being put on all the innocent people. Fascist and Nazis are really the outgrowth of the 19th century evolution scientists clubbed with Evangelism and belief in literal interpretation of the Bible. Those two groups are "Evangelical Darwinists". So until the Chinese get evanjihadized, the Ledeen description cant be true. One cant be Marxist and Evangelized Darwinist"


What is this 'Evengelized Darwinist'

Author: Paul [ 13 May 2008 04:58 am ]
Post subject:

The recent case of the a man confining his children in his cellar for 24 years and having them bear his children reminds me of the social environment in 19th century Austria in which Herr Schiklegruber was born.

His mother was 18 and his father was 57 as I recall it. and she was his cousin to boot. His father was an illegitimate child as well. Sigmund Freud grew up in Austria in a similar environment and gave him an eagle'e view to formulate his theories.

Added later: I believe my instincts are right...I did a google search and get this. There is a connection between this brutal incident and Austro-Germany's Nazi past. see the comments in the blog.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/04/analysing-austria/

[quote]One needs to make a distinction between the crime itself and detection of the crime, although these two phenomena may be connected in some way.

it’s interesting to note that Fritzl’s brutalised daughter herself blamed her brutalisation at the hands of her father and an as-yet unknown number of others on Austria’s Nazi past.

This form of intimate analysis does deserve some thought before being chucked into the “knee-jerk basketâ€

Author: Raju [ 19 May 2008 06:17 pm ]
Post subject:

Quote:
THE DANCE OF GHOSTS
By M.J.AKBAR
18 MAY 2008

Old rules get old because they have legs to walk through generations. Time, then, to recall one of the oldest: When you are dead, lie down. So many politicians simply don't get this, whether they are provincial wannabes like the erstwhile Congress satrap from Uttar Pradesh Akhilesh Das or the woman who wanted the White House, Hillary Clinton.

I am familiar with the face of defeat – not least my own in 1991, when I failed to get re-elected in the general election, during my brief departure into politics. But never have I seen a visage as utterly depressed, seething with the last twitches of a withered dream, as that of Bill Clinton standing behind Hillary on the night of 7 May. For the record, she was delivering a "victory" speech after the Indiana primaries, but her words turned instantly into ash the moment they left her mouth. Poor Bill got the blowback. He knew that this was the last dance of a dead campaign. Four more years of adulation and power had disappeared into a blank. I've seen long faces too, but that evening Bill's jaw was nearer his nipple than his lip.

There are no exact parallels, least of all between democracy in the United States and India, but common questions can open fresh lines of thought.
Does Barack Obama represent the arrival of a new role model? Will this drama of startling shifts energise hope elsewhere?

Barack is young, but he is not about youth. George Bush and Tony Blair were startlingly young when they won office; they have aged decades in less than ten years. Power seems to be an aphrodisiac for the old (P.V. Narasimha Rao yesterday, John McCain today), and decomposes the young.

The Barack phenomenon is about identity, not youth, the vital first act as America attempts to exorcise the demons that have kept the enslaved and dispossessed on the margins, not totally excluded in these "liberal" times, but not fully included either. His personal history is the antidote of convention. He is a child of an absentee black, talented Muslim father and a white, bright, single mother who survived for a while on food stamps. His personality, his success and his dramatic invasion of the white political club, with- to the shock of traditional America - a coalition of white college kids and his black community, provokes reservations, suspicion and downright, barely-disguised hatred. The Clintons, who are brilliant at surreptitious politics and viral-marketing, positioned him as the ultimate Manchurian candidate at a time of Bush's war against "Islamofascism": they converted him into a "closet Muslim" without of course letting the phrase escape through their noble, if clenched, teeth. Worse, he was an uppity snob who had the temerity to wear Gucci, drink latte, and, worst of all, dress and dance better than the Clintons. The Clintons have every right to a bank balance of $109 million between them, earned in the last eight years. An upstart should remain a degree below latte. Obama prevailed among the Democrats not because he had changed but because enough of America has changed.

One suspects that Congress whizkids and a few whizuncles will rush to sell Rahul Gandhi as India's Obama. The similarity is superficial, if there is one at all. Rahul Gandhi is an image of youth but not of change; he is yet another rung of an ageing idea called dynasty.

The Real Parallel To Obama In India Is The Spectacular Trajectory Of Mayawati.

She never studied in Harvard, and the only law she knows is that of the jungle through which her elephant has had to fight for survival. But she rose from the margins and is imploding upon the Centre by extraordinary political skills. Her coalition of Brahmin, Dalit and Muslim is if anything more impressive than Obama's. She does not wear Gucci (she thinks Rahul Gandhi does). But she does wear diamonds; the contempt/anger/hatred and pseudo-morality that her wealth induces is evident enough. She does not belong to the class that has a hereditary right to be dishonest. But the most important similarity is that she has energised her own community to an unprecedented degree. The Dalits are the blacks of India; Babasaheb Ambedkar is their Martin Luther King; Kanshi Ram is their Jesse Jackson; and Mayawati is their Obama. Being less suave than Obama, she is both the acceptable and unacceptable face of Change; she can apply the rhetoric of Obama and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr, the pastor who has made incendiary remarks against white racism and America, depending on the audience she is addressing, or dismissing.
Obama is leading a sophisticated upheaval.

Maya is heaving against prejudice that has congealed over many thousands of years.

In neither case has the Establishment surrendered, yet. The Republicans believe they can slice Obama up and feed him to middle America. The Congress is convinced it can undermine Maya after she has sabotaged herself. All options are possible, for the turbulence and direction of change can never be certain. Hillary Clinton refuses to lie down even when declared dead because she still hopes that the unpredictable will somehow emerge from the inconceivable. If the correctly-pigmented John Edwards had pounded her as Obama has done, she would have shaken his hand and accepted the Vice President's nomination some time ago. But with chocolate-flavoured Obama, you never know when some circumcised skeleton will fall out from the cupboard…

The candidate may be dead. The ghosts dance on.

There is a second old rule in politics. Stick with friends, but stick closer to enemies.
An Obama or a Mayawati has learnt that sentiment is a trap.

Once you have fought a foe to death, you can always dance with the ghost on the way to power.

Author: derkonig [ 20 May 2008 05:59 am ]
Post subject:

^
hi,
Do put this in the Psyops thread as well.

Author: Kalantak [ 26 May 2008 03:49 pm ]
Post subject:

Western criticism: Look at the East
By Dipak Basu

The distinguishing virtues of the Western civilizations are not unique; these were there also in the Eastern civilizations.

The problem with the Western intellectuals is that they know very little beyond their own countries but are arrogant enough to make comments about the whole world.

Guy Sorman is one of those Western intellectuals who has taken as his profession denigration of the East or the Eastern civilisations. As a critic of the East he has considered, forgetting India altogether, only the Chinese and the Muslims as the representatives of the East and pointed out some fundamental differences between the East and the West. According to Sorman three major characteristics that separate the East from the West are innovative nature, self criticism and gender equality. According to him the East cannot innovate but is dependent on the West for every scientific innovation. The East cannot criticise the concept of God or deny it. He says the East also discriminates against women.

Similar opinions were expressed by a number of Western intellectuals. Paul Krugman, professor of economics in Harvard in 1995 in the Foreign Affairs magazine also wrote that the Eastern people, including the Russians, couldn’t innovate but depend on the West for every scientific innovation. Another Harvard professor, historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in a number of articles in the Foreign Affairs that the concept of human rights is purely European; the Asian civilisations have no idea about it.

The first problem is that there is no proper boundary of the Western or the Eastern civilisations. Where exactly the East starts, if the Arab world is the Middle East? If it starts from Constantinople, a fusion of Greek, Roman and Armenian civilisations, then Greek itself is also a part of the East. The Hindu deity Mitra was the principal god in Persian, Roman and Byzantine Empire before Constantine. Ancient temples of Mitra still exist in both Armenia and in Britain, which was a colony of the Roman Empire.

Even before the birth of Gautam Buddha there was a great university in Taxila. After the death of Buddha, several universities were formed in Nalanda, Ujjain, Vikramshila and Paharpur, which received scholars from China, the Arab world; besides South East Asia, until their destruction by the Turkish invasion of India in 12th century. The oldest surviving university of the world today is in Cairo.

Since the days of the invasion of India by Alexander until the Arab invasion in 7th century, Afghanistan had Indo-Greek kingdoms creating fusion of all knowledge from three great civilisations India, Persia and Greece. Since the 7th century, Baghdad became the reservoir of knowledge of the world until it was destroyed by the Mongol invasions in 11th century. Scholars from India were invited to go there and translate books of Indian mathematics and sciences from Sanskrit to Arabic. Several Arab scholars, like Al-Beruni and Iban Batuta, also came to India searching for knowledge.

Modern development of science and mathematics in Europe had started in Italy in 14th century, when Italian and Armenian traders transmitted the knowledge of India translated by the Arab scholars in Baghdad and Constantinople.

Thus, much of what is considered as Western is nothing but recycled Eastern knowledge; that is particularly true about inventions in science, technology and mathematics. That was the reason when the East India Company first came to India, it had nothing new to offer to Asia until they began the industrial revolution with the money brought in from the exploitation of Bengal. However, even then the East had made major contributions in 19th century science, which was not acknowledged by the West.

Radio transmission, for example, was first invented and demonstrated by J C Bose in Calcutta, India in 1896 and in London in 1897 but was copied by Marconi who got all the credit. That was also true about Copernicus who only had repeated the discovery made by Arya Bhatta in the 4th century.

Self-criticism is the fundamental part of Indian philosophy. Thousands of years ago in the Rig Veda, the most important book of the Hinduism and the first book composed in Indo-European language group, it is written, “Only that god in highest heaven knows whence comes this universes. He only knows or perhaps he knows notâ€

Author: ramana [ 27 May 2008 04:12 pm ]
Post subject:

I have been thinking about Post colonial literature in the West. is is a new form of Orientalism? IOW is the West still dominating the discourse of the ex-colonials? By self abnegating themselves they (West) are denying the voice of the former colonials to complain on their past masters and more importantly to recoup and move on.

And why is the base for these studies in US and not in the former colonial powers- UK, France, Belgium and Holland?

Author: abhischekcc [ 27 May 2008 04:36 pm ]
Post subject:

The problem with the west s that it is t he last 'civilisation' to be come civilised. Hence, it can only define itself in opposition to other civilisations.

It is the same problem with Islam in the religious field.

And look how bloody violent and devoid of civilised behaviour they both are.

These babes are still to grow up.

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

The west at least used to acknowledge its debt to other, esp Indian civilisations up untilthe middle of the 19th century.

It was India's defeat in the 1857 war, that made Europe aware of the fact that not only would the world be dominated by one civilisation in future - but that the civilisation would be Europe. THAT'S when the land grab really started.

The earlier expoits of the Spaniards, etc were considered excursions - not permanent conquests - this changd after 1858.

Of course, the west is the greatest thieving 'civilisation' ever in teh history of mankind. They not only steal material goods, but credit for other people's work as well.

Just ask them who invented the concept of zero.

Author: Acharya [ 27 May 2008 07:02 pm ]
Post subject:

ramana wrote:
I have been thinking about Post colonial literature in the West. is is a new form of Orientalism? IOW is the West still dominating the discourse of the ex-colonials? By self abnegating themselves they (West) are denying the voice of the former colonials to complain on their past masters and more importantly to recoup and move on.

And why is the base for these studies in US and not in the former colonial powers- UK, France, Belgium and Holland?

Old Europe - Past colonial countries have accepted the dominance of the new world to create the 'western civilization'. They have relinquished their role to US so that the project can continue for the next 500 years.

Author: Prem [ 27 May 2008 07:25 pm ]
Post subject:

Acharya wrote:
ramana wrote:
I have been thinking about Post colonial literature in the West. is is a new form of Orientalism? IOW is the West still dominating the discourse of the ex-colonials? By self abnegating themselves they (West) are denying the voice of the former colonials to complain on their past masters and more importantly to recoup and move on.

And why is the base for these studies in US and not in the former colonial powers- UK, France, Belgium and Holland?

Old Europe - Past colonial countries have accepted the dominance of the new world to create the 'western civilization'. They have relinquished their role to US so that the project can continue for the next 500 years.


New world dominance is receeding and the split between old and new is widening . This create oppertunity for mature Eastern Civilizations to assert their traditional dominant role.

Author: mayurav [ 27 May 2008 07:37 pm ]
Post subject:

[quote="Kalantak"]Western criticism: Look at the East
By Dipak Basu

The distinguishing virtues of the Western civilizations are not unique; these were there also in the Eastern civilizations.

The problem with the Western intellectuals is that they know very little beyond their own countries but are arrogant enough to make comments about the whole world.

Guy Sorman is one of those Western intellectuals who has taken as his profession denigration of the East or the Eastern civilisations. As a critic of the East he has considered, forgetting India altogether, only the Chinese and the Muslims as the representatives of the East and pointed out some fundamental differences between the East and the West. According to Sorman three major characteristics that separate the East from the West are innovative nature, self criticism and gender equality. According to him the East cannot innovate but is dependent on the West for every scientific innovation. The East cannot criticise the concept of God or deny it. He says the East also discriminates against women.

Similar opinions were expressed by a number of Western intellectuals. Paul Krugman, professor of economics in Harvard in 1995 in the Foreign Affairs magazine also wrote that the Eastern people, including the Russians, couldn’t innovate but depend on the West for every scientific innovation. Another Harvard professor, historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in a number of articles in the Foreign Affairs that the concept of human rights is purely European; the Asian civilisations have no idea about it.

The first problem is that there is no proper boundary of the Western or the Eastern civilisations. Where exactly the East starts, if the Arab world is the Middle East? If it starts from Constantinople, a fusion of Greek, Roman and Armenian civilisations, then Greek itself is also a part of the East. The Hindu deity Mitra was the principal god in Persian, Roman and Byzantine Empire before Constantine. Ancient temples of Mitra still exist in both Armenia and in Britain, which was a colony of the Roman Empire.

Even before the birth of Gautam Buddha there was a great university in Taxila. After the death of Buddha, several universities were formed in Nalanda, Ujjain, Vikramshila and Paharpur, which received scholars from China, the Arab world; besides South East Asia, until their destruction by the Turkish invasion of India in 12th century. The oldest surviving university of the world today is in Cairo.

Since the days of the invasion of India by Alexander until the Arab invasion in 7th century, Afghanistan had Indo-Greek kingdoms creating fusion of all knowledge from three great civilisations India, Persia and Greece. Since the 7th century, Baghdad became the reservoir of knowledge of the world until it was destroyed by the Mongol invasions in 11th century. Scholars from India were invited to go there and translate books of Indian mathematics and sciences from Sanskrit to Arabic. Several Arab scholars, like Al-Beruni and Iban Batuta, also came to India searching for knowledge.

Modern development of science and mathematics in Europe had started in Italy in 14th century, when Italian and Armenian traders transmitted the knowledge of India translated by the Arab scholars in Baghdad and Constantinople.

Thus, much of what is considered as Western is nothing but recycled Eastern knowledge; that is particularly true about inventions in science, technology and mathematics. That was the reason when the East India Company first came to India, it had nothing new to offer to Asia until they began the industrial revolution with the money brought in from the exploitation of Bengal. However, even then the East had made major contributions in 19th century science, which was not acknowledged by the West.

Radio transmission, for example, was first invented and demonstrated by J C Bose in Calcutta, India in 1896 and in London in 1897 but was copied by Marconi who got all the credit. That was also true about Copernicus who only had repeated the discovery made by Arya Bhatta in the 4th century.

Self-criticism is the fundamental part of Indian philosophy. Thousands of years ago in the Rig Veda, the most important book of the Hinduism and the first book composed in Indo-European language group, it is written, “Only that god in highest heaven knows whence comes this universes. He only knows or perhaps he knows notâ€

Author: ramana [ 17 Jun 2008 05:41 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

A blog Chapati Mystery has an article on The decline Scenario

Gives a different take on the Empire/vampire stuff.

And Amratya Sen in The New Republic Imperial Illusions

Author: Raju [ 18 Jun 2008 03:24 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Market full of oil, price trend "fake": Ahmadinejad

By Hashem Kalentari
Tue Jun 17, 2:59 AM ET

ISFAHAN, Iran (Reuters) - The market is full of oil and the rising price trend is "fake and imposed," Iran's president said on Tuesday, partly blaming a weak U.S. dollar which he said was being pushed lower on purpose.

"At a time when the growth of consumption is lower than the growth of production and the market is full of oil, prices are rising and this trend is completely fake and imposed," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a televised speech.

"It is very clear that visible and invisible hands are controlling prices in a fake way with political and economic aims," he said when opening a meeting of the OPEC Fund for International Development in the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter, has repeatedly said the market is well-supplied with crude and blames rising prices on speculation, a weak U.S. currency and geopolitical factors.

"As you know the decrease in the dollar's value and the increase in energy prices are two sides of the same coin which are being introduced as factors behind the recent instability," Ahmadinejad said.

Oil steadied on Tuesday after touching a record near $140 the previous day, with traders caught between a weaker dollar and expectations that top exporter Saudi Arabia will ramp up output to its highest rate in decades.

Iran has often said it sees no need for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to boost output.

"EVER-INCREASING DECREASE"

Ahmadinejad reiterated his view that oil should be sold in a basket of currencies rather than U.S. dollars, an idea which has failed to win over other OPEC members, except Venezuela.

"The ever-increasing decrease in the dollar's value is one of the world's major problems," he said.

"A combination of the world's valid currencies should become a basis for oil transactions or (OPEC) member countries should determine a new currency for oil transactions," he said.

Iran, embroiled in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program, has for more than two years been increasing its sales of oil for currencies other than the dollar, saying the weak U.S. currency is eroding its purchasing power.

Ahmadinejad, who in the past has called the dollar a "worthless piece of paper," suggested "some big powers" were driving it lower on purpose:

"The planners for some big powers are acting to decrease the dollar's value," he said. "For years they imposed inflation and their own economic problems to other nations by injecting the dollar without any support to the global economy."

Foes since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, Tehran and Washington are also at odds over Tehran's disputed nuclear activities as well as over policy in Iraq. Iran says its atomic work is peaceful.

(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian in Tehran; Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by William Hardy)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080617/ts_ ... dinejad_dc

Author: surinder [ 18 Jun 2008 04:26 am ]
Post subject: Re:

mayurav wrote:
Kalantak wrote:
Western criticism: Look at the East
By Dipak Basu

The distinguishing virtues of the Western civilizations are not unique; these were there also in the Eastern civilizations.

The problem with the Western intellectuals is that they know very little beyond their own countries but are arrogant enough to make comments about the whole world.

...

Even before the birth of Gautam Buddha there was a great university in Taxila. After the death of Buddha, several universities were formed in Nalanda, Ujjain, Vikramshila and Paharpur, which received scholars from China, the Arab world; besides South East Asia, until their destruction by the Turkish invasion of India in 12th century. The oldest surviving university of the world today is in Cairo.

Since the days of the invasion of India by Alexander until the Arab invasion in 7th century, Afghanistan had Indo-Greek kingdoms creating fusion of all knowledge from three great civilisations India, Persia and Greece. Since the 7th century, Baghdad became the reservoir of knowledge of the world until it was destroyed by the Mongol invasions in 11th century. Scholars from India were invited to go there and translate books of Indian mathematics and sciences from Sanskrit to Arabic. Several Arab scholars, like Al-Beruni and Iban Batuta, also came to India searching for knowledge.

Modern development of science and mathematics in Europe had started in Italy in 14th century, when Italian and Armenian traders transmitted the knowledge of India translated by the Arab scholars in Baghdad and Constantinople.

Thus, much of what is considered as Western is nothing but recycled Eastern knowledge; that is particularly true about inventions in science, technology and mathematics. That was the reason when the East India Company first came to India, ... ... ..
.. ..



This article has a problem. Best described by Shiv in a pithy phrase: "You farted".

Western intellectuals said something bad about East, and East go into a twist to defend itself. Why? Firstly, denying accusations is always a loosing proposition. Don't do it unless you are forced to in a court of law. The answer to the article should be, to say that the concept of genocide, imperialism, looting, plunder, empires, violence, sexual promiscuity are uniquely Western ideas. Go on to point out Slavery, Bengal famines, Holocaust, Apartheid, Native Americans, Spanish in S. America, WW-1, WW-2, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, as uniqely Western ideas. Case closed.

Better still, ignore and smile because you know only desparate people lob accusations.

Author: ramana [ 18 Jun 2008 04:29 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
A blog Chapati Mystery has an article on The decline Scenario

Gives a different take on the Empire/vampire stuff.

And Amratya Sen in The New Republic Imperial Illusions


interesting to and from between Amartya Sen and Niall Ferguson on the British legacy. Shows how the battlefield of ideas is shaping up.

Author: Paul [ 19 Jun 2008 12:40 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

The Aryans of old Iran

The author wrote this piece in the 1920s. While it is defintely infected with the AIT smut, there are some interesting pieces describing the relationship between the Devas and Asuras...

Quote:
Hard pressed even here they ultimately set sail eastwards, to India. They were well aware that India was the land of brother Aryans, who had religious customs and beliefs very similar to their own. So on account of the love they bore to their religion, and because they wished to be allowed to worship their own God in their own way in complete freedom, these sturdy 'Pilgrim Fathers' deliberately accepted exile in the friendly land of Ind. At first they stayed for a few years in the island of Div, off the coast of Kathiawar. But they found the place inconvenient and therefore they left it and arrived at the port to which they gave the name of Sanjan, in South Gujerat on the western coast of India. Here they were welcomed by the Yadava Prince of that land, who gave them some land to settle down and to build their Fire-temple for the Iran-Shah. This was about one hundred and fifty years after the Arab conquest. In return for this kindness of the Hindu prince the Zoroastrians promised to live at peace with the people of the land, to help the Prince and his successors in time of war, to adopt the dress and the language of the people, and to introduce certain changes in the marriage ceremony. These conditions the Parsis have observed faithfully to this day. When Gujerat was invaded in the beginning of the fourteenth century by the King of Delhi, and Sanjan was attacked, Parsis fought and died for their adopted motherland by the side of their Hindu brothers.


http://www.farvardyn.com/zoroaster8.php

The Zoroaster religion belongs to the Indic pantheon of Vedic, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain religions. The Brits in their usual divide and rule wisdom, encouraged parsis to consider themselves superior to the Indian/Hindu sea which gave them shelter 10 centuries ago.

Author: ramana [ 19 Jun 2008 02:05 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

What or where is modern day Sanjan? Is it Surat?

Author: sanjaychoudhry [ 19 Jun 2008 03:23 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Quote:
Western intellectuals said something bad about East, and East go into a twist to defend itself. Why? Firstly, denying accusations is always a loosing proposition.


You are right. The best way to counter an accusation is to hurl an accusation of your own on the accuser.

Author: Raju [ 19 Jun 2008 03:52 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

don't know really where this fits in .. but look at the way these two rattle off in Punjabi ..

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

Author: surinder [ 19 Jun 2008 05:36 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Paul wrote:
The Zoroaster religion belongs to the Indic pantheon of Vedic, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain religions. The Brits in their usual divide and rule wisdom, encouraged parsis to consider themselves superior to the Indian/Hindu sea which gave them shelter 10 centuries ago.


And little did the King who welcomed Parsis know that they would of such tremendous help to their adopted land: They were the pioneers in India who set up huge Industries (Tata), started the Indian film industry, gave IISc to India, gave Nuclear weapons (Bhabha) and also smashed Pakistan into two to give India its biggest victory in recent times (Amritsar-born Sam Maneckshaw).

Author: surinder [ 19 Jun 2008 05:40 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Raju wrote:
don't know really where this fits in .. but look at the way these two rattle off in Punjabi ..

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


I have had the chance to meet this gentlemen. They are children of Whites who converted to Sikhism in the 60s and 70s and studied in Amritsar. They have a Kirtan Jatha and visit around. Pretty inspiring young guys.

Author: Raju [ 20 Jun 2008 03:33 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Are they originally from Uk or US ?

Author: ramana [ 20 Jun 2008 04:22 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

A very good interview on the basis of the East India Company. The movie Mangal Pandey alludes to this but Indian history books hardly menion it or gloss over it as a minor fact. It is because of this that most Chinese have lot of resentment towards India. THey know its the Brits who did it but Indina merchants and sepoys were part of the trade Note I said sepoys of the East India Company. Most of the Indian trading companies of the 19th century were prosperous because of this trade. This is a blot and needs catharisis for rapproachment with the Chinese.
I came to know this in college when a junior told us he was from Neemuch, MP and his father, a chemist, was the mgr of the govt opium factory! We wondered what was the govt doing that for and found out the history of it all. Its used for medicinal precursor products.


Pioneer, 19 June 2008
Quote:
'India was the biggest opium producing region in the world'

Sea of Poppies, the latest novel by Amitav Ghosh based on the cultivation of poppy along the Ganga in the Bhojpur region to feed East India Company's opium factories and sustain Britain's illicit opium trade with China that left the imperial coffers in London overflowing with wealth, has just been published. It is a fascinating story that unfolds in the 1830s, centred around Deeti, and reminds us of the journey undertaken by 'girmitiyas' -- indentured workers who signed an agreement or 'girmit' -- across the forbidden kala paani to foreign shores to work in sugar plantations. It is about disinherited nobility, disempowered peasantry, caste, community and kin -- the many identities that make up the Indian identity at home and abroad. The following are excerpts from a conversation between Kanchan Gupta and the celebrated writer that took place on a rain-drenched afternoon in Delhi --

Kanchan Gupta: I am sure it feels great to have your tenth book published. Sea of Poppies has made a big entry and been received with rave reviews. The British newspapers have lavished praise on the book, especially The Times. And this is only the first of a trilogy...

Amitav Ghosh: A trilogy, yes...

KG: So, how do you plan to carry forward the story of Sea of Poppies?

AG: You know, I think my approach to it is going to be like driving a car at night. You can't see very far ahead of what you can see in your headlight. You keep driving slowly down the road so someday you will get there. I don't think that one can have a sense of what it is going to be like at the end of it. The interest and pleasure of it will really lie in the writing.

KG: But surely there's a big picture... there could be various routes to reaching the final destination. Even if you are driving at night you do know where you want to go...

AG: Yes, there are various routes, various options. But you know, two or three years down the line I may decide to take a different route... It's impossible to talk about something that's not written yet.

KG: In a recent article you have mentioned how one of your ancestors travelled from East Bengal to Chapra and although there's no conclusive evidence, most probably he was involved in the opium trade... Is that what triggered your interest or is it that you wanted to build a story up to 1857 since it is very much there in our conscience now?

AG: No, it's nothing like that. You know my interest really began while I was writing the Glass Palace. I became very interested in the whole business of indentured workers. The process of indenture and how it happened.

It's a curious thing about indenture... the children of the indentured workers, I mean the great, great grand children, you know, there are some very great writers among them... VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul... some of our greatest contemporary writers... and they have given us a very vivid picture of what it was for the descendents of these people to grow up wherever they happened to be.

But from our end, from the Indian end, we really never had any sense of what happened. How those processes came into being, how the indentured labourers left, what was the mechanism by which they left. And for me this had a very personal connection simply because of my family having lived in the Bhojpur region for a long time.

I wanted to write about the early years, when indenture first started, which is actually in the 1830s. Once I started looking into it and researching it, it became pretty inescapable because, I mean, it's a strange thing that we have so completely forgotten it now, but this was the biggest opium-producing region the world has ever known.

KG: Michael Binyon, in his review of Sea of Poppies in The Times, begins his article with a very telling line, "The British version of history glosses over the time when this country was the world's biggest drug pusher." That was 200 years ago...

AG: Not even 200 years, until the 1920s it was the biggest drug pusher in the world.


KG: And now you have Afghanistan growing the poppies and feeding Europe's hunger for heroin!

AG: You know, we can take no pleasure in that, this is one of those stories. The whole business of drugs is quite an incredibly grim and hideous thing. I mean, I don't think it's a pleasurable irony in that sense. You don't want this scourge inflicted upon any nation. It's good to remind ourselves of this history. You know, really it was these drugs grown in India that brought about the downfall of China.

KG: Some Indian authors have written about indentured labour, or mentioned it in their novels. Sunil Gangopadhyay...

AG: Aachchha? I didn't know about this...

KG: Why did you choose poppy cultivation and the opium trade? It could have been indigo. After all, indigo cultivation and the entire process was equally dehumanising and fed imperial coffers, it was equally devastating.

AG: Indigo and opium are not quite similar, you know. Indigo was a plantation crop, opium was not a plantation crop. There was some idea of converting opium into a plantation crop. So, we must resist the temptation of assimilating them, although they were similar in the sense of imposing a monoculture. But the mechanism was quite different.

These (poppy cultivators) were peasant farmer who basically were given advances to work on the land and it was through this mechanism of credit that things intensified.

KG: How did you think up Deeti?

AG: You know, the difference between writing history and writing novels is that history scholars are there already while in novels sometimes you just have an idea or you have an image. All my novels have begun with certain images, certain pictorial or visual images. And that's how it happened with Deeti.

As much as Deeti sees Zachary (who steers Ibis, the ship carrying indentured labourers to Mauritius, in the book) while she is standing in the Ganga, I similarly had a sense of actually being able to see her. She became for me the centre of the book around whom the story unfolds or anchors itself.

It happens like that. You know, you can't plan a book the nuts and bolts way.

I knew Deeti would be an important character right from the start -- all my characters are important -- but I didn't really expect she would become the central figure the way she has. She did become for me, how shall I say, she became the mast...

KG: She carries the book forward, linking the various strands and layers or the story...

AG: That's right.

KG: And then you built the other characters keeping her in mind or they just happened?

AG: No, no. They are completely individual and separate characters.

KG: Kalua, the 'untouchable' bullock cart driver who rescues Deeti, for instance...

