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The Caste System or varna-ashrama has been one of the most
misrepresented, misinformed, misunderstood, misused and the most maligned
aspects of Hinduism. If
one wants to understand the truth, the original purpose behind the caste system,
one must go to
antiquity to study the evolution of the caste system. Caste System, which is said to be the mainstay of the
Hindu social order, has no sanction in the Vedas. The
ancient culture of India was based upon a system of social diversification
according to SPIRITUAL development, not by birth, but by his karma. This system became hereditary and over
the course of many centuries
degenerated as a result of exploitation by some priests, and other socio-economic elements of
society.
However, as Alain Danielou, son of French aristocracy, author of numerous books on
philosophy, religion, history and arts of India, says: "Caste system has
enabled Hindu civilization to survive all invasions and to develop without
revolutions or important changes, throughout more than four millennia, with a
continuity that is unique in history. Caste system may appear rigid to our eyes
because for more than a thousand years Hindu society withdrew itself from
successive domination by Muslims and Europeans. Yet, the greatest poets and the
most venerated saints such as Sura Dasa, Kabir, Tukaram, Thiruvalluvar
and Ram Dasa; came
from the humblest class of society." In the words of Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan, " In spite of the divisions, there is an inner cohesion
among the Hindu society from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin."
Caste
system has been exploited against the Hindus, for the last two centuries by the
British, Christian Missionaries, Secular historians, Communists, Muslims, Pre and
Post-Independence Indian politicians and Journalists for their own ends. One way
to discredit any system is to highlight its excesses, and this only adds to the
sense of inferiority that many Indians feel about their own culture. Caste
system is often portrayed as the ultimate
horror, in the media, yet
social inequities continue to persist
in theoretically Egalitarian Western Societies. The Caste system is
judged offensive by
the Western norms, yet racial groups have
been isolated,
crowded into reserves like the American Indians or Australian Aborigines, where
they can only atrophy and disappear.
This
chapter is not a justification of the abuse of caste system, rather it is a
collection of interesting information. Caste system has
enabled Hindu civilization to survive all invasions and made Indian society
stronger. Caste
system served a purpose, performed certain functions, and met the needs
appropriate to the times in history. India's caste norms may once have had a
rationale; but the norms are outlived today. Caste system is not stagnant
and is undergoing changes under the impact of modernization. Caste system should
undergo reforms in the social arena so that unjustified discrimination and abuse
is
eliminated.
A Comprehensive Look: Pro and Cons of The Caste
System
Sociology
of groups in Ancient India
Discrimination
in Western societies
Mahatma Gandhi and Louis Dumont
No Religious Sanction in Hindu Scriptures
Degeneration of the Caste System
Manu Smrti: Not a Religious Book
Exploitation of Caste by Christian
Missionaries
The Anglo-Indians, Pondycherians and Harijan/Dalit Converts
Abrahamic
Super Caste System
Christian and Poor Countries
Gandhi
and Brahmins
Conclusion
Articles
***
The caste system
was never a tenet of the Hindu faith.
"The universe is the outpouring
of the majesty of God, the auspicious one, radiant love. Every face you see
belongs to Him. He is present in everyone without
exception." - says the
Yajur Veda.
"The Lord (The Divine) is
enshrined in the hearts of all."
- says the Isha
Upanishad 1 -1.
The
Upanishads which are a pure, lofty, heady distillation of
spiritual wisdom which come to us from the very dawn of time tell us:
"Reality (God) is our real
Self, so that each of us is one with the power that created and sustains the
universe."
In Sanskrit, Tat tvam asi,
“You are That.”
"In the depths of meditation,
sages (rishis)
Saw within themselves the Lord of Love,
Who dwells in the heart of every creature."
- says the Shvetashvatara
Upanishad. 1 - 3.
Lord Krsna expounds the
unique philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna.
"I
am the Self seated in the heart of all creatures. I am the beginning, the middle
and the very end of all beings".
The
Bhagavad Gita has influenced great Americans from Henry
David Thoreau to J R Oppenheimer.
Listen to The
Bhagavad Gita podcast
- By Michael Scherer
- americanphonic.com.
Watch
Scientific
verification of Vedic knowledge
***
In
Bhagawad Gita, sloka 20, Chapter 10, Lord
Krishna says,
"I
am the Self seated in the heart of all creatures. I am the beginning, the middle
and the very end of all beings".
All beings have, therefore to be treated alike.
Lord
Krishna as saying, in response to the question— "How is Varna
(social order) determined?"
"Birth
is not the cause, my friend; it is virtues which are the cause of
auspiciousness. Even a chandala (lower caste) observing the vow is considered a
Brahman by the
gods."
“The
four fold division of castes’ “was
created by me according to the apportionment of qualities and duties.” “Not
birth, not sacrament, not learning, make one dvija (twice-born), but righteous
conduct alone causes it.” “Be he a Sudra or a member of any other class,
says the Lord in the same epic, “he that serves as a raft on a raftless
current , or helps to ford the unfordable, deserves respect in everyway.”
 
A
Comprehensive Look: Pro and Cons of The Caste
System
Hinduism believes in
"Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam" (the world is one family -
an ancient Vedic term).
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) Was among India's most fervent
nationalists, fighting for Indian independence from British rule. Gandhi
was a staunch and devout Hindu and he
proclaimed it proudly:
"I
am a Hindu because it is Hinduism which makes the world worth living."
(source:
Young India
1-12-26).
He said
that the caste system or varnashrama is
"inherent in human nature, and Hinduism has simply made a science of
it."
He defended the "much-maligned Brahman" and entertains " not a shadow
of doubt" that "if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism will
perish".
"Hinduism
insists on the brotherhood of not only all mankind but of all that lives."
(source: Hindu
Dharma - M. K. Gandhi p. 7-374 and Harijan
28-3-1936).
Swami
Vivekananda (1863-1902)
was the foremost disciple of Ramakrishna and a world spokesperson for Vedanta.
India's first spiritual and cultural ambassador to the West, came to represent
the religions of India at the World Parliament of Religions, held at Chicago in
connection with the World's Fair (Columbian Exposition) of 1893. His Chicago
speech is uniquely Vedantic. Jawaharlal
Nehru refers to
this universal dimension of Vivekananda in his Discovery of India. “Rooted in
the past, and full of pride in India’s heritage, Vivekananda was yet modern in
his approach to life’s problems, and was a kind of bridge between the past of
India and her present.”
He said:
"Caste
is a plan we want to follow- - .There is no country in the world without caste.
The plan in India is to make everybody a Brahmin, the Brahmin being the ideal of
humanity. Indian caste is better than the caste that prevails which prevails in
Europe or America."
(source:
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
Kolkata,1985, Vol V, pp 215).
Sir
Rustom Pestonji Masani (1876 - ) a Parsi, distinguished
himself when he was elected as the first Indian national to become Municipal
Commissioner of Mumbai. Author of Zoroastrianism:
the religion of the good life he
points out:
“The
seers of the early Vedic period know nothing of caste. Delve as much as one may
into the literature of the period, one discovers only classes not castes. …the
conception of social segregation and untouchability was repugnant to the genius
of the people who sought unity in variety and dissolved variety in unity. Each
class was regarded as an integral part of the fabric of society. Each submitted
cheerfully to the special functions and duties assigned to it. Even the Sudra
appears to have been content with his mission in life; and there were no
agitators abroad to sow in the minds of the proletariat the seeds of discontent.
There appeared to have been a tacit understanding that different classes of
individuals stood at different stages of evolution and that, therefore, the
duties, modes of life, and rules of conduct applicable and helpful to each must
necessarily differ. The differentiation was, however, regarded only as a means
to an end, not an end in itself. It assigned to each individual his due position
in the social order; it regulated his relation with other members of the
community, and provided means for his orderly development, eliminating
possibilities of a clash of interests between master and servant, landlord and
tenant, capital and labor, state and subject.”
"According
to Hindu philosophy divine energy manifests
itself in different degrees according to the preponderance in each person of one
or other of the three gunas, or fundamental qualities, which make up the
prakriti or nature, of an individual. These gunas are sattva, rajas and tamas.
It follows, therefore, that for his own salvation as well as for social
efficiency an individual should be allowed to develop along the lines best
suited to his natural endowments and that he on his part should perform the
duties assigned to him in accordance with the predominant quality of the strand
in his nature. The well-known episode of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita is a
typical illustration of this philosophy of life. Dismayed, he refuses to fight;
but Lord Krishna, the preacher, prevails upon him to discharge the duty proper to his Kshatriya
caste."
"There is
nothing, however, in the whole body of Sanskrit literature to show that the
caste system was deliberately devised as a means to attain the coveted end of
realizing the divine within man. A remarkable and almost unique feature of Hindu
culture is the process of minute analysis and synthesis to which it subjects
from time to time the phenomena which leave their impress upon the senses and
the mind and the unchangeable soul. Such an exposition has helped succeeding
generations to grasp the significance of the philosophic doctrines underlying
the social and religious systems of a race excelling in spiritual speculations
and metaphysical subtleties."
"According
to the Rig Veda hymn, the different classes
sprang from the four limbs of the Creator. It was meant to show that the four
classes stood in relation to the social organization in the same relation as the
different organs of the Primordial Man to his body. Together they had to
function to give vitality to the body politic. There was nothing in that account
to warrant the assumption, that the order in which the four groups were
mentioned, or that the particular limbs specified as their origin, marked their
social status."
"A
person’s worth is determined by his knowledge and capacity and the inherent
qualities which mark his conduct in life. “The four fold division of castes’
says the Creator in the Bhagavad Gita, “was
created by me according to the apportionment of qualities and duties.” “Not
birth, not sacrament, not learning, make one dvija (twice-born), but righteous
conduct alone causes it.” “Be he a Sudra or a member of any other class,
says the Lord in the same epic, “he that serves as a raft on a raftless
current , or helps to ford the unfordable, deserves respect in everyway.”
(source: Legacy of India
- edited by G T Garratt - Oxford At the Clarendon Press p. 132
- 140).
Sardar
Kavalam Madhava Panikkar (1896-1963)
Indian scholar, journalist, historian from Kerala, administrator, diplomat,
Minister in Patiala Bikaner and Ambassador to China, Egypt and France. Author of
several books, including Asia
and Western Dominance,
India Through
the ages and India
and the Indian Ocean.
He says:
“The
fact is that the four-fold caste is merely a theoretical division of society to
which tribes, clans and family groups are affiliated. It is a sociological
fiction. The earliest available literature gives instances of Brahmins carrying
on the professions of medicine, arms and administration."
"In the Jatakas
Brahmins are mentioned as traders, hunters and trappers. R P Masani quotes the
case of a Kshatriya prince, Kusa, mentioned in one of the Jataka tales, who
became an apprentice in turn to a potter, a basket maker, a florist and a cook.
Conversely, from even the Vedic days there have been innumerable instances of
men born in the lowest rank of caste-society taking to professions which in
theory were the monopoly of the other castes. Even the Mauryas royal family came
from among the Sudras.”
(source: Hindu
Society at cross roads - By K M Panikkar p. 1 - 17).
P. D.
Ouspensky ( ? ) a thoughtful Western writer is of the opinion that
"All the most brilliant period of history, without exception, were periods
in which the social order approached the caste system." He thinks that the
caste system (varna vyavastha) "is a natural division" of society.
"Whether people wish it or not, whether they recognize it or not, they are
divided into four castes. There are Brahmans, there are Kshatriyas, there are
Vaishyas, and there are Shudras. No human legislation, no philosophical
intricacies, no pseudo-sciences and no form of terror can abolish this fact. And
the normal functioning and development of human societies are possible only if
this fact is recognized and acted on."
(source: A
New Model of the Universe - By P. D. Ouspensky p. 447).
Sir George
Birchwood ( ? ) has said:
"So long as
the Hindus hold on to the caste system, India will be India; but from the day
they break from it, there will be no more India. That glorious peninsula will be
degraded to the position of a bitter "East End" of the Anglo-Saxon
Empire."
(source: The
Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru.
Oxford University Press. 1995. p. 247).
Dr.
Subramanium Swamy (1939
- ) He is also a reputed economist and worked as Assistant Economic
Affairs Officer, United Nations Secretariat, New York in 1963. He worked with
two Nobel laureates, Simon Kuznets and Paul A. Samuelson for his doctorate in
economics at the Harvard
University, awarded in 1965. He
is the President of the Janata Party and author of the book, Hinduism
under Siege. In an interview with a Canadian TV station he
has remarked:
"Caste
system was originally not designed as mutually antagonistic groupings. It was
not even connected to birth. It is one of retrogression that caste
has been connected to birth. The sages in their discussions on why caste system
should be created had said that there are four sources
of power in society – knowledge, wealth, weapons and land and
thus all these should not be in any one hands. In fact one should be
in the hands of one person. Therefore if you are a pursuer of knowledge, a
teacher of knowledge you should have no wealth, weapons or land. Society should
give you donations so that you could live – that is how our preachers,
sannysis, religious preceptors etc. they lived in society and taught people but
donations came from the public.
If you were the owner of weapons then you were the King but you could not make
policy - for policy you had to go to people of knowledge – same thing with
wealth and land."
(source:
Dr.
Subramanian Swamy interview on Hinduism with CTS TV Canada - By Richard
Landou).
Rev.
William
H Robinson (1955 - ) in his book By
Temple Shrine and Lotus Pool p. 66 writes:
“The
fortress of caste cannot be taken by external assault. Its wall will only
crumble when the garrison within ceases to repair them. The only real discipline
that
India
has maintained is the discipline of caste. If you really could create genuine
democracy in
India
it would destroy caste. If it destroyed caste it would
destroy Hinduism and if it destroyed Hinduism it would destroy
India
, at least the
India
that has existed for so many thousands of years….Far far better
that they should remain good Hindus than become rampant atheists!
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty.
Penguin Books. 1991 p. 69 -
239). For more refer to the book online - digilib.
bu.edu.
Swami
Chidanand Saraswatiji ( ? ) of the India
Heritage Research Foundation defines:
"The Caste system as
you see it today is not was originally simply a
division of labor based on personal, talents tendencies and abilities. It
was never supposed to divide people. Rather, it was supposed to unite people so
that everyone was simultaneously working to the best of his/her ability for the
greater service of all. In the scriptures, when the system of
dividing society into four groups was explained, the word used is “Varna.”
Varna means “class” not “caste.” Caste is actually “Jati” and it is
an incorrect translation of the word “varna.” When the Portuguese
colonized parts of India, they mistakenly translated “varna
vyavasthaa” as “caste system” and the mistake has stayed since then.
The
varna system was based on a person’s characteristics, temperament and their
innate “nature.” The Vedas describe one’s nature as being a mixture of the
three gunas – tamas, rajas and sattva. Depending on the relative proportions
of each of these gunas, one would be classified as a Brahmin, Kshetriya, Vaishya
or Shudra. For example, Brahmins who perform much of the intellectual, creative
and spiritual work within a community have a high proportion of sattva and low
proportions of tamas and rajas. A kshetriya who is inclined toward political,
administrative and military work has a high proportion of rajas, a medium
proportion of sattva and a low proportion of tamas. A Vaishya who performs the
tasks of businessman, employer and skilled laborer also has a high proportion of
rajas but has relatively equal proportions of sattva and tamas, both of which
are lower than rajas. Last, a shudra who performs the unskilled labor in society
has a high proportion of tamas, a low proportion of sattva and a medium
proportion of rajas.
These
gunas are not inherited. They are based on one’s inherent nature and one’s
karma. Therefore one’s “varna” was also not supposed to be based on
heredity, and in the past it was not. It is only in relatively modern times that
the strict, rigid, heredity-based “caste” system has come into existence. There
are many examples in the scriptures and in history of people transcending the
“class” or “varna” into which they were born. Everyone was free to
choose an occupation according to his/her guna and karma.
Further,
according to the scriptures, there is no
hierarchy
at all inherent in the varna system. All parts are of equal importance and equal
worth. A good example is to imagine a human body. The brain which thinks, plans
and guides represents the Brahmin caste. The hands and arms which fight, protect
and work represent the kshetriya caste. The stomach which serves as the source
of energy and “transactions” represents the vaishya caste, and the legs/feet
which do the necessary running around in the service of the rest of the body
represent the shudra caste. No one can say the brain is better than the legs or
that hands are superior to feet. Each is equally important for the overall
functioning of the body system. They just serve different roles. " Look
at Bhagwan
Ram and Bhagwan Krishna.
Both show the example of taking their food from even people of the lowest caste
and going to the homes of the lower caste people. It is devotion, purity and
commitment which make us great or small, not our caste.
(source: The
Caste system - By Swami
Chidanand Saraswatiji - India
Heritage Research Foundation).
M V
Nadkarni ( ?) writes:
"It
is necessary to demolish the myth that caste system is an intrinsic part of
Hinduism. This myth is believed by orthodox elements within Hinduism and also
is propagated by elements outside Hinduism with the mischievous intent of
proselytising. Even Vedic and classical Hinduism – not
only does not support the caste system, but has taken lots of pains to oppose it
both in principle and practice, making it obvious that caste system is not an
intrinsic part of Hindu canon, philosophy and even practice.
It is only in
the dharmashastras (dharma sutras and smritis) that we find support to the caste
system, and not in other canon. However, dharmashastras
never had the same status as other canon known as shruti (Vedas and Upanishads)
and it is laid down that whenever there is a conflict between the shruti and
smriti literature, it is the former that prevails. It is Manusmriti, which is
particularly supportive of caste system but where it conflicts with Vedas and
Upanishads, the latter would prevail. Though Bhagvadgita (Gita) is not regarded
as a part of shruti, Gita is highly regarded as sacred and is very much a part
of classical Hinduism. As we shall just see even the Gita is against caste
system based on birth, and not supportive to it. Thus, to the extent that
dharmashastras conflict with shruti and the Gita, the latter prevails.
Apasthambha dharmasutra may have supported untouchability, but it seems to be
read more by those who like to attack Hinduism with it than by its followers! It
is hardly regarded as canon, even if any Hindu has heard of it. Vedanta
philosophy declares that there is divinity in every lecture. Rg Veda emphasises
equality of all human beings. It goes to the extent of saying, which sounds
quite modern: ‘No one is superior, none inferior. All are brothers marching
forward to prosperity’
"
(source: Is
Caste System Intrinsic to Hinduism?
Demolishing a Myth - By M V Nadkarni - Economic
and Political Weekly - November 8' 2003).
John
Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892- 1964) the
world-renowned geneticist. In 1922, he joined Cambridge University to take up
research in biochemistry. Among his significant contributions is an estimate of
the rate of mutation of a human gene. Some of his famous books are The
Causes of Evolution, New Paths in
Genetics and Biochemistry of Genetics.
He
immigrated to India and soon found himself attracted to Hindu culture.
Himself a rationalist, Haldane told his colleagues, “I do not think that a
Rationalist and Humanist need necessarily break with Hinduism.” He
watched with disdain the way the socialist government machinery rooted in
sycophancy and corruption, was developing a stranglehold on the budding Indian
science. The stranglehold on the progress of India, as Haldane
observed was of a socialist government's making and not that of the Dharma. He
wrote:
“The old caste system
had this merit, that the richest merchant or Zamindar could not buy the status
of Brahmin for his son, even if the son was learned and pious. Whatever the
defects of that system – and I think that they were and are grievous – it
was not subservient to wealth. The new caste system, which the
university administrative authorities, with the connivance of many government
officials, are trying with some success to impose upon India, has no such
excuse…. In India today the unworthy successors of Durvasa and Vishvamitra
actually invite governors, vice-chancellors, and the like, to address them. This
may be a relic of British Rule. If so, it is a regrettable one.”(source:
A passage to India - By JBS
Haldane
1958 and
Science and Indian Culture - By JBS Haldane
1991
p.19 & p.24. For more on J B S Haldane,
refer to chapter on Quotes).
(Note:
Casteism pales in comparison with 50 million Africans killed in slave
boats, 200+ years of slavery with church justification of Africans having no
soul, lynchings of young African Americans, decimation of Native Americans with
things like disease infected blankets, colonization of Africa, Americas and Asia
and sapping their economy totally causing famines and living skeletons, Nazi
holocaust of 10 million, burning of witches. Refer to Hinduism
Under Threat - protectreligions.org).