AG: Kalua, too. He is a completely individual and separate character. You know what happened with Kalua (laughs) was when I went to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius -- which is a truly marvellous archive and they have preserved all the earliest papers of the indenture, including the immigration slips - I looked through the papers carefully and I came upon one which had this name Kalua!

It's a strange thing, a lot has been written about these indentured labourers and immigration certificates that they took, but I discovered something which I have never seen anyone comment upon. I will tell you what it is.

See the immigration slips are like this (draws a rectangle in the air) and they have a few printed lines for name, age, caste, appearance, weight. Later they began attaching photographs but on the earlier ones there were no photographs.

All of this is written in English. If you turn the thing over, in the corner it's written in Bangla, you know, little notations are written in Bangla. And that was what really caught my attention. The things that were noted on the back of the slips tell a peculiar history. Each of the notations ended with a Dafadar - for example, Ismail Dafadar, Rafiq Dafadar or Lallu Dafadar and so on.

That's one thing you would see on the back of the slips. And also in Bangla you would see a version of the name of the indentured labourer. So, clearly what happened is that these dafadars were the ones who recruited the indentured labourers and brought them to Kolkata. There he went to some gomusta or serishta, a Bengali babu, to whom he would hand over the slips and he would be told to bring his gang. The gomusta or serishta would ask for the names of those seeking indenture, scribble them on the back of the slips and then put down the dafadar's name who would be paid per head. This would be the initial notation.

The slips were then passed on to another gomusta or serishta, also a Bengali clerk, who would then translate the names into English. So, on the back of the slip in Bangla it is written 'Kalua', on the other side it is 'Colver'! When you see that piece of paper you already see such an enormous journey.

KG: In Trinidad I was told that the corruption of names took place when the indentured labourers got off their ships and English clerks entered their names in ledgers. So Basudev became Basdeo ...

AG: This is the mythology. They had to have the migration certificates before they left. The corruption of names was done by Bengalis sitting in Kolkata! That was to me a real discovery.

KG: Why Mauritius and not Trinidad? After all, Trinidad symbolises everything about indentured labour.

AG: Well, the Trinidad indenture began much later. Mauritius indenture is the first. In proportion of numbers, it's the biggest. Also, it is the only place in the world where the descendents of indentured labourers are a numerically preponderant group.

So, in many ways the Mauritius indenture is the most interesting because it establishes the patterns for all the subsequent indentures. Among the girmitya communities around the world, they look upon the Mauritians as the aristocrats!

KG: We have forgotten that Mauritius was also a penal colony where people were despatched as punishment. People only refer to Andaman islands...

AG: Yes, and prisoners would be stripped and photographed. In a way, the penal colony in Mauritius was the original Abu Ghraib. Photographing them naked was an assertion of control and served the purpose of humiliating the prisoners. It remains the metaphor of the imperial experience.

KG: You have used words that we don't come across every day... a language that was spoken during the East India Company days by the sahibs. The reviewer in The Times could not comprehend most of the stuff. He has written, "But the clothes -- zerbaft brocade, shanbaff dhoti, alliballie kurta, jooties and nayansukh -- or the ranks and offices -- dasturi, sirdar, maharir, serishtas and burkundaz -- are frankly incomprehensible. And that is Ghosh's trick: We clutch at what we can, but swaths of narrative wash over us, just as they did over those caught up in a colonial history they could neither control nor understand."

AG: It's all about assimilation of words. I have used words from the Oxford English Dictionary. Today we hear that English is more absorptive and assimilative, that it has become global. But in the 19th century the role played by Asian languages in English was much, much greater than today. In the 20th century what happened, without being stated, is a purification of English where Asian words were dropped or treated as marginal to English language. {Decolonization of English started in 1900s just as assimilation started with the arrival of Sir Thomas Roe in 1600s! Thats why I say the study of humanities is a strategic necessity for it gives precursor or indicators of trends!}

When you read this book, you will find many words that have crept in so completely that they are not even recognised to be foreign. But there's a category of words that even though they are English, appear in the guise of something alien. If they go and look at the Oxford English Dictionary and find these words there, what is The Times going to say? Why are these words any more foreign to English than the other words they are accustomed to? {Because the misson of England has changed. So its suitable for Times to refuse to understand these words which were earlier acquired as part of the colonization project}

We are taught there's a standard English and these are the words that can be used. So, if it's a gun, you can't call it a bandook, although it is in the Oxford English Dictionary. Take for instance balti. If you look up the Oxford English Dictionary, balti is defined as north Indian style of cooking. But actually balti is a Portuguese word which was introduced to Indian languages by the laskars, it meant a ship's bucket. Which Indian will believe balti is not an Indian word?

Languages, for me, are like water, they flow into each other and cannot be distinguished from one another.

KG: You deserve to be complimented for the effortless ease with which you introduce entire phrases and sentences in Bangla and then continue in English. Do you do this because you just take it for granted that the readers will get the hang of it, even if they do not understand Bangla?

AG: Look, when we were kids, we were reading books in English, books which had things like 'potted meat'. I had no idea what potted meat meant, but that didn't stop me from reading the book! You can't expect to understand every word of a book, and why should you? In any book that you are reading there will be things that will elude you, that are going to be outside your comprehensive understanding.

KG: It was a pleasure speaking to you.

AG: We had a very interesting conversation.



Edited out....ramana

I plant to read this book to learn more about that phase of Indian history.

Author: surinder [ 20 Jun 2008 05:01 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Raju wrote:
Are they originally from Uk or US ?


US. Pukka Ameriki. Patriotic to the core.

Author: Raju [ 21 Jun 2008 03:41 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

what are these guys singing surinder ? Can you translate it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LClB52p3BoE

Author: Keshav [ 24 Jun 2008 05:21 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Raju wrote:
what are these guys singing surinder ? Can you translate it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LClB52p3BoE


You should read the comments for that video. What a doozy.

Author: ramana [ 24 Jun 2008 02:54 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

More on Amitav Ghosh from BBC:

'Opium financed British rule in India'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm

So Lyndon Larouche has a core truth to his dippy tirades! - the British were drug dealer number one till they found other ways to make money.

Author: John Snow [ 24 Jun 2008 03:27 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

deleted

Author: John Snow [ 24 Jun 2008 03:35 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Also note the name Sib sagar Ram Gulam
Gumusto ----> is used in Telugu as Gumasta == Clerk in office.

Author: ramana [ 24 Jun 2008 03:37 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Comments on Conspiracy Theories are to be limited to the nuke threads olee please.

Meanwhile a criticsim of contemporary art theory by Dr Dipanker Basu of Nagasaki Uty, Japan:

Art, Culture and Society-Baroda Paintings

Author: wasu [ 24 Jun 2008 03:39 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Ramana, you refer to this opium thing and also indian troops participation in the british destruction of the old summer palace as major sources of chinese resentment of India. Were u referring to mainland PRC folks or chinese outside PRC?

Author: ramana [ 24 Jun 2008 03:45 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

wasu wrote:
Ramana, you refer to this opium thing and also indian troops participation in the british destruction of the old summer palace as major sources of chinese resentment of India. Were u referring to mainland PRC folks or chinese outside PRC?



Overseas Chinese. The emigrants after the Mao tookover who belong to all classes. Some of them I interacted were mandrin descent and formerly held high positions in Imperial China. Teir poitn was India should consider that point when dealing with Chinese that they are considered a lackey of the West's imperialism as late as the 19th century. Indian troops were used in the Boxer Rebellion suppression.

Author: abhischekcc [ 24 Jun 2008 04:24 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
More on Amitav Ghosh from BBC:

'Opium financed British rule in India'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm

So Lyndon Larouche has a core truth to his dippy tirades! - the British were drug dealer number one till they found other ways to make money.


Ramana,

Don't be too sure that the opium phase has ended.

Author: abhischekcc [ 24 Jun 2008 04:30 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
wasu wrote:
Ramana, you refer to this opium thing and also indian troops participation in the british destruction of the old summer palace as major sources of chinese resentment of India. Were u referring to mainland PRC folks or chinese outside PRC?



Overseas Chinese. The emigrants after the Mao tookover who belong to all classes. Some of them I interacted were mandrin descent and formerly held high positions in Imperial China. Teir poitn was India should consider that point when dealing with Chinese that they are considered a lackey of the West's imperialism as late as the 19th century. Indian troops were used in the Boxer Rebellion suppression.


I think that giving consideration to the Chinese POV in this issue is really missing the point - we should really try to convince them that India was as much a victim as China.

Also, I think the Chinese POV hides an unconcious xenophobic attitude - because their government wants a culture of victimhood to prevail in the country - hence does not want any other 'victims' in its vicinity.

Author: pradeepe [ 24 Jun 2008 05:40 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

abhischekcc wrote:
ramana wrote:
More on Amitav Ghosh from BBC:

'Opium financed British rule in India'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm

So Lyndon Larouche has a core truth to his dippy tirades! - the British were drug dealer number one till they found other ways to make money.


Ramana,

Don't be too sure that the opium phase has ended.



I recently read a review of Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" in The Hindu by Priyamvada Gopal. Amitav Ghosh's comments on imperialism, slavery and indenture. I saved the paper. Here are snippets from Amitav Ghosh that reflect Abhischekc's view.

Quote:
The past cannot, and ought not to, be planed down to one dimension. ...
But to acknowledge that the past is complicated, is not to say that we should turn our backs on it, either in shame or because we just want to move on. One reason for this is that colonialism is not really in the past, even in the Indian sub-continent. Pakistan, for instance, is in a situation where re-colonisation is a real possibility. The present incarnation of the empire is in fact uncannily like the old one, with its island prisons, its vast network of jails, its "canotonments" and most of all its tireless trumpeting of its good intentions. This is why we cant turn away saying "who cares?" Because present-day colonialism derives is charter from the past: it wants us to give our assent to a certain view of history so that this history can be repeated (as in Iraq). There is not so much we can do about the past, but it is certainly within our power to withhold the assent it demands of us in the present day - not in order to seek retribution for what happened, but as Gandhi famously said, to make sure it does not happen again.

Loaded para, the above.

Btw, he also provided snippets on the oft touted cultural exchage that benefited the colonised. He says,
Quote:
Even within the spectrum of empires, the British Empire was perhaps the least open to "diversity" because race was so central to its functioning. The portugese and dutch empires were no better in other respects, but they certainly allowed a far greater degree of contact and intermixing.


I have only selectively quoted him, but nonetheless they are a good precis of what has been said on BR over the years.

Author: ramana [ 24 Jun 2008 06:12 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

could you post the whole thing please?

And is Priymavada Gopal related to S. Gopal?

Author: amol [ 24 Jun 2008 06:39 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
More on Amitav Ghosh from BBC:

'Opium financed British rule in India'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm

So Lyndon Larouche has a core truth to his dippy tirades! - the British were drug dealer number one till they found other ways to make money.

All I can say is "WOW"!! This was a real eye opener.

A few things that stood out for me were:
Quote:
It is not a coincidence that 20 years after the opium trade stopped, the Raj more or less packed up its bags and left. India was not a paying proposition any longer.

Quote:
Opium steadily accounted for about 17-20% of Indian revenues.

Quote:
Why do you think that {the glossing over of this in history books} happened?
I think the reason is some sort of whitewashing of the past.
On the Indian side, there is a sort of shame, I suppose. {nope, whitewashing here too.}

Quote:
Before the British came, India was one of the world's great economies. For 200 years India dwindled and dwindled into almost nothing. Fifty years after they left we have finally begun to reclaim our place in the world.
All the empirical facts show you that British rule was a disaster for India. Before the British came 25% of the world trade originated in India. By the time they left it was less than 1%.


It is indeed ironic that the chickens have come home to roost for the west.
What caused the opium trade to decline in the 1920s? Was it the freedom movement and the increased spotlight on the country that made it untenable to carry on?

Author: abhischekcc [ 24 Jun 2008 07:40 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Amol,
The British are the most shameless race on earth - they would never have left the opum cultivation in India from shame.

The only conclusion I can think of is that they either:
1. found a better exploitative position.
2. lost their market.

Not sure about the first point.

For the second, the Japanese conquered large parts of China (manchuria) in 1931, so the british lost that market then.

This is an open question.

Author: ramana [ 24 Jun 2008 08:03 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Looks like the period from 1905 to 1925 saw a moral turn around on the question of selling opium. A League of Nations convention was signed in 1925 leading to the stopping of the trade.

History of opium cultivation

So its not always so dark.

Author: Kakkaji [ 24 Jun 2008 08:29 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
Edited out...ramana


I am sure I have seen that name on a signboard on either an office building or a shop in Central Kolkata.

Any BRF-ites presently in Kolkata can confirm.

Author: abhischekcc [ 24 Jun 2008 09:32 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Ramana, thanks for the link.
Will have to spend considerable time studying it. :)

Author: abhischekcc [ 24 Jun 2008 09:57 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Ramana, history-buffs:

Here are some links for history texts. I know you will enjoy this.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/feros-pg.htm

And within that link:
(For India related) http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/india.htm

Interwar priod:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/interwar.htm

Author: ramana [ 24 Jun 2008 10:12 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Thanks.

India Forum has numerous links like this.

It seems in 1924, INC passed a resolution to ban opium cultivation and banned all consumption after 1947. Medicinal cultivation was legalised.

India -A case study

Author: Raju [ 25 Jun 2008 05:51 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Results of study done on spread of drugs in Punjab in 2006

http://sikhgiving.com/punjab_drug_report.html

heroin has taken over as #1 drug over there. And drug-running has increased manifold in the region post US invasion of Afghanistan.

Author: abhischekcc [ 25 Jun 2008 12:09 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Hi Ramana,

Continuing from my previous posts. I couldn't write the whole thing as I was in office.

Opium was the reason the Yanks were in Vietnam, and are in Afghanistan now. The western financial system needs a regular infusion of narco-dollars to stay afloat.

Remember that during the 80s, a powerful Pakistani transnational bank was created - BCCI. The main role of this bank was to launder narc-dollars for remitance to the western financial system. Also recall that this bank 'collapsed' soon after the Soviets withdrew. And further recall that the then ruler of dubai tried to save this bank from going under.

The importance of paki-army to America is because it is the on-ground manager of the opium production.

----------
On Vietnam, it is my gut feeling that US withdrew after making the Chinese responsible for the SEA drug trafficking. Take it FWIW.

Author: Johann [ 25 Jun 2008 12:18 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Abishek,

In the post-WWII era its the other way around; drugs follow wars, especially irregular wars. War is the most expensive human activity, and drugs are the most lucrative source of income for any irregular army.

That was true of the Meos in Laos, the communist FARC and anti-communist AUC in Colombia, and the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan. It is no different left or right - even Ho Chi Minh did it until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to the creation of North Vietnam.

But the biggest producers in SE Asia was always Burma, particularly the by remains of Chiang Kai Shek's army that fled to northern Burma in 1949 after the PLA victory. Thailand has been the central avenue for the flow of opiates from the golden triangle to the rest of the world, channeling production from the whole area.

ramana wrote:
Looks like the period from 1905 to 1925 saw a moral turn around on the question of selling opium. A League of Nations convention was signed in 1925 leading to the stopping of the trade.

History of opium cultivation

So its not always so dark.


That is also the period when most narcotics actually became illegal within Western markets as well - they had been legal up to that point, but heavy dependence was socially frowned upon (remember Sherlock Holmes and his 7% solution of cocaine? Sort of the way that tobacco is heading now.

In just the same way that alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s and 1930s fuelled the growth of organised crime, keeping drug consumption as a crime only benefits the global underground economy, and ties it to conflict economy. Legalisation may be the best way to clear out the muck, but social conservatives cant even imagine it.

Author: abhischekcc [ 25 Jun 2008 12:33 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

About opium trade from India,

I remember kgoan saying long time ago that a particular Parsi businessman became the largst opium exporter from India in the 40s, when it was still legal.

That man's name was Jamshed......

I dont think I need to tell the whole name.

So, perhaps the drug trade was simply 'privatised'.

Author: SwamyG [ 25 Jun 2008 12:42 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Please ignore the rhetoric in the article. I post the article as I find fascinating insights into USA.
Why the US is an economic ...
My choice nuggets:

{Present forms of governments and economics have been lot influenced by the Western culture. Hopefully one day, when the East becomes a mighty entity, the Eastern values will influence these.}
Quote:
But the problem with understanding economics, especially when articulated by economists is that they understand and explain economics as a discipline completely disconnected with the larger question of how culture and civilisational values impact economics.


{It is touted, sometimes, that in the East the support structure from the family and the society is better than the West.}
Quote:
This revolution, he believes, has its roots in the Christian Protestantism which provided a moral basis for the promotion of individualist behaviour while simultaneously weakening other tendencies towards group life. This is evidenced by the disintegration of even the nuclear family and community with a concomitant rise in social isolation within the US.


Quote:
Subsequent thinkers have even suggested that not even the family is necessary for human sustenance. Based on such extreme ideas, constitutional experts in the US argue that parents and children may have mutual obligations of love and respect, but parental authority should end when the children are capable of reasoning things out on their own.


{This is a great piece.... often our ancient texts talk about different roles and different kinds of duties in various stages of our lives. In the cycle of 'samsara' we all have our own duties to keep the society running. And they also prescribe ways to get the heck out of 'samsara'.}
Quote:
And the fundamental assumption that has driven such political thought has been that man is born not with duties but with rights and rights alone. Whatever duties he takes on, he acquires as a result of his free will -- neither necessitated by law nor expected by society.


We in the East start from one end of the spectrum, the West starts from the other end; we meet somewhere between and hopefully we have our view points asserted as much the other.

Author: shaardula [ 26 Jun 2008 03:09 pm ]
Post subject: Attention Ramana, Shiv

Attention Ramana & Shiv and other mods.
didnot know where to post this.

very important steps in deconstruction and reconstruction of indian worldview.
http://www.youtube.com/cultuurwetenschap

a perspective
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/12/09/sto ... 090400.htm
Quote:

What is the framework you would use to define Hinduism in this conference?

The definition will only come later. We would first need some kind of description. We will look at traditions first. Is it possible to demarcate traditions? Can we, for example, say that Buddhist traditions are completely different from Advaitin traditions? Do they overlap? Where do you draw the line? Should you draw the line? Why draw the line? These are the kinds of questions that will be asked.

The plurality of Indian traditions has led to them being described as “deficient” religions. An attempt of this conference is to start developing new ways of thinking about these traditions, finding out what their strengths are and how it might be possible for us to recover their essence and explain them in 21st century language. It makes no sense to speak of chittasuddhi, manasuddhi, atman, etc. because many of us don’t even know to what these terms refer. We would have to explain the concepts in a simple language — English in this case, because it is the language of the present time.

Do you think part of the problem in understanding Hindu concepts like atman is that we don’t speak Sanskrit any more? And most of our philosophical texts are in Sanskrit.

No, because Sanskrit, in the first place, was never a spoken language. It was a language of the literati who wrote the texts. It is not simply the absence of Sanskrit that creates a problem. The problem lies in transmitting words, but not their underlying meanings and theories. One could, of course, read up Patanjali’s Yogasutra, but it is very difficult to agree with his theories of the gross body, the subtle body etc. These kinds of explanations are both inadequate and unscientific.

But is there no understanding beyond scientific understanding?

No, but what I’m going to say is something more interesting. Indian insights in themselves are scientific in nature. What we need to do is understand and develop these extraordinary insights into the nature and structure of human psychology that no sociology, psychology or political science has ever come even remotely close to doing. And we have to re-formulate in 21st century language what was formulated 3,000 years ago in languages and idioms of that time.



Quote:
why is this conference relevant?
it is very simple. if it is the case that the research programme we are doing is true. then most of the social policies in a country like india and most of the political posturing is based on nothing. so, in that sense it will to have to reconfigure certain political constellations and certain social policies which have become the corner stone and characteristic of india after indian independence.

so the relevance would be this: if you are able to get this into the common, commonsenses of it somehow or the other i think this is going to mean an immense change in india society ...


Lots of work... but this i had posted a link to earlier.
The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism
-- S. N. Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover
http://heathenfaqs.googlepages.com/jopp1.pdf

Author: ramana [ 26 Jun 2008 07:18 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Was Nazism a new Islam for Europe? IOW a normative process for Germanic/Central and Eastern Europeans? Islam was similarly developed for Arab people.
Thanks, ramana

Author: John Snow [ 26 Jun 2008 08:14 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

It is said that during the times of Kalidasa, everybody used to speak Sanskrit, according to historical documents.

Also when Hala wrote Gatha Sapthasati in Pali it was well known that people only were using the snakrit for common puposes.

Author: abhischekcc [ 26 Jun 2008 09:40 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
Was Nazism a new Islam for Europe? IOW a normative process for Germanic/Central and Eastern Europeans? Islam was similarly developed for Arab people.
Thanks, ramana


Ramana,

There were several factors supporting growth of Nazism, besides the prevailing socio-economic conditions in Germany.

I have earlier written about British and American support for Nazi movement, and then later Nazi Germany.

But I have never spoken about the German elite. They have been trying to unite Europe under their leaderhip for several centuries. First, the Hapsburgs tried to unite/control Europe by marriage alliances. Marie Antoinette was German, so was the wife of Tsar Nicholas, last Tsar of Russia. This effort of the Germans ultimately ended by WW2.

Then the elite tried a more direct approach - war. This was the impulse for their support for Nazis. This effort ended in WW2.

Then when sex and violence both failed, they tried trade.

And the European Economic Community was born. I got the heebie-jeebies when I read that the Nazi plan for post WW2 Europe was called just that - the European Economic Community. :eek:

One of the biggest supporters of the EEC was Francois Mitterand - someone who was known to be a Nazi supporter in Vichy France.
So even the people pushing the United-Europe agenda are the same as in WW2.

This project has come closest to fruition among all the paths germany has taken.

And naturally, the Anglo-American Empire does not like it.

Case in point - George Soros' attack on the British pound, which led Britain to get out of the ERM. At that time Britain was undecided whether to throw its lot with a German-led Europe or with their blood brothers across the pond.

Pound's ejection from the European ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism), which was a stepping stone to the adoption of the Euro, caused Britain to side with the Americans - this was the big game going on. Yanks wanted to retain a beachhead in Europe - they got one.

Ironically, this helped Germany's position on the continent to become the strongest ever. For the first time, Germany became the dominant power in Europe. Britain was (partially) out of the united-europe game, and consequently had less say in the Euro. And no longer could Britain play France and Germany against one anothr , as it did in the whole of the 19th century.

Germany's grand strategy in motion.

Author: Pulikeshi [ 27 Jun 2008 06:05 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Attention Ramana, Shiv

shaardula wrote:
Attention Ramana & Shiv and other mods.
didnot know where to post this.
...



Shaardula,

Thanks for this link. It is interesting that Balu, et. al. are touching upon what some of us had discussed on the Religion threads that existed briefly on this forum. Once again, BRF was ahead of the curve on this one as well :-)

The time spent on all the youtube videos on this topic was well worth it - thank you for sharing this...
I hope we can see some exciting work coming out of such efforts.

Pulikeshi

Author: Keshav [ 27 Jun 2008 07:42 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Attention Ramana, Shiv

shaardula wrote:
Lots of work... but this i had posted a link to earlier.
The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism
-- S. N. Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover
http://heathenfaqs.googlepages.com/jopp1.pdf


That was one of the best observations about the differences between Semitic and Hindu worldviews. I had actually thought about that earlier but Mr. Balagangadhara put it into better words, although his semantics were really annoying (secularists versus Gandhian anti-secularists and what not).

Author: Acharya [ 27 Jun 2008 07:49 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Pulikeshi wrote:
shaardula wrote:
Attention Ramana & Shiv and other mods.
didnot know where to post this.
...



Shaardula,

Thanks for this link. It is interesting that Balu, et. al. are touching upon what some of us had discussed on the Religion threads that existed briefly on this forum. Once again, BRF was ahead of the curve on this one as well :-)

The time spent on all the youtube videos on this topic was well worth it - thank you for sharing this...
I hope we can see some exciting work coming out of such efforts.

Pulikeshi


I met Dr Balu one on one when he was visiting and had a long talk. He is breaking the stereotype and bringing the discussion on Indian religion to the right place where it should be discussed. But there are still certain things about his analysis which is not clear yet.

Author: Pulikeshi [ 27 Jun 2008 08:22 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Acharya wrote:
I met Dr Balu one on one when he was visiting and had a long talk. He is breaking the stereotype and bringing the discussion on Indian religion to the right place where it should be discussed. But there are still certain things about his analysis which is not clear yet.


Must have been an interesting meeting. Care to explain what about his analysis is not clear yet?

I'd argue he is posing a question regarding what "framework" to use to understand the native traditions of India, if not a Religious (Western) one. However, he has yet to provide the alternative framework, one that he has demanded himself that others produce. Perhaps his assertion is that a new "framework" will evolve based on such questioning or then again he may already have an answer - on this I am not sure!

Finally, if a new "framework" is indeed found, then perhaps we can look at Religion (Western/Arab notion) through this new framework. However, without defining this new framework, all we have is a bunch of ifs and buts... Not to say others do not have an idea of what this "framework" may be... Just don't see that from Dr. Balu yet.

Author: Keshav [ 27 Jun 2008 08:47 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Quote:
Finally, if a new "framework" is indeed found, then perhaps we can look at Religion (Western/Arab notion) through this new framework. However, without defining this new framework, all we have is a bunch of ifs and buts... Not to say others do not have an idea of what this "framework" may be... Just don't see that from Dr. Balu yet.


There will always be two frameworks - the Abrahamic and the Hindu (which includes other Pagan and Indigenous groups as he points out). The answer is to have people who can understand both in their proper contexts. Pointing out the flaws is itself a step in the right direction as this has not been done in the past 2000 years.

Is there anyway to convert PDF to plain text so parts of the article can be posted here?

I think the author hits the nail on the head, especially at certain points.

Author: JE Menon [ 27 Jun 2008 09:52 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

>>Is there anyway to convert PDF to plain text so parts of the article can be posted here?

If the original PDF is not converted from a jpg or other image, but converted directly from text, then you can simply Save As and give "Rich Text Format" as the option and it should do the job...

Author: Rahul M [ 27 Jun 2008 10:03 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Keshav wrote:
Quote:
Is there anyway to convert PDF to plain text so parts of the article can be posted here?

open with kpdf, click on select tool and you should be able to select text even from pic scans.

Author: Pulikeshi [ 27 Jun 2008 10:09 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Keshav wrote:
There will always be two frameworks - the Abrahamic and the Hindu (which includes other Pagan and Indigenous groups as he points out).


I believe Dr. Balu (as well as others on this forum) would argue that the "Hindu" framework has not been sketched out.
Well indeed the very word Hindu is alien to us. That is, your point on "pointing out the flaws" needs to accommodates this line of thinking as well.

The difference between Dr. Balu and me (among others) is that some of us think there is no need to search for a mythical "framework". That is, we believe that Dharma (outside its "Religious" context) is sufficient to have a discourse from a Non-Western view point. And if we were to do so, we come to some interesting conclusions on the Abrahamic Religions. However, one subtle point that Dr. Balu may suggest - is if Dharma is the framework, then it has to be defined and scaffolding built around it to enable the reconstruction process. However, this is my humble reading of the issue.... and on this I would agree with him.

PS: With Acrobat 8, I was able to save the file as text as JEM recommended successfully.

Author: SwamyG [ 27 Jun 2008 11:01 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Prof. Balagangadhara talks in Sanskrit, we also need folks who can translate that to Prakrit. India Forum carries several articles from him & Jakob.

Author: Acharya [ 27 Jun 2008 11:57 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Pulikeshi wrote:

Must have been an interesting meeting. Care to explain what about his analysis is not clear yet?

Send me a email.
I have a recording of his talk.

Author: Acharya [ 27 Jun 2008 11:57 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

SwamyG wrote:
Prof. Balagangadhara talks in Sanskrit, we also need folks who can translate that to Prakrit. India Forum carries several articles from him & Jakob.

Jakob is his student and a contributor of articles in IF

Author: Keshav [ 28 Jun 2008 04:23 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Pulikeshi wrote:
Keshav wrote:
There will always be two frameworks - the Abrahamic and the Hindu (which includes other Pagan and Indigenous groups as he points out).


I believe Dr. Balu (as well as others on this forum) would argue that the "Hindu" framework has not been sketched out.

Well indeed the very word Hindu is alien to us. That is, your point on "pointing out the flaws" needs to accommodates this line of thinking as well.


It seems like a semantics issue - how are we defining framework? Worldview?

Another thing that annoys me is his idea that we need to use English rather than Sanskrit. Translating philosophical concepts from Sanskrit into English always creates weird, verbose, pseudo-scientific sounding ideas that don't immediately tell you anything about the concept. And more than that it gets passed off as some Anglo discovery, like Integral Theory has been taken over by Ken Wilber when it was started by Sri Aurobindo. There's no need to reinvent the wheel - the words are right there. Seems to me it might be a lot easier to just learn a little Sanskrit instead of creating another "framework" if you truly want to understand Hindu philosophy.

Author: ramana [ 08 Aug 2008 08:08 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

X-posted in part....

I have been re-looking at US Foreign Policy during and since WWI. In WWI, US intervened on side of Anglo-Saxons to ensure Balance of Power in Europe. Here they borrowed a leaf from the Great Britain. The fact they intervened means there was no single major power in Europe henceforth for the rest of the century. Yes GB was there but with US help.

During WWI, Japan used its Anglo-Japan alliance to intervene in China as European powers were unable to intervene. Japan was able to use its Alliance with GB to do this. So in the aftermath of WWI, US offered the Washington Treaty on naval ship tonnage to induce GB to break its Japan alliance. This ensured the viability of China as a nation state. All the Western powers intervention in China was removed when power for tariffs was restored to China.

During WWII, US pressured the GB to give up the colonies especially India for that was the basis of power for GB. I don't know how much they built up Gandhi via press and saintdom. It was mainly US journalists and media that portrayed him and gave international press to him in the English language media. GB was off course depicting him as naked fakir etc.

Then Cold War came and ended with FSU dissolution.

The purpose of the narration is that US goal is to ensure there are no single challengers to its power since WWI.

However PRC emerged with no competition and would require a challenger. Has to be indirect as there is a lot at stake.

Author: ramana [ 08 Aug 2008 09:38 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

The present Beijing Olympics are the result of actions taken in 1920s to protect and nurture the Chinese as a nation state.

Author: Philip [ 10 Aug 2008 06:15 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Ramanna,here is a viewpoint often forgotten by the mainstream media and the world of the key importance of the Indian fight for independence,from the other side of the freedom struggle coin,the armed freedom fighters,Netaji and the INA and the other "mutineers" of the time.They caught the British between "a hard place and a rock",so to speak,between Gandhi and the INC and Bose and the INA.In fact,the "desertion" of Indian soldiers to the INA rocked the British govt. as much as Gandhi's non-violent campaign.They knew that they were finished in India beacuse of the two opposite methods of kicking them out.

Independence Day Special

http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sunda ... al&rLink=0

Militants had a crucial role
Sunday August 10 2008 05:05 IST

N A Karim
The destiny of a nation is shaped by several factors including the quality of leadership. India emerged from colonial rule without shedding much blood and leaving little bitterness between rulers and ruled. That does not mean that the country and the people did not suffer, but it was mitigated by the non-violent and non-cooperation mode of struggle the Indian National Congress followed under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi from the 1920s.

On a closer analysis of the national movement, one can see a confluence of the currents of non-violence and violence that helped India achieve Independence in 1947. The almost parallel Quit India movement here, and the war cry “Dilli Challo” raised by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose abroad, together undermined British authority.

In spite of the fact that Gandhi and Bose took diametrically opposite paths to freedom their efforts were politically complementary. Gandhi thoroughly disapproved of the violent means adopted by Bose but was all praise for his courage and patriotism. In the same way, Netaji wanted to dedicate the freedom to the Mahatma, to be used in any manner he liked.

Therefore, it cannot be said that India won freedom exclusively through non-violent means. It would be a black ingratitude to the memory of Netaji and thousands of his followers who sacrificed their lives here and abroad. The statues of Gandhi in his characteristically simple dress, and Bose in his army boots and military uniform in the Parliament House compound loudly proclaim the way in which India won freedom.

The urge for freedom was strong and growing irresistibly. India would have won Independence irrespective of the means, violent or non-violent. But the flavour of freedom would have been distinctly different if it had been exclusively through violent means. Indeed, violent means would have brought more radical changes in the social structure of the country and the movement itself would probably have been more secular.

Indeed, parallel to the non-violent movement led by Gandhi, a violent struggle was underway, started by revolutionaries or extremists, whom the colonial power generally dubbed as terrorists. But unlike today’s terrorists they ensured that civilians were not hurt by their activities. They targeted their selected white victims with care, risking their own lives in the process.

The long line of revolutionaries continued to the very end of the struggle, and they followed their own path without concerning themselves with the Congress. People like Shahid Bhagat-Singh, though young, showed political maturity and had a clear vision of the future after Independence, a secular, socialist India.

There were also a number of Congressmen who were impatient with Gandhi’s methods, and they wanted fight the colonial rulers through more militant methods. Young socialists and revolutionaries formed small groups in the Congress. Gandhi and the official leadership looked upon them with disapproval and suspicion. These young leaders had a mass following outside the party and posed a distinct threat to the moderate leadership.

The election of Bose as president of the Congress against Gandhi’s nominee Pattabhi Sitaramaiah in 1938 created a crisis in the organisation. It also led to Gandhi and Bose going their own separate ways. He formed the Forward Bloc and decided to fight the enemy from abroad, making use of the opportunity offered by World War II to capture political power in India with the help of the Axis Powers, Germany and Japan. But it failed with their defeat.

Though his military venture was a complete failure, Bose spread the contagion of nationalism among Indian soldiers and persuaded them to desert the British and fight for the freedom of their country abroad under his leadership. It was an event of great significance.

This disaffection in the army weighed with Britain’s decision to quit India at the end of the war. The mutiny of Indian naval ratings in Bombay and other naval bases of the Royal Indian Navy, the discontent of Indians in the Royal Air Force (RAF) that surfaced in a threatening manner was the last straw on the camels back, as it were.

Thus, the possibility of violence would have played on British minds and pushed forward the timetable for Independence. This is where Bose’s influence can be seen. That he could mobilise Indian soldiers of the British army and form the Indian National Army (INA) in faraway Malaysia, and set up an independent Indian government abroad was a feat of revolutionary action that thrilled Indians everywhere.

Non-violence did have one very important side-effect. It was Gandhi’s way and the Indian National Congress reaped the harvest of that reflected glory long after his death. It monopolised political power in independent India for a long time only because the transfer of power was smooth, though rivers of blood flowed on either side of the border due to the insensitive manner in which Partition was carried out by Cyril Radcliff.

He did with a butcher’s cleaver a task that should have been performed with surgical care. It is also worth noting that Partition itself may not have been necessary if a more secular and revolutionary liberation movement had gained the upper hand in clinching the freedom issue.

In their greed and impatience for political power, some Congress leaders hastily agreed to Partition, an unsavoury fact that has been clearly brought out by the Transfer of Power papers since published. Independent writers in their studies and books have established that a moth-eaten Pakistan was thrust upon M A Jinnah as he was not particular about the vivisection. The demand for Pakistan was put forward earlier by others, and Jinnah, a hard-headed political realist, made use of it only as a bargaining counter. However, Partition ended in the biggest ever man-made tragedy on the Indian subcontinent.

At the beginning of World War II, Britain had refused to consider even Dominion status for India. After the war, though, the British suddenly decided to quit the country after elections brought the Labour Party to power under the leadership of Clement Attlee. So perhaps violence played a role after all, offstage as it were.

One fact that emerges from a look at the national movement is that the role of south India is proportionately small. This neglect of the south seems to be a habit. Even early Indian historians did not think there were Indians beyond the Vindhyas. This focus only on aryavarta, the heartland of India, is an old tradition, though ordinary writers feel the south has played more than its share in all spheres of human endeavour.

Regarding the south’s contribution to the freedom movement, there is a deficit, particularly in the area of agitational and militant activities. But the south contributed a number of the finest minds to the movement.

At the same time, the south got much less than its rightful share in the pie. This imbalance between south and north should be redressed by suitable political and administrative mechanisms. It is strange that it continues in various forms even after 60 years of freedom and democracy.

Now India at 60, with more than a billion people and a rapidly growing economy has to contend with a neighbourhood that is not kindly disposed to it. Bold policy decisions regarding external security are needed.

Here, the old doubts on the morality of force and violence will have to give way to pragmatism. True to its traditions India can uphold the principle of panchasheel but at the same time keep its powder always dry.

— Dr N A Karim is a former pro vice-chancellor of the University of Kerala.

Author: Paul [ 21 Aug 2008 07:08 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Thank you Johann, will certainly do that……

The question to ask IMVHO is not who took the lead in setting into motion these events you refer to, but should who derived the major benefits from it's outcome.

it is true that Britain derived immense benefits from the endless squabbles between the European land powers over the centuries. These squabbles did help Britain retain control over the Oceans of the world help retain Control of strategic locations like Gibralter, Cape of hope, Malacca straits and other strategic choke points.

Quote:
Pax Britannica (Latin for "the British Peace", modelled after Pax Romana) was the period of relative peace in Europe and the British Empire controlling most key naval trade routes and enjoying unchallenged sea power. It refers to a period of British imperialism after the 1815 battle of Waterloo, which led to a period of overseas British expansionism. Britain dominated overseas markets and managed to influence and almost dominate Chinese markets after the Opium Wars.

The Empire's strength was guaranteed by dominance of a Europe lacking in strong nation states, and the presence of the Royal Navy on all of the world's oceans and seas. In 1905, the Royal Navy was superior in strength to the next two largest navies combined (known as the 'two power rule'). It provided services such as suppression of piracy and slavery. Britain also went beyond the seas and developed and funded a universal mail system.

This led to the spread of the English language, parliamentary democracy, technology, the British Imperial system of measures, and rules for commodity markets based on English common law.

The Pax Britannica was weakened by the breakdown of the continental order established by the Congress of Vienna and the consequent establishment of new nation-states in Italy and Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. The industrialization of Germany, the Empire of Japan, and the United States of America further contributed to the decline of British industrial supremacy following the 1870s. [b]Pax Britannica ended at the outset of the First World War, being an end to the peace between European powers. Hallelujah!!!

Author: ramana [ 23 Aug 2008 03:46 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Editorial in Telegraph, 23 Aug., 2008

Link:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080823/j ... 728586.jsp

Quote:
MORE THAN SKIN DEEP
- A coffee coloured future might kill caste, the oldest colour bar
SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY
All bunched up

Hispanics may think they are white, as Bhagat Singh Thind also did, but the American census is obviously as dismissive of their pretensions as the American supreme court was of Thind’s fantasy. Otherwise, there would have been no talk of whites being reduced to a minority by 2042, when they will account for 46 per cent of the American population, since Hispanics are expected to account for another 30 per cent. Not just Britain, as The Times, London, once lamented, but the world is headed for the saving grace of “a coffee-coloured” future.

Colour and race are moveable feasts. We know from E.M. Forster that whites “are really pinko-grey” and from Julian Huxley that race is a pseudo-scientific term. How pseudo is evident in Singapore where Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans are lumped as Indian. My efforts to enter Indo-Aryan for “Race” were brushed aside: I had to choose one of 15 categories of Indian. A Filipino friend’s self-description of Malay was also unacceptable. He was Christian and everyone knew Malays are Muslim. He pleaded that His Most Catholic Majesty King Philip II of Spain had given the Philippines its name but not fathered 91 million Filipinos. In vain. Filipino, like Indian, is a race for Singapore’s national registration department.

Colour is another conundrum. Forster’s Fielding gave great offence with his pinko-grey comment because if white referred only to skin, pallid Parsis and rosy-cheeked Kashmiris would steal a march over sunburnt sahibs. White stood for superior. Black for inferior. Both the warring Whites (Fascists, so called after White Russians) and Reds (Bolsheviks) in Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious novel, Scoop, were Negroes.

Aware of the pitfalls of a too literal interpretation, the Americans invented a legal variant of what New Orleans streetcar conductors called the floating Mason-Dixon line. The original Mason-Dixon line separated the slave states from the rest, but the one I saw was a loose board separating the black rear from the white front of the carriage. It was moved up to accommodate more passengers when the track ran through black areas, and shifted back when whites were expected to predominate. The young conductor I chatted with talked gleefully of the fun they used to have suddenly moving the board behind a solitary black passenger.

American law was equally capricious. The supreme court turned down Takao Ozawa’s citizenship application in 1922 on the grounds that though light-skinned, Japanese were not Caucasians. Possibly encouraged by that argument, Thind, who went to the United States of America in 1913 and fought with the American forces in World War I, claimed citizenship as “a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and therefore) white”. But it was damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The court ruled that while the Amritsar-born Thind may have had “purity of Aryan blood” and would be “classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race” he was not white as used in “common speech” or in “the understanding of the common man”.

Eleven years earlier, another judge had similarly rejected Akhay Kumar Mozumdar’s application because he did not “look like” a North European Caucasian. Mozumdar, a respected religious teacher who travelled to Palestine, China and Japan before reaching the US in 1903, argued in his appeal that high-caste Hindus “consider themselves to be members of the Aryan race” and call India “Aryavarta which means land of the Aryans”. Whether or not Hitler would have been impressed, his casteist elitist plea won over the appeal judge and Mozumdar became the father of today’s bustling Indian-American community.

Alas, Thind’s failure led to Mozumdar’s citizenship being revoked. A stroke of the judicial pen changed his colour. As Associate Justice George Sutherland found in Thind’s case, Aryans, even of the highest castes in “the extreme northwestern districts of India” where one might expect genetic purity, suffer from an “intermixture of blood” with the “dark-skinned Dravidian” races. Presumably this explained the resolution passed that year by Allahabad’s municipal board, chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru, deploring the treatment of Indians in the US. Seeing themselves as white, like Mozumdar and Thind, though destined to lead non-whites against white domination, Indian politicians resented the rebuff on grounds of colour.

Sutherland’s ruling boasted a legal basis. The US is the only country in the world to observe the “one drop rule”, meaning that no one with even a trace of non-white ancestry (however small or invisible) can be considered white. Calcutta’s own Queenie of the eponymous novel got away despite whispered sniggers but the rule led to confusion over the singer, Mariah Carey, who was accused of being “another white girl trying to sing black”. Carey told Larry King that despite looking white and having been raised mainly by her white mother, she did not feel she was white because of the one drop rule. There’s a poser there for Barack Obama.

But laws are made by men, not men by laws. Even if the supreme court ruled in 1923 that Indians were not “free white men” — the Immigration Act’s qualification for naturalization — the census decided that Indians are white. South Africa’s expedient of treating the Japanese as “honorary white” had already underlined the merit of gainful flexibility. The restaurant manager at Houston airport who showed G.L. Mehta, India’s ambassador, and his secretary to a separate room because she took them for Negroes, retorted when pressure mounted that she recognized them as VIPs who could not eat with the common herd.

Four decades later, poor P.V. Narasimha Rao was the victim of American race blinkers. Fearing Khalistani, Kashmiri or Tamil Tiger rebels, his security chief asked his Boston hotel not to allow any south Asian near him. One non-white being the same as another to the management, “no African-American could carry his bags, no Asian could clean his room, no Latinos could serve him food,” shrieked the New York Times. He “had to be served by whites only, American or European”. The prime minister was accused of “fostering racial discrimination” when two African-American hotel employees, a night bellman and a porter, said they had been shifted to other duties. Though Narasimha Rao was blissfully unaware of the row, it looked as if he also nursed the self-image of Mozumdar and Thind.

Scientists claim that at least a third of American blacks have white DNA. Similarly, Britain’s white population has absorbed the black pages who were fashionable in the 18th century. Nor can Sukarno’s claim that Bandung ushered in a “century of the awakening of the coloured peoples” have pleased participants who reportedly spent their nights straightening crinkly hair and daubing themselves with lightening cream. As for Hispanics, Nehru noted that they always ranked fairly low in the international pecking order. Britain was followed, after a long gap, by the white population of the old dominions and by Anglo-Saxon Americans (“not dagoes, wops, etc.”). Then came Western Europeans, the rest of Europe, Latin South Americans, and, after another long gap, “the brown, yellow and black races of Asia and Africa, all bunched up more or less together”.

Now, we might at last be witnessing the beginnings of a reversal of the effects of the great trek out of Africa that in the course of many millennia transformed migrant humanity by adjusting pigmentation to the environment. Only this time, the process will be speeded by what the language of apartheid called miscegenation. The market for wheat-complexioned brides might slump. Bad news, too, for those whose skin whiteners are regularly advertised on TV. The café au lait future might also deal its death blow to varna, caste, the world’s oldest colour bar, on which Mozumdar and Thind relied.
sunandadr@yahoo.co.in

Author: ramana [ 24 Aug 2008 12:56 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

x-posted....
asprinzl wrote:
1)Paul Craig Roberts is essentially a garbage producer so his articles are usually only suitable to fertilize the soil.

2) Russian military performance -though produced more or less the intended end-result due to overwhelming use of fire power- has a lot of room for improvement. They have had a lot of real combat exposure in their long operations against the Chechens and should have learned some lessons especially in non-conventional warfare and in command and control. Still, their performance has a lot of room to get better. You cannot finish up you ammo store to flush out one bunker. All told, economics of use of force and equipments while obtaining the best result needs to be paramount.

3) Georgians were the aggressors for invading SO. Ofcourse they had been provoked but that is for another day. Come to think of it, the MUslim Albanians were provoking the Serbs since at least 1988 and Serb patience bottomed out. Nick Burns (yep...that same dude who had been selling the nuke deal to India) can say whatever he wants to but there is absolutely everything similar in Kosovo and SO and Abkz.

4) Russia had been invaded by the Mongols, Tartars, Golden Hordes, Arabs, Persians, Swedish, Germans, Teutonic Knights, French, Poles and the Turks in their 1000 year history. Not a century went by without an invasion of Russia being concoted somewhere. Oh...you wanna talk about paranoia now?

5) Russians and Eukranians have more in common (linguistic-cultural-religion) than Marathis and Punjabis.

6) Everyone talks about how Russia had always been imperialistic and expansionist. Hmm...I guess everyone forgot about "Manifest Destiny" which could succeed only via the decimation of another race, the colonization of Australia and New Zealand. Thing is, in Russian enterprise, Russification of the conquered natives was more attempted than decimation while in australia, New Zealand and in the Americas the Islamic solution was imposed- decimation. So if some western comentator tries to impose the imperial brand on Russia......hypocrit.

7) Romans (east and west) and Persians -the superpowers of their time- fought to their own demise. They depleted their manpower. To augment their loses both conscripted "others" to fill their ranks. As the loses mounted, the non romans and non persians in their respective forces soon became majority. Soon, the littlest of a mouse of the desert (Arab muslim barbarians) came against both and the rest is history.

8) Everyone talks about Russia's population decline. This is misleading. Russia's population is slowly increasing but the population of ethnic Russians is declining. In another words ethnic Russians will be minority if the trend is not rectified. What no one is talking about is that this trend is also taking place in the USA. The whites will be less than 50 percent in about 2048. So to all the comentators who have been belittling Russia for their ethnic decline......watch your back....payback is a biatch.

9) So, while Byzantians battled the Seljuks and later the Ottomans, Venice was happily selling weapons to the Muslims. While the French led crusade was being waged to liberate the holyland, assorted other Europeans were fighting for the Arabs. While Tzarist Russia was fighting for its survival against the Ottomans, Napolean was selling arms to the Turks while French freelancers were training the Muslim army. While Ottomans were raiding Ukranian and Russian villages to kidnap their females for the Middle Eastern sex-slave market, western Europe was busy trading trading with the Turks. When Tzarist Russia undertook a military campaign to kick out the Turks from Ukraine, English and French fleet bombarded Sevastapol and launched the Crimean War. When Barbary pirates invade Italian villages to capture females for their sex slave markets, French forces stood by. When these same pirates invade Irish coastal villages, the English forces stood by. That is Europe for you in a nut shell. They always tried to undermine their fellow Europeans which all along benefitted Islamic forces. Watch out. Islamic forces are still waiting on the fringes.

10) Western Europe had always appeased Islam at the expense of their Orthodox brethrens.

11) Col. Ralph Peters is an idiot. That he was a former military-intelligence officer is a joke. How could an idiot like him become one?

12) Shakashvilli is a democrat? Last I heard there is no such thing as an opposition news media in Georgia and Georgia is supposed to be a democratic state. Oh wait....despite Putins dictatorial tendencies.....there are opposition media outlets in Russia. Wow...I can't believe my eyes.

13) The west needs Russia just as the Russians need the west. They are both facing civilizational threat and both are in denial of it.

14) Historically Islam has been the biggest beneficiary of European/Western folly and Islam is going to be the biggest beneficiary if this folly continues.

15) Avram is the greatest. Have a good weekend.



I will have some comments on item 13. However it needs a discussion of Western religions and political doctrines and has to be carefully worded to avoid rancor.

Author: ramana [ 24 Aug 2008 01:48 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

X-Posted...
Igorr wrote:
asprinzl wrote:
5) Russians and Eukranians have more in common (linguistic-cultural-religion) than Marathis and Punjabis.

Avram,
add to that that Ossetians are 1500 years old fraternal people with Russians since the East Slavic tribes came to Dnepr-Don region and settled Alans (Oironistan) land and indeed two peoples were assimilated in one people, like Engles and Saxons or Francs and Galls or Volga turkish BUlgars with slavs now Bulgarians. The first known name for Russian is Rossolans - i/e Ros-Alan (Like Anglo-Saxons). Alans BTW also were the allies of Goths (Goth-Alans). All the RIver in South Russia still have still Iranian language names: Dnepr, Don, Donets, Ros', Vorskla - are not slavic origin but Iranian (Alanian). Mongols divided the remnants of Alans tribes in the north Caucasian steppe with the Russians, but Ossetians were the first who re-united with Russians when rized such a possibility. It was well before Georgian king asked unification with Russia. For Georgia defence Russia twice had wars with Iran and Turkey. But further Unlike Georgians, Ossetians NEVER asked independence.

Together with Armenians Ossetians are only indogenious Indo-European people in Caucasus region. Nor Georgian nor the North-Caucasians, Azerbaijans are Indo-Europeans. Indeed the self-name of the Ossetians is Oiron and the name of South Ossetia is Oironistan - it's typical may be the most archaic self-nomination of Indo-Europeans - 'arians' = nobless. The name Alania - is probably due to 'r'-'l' rotation in the Indo-European languages, compare 'Ellin-Ellas' (Greece) with old name 'Alan-Alania' and after alternation "Arian-Iran', 'Arman-Armenia'.

It's not by accident that Russia remains the traditional ally of both christian and Indo-European Ossetians and Armenians in Caucasus.

Author: ramana [ 24 Aug 2008 04:08 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Pope Benendict was right- The history of Europe is the history of Church in Europe. Without the Church's influence Europe was very backward and quite uncivilized. However that was not true of the Mediterranean Europe comprising of Greece and Rome or Italy.

Ancient Greece was a collection of city states that could not come to terms with each other and led to conquest by a Macedonian(Philip and his son Alexander) who was at the outer limits of Greek civilization. Within a hundred years after Alexander's death in Persia, Greece was conquered by Rome and we do not hear of Ancient Greece as an independent area. It is a Roman province and yet its thought was adopted by Romans and assimilated. From there on the Romans conquered Asiatic Middle East and setup an empire. They persecuted the Jews and viewed their not acknowledging the Emperor as a God to be sedition. Many Jews were killed and their revolts suppressed.

It is interesting that two of Jesus's disciples who were brothers- St Andrew and St Peter went to spread the message to Greece and to Rome respectively. It is the doctrine taught by these two brothers that leads us to the current Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. St Paul comes later on to spread the message to Gentiles(ie is non Jews)

While the Roman Catholic Church under went splits from Protestants and others, and went through Reformation, the orthodox church did not go through any such events even during Soviet Communist rule. I do not know why and am searching for it.

Was there a difference in the message from the two brothers? This has a direct bearing on the history of Europe as we see it.

Author: ramana [ 27 Aug 2008 04:53 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Gerard wrote:
Behind most religious conflicts is the fight for control over resources. Islam took control over the southern Arabian peninsula because it allowed one Arab group to defeat the Jewish kingdoms in the Yemen. Religion is nothing but the tool of control.
The Orthodox and Catholic supposedly split over three words in the creed "and the Son". The split was really controlling the wealth of the Church and maintaining political control over religion.



Very good insight, Gerard. You should write more often.

Author: sanjaykumar [ 27 Aug 2008 05:02 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Pope Benendict was right- The history of Europe is the history of Church in Europe. Without the Church's influence Europe was very backward and quite uncivilized. However that was not true of the Mediterranean Europe comprising of Greece and Rome or Italy.


Is there any evidence for this assertion, or can be dismissed as antipagan propaganda?

Any impartial reading of the role of the Church in Europe will likely lead t opposite conclusions.

Author: mayurav [ 27 Aug 2008 05:10 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

I have been forming the view that Xtianity was an attempt by India to civilize Europe and to raise them up a little bit. The pagans were quite uncivilized and barbaric. Xtianity definitely civilized them a little. Unfortunately, the pagans took hold of Xtianity and converted it into a tool for their own political aims. And today they are even exporting it back to India! Also today, many pagans are giving up Xtianity. So there are the non-Xtian pagans and the Xtian pagans. Sounds like an oxymoron, but I am increasingly convinced by this.

Author: ramana [ 27 Aug 2008 05:31 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

mayurav wrote:
I have been forming the view that Xtianity was an attempt by India to civilize Europe and to raise them up a little bit. The pagans were quite uncivilized and barbaric. Xtianity definitely civilized them a little. Unfortunately, the pagans took hold of Xtianity and converted it into a tool for their own political aims. And today they are even exporting it back to India! Also today, many pagans are giving up Xtianity. So there are the non-Xtian pagans and the Xtian pagans. Sounds like an oxymoron, but I am increasingly convinced by this.



Mayurav, Any info to how you reached the conclusions/view? There is a whole thread in its second genesis at IF on this subject.

Author: Anujan [ 27 Aug 2008 06:58 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
Pope Benendict was right- The history of Europe is the history of Church in Europe. Without the Church's influence Europe was very backward and quite uncivilized. However that was not true of the Mediterranean Europe comprising of Greece and Rome or Italy.


ramana-saar,

I disagree with your statement that "Without the Church's influence Europe was very backward and quite uncivilized." This is not true.

It is true that the history of Europe is the history of Church in Europe. That is because of the enormous political influence that the Church had. Irrespective of whether the church came out on top---like the templar issue: Philip IV of France owed a lot of money to the templars and he conspired with Pope Clement V, who was a french man, didnt like the templars either, to have the pope declare them as heretics. The templars were arrested and decimated, their fortune taken and divvied up between Philip and the Church---or lost out---like the Church of England issue: Henry VIII wanted a divorce, so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The Catholic Church protested, Henry VIII split the Church of England from the Catholic Church, declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England, and gave himself the permission to divorce !! As an aside, I think that the British monarchs being the head of the Church of England, and pandering to royal escapades, makes the Anglican church quite liberal. They support homosexuality and gay couples for example.---It has created seismic changes in the politics and power equation of Europe. That was simply because of the political influence of the church. It is akin to saying "The history of the united states, is the history of the government of united states".

Keeping this in mind, it is quite debatable if the Church civilized anybody. For example, We can mark Constantine I's rule as the point where Christianity crossed over as a political force (from being the religion of a small section of society). Constantine I started ruling in 306AD and and consolidated his power in about 324AD. The roman empire at its peak was under Trajan, in about 117AD, and included spain, portugal, france, half of germany, turkey, half of Iraq, half of Iran, half of Egypt, most of northern africa, Italy, greece, Romania and Bulgaria. IE, it rivaled EU in size ! All of the celebrated philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, were pre constantine-I. So were roads, canals, irrigation, governance.

Who exactly did the church then "civilize" ?

Author: ramana [ 27 Aug 2008 07:14 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

The ones you didnt mention who are now the core of the Western Europe. Its not my statemetn . Its in the famous pdf released by the Pope's office which was controversial sometime ago.

Author: mayurav [ 28 Aug 2008 01:40 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
mayurav wrote:
I have been forming the view that Xtianity was an attempt by India to civilize Europe and to raise them up a little bit. The pagans were quite uncivilized and barbaric. Xtianity definitely civilized them a little. Unfortunately, the pagans took hold of Xtianity and converted it into a tool for their own political aims. And today they are even exporting it back to India! Also today, many pagans are giving up Xtianity. So there are the non-Xtian pagans and the Xtian pagans. Sounds like an oxymoron, but I am increasingly convinced by this.



Mayurav, Any info to how you reached the conclusions/view? There is a whole thread in its second genesis at IF on this subject.


Mostly after I learnt about Swami Yogananda's observation that Christ visited India to learn from rishis and took what he learnt and spread in ME. And recently I learnt Sri Sri Ravishankar also holds the same view. This view also allowed me to square the similarities in some narratives in our puranas and Xtianity. And to square my belief that it is the Hindu's burden to civilize the world. And also some observations of Swami Vivekananda like the ones below..

Quote:
Still, it has the largest number of followers of any religion, and it has indirectly modified the teachings of all the other religions. A good deal of Buddhism entered into Asia Minor. It was a constant fight at one time whether the Buddhists would prevail or the later sects of Christians. The [Gnostics] and the other sects of early Christians were more or less Buddhistic in their tendencies, and all these got fused up in that wonderful city of Alexandria, and out of the fusion under Roman law came Christianity. Buddhism in its political and social aspect is even more interesting than its [doctrines] and dogmas; and as the first outburst of the tremendous world-conquering power of religion, it is very interesting also.


Quote:
The Mother Kali is still exacting Her worship even in China and Japan: it is She whom the Christians metamorphosed into the Virgin Mary, and worship as the mother of Jesus the Christ.


Quote:
But spiritual knowledge can only be given in silence like the dew that falls unseen and unheard, yet bringing into bloom masses of roses. This has been the gift of India to the world again and again. Whenever there has been a great conquering race, bringing the nations of the world together, making roads and transit possible, immediately India arose and gave her quota of spiritual power to the sum total of the progress of the world. This happened ages before Buddha was born, and remnants of it are still left in China, in Asia Minor, and in the heart of the Malayan Archipelago. This was the case when the great Greek conqueror united the four corners of the then known world; then rushed out Indian spirituality, and the boasted civilisation of the West is but the remnant of that deluge.


Quote:
Afterwards, in Italy, a barbarous tribe known as the Romans conquered the civilised Etruscans, assimilated their culture and learning, and established a civilization of their own on the ruins of that of the conquered race. Gradually, the Romans carried their victorious arms in all directions; all the barbarous tribes in the southwest of Europe came under the suzerainty of Rome; only the barbarians of the forests living in the northern regions retained independence. In the efflux of time, however, the Romans became enervated by being slaves to wealth and luxury, and at that time Asia again let loose her armies of Asuras on Europe. Driven from their homes by the onslaught of these Asuras, the barbarians of Northern Europe fell upon the Roman Empire, and Rome was destroyed. Encountered by the force of this Asian invasion, a new race sprang up through the fusion of the European barbarians with the remnants of the Romans and Greeks. At that time, the Jews being conquered and driven away from their homes by the Romans, scattered themselves throughout Europe, and with them their new religion, Christianity, also spread all over Europe. All these different races and their creeds and ideas, all these different hordes of Asuras, heated by the fire of constant struggle and warfare, began to melt and fuse in Mahâmâyâ's crucible; and from that fusion the modern European race has sprung up.