Professor
R. Vaidyanathan is Professor of Finance at the Indian
Institute of Management,
Bangalore has observed:
"The
metropolitan elite and rootless experts have concluded that caste is bad. They
have made it so that every Indian is expected to feel guilty at the mention of
caste. Internationally, caste is a convenient stick to flay anything Indian, its
religions, customs, culture.
But the caste system is undeniably a valuable social
capital, which provides a cushion for individuals and families to
deal with society and the state. The Western
model of atomising every individual to a single
element in a right-based system and forcing the individual to have a direct link
with the state has destroyed families and erased communities. Every person
stands alone, stark naked,
with only rights as his imaginary clothes to deal directly with the state.
While attacking the caste system, Indian intellectuals
have borrowed the Western right-based concept of reservation, or affirmative
action. In doing so, they have overlooked an extraordinary contribution of the
caste system, in consolidating business and entrepreneurship in
India
, particularly in the last fifty years."
M.
N.Srinivas, the
late great sociologist, said in Collected Essays
brought out by the Oxford University Press in 2005,
“An
important feature of social mobility in modern
India
is the manner in which the successful members of the backward castes work
consistently for improving the economic and social condition of their caste
fellows. This is due to the sense of identification with one’s own caste, and
also a realisation that caste mobility is essential for individual or familial
mobility.”
“The caste system is
far from a rigid system in which the position of each component caste is fixed
for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially so in the middle
regions of the hierarchy. A low caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise
to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism,
and by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon.” (Srinivas 1952: 127)
Dr.
Koenraad Elst
(1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven, Belgium,
on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family.
He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the
Catholic University of Leuven. He is the author of several books including The
Saffron Swastika, Decolonising
The Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism and Negationism
in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam
He
has written why Christian missionaries attacked the caste system.
'The caste system is
often portrayed as the ultimate horror. Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable
to us moderns, but this does not preclude that the system has also had its
merits.
Caste is perceived as an "exclusion-from," but first of all it is a
form of "belonging-to," a natural structure of solidarity. For this
reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very
difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities. Sometimes
castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope Gregory XV (1621-23)
decreed that the missionaries could tolerate caste distinction among Christian
converts; but by and large, caste remained an effective
hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism through conversion. That
is why the missionaries started attacking the institution of caste and in
particular the brahmin caste. This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged
anti-brahminism, the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism.
Every caste had a large measure of autonomy, with its own judiciary, duties and
privileges, and often its own temples. Inter-caste affairs were settled at the
village council by consensus; even the lowest caste had veto power. This
autonomy of intermediate levels of society is the antithesis of the totalitarian
society in which the individual stands helpless before the all-powerful state.
This decentralized structure of civil society and of the Hindu religious
commonwealth has been crucial to the survival of Hinduism under Muslim rule.
Whereas Buddhism was swept away as soon as
its monasteries were destroyed, Hinduism retreated into its caste structure and
weathered the storm.
Caste also provided a
framework for integrating immigrant communities: Jews, Zoroastrians and Syrian
Christians. They were not only tolerated, but assisted in efforts to preserve
their distinctive traditions.
Nineteenth-century Westerners
projected the colonial situation and the newest race theories on the caste
system: the upper castes were white invaders lording it over the black natives.
This outdated view is still repeated ad-nauseam by anti-Hindu authors: now that
"idolatry" has lost its force as a term of abuse, "racism"
is a welcome innovation to demonize Hinduism. In reality,
India
is the region where all skin color types met and mingled, and you will find
many brahmins as black as Nelson Mandela. Ancient "Aryan" heroes like
Rama,
Krishna
, Draupadi, Ravana (a brahmin) and a number of Vedic seers were explicitly
described as being dark-skinned.
Finally, caste society has been the most stable society
in history. Indian communists used to sneer
that "
India
has never even had a revolution." Actually, that
is no mean achievement.
(source: Why
the Christian missionaries attack the institution of caste and in particular the
brahmin caste? - By Koenraad Elst).
Gurcharan
Das, the strategic consultant, writer and former vice-president
and managing director of Proctor & Gamble Worldwide, says in his book, India
Unbound,
“In
the nineteenth century, British
colonialists used to blame our caste system for everything wrong
in India. Now I have a different perspective. Instead of morally judging caste,
I seek to understand its impact on competitiveness. I have come to believe that
being endowed with commercial castes is a source of
advantage in the global economy.”
(source:
Caste
as social capital: Why
have the Gounders, Nadars, the Marwaris and Katchis done so well - By R
Vaidyanathan - newsinsight.net).
Gerald
Heard (?) American thinker and writer who has studied the Indian
social system, has called it "organic democracy", and
suggests in his work, Man the Master, that it is the type of democracy the world
as a whole needs today. Heard defines "organic democracy" as "the
rule of the people who have organized themselves in a living and not a
mechanical relationship; where instead of all men being
said to be equal, which is a lie, all men are known to be of equal
value, could we but find the position in which their potential contribution
could be released and their essential growth so pursued." He calls the four
varnas by the names "seers" (Brahmins), "politicians (Kshatriyas),
"technicians" (vaishyas) and "coherers" (Shudras).
"These four classes are distinguished by unmistakable psychological
characteristics which suit them to their particular purpose, function and
place." It is this organization that made
Indian society stable, efficient and strong. It produced in India great
scholars, warriors, administrators, and producers of wealth.
(source: Man,
the Master - By Gerald Heard p. 129).
Rajeev
Srinivasan has wisely noted that:
"It
has become a conditioned, Pavlovian reflex
for Indians to condemn the entire idea of caste unthinkingly. It
has become a cliché to rail against caste, but jati and varnam are just a
codification of the fact that all humans are not born equal in their endowments:
Some are tall, some are fat, some are musically talented, and so on. We cannot
escape the ruthless Bell Curve.
The very term 'caste' is not proper, because it
is a European Christian distortion of the ideas of jati and varnam, which the
colonialists condemned out of ignorance and prejudice." What
is deplorable is not caste per se, but casteism, or discrimination based on
caste. This is similar to the rightly abhorred discrimination based on other
inescapable biological facts: Race, gender, or age. Casteism
must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, but that does not mean caste
has to be thrown out, baby with bath-water.
Allegedly egalitarian Communist
states, too, have their elites: Rulers' offspring get the plum jobs.
Not too many children of Polit Bureau members toil in the gulags of
China
, or have their organs harvested on demand. In Muslim
societies, too, there are obvious hierarchies: Women are defined to
be inferior. Among men, Arabs are top of the heap; among Arabs, Prophet
Mohammed's tribe is superior. In that tribe, Mohammed's family members are more
privileged. The rigidity of caste as we know it is yet another 'contribution' -
as are very many of modern
India
's ills, such as dowry - of Christian European
imperialists. They capriciously decided that the Manusmrti was the
rulebook of Indian society, and used their census to arbitrarily assign jatis to
varnams. The objective of the imperialists was simple: To divide and rule.
Today, their lineal descendants, the Communists, have latched on to the same
idea as a way of subverting
India
.
The
truth of the matter is that jati is an entirely satisfactory construct for most
members of a particular jati, so long as there is no overt discrimination
against them. It is not as though people are just dying to get into a 'higher'
jati. They are content with their existing in-group, even if they belong to a
relatively 'low' jati. It is belonging that matters. Finally,
caste makes Indian society robust.
It is a
system theory axiom that a centralised, monolithic system is vulnerable to a
single-point failure. But a distributed system, which has many smaller,
independent, nodes, is far more difficult to destroy. Castes have functioned as
these distributed nodes, and thus no attacker could overthrow the system. Caste,
in a fundamental way, has been a reason for the longevity of Indian civilisation.
Surely, the distortions in this perfectly sensible construct need to be removed,
but it is not per se inappropriate.
(source:
Nothing
wrong with caste: Birth and berth - By Rajeev Srinivasan
- dailypioneer.com - Agenda Special section).
***
The caste system has
been the most misunderstood, the most vilified subject of Hindu society at the
hands of Western scholars and even today by "secular" Indians. The Hindu caste system has often been described as
" the most cruel
apartheid, imposed by the barbaric white Aryan invaders on the gentle
dark-skinned natives."
(Refer to Aryan Invasion Theory
Chapter).
The earliest reference to the four
classes is in the Purusa Sukta of the Rig Veda,
where they are described as having sprung from the body of the creative spirit,
from his head, arms, thighs, and feet. This indicates that just as in a human
body, the different organs perform different functions so also in human society
different people must perform different functions, according to their
predominant traits or temperament.
(source: Hinduism:
The Eternal Religion - By M. D. Chaturvedi p.
200-201).
'This poetical
image is intended to convey the organic character of society."
Man is
not only only himself, but is in solidarity with all of his kind. Man is not an
abstract individual. He belongs to a certain social group by virtue of his
character, behavior, and function in the community. The four-fold classification
is conceived in the interests of world progress.
(source: Eastern
Religions and Western Thought - By S.
Radhakrishnan p. 355-357).
Sir
Sidney Low
(1857-1932) in his book, A Vision of India: with a
frontispiece says:
“There is no doubt that it
(caste) is the main cause of the fundamental stability
and contentment by which Indian society has been braced
for centuries against the shocks of politics and the cataclysms of Nature.
It provides every man with his place, his career, his occupations, his circle of
friends. It makes him, at the outset, a member of a corporate body; it protects
him through life from the canker of social jealousy and unfulfilled aspirations;
it ensures him companionship and a sense of community with others in like case
with himself. The caste organization is to the Hindu his club, his trade union,
his benefit society, his philanthropic society. There are no work houses in
India, and none are as yet needed. The obligation to provide for kinsfolk and
friends in distress is universally acknowledged; nor can it be questioned that
this is due to the recognition of the strength of family ties and of the bonds
created by associations and common pursuits which is fostered by the caste
principle. An India without caste, as things stand at present, it is not quite
easy to imagine.”
(source:
Hindu
Superiority
- Har Bilas Sarda p.
32-33).
William
Robinson,
author of By
Temple
Shrine
and Lotus Pool, wrote on p. 66 of his book:
"The fortress of caste
cannot be taken by external assault. Its wall will only crumble when the
garrison within ceases to repair them. The only real discipline that
India
has maintained is the discipline of caste. If you really could create genuine
democracy in
India
it would destroy caste. If it destroyed caste it would
destroy Hinduism and if it destroyed Hinduism it would destroy
India
, at least the
India
that has existed for so many thousand of years… Far, far better that they
remain good Hindus than become rampant atheists!"
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By
Suhash Chakravarty p. 233).
Nirad C.
Chaudhari, (1897-1999) prominent Indian author and scholar, who
rejected Western culture in an independent India, has defended the caste
system on the grounds that the successive waves of migrant tribes or invaders
probably made a class society inevitable in India, and that caste still has a
useful function:
"The Caste system has only
organized the disparities created by historical forces and movements. By doing
so, it has done great good by reducing the competition of the diversities, by
freezing them within certain limits, and by making each not only legitimate but
even moral.....It canalized competitions and helped the coexistence of elements
which otherwise would have been at war. It was a social
system specially suited to a country like India, which
history has made into a warehouse of civilizations, and a couloir and cul-de-sac
of diverse people and cultures." He
emphasized that if he considered the caste system in any danger - which he does
not - he would add, "Please do not pulverize a society which has no other
force of cohesion, into amorphous dust."
(source: The
Continent of Circe - By Nirad C. Chaudhari New York: Oxford
University Press, 1965 p. 60).
Alain Danielou
(1907-1994) author of several books,
including History of India and Virtue,
Success, Pleasure, & Liberation : The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of
Ancient India. writes:
"It
is easy to see that despite all the national and linguistic barriers, even
modern Western society is fundamentally, like all societies, a caste system. The
problem of Western society derive from the fact that while proclaiming the
equality of men, it is entirely graded on a hierarchical system as far as the
professions are concerned. Under the pretext of equality, Western lawmakers do
not let the various groups cooperate among themselves while keeping their
different habits, ethics, and social life. Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Celts,
Basques, Albigemsoams, Pygmies, Blacks or Inuits are accorded a relative
equality only on condition that they conform to our customs, losing most of
their social, national, and religious characteristics and in fact abandoning
their own personality."
Hindu Society is 'caste-ridden' while modern democratic society reveals the
presence of 'classes', sociologist explain. They acclaim 'class' and condemn
'caste'. Caste, according to them, has its roots in Hindu (Brahmannical)
religion, while 'class' has its roots in economic disparities.
(source:
Virtue,
Success, Pleasure, & Liberation : The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of
Ancient India - by Alain Danielou
p. 33 - 35).
Caste
system provided for positive Social Networking and support
Mark Tully
( ? ) was the BBC correspondent in New Delhi and author of several books
including No
Full Stops in India
and The
Heart of India.
He points
out:
"The
alienation of many young people in the West and the loneliness of the old show
the suffering that egalitarianism inflicts on those who do not win, the
superficiality of an egalitarianism which in effect means equal opportunities
for all to win and then ignores the inevitable losers. For
all that, the elite of India have become so spellbound by egalitarianism that
they are unable to see any good in the only institution which does provide a
sense of identity and dignity to those who are robbed from birth of the
opportunity to compete on an equal footing – CASTE. Caste
is obnoxious to the egalitarian West, so it is obnoxious to the Indian elite
too."
"The very fact that the institution of caste has
survived about 3,000 years is a clear proof of the services which it must have
rendered to the Hindu society in different periods of history. It
is the caste system that has been largely responsible for the preservation of
Hindu religion and culture. The caste
brotherhoods, on account of their policy of exclusiveness, did not mix with the
foreigners. So the Greeks, Huns or Muslims could not conquer Hindu culture. On
the contrary, most of these foreigners were themselves absorbed into the Hindu
fold."
(source:
No
Full Stops in India
- By Mark Tully).
"The
caste system is based on the sound economic principle of division of labor which
ensures efficiency of production. A person from
his birth knew what profession he was to follow later on. So from the start, he
devoted all his energy to the one profession of his forefathers. It was because
of this reason that in every period of Indian history, there was no dearth of
highly-skilled workers and scholars. Megasthenes, Hieun Tsang, Alberuni, Ibn
Batuta, Babar and even the early Britishers were impressed by the talents and
artistic skill of the Indians in every art and craft."
(source: Ancient
India - By V. D. Mahajan p. 166).
Note:
Mark Tully has spoken in defense of the caste system
and denounced the spread of consumerism in the subcontinent. The BBC
pushed him out because of his excessive identification with Indian
culture.
(source: India
Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 - By
Kate Teltscher introduction page).
Michael Pym
wrote : "Caste
is the secret of that amazing stability which is characteristic of the Indian
social structure. It is the strength of Hinduism. Naturally, it can
be abused. The moment a Brahmin treats a sweeper cruelly because he is a
sweeper, he departs from his Brahminhood. He becomes a usurper and a social
danger. And in due course, he will have to pay for this mistake. Because men are
imperfect, and because power is a deadly intoxicant, such abuses may and do
occur, but they are not inherent in the institution – they are contrary to its
principles, though they may be inherent in the make up of the individual.
Caste in
itself is also a protection for the individual, because it permits group action.
The reason why a Hindu dreads being outcaste is analogous to the reason why, in
England say, a worker would dread being thrown out of his trade union.
(source:
The Power of India
- By Michael Pym
p. 152- 153).
While Marxists and other anti-Hindu intellectuals calling
themselves Secularists never miss an opportunity to denounce it, the fact of the
matter is that the Indian civilization survived nearly
a thousand year onslaught of Islam. Several
other ancient civilizations – like those of Iran (Zorastrian), the Byzantine
Empire (Christian) and Central Asia (Buddhist) broke down under the same force
over a much shortest period. This shows that they must have lacked a social
order capable of protecting their societies.
The so called ‘egalitarian’
Buddhist society lacked the social organization which enabled the Hindu society
to survive. It was the same story in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey which were part of
the Christian Byzamtine Empire. They lacked the strength and resilience of the
Hindu society and succumbed to the Islamic invasion.
(source:
A
Hindu View of the World - By N. S. Rajaram p. 103 -
104).
Dr.
Koenraad Elst
(1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven, Belgium,
on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family.
He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the
Catholic University of Leuven. He is the author of several books including The
Saffron Swastika, Decolonising
The Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism and Negationism
in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam
"The caste system is
often portrayed as the ultimate horror. Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable
to us moderns, but this does not preclude that the system has also had its
merits.
Caste is perceived as an "exclusion-from,"
but first of all it is a form of "belonging-to," a natural structure
of solidarity. For this reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very
difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities.
Sometimes castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope
Gregory XV (1621-23) decreed that the missionaries
could tolerate caste distinction among Christian converts; but by and large,
caste remained an effective hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism through
conversion. That is why the missionaries
started attacking the institution of caste and in particular the Brahmin caste.
This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged anti-brahminism, the Indian
equivalent of anti-Semitism."
(source: Caste
- By Prof Koenraad Elst - hinduismtoday.com).
T M P
Mahadevan wrote about the castes:
"The origin of caste is lost in obscurity. It purpose however,
seems to have been the same as that of Plato’s
division of the State into three classes, castes, or professions,
viz. philosophers-rulers, warriors and masses. (see Plato’s
Republic) The underlying principle is division of labor. Originally
the castes were professional and subsequently became hereditary. The Brahmins
were custodians of the spiritual culture of the race. He was friend,
philosopher, guide to humanity. The Kshatriya is the guardian of society, its
protector and preserver. The Vaisya is the expert in economics. His was the duty
of arranging for the production and distribution of wealth. The Sudra was the
worker or manual laborer. By his manual labor he places the entire community
under a debt of gratitude. The
system was evolved to keep the social fabric in a harmonious condition; but in
later years it became a divisive force. The original
designers built the edifice of caste on the secure foundations of obligations;
the lesser men who came after them produced a caricature on the shifting sands
of rights…
The four classes were not meant to be warring communities but
complementary classes. Mahatma Gandhi said: “It
is a law of spiritual economics” “It has nothing to do with superiority or
inferiority”. And as the system of caste is purely a social
adjustment, there is nothing that can stand in the way of its revision and
readjustment except a sense of pride and obstinacy and a demand to preserve the
status quo on the part of some of its members."
(source:
Outlines
of Hinduism
- By T M P Mahadevan ISBN 0836457862 p. 69-74).
When Julius Caesar occupied the
Celtic West of Europe, he found that the Druid
class was the backbone of this society (the
parallel with the Brahmins
in the perception of the missionaries is quite exact): therefore, he persecuted
the Druids.
(source:
Ayodhya
and After: Issues Before Hindu Society -
By Koenraad Elst p. 100).
Huston Smith
(1919 - ) born in China to Methodist missionaries, a philosopher, most
eloquent writer, world-famous religion scholar who practices
Hatha Yoga. He has written various books, The
World's Religions. He says:
Men
and women that are lining the bathing ghats are all Hindus, but how different
they are. But India looked past their bodies into their minds where she found
the prolific ness of the infinite exploding like a Roman cantle.
No other
civilization saw, appreciated, and classified so precisely the full spectrum of
human personality types…an achievement that has earned for India – the title
of the world’s introspective psychologist.
"India identified four such
types and once again honored all of them. Likening society to an organism,
she pictured Brahmins - its head, Brahmins are intellectuals, their chief
delight in art, ideas, and things of spirit generally.
Next come the arms and shoulder of society – its
administrative - persons who are
talent for getting things done
Next personality
type – the artisan or craftsmen – the engineer and the farmer – India
likens these people to society’s stomach – for they produce and feed us the
things on which life depends.
Finally, manual labor is important too. They are the legs and
feet without which society could not run.”
(source: The
Mystic's Journey - India
and the Infinite: The Soul of a People – By Huston Smith).
The
Ploy of Western Propaganda
Linking
Caste to Hindu Scriptures and de-linking Racism from the Bible
***
Dr.