Thus a barbarous, very barbarous European race came into existence, with all shades of complexion from the swarthy colour of the Hindus to the milk-white colour of the North, with black, brown, red, or white hair, black, grey, or blue eyes, resembling the fine features of face, the nose and eyes of the Hindus, or the flat faces of the Chinese. For some time they continued to fight among themselves; those of the north leading the life of pirates harassed and killed the comparatively civilised races. In the meantime, however, the two heads of the Christian Churches, the Pope (in French and Italian, Pape (pronounced as Pâp)) of Italy and the Patriarch of Constantinople, insinuating themselves, began to exercise their authority over these brutal barbarian hordes, over their kings, queens, and peoples.

Author: Rahul M [ 28 Aug 2008 02:21 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

I urge people once again to see the movie "man from earth". it has some interesting take on this viewpoint. filter out the obvious absurdity but the rest of the nuggets on JC's origin is intriguing to say the least.

Author: ramana [ 28 Aug 2008 05:01 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

A book review
Acharya wrote:
Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000
by Barry Cunliffe (Author)



# Hardcover: 480 pages
# Publisher: Yale University Press (September 2, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0300119232
# ISBN-13: 978-0300119237
Quote:
Starred Review. Cunliffe, emeritus professor of archeology at Oxford, colorfully weaves history, geography archeology and anthropology into a mesmerizing tapestry chronicling the development of Europe. The sheer size of the European coastlines, as well as the inland rivers pouring into these seas, enabled many groups to move easily from one place to another and establish cultures that flourished commercially. Between 2800 and 1300 B.C., for example, Britain, the Nordic states, Greece and the western Mediterranean states were bound together by their maritime exchange of bronze, whose use in Britain and Ireland had spread by 1400 B.C. to Greece and the Aegean. From 800 to 500 B.C.—the three hundred years that changed the world—the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans and Carthaginians emerged from relative obscurity into major empires whose struggles to control the seas were for the first time recorded in writing. Cunliffe points out that each oceanic culture developed unique sailing vessels for the kinds of commerce peculiar to it. Richly told, Cunliffe's tale yields a wealth of insights into the earliest days of European civilization. Illus., maps. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"This book is an achievement of astonishing scope: the first to present the whole prehistory of Europe from the origins of farming to the rise of urban society with evident authority, and then to go on to review the Roman world right through to the dawn of the Middle Ages. A pioneering work of synthesis on a continental scale, this is the first coherent overview of the origins of Europe which meets the challenge of treading the path from prehistory into the full light of history. Only an archaeologist could have written it, yet Professor Cunliffe has an impressive grasp also of the historical sources for the Roman world and its aftermath. His easy style should please the general reader, while the boldness and assurance of his masterly treatment will challenge and intrigue the specialist." - Lord Colin Renfrew, Formerly Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge (Colin Renfrew )


They are working on a new non Christian European history that encompasses all of Europe to get out of the mess they are in.

I am working on a composite history of South India from the early historical period to the modern era. However it wont be abook for I am no historian but will be more like a long essay.

Author: Johann [ 28 Aug 2008 05:07 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Paul,

Britain's most important advantages in the 19th century were political and technological - a political system that was more mature and stable than its neighbours, and a technological edge. Without those advantages, it would have been in no position to capitalise on the balance of power that developed in continental Europe.

By the beginning of the 20th century both the US and Germany, as business friendly economies with even larger pools of technical manpower overtook the UK's technology lead.

What repeatedly set Germany back was its repeated attempts to *unilaterally* redefine the European balance of power. That was no more acceptable to the rest of Europe than Napoleonic France's attempt to unilaterally redefine the European balance of power. The UK has never been foolhardy enough to attempt such a task. No consultative government in any country would voluntarily take on such enormous risk and expenditure in blood and treasure.

Gerard, Ramana,

At the time of the Orthodox-Catholic split the issue was not church wealth - the Rome and Constantinople did not pool wealth having functioned as separate geopolitical entities since the partition of the Roman Empire.

This was a split over legitimacy. The Teutons who had conquered the Western Roman Empire wanted to be recognised as its inheritors. Eastern Roman Emperors had no interest in doing that, and so the split. There was also a deeper difference - the Eastern Roman Empire was Roman in name only and actually had become a second Greek empire, while the West remained Latin Roman in orientation.

Surinder,

Thanks for the reply - still trying to process it.

I've seen different interpretations of the Pakjabi situation, and its something that I'd really like to understand better.

Obviously culture, identity and national mood are fluid things, that shift, so different things may have been true at different times.

And yet, it seems difficult to reconcile conceptions of the Pakjabis as people who knowingly use a myth of this idea called Pakistan to manipulate other nationalities/communities in Pakistan, and at the same time victims of the same myth, a people ashamed of their culture as insufficiently sophisticated.

S. Bajwa (where is he?) once said here that in undivided Punjab, Muslim Punjabis used to celebrate stories of heroes who defied and rebelled and fought against the Mughals.

Im curious to know more about that sort of thing. Surely if thats the case, it cant all be buried. Any Pakjabis inferiority complex towards what their Mughal Muhajirs represented must still have veins of resentment!

Author: Philip [ 29 Aug 2008 12:58 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Remember what Gandhi said when asked about his views on "western civilisation"....that it would be a "good idea"! Self interest amongst European leaders has played its part,such as Henry and his lust for Anne Boleyn,which saw him depart from the Church of Rome.So also was the envy and fear of the Templar's wealth and power by Philip of France and the Pope and the family feuds of European royalty saw the end of the monarchies in Europe and WW1.The corruption or Rome produced Martin Luther and the Protestant/Anglican Church,which these days seems to be stronger and has more influence in Africa than in England!

However,the futile desire of European leaders like Hitler and Napoleon to punish and invade Russia ,have found their 21st century supporters in the likes of Milliband and Rice.These hotheads in their zeal to punish Russia for the catastrophe and defeat of the western gameplan,thanks to their cretinous and moronic puppet Saakashvili (emulating other European misfits of history) is only accelerating the CW2.

Here is a fine first person account of the first salvoes of CW-2.
August 17, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 545980.ece
The new cold war hots up

Riding to war in Georgia alongside a bloodthirsty and vengeful gunman, Mark Franchetti saw at first hand how one small conflict in a faraway country led to a superpower confrontation.

Excerpt:
America had sleepwalked into a foreign policy disaster and its response was slow and uncertain. With Bush tarrying in Beijing watching the Olympics while Putin executed a war, Americans were reminded uncomfortably of Hurricane Katrina – another occasion when Bush dithered before eventually getting around to sending humanitarian aid.

Ralph Peters, a former military intelligence analyst, said last week at a symposium on Georgia at the neoconser-vative American Enterprise Institute: “The image for me will be the president going to a basketball game and flirting with the beach volleyball team.”

He added: “Vladimir Putin is the most effective leader in the world today. Nobody comes close. In contrast, President Bush is looking like Jimmy Carter when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It’s tragic.”

Bush had thought he had Georgia in his pocket. Saakashvili is surrounded by US civilian and military advisers and is so close to US politicians that John McCain, the Republican nominee, claimed last week to be in daily telephone contact with him. However, he is regarded as “mercurial” – a polite way of saying that the Americans lost control of their client. “We’d been warned about Saakashvili for some time. Our advisers knew he wasn’t ready for prime time,” said Peters. “But he’s the democratically elected leader of Georgia.

Author: ramana [ 22 Sep 2008 05:31 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Need to read and understand this as Western World model is based on the Greek and Roman model. Shows why city state democracy leads to Imperium!

Greek Imperialism (pdf)
William Scott Ferguson

Author: Acharya [ 22 Sep 2008 06:00 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
Need to read and understand this as Western World model is based on the Greek and Roman model. Shows why city state democracy leads to Imperium!

Greek Imperialism (pdf)
William Scott Ferguson

Thanks - Explains a lot

Author: ramana [ 22 Sep 2008 06:20 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Could you spend some time and point out which part is new info and provides better insight?
Thanks, ramana

Another google book

History of Ancient World

Revised By William Fergusson.

and Harvard Classics lectures Ancient History

Author: ramana [ 22 Sep 2008 07:36 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

page 24 of the Greek Imperialism shows the improtance of Herodotus's history which is really a spin.

Quote:
We know, on the authority of a
German military expert,18 that, had the host which followed Xerxes to Athens
numbered the 5,283,220 men attributed to it by Herodotus “without taking count of women cooks, concubines, eunuchs, beasts of burden, cattle, and Indian dogs,” its rear guard must have been still filing out of Sardis while its van was vainly storming Thermopylae. But what Herodotus reports is what the Athenians believed. They hadmet and routed the might of all Asia. They had mastered in fair fight the conquerors of all other peoples. The world was theirs: it was merely a question of taking possession.


You see the same kind of spin and hagiography in the Islamist historians and their "Force of history" myth. Shows clearly the lineage of such thinking.

Author: R Vaidya [ 23 Sep 2008 01:45 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

India should re-joice at the Decline of US institutions


http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1192432

Author: ramana [ 23 Sep 2008 03:59 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

R. Vaidya's article posted in full

India should re-joice at the Decline of US institutions


http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1192432


Quote:
Failure of American financial institutions is a reason to rejoice
R Vaidyanathan
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 03:16 IST

The decline of the West is a pre-requisite for the emergence of India as a global power.

I have been closely watching the reaction of our press, particularly the business papers and TV channels, to the implosion that has taken place in the Western financial markets and institutions.

Lehman Brothers, the original cotton trading company of the mid-nineteenth century fame from Alabama, is no more.

US government is acting like the erstwhile Soviet Union in nationalising institutions and bailing out market mayhem.

Our experts and analysts are pathetic in responding to this. Some of them are whining and the rest ad nauseam repeating about globalisation and impact on India, etc. It proves once again that the colonial gene is embedded in all of us and it refuses to recognise opportunities and turns advantageous as disasters.

First thing first. The decline of these institutions — many more to come — is the best thing that has happened to countries such as India, which are poised to play a larger role in global financial affairs.

Let us have some facts. India had 25% of global income in 1500 through 1700; by 1820, this was down to 17% and by 1951 to 5%; in 1998, the country’s share stood at 5.5% (according to Angus Maddison in The World Economy: A millennial Perspective, OECD Development Centre Studies -2007; Table-B-20 Appendix B; pp263).

We need to reclaim our position in the world — it is just returning to where we were. By 2025, we should have at least 25% of global GDP
.

This requires strategic thinking and a new mindset. We are not going to be easily accepted as a global power. There is going to be a tussle between existing powers, declining powers and emerging powers.

Nobody is going to offer the seat in the top table to us by request or by supplication. We need to earn it and be in a position to demand it. We need national purpose and a single minded devotion to achieve it.

The decline of the global financial institutions provides great opportunities since our growth is primarily due to our domestic savings.

Foreign direct investment and foreign institutional investment put together is not more than 8% in relation to our gross savings in any one of the past several years.

Also, nearly 80% of our domestic savings of 35% comes from household savings. In comparison, the USA has meagre or negative household savings.

It has been running a consumption economy for too long, sustained by the savings of other countries, particularly Asian. It has also taken financial convergence to the extreme — anybody can do anything.

Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain a good old traditional insurance company such as AIG having such significant exposures in derivative products.

It is important to recognise that Europe is past, USA is the present and countries like India are the future. USA is slowly getting into a situation of the UK, which started declining after the Second World War.

What should India have done?

Immediately after the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the crisis in many investment banks, our finance ministry should have called a meeting of major banks, industrialists and some — shall I say obscenely rich — NRIs and announced the readiness of some Indian groups to acquire some of these institutions after due diligence.

This is just to put the cat among pigeons and announce to the world that we have arrived. It is not required that we should acquire these sick entities.

It is just to express our readiness and also to tell the world that we want orderly transition as a responsible global power. It is not late even now, since many more commercial banks of US origin are in the queue.

However, India was silent and generally mumbling that we are not affected, etc. It was behaving like a small sidekick country.

The country should call for an alternative global financial architecture, which is built on the real economy and not on the paper economy.

The disconnect between stock markets and the real economy was accentuated by the derivative markets where the tail had begun to wag the dog.

This fact has been told many a time by many from countries such as India.
India and China should play an important role in evolving the alternative global financial architecture and for which we should start working.

The existing institutions have failed and the existing market mantra has been exposed in the most compromising position wherein the market and government are caught in the act.

Unless we internalise the fundamental truth that the decline of the West is a pre-requisite for the emergence of India as a global power, we are not going anywhere.

To do that, we need to be pro-active and not supplicant. After all these acts of thievery, thuggery and market manipulations and mis-sales, it is interesting that no one categorically and unambiguously and unequivocally proclaims that the US financial system is a big sham and the regulations are totally ineffective and the marauders and vandals have been running major institutions from smoke-filled pubs .

That is the fact.

To build a new architecture, India should take the lead. Unfortunately, we have the US lobby, Chinese lobby, Pakistan lobby and all sorts of lobbies in the Capital, but no India lobby yet.

Until we do, we cannot but be mouthing inanities and discussing inconsequential things.

The author is professor of finance, Indian Institute of Management — Bangalore, and can be reached at vaidya@iimb.ernet.in.

The views are personal and do not reflect that of his organisation.



I fully agree. I was shocked that no move was made to acquire the distressed properties. And no one understood the opportunity that was being presented. The impact of this meltdown is that, the India related milestones forecast in RAND reports/Goldman Sachs reports were all being advanced in India's favor and yet there is no understanding.
Thanks R Vaidya.

Author: Rony [ 25 Sep 2008 03:24 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

In 19th century, the Germans tinkled into every one's History starting from the stealing of the concepts of Aryan and Swastika from India .


Johann Gustav Droysen, creator of Greece's Fake History

Author: ramana [ 02 Oct 2008 03:36 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Persian Fire-Tom Holland

Quote:
by Tom Holland
418pp, Little, Brown, £20

The Persian invasions of mainland Greece in the early fifth century BC are the beginning of history as we understand that word. Seeking "to preserve the memory of the past" and also to understand how Greeks and Asiatics came into conflict, the ancient writer Herodotus deployed a technique he called historia: knowledge obtained through diligent inquiry.

Herodotus, a native of Ionian Greece or what is now western Turkey, travelled the known world asking people what had occurred in the 490s and 480s and why. The result was a story of pride, heroism and intrigue that gave first the Greeks, and then Europeans in general, a sense of special destiny. Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae were inspirations in the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and, less creditably, for European domination of the near orient.

For the Iranians, national myth and Islamic history had submerged all memory of the achievements of Cyrus the Great, Cambyses and Darius until European archaeologists and translations of Herodotus arrived at the turn of the 20th century. The Pahlavi monarchy that came to power in the 1920s sought to revive ancient Persian glory as the Greek historians had known it. Patriotic Iranians named their sons Kourosh, Kambiz and Daryush.

Tom Holland showed in Rubicon, his book on Julius Caeasar and his age, that he could master a complex and fast-moving narrative from ancient history and make it a pleasure for both general readers and the learned. There is not nearly the same body of evidence for the Persian wars as there is for the breakdown of the Roman republic, but what there is is to die for.

Beside the nine books of Herodotus, there is Aeschylus's tragedy of 472BC, The Persians. The playwright had fought at the decisive sea-battle of Salamis and the high point of the drama is a report of the battle from the Persian point of view. There are also Plutarch's lives of the chief Athenian statesmen, and his account of the Spartan system of government, written much later under the Roman empire. From Iran, there are rock inscriptions of royal conquests above all at Bisitun in Kurdistan.

The Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC with a mission, part bureaucratic, part religious, to bring good order and good government to creation. Cyrus's successors extended the empire into Central Asia and Africa and beyond the Danube. That left the eastern Mediterranean as a field for expansion. There, the Phoenicians, allies of the Persians, had been for some time in competition with the traders and colonies of the Greeks.

The immediate cause of the war was a revolt in the Greek cities of the Ionian coast in 499BC. With the help of reinforcements from the mainland, the Greek rebels ejected their autocratic rulers and burned the Persian provincial capital of Sardis. The revolt was put down, but in 490 the Persians launched a punitive expedition that resulted in defeat at Marathon. Ten years later Xerxes, the Persian king, launched a coordinated invasion by land and sea. The Greeks deployed their army and fleet at linked positions at Thermopylae and Artemisium. Storms and battle inflicted heavy losses on the Persian fleet, but the force at Thermopylae was outflanked. After three days of intense fighting, the rearguard of 300 Spartans under their king, Leonidas, was wiped out. Under the strategic direction of Themistocles, Athens was deliberately abandoned to the Persians. Instead, the Athenians and their allies provoked a sea-fight in the narrows at Salamis where the immense Persian and Phoenician fleet could not exploit its numbers. Xerxes withdrew to Asia and the following year his army was routed by the Spartans. Having expelled the Persians from the mainland, the Greeks counter-attacked and eventually, under Alexander the Great in the next century, captured the Persian empire in a piece.

All the ancient sources are partial, with a bias towards Athens even in Herodotus, but Holland succeeds in writing an account that is clear and uncluttered. His technique is to present his narrative as an uncontested succession of events, and leave the evaluation of sources and the scholarly reservations to notes.

He likes to cut and splice Herodotus's account when the chronology doesn't suit his narrative purposes, but he explains what he is doing and the effect is often fresh and interesting. (The exception is at Salamis, which is a very hard battle to understand, and even harder when Holland introduces a complex Persian night manoeuvre that doesn't appear to be in any ancient source at all.) Similarly, the evacuation of Athens is full of anachronistic detail. But some of the set pieces, such as the charge of the Athenian heavy infantry at Marathon and the Persian army crossing the bridge of boats strung across the Dardanelles, are thrilling.

There is one disreputable passage. The constitution of Sparta, with its severe military communism, has been a source of fascination right up to the 18th century and was encrusted with myths. Holland claims that unmarried Spartan women were routinely sodomised. In the notes, he admits ("only fair") that the earliest source for this unlikely claim dates from some six centuries after the Persian wars. Then he repeats the allegation in the text as fact.

Holland pays his dues to the clash-of-civilisations claptrap but is more inclined, like Herodotus, to "record the astonishing achievements of both our own and the Asiatic peoples". All the chief sources show that Persia was not some alien entity at moral war with Greece but deeply intertwined in the politics of the mainland cities. Even Themistocles ended his days a servant of Persia. For the Spartan subject races, known as helots, Persian rule would have felt like the sweetest liberty.

What happened is that the victories gave the ancient Greeks a sense of superiority over easterners which their modern epigones in Europe and America, who did not carry a shield at Marathon, nevertheless seek to enjoy.

· James Buchan's Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World is published by John Murray

Author: Philip [ 03 Oct 2008 11:39 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

I think that 'rejoicing' at someone else's misfortune is often wrong,unless it happens to be that of an evildoer,a terrorist,fall of a dictator,etc.having said that "hubris" certainly has an American flavour to the word right now! I've received quite a bit of mail rejoicing at the US economic collapse and the demise of many fat cats of Wall St.,now being called "Fall St." I also see some journo friends also commenting about the same fact and feeling.The fall of crony capitalism is heaven sent,even if we have to take some punishment too.The trick of the US for decades has been at times of economic crisis to spread the loss around the world,profits to the "US" and losses to "us".Kissinger raised oil prices in a conspiracy with the Shah of Iran in the '70s.We've seen how the oil prices have been manipulated just months ago to "fuel" the Us with windfall from its "war profiteering" that has cost over 3 $trillion according to experts.The most shameful experience to watch however has been that of our grovelling PM carrying India's "love" ( he never asked for an Indian referendum on the subject) for the war criminal of the White House and the architect of the US economic collapse.

Here is Vladimir Putin on US "irresponsibility",with agreement from Europe too.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 48577.html

Putin turns on US 'irresponsibility'

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor
Thursday, 2 October 2008

Putin accused the United States of "irresponsibility" as he criticised its primary role in the economic and financial turmoil that has undermined the foundations of global capitalism across the world.

The Russian Prime Minister's remarks yesterday came after several European leaders, including the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the spiralling crisis started by toxic housing debts in the US raised questions about the "Anglo-Saxon" way of doing business.

"Everything that is happening in the economic and financial sphere has started in the US," Mr Putin told a government meeting in Moscow. "This is a real crisis that all of us are facing. And what is really sad is that we see an inability to take appropriate decisions. This is no longer irresponsibility on the part of some individuals, but irresponsibility of the whole system, which as you know, had pretensions to [global] leadership."

The Russian stock market has collapsed by 50 per cent from its peak last May as a result of the global uncertainty, coupled with investor nervousness following the Georgian crisis.

M. Sarkozy, speaking in Toulon a week ago, said: "A certain idea of globalisation is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that had imposed its logic on the whole economy and contributed to perverting it. The idea of the absolute power of the markets that should not be constrained by any rule, by any political intervention, was a mad idea. The idea that markets are always right was a mad idea." The German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück said "the US will lose its superpower status in the world financial system". He hesitated to predict the long-term consequences of the upheaval, which he described as "above all a US problem" but said: "The world financial system is becoming multipolar."

Leaders of developing countries have also lashed out at the US over what Gordon Brown called the first crisis of globalisation, in the light of the Bush administration's failure to swiftly put an end to the bloodletting in the financial markets. "The managers of big business took huge risks out of greed," said the Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, whose economy is highly dependent on US trade. "What happens in the United States will affect the entire world and, above all, small countries like ours."

Another ally of Mr Bush, the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, criticised Washington's failure to deal with the uncontrolled financial speculation. "The whole world has financed the United States, and I believe that they have a reciprocal debt with the planet," he said.

France and Germany are calling for greater EU intervention to regulate the markets, while Britain is wary of such a move. But Mr Brown used his UN speech last Friday to press for international regulators to set up "colleges" overseeing the megabanks with branches across the world.

Author: abhischekcc [ 03 Oct 2008 12:49 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Philip wrote:
I think that 'rejoicing' at someone else's misfortune is often wrong,unless it happens to be that of an evildoer,a terrorist,fall of a dictator,etc.having said that "hubris" certainly has an American flavour to the word right now!


That's precisely the reason why people are rejoicing at the fall of the Great Satan which is "an evildoer,a terrorist, a dictator" :)

Quote:
I've received quite a bit of mail rejoicing at the US economic collapse


Can you share some here? :mrgreen:

Author: Paul [ 04 Oct 2008 12:48 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

I have always wondered as to why the Persians never invaded India....Even Nadir Shah was a Turkomen carpet dealer who usurped power of persia.

The persian expansion has been to the west and stake control over the mediterranian regions. Consequently their rivals have been the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, or the Central asian turkics (who preyed upon tem the way the did on india).

We have fought with them over the buffer territories like Kandahar but never invaded each other's heartlands. I have not read of the achaemids, sassanids, or safavids crossing the bolan pass to take over the indian plains.

Author: G Subramaniam [ 04 Oct 2008 01:05 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Paul wrote:
I have always wondered as to why the Persians never invaded India....Even Nadir Shah was a Turkomen carpet dealer who usurped power of persia.

The persian expansion has been to the west and stake control over the mediterranian regions. Consequently their rivals have been the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, or the Central asian turkics (who preyed upon tem the way the did on india).

We have fought with them over the buffer territories like Kandahar but never invaded each other's heartlands. I have not read of the achaemids, sassanids, or safavids crossing the bolan pass to take over the indian plains.



Andre Wink in Al-Hind, writes that the Zorastrians were good neighbors

Parts of punjab seem to have come under the rule of Darius

The persians repeatedly invaded Afghanistan

Between the fall of the Mauryas and the rise of the Guptas several Persian kingdoms seem to have come up in India

Author: ramana [ 04 Oct 2008 01:26 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Paul, Check the Nat Geo issue on Cyrus. Apparently his empire included parts of India west of Indus. ~ 550 BC. And Herodotus writes of Indian soldiers in the Persian armies. And Caroe in his book on Pashtuns writes of the Persian connection in that area.

So they were there before Alexander and after Mauryas in the near abroad of India till the Kushans displaced them.

Author: Paul [ 04 Oct 2008 03:52 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

GS and Ramana: Thank you for replying. As civilizational monoliths, these account for not even skirmirshes. No persian monarch has led a expedition into India to confront the Indian kingdoms the way they did against the greeks or the mediterranean regions.

The indic and Persian civilizations have never come into conflict from the days of the asuras/devas.

This has lessons from India-China POV as well: Mao may succeeded in intimidating our macaulaized dhmmified elites but his slight to the indic civilization will be etched in the memories of indians forever. This will lead to retaliation by future generations of indians for which the chinese pop could well pay the price. Relations between India and China are damaged permanently to satisfy the ego of one maniac.

lesson for India: While I do believe it is not in India's interests to see nuclear weapons in the Middle east, India should not be party to any attack on Iran. Even if logistical facilities for any attack are provided by India, this could lead to poisoned perceptions towards Indian for which future generations will pay the price.

Author: Pulikeshi [ 05 Oct 2008 02:52 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Paul wrote:
The indic and Persian civilizations have never come into conflict from the days of the asuras/devas.


Are you saying there was no conflict during the Mauryan times (approx 3 BCE to 1 BCE)?
AFAIK - the Mauryas conquered all the way Persia.
Also the Greek/Persian war and antipathy is rather blown out of proportion.

Where I would agree is that post "Deva/Asura" wars, we did not have an occasion to see
each other as enemies.

Quote:
lesson for India: While I do believe it is not in India's interests to see nuclear weapons in the Middle east, India should not be party to any attack on Iran. Even if logistical facilities for any attack are provided by India, this could lead to poisoned perceptions towards Indian for which future generations will pay the price.


You are probably correct in this particular case, but such arguments by previous generations are what got us here in the first place.
If India is to determine who does what in her neighborhood, she better be prepared to take initiative and not just wait for them to
show up - by which time it is too late!

Author: ramana [ 05 Oct 2008 03:01 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

I think he means that the clashes were limited and at the periphery. The core never clashed.

Another karz is the civilizing influence that Persianized Islam had on the Mughals which reduced their ferocity.

Persian had similar inputs to Judaism and by extension to Christianity.

Author: Paul [ 05 Oct 2008 05:05 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

That is what I was basically getting at. Ramana…you have a good handle on my thoughts.

What Zarathus basically did was to elevate the main asura deity – Varuna to the head of their pantheon. Varuna is Ahura Mazda as we know of now. The devas who were held in some reverence by the pre- Zoroasterian Iranians (as they were cousins) were removed from the pantheon to cast out - never to be worshipped again.

In essence - It is basically a realignment of the gods which is misconstrued as first Generation monotheism by the western intelligentsia/orientalists.

+++++++++++++

Subhash Kak has done some relevant research. His article on this subject appeared in asia times some years ago.

Author: Paul [ 05 Oct 2008 05:25 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/zoro.pdf

Author: SK Mody [ 05 Oct 2008 05:31 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Has anyone seen this site before? They are looking for authors.
Freepedia - the Indian encyclopedia

Author: Paul [ 05 Oct 2008 05:38 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Quite some time I had said that the Zoroasterian religion needs to be take it's rightful place amongst the indic religions along with the Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh thoughts. It is in their interests to join forces with the indic faiths.

The orientalists and the Brits have instilled in our (and the Zoroasterian worshippers) that their religion is a monotheistic faith closer to the abrahmic thought. The reality is very different.

Are there any Parsis on this forum to share their thoughts on this subject.....TIA

Author: ramana [ 07 Oct 2008 06:48 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

X-posted...
parsuram wrote:
RajeshA:

Quote:
The Americans and the Europeans are facing a crisis in the very core of their civilization, their financial institutions. That is their priority. The World comes later.


No, Rajesh, the current financial tempest in a tea cup is just that, a minor blip. For starters, check comprables from the 1930s. "The very core of their civilization" (Western Judeo-Christian Helenist rationalism) is still to be found in Genesis Chapter I [....& God created man to hold dominon over birds of the air, beasts of the land & creatures of the deep....] This continues to drive western civilization, being its rationale for being [the struggle to hold dominion (over nature)]. And that means resources. And that means the middle east, Afghanistan, central Asia, Africa, & so on & so on....So there we are.

Author: Acharya [ 20 Oct 2008 09:36 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Quote:
Jan 26 2007, 03:02 PM
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_web ... and_i.html

Exclusion of India Philosophy by Europeans


Heidegger and Indian Philosophy

I: IS THE QUESTION OF BEING UNIQUE TO THE WEST?

Inspired by Heidegger's ontological questioning of Western tradition, Wilhelm Halbfass attempts to retrieve comparable ontological dimensions of Indian thought, which have been neglected by other scholars. He sees “no good rsason to adopt Heidegger's own exclusion of his ideas from the interpretation of non-Western traditions" (On Being and What There Is, SUNY Press, 1992, p. 25). If for Heidegger, the being-question is present in a latent or repressed way in Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and the early Husserl, although they do not formally discuss being qua being, why should it not be equally present in Indian thought?

Using Heideggerian phenomenology to apprehend what is afoot in Indian tradition in a discreet, suggestive and nondogmatic way, Halbfass shows a sophisticated awareness of the problematic aspects of Heidegger's enterprise. The "history of being" which Heidegger distilled out of a selective focus on the ontological implications of past philosophical debates tends, though powerfully illuminating, to a determinism or fatalism which is implausible and paralyzing. Halbfass calls this construction into question by insisting that being is a universal concern, not a distinctively Western one, and that "being is one of the central and pervasive themes of Indian thought' (OB, p. 21).

If my comments here take the form of doubts and misgivings – most of which have surely occurred to Halbfass himself - , the reason is not only my hesitancy to make positive statements about Indian philosophy, of which I know so little, but also a sense that, given the promise of Halbfass's approach for the mutual clarification of Indian and Western thought, such misgivings need to be aired as fully as possible lest the process be short-circuited by hasty identifications. This merely dubitative posture may not save me from mistakes, but I am happy to think that Professor Halbfass's corrections will provide the surest of safety-nets.