Koenraad Elst has written:
"Increasingly,
Hinduism is identified by the international public with the caste system and
nothing but the caste system. The caste system, in
turn, is painted in the ugliest colors: as a racist Apartheid system designed to
oppress the native population. These notions are eagerly welcomed and amplified
by outside forces such as Christian missionary centers, followed by their
Islamic counterparts. Till recently, American foreign policy agencies
made no secret of their designs on India's unity. When she was US ambassador to
the UN, Mrs. Jean Kirkpatrick once said that "the break-up of India is one
of the goals of the American foreign policy." Patrick Moynihan, who had
held the same job, said more recently, "After the break-up of the Soviet
Union, the artificial state India is also bound to break up."
(source:
Indigenous
Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar - By Koenraad Elst Voice of India
ASIN 8185990042 p. 59-60).
For
more refer to chapter on Islamic
Onslaught and European
Imperialism
Ronald
B Inden has pointed out:
"Caste, the Western scholars held, is the type of
society characteristic of India, the institution that distinguishes it from the
other civilization dominated by caste from the West. The
representation of India as a civilization dominated by caste are legion. Caste,
considered the essence of Indian civilization, has
often been treated as though it were the unchanging agent of the civilization,
from the rise of the Indus Valley culture and the arrival of the Aryans down to
the present day of regionalism and caste in electoral politics. It is, thus,
deeply embedded in Indological discourse. Many of the more recent accounts of
caste have dropped the racialist discourse, but they have not broken with the
notion that caste is a unique type of society, one that displaces the
economically oriented politics of the West. Accounts of
caste can and have been used as a foil to build up the West’s image of itself."
(source:
Imagining
India - By Ronald B Inden p.
82-83).
"It would lead to a greater respect for Indias
culture, and indeed a better
understanding of it, if it were recognized that the caste system has never been totally
static, that it is adapting itself to todays changing circumstances and that it has
positive as well as negative aspects. The caste system provides security and a community for millions
of Indians. It gives them an identity that neither Western Science nor Western thought has
yet provided, because caste is not just a matter of being a Brahmin or a Harijan:
it is
also a kinship system. The system provides a wider support group than a family: a group
which has a social life in which all its members participate."
In the September 1989 issue of Seminar magazine, Madhu
Kishwar,
one of India leading feminists, wrote,
"The caste system provides for relatively
greater stability and dignity to the individuals than they would have as atomized
individuals. This is part explains why the Indian poor retain a strong sense of
self-respect. It is that self-respect which the thought-less insistence on egalitarianism
destroys."
(source: No
Full Stops in India - By Mark Tully p. 4-8).
Caste
system is often perceived to be an integral part of Hindu religion. This erroneous
perception arises when people mix the ancient social tradition (caste system)
with Hindu religious philosophy.
According to V. A. Smith, most of the
misunderstanding on the subject of caste system has arisen from the persistent
mistranslation of Manu's term "Varna" as caste, whereas it should be
rendered class or order or by some equivalent term.
(source:
Oxford History of India - By V. A. Smith
Oxford Date of Publication: 1958).
The Genius of
India
Guy Sorman
(1944 - ) visiting scholar at Hoover Institution at Stanford and the
leader of new liberalism in France, states:
"Westerners tend to be perplexed and scandalized by the caste
system but they forget that the aristocracy which ruled over Europe for a
thousand years was a caste of sorts. The guilds of the Ancient Regime resembled
Indian castes as they had existed initially, each caste corresponding to a
particular trade." When it comes to marriage, in Europe as in India, one
looks for a partner from among one's immediate social circle.
Till the Age of
Enlightenment, castes were viewed with interest rather than revulsion. Some
French travelers even felt that the caste system had a certain social utility.
In 1777, when Desvaulx (1745 - 1825) wrote in his
book:
"Indians
are as attached to their caste as our gentlemen to theirs."
(source: Les
indes florissantes - Robert Laffont 1991).
Sorman further said: "The
authority of the caste is a check on the possible abuse of their power by the
princes." There has never been a central authority capable of imposing a
single language, religion or way of life on the myriad castes that constitute
India.
It is for this very reason that in the past the
Muslim and British conquerors and prozelytisers have had to curtail their
ambitions.
" India, is the only great civilization not to have been devoured by the
West." says Guy Sorman.
Caste system has
also made Indians completely immune to the totalitarian temptations. Overturning
Western prejudice, Guy Sorman sees in the caste system and polytheism not a
curse but the stuff that forearms Indians against absolutism. It is perhaps
thanks to castes, however archaic and oppressive they may be, that India, unlike
China, has escaped from totalitarianism and the grip of a single state or a
single party. It may be said that the endurance of the Brahmins in India has
kept her elite intact, whereas in neighboring China the anti-intellectualism of
communist peasants has completely wiped out the intelligentsia of that country.
It was the Brahmins who, at the time of British colonization, introduced in
India the first notions of public health and modern techniques in agriculture
and industry.
Though caste as an ideology is
unique to India, the caste spirit, both as a metaphor and social reality, seems
widespread. It is the caste system which holds Indians
together and has allowed eternal India to endure. Its religious bases
was attacked by Islam and Christianity and since the 19th century both Indian
and European reformers have not stopped harping on the social ills of the caste
system. But nothing, neither socialism nor nationalism nor republican
egalitarianism nor any other doctrine of Western origin, has managed to replace
it.
(source: The
Genius of India - By Guy Sorman ('Le Genie de
l'Inde') Macmillan India Ltd. 2001. ISBN 0333 93600 0 p. xiii - 56-58).
***

An Englishman getting a
pedicure from his Indian servants.
No Ten Commandments in the
East of the Suez Canal?
The Tyranny of British Rule: "The British have set
themselves up as the master race in India. British rule in India is fascism,
there is no dodging that."
"It is in India, of all places on the earth, that the
superiority of the white over the colored races is most strikingly
demonstrated."
Refer to the chapter on European
Imperialism. Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com
Refer
to Think
tank alleges British MPs involved in promoting evangelism in India -
hinduvoice.co.uk. Refer to The
Genocidal war being waged against
Iraq
and its people by the Anglo-American imperialists - Iraq
Body Count. Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide. Refer
to Campus
murders of Indian students in US cause for concern. Refer
to Hindus
want public apology from Pope
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
Watch
Why
we fight
(2005)
documentary
- Imperial
and technological arrogance of world's Super power:
describes the rise and maintenance of the
United States
military-industrial complex and its involvement in the wars led by the
United States
during the last fifty years, and in particular in the 2003
Invasion of Iraq.
The film alleges that in every decade since World War II, the American public
has been told a lie to bring it into war to fuel the military-economic machine,
which in turn maintains American dominance in the world.
***
Why
The British Hated
the Brahmins
According
to columnist, Meenakshi Jain:
"The
British were not wrong in their distrust of educated Brahmins in whom they saw a
potential threat to their supremacy in India. For instance, in 1879 the
Collector of Tanjore in a communication to Sir James
Caird, member of the Famine Commission, stated that "there
was no class (except Brahmins ) which was so hostile to the English."
The predominance of the Brahmins in the freedom movement confirmed the worst
British suspicions of the community. Innumerable CID reports of the period
commented on Brahmin participation at all levels of the nationalist movement. In
the words of an observer,
"If any community could
claim credit for driving the British out of the country, it was the Brahmin
community. Seventy per cent of those who were felled by British bullets were
Brahmins".
To
counter what they perceived, a Brahmanical challenge, the British launched on
the one hand a major ideological attack on the Brahmins and, on the other
incited non-Brahmin caste Hindus to press for preferential treatment, a ploy
that was to prove equally successful vis-à-vis the Muslims.
In the attempt to rewrite Indian history, Brahmins began to be portrayed as
oppressors and tyrants who willfully kept down the rest of the populace. Their
role in the development of Indian society was deliberately slighted. In ancient
times, for example, Brahmins played a major part in the spread of new methods of
cultivation (especially the use of the plough and manure) in backward and
aboriginal areas. The Krsi-parasara,
compiled during this period, is testimony to their contribution in this field.
Apart from misrepresenting the Indian past, the British actively encouraged
anti-Brahmin sentiments.
Apart from misrepresenting the
Indian past, the British actively encouraged anti-Brahmin sentiments.
A number of scholars have commented on their involvement in the anti-Brahmin
movement in South India. As a result of their machinations non-Brahmins turned
on the Brahmins with a ferocity that has few parallels in Indian history. This
was all the more surprising in that for centuries Brahmins and non-Brahmins had
been active partners and collaborators in the task of political and social
management.
(source:
The Plight of Brahmins - By Meenakshi Jain The Indian
Express, Tuesday, September 18, 1990).
Refer
to The
Indian Jews - By Jakob
De Roover - Outlookindia.com June 20, 2008.
Author S.
Balagangadhara writes:
"The Brahmins were identified as the
‘clergy’ or the priests of Hinduism. An explicit
hostility towards the heathen priesthood was not helped by the inability of the
messengers of God’s word to convert Brahmins to Christianity. In
Brahmins, they came across a literate group, which was able to read, write, do
arithmetic, conduct ‘theological’ discussions, etc. During the first hundred
years or so, this group was the only source of information about India as far as
the missionaries were concerned. Schooled to perform many administrative tasks,
the Brahmins were mostly the only ones well-versed in the European languages –
enough to communicate with the Europeans. In short, they appeared both to be the
intellectual group and the most influential social layer in the Indian social
organization. Conversion of the heathens of India, as
the missions painfully discovered, did not depend so much on winning the
allegiance of the prince or the king as it did on converting the Brahmins.
This
attack was born out of the inability of Christianity to gain a serious foothold
in the Indian society. The ‘red
race’ was primitive – it could be decimated; the ‘blacks’ were backward
– they could be enslaved; the ‘yellow’ and the ‘brown’ were inferior
– they could be colonized. But how to convert them? One would
persecute resistance and opposition. How to respond to indifference? The
attitude of these heathens towards Christianity, it is this: indifference.
"
(source: The
Heathen in His Blindness...: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion - By
S. Balagangadhara p. 82 -149). For more refer to chapter on First
Indologists and European
Imperialism).
Sesha
Samarajiwa
( ? ) from Sri Lanka is interested examining foreign religious agents’ role as
Fifth Columnists of neocolonialism/neoimperialism. He has written:
"Evangelists
belong to a long line of pests from the West who have come and keep coming like
locusts to colonize our souls and cannibalize our cultures.
The
latest incursions are merely a continuation
of the 500-year-old sorry saga
of Asia, Africa and
South America
, which began with the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Some have
never recovered from the machinations of their priests and the savagery of their
conquistadors. The baton of imperialism has passed from the Europeans to the
Americans. That is not to say that the rest of the West has dropped out. They
have not. They are very much in the game. It’s just that the Americans are in
the lead, the new Romans on the rampage.
We know
well how the Europeans won the West. They won it through mass
genocide of the native populations
in North and
South America
. In
South America
, hundreds and thousands of natives who resisted conversion were garroted.
There is a poignant painting depicting such conversions. It shows armored
Spanish soldiers garroting native priests, while a Spanish priest holds up a
large cross. More terrified natives await their turn. On the side, another
Spanish priest feeds stacks of ancient gold-leaf books of the Mayans into a
fire. On the face of the Mayan priests, a look of utter sadness mixed with
resignation.
In places
like
India
and
Sri Lanka
, they were no better. They too faced abject horrors. In his book, Christianity's
scramble for
India
, Navaratna
Rajaram
says that “the
Christian Missionary is neither a Christian nor a missionary. In fact, he is a
racist and a white supremacist in priestly guise.” Their
Buffalo Bills and their Wild Bills, their Custers and their Cortezes, and the
long line of predators
and priests
made sure that the sorry remainder of once-proud nations would remain so, while
they ruled the roost in lands drenched with native blood. Many weaker cultures
succumbed to the relentless onslaught from the West. They either slaughtered
those who resisted or they sowed the seeds of abjection and their eventual
self-destruction. Even today, we see the pathetic dregs of once-noble nations
staggering around native reservations and barrios in North and South America, in
Australia
, in
Canada
, in
New Zealand
. They have lost their spirit. They have lost their will to live. They seem
embarrassed to be alive. They are self-destructing. At best, they are performing
monkeys titillating whites with a thirst for the exotic. These are abject
peoples, vanishing tribes. Now, not satisfied with ruling their large chunk of
raided real estate, they are hell-bent on extending their hegemony over the
whole world. They
howl in protest when the natives resist.
Human misery is happy hunting grounds
for these
spiritual cartels.
They strike when their targets are at their weakest or bomb them to submission
to make sure they are at their weakest. Thus softened up, they are susceptible
to inducements and brainwashing. They are canny. To ‘convert’ people, you
must first make them despise
and reject what had sustained their people for
millennia. So they vilify their faith or convince them it is a spent force or
dark superstition. In so doing, they make us spit
on our heritage."
(source:
Beware
of wolves in sheep’s clothing
- By Sesha Samarajiwa - Asian Tribune October
9, 2007).
According to Shyam Sashtri, the words,
Brahmins, Kshatryas, Vaisyas and Sudras were names of classes rather than castes
during the pre-historic period. According to H. G. Rawlinson, caste is a
Portuguese word meaning purity of race.
But ultimately if
one wants to understand the truth, the original purpose behind the caste system,
one must go to
antiquity to study the evolution of the caste system. When the Vedas refer to the four-fold division
of society, they use the Sanskrit word varna meaning "class," not the
word jati meaning "caste". The word varna was mistakenly translated by
the Portuguese during their period of colonial establishment in India. Four
orders of society were recognized based upon the four main goals of human beings
and established society accordingly.
These
four orders of society were called "varna", which has two
meanings; first it means "color" and second it means a "veil".
As color it does NOT refer to the color of the skin of people, but to the
qualities (gunas) or energies of human nature. It is true that the Caste system did
degenerate with passage of time.
This mix-up is quite significant because
the Varna system of the Vedas was designed to achieve division of labor and help
society operate efficiently.
Dagmar
Grafin Bernstorff, (author of 'Das Kastensystem im Wandel' Indien
in Deutschland 1990 p 29-51) based on convincing evidence, suggests
that varna originally did not refer to skin color but designed the four
directions identified by white, black, red, yellow according to which the
participants were arranged during the Vedic yajna.
(source: A
Survey of Hinduism - By Klaus K. Klostermaier p. 334)
Alain Danielou
writes: " The Hindu lawgivers felt that no advanced society could exist without the
recognition of certain facts, such as professional organizations; relations
between the various occupations needed to maintain the economic, political, and
social stability of the state; and the problems arising from the various
degrees of development among peoples and individuals, their various aptitudes,
and the drawbacks of intermarriage. It should not be forgotten that the
so-called equality in aptitude of the sundry human races takes only the
capacities of the most aggressive races into account, and not of those that are
unable to adapt to modern conditions, such as the Pygmies, the Australian
aborigines, the Munda populations of India, and many other groups. Their
systematic genocide still continues today, since their existence upsets all
ideas of so-called equality of aptitude, values, and aspirations among the
various races. For the Hindus, the caste system is not a man-made invention to
justify slavery but the recognition of the Creator's will, the codification of a
state of fact, an attempt to harmonize human society in accordance with the
general scheme of creation."
He predicts:
"Far from guiding the world
toward an ideal future for human society, democratic ideas are probably no more
than a brief period of romantic politics, which will lead the world into great
turmoil. The social and political ideologies of the modern West will probably
appear as childish and absurd to our descendants as they seem irresponsible and
incoherent to traditionalist Hindus today."
(source:
Virtue,
Success, Pleasure, & Liberation : The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of
Ancient India - by Alain Danielou -
p. 33 - 43).
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)
most original philosopher of modern India. He wrote:
"Caste was originally an arrangement for the
distribution of functions in society, just as much as class in Europe, but the
principle on which this distribution was based was peculiar to India. A Brahmin
was a Brahmin not by mere birth, but because he discharged the duty of
preserving the spiritual and intellectual elevation of the race, and he had to
cultivate the spiritual temperament and acquire the spiritual training which
alone would qualify him for the task. The Kshatryia was Kshatryia not merely
because he was the son of warriors and princes, but because he discharged the
duty of protecting the country and preserving the high courage and manhood of
action, and he had to cultivate the princely temperament and acquire the strong
and lofty Samurai training which alone fitted him for his duties. So it was for
the Vaishya whose function was to amass wealth for the race and the Shudra who
discharged the humbler duties of service without which the other castes could
not perform their share of labor for the common, good".
(source: India's
Rebirth - By Sri Aurobindo Publisher: Mira Aditi
(ISBN 2-902776-32-2
p 26).
Many Indian sages have even gone even further than Sri Aurobindo, arguing that
in the occult relation India had with the Universal Force, each one was born in
the caste CORRESPONDING to his or her spiritual evolution. There are accidents,
misfits, errors, they say, but the system seems to have worked pretty well
until
modern times when it got perverted by the vagaries of materialism and western
influence.
Varna vyavastha means a
social organization based on free choice of vocations in accordance with one’s
vocational aptitudes determined by heredity and vocational training. Its
purposed is not to divide people into castes or classes, as it is generally
supposed to be, but to integrate the society into a whole by giving each type of
individual a suitable vocational place in it. It aims at efficiency,
satisfaction, and co-operation. Modern society in the
West is in a chaotic condition. There is a great struggle for
existence, power and wealth and superiority. All people seek for one and the
same thing, wealth, and power. The ancient Indians who planned society on the
basis of varna understood human nature better and planned a pattern of society
in which there would be less chaos, less struggle and less dissatisfaction. They
found out that all people fall naturally, into four types. Each of pleasures,
and distinctive ways of living and dressing etc.
(source:
Indian Culture - Its Spiritual, Moral and Social
Aspects - By
Suniti
Kumar Chatterji, Bhikhan Lal Atreya and Alain Danielou p. 30-31).
According to Sir
S. Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most profound
philosophers of this century:
"Caste divisions are based on individual temperament, (Sattvadguji
brahmanah syat ksatriyastu rajodhikah tamodhiko bhaved vaisyo gunasamyattu
sudrata.)which is not immutable. In the beginning there was only one caste. We
were all Brahmins (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad I. 4. 11-5; Many I. 31. Cp. Also
Mahabharata, XII. 188: na visesosti varnanam sarvam Brahman idam jagat brahmana
purvasrstam hi karmabhir varnatam gatam.) or all Sudras. A smriti text says that
one is born a Sudra, and through purification he becomes a Brahmin. (Janmana
jayate sudrah samskarair dvija ucyate.)
Brahminhood in not an order, but a
temperament. Anyone can have it, though many born in the Brahmin caste may be
without it. It is independent of sex or calling, birth or breeding. Everyone has
a right to Brahminhood, the state where inward grace and outward beauty fuse.
People were divided into different castes according to social
needs and individual action. The Brahmins are the priests. They should have
neither property nor executive power. They are the seers and conscience of the
society. The Kshatriyas are the administrators, whose principle is reverence for
all life. The Vaishyas are the traders and craftsmen, men of technical ability
who aim at efficiency. The Sudras are the routine workers, the proletariat, who
carry out instructions and contribute only a fraction. The caste scheme is meant
to apply to all mankind. In the Mahabharata we are told that the Yavanas
(Greeks), the Kiratas, the Daradas (Dards), the Chinas (the Chinese), the Sakas
(Scythians), the Pahlavas (Parthians) and several other non-Hindu peoples,
belonged to one or the other of the four classes. The foreign tribes were
absorbed into the Hindu society. The sort of social adjustment, by which
foreigners were admitted into the Hindu fold, has taken place from very early
times. The great empire-builders, the Nandas, the Mauryas and the Guptas, were
according to low-born.
In special cases individuals and
groups changed their social class. Visvamitra, Ajamidha and Puramidha were
admitted to the status of the Brahmin class, and even composed Vedic hymns.
Yaska, in his Nirukta, tells us that of two brothers, Santanu and Devapi, one
becomes a Ksatriya king and the other a Brahmin priest. Kavasa, the son of the
slave girl Ilusa, was ordained as a Brahmin priest. Janaka, a ksatriya by birth,
attained the rank of a Brahmin by virtue of his ripe wisdom and saintly
character. The Bhagavata tells of the elevation of the ksatriya clan named
Dhastru to brahminhood. Even a Sudra, if you do good, you become a Brahmin. (ebhistu
karmabhir devi subhair acaritais tatha sudro brahmanatam yati, vaisyah
ksatriyatam vrajet.)