My principal misgiving concerns Halbfass's scepticism about the Heideggerian question of being, a scepticism which facilitates his claim that ontology is a universal enterprise, but at the same time risks robbing this enterprise of any major philosophical interest. Certainly, Heidegger's view of Western thought needs to be demystified to some extent. In part, his construal of the meaning of being is a modern, idiosyncratic reflection, and this may relativize his claim to retrieve the buried truth of the entire philosophical tradition. The word "being" itself may be incapable of sustaining the edifices of systematic metaphysics or even a unitary reflection on the meaning of being pursued in phenomenological style.

Heidegger's attempt to gather things together in the Ereignis may be incompatible with the intrinsic pluralism of language, and the Ereignis may reflect a Greco-Germanic sense of being which is but one historical possibility among others, even within Western culture. His effort to step back from Western philosophical tradition to uncover its fundamental bearings, by a phenomenological bringing into view of matters that this tradition occludes, may suffer from a narrow purism in its focus on the being-question. Perhaps the Heideggerian path of questioning has no future unless opened out fully to historical pluralism and relativity. Just as one may take over Hegel's dialectical negativity without adopting his system, so one may best do justice to the Heideggerian path of thinking by giving it such a pluralist inflection. Just as orthodox Hegelians have been an almost insignificant strand in the Wirkungsgeschichte of Hegel in comparison with heretics such as Marx or Kierkegaard, so the future impact of Heidegger may have little to do with orthodox Heideggerians, perhaps already an anachronistic species.

The being-question may not be as monolithic or as absolutely centralas Heidegger supposes. Yet if one sees his concern with it as misguided, and surrenders to 'growing doubts concerning the meaning and relevance of the topic itself' (OB, p. vii), the evident richness of Heidegger's thought is left untapped. If the language of being turns out to be an inadequate vehicle for this richness, then a better one needs to be constructed. Despite my doubts about particular features of Heidegger's construction of the "history of Being," I consider that the basic thrust of his thought - the step back from rationalism to the phenomenality ofbeing - opens the most fundamental perspective now available for the assessment of Western philosophy. As sunlight falling on old stone carvings brings out their forms with a startling warmth of presence, so Heidegger's reading lights up the most intimate concern of Western philosophy. His analysis of metaphysics as onto-theology applies squarely to the definition of that science in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Suarez, but it also sheds light on the ontological depth of German idealism, as the Erkenntnistheorie of Heidegger's academic elders had failed to do (see GA 42:156-163). The Western philosophers _respond_ to Heidegger's reading as the pages of Beethoven or Chopin do to the fingers of a great if sometimes eccentric pianist, and his reading of the history of philosophy will retain its authority until those who query it come up with a more illuminating story. However, - and this is my second misgiving about Halbfass's enterprise - it seems that Indian philosophy does not respond comparably to Heideggerian readings; the question of being has no thrilling resonance for it; its harmonies are not fully awakened by the Western touch.

(a) The Question of Being

The title “On Being and What There Is” sounds as Greek as Greek can be. Is it appropriate for a work on Indian ontology? The legitimacy of this transference becomes doubtful if we recall how rare and strange the question of being is, even in Greece:
“The problem of being - in the sense of the question ‘What is being?’ - is the least natural of all problems, one which common sense never poses, one which neither pre-Aristotelian philosophy nor the immediately posterior tradition posed as such, one which is never sensed or glimpsed in non-Western traditions” (P. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, PUF, 1991, pp. 13-14). It may be excessive to say that the question of being is not even glimpsed in non-Western traditions. Yet unless it is brought into sustained, explicit focus, it is a question that tends to evaporate. Indian reflection on the logic of being-words seems not to have attained this focus, not being firmly anchored in Parmenidean wonder at the fact that beings _are_.

[2006: To counter the misinterpretation that I am claiming in colonialist style that Indians are incapable of thinking of being, let me quote Arvind Mandair’s recent essay, “The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology”. JAAR 74, 2006, pp. 646-73. He argues that confidence in the universality of metaphysics has led to the imposition of Western notions of ethical monotheism on Sikh tradition, leading to an “eclipse of nonduality”. Heidegger is cited as an anti-colonial resource: “far from being a term that can be applied without prejudice to all cultures, metaphysics is rooted in a specific religio-cultural tradition whose contours reveal themselves through the combination and continuity of the Greek (_onto_), Christian-scholastic (-_theo_) and secular-humanist (-_logical_) traditions” (649). I would stress, however, that the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics is there in essence in Aristotle, against the tendency of French Catholic philosophers to date it to Duns Scotus or later, which would undercut the use of Heidegger for a critical interrogation of patristic and scholastic ontotheology.]

For Heidegger, this wonder is the founding event of Western thought: "Esti gar einai – ‘For there is being’ – in this saying lies hidden the initial mystery for all thinking" (GA 9:334). As early as 1922 he found here "the historical paradigm for the immediacy of the encounter with Being":

“Whatever is encountered _is_. Dasein is the basic trait of its look [eidos]. The overriding experience here, which has a way of obtruding upon what a being is, is _that_ it is. It is in this sense that any being in its look of be-ing is simply one. Parmenides' thesis is the expression of an original encounter with being itself. The force, simplicity, directness, and so the underivability of this encounter of an entity for itself and from itself correspond to the latent difficulty of illuminating and exposing such a Being”. (T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, University of California Press, 1993, 245-6)

Aristotle, unlike Parmenides, is a thinker of form, but as Heidegger shows in Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis (GA 9:239-301) form is not mere stuff or shape, but the concentrated actuality of being. Dismissing Antiphon's conception of nature as underlying matter (e.g. wood as the nature of the bed), Aristotle defined physis as "the shape or form of things which have in themselves the source of their motion” (Physics 193b). Only when physis is grasped in terms of form is it "adequately grasped as ousia, as a species of coming to presence" (GA 9:274). Aristotelian form (morphe, eidos) is not a mere attribute but a mode of being. Form and matter are in a relation of actuality and potency, and each of these terms is defined ontologically. When being is interpreted phenomenologically as coming to presence, form or entelecheia is grasped as the event of the coming to presence of an entity. Form as an ontological idea (in Plato) answers the question, “How does the entity qua entity look? As what does the entity itself show itself, when I contemplate it not in view of a given quality but only as an entity?” (GA 22:252). To grasp forms in a merely logical, objectifying way is to be blind to what is nearest to hand: “Corresponding to the colour-blind there are also people who are blind to physis. And when we consider that physis is qualified as a mode of ousia (beingness), then the physis-blind are but a variety of the blind to being” (GA 9:264). Banal conceptions of stuff and shape, matter and form, are the “Allerweltstrasse" of Western thinking (GA 9:214); Heidegger presents these as a decline from originary Greek insight, but they may well belong to the ordinary stock of notions latent in the grammar of Indo-European languages. The question "ti to on?" (Metaphysics 1028b) - "what is a being qua being in its being?" - invites two sorts of reply. The first reply, a rational, speculative one, analyses the characteristics of being as such, and founds being in its ultimate cause, the supreme being. This reply constitutes onto-theo-logy, the distinguishing structure of Western metaphysics, fully explicit in Descartes and Leibniz (GA 40:88). What is wrong with onto-theo-logy is that, as onto-logy, it flattens out the phenomenological apprehension of the being of beings, eventually reducing it to an abstract and colourless ens commune. Concomitantly, as theo-logy, in grounding being in a supreme first cause it subjects being to the principle of sufficient reason; beings are now explained, in a rationalistic way, and are not allowed to flourish "without why" like the rose of Angelus Silesius (see Der Satz vom Grund, GA 14). Just as Voltaire's Pangloss, caught up in the Lisbon earthquake, has only one question: “What could be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?”, so one might imagine a caricatural ontotheologist examining a rose: "Aha! A being! And its ground? Why, being as such, being in general, ens commune (onto-logy). But is this sufficient? Must we not pose a supreme being which is the source of its being and the unifying ground of beings-as-a-whole? And this we call God (theo-logy)." in this construction is lost not only the fragrance of the rose, but the phenomenality of being and the authentic otherness of God [as revealed in Scripture].

Heidegger overcomes onto-theology by his retrieval of the Aristotelian question as a hermeneutical and phenomenological interrogation of the coming to presence of beings. He himself interrogates the experience of being (our everyday understanding of isness; our search for authentic existence; our wonder at the fact that there are beings rather than nothing) and the language of being (the everyday uses of "is"; the languages of philosophical and poetic tradition) in order to discover the meaning of being or the truth of being, which he ultimately names the Ereignis - the "event' which grants the being of beings, which enables "the worlding of world" and "the thinging of things." This is not a metaphysical foundation but the phenomenological essence of the givenness of beings. The vocabulary of being is inadequate, a culture-bound Western product, to what is emerging here, so that Heidegger has to develop his own style of quasi-metaphorical saying.

The basic step in ontology is to distinguish "being" from "beings" so as to clarify their relationship. Halbfass accepts Quine's question "what is there?' as "the fundamental ontological question" (70), thus reducing ontology to a merely ontic "inventory of what exists' (49). Such an inventory will, to be sure, carry an implicit ontological commitment (a notion of what being is). But if this commitment is not thematized, or if its thematization is seen as impossible, then we do not have ontology in Aristotle's or Heidegger's sense. Crude thematizations – e.g. "what exist are just physical things" - lack a sense of the question of being. Even loftier thematizations - e.g., 'all that exists is Brahman"- may not have glimpsed the question of being. The issue may have been decided in an ontic contest between different descriptions of what there is, rather than in an ontological clarification of what it means to be. Even if, with Nietzsche, one dismisses inquiry into being as a mist, it does seem to be a distinctively Western mist.

Analytical philosophers may deplore Heidegger's "use and misuse of'systematically misleading expressions'” (Halbfass, 11), yet have they produced critical studies of Heidegger's language and thought-patterns that could measure the strength and limits of his revival of the being-question? That would require some basic sympathy with his concern for the authentic phenomenality of beings.
Full-blooded positivists dismiss the entire ontological tradition as based on systematically misleading expressions. They could be answered by a logical clarification which retrieves and justifies the discourse on being or, in Heideggerian style, by a study of the phenomenological content of being-language. It can happen that a philosophical classic reveals weaknesses when approached in the logical way, while retaining its power in the phenomenological perspective. Thus Parmenides confuses different senses of the word "is," and the logical reading shows him at best as forming the notion of a pure existence without qualities, which replaces Thales's water or Heraclitus's fire in the role of ultimate explanatory principle. The phenomenological approach on the other hand retrieves coherence and depth in his thought by reading him as a thinker of the event or phenomenon of being.

Heidegger is aware that the term "being" is a tricky one. He envisages its multivocity as a weave or skein, a Geflecht, translating the Aristotelian "to on legetai pollachos" (Met. 1003a. 1028a) in phenomenological terms as "The coming to manifestation of being is manifold" (Was ist das – die Philosphie?, 1956, p. 46). His own use of the vocabulary of being acquires its coherence from its rigorously phenomenological character. The precise bearing of his explorations can be measured only in terms of the matter with which they are concerned - not the logic or conceptuality of "being" but the concrete modes of the presence or givenness of beings in their being. However, it is misleading to say that the later Heidegger withdrew "into poetry, myth, and capricious etymologies" and "does not even attempt that kind of historical and systematic clarification that we find in Heidegger's earlier statements" (Halbfass, 10). The critiques of Leibniz and Hegel in the mid-fifties show that he kept up his quest for a clear overview of the history of the being-question.

(b) A Distinctively Greek Question

The Greek question of being is foreign even to Western ears. It points to what is nearest at hand yet farthest from our reflective grasp. The question is doubly foreign to Indian ears. The Parmenidean wonder at being was not a foundational event in Indian thought, and so the subsequent Aristotelian question "What is being?" was never posed in the same sense, nor did India produce a metaphysics in the sense of a science of being qua being. There is a fit between the being-question and the history of Western metaphysics which makes its illumination central and foundational; the light it can shed on Indian thought may introduce distorting emphases. To ask what destiny of being lies behind Indian thought, as J. L. Mehta does, is to risk forcing it into shapes suggested by the Western story (while drawing on questionable reaches of Heidegger's thought).

Heidegger would probably agree that blindness to being is universal- and not only because of the Westernization of the earth through technology. Attention to being must then be equally universal. But it is only in the West that such attention has been thematized as a central concern, by a rare handful of powerful thinkers. The other traditions have different languages for awakening to the reality of the things themselves. As a distinctive thematization of a universally latent problematic - a thematization which in its concrete elaboration has of course many parochial, non-universal features - Western philosophy has an irreducible identity. Thus Heidegger writes, as early as 1939: “Philosophy is _Western_ philosophy; there is no other, for the essence of the West and Western history has been determined through what is called philosophy. Ignoring all academic notions and historical accounts of philosophy as a cultural phenomenon, we should understand it as: reflection on what there is as such as a whole; in short - though this too is indeterminate because polyvalent - _asking the question of being_. "Being" is the _ground-word_ of philosophy” ((GA 68:9). It could not be said that "being" is the Grundwort of any Indian philosophy. Some of Heidegger's strongest pronouncements on the specificity of metaphysics date from the mid-fifties: “The style of all Western/European philosophy - there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian - is determined from the twofold, "beings-being." Its dealings with this twofold take their normative shape from the Platonic account of this twofold” (Was heisst Denken?, 1954, p. 136). The word "style" here suggests that there is a contingency to the development of philosophical and religious traditions comparable to that of artistic styles, so that what seems normative and natural within one culture may remain unthought of in another. The concept of being is a cultural construction just as much as is that of moksa or karman. Our present insight into cultural pluralism (as Dilthey understood) forces us to renounce the illusion that these great words are transparent namings of the real.

Metaphysics, for Heidegger, is not a system but "that knowing in which Western historical humanity preserves the truth of the relation to beings-as-a-whole and the truth about beings-as-a-whole" (GA 9: 241). Western philosophy is "einzigartig" and "eindeutig" (Was ist das – die Philosophie?, p. 14) because of the unusual question that guides it, the question of the being of beings: "Philosophy is underway to the being of the entity, that is, to the entity in regard to being" (ib., 25). This very simple, but also quite confusing question about beings in their being is one that occurred to the Greeks and that only they pursued in depth: “Just this, that the entity remains gathered in being, that in the manifesting of being the entity appears, this plunged the Greeks, and them first and only, in amazement” (ib., 22). It is in this sense that the question, "What is that?" is "an originally Greek question" (p.17), for it is pushed back to its ontological basis: 'What is this being qua being?"

If Heidegger had embarked on a dialogue with India, he might have been as unwilling to talk about being as he was when in dialogue with theology, or with Japan. This is perhaps less an "exclusion" (Halbfass, 25) than a sense that, however fruitful inquiry into the ontological aspect of Indian thought may be, we need to go beyond this if the Indian "great beginning" is to put us in question in light of its own foremost concerns. Even in the case of Western sources which use the Greek language of being correlations with Greek ontology can be treacherous. I am thinking of the Johannine vocabulary of Logos, einai, aletheia, pneuma and how entirely it would be falsified if one tried to bring it into direct connection with metaphysical or Heideggerian concerns. Via Philo of Alexandria, John inherited Platonic vocabulary, yet the remarkable thing is how he frees this vocabulary of any associations with the demiurge of the Timaeus or any other theme of philosophical ontology.

The claim that the question of being is uniquely Greek does not imply ignorance of the fact that there have been Indian debates about "being," with logical procedures similar to those of the West. "His assertion that the 'question of being' is the one and only question of philosophy seems as excessive as his stubborn insistence that not only ontology, but philosophy in general, is a uniquely Greek-European phenomenon" (Halbfass, 11). But in Heidegger's defence it should be noted that he is reducing Western philosophy to a local, historical tradition with a specific question, the question of being; there is no suggestion that India lacked logical analysis and speculative penetration. While Greek thought, at its most distinctive, bathes in the light of being, in other traditions it is not under the aegis of the being-question that logic, ethics, causally based cosmology, theories of truth and of beauty are developed, but in light of some other distinctive opening for thought, such as the question of spiritual liberation. Though much of Indian thought is oblivious of spiritual liberation just as much of Western thought is oblivious of the being-question, the topic of liberation exerted on some of India's greatest thinkers a magnetic attraction comparable to that which being has had at high points of Western philosophy. It is not on the question "what is being qua being?" that Indian philosophical radicality converges, and India has largely been spared the intellectual headaches this question has always caused.

Heidegger is the opposite of a Eurocentric imperialist, for his awareness of the historical contingency of Western ontology clears the path to a radical pluralism of what he calls the "great beginnings,” though to be sure there is a certain essentialism in the way he tries to cleanly differentiate these traditions (notably the Hellenic and Semitic traditions in the West). His discovery that Greek ontology is but a province of thought makes him a pluralistic thinker in principle, not a provincial one. To stress the commonalities between India and Europe to the point where these differentiations are flattened out is to regress from this dialogal openness. J. N. Mohanty, whose criticism of Heidegger's view of history resembles Halbfass's, seems to court this danger: “To hold that, since the specific question about the meaning of Being (raised by Heidegger) was not asked in the Indian tradition that tradition's concern with Being cannot yield ontology, would be misleading, for not all those who thought about metaphysics and ontology in the Western tradition asked the Heideggerian question about the meaning of Being… Metaphysical or ontological thinking is not Greek in origin: a certain variety of it is” (Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought, OUP, 1992, p. 152). But it is precisely the generic similarity between Indian and Greek philosophy that Heidegger wants to get beyond. The Greek "variety" is not one among others. It is a grasp of being (subjective and objective genitive) which did not come to pass in this insistent, determining way in other traditions, despite their random and tentative broodings on the sense of the word 'being.'

Mohanty (289) thinks that the importance of the subject-object distinction in Indian thought confutes Heidegger's view that it belongs to the Western destiny of being; but Heidegger sights Cartesian subjectivity and objectivity in terms of their ontological upshot within Western thought; he does not deny that analogous distinctions may have been made in other traditions, but there they do not play a role in the unfolding of the question of being. How little Mohanty appreciates the strength of Heidegger's reading of the Western metaphysical adventure can be gauged from his misunderstanding of the term "onto-theology”: “Heidegger continued to look upon the Kantian Transcendental unity of apperception, the Hegelian Geist, the Fichtean Ego as but secularized versions of deeply theological notions. Not surprisingly, Heidegger characterized Western metaphysics as onto-theological" (297).

II: ONTOLOGICAL THEMES IN INDIAN THROUGH

(a) The Analysis of "Being" is not Central

The intense logico-linguistic discussion about the words “as/asti (corresponding to the Latin est, Greek esti, English is, etc.) and bhuu/bhavati (which has an intriguing etymological kinship with Greek phuo/phusis)"(Halbfass, 22) does not necessarily amount to focussing the question of being as a basic one, in the manner of metaphysics. Still less does it amount to attending to the phenomenon of being, as the Greeks did in their "wonder" at the enigma of being and as Heidegger attempts to do more explicitly by means of phenomenological hermeneutics or poetic thinking. (Poetic thinking could be seen as a more refined and rigorous version of phenomenological hermeneutics, in that it is less encumbered with metaphysical conceptuality and more attuned to the thing itself.) Even if the darsanas intensively discuss being and substance (bhâva,sattâ, astitva, dravya), this may be no more than a scholastic clarification of abstract concepts, of which "being" may be just one among others. The distinction between sattâ (being) and the second order concept of astitva - "is-ness," “irreducible identity, identifiability” (Halbfass, 144), which can apply even to non-existence - is a lucid clarification of ideas, but does it reflect an experience of being? Has the notion of being sufficient valency in Indian thought to be invoked as a solution to the problem of evil, as in the Augustinian teaching that evil is nothing substantial, but a mere defect of being? Never more than a pallid universal - whether conceived as an abstraction or as a primal stuff -,it cannot serve to name the concrete actuality of entities in their analogous diversity.

The verbs for "to be" in Sanskrit are "commonly treated as verbs expressing a peculiar kind of process or action" (Halbfass, 22). So is the verb _sein_ in Heidegger. But the process or action in question is exclusively the presencing of beings in their being, and confusion with any other kind of process or action is scrupulously avoided; hence the diffrculty of Heidegger's language, which is at the service of a basic simplicity. Does the Indian discussion of "to be" bring into view the phenomenon of being in a comparable way? Such topics as occurrence, durable presence, genesis, change, manifestation, actuality/potentiality are ontic rather than ontological unless their specifically ontological import is isolated. Heidegger's exegeses of Aristotle go one step further, descrying the phenomenological core of the ontological statements. Similarly, the logic and semantics of nonbeing and-negation do not necessarily amount to a metaphysical question ("why are there beings rather than nothing?") or, still less, to a thoughtful grasp of the phenomenon of nothingness.

The "horizon concepts' or "mythical projections under which being itself is subsumed" (Halbfass, 23) suggest that the question of being never acquired autonomy and primacy in Indian thought. It could easily be treated lightly and subordinated to other concerns. When Erich Frauwallner finds parallels between the movement in India from myth, to home-made "scientific' explanations of natural phenomena, to the introduction of a doctrine of categories, and the Greek progress from myth, to Pre-Socratic "science," to Platonic-Aristotelian categoriology, these parallels throw into relief what is missing at every stage: the ontological interest which prevails in the greatest Greek thinkers. As cosmologists, logicians, category-analysts, the Indians are close to the Greeks; but the elusive question of being remains the distinctive trait of the latter. Moreover, the proto-scientific dimension of Indian thought never flourished, for lack of empirical observation; "in this domain Indian philosophy doesn't even come near the attainments of Greek philosophy" (Frauwallner, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, II, 1956, p. 7). Could there be a connection between the non-emergence of the question of being and this lack of empirical curiosity about bodily substances? The Greek wonder at being inspired the interrogation of beings; the Indian readiness to treat the external as secondary or illusory leads to a volatilization of the being-question in favour of issues of spiritual release.

No doubt Sanskrit, just as much as Greek, lends itself to a speculative development and precise analysis of being-language. But isn’t there an extra twist in the Greek fascination with being that has no equivalent in the Indian world? Systems of thinking of different cultures may freely intermingle at their lower reaches - in logical or ethical discussion – but when one traces them back to their fundamental motives their difference appears. As the Seinsfrage loses its specifically Greek contours it can blend with a more general commonsense puzzling about the logic of "to be" found also in Indian tradition.

Greece is more worthy of question than India on the topic of being: “As Indo-European, Sanskrit also is in some measure ‘metaphysical,’ as distinct from the languages of the Far East, with the notions of Being embedded in it grammatically and conceptually. It is metaphysical in being representational, concept-generating, and in being productive of ontological speculation about Being as the ground of all that is… Since _this_ possibility of thinking has been fulfilled in its amplest and purest form in the Greek tradition, Heidegger is not interested in how Sanskrit speaks.” (J. L. Mehta. “Heidegger and Vedanta”, in G. Parkes, ed. Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu, 1987, p. 27).

On other topics, however, India may be the privileged dialogue-partner. Sanskrit shares with Greek "a common stock of philosophical problems, insights, and confusions" (Halbfass, 129) in the discussion of universals. Such logical topics were perhaps only imperfectly integrated with the ontological question in the West, and ontological presuppositions may have been a barrier to the development of logic.

Again, Indian epistemological discussions were often in advance of the West, perhaps because they were not clogged by Western commitments to substantial being. In the West, it is only with Kant that epistemology and logic are foregrounded to supplant ontology in the manner of Udiyana's (11th century) definition of astitva as "being the object of affirmative awareness” or "ascertainability without reference to a counter-entity" (Halbfass, 156-157), or his definition of dravya as "what is not the locus of the utter absence of qualities" or “the substrate of three layers of inherence” (93). The Vaisesika thinkers know that “objectivity and cognizability as such cannot establish the distinction between being and nonbeing" (157), but this again sights the reality of being only in a logical perspective and offers no distinct positive conception of its nature.

In the treatment of perception, the rival claims of phenomenalism, representationalism and direct realism could be discussed all the more lucidly in that the ontology of substance was not hovering over them as a daunting enigma. Heidegger is a direct realist; he would say: "I see the tree in the garden, not the representation of the tree,” but with an ontological, Aristotelian twist, quite absent in India - "I apprehend the tree in its being, either letting it be in poetic, meditative thinking, or cramping its being in technological, calculative objectifications." Merely epistemological clarification of perception cannot fulfil the Western philosopher's thirst for being, to which Heidegger recalls the tradition, and which he retrieves beneath the epistemological burrowings of Descartes and Kant. A parallel argument that Indian epistemology is led by the tacit question of being would be less persuasive.

Again, many themes in the philosophy of mind as developed in the West seem to have been explored more radically in India, so that here one cannot afford to neglect "how Sanskrit speaks." Conversely, it would be hard to discuss Yogacara, for example, without drawing on the resources of a Hegelian or Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness. Yet the "selective affinities" (G. Larson and R. Bhattacharya, Classical Samkhaya, Delhi, 1987, p. 641) between parts of both traditions do not amount to identical problematics. In any case they do not concern Heidegger's question; he uses the term "consciousness" only for the modern medium of the apprehension of being, which, since Descartes, entails an occlusion of the authentic phenomenality of being. On the theme of consciousness, India may challenge Europe, whereas on the theme of being, it is Europe's force that challenges India.

Reference to India certainly introduces a broader horizon, bringing our own puzzling ontological legacy into a fuller perspective. But it may be instructive above all as showing how a great intellectual tradition can get on without the question of being. Analogously, what makes Buddhism instructive to Christianity is the way it gets on without the question of God. The "relativistic detachment" (Halbfass, 12) such comparison induces may weaken our commitment to the frameworks of our own tradition, but it is likely also to confirm that our tradition is local and idiosyncratic- that monotheism is characteristically Jewish and that ontology is characteristically Greek, even if one does find notions of God and of being in other traditions.

(b) Being as Stuff and as Abstraction

The Indian notion of being wavers between reification and conceptualism, both of which occlude at base the phenomenon of being. There is no higher understanding of being whereby a critique of these notions could be carried out, though they may be transcended towards an absolute beyond being. Some Samkhya statements look like universal ontological theses, e.g.: "There is no origination for what is not, nor destruction for what is" (Halbfass, 59). But these may amount to no more than a principle of conservation of the material universe. Thinkers who see _sat_, pure being, as “the universal substrate" (ib.) may likewise think of being only as a stuff; the Chandogya Upanisad's teaching that "In the beginning my dear, this world was just Being" (Halbfass, 26) glides swiftly into an evolutional unfolding, of which being is no more than the undifferentiated point of departure.

Prabhâkara (Mimamsa) rejected the general concept of existence on the ground that "we do not in fact perceive things as merely existing. The true sense of existence is merely the individuality of things (svaruupa-satâ; it is not a true class character" (A. B. Keith, The Karma-Mimamsa, Delhi, 1978, p. 58; see Halbfass, 156). The apperception of being qua being, in its transcendental, analogous character - which is neither an empirical datum nor an abstract concept - is again missed here.

In Vaisesika, ontological thought was arrested by a fundamental option for ontological realism (Frauwallner, 119) and especially by the treatment of sattâ as a "reified universal" (Halbfass, 150). For Halbfass, the notion of inherence (samavâya) has ontological status as "the one pervasive structure of our universe that constitutes the condition of the possibility of concrete, qualified entities and of contingent existence" (148). A faint suspicion: do the refinements sighted here depend on a Kantian lens? Others view this notion of inherence as another reified abstraction. But if we see inherence as a pervasive ontological structure, comparable to Buddhist dependent origination or Vedantic mâyâ, we may still ask whether these structures which govern the emergence and relations of beings ever bring into focus their being qua being. A causal and logical ordering of things may trace their origins without interrogating their being, as happens in the sciences for example. The extra step which raises the question of being may be a step back or away from sensible logical or causal thinking. It is doubtful if Western discourse on being is a harmonious continuation of logical and causal investigation; it seems rather to introduce a troubling cloudiness; and even when being is finally tamed to logic and grounds it seems unhappy in its onto-theological abode, as if itching to break out again. In India the analysis of being never clouds over in this way. Buddhism and Vedanta also take a step into realms irreducible to logic or common sense, but led by other issues than the question of being. The energy of fundamental questioning is captured by these issues, and being as such is not what becomes problematic.

Again, defences of stable identity against Buddhist doctrines of universal momentariness and flux are not properly ontological. The concept of "practical efficiency" (arthakriyâ) as a criterion of being focusses on the problem of distinguishing reality from appearance (Halbfass, 152) rather than on the question of what being as such is. If the Buddhists used it to give a reductive account of being-language, this again is not ontology but a discrediting of ontology. On the Buddhist side, being had only conventional reality, and did not become a subject of contemplation for its own sake; on the other side, the defence of robust ontological realism against Buddhist subversion left little leisure for disinterested musing on the enigmatic character of being. Such musing remains a peculiarly Greek pastime and to pursue it today one has to think as a Greek rather than as an Indian.