We are Brahmin not on account of
birth or the performance of rites, not by study or family, but on account of our
behavior.
(na yonir napisamskaro nasrutam na ca santatih karanani dvijatvasya vrttam eva
tu karanam.) ( sarvoyam brahmano loke vrttenaca vidhiyate vrttisthitasu sudropi
brahmanatva, mouaccjato – Anusasanaparva.
Even if we are born Sudras. By good conduct we can raise
ourselves to the highest status. (sudrayonau hi jatasya sadgunan upastisthatah
vaisyatvam labhate brahmam ksatriyattvam tathaiva ca arjave vartamanasya
brahmanyam abhijayate – Aranyaparva. )
Patanjali refers to
Brahmin kings, and Manu to Sudra rulers. There were Brahmin soldiers in the time
of Alexander, as there are today. Shankara held the view that members of all
castes can read the sastras. Hindu acaryas denounced the spirit of caste
separatism. Vajrasucikopanisad holds that many who were born of non-brahmin
women had risen to the rank of Brahmin saints.
Even The Hindu Mahasabha
resolved: “Whereas the caste system based on birth as at present existing is
manifestly contrary to universal truth and morals: whereas it is the very
antithesis of the fundamental spirit of the Hindu religion: whereas it flouts
the elementary rights of human equality…this all India Hindu Mahasabha
declares its uncompromising opposition to the system and calls upon the Hindu
society to put a speedy end to it.”
(source: Religion
and Society – By S. Radhakrishnan ASIN 8172231636 p. 129-133).
R
P Masani has observed:
"Caste
riven though the population was, these groups may be likened to the fingers of
one's hand, perpetually separated, yet perpetually co-operating."
(source:
Our
Heritage and Its Significance - By Shripad Rama Sharma p.93).
Sri Aurobindo,
while praising the original caste system, does not spare it in its later stages:
"it is the nature of human institutions to
degenerate; there is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated.
It
ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have
now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely
material tests of occupation and birth... By this change it has set itself
against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual
and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. the spirit of
caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of
the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us
to our present condition..."
(source: India's
Rebirth - By Sri Aurobindo Publisher: Mira Aditi
(ISBN 2-902776-32-2 p 27).
The Varna scheme is a
multi-dimensional, omnibus scheme of social organization. According to Sri
Aurobindo, it is "at once spiritual, psychic, ethical and economic
order.."
(source: The
Human Cycle - By Sri Aurobindo p. 166).
Sir Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan
one
of the most profound philosophers of this century, writes:
"The institution of caste illustrates the spirit of comprehensive
synthesis characteristic of the Hindu mind with its faith in the collaboration
of races and the co-operation of cultures.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the
system of caste is the outcome of intolerance and trust.
Though it may now have degenerated into an instrument of oppression and
intolerance, though it tends to perpetuate inequality and develop the spirit of
exclusiveness, these unfortunate effects are not the central motives of the
caste system."
"The system of caste insists that the law of social life should not be cold
and cruel competition, but harmony and co-operation. Society is not a field of
rivalry among individuals.
The castes are not allowed to compete with one another."
"Civilization is not the suppression of races less capable of or
less advanced in culture by people of higher understanding. God does not give us
the right to destroy or enslave the weak and the unfit. One race may not be as
clever or as strong as another, yet the highest idealism requires that we should
give equality of opportunity even to unequal groups."
" The
trail of man is dotted with the graves of countless communities and races which
reached an untimely end. But is there any justification for this violation of
human life? Have we any idea of what the world loses when one racial culture is
extinguished?
Indiscriminate racial amalgamation
was not encouraged by the Hindu thinkers. In
dealing with the problem of the conflict of the different racial groups,
Hinduism adopted the only safe course of democracy, viz., that each racial group
should be allowed to develop the best in it without impeding the progress of
others. Caste, on its racial side, is the
affirmation of the infinite diversity of human groups.
In spite of the divisions, there is an inner cohesion among the Hindu society
from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin."
(source: The
Hindu View of Life - By Sir. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
p. 73-77. Material in this book was originally delivered in the form of
lectures, the Upton Lectures, in 1926, at Manchester College, Oxford).
Dharampal
(1922
- 2006) a Gandhian and
author of several books including The
Beautiful Tree and Indian Science and
Technology in the Eighteenth century.
He
wrote extensively of the damage the British Raj inflicted on
India and Indians:
"The
conquered in their view, had ultimately to disappear, if not wholly physically,
at least as a culture and civilization. In Australia, and New Zealand
practically all the local inhabitants were wiped out soon enough; in North
America near complete elimination happened, over 300-400 years, and in Ireland
only partially. The indigenous population of the Americas had been estimated at
112 to 140 millions in 1492.
In
India a large number perished by British brutality
and deliberate creation of famines, violation of persons bodies and dignity;
in Palnad in Andhra, half of the population was said to be have perished every
ten years, during several decades after the subjugation of the areas by Britain. It
seems as if the intellectuals and leaders of Britain hated India, and felt
outraged that in spite of all their brutalities, smashing of Indian
institutions, high extortions, and tortures, men made famines and expropriation
of Indian resources to the British state, and thus the all round breakdown of
Indian society, the Indians on the whole, could not be wiped out that easily.
"
(source: Despoliation
and Defaming of India – By Dharampal published
by Bharat Peetham, Wardha Other
India Press, Goa p. 1 - 17). For more refer to The
Unity of India - By Dileep Karanth - svabhinava.org).
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
And
Sermons from the West?
Jakob
De Roover is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO)
at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap,
Ghent University
,
Belgium
. He has written:
"Recently,
the European Parliament hosted a meeting on
“caste discrimination in
South Asia
”. At the meeting, participants stated that “
India
is being ruled by castes not by laws” and that they demanded justice, because
there “is one incredible
India
and one untouchable
India
.”
First, the dominant
conception of the caste system has emerged from the accounts by Christian
missionaries, travelers and colonial
administrators. Rather than being neutral, these accounts were shaped
by a Christian framework. That is, the religion of European visitors to
India
had informed them beforehand that they would find false religion and devil
worship there, and that false religion always manifested itself in social evils.
Especially the Protestants rebuked the “evil priests” of Hinduism for
imposing the laws of caste in the name of religion. They told the Indians that
conversion to Protestantism was a conversion to equality. Thus, Indian souls
were to be saved from damnation and caste discrimination.
Second, this Christian
account of “the Hindu religion” and its “caste system” informed colonial
policies in
British India
. Building on the theological framework, scholars now wrote “scientific”
treatises on Hindu superstition and caste discrimination. The Christian mission
found its secular counterpart in the idea of the civilising mission, which told
the West that it had to rescue the natives from the clutches of superstition and
caste. One no longer promoted religious conversion, but the colonial educational
system harped on “the horrors of Hindu society.”
Fourth, the “Dalit”
movement of today is the product of these colonial movements. The notion of
“Dalits” makes sense only within the colonial account of
India
, which had postulated the existence of one single group of “outcastes” or
“untouchables” that was supposedly exploited by the upper castes. In
reality, it concerns a variety of caste groups, with no criteria to unite them
besides the claim that they are all “downtrodden.” Indeed, many of these
groups are poor and discriminated against by other caste groups. However,
their socio-economic interests have been hijacked by some of their western-educated
elite members. In the name of the downtrodden,
these elites establish NGOs
and then travel from conference to conference and country to country in order to
reveal the plight of the “Dalits” to eager western audiences and secure
funding from donor agencies.
Fifth, when present-day Europeans rebuke Indian
society for the “barbarism” of caste discrimination, they are reproducing
the old stanzas of the civilising mission. Such a stance of superiority perhaps
worked in the context of colonialism. But today, at a time when Indians
buy some of the European industrial giants and Europe is in need of
more collaboration with
India
, it is ill-advised to continue this type of civilisational propaganda. The
implication is that there is only one way to get rid of socio-economic wrongs
here: one has to eradicate both the social structure and the Hindu civilisation.
It is as though one would blame the racism,
bingedrinking, pedophilia, poverty, homelessness and domestic violence in the
contemporary West on its age-old civilisation.
The times have changed. As Europeans, we need to
reflect on our deep-rooted sense of superiority and how this informs our
moralising discourse on human rights in other parts of the world. To appreciate
the impression we give to Indians with our statements on caste discrimination,
just imagine a possible world in which the Indian government regularly
castigates the US for its racism against African-Americans and the
disproportionate death penalties, and the EU for the treatment of South Asians
in England, Turks in Germany, women in Romania, the Basque movement in Spain,
gypsies in Italy ... just imagine Indian members of parliament consistently
blaming the very structure of western societies as the cause of all these
wrongs.
Europe
needs to wake up fast. The time of colonialism is over. If we do not change our
attitudes, the irritation towards the EU will grow in countries like
India
and
China
.
(source: Does
Europe have a Civilising mission in
India
? – By Jakob De Roover).

Indians as Inferior Race?
Racism in British India.
No Ten Commandments in the
East of the Suez Canal?
Lord
Mayo (1822 - 1872) declared, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the
magnificent work of governing an inferior race in India."
(Note:
The legacy of Western civilization to the world - Dark
Ages, Crusades, The Inquisition, Witch Hunt, Slavery, Colonization of Africa,
Asia, America and Australia, Imperialism, World Wars, Holocaust, Bombing of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Conversion and destruction of Native cultures to
Christianity, Drugs, School shootings in American schools, Gun violence, Racism,
Clergy sex Abuse, Viagra spamming American Capitalism, quest
for individualism, Iraq war ….
).
(image
source:
Imperial
Lives in the Victorian Raj - By David Gilmour).
For more refer to
chapters on Aryan
Invasion Theory and European
Imperialism. Refer
to Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide Refer
to Think
tank alleges British MPs involved in promoting evangelism in India -
hinduvoice.co.uk.