"Being is one, because of the uniformity of its mark ‘is,’ and because of the absence of any mark of differentiation"; “Being is not a substance, because it possesses one substance. It is neither a motion nor a quality, because it exists in qualities and motions. Also because of the absence of genus and species in it, Being is known to be different from substance, quality, and motion. For the same reasons, substanceness, qualityhood, and motionhood are known to be different from substance, quality, and motion” (Potter, 213-14). Being here is a pure abstraction, comparable to substanceness or motionhood. Aristotle, in contrast, rejects the interpretation of being as supreme genus (Halbfass. 2, 140); only in doing so can he keep open the question of being in its multivocity, and glimpse the irreducibility of being as the _transcendens schlechthin_ (GA 2:51; 9:336-7), in its qualitative difference from entities (the ontological difference). Phenomenologically, existence is not a universal, a predicate universally applied, but in each case the distinctive act or event of existing - energeia. Here Vaisesika finds nothing worthy of thought. The readiness to identify bhâva as the supreme genus cuts off the question of being at its roots. In the West, when being is thought of in this abstract way it represents a forgetfulness of the question; in India it represents a failure of the question to emerge. We have at best an undetermined sense that "as the supreme universal it is also something over and above, and different from, the particular and perishable entities in which it occurs" and "imperishable and permanent" (Halbfass, 140)

© Shared Themes
1. Form. There is a wonder at form in Indian thought. But again it is not clear that this carried the charge of a wonder at being. Is there any Indian notion of form that plays the specifically ontological role that eidos has in Plato and Aristotle? Even the "form itself is emptiness" of the Heart Sutra grasps phenomena in their phenomenality, not specifically in their being. A phenomenology of the empirical world in view of emptiness is quite a different matter from one in view of being. Though one might find in Plotinus, Spinoza, Berkeley, Bradley, or Bergson some rough analogies to Madhyamaka and Advaita notions that the objective world with its differentiations has a merely conventional reality, or that all empirical objects are merely superimpositions on the pure undifferentiated ultimate reality, nonetheles such ideas are still, after two centuries of Western exposure to Vedânta, experienced as foreign and unsettling. The Western concern with being and form seems to have worked against a radicalization of the question of appearance and reality. This concern was reinforced by the Christian metaphysics of creation which stressed the distinct existence of finite created substance, and by the doctrine of Chalcedon (451 CE) which, by insisting on the integrity of Christ's human nature, formed a bulwark against emanationist or absorptionist accounts of the relation of human and divine (see H. U. von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, Einsiedeln, 1988, pp. 35-41; he refers sweepingly to “asiatische Aufloesung”, p. 122). To Western thinkers, Indian reflection on maayaa and emptiness initially seems but an inchoate groping toward their own mastery of logical determinations. But if these Indian worlds of thought could be tucked neatly away in the folds of Hegel's Logic, they would not be worth our study. Their cultural and historical roots make them more than mere intellectual contructions. As living paths of thought they elude our mastery and summon us to open dialogue.

2. Causality. In Indian thought a fascination with causality has given rise to theories at least as subtle as those of the West. However, this causal reasoning was not applied to being qua being, but only to entities - cosmic or psychological - in their arising and passing away. Cause, in India, is not the Aristotelian aition, namely “that which is responsible for the fact that a being is _that_ which it is”(GA 9:246). We do not find in India "Parmenides's persistence. in holding fast to the purity and simplicity of the experience contained in the single Greek word _Esti_ (‘it is’), by the sharp repulsion of the obtrusive tendency to address being in terms of _doxa_, as coming to be and passing away" (Kisiel, 246). Descending from the Eleatic acropolis one may indeed retrieve the world of coming to be and passing away as a worthy theme of specifically ontological thought; but this was not the Indian experience.


In the West, causal arguments for the existence of God quickly become ontological. The arguments from motion or design can be reduced to the argument that finite or participated being requires to be grounded in Being itself. The arguments of Udayana in the Nyâkakusumânjali sometimes have a familiar feel to Western readers, for instance the temporal argument against self-causation: “Nor can things be self-caused, since a thing cannot both originate at a certain time and yet exist prior to that time, and the causal relation involves temporal succession” (Potter, 559); compare Aquinas: “nihil est causa semetipsius; esset enim prius seipso, quod est impossibile" (Contra Gentiles I 18). Yet as he develops his causal reasoning, it is striking how rarely he alights on the ontological notions that would immediately suggest themselves to the Western mind. "Causation just means regular connection between something prior to the effect and the appearance of that effect” (ib., 560). There is a touch of Humean refinement to this, but no sense of the production of an effect as an ontological (rather than merely ontic) event - no glimpse of the cause as bringing the effect from potency to act in virtue of its own actuality. This might give Udayana a modern cast, prompting comparison of his arguments with Western discussions of causality since Leibniz. Most of his arguments are epistemological: "we need the hypothesis of God to justify the initial acceptance of the Vedas by reasonable men” (Potter, 574). Epistemological acuity seems to crowd out talk of being. Again, when Udayana plays with the notions of "latent causality, potentiality, and manifestation" (Halbfass, 58) in his dialectical refutation of the sheer actualism of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness, it does not appear that these acquire any properly ontological consistency for him.

Earlier, Vyomasiva had defined the production of objects as "connection with their own causes and reality" rather than merely "(coming into) existence after prior nonexistence" (ib., 193); this had some ontological bite. Udayana regresses to the view that "'Being an effect' is simply the state of being of something that did not exist before” (ib.). His disregard of the earlier stress on sattâdsambandha, "connection with reality," may reflect a major ontological reorientation as Halbfass suggests. But sattâdsambandha, as originally used by Prasastapâda (6thcentury), 'does not answer or even address the question what being, reality, or existence is." It has the merely logical, classificatory sense of "having reality as a predicate" (ib., 170, 174). It seems that discussion of causality never made the breakthrough to a radically ontological treatment.

3. Act and potency. Halbfass claims that the debate between Sankhya satkâryavâda and Vaisesika asatkâryavâda - between "actualization of the nonactual" and "production of new actualities out of preexisting underlying actualities" (186) - is not merely about causation but is "a genuinely ontological debate," albeit marked by "a certain refusal to address each other's basic premises concerning the nature of being and the different meanings in which the words _sat_ and _asat_ are used" (58). The "being" from which things originate in Samkhya is a kind of being that Vaisesika does not recognize at all, characterized by "potency, potentiality, latency, indefiniteness, and subtleness” (185). There is a contrast in ontology here, but if the two darsanas did not join battle on this topic, then the specifically ontological question was eluded.

In Yoga, "Transition from potentiality (sakti) to actuality (abhivyakti) in the mental sphere means change from an unconscious, 'unnoticed' (aparidrsta) state to a conscious, 'noticed' (paridrsta) one" (60-1): here there is no reference to being. "Present phenomena are manifest, that is, actual; past and future phenomena are subtle, that is, potential… The concepts of actuality and potentiality are thus used in an attempt to clarify the nature of time" (61). Again, the contrast between subtle and manifest is not the equivalent of the Aristotelian focus on being in potency and in act. It seems misleading to see here an insight into "the enigmatic relationship between being and time" (62). Nor do Bhartrhari's questions - "How does the verb be (bhuu), how does the noun _reality_ (sattâ) refer to time?... How can ‘being' itself in its verbal sense, as an act or process, be there?" (207) - rise from the logico-ontic to the ontological level. Again, Bhartrhari's thesis that time (conceived as a substance) activates "those powers and potentialities (sakti) that constitute the condition of the possibility of all actual, particularized existence," or that "reality itself (sattâ), the highest universal, is unleashed and manifested in those lower universals (jâti) which are the eternal prototypes and potentialities of all particulars" (205-6), is a speculative construction that does not entail a phenomenological meditation on the interplay of being and time.

4. Time. The closest one comes to such a phenomenology in India is in the Buddhist tendency to "an increasingly radical and explicit fusion of being and time or temporality" (221). But even here Nâgârjuna uses the mutual dependence of past, present and future to prove that none of them has real existence; this demonstration of emptiness shows little puzzling over the phenomenon of time for its own sake. For Advaita,"time appears as fundamentally incompatible with reality in the true sense" (22I), whereas Western thought, even in Neo-Platonism, has dwelt attentively on the being, or half-being, of time. The Greek way of posing the question "What is time?" or any other "What is" question is honed by a focus on essence or being. Indian definition, in contrast “has no relation with what we would call the essence of a thing… Because I read the universal in the concrete, at the very level of the concrete, I am dispensed from thinking that universal, from conceptualizing it, from defining its essence”(M. Biardeau, Journal Asiatique 257, 1957, pp. 373,375). Indian analysis was not answerable to a strict, authoritative regime of essence (as even Christian theology has been); its starting points and its goals were of varied religious or speculative kinds, each determining a style of analysis only rarely coincident with the "scientific" and "philosophical' attitudes central in the West. Heidegger is the heir of Aristotle (and Augustine) whose aporetic interrogation of the most salient phenomenological features of time set the agenda for Western thought on the subject. Rather than dissolve time in true Being he focusses more sharply the phenomenon of being by bringing into view the inevitable temporality of its play of presence and absence.

'Kanâda's six categories do not include "isness"; neither do Aristotle's ten, but _ousia_ is related to _einai_, whereas dravya (substance) is not related to _sat_ or astitva. To be sure, among the six, substance, quality, and activity are singled out as connected to being (sattâ). In the list of ten we find sakti and asakti, potentiality and nonpotentiality. There is confusion as to whether the universal, sattâ, applies to all positive categories or to the first three only. In any case since the three following categories (universal, particularity, inherence) inhere in the first three, and snce quality and activity inhere in substance as their substrate, there is a strong identification of substance with being, as in Aristotle. So in this sense "explicit conceptualization of being" does indeed "emerge out of the enumeration and classification of what there is" (Halbfass, 139). But does it emerge as just a formal abstraction? Is it an especially thought-provoking concept, a source of wonder - or is it merely an occasion for logical clarifications? "Is the Vaisesika ontology an epiphenomenon of its categoriology? Is there an understanding of being which is prior to, and the condition of, its project of categorial analysis and enumeration?"(ib.). “A sense of 'being' that implies, above all, enumerability and identifiability" (220) is a very undeveloped notion of the meaning of being - and one that is "internally inconsistent, theoretically unfeasible" and "soteriologically irrelevant or counterproductive" (70). Even if other Indian thinkers formulated such negative evaluationsof the ontological upshot of enumerability, they did not necessarily do so from an ontological concern of the sort that we are likely to import into the Indian framework. Neither the positive nor the negative implications of Vaisesika ontology bring it into the neighbourhood of the highest Western thematization of being.

Even if Indian thought lends itself to Heideggerian exegesis in a way that biblical thought, for example, does not, what the exegesis yields is much less rich than in the case of Western sources and also much less illuminating as regards the internal dynamic of Indian thought. In Western thinking led by the question of being the categoriology is a fleshing out of the prior understanding of being (even in philosophers such as Hegel who have "forgotten" being as the Greeks saw it). The tendency to enumeration, so tiresome in Abhidharma, Samkhya and Vaisesika, never took hold among the Greeks, because their overriding philosophical interest was not the multiplicity of beings but their unity in being. Vaisesika enumeration aims to be an exhaustive catalogue of the many; some Vedantin critics insisted that "an understanding of Being cannot be gained through an enumeration and classification of different entities. True, absolute being transcends and precedes all distinctions, including the distinction between being and nonbeing" (Halbfass, 159). But do even the Vedantins linger in meditation on the _hen panta_ in terms of the being of beings? Does their quest for unity get beyond an ontic totalization? Having identified the principle of cosmic unity, do they go on to interrogate it, and to dwell on the enigmatic interplay of the one universal reality of being and the many distinct individual entities? Their monism is the obverse of Vaisesika enumeration, and equally suggests a forgetfulness of being: they “argue against the very possibility of defining entities, of establishing them in their individual identity, and of defining and establishing being itself in its distinction from nonbeing" (232). The failure to focus being as being is in both cases due to an overriding concern with spiritual liberation. Multiplicity, for the Abhidharma or Vaisesika, is of interest primarily as a map of the obstacles or aids to liberation, while the Vedantins' stress on unity also has a primarily soteriological purpose; whether controlled by categorization or totalized and dissolved in some form of monism the many ceases to obstruct liberation.

When Western metaphysics declines into representational thinking, used as a means of technological mastery of the earth, an expression of the will to power, this should not be equiparated with vaguely similar features in Indian thought:

“’Representational,’ ‘objectifying’ thought is fully present in the Vaisesika system of categories, in its enterprise of enumerating and classifying whatever there is, and above all, in its conceptualizations of being. To be sure, it is not a Cartesian attempt to establish man &s the master and owner of nature; but it is an attempt to put the world at our intellectual and conceptual disposal, to explain it once and for all through a process of comprehensive enumeration and classification. Being itself is either objectified and appears as an entity among entities or it accompanies the process of enumeration as its receding horizon or expanding shadow.” (Halbfass, 231)

Here a Heideggerian lens allows one to find a phenomenon of rationalistic decadence in Indian scholasticism, and at the same time this casts doubt on Heidegger's claim to explain such phenomena in the West exclusively in terms of the destiny of the thinking of being. But what also emerges is that the Indian phenomenon lacks the distinctive ontological import that it has in Western rationalism; it even appears to suffer a certain aimlessness in comparison with the intense determination of the Western rational project. The fixational character of Vaisesika categorizations, criticized by Sankara (Halbfass, 231), contrasts with the dynamic thrust of Western rationalism precisely in this: that the West is haunted by the quest for Being (however narrowly conceived) whereas Vaisesika is trapped in the enumeration of beings. In short, Vaisesika thinking is ontic, not ontological. Or if it has an ontological upshot, this is clarified by reference to the Greek tradition, just as the relevancy of Western philosophy to the attainment of moksa could be clarified only by reference to the Indian tradition.

(e) The Absence of the Question of Being in Nâgârjuna and Sankara

The Indian style of thought which effects a "simultaneous de-objectification of the objectified” may make Indian philosophy "a treasure house of direct promise to the Heideggerian quest" (Mehta 44). But to conflate it with the Heideggerian tension between calculative and meditative thinking is to slur over the basic difference between the thought of being and the nondual apprehension of Brahman or sunyatâ. Nâgârjuna and Sarikara, in their overcoming of the conventional in the name of a different kind of thinking or apperception which reaches highest truth, recall Heidegger's overcoming of metaphysical and technological reason in the name of the thinking of being. In both cases what is to be overcome is allowed validity in its proper sphere; though in both cases there is a certain ambivalence toward the realm of the conventional that is never quite resolved. But the ultimate truth aimed at in the Indian thinkers is of a loftier order than the contemplative apprehension of beings in their being, and they do not have any time to linger on the latter occupation. Advaita overshoots the thought of being to affirm instead "the nondual state of âtmanlbrahman that is prior to, and the condition of, all apparent dichotomies and alternatives, including those between being and nonbeing" (233), and the same may be said of the Madhyamaka affirmation of emptiness. The contemplative nonduality both cultivate cannot be equated with Heidegger's goal, the togetherness of being and thinking in the Ereignis.

Halbfass claims that in addition to the negative ontology - "beyond being and non-being" - Indian thought also apprehends the character of being in a positive way in a kind of "soteriontology." Sankara's concept of liberation and Nâgârjuna's emptiness have "an undeniably ontological dimension" (39).

Author: ramana [ 21 Oct 2008 08:01 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

The key to understanding Middle Eastern history in the ancient period is decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt and the Behistun inscription (of Darius I) in Persia even though they are separated by atleast a few centuries. These enable the decipehring of ancient languages and lay bare the treasures of historical inscriptions. the first decipherment was by a French officer of Napoleon and the latter was by Sir henry Rawlinson.

Author: Acharya [ 22 Oct 2008 01:30 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7447100/The-A ... an-History


The Aryan Invasion Theory - European History

Description
Quote:
Why does AIT model still persist? Why do indologists not reconsider the fundamental premise of their theory? Though they have retracted the Aryan Invasion and have been forced to give up large scale migrations (to the point where, at present, one must imagine tiny bands of Aryan entrants to have silently crept into India, wiped out all records of their presence and interactions there, and then disappeared or died out without passing on their genes), they refuse to reformulate or even re-evaluate their basic assumption.
Why? What are the reason(s) governing indology's non-self-critical approach when dealing with counter-evidence from other sciences?
As we have seen, linguistics has historically been, and continues to be, motivated by concerns that are not always scientific. What motivations are driving IE linguistics and indology research today?
• Is it inertia? Are they unwilling to sift through the material that laid the foundations of IE research in the last 150 years of the field? Or are they, unlike real scientists [48], so sure of the inerrancy of their framework that they are unwilling to re-evaluate it, its assumptions and central premise?
• Has the IE world-view come to define the very identity of the west? Has their view of their past and their origins become so intimately tied up with the Indo-European framework? (See also [49])
• Are there other motivations propping up the IE framework today, just like there was during the period of British imperialism when the AIT served its purpose? [50]
Indians today need to reconsider whether they should so whole-heartedly base their entire world-view upon a model whose very premise remains unverified and unverifiable. [51]


http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/396/ ... oryld5.gif

Author: Acharya [ 22 Oct 2008 01:42 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Philosophy/ ... e%201.html

History of Indian philosophy

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/hindu.html

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/eg ... syria.html

Quote:
Books:
babylonian legends of creation
babylonian story of the deluge
book of the dead
egyptian conception of immortality
egyptian ideas of the future life
legends of babylon and egypt
legends of the gods
myths of babylonia and assyria
religion of babylonia and assyria


http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/india.html

Quote:
Books:
fall of the moghul empire
forgotten empire
indian ghost stories
on the indian sect of the jainas
religions of india


http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/jewish.html

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/ab ... thics.html

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/ch ... japan.html

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/Religion/buddhist.html

Quote:
Books:
book of tea
bouddha
buddhism and buddhists in china
buddhist psalms
buddhist suttas
dawn and the day
dhammapada
essence of buddhism
life of buddha and its lessons
light of asia
record of buddhistic kingdoms
saddharma-pundarkika
sutta-nipata
vinaya texts
wisdom of the east



http://www.bored.com/ebooks/History/india.html
Quote:
Books:
akbar emperor of india
by-ways of bombay
campaign of the indus
case for india
darkest india
fall of the moghul empire
folklore of the santal pargaras
forgotten empire
forty-one years in india
from the caves and jungles of hindostan
handbook to agra and the taj
history of indian philosophy volume 1
india old and new
indian frontier policy
indian speeches
indian unrest
journey through the kingdom of oude
lighted to lighten
modern india
narrative of siege of delhi
pirates of malabar
rambles and recollections of an indian official
recollections of calcutta
record of buddhistic kingdoms
ride to india
sport and work on the nepaul border
three frenchmen in bengal

Author: ramana [ 23 Oct 2008 03:36 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

ramana wrote:
Pope Benendict was right- The history of Europe is the history of Church in Europe. Without the Church's influence Europe was very backward and quite uncivilized. However that was not true of the Mediterranean Europe comprising of Greece and Rome or Italy.

Ancient Greece was a collection of city states that could not come to terms with each other and led to conquest by a Macedonian(Philip and his son Alexander) who was at the outer limits of Greek civilization. Within a hundred years after Alexander's death in Persia, Greece was conquered by Rome and we do not hear of Ancient Greece as an independent area. It is a Roman province and yet its thought was adopted by Romans and assimilated. From there on the Romans conquered Asiatic Middle East and setup an empire. They persecuted the Jews and viewed their not acknowledging the Emperor as a God to be sedition. Many Jews were killed and their revolts suppressed.

It is interesting that two of Jesus's disciples who were brothers- St Andrew and St Peter went to spread the message to Greece and to Rome respectively. It is the doctrine taught by these two brothers that leads us to the current Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. St Paul comes later on to spread the message to Gentiles(ie is non Jews)

While the Roman Catholic Church under went splits from Protestants and others, and went through Reformation, the orthodox church did not go through any such events even during Soviet Communist rule. I do not know why and am searching for it.

Was there a difference in the message from the two brothers? This has a direct bearing on the history of Europe as we see it.


X-posted...

Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered
by Peter S. Wells (Author)


# Hardcover: 256 pages
# Publisher: W. W. Norton (July 14, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0393060756
# ISBN-13: 978-0393060751



Quote:
Starred Review. As archeology professor and author Wells (The Battle That Stopped Rome) points out, the only texts available on the cultures of "Dark Age" Europe (roughly A.D. 400-600) were written by those educated in the Roman tradition. The only unbiased evidence, therefore, is the material evidence. Covering five decades of excavation in western Europe (including London, Copenhagen, the outskirts of Stockholm, Cologne and Trier), Wells chronicles a revolution in the understanding of Europe after the Western Roman Empire's collapse, ostensibly at the hands of "barbarian hordes." Evidence accounts for vast trade networks that ranged from Byzantium and the Black Sea through the Baltic to Ireland, and across the Alps and Pyrenees; artifacts from as far away as India have been uncovered in Scandinavia. Buildings, metalworking and gem-cutting sites, and evidence for continuous occupation of many modern European cities, also provide rich proof that, contrary to the Roman-centric collapse-of-civilization narrative, the post-Roman world pulsed with robust, vital activity. Wells's aim is obviously a wide audience of armchair historians and archeologists; they won't be disappointed, and they'll have a fine reading list in Wells's sources and suggestions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
A surprising look at the least-appreciated yet profoundly important period of European history: the so-called Dark Ages.

The barbarians who destroyed the glory that was Rome demolished civilization along with it, and for the next four centuries the peasants and artisans of Europe barely held on. Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only way of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter S. Wells, one of the world's leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known, European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts. This recently recognized culture achieved heights in artistry, technology, craft production, commerce, and learning. Future assessments of the period between Rome and Charlemagne will need to incorporate this fresh new picture. 24 illustrations.


There are so many lengthy difficult books about the Early Middle Ages, written for and by specialists, what a delight to find a short and easy to read summary of the latest scholarship of this rapidly changing multi-disciplinary field, written for a general audience by a medieval scholar with an up to date and useful bibliography.

The term "Dark Ages" has a long and complicated history ever since its invention by Italian Humanists in the 14th and 15th centuries. Modern medieval historians try to avoid the term Dark Ages with its pejorative implications. However some will still justify its use because the period was "dark to us", because of the lack of written record. However even this is no longer the case, a wealth of archaeological information has surfaced to enlighten the period. The old prejudices of a violent, backwards and stagnant time are falling away. Was it different from Rome? Yes, but to apply a value judgment of a "Dark Age" is inappropriate, this powerful metaphor has sadly shaped many peoples vision of the period.

Peter Wells examines some of the enduring myths and shows, through new archaeological findings, rather than a sudden break with the past, a continuity of history. For example there is a myth that urban centers declined or were abandoned, Wells shows substantial evidence this was not the case, using a case example of London. There is a myth of continuous violence and warfare, however Wells suggests this could not have been the case because of freedom of movement and trade that was occurring. There is a myth that technology halted or went backwards, when in fact it was a period of innovation, including the deep plow, horse harness and 3-field system which created a surplus in food, population and specialization. There is a myth that Roman roads deteriorated, which is true, but the original Roman roads were built on ancient roadways and were mainly only meant for military purposes anyway. Artwork flourished in this period finding new and original expressions.

Barbarians to Angels is a quick read for a general audience that summarizes a lot of recent and difficult scholarship. For more specialized works, to understand how we know what we know, the "proof", there is an excellent Bibliography.


Like another reviewer, I remain unconvinced of the author's thesis about post-Roman Europe. He rejects the term "barbarians" for the people who followed the Romans, but because they lacked a written language, their level of "civilization" cannot be demonstrated. The fact that they made and imported decorative objects is not proof of either moral enlightenment or intelligence. I read this book with much interest, and admire its succinct coverage of a complex subject, accessible to the nonspecialist. However, I sense an apologia for our Enlightenment viewpoint, an attempt not to judge, to give "Dark Ages" Europeans too much of the benefit of the doubt. His philosophy is much like Jared Diamond's in his two best-selling books which try to downplay the "superiority" of the West and explain the lack of development in the Third World totally in terms of geographical happenstance and environmental negligence. I would put credence in the written evidence of contemporary Roman writers. The quality of the human beings involved to me is always paramount. And given the paltry evidence for Dark Ages civilization (except for the monasteries), I read this book with yes, skepticism.



There is an intellectual fight going on in Europe to find their next thing. The fight is between the Catholic Church historians and those who seek to secularize their civilization. first they had the Reformation and then the whole series of intellectual 'isms'. On the way they came up with Proto-Indo -European (PIE) to deHebrewize their religious book and along with the Aryan Invasion Theory. So Europe is struggling to find and redefine itself.

Author: ramana [ 23 Oct 2008 03:01 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Singha wrote:
these euros are pathetic, treats blacks and browns badly, claim to be the superior
and artistic tfta culture, claim to be hotspots of every intl trend and squeal and line
up with begging bowls when the music of free credit stops.

Author: Johann [ 25 Oct 2008 04:35 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Singha's post was in response to the economic crisis in eastern Europe.

There were very clear predictions of the crisis 3 months ago - Businesses need capital to grow, and the market that supplied that capital to these countries was Western Europe. Once the banking crisis hit Western Europe, the financing started to dry up, and they were hit particularly hard. All markets heavily dependent on European capital have been hit hard, including Russia. In addition, new EU members like Hungary are only due to join the Euro in 2012, and their currencies are very vulnerable in these kinds of volatile periods. All in all it's very similar to South East Asia in 1998, except this time the crisis started spread from the financial sectors of the investor countries to the emerging markets. The global economy will recover, and the eastern european economies will bounce back, and sooner rather than later they will have additional security of monetary union.

Author: ramana [ 28 Oct 2008 06:32 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Sri Rama Jois' book in Google Books:

Legal and Constitutional History of India

Author: ramana [ 29 Oct 2008 07:43 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Book review Pioneer, 30 Oct., 2008
Quote:
British Empire’s incredible objective: Welfare of the Conquered

If there was a single moving spirit consistently behind British Imperialism, it was pioneering enterprise, business through discovery. KR Phanda and Prafull Goradia look at Piers Brendon’s story of the decline and fall of the Empire

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
Author: Piers Brendon
Publisher: Vintage (Random House Group)
Price: Rs 695

Piers Brendon has written an exceptionally interesting account of the largest empire in history. Its title, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is, however, a misnomer. Evidently, the author is a Gibbonphile. Or else, there is no reason to use this name for his book. If anything, the volume covers the beginning to the end of the empire, from the 17th century when America began to be colonized to 1997 when the Hong Kong lease expired. A photograph of the Union Jack being lowered on the island is a part of the book. Incidentally, the Falkland Islands still celebrate the continuing flicker of the empire. This epical saga has been covered in the course of some 650 pages; too short a length for so long a story. It is therefore not a history but a racy narrative of selected, engaging episodes.

In the words of the author, “This is my aim, for a shorter period, in the following pages. I endeavour to give the big picture vitality through abundance of detail, telling the imperial story in terms of people, places and events; through brief lives, significant vistas and key episodes. I trace the warp and weft of imperial existence. And some strands come under particularly close scrutiny: the food and drink empire-builders consumed, the clothes they wore, the homes they built, the clubs they joined, the struggles they endured, the loot they acquired, the jubilees, durbars and exhibitions they attended. Also observed are their trimmed moustaches and clipped foreskins, their addiction to games and work, their low-brow ideas and high-minded attitudes, their curious blend of honesty and hypocrisy, their preoccupation with protocol and prestige, their racial prejudices and the extent to which they lived in symbiosis with their charges. I lack the space, not to mention the knowledge, to treat all aspects of the history of the British Empire.”

In the Introduction to his work, Brendon quotes Edward Gibbon as having taught that chronology is the logic of history. But he himself does not follow this teaching in this book under review. He is choosy; apparently his criterion is how interesting an episode and how few readers are likely to be familiar with it. For example, the first chapter consists of 29 pages on The American Revolution or the War of Independence. Yet 14 of the 29 pages are devoted to the Slave Trade mainly with Jamaica and its sugar plantations. The details are lurid and unlikely to be known to many. To quote a paragraph, after the cruel rigours of their abduction in West Africa, their sale to the white traders and the voyage to the New World, “Africans who reached the West Indies looked more like shadows than men. Most were skeletal, many were ill and a few had gone mad. So they were prepared for market, fed, washed, rubbed with palm oil until they gleamed, calmed with drams and pipes. Grey hair was shaved or dyed. To conceal signs of the ‘bloody flux’ some ships’ doctors plugged the anuses of slaves with oakum, causing excruciating pain. They also used a mixture of iron rust, lime juice and gun powder to remove the external symptoms of yaws. Slaves were then subjected to further humiliating scrutiny and sold once again, sometimes individually, sometimes by auction, sometimes in a ‘scramble’. The last was a ferocious melee in which purchasers seized what slaves they could, all at a fixed price.”

The author then scoffs at the slave owners, traders, shippers and British leaders like Edmund Burke who said that colonial government was for those who were unable to rule themselves. They need a trust to be exercised by the rulers for their benefit; an imperial trusteeship for the betterment of native societies. The fact that many a liberated slave, after slavery was abolished, were unwilling to go to Sierra Leone or Liberia showed that they had to be forced to be free. So as Jean Jacques Rousseau said liberty could be compulsory. The author adds, Britain would subjugate many lands in its name, i.e. liberty.

As one reads on, one often comes across an apologetic attitude of the author to the empire. It is difficult to say whether Brendon sincerely feels that way. Or is it to give a balance to his narrative; so that it does not sound like a boast about Britain’s imperial success? Or is it a touch of inverted snobbery whereby it sounds right to be self derogatory? At one stage, he refers to British hypocrisy which claimed that liberty was its governing principle. On the other hand, the author of capitalism, Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, did write that trade was cost effective, humane, immune to rebellion compared with empire. Britain should restrict itself to commercial dominance. The author goes on to quote how Smith contended that colonies were a cause of weakness rather than of strength to Britain. On the other hand, Brendon could not help referring to Sir George Macartney who talked about the empire on which the sun never set. In the ultimate analysis, the British could not be free from the ego !

In the course of his treatment of America, Brendon shows repeated concern for the fact that it was Lord Cornwallis who finally surrendered to George Washington and ended the War of Independence in 1776. He appears to feel that the quality of Cornwallis was vindicated by defeating Tipu Sultan at the second battle of Seringapatam in 1799. Britannia’s Indian Empire is a 31 page chapter in which three pages are devoted to Tipu only. His qualities make absorbing reading although in a historical perspective they might not have deserved so much space. To quote, “Moral censure of Tipu Sultan did not come well from a nation which treated convicts and slaves so brutally and, in any case, it rather missed the mark. Seen in the context of South Indian kingship, the Tiger of Mysore was, if hardly tame, not altogether wild. Tipu was intelligent, cultured and witty. He possessed a library of two thousand volumes (carefully wrapped and placed in chests to protect them from white ants) which doubtless nurtured his passion for innovation. He was as fascinated by western technology as by eastern astrology, wearing on his person a gold fob watch and a magical silver amulet. His French-trained army was in some respects superior to that of the British. Tipu’s artillery was ‘both larger and longer than ours’, wrote an English officer, his ‘Rocket Boys are daring, especially when intoxicated by Bang.’ The Sultan was altogether ‘a respectable and formidable enemy’. He was also notably fastidious. His chin was cleanly shaved in oil of almonds, and his muscular body, tending to corpulence but distinguished by delicate wrists and ankles, was regularly ‘shampooed’ (i.e. massaged). A fine white handkerchief, a black enamel vase of flowers and a silver spit-box were placed close to his musnud, which faced Mecca. Although the court elephants were trained to make obeisance to him, Tipu dressed plainly, ate; with restraint (for breakfast ‘an electuary composed of the brains of male tame sparrows’), and spent little time in his zenana. A keen hunter, ‘an incomparable horseman, a gallant soldier, an excellent marksman’, he was admired as well as feared.”

Although Pitts India Act of 1784 prohibited further conquest in India, Cornwallis’ successor Richard Wellesley, aimed to establish one paramount power in India. He kept his aim and, in a matter of eight years, he ensured the rise of “an insignificant trading settlement to a mighty empire” as Lord Valentine wrote. He built the palatial Government House for himself against the wishes of the East India Company Directors. They could do nothing; the moral of these stories was how little was the control of London over self willed Governor Generals 7000 miles away. And how uncoordinated was the growth of the empire.

In the course of a total of 22 chapters, the author deals with the entire empire from the white colonies like Australia to the conquest of Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Gold Coast to East Asia, Malaya et al. If there was a single moving spirit consistently behind the empire building, it was a pioneering enterprise, business through discovery. Most other motives were paradoxical. Trade versus empire. Liberty versus helping those who did not know how to rule themselves. Then there were the evangelists for whom it was a white man’s burden to civilize the coloured people.

Regardless, the British empire was the most sophisticated of all empires in history. It exploited its colonies but as businessmen would. Develop their economies, create their productivity and then cream their surpluses by exporting manufactured goods to them expensive and importing their commodities cheap. What Dadabhai Naoroji had called adverse terms of trade. Otherwise, the accounts of each colony were separate and often Britain owed money to some colonies. For example, at the end of World War II, New Delhi was London’s creditor. All in all, Britain enabled a number of its colonies to undergo an industrial revolution; India was one example. True, it meant more profit for the British. But for India, it meant the building of infrastructure like the railways, the ports, the electricity to enable the profits. Above all, an excellent administration guided by the rule of law backed by a modern jurisprudence.

Although Brendon, in his modesty, has not made the point, its merit would standout clearly if a comparison was attempted with the other contemporary imperialists. The Dutch did little in their colonies but loot. The Portuguese priority was to destroy temples and convert the people to Catholicism. The French busied themselves with civilizing the people; making them pseudo-French; did not lend their excellence of governance. Belgium and its Congo need no mention.

The British empire did not decline and fall in the manner of say the Roman or the Ottoman. The rulers in London and elsewhere did not degenerate as did the Romans and the Turks. The nation, that fought World War II, could not possibly be decrepit. Soon after the war, the Atlee government decided on a spontaneous, largely graceful, withdrawal. Beginning with India in 1947, the end of the empire was completed in 1997 at Hong kong.

Whitehall must have been motivated by several factors, some conscious others implicit, but certainly differing from colony to colony. In the case of India, London might have felt that, after the rebellion led by Netaji Subhas’ Indian National Army whose soldiers violated their oath of loyalty to the crown, a lakh of expatriates can no longer control the enormous colony. Perhaps, it was the British aversion to dealing with the Hindu-Muslim conflict after the war. And so on.

Nevertheless, one was a universal consideration applicable to all colonies. Territory or land was about the only source of big wealth until the Industrial Revolution. Fishing, farming and mining were the main economic activities. With the progress of the Revolution, the growth of manufacture and marketing, territory began to be discounted; with that the economic value of colonies.



This last one was the arguement advanced by US experts for dismantling the empire.

Author: ramana [ 30 Oct 2008 08:27 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

op-ed Pioneer, 31 oct., 2008

Quote:
Art of looking the other way

Francois Gautier

Those who select the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize suffer from selective amnesia about India and its ancient knowledge and traditions. Hence the winner is not an Indian

In a remarkable book, L'oubli de l'Inde (Amnesia of India), French philosopher and journalist Roger-Pol Droit recounts how till the 19th century Europe's admiration for Indian philosophy and spirituality was boundless, particularly in France and Germany, both terra franca of philosophical thought. He explains how, for instance, French philosopher Pierre Sonnerat had written in the 18th century: "Ancient India gave to the world its religions and philosophies: Egypt and Greece owe India their wisdom and it is known that Pythagoras went to India to study under Brahmins, who were the most enlightened of human beings."

Or how German philosophers, such as Friedrich Schlegel, have said: "There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit." Nietzsche had read the Vedas, which he admired profoundly and thought that "Buddhism and Brahmanism are a hundred times deeper and more objective than Christianity".

It was not only in the realm of philosophy that Europe admired India. American mathematician A Seindenberg wrote: "Arithmetic equations were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians and the theory of contraries and of inexactitude in arithmetic methods, discovered by Hindus inspired Pythagorean mathematics".

Seventeenth century French astronomer Jean-Claude Bailly had already noticed that "the Hindu astronomic systems were much more ancient than those of the Greeks or even the Egyptians and the movement of stars which was calculated by the Hindus 4,500 years ago, does not differ from those used today by even one minute".


When Nietzsche died in January 1889, the India of philosophy, of the Vedas and spirituality seemed to have disappeared with him from the consciousness of Europeans. Since then, Europe (and the United States) believe in what Droit calls "Helleno-Centrism", that all philosophical systems started with Greece and there was nothing worth the name before the Greeks. The two main culprits for this amnesia of India in Europe, thinks Pol Droit, are the British colonisers and the Christian missionaries. How could the English, they who had come to civilise the 'heathens', admit that their culture was derived from these very savages? And how could the missionaries, they who had come to bring the 'true god' to the Pagans, acknowledge that their own religion may have been influenced by the latter, as Jesus Christ is supposed to have come to India to study Hinduism and Buddhism?

What has this got to do with the Nobel Peace Prize, you may ask? Well, first, one has to understand the minds of the Nobel Peace Prize committee members: When they award prizes, they are necessarily influenced by a Christian vision of the world. For, as most Europeans, they have been brought-up in the belief that democracy and philosophy started with Greece and that a humane civilisation began with Jesus Christ. And, of course, they have a covert -- or at best unconscious -- suspicion, if not of India at least of Hindus, who for them remain Pagans, which the missionaries of yesteryears, and unfortunately those of today too, have created in the minds of many Westerners. How can they then give Peace Prize to a Hindu?

Among those Indians most nominated in the last few years is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living. Sri Sri is not only involved with charity in India's villages, he also promotes pesticide and fertiliser-free farming, takes orphans from Jammu & Kashmir and the North-East into his ashram, and his volunteers do relief work, both at the physical and psychological level -- whether in Bihar during the floods, in Iraq or in the US during the recent cyclone. Sri Sri is also trying to revive the ancient Vedic tradition by training young priests in a gurukul, which blends ancient knowledge with modern thought, while promoting ayurveda as the medicine of the 21st century.

There is only one problem: Sri Sri is a Hindu. In the same way the Nobel judges ignored Sri Aurobindo, India's extraordinary yogi, poet, revolutionary, and philosopher and France is yet to acknowledge that one of the great figures of the 20th century was his spiritual companion, Mira Alfassa, the 'Mother'.

Will Sri Sri ever get the Nobel then? Maybe his manifold work confuses the judges. For, if you analyse all recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients, you will see that they were crowned for their work which carries only one label.

Sri Sri is not bothered and goes on with his work. As he gains fame in the West, he helps erase the amnesia about India and revive admiration and thirst for Sri Sri's knowledge.

Author: ramana [ 31 Oct 2008 04:12 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

fanne wrote:
Sugriva Sir,
I would not worry about the slow economic growth of the earlier decades. Among all the big economics, we have the highest amount of organic growth, full 80-90% of our economy is about us. For China, they have 30-40% economy tied to the well being of the global economy. We are the original and real businessman. Of the 5000 years of recorded history, we were the richest nation for almost 4700 hundred years, last 200 years have been bad (last 60 the worst, at independence we accounted for 5% of world trade, now not even 1%). There was some 100 years in 1600 AD that China took us momentarily. The last 60 years were like putting shackles around Indians. We will thrive and do great, we always have. The Islamic invasion could not slow us down, neither the looting of the British (they built the largest train network for that!!). The so called shinning sectors will be hit, like people who are mousers to foreigners, or like write codes for them. But for many Indians, who choose to serve 1.2 billion Indians, sky is the limit. We would be OK, just that we do not go back to that mai baap system where everything is decided by Rajmata and Rajkumar.



If you look back in history these trading routes were both sea and land based. What colonialism did was to take over the Indian mercantile system and enrich itself. The Portugese and then the Brits took over the seas around India and the land route aka Silk Route got cut off with modernization and creation of nation states. The rise of US after 1965 starts because of taking over the rupee trade area in the Gulf countries. KSA starts using dollar for its tradeinstead of rupee.

Author: SK Mody [ 31 Oct 2008 05:23 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

Acharya wrote:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7447100/The-Aryan-Invasion-Theory-European-History


The Aryan Invasion Theory - European History

Description
Quote:
Why does AIT model still persist? Why do indologists not reconsider the fundamental premise of their theory? Though they have retracted the Aryan Invasion and have been forced to give up large scale migrations (to the point where, at present, one must imagine tiny bands of Aryan entrants to have silently crept into India, wiped out all records of their presence and interactions there, and then disappeared or died out without passing on their genes), they refuse to reformulate or even re-evaluate their basic assumption.
Why? What are the reason(s) governing indology's non-self-critical approach when dealing with counter-evidence from other sciences?
...
[51]


Is it that the high level of genetic diversity found in India is a psychological barrier to rejecting the AIT?

There seems to be an unspoken premise that diversity is a result of purely environmental and migratory factors. The assumption seems to be that an isolated population must be homogeneous - and environmental and migratory factors are the reason for diversity. I would like to invert this logic. Why can't it be true that diversity is _greatest_ at the source? Then as sub-populations migrate outwards they tend to form more homogeneous clusters. To take an analogy from complex analysis - in any neighborhood of an "essential singularity" of a complex function, the function takes on every possible value. The Indian subcontinent is that kind of neighborhood - genetic expression is the greatest in this neighborhood.

As sub-populations from the India migrated outward they formed the more homogeneous populations that we see today outside India. Now one can ask - Why should these migrated populations be more homogeneous? One answer would be that they need to adapt to their new environment - ie: the environment molds the migrated population and homogenizes them. This also means that after a substantial period of time, after the populations have adjusted to their new environment, they will begin to differentiate and diversify again. Applying this to present day Europe for example, one could speculate that Europeans will eventually start "naturally" becoming more diverse in the genetic makeup, as they have survived the period of adapting to the environment. The idea is that populations _naturally_ tend to differentiate unless _constrained_ by a new/hostile environment. As you can see this inverts the generally accepted logic.

There is also the Banyan tree analogy. While the Banyan tree is nourished by the branches that dig in to the soil from above, these branches don't come from the sky but from the tree itself. The analogy with India is obvious.

Author: Acharya [ 31 Oct 2008 07:52 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

SK Mody wrote:


Is it that the high level of genetic diversity found in India is a psychological barrier to rejecting the AIT?

This explains why there is high genetic diversity in India. Earliest human evolution was in the sub continent. Other regions got their DNA diversity from India. High diversity implies it is origin of those groups.

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

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/ilectures/

Author: Acharya [ 01 Nov 2008 04:52 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview - 4

From another forum

Quote:
Quote:
India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says
.
The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages

NOT. That "may" is English for a probability of 0.0% by the way. Where the 0 after the decimal repeats infinitely.

It is the Aryan-Mind-Invasion Theory now. Their minds invaded us Indians, who were incapable of speech and agriculture, until they kindly civilised us like the swell British did millennia later. How grateful we are! No, really. Where did the invading chariots go of some barbaric tribe bringing down the Harappans who were the "Dravidians" who fled south? Ooh, wait, Underhill and Witzel probably still believe in their ancestors invading our lands. Because there's still Aishwarya Rai to account for.

The AIT continues. Except now they are happier than ever: they never wanted to be connected genetically with us, but they always wanted to claim the root of the IE languages. What next? I can see the Global Christian Movement (aka Global Christian Menace) is going to say: "you are all one people living under a religion that is not yours. Let it go." No thanks.

How can they make a claim on our language when they have no older IE language anywhere living among them or written down anywhere?
From the "West"? Where in the west do they mean?
"agricultural techniques and languages" - no, because they got agriculture (farming) from the ME. Samskrt and all the languages derived from it in India are ours. If they want it, they should prove otherwise, without resorting to their laughable and desperate PIE.
Since they can't prove an invasion into India, and our genes are splattered all over their ancestors, they still want to claim our culture. Language is culture. It's what our ancestors used to compose and write our knowledge like the Rg Veda. We've got Pannini who detailed the grammar exquisitely. What next, they'll claim the Dravidian languages once they discover how cultured the South Indians are?

How did the West invent PIE again? Where do they speak PIE again?
Not giving us the credit of our own language is the same as saying we were uncivilised (in western terms). The AIT lives.

Our culture and our languages and our genes are our own. I'm sorry that they can't accept that. I'm sorry they find it hard to swallow and can no longer play ubermenschen. But that's just tough luck. There are no ubermenschen. They need to get off the pedestal and everyone else needs to kick the pedestal so it never comes up again.

This paper has effectively stated that the A(Mind)IT will in future not be affected by genetics whatever the outcome. (Unless of course some study shows a massive European genetic invasion of N-India. In which case the AIT will make a massive comeback, like it had never gone away.)
However, no genetics study that makes us the genetic ancestors is going to credit us with the IE languages. They've made their minds up: it's a one-way street, a rigged game where we lose no matter what.

They're such liars. At night they'll lie awake and know their ancestors did not accomplish what they now claim them to have. Anyway, Karma will bite them in the ... foot.


Author: ramana [ 14 Nov 2008 10:53 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Interesting article

How Muslims made Europe

Quote:
How Muslims Made Europe
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215
by David Levering Lewis
Norton, 473 pp., $29.95

The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and Asians as particular kinds of people.

David Levering Lewis's rich and engaging God's Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God's Crucible offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.

Charlemagne's rule included at its high point most of France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, the west of Germany, Italy as far south as Rome, a strip in the north of Spain, and parts of Hungary and the Balkans. At nearly three and a half million square miles, it was larger than the continental United States. Charlemagne imposed Catholic orthodoxy on the pagan Saxons in the east at the point of a very sharp sword, massacring thousands of those who resisted, and suppressed heresy within Frankland with equal vigor. He created monastic centers of learning, drawing scholars from across his empire and beyond; and after the centuries of ignorance that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in Gaul and Germania, the works of men like the Northumbrian Alcuin (poet, theologian, and restorer of the classical curriculum) created a Carolingian Renaissance.


These achievements perhaps entitled Charlemagne to his self-conception as Rome's heir in the West, author of a Renovatio Romani Imperii, an imperial restoration. When he traveled to Rome in December 800, some thirty years into his reign, he went to defend the authority of Leo III as pope; and His Holiness returned the favor by crowning him Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800 (much to the annoyance of the Byzantine regent Irene, who called herself Emperor, rather than Empress, and thought the title was hers).

Charlemagne was a great soldier, a devoted Catholic, an ambitious administrator, and a patron of learning. He had reason to take pride in what would prove a brilliant Carolingian legacy; we need think only of the magnificent carved ivory plaques in the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum or the elegance of manuscripts in Carolingian minuscule or Alcuin's Latin verse history of York. But the empire he created was, as Lewis puts it trenchantly, "religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive," ruled by a "warrior caste and its clerical enforcers." Despite the new currency, the economy was dominated by barter; there were few cities of any size; and wealth was measured in land, peasants, and slaves.

Charlemagne had no national system of taxation. He lived off plunder and the product of his own estates. What his lords owed him was military service. They were obliged to show up annually in the late spring, armed for a military campaign, in case he thought it necessary. (Very often, he did.) The Franks had once been a relatively free agrarian people; now they were largely a nation of serfs, working alongside slaves—many of them Slavs from Bohemia and the southern shores of the Baltic.

Charlemagne's royal hall, in his new capital at Aachen, was built on a fifty-acre complex of buildings, secular and religious, and was the largest stone structure north of the Alps. But it paled in comparison to the architectural majesty of Byzantium or Rome. The King endowed libraries with hundreds of manuscripts, impressive by comparison with anything that had been seen hitherto by the Franks, but pitiful (as Gibbon observed) beside the thousands of documents in the libraries of Italy or Spain. He created a new bureaucratic structure, sending royal officials to each of the 350 counties of his realm to deliver his commands, hear cases, and, when necessary, to summon his people to war. But as Lewis says, much of this royal centralizing had scarcely more than a parchment reality in a world of near-universal illiteracy, deep suspicion and resentment on the part of the nobility, and a crippling disparity between resources and objectives.

The fact is that Charlemagne's empire, impressive as it was, lacked many of the marks of what we think of as civilization: cities, commerce, great libraries, a literate elite. This is especially clear if we compare the world he made with the cultivated society of his new Muslim neighbors.

Like Charlemagne's empire, al- Andalus was very much the product of a war machine. Islam burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with astonishing rapidity in every direction. After the Prophet's death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere thirty years to defeat the two great empires to their north, Rome's Christian residue in Byzantium and the Zoroastrian Persian empire that reached through Central Asia as far as India. The dynasty of the Umayyad clan, which took control of Islam in 661, pushed on west into North Africa and east into Central Asia. In early 711, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, acting for the sixth Umayyad caliph in Damascus, led a Berber army across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain.[1] There he attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries. A year later, a new army of 18,000 men, mostly Yemeni Arabs, joined in the assault. Within seven years, most of the Iberian peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly eight hundred years later, was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.

After the early Muslim triumphs, the Christians of northern Iberia fought back, consolidating the Kingdom of Asturias in the 720s, and recovering Galicia from Muslim rule by the end of the next decade. In the mountainous northwest of the peninsula, on the storm-buffeted southern coast of the Bay of Biscay, the Christian tribes were largely able to resist Muslim encroachment. Nor was Muslim rule ever secure in the Basque region on the southern side of the Pyrenees. The Upper, Middle, and Lower Marches (or borderlands) lay between the core of al-Andalus, the region around Córdoba, and these Christian kingdoms in the northwest, on the one hand, and the Franks over the mountains to the northeast, on the other. As borderlands—whether with the Asturians or with the Franks—the Marches were always at risk of attack.

The Umayyads did not, however, intend to stop at the Pyrenees. Their first attempt to take Aquitaine, the southern Frankish duchy, was frustrated in 721, when Duke Odo charged his heavy horses through a Muslim army encamped outside his capital at Toulouse. But a little more than a decade later, 'Abd al-Rahman, the new emir of al-Andalus, returned to take up the task, with a vast, disciplined, experienced Moorish army. He sent Odo scuttling off from a defeat near Bordeaux and marched on northward toward Poitiers, almost halfway from the Pyrenees to Paris.

Near Poitiers, however, the Muslims met their match. In October 732, Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, who had force-marched his troops from the faraway Danube, joined Duke Odo in decimating the emir's troops. A Christian scribe in a Latin chronicle written in 754 calls the victors at Poitiers Europenses : it is the first recorded use of a Latin word for the people of Europe. And it was written in al-Andalus.

Later Christian historians assigned to the Battle of Poitiers an epochal significance. Gibbon remarked that if the Moors had covered again the distance they had traveled from Gibraltar, they could have reached Poland or the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps, he thought, if 'Abd al-Rahman had won, "the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet." For him, the fate of Christian Europe hung in the balance. After a week of battle, he wrote, "the Orientals were oppressed by the strength and stature of the Germans, who...asserted the civil and religious freedom of their posterity."[2]

At the time, though, it would have been odd to regard Charles Martel's victory as guaranteeing religious freedom. The small but influential Jewish community in Iberia had been tolerated in Spain when their Visigothic overlords were still Arian heretics ruling Catholic and Jewish subjects; but Jews began to be persecuted in 589, when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism. For the Jews, then, the Muslim Conquest, bringing rulers who practiced toleration toward them as well as toward Christians and Zoroastrians, was not unwelcome. During the first period of Muslim domination, Christians, too, discovered that they would have religious freedom, so long as they (like the Jews) did not seek to convert Muslims or criticize Islam. The contrast with Frankish rule could hardly have been more striking. The obsession of Catholic rulers with religious orthodoxy was one of the things that made the Dark Ages—as Petrarch was to dub the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries—so dark.

Nor was it evident at the time that the Battle of Poitiers had put an end to the dreams of a Muslim conquest in the land of the Franks. For nearly thirty years the Arabs maintained control of Septimania—modern-day Languedoc in southern France—ruling from their capital at Narbonne. In the ensuing decade there were constant sallies and retreats as a succession of emirs sought to go deeper into Frankish territory. In all this back-and-forth, it makes little sense (as Lewis shows) to pick Poitiers as the turning point.

Indeed, the greatest obstacle to Muslim expansion proved to be the divisions among the Muslims, which led to almost constant conflict in al-Andalus. Discord in the world of Islam began in the tribal society that was the religion's first home. The Prophet came from the Meccan Quraysh tribe, whose members were regarded with special favor by the faithful. Among the Quraysh, Muhammad's clan was particularly exalted. The first caliphs were all Qurayshi, but the first dynasty came not from Muhammad's kinsmen but from the Umayya clan. When the fourth caliph, Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, was assassinated and succeeded by an Umayyad caliph, a long rivalry between the clans was launched.[3] In 750, revolts in the new Muslim empire unraveled the Umayyad dynasty; and the new caliph of the Abbasid clan set out to massacre anyone who could resurrect the Umayyad line. Not for nothing was he called as-Saffah, the Shedder of Blood.

Unfortunately for Abbasid claims to control of the empire, the bloodletting was not completed. 'Abd al-Rahman, nineteen-year-old grandson of the Umayyad caliph Hisham I, evaded capture, and managed to get to Morocco. Across the narrow straits between Morocco and al-Andalus, 'Abd al-Rahman planned to conquer a Muslim society whose rulers owed their place to the patronage of his ancestors. In 755 he landed in Granada with over a thousand Berber cavalry. He was twenty-five years old. Within a year, he had installed himself in Córdoba, as emir of al-Andalus. But his hold on power was tenuous. He lost his foothold north of the Pyrenees in 759 to Pippin the Short, Charlemagne's father, in part because he was facing a revolt in the west of his own empire. And he spent most of his time in the saddle, fighting resistance to his claims as emir.

When 'Abd al-Rahman defeated the Abbasid emir in 763, he commanded that all prisoners of war be executed, and himself presided as the emir's hands and feet and then head were cut off. "Labeled and pickled in brine, the leaders' heads were dispatched to Mecca," Lewis writes. "When Caliph al-Mansur received the gory details, he is said to have expostulated, 'God be praised for placing a sea between us!'"

Despite, or perhaps because of, these sanguinary beginnings, the reign of 'Abd al-Rahman and his descendants in al-Andalus introduced a period of relative stability. An emir had to be ready at any moment to defend his territory from without and his authority within. But alongside the disciplines of war, he could practice the arts of peace.

The original core of the Great Mosque at Córdoba, which stands to this day, was built for 'Abd al-Rahman in an astonishing burst of architectural fervor, apparently between 785 and 786. With 152 columns, arranged in eleven aisles, it consisted of two parts: a large prayer hall, some two thirds of an acre in area, and an adjoining piazza of the same size, filled with rows of orange trees, which together made up a square whose sides measured about 240 feet. The results, added onto over the centuries, still amaze. Lewis writes:

Its builders devised the art and science of transmuting matter into light and form that medieval Christendom was the poorer for its general inability to comprehend.... The unprecedented innovation of the Great Mosque's master builder was to loft the coffered ceiling to a height of forty feet by means of an upper tier of semicircular arches that appeared to be clamped to the bottom tier of horseshoe arches supported by columns.... Structurally ingenious, the visual effect of the double arches has been from the moment of completion one of the world's distinctively edifying aesthetic experiences.

If the Great Mosque was the most evident material embodiment of the civilization of the Arabs in Spain, their intellectual achievements were even more astonishing. Starting in 'Abd al-Rahman's time, the Umayyads sought to compete with their Abbasid rivals in Baghdad for cultural bravura. Over the next few centuries, Córdoba alone acquired hundreds of mosques, thousands of palaces, scores of libraries. By the tenth century, those libraries had hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, dwarfing the largest libraries of Christian Europe. The university of Córdoba predated Bologna, the first European university, by more than a century. And al-Andalus was a world of cities, not, like Europe, a world of country estates and small towns. By the end of the millennium, Córdoba's population was 90,000, more than three times the size of any town in the territory once occupied by Charlemagne. In those cities, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs, and countless others created the kind of cultural goulash—a spicy mixture of a variety of distinct components—that would generate a genuine cosmopolitanism.

There were no recognized rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Córdoba's ambassador to Constantinople and Aachen. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Córdoba's Jewish community in the middle of the tenth century, was not only a great medical scholar but was also the chairman of the caliph's medical council; and when the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII sent the caliph a copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, the caliph sent for a Greek monk to help translate it into Arabic. The knowledge that the caliph's doctors acquired made Córdoba one of the great centers of medical expertise in Europe. By the time of 'Abd al-Rahman's successor and namesake, 'Abd al-Rahman III, in the tenth century, the emir of al-Andalus had the confidence to declare himself caliph, successor or representative of the Prophet and, implicitly, leader of the Muslim world.

Like Charlemagne's, the emir's position was partly religious; he was supposed to be (and often was) pious. But piety for the emirs did not mean—as it did for the Holy Roman Emperor—imposing one's religion on others. From the earliest times, the emirs of al-Andalus accepted conversion but did not demand it. There were, naturally, some pressures to convert: non-Muslim subjects—the so-called dhimmi—were required to pay special taxes; and non-Muslims could be enslaved while, at least in theory, Muslims could not. Still, it probably took about two centuries after 'Abd al-Rahman's death in 788 for Muslims to become a majority in al-Andalus.[4] In the cities of al-Andalus, scholars of all three faiths, with access to the learning of the classical world that the Arabs had inherited and brought to the West, gathered and transmitted the learning whose recovery in Europe created the Renaissance.

By 777, 'Abd al-Rahman, now in his mid-forties, and still a vigorous warrior, had established control over some two thirds of the peninsula. Not all his co-religionists were pleased. Evidently hoping to contain him, the emir of Barcelona and the Muslim governors of Saragossa and Huesca rode the nearly one thousand miles to Saxony to conspire with Charlemagne. It was at a time when the King had gathered his nobles and his leading clergy for the Diet of Paderborn to receive the submission of the Saxon tribes and witness the baptism of many of their leaders. The coincidence seemed providential. Here were three Muslim princes offering fealty to the king of the Franks and the Lombards, who had recently become ruler of the Saxons as well. "To Charlemagne's vaulting ambitions," Lewis writes, "the symmetry of a Frankland flanked by two conquered peninsulas proved irresistible—rex Hispanicum added to the title rex Francorum et Langobardum." In 778, Charlemagne assembled an army of Franks, Bavarians, Burgundians, Lombards, Septimanians, and others—perhaps as many as 25,000 men at arms—to begin his assault on Hispania. For the first time in history, a Christian army set out to conquer the world of Islam; but it did so at the invitation of and in alliance with Muslims.

'Abd al-Rahman prepared his own army but he did not have to use it. Accounts of Charlemagne's great muster gave the governor of Saragossa second thoughts, and so when the Frankish armies arrived there, expecting to be welcomed, its gates remained barred. Worse news came from the far north; the Saxons whose defeat he had celebrated at Paderborn had risen in revolt. When Charlemagne sought refuge in the old Basque city of Pamplona, his fellow Catholics spurned him. Infuriated, he destroyed Pamplona. In the end, a Christian city was the major victim of his planned assault on the Muslim emirate.

As Charlemagne retreated through the Pyrenees, he was harried by Basques, who had no love for the Frankish king who had devastated their city; and in a mountain pass at Roncesvalles the Frankish rear guard was destroyed. Einhard, Charlemagne's first biographer, lists among the dead "Roland, Lord of the Breton Marches." This appalling Christian loss to fellow Christians—Catholic Franks slaughtered by Catholic Basques—was transmuted three centuries later in the Chanson de Roland into a fatal conflict between Christianity and Islam.

In the epic, Charlemagne sees the carnage of the flower of Frankish chivalry, and destroys an army sent from the other end of the Muslim world. In reality, Charlemagne now turned his wrath on the Saxon apostates. By the summer of 779, he had amassed a great army aimed at the final conversion of the Saxons from paganism. At Verden in 782, according to Einhard, Charlemagne supervised the slaughter of 4,500 Saxon prisoners. The armies of the Saxons were defeated in 785. Charlemagne threatened those who refused baptism with capital punishment. As late as 804, Charlemagne uprooted 10,000 recalcitrant Saxons, settling them in the west of his kingdom.

After four and half decades in power, Charlemagne died in 814. His rule overlapped the last twenty years of 'Abd al-Rahman's emirate, encompassed the twelve-year reign of al-Rahman's son, Hisham I, and also part of the twenty-eight-year reign of the grandson who consolidated Umayyad rule. The limitations of Charlemagne's state-building were evident at his death. He had made plans, following Frankish tradition, to divide the kingdom among his three legitimate sons, but only Louis the Pious was still alive by the time he died. Louis's attempts to divide the empire among his own sons led to a series of civil wars, out of which emerged a partition of Charlemagne's empire, laid out at the Treaty of Verdun of 843. The Frankish empire was split into East, Middle, and West Francia. The eastern kingdom became the (new) Holy Roman Empire, including much of present-day Germany; the western one is the core of modern France; and the middle kingdom included Burgundy, Italy, and the Low Countries. Verdun effectively ended the Frankish empire that had united Western Europe for the first time since the Romans.