***
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
In
1452 Pope Nicholas V authorized Portugese to abduct blacks from Africa and force
them into slavery. Dum Diversas,
a bull authorising the Portuguese to reduce any non-Christians to the status of
slaves, was issued by Papal authorities. All black people were
depicted as the descendants of biblical Cain who killed righteous Abel and was
later banished by thier father to Africa. This invented legend gave Christians
needed theological justification to abduct and enslave blacks. Bible is full of
verses supporting slavery.
(source:
religioustolerance.org).
Koenraad
Elst has written:
The number of Africans killed in the age of the slave trade
and colonial conquest is estimated at 50 million or more. It
has been said that Europeans found the Holocaust so gruesome because the things
which they had considered acceptable in the case of the black “savages” had
now been committed on white Europeans. In the conquests of America
and Africa, the same psychology was at work as in Auschwitz: the inferior races
had to make way (or Lebensraum, “living space”) for the superior race. In
some cases the massacre was “functional”, the result of an unplanned
escalation. In others, the massacre was entirely “intentional” and
pre-planned.
(source:
Negationism
in India - By Koenraad Elst p. 6).
Rabindranath
Tagore (1861-1941) Poet, author,
philosopher, Nobel prize laureate, says in his Nationalism:
"Her (India's)
caste system is the true outcome of the spirit of tolerance. For India has all
along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the
different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of
their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet at close as
the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of
a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism!"
(source: Hindu Culture
and The Modern Age - By Dewan Bahadur K.S. Ramaswami Shastri -
Annamalai University 1956 p.113).
Author
Beatrice Pitney Lamb has pointed out:
"Clearly
the Indian way of assimilating foreigners - by allowing them to pursue their own
customs within some niche of the caste system - has led to greater variety and
tolerance within the country than exists in the United States, where
immigrants have been assimilated through a school program emphasizing 100 per
cent Americanization - and hence, implicitly, the rejection of inherited
cultural roots."
(source: India:
A World in Transition - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb
p. 363).
Koenraad Elst
points out: " The Buddha never said: “Down with the Brahmins! Break
Brahmin tyranny! On the contrary, he
taught about how to be a true Brahmin, as against having the outer attributes
but not the inner
qualities of the Brahmin.
Many of his disciples were Brahmins. The myth of Buddhist social revolution
against Brahmin tyranny can be disproven on many counts with the Buddha’s own
words.”
(source: Ayodhya
and After - By Koenraad Elst - Voice of India - Issues Before Hindu
Society SKU: INBK2650 p.141).
Rajiv
Malhotra ( ? ) has
observed: "Caste systems in India evolved, just as
they have done in the US, as a labor group by the kind of work. This is why each
of India's castes corresponds to a category of labor, much like the modern guild
of American workers of a given profession, with its own procedures for
membership and strategies to compete with outsiders. In India, this segmentation
got perpetuated because training was done through work apprenticeship under
one's parents, thereby turning family lineages into specialized labor.
Perhaps, ancient rulers found it easier to
negotiate with a given category of labor collectively, much like the British
created the landowner class (zamindars) in India as a more efficient way
to maximize the collection of taxes. Most law firms in
the US are owned by Jewish families; most motels are owned by Gujaratis from
India; and this kind of list goes on. Communities evolve towards centers of
skill, excellence, and specialized assets. Bush and Gore are both political
dynasties." A key difference is that in India, caste became explicitly
codified, whereas in America social structure by ethnicity or family lineage
remains uncodified and subliminal. But what is commonly not pointed out today is
that India's smritis (codified rules) pertaining to many topics including
caste, were meant to be specific to a given time, place and cultural context and
not intended as universal 'commandments' for all people at all times.
"The
Hindu identity is still largely outcast in America or subverted in many
instances. Media, education and public images of Hinduism are often dominated by
negative stereotypes."
(source: Is
There an American Caste System?
- By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com).
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
Market
fundamentalism and India's rootless Elites
Sandhya Jain (
? ) author of
Adi
Deo Arya Devata. A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface and
eminent columnist in the
mainstream English Media of India, and one who has written
eloquently about Hinduism, says:
"The
American Model of Governance is a failure. The system which allowed
Presidents to induct private sector cronies into the highest echelons of
government gave de facto control of the economy, polity, and even foreign
policy, to Corporates rather than professionals with accountability. Over time,
this eroded all institutions through de facto privatisation of all activities,
to the point that even Intelligence gathering has been out-sourced! American
government today is truly a headless torso.
The Wall Street
hustlers are everywhere.
India
’s rootless elite is increasingly enamoured of the
American model – oblivious of its obvious failures – precisely because it
wishes to enjoy the benefits of untrammelled power without responsibility.
The
rest of us will revel in the validation of the Hindu
varna
system as a hierarchy of
values relevant to all ages – brains on top (brahmin), state power on the side
(kshatriya), wealth-generators in the middle (vaishya) and the rest of the
people all around (shudra). In Hindu India, wealth served the society and the
state; a system where wealth subordinates society and state is Asuric, immoral,
and destructive of all human values."
(source: End
free market fundamentalism - By Sandhya Jain - vijayvaani.com).
Top of Page
But
finally, have the people who dismiss caste as an Aryan imposition on the
Dravidians, or as an inhuman and nazi system, ever attempted to understand its
original purpose and genius? Is it really worse
than the huge Class differences and racism you can see nowadays in Europe and America? The
West can boast no advantage here, no effectual superiority. Street-sweepers are
rarely invited to lunch with middle-class families, yet virtuous Europeans are
often heard decrying caste injustice and the odious Brahmin who will not share
his meal with the butcher or allow the sweeper or the tanner to draw water from
his well.
The
Imperial British and their Uncomfortable Claims:
Alexis Charles
Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
was one of the greatest political
thinkers, most prescient commentators on American society,
had observed that the English in India behaved as if they too were
members of a caste. According to
Guy Sorman: "He might well have
concluded that the notion of caste was universal and not specific to
India."
(source: The
Genius of India - By Guy Sorman ('Le Genie de
l'Inde') p. x).
Though the Imperial British scoffed
at the debased caste system, and talked about the downtrodden Hindoos, yet in India and
they themselves continued assiduously to
cultivate a detachment from the Indians.
"A British establishment in
India was situated outside the old walled town. It was generally divided into
two parts, the civil lines and the cantonment. The former was spaciously
arranged with lots of green between the bungalows inhabited by the sahiblogs and
the latter was organized on severe military lines. By and large the British
community in India lived its own life, ran its own shops and newspapers,
entertained itself at exclusive halls and concerts, admired or criticized itself
on Chowringhee Road and Connaught Circus, congratulated itself at the official
receptions at the government houses and the viceregal palace, exalted itself at
the Imperial Orchestra played Rule Brittania
on the Mall at Simla or titillated itself down memory lane as a certain Mr.
Cunningham performed Othello at the Gaiety Theatre.
F.
Yeats-Brown in the Bengal Lancer, put
it bluntly,
"The Brahmins, made a circle within which they cooked their
food. So did we. We were a caste, pariahs to them, princes in our estimation. The
compulsions of imperialism negated all passions for democratic equality or
Christian egalitarianism. Imperialism, by virtue of its very nature, was
insular, racist and arrogant."
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty.
Penguin Books. 1991 p. 87-90).
Dogs and
Indians?
"Dogs
and Indians not allowed”
- Such a barbaric signs during the British Raj clearly classified Indians as
belonging to some other-than-human species.
***
"...dogs
and Indians" were, by notification in that precise language, excluded from
some of "Europeans only" clubs. Indians were not allowed to travel by
railway carriages, or use railway waiting rooms, reserved for Europeans. Not
only that, Indian judges were not allowed to try Europeans in the districts and
the Ilbert
Bill, introduced in 1883 during Lord
Ripon's viceroyalty, to remedy the situation, had
to be withdrawn in the face of vicious opposition by Europeans and
Anglo-Indians.
(source:
Colonialism
and animals - By Hiranmay
Karlekar
- dailypioneer.com - March 5
2004).

Britannia,
a lion at her feet, examines a string of pearls she has taken from a cushion
held up by an Indian woman.
Soon
India
would be depicted as a naked black female submissively offering her rich jewels
to Britannia.
India
now entered in the
cataclysmic epoch which has left few native cultures of the world intact –
the Era of Colonialism.
The Indians, bearers of the world’s oldest civilizations were treated like
children by people who thought themselves as superior race.
(image
source: British
Library. Refer to India:
Empire of the Spirit - By Michael Wood).
Refer
to What
Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British
- www.larouchepac.com
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide
For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby
***
Jawaharlal
Nehru has remarked:
"In India every European, be he German, or Pole or Rumanian, is
automatically a member of the ruling race. Railway carriages, station retiring
rooms, benches in parks, etc. are marked 'For Europeans Only.' This is bad
enough in South Africa or elsewhere, but to have to put up with it in one's own
country is a humiliating and exasperating reminder of one's enslaved
condition."
In this land of
caste the British have built up a caste which is rigid and exclusive."
(source: The
Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru.
p.295).

An
Indian woodcut from around 1870 shows a train with separate carriages for
Europeans and for Indians.
(source: Colonial
Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900 - Time-Life
Books. The Scramble for Africa ASIN 0809464667 Noon of the Raj. p. 22).
Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
Sir
Winston Churchill's attitude to Indians was quite explicitly racist. He
told the Foreign
Secretary, Leopold
Charles Maurice Stennett Amery that:
“the
Hindus were a foul race…and he wished Bert
Harris (Air Marshall Bert "Bomber" Harris could send some of
his surplus bombers to destroy them.”
Refer
to What
Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British
- www.larouchepac.com
For
more refer
to chapter on European
Imperialism.
***
"The
Viceroy sat at the apex of a colossal pyramid of power, and British rule was
founded on an idea of hierarchy as baffling in its complexity as the caste
system of the Hindus themselves. The Hindus had their castes while
the British had their classes, and in each case very fine distinctions sometimes
separated one social level from the next. The subtleties of the British class
system became elaborately codified in the Warrant
of Precedence, which was designed as an infallible guide to
hierarchy in India, indispensable to the proper arrangement of ceremony,
conference or even of a mere dinner party."
(source: India
Britannica - By Geoffrey Moorhouse p. 130). Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
Indian
caste