'Abd al-Rahman's heirs as emirs of Córdoba held al-Andalus together with a little more success. But by the 880s, under his ineffective great-great-grandson, the emirate was so weakened by rebellion and demands for regional autonomy that his writ barely ran beyond Córdoba. It took that emir's son, 'Abd al-Rahman III, to consolidate Umayyad authority in the peninsula and extend it into North Africa. For nearly half a century, from 912 to 961, he built Córdoba into a center of power, creating a palace complex, the Madinat al-Zahra, that awed all who visited it, from the governors of the towns of the Marches to the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire.

After the debacle at Roncesvalles, Charlemagne never returned to Spain. In 798, the governor of Barcelona sought Frankish help in achieving independence from 'Abd al-Rahman's grandson, and Charlemagne authorized a campaign led by his son Louis. Barcelona was reconquered in 801 after a two-year siege. By 812, after a series of Frankish campaigns, the emir in Córdoba had accepted that his border was at the river Ebro, which runs through Saragossa in the northeastern part of the peninsula.

The Umayyad caliphate collapsed in the eleventh century and Muslim Spain descended into a chaos of little kingdoms, the Ta'ifa, some ruled by Arabs, some by Berbers, some by Slavs. In 1085, Alfonso VI, Christian king of Leon and Castile, captured Toledo; unlike the Franks, he knew better than to impose Catholicism on the people at the point of a sword. He called himself "king of the two religions"—meaning Islam and Christianity—but tolerated Jews as well: his doctor, Joseph Nasi Ferruziel, was Jewish. The spirit of cohabitation that the Arabs had created survived their departure. It took nearly four more centuries to get from the king of the two religions to the rigorous intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Berber dynasts—Almoravids and Almohads—who eventually took control of Córdoba and Seville, re- establishing a single Muslim state in the southern third of the peninsula from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, were very different from their Arab predecessors; they were driven by an intolerant orthodoxy that made it impossible to sustain the centuries-old intellectual openness that had made Umayyad Spain a place of scientific and philosophical learning. True, the philosopher Ibn Rushd—known to the Christian world as Averroës—had the first Almohad emir as his patron; but three years before his death, he was exiled to a village near Córdoba in 1195, his philosophical speculations condemned by the conservative Mus-lim scholars who now dominated the society.

As for Maimonides, the greatest of the Jewish scholars of al-Andalus, his family had to leave Córdoba around 1148, escaping Spain for Alexandria, by way of Morocco and Palestine. Without Ibn Rushd, whom Aquinas called simply the Commentator (on Aristotle, it was understood), as without Maimonides, there is no doubt, as Lewis insists, that the intellectual history of Europe would have been radically different. And without the Umayyad centuries, both Maimonides and Ibn Rushd would have been inconceivable.

The conquest of Spain by an alliance of Catholic princes was now proceeding apace. They called it a reconquest, because they saw it as the return to power of Catholicism in the peninsula, long centuries after the Visigoths had lost control. In the thirteenth century, the Almohads abandoned Granada to the last Muslim dynasty in Spain. Within a decade it was a tributary state of Catholic Castile. The end of al- Andalus came with the submission, in 1492, of the last emir to los Reyes Católicos, Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile. By then the crusades had for nearly three centuries been redefining the contrast between Christians and Muslims, shifting the focus of the conflict to the east. The toleration that Alfonso VI, Isabella's ancestor, had shown to the two religions that had shared Spain with the Catholics for so many centuries was formally ended: expulsion or conversion was required of all the Muslims and Jews of Iberia. The pattern that Charlemagne had set in Saxony was carried forward, once more with a pope's blessing, in Spain.

There were Europeans before there were Frenchmen or Germans or Italians or Spaniards because there was a world of kingdoms in the western residue of the Roman Empire bound by Catholicism to Rome. The histories that made France, Germany, Italy, and Spain—not to mention Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, or the Netherlands—all pass through one or both of the empires Charlemagne and 'Abd al-Rahman made. God's Crucible reveals how much the world we have inherited is the product of identities created long ages ago in rivers of blood, proceeding from a slaughter that was as often within Christendom or Islam as it was at their frontiers.

But there is also a more uplifting message here. Though Christians and Jews were clearly subordinated to Muslims in al-Andalus, they were nevertheless able to share in its manifold intellectual and material treasures. Had the three religions not worked together, borrowing from the pagan traditions of Greece and Rome, what we call the West would have been utterly different. In an age where some claim a struggle between the heirs of Christendom and of the Caliphate is the defining conflict, it is good to be reminded of this history of fruitful cohabitation.

Earlier this year, I visited the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barce-lona, housed in an old seminary. In the entrance archway, a group of people dressed informally in North African clothes, the men in long djellabas, the women with their heads covered in silk scarves, chatted cheerfully. Their presence was a reminder that the project of Charlemagne and los Reyes Católicos—the creation of a totally Catholic Europe—has failed; a failure that began, of course, from within, in the Reformation and took hold in the Enlightenment, both of which, though they have many other ancestors, are heirs to the philosophical traditions transmitted through al-Andalus. As the Muslim children ran around their parents on a warm, spring evening, it occurred to me that in a different history, without the Reconquest, I might still have seen people much like them in that archway—or, at any rate, one much like it; and, since I had read God's Crucible, I decided that in that other history the Christian Catalans who wandered by would also not have seemed out of place.

Notes
[1]Which is where Gibraltar gets its name: Jabal Tariq in Arabic is Tariq's Mountain.

[2]Edmund Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (P.F. Collier & Son, 1899), p. 288.

[3]The division between Sunni and Shia Islam originates here. The Shia are the followers of Ali, believing that the household of the Prophet should provide the leaders of Islam.

[4]Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion To Islam In The Medieval Period: An Essay In Quantitative History (Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 124.


Author: Acharya [ 14 Nov 2008 11:15 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Quote:



The West and the Rest

By Charles Murray
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2003

ARTICLES
The Public Interest
Publication Date: June 1, 2003

Eurocentrism has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the postmodern mortal sins. The Left's fight against Eurocentrism explains why students in elementary school are likely to know more about Mayan culture than French culture, and why liberal arts students at elite universities can graduate without taking a course that discusses the Renaissance. The assumption that Eurocentrism is a real problem accounts for the reluctance of many to celebrate Western culture-or even defend it.

Part of the Eurocentric critique is based on an open hostility to Western culture. Other cultures, it is claimed, were more in tune with the earth, fostered more nurturing personal relationships, or were more cooperative than the despoiling, competitive Europeans. These are not positions to be refuted by logic and evidence-the West's arbitrary allegiance to "logic" and "evidence" is one of its supposed evils. Another rationale for increasing attention to non-Western cultures is simple historical accuracy and balance. This is the "Eurocentric hypothesis," which might be put as follows: When Westerners set out to survey history, they conveniently find that most of it was made by people like themselves. Sometimes this parochialism is fostered by a prescribed canon of fine art, music, and literature that marginalizes non-Western traditions. Other times it is a function of ignorance, which leads Western historians to slight the scientific and technological achievements of other parts of the world. In either case, the result is a skewed vision that does not reflect real European preeminence, but rather Eurocentric bias.

This argument is plausible. It is easy to mock today's New Age deference to the Mayans, but the great civilizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world left splendid legacies in the arts and sciences. The West may have been pivotally important, but has it been too much at center stage?

Measuring Excellence

The data I collected for a book on human accomplishment left me with a way to explore that question. The data consist of inventories of people and events assembled from major histories and encyclopedic sources, covering the period from 800 BC to 1950. Each inventory was based on a dozen or more sources widely regarded as authoritative, drawn from a mix of countries. For example, the Western visual-arts inventory used 14 sources from the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, ranging in length from single-volume histories such as Janson's History of Art to the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art. The methods are described fully in my forthcoming book. Here, I limit myself to a few basics.

The science inventories (subdivided into astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, and technology) were worldwide-that is, Chinese and Arab scientists were part of the same inventory that contained Copernicus and Newton. My working assumption was that historians of science are able to identify important scientific achievements independently of the culture in which they occur.

The arts inventories (subdivided into the visual arts, music, and literature) and the philosophy inventory could not be worldwide. Even though some sources for these topics purported to cover the entire world, the weight given to different artistic traditions involves judgments and preferences in ways that accounts of scientific accomplishment do not. It could not be assumed, for example, that a history of the visual arts written by a German would use the same standards for Chinese or French art as for German art. To avoid the problem of cultural chauvinism within the Western world, I selected sources balanced among the major Western countries (along with other precautions discussed in the book). For non-Western countries, the most direct way to sidestep this problem was to prepare independent inventories. For philosophy, I prepared separate inventories for the West, China, and India. For the visual arts, I made use of distinct inventories for the West, China, and Japan. For literature, I used separate inventories for the West, the Arab world, China, India, and Japan. Music was restricted to the West. Altogether, 4,002 people qualified as "significant figures," defined as those who were mentioned in at least 50 percent of the sources, in one or another of the inventories.

As the entry point for exploring the Eurocentric hypothesis, consider the simplest of all questions: If the 4,002 significant figures are divided into three groups consisting of European peoples, people from the rest of the West (the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand), and non-Western peoples, how are they distributed over the period from 800 BC to 1950? Figure 1 below shows the results.

The story line implied by the graph is that little happened from 800 BC until the middle of the fifteenth century, that really intense levels of accomplishment didn't begin until a few centuries ago (fully half of all the significant figures make their appearance after 1800), and that from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, almost everything came from Europe. As late as the 1890s, 81 percent of the newly entering significant figures were European. Thirteen of the remaining 19 percent were from North America. But if this is the most direct story line, it is also one that leaves open many reasons to suspect that various factors are misleading us. The rest of the discussion works through the major possibilities.

Populations and Prejudices

The bulge in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries shown in figure 1 will prompt many readers to ask whether we are seeing the effects of "epochcentrism" (paying excessive attention to people in the recent past) and a growing population. A detailed answer to these questions consumes the better part of two chapters in my book. The short answer is that these phenomena do have a limited influence on the data, but do not bear importantly on the Eurocentric hypothesis.

The problem of epochcentrism is concentrated in the recent past. Cutting off the inventories at 1950 eliminates most of it, and the rest is concentrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In any case, epochcentrism applies equally to the Western and non-Western worlds. You may visualize figure 1 stopping at 1900, or visualize it with the totals for all three groupings somewhat reduced. Neither alternative changes the overall shape of graph.

In the case of population change, it is true that a country of 100 million people tends to produce more significant figures than a country of 10 million people, and the growth in Western significant figures is related to the increase in Western population. But the non-West has always had a larger population than the West, and in raw numbers, population growth in the last three centuries was greater outside the West than within the West. A revised graph that takes population into account would make Western dominance since 1400 greater, not smaller.

Geniuses and Giants

The most obvious objection to the story told by figure 1 is that a head count of significant figures is the wrong way to think about the distribution of accomplishment. The reason for teaching ancient Greek philosophy is not that 32 significant figures in Western philosophy come from ancient Greece, but that 2 of those 32 were Plato and Aristotle. The reason for teaching nineteenth-century European literature is not that it produced 293 significant figures, but that the 293 include writers of the stature of Tolstoy, Hugo, Keats, and Heine.

True enough. But as history has worked out, the ages rich in giants have also been rich in near-giants and the rest of the significant figures who make up the inventory. This point can be made more fully by examining the actual rosters of significant figures, but for the sake of brevity consider what happens when the raw numbers are weighted by the eminence of the people in question. The "eminence scores" I calculated for the significant figures used techniques for measuring eminence-essentially, by measuring the amount of attention given to people-that were originated by polymath Francis Galton in the 1860s and have been refined by succeeding generations of scholars. The specific method I employed produced scores ranging from 1 to 100.

These scores have the potential to shift the pattern shown in figure 1 substantially-one Aristotle, with his eminence score of one hundred, counts the same as a hundred Antiphons, and one Shakespeare counts the same as a hundred Dubose Heywards. Because I prepared separate inventories for the non-Western traditions, Eurocentrism cannot deflate the scores of the non-Western giants in the arts-Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Du Fu both have scores of one hundred, for example. However, as one can see in figure 2 below, employing eminence scores in place of a head count does not change the main outlines of the distribution of accomplishment shown in figure 1, either across time or geography.

The second graph shows an increased visibility of non-Western cultures after about 500 AD. However, the main point of Western dominance after 1400 persists, with West meaning Europe until the late nineteenth century.

The effects differ across inventories, but only in the case of the Western philosophy inventory, where the eminence scores drastically raise the importance of ancient Greece, does the balance between pre- and post-1400 visibly shift. Take Western literature as an example. Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles are giants of Western literature-but the post-1400 era has its own giants (Shakespeare, Goethe, and Moliere, for example) plus dozens of other near-giants who merit attention, compared with only a handful of near-giants from ancient times. In the end, a student with unlimited time to study Western literature has as much great literature post-1400 as pre-1400 (more, by most estimates), and a vastly larger number of works that are worthy of study. Taking eminence into account does not (again, with the exception of Western philosophy) radically elevate the importance of pre-Renaissance accomplishment.

An examination of significant figures in the sciences shows the same profile, but with even fewer people coming from outside the West. One might object that the role of the non-West is underestimated because of anonymous scientific discoveries, which might be more numerous in China, India, or the Arab world than in the West. Another possibility is that the number of significant figures after the mid-1800s is inflated because, as scientific teams have become more common, more scientists are identified with a single invention or discovery. Both possibilities may be checked by turning to the inventory of "significant events" in the sciences, compiled in the same way as the inventories of significant figures. (Specifically, a significant event refers to one mentioned in at least 50 percent of a large set of chronologies of scientific events.) An inventory of significant events shows the same Western dominance as the inventory of significant figures. Europe and North America together account for 97 percent of both the significant figures and significant events.

The Record in the Sciences

Are these "Eurocentric" numbers? In science as in the arts, we have grown accustomed to hearing the claim that the European contribution is overrated. In his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes quotes a historian of Chinese science, Nathan Sivin, to represent the essence of the new historical perspective:

The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European and that before modern times no other civilization was able to do science except under European influence. We have gradually come to understand that scientific traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental respects-from techniques, to institutional settings, to views of nature and man's relation to it-existed in the Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as well. It has become clear that these traditions and the tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that they have all helped to form.

Landes then gives the essence of the countervailing view in his response:

This [sivin's view] is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that modern science, in the course of its development, took up knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings. The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical interaction among diverse civilizations.

In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner... Later on, of course, the story was different: Once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance. Here too, the myth misleads by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe's making... Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew) but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning. This was no common stream.

This may seem to be one of those conflicts between experts that a layman is unable to assess, but it is not. On the contrary, it is easy to reach an independent judgment about allegations of Eurocentrism if one subjects the allegations to close scrutiny. Reread Sivin's passage, and note how effectively his language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is in fact exaggerated. This is standard practice. Two other examples demonstrate how the evocation differs from the evidence actually presented. The first is taken from the publicity copy of the 1998 edition of Arnold Pacey's Technology in World Civilization:

Most general histories of technology are Eurocentrist, focusing on a main line of Western technology that stretches from the Greeks through the computer. In this very different book, Arnold Pacey takes a global view ... portray[ing] the process as a complex dialectic by which inventions borrowed from one culture are adopted to suit another.

The other is from the publicity copy of the 1999 edition of an introductory college history text, Science and Technology in World History by James McClellan and Harold Dorn:

Without neglecting important figures of Western science such as Newton and Einstein, the authors demonstrate the great achievements of non-Western cultures. They remind us that scientific traditions took root in China, India, and Central and South America, as well as in a series of Near Eastern empires.

Lest we fail to get the point, the publisher adds a blurb from a professor at Stanford, who tells us that

Professors McClellan and Dorn have written a survey that does not present the historical development of science simply as a Western phenomenon but as the result of wide-ranging human curiosity about nature and attempts to harness its powers in order to serve human needs.

But do these two books in fact challenge my assertion that 97 percent of both significant figures and events in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America? Pacey's Technology in World Civilization is a wide-ranging account of the ways in which the recipients of new technology do not apply it passively, but adapt it to their particular situation. With this interaction between technology and culture as his topic, Pacey does indeed spend more time on non-Western civilizations than would a historian describing who invented what, where, and when. For example, he has a chapter on railroad empires, with 18 pages of material on how railroads developed in Russia, Japan, China, and India. But who invented the railroad engine, tracks, trains, and the infrastructure of complex railroads? All this occurred in England.

Similarly, McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History presents material on non-Western societies. But McClellan and Dorn, unlike Pacey, are writing a history of science. The 10 scientists with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes-a wholly conventional roster of stars. Of all the scientific figures mentioned in McClellan and Dorn's index, 97 percent come from Europe and the United States-precisely the same percentage yielded by the inventories I compiled.

There is nothing wrong with the historiography of either of these books. Both are consistent with the sources used to compile my science inventories. The contrast between the packaging for the books and the facts within them is emblematic of our times. The packaging illustrates how intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts contained therein reflect the way things really are.

The reason that any responsible history of science and technology will end up with these numbers is that historians of science and technology are all working with the same data which are, for the period we are exploring, reasonably complete. Gaps still exist, but none of them is large enough to do more than tweak the details of the general portrait of historical achievements.

Herein lies a difference between the layman and the specialist. Is the average European or American often unaware of the technological sophistication achieved by non-Western cultures? No doubt about it, and in this sense the charge of Eurocentrism is often appropriate. But what is really at issue is whether historians of science and technology in the last half-century are aware of the non-Western record-and it is clear that they are. Europeans used the works of the great Arab scholar-scientists of a millennium ago as the foundations for European science (which is why so many Arab scholars are known by their Latinized names). The great works of Indian mathematicians have long since been translated and incorporated into the history of mathematics, just as the works of Chinese naturalists and astronomers have been translated and incorporated into the narratives of those fields.

In recognizing how thoroughly non-Western science and technology have been explored, let's also give credit where credit is due: By and large, it has not been Asian or Arab scholars, fighting for recognition against Western indifference, who were responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-Western cultures, but Westerners themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the byproducts of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and American scholars who, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected. Joseph Needham's seven-volume history of Chinese science and technology is a case in point. Another is George Sarton's Introduction to the History of Science, five large volumes published from 1927 to 1948, all of which are devoted to science before the end of the fourteenth century-including meticulous accounts of scientific accomplishment in the Arab world, India, and China.

Of the remaining ways in which one could attenuate the 97-percent proportion I assign to both significant figures and significant events in the sciences, my proposition is that none work. I attach two provisos to that claim: First, attempts to add new events to the non-Western roster must consist of discoveries, inventions, and other forms of "firsts." No fair adding the first Indian suspension bridge to a catalog of Indian technology if suspension bridges were already in use elsewhere.

The other proviso is that the rules for inclusion of a person or event must be applied evenly. If one augments the inventory of non-Western accomplishment by going to Joseph Needham's seven-volume account of Chinese science and technology, one must also augment the inventory of Western accomplishment by going to comparably detailed histories dealing with German science (for example)-in other words, no fair using the naked eye to search for Western accomplishments and a microscope to search for non-Western ones.

If one observes these two constraints, the Western dominance of people and events cannot be reduced more than fractionally. For every new non-Western person or event that is added to the list, dozens of new entries qualify for the Western list, and the relative proportions assigned to the West and the non-West do not change. The differential may become even more extreme, because the reservoir of Western scientific accomplishment that did not qualify for the inventories is so immense.

The Record in the Arts

In compiling the inventories for the arts, I assumed that my method precluded direct comparisons of artistic activity in the West and non-West. It did indeed prevent comparisons that would assign specific percentages to the West and non-West of the type presented for the sciences. But nevertheless a few observations are possible.

The Western arts inventories are much larger in total numbers than their non-Western counterparts. In the visual arts, the West produced 479 significant figures, compared to just 111 and 81 for China and Japan respectively. In literature, the West has 834 significant figures, compared to 82, 83, 43, and 85 for the Arab world, China, India, and Japan respectively. Is this a function of different levels of detail in the sources? Not in any readily apparent way. Encyclopedic sources specific to each inventory were used to establish the universe of potential significant figures. The mix of sources for each inventory-encyclopedic sources versus major histories, for example-was comparable across inventories. For whatever reason, references of comparable scope-encyclopedic sources compared with encyclopedic sources, histories compared with histories-of art and literature in non-Western cultures do not contain nearly as many people as sources dealing with the West. As far as I was able to determine, the pattern applies equally to sources written by the native-born of a given culture and sources written by foreigners.

How might the differences in numbers falsely underestimate the contribution of the non-West? No important parts of the world have been left out-the inventories include all of the countries with long-standing traditions of named writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Any alternative conclusion requires that we assume that the distribution of artistic excellence among the significant figures is utterly different in Western versus non-Western cultures, and that the quality of artists in the non-Western traditions is so much higher than in the West that even though their numbers are far fewer, virtually all of them are worthy of extended study, whereas only a small proportion of the significant figures of the West are worthy of study. But this line of argument has neither a rationale nor evidence.

What if we were to discard artists as the unit of analysis, and substitute artistic works for assessing relative contributions? If we limit ourselves to attributed works, the substitution of works for artists will have no effect, or will be in the West's favor. The authors, composers, painters, and sculptors of the post-1400 West were, as a rule, prodigiously productive. Compare the body of work by Shakespeare or Goethe with that of Li Bo or Murasaki; that of Michelangelo or Picasso with that of Sesshu or Zhao Mengfu; and so on down the list from the giants to the merely excellent. At every level, the aggregate number of major works is at least as large for Western as for non-Western artists.

Shall we consider lost works? Some of the most highly regarded Chinese artists have no surviving works at all. But the West similarly has painters such as Zeuxis, Polygnotos, and Apelles, considered by their contemporaries as artistic equals to the sculptor Phidias. None of their paintings survive, nor does any work of their lesser contemporaries. Even in literature, the masterpieces the West retains from ancient days are probably outnumbered by the ones we have lost. We know that Euripides wrote at least 90 plays, for example, and only 18 of them survive. One of the greatest of the surviving Greek dramas, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that took first place. Inserting a correction for lost works will not redress the imbalance between West and non-West.

Adding anonymous works also won't alter the picture. In literature, many non-Western cultures have traditions of authorless folklore, but so does Europe, with separate and rich traditions ranging from ancient Greece through the Norse Sagas and into the Renaissance, with contributions from every European language. In the visual arts, countries such as India and Persia have important bodies of unattributed painting and sculpture, but so do the countries of Europe, embracing virtually all the sculpture, paintings, and mosaics from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages.

Expanding the definition of artistic accomplishment to include other forms of art that existed in East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian America runs into the same problem. Shall we add architecture, a category omitted from the visual-arts inventory? Certain structures in Asia and Central America belong on any list of great architectural accomplishment. But the entire roster of such architectural landmarks from outside Europe will be exceeded by comparable landmarks in medieval and Renaissance Europe alone, before we even look at European architectural accomplishment since then. Shall we introduce the decorative arts and crafts into the inventory of art works? Whatever gems of fine artisanship are introduced from Asia, Africa, and the Americas are going to be matched in quality and outnumbered by orders of magnitude by those originating in Europe. Consider the sheer volume of fine artisanship in stone masonry, stained glass, tapestry, and painted decoration from European churches and cathedrals alone.

Just as in the sciences, whatever mechanism one uses to try to augment the non-Western contribution in the arts will backfire if the same selection rules are applied to the West. It is impossible to be as precise about the relative contributions of West and non-West in the arts as in the sciences, but the generalization seems as valid: A balanced presentation of human accomplishment in the arts will naturally devote the large bulk of its attention to the West, and a large portion of this to Europe from the Renaissance onward.

The End of European Dominance?

I have gone to considerable lengths to document facts about the geographic and chronological distributions of human accomplishment that are controversial mainly because of intellectual fashions, not because the facts themselves can be disputed. Now is the time to introduce some cautions about the interpretation of those distributions.

The first caution is directed to those of us in the United States. Many Americans combine our civilization with that of Europe under the broad banner of "the West," but this is presumptuous. In his landmark Configurations of Culture Growth, written during the 1930s, anthropologist A.L. Kroeber observed that "it is curious how little science of highest quality America has produced"-a startling claim to Americans who have become accustomed to American scientific dominance since 1950. But Kroeber was right. Compared to Europe, the American contribution was still small then. In the arts as well, a large dose of American humility is in order. Much as we may love Twain, Whitman, Whistler, and Gershwin, they are easily lost in the ocean of the European oeuvre. What we Americans are pleased to call Western civilization was overwhelmingly European civilization through 1950.

The second caution is not to place too much weight on the numbers. The number of lost works and forgotten artists in the period before 1400 would, if taken into account, increase the pre-1400 proportion somewhat. Not a lot-even very generous estimates of the bias created by lost works only modify the dominance of modern Europe-but some. It is also important to remember that the period prior to 1400 may have had comparatively few significant figures, but it was rich in giants.

Furthermore, much of that genius came from outside Europe. Aristotle had different insights into the human condition than Confucius and Buddha, but not necessarily more profound ones. Those who are in a position to make such judgments describe the greatest poetry from China as among the greatest poetry ever written. A fine Japanese rock garden or ceremonial tea bowl expresses an aesthetic sensibility as subtle as humans have ever known.

The third caution is to remember that many civilizations arose independently of Europe, and rose to similar technological levels-developing tools and techniques that enabled them to build large structures and road networks, develop complex agricultural practices and distribution mechanisms, conduct commerce, and build thriving cities. Evidence scattered from Angkor Wat to Machu Picchu attests to the ability of human beings throughout the world to achieve amazing technological feats.

And yet the underlying reality is that Europe since 1400 has overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in both the arts and sciences. The estimates of the European contribution are robust. I write at a time when Europe's run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will even exist by the end of this century. Perhaps this is an especially appropriate time to stand back in admiration. What the human species can claim to its credit in the arts and sciences is owed in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just a half-dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.

Charles Murray is a senior fellow at AEI.



Source Notes: This essay is adapted from the author's forthcoming book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950.


AEI Print Index No. 15487


Author: Paul [ 15 Nov 2008 12:15 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Charlemagne's role model was the abbasid caliph - Harun Rashid.

In his quest to replicate the Abbasid glory, he even had a harem and inducted his sister into it.

Author: Acharya [ 15 Nov 2008 04:10 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Quote:
We should not be surprised that India is now producing its own spokesman on the order of Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn and Augustine. Colonialism is half-a-century behind us; it is now possible for an Indian scholar to appreciate the spiritual dynamics of Western civilization without feeling unpatriotic…. Having read most of Mangalwadi’s works, I believe he combines Tocqueville’s profound insights into American spirituality with the passion of a Solzhenitsyn to reform his own nation.

Professor Prabhu Guptara
Union Bank of Switzerland

http://www.vishalmangalwadi.com/vkmWebSite/index.php

Author: ramana [ 17 Nov 2008 03:47 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Are there any refs to Persians or any Eastern states in Homer's Illiad?

Author: Philip [ 17 Nov 2008 11:04 am ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Even Blair's govt. had its secret Cold War warriors,batting for the other side!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... r-spy.html

Labour Party activist was 'Cold War spy'
A Labour Party activist linked to two members of Tony Blair's Cabinet was a secret Cold War spy, it has been claimed.

By Ben Leach
Last Updated: 9:37PM GMT 16 Nov 2008

Cynthia Roberts, 72, who stood as a Labour Parliamentary candidate, allegedly spied for the Czech Government when the country was controlled by the Soviet Union.

Documents obrained by the Mail on Sunday purport to show that she worked for the Communists under the codename Agent Hammer.

The files, held by the Czech security service, claim that she wrote secret dossiers for the communist regime on Tory politicians including Margaret Thatcher and ex-Cabinet Minister David Mellor after moving to Prague in 1985.

Mrs Roberts moved to the Czech capital from London, where she used a House of Commons office to run the controversial Labour Action for Peace (LAP) group, which opposed nuclear weapons, and had links to Soviet Moscow.

Labour MPs involved in the group, which still exists today, included two politicians who went on to serve in Mr Blair's Cabinet, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Transport Minister Gavin Strang.

Other prominent Labour MPs linked to LAP include Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner and Jeremy Corbyn.

Current LAP president Jeremy Corbyn MP said: "I don't know Cynthia Roberts at all. Of course I'm surprised. I didn't know her and this was long before I was involved in the organisation. I'm not going to be able to comment on people like Cynthia Roberts. The issue of the Cold War is one that has long passed."

A spokesman for the Czech Embassy in London said: "We are not aware of the details of this particular case. The Czech Embassy is not in a position to comment."

A Czech government source added: "This sort of espionage relates to the previous communist regime. It is a thing of the past and not something our country would engage in now."

Roberts is now living in a communist-era block of flats on the outskirts of Prague. She denies being a spy.

The name plate on her letterbox in the entrance hall reads 'Robertsovi’ and bears the message 'Please do not post advertising fliers in this mailbox’.

Asked if she considered herself a traitor, Roberts said: 'I have nothing to say. I was not a spy.’

Author: Acharya [ 19 Nov 2008 11:32 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

This book was written in 1922


DECLINE OF THE WEST
Decline of the West: Volume II, Perspectives of World by Oswald Spengler
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4654389/Decli ... d-Spengler


Description

Decline of the West Perspectives of World by Oswald Spengler

Author: Philip [ 20 Nov 2008 12:53 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

Deleted.

Author: surinder [ 26 Nov 2008 03:43 pm ]
Post subject: Re: Non-Western Worldview

There was an interesting program on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela on PBS TV last night.

Chavez has a weekly TV show on which journalists come too. A British journalist asked him why Chavez has tried to get the governers elected, but increase his tem limit. Chavez took him to town. Mocked him and cynically mocked the Europe's contempt for those "barbaric Indians, Blacks of S. America". He asked the journalist you have a queen, is she elected?

The journalists just looked crushed. All he said was he was Irish and a republican. Which still did not answer why The Guardian (he was from this newspaper) would ask a Venezualan why his term is longer than that of governers, but why not ask the Queen why she is never elected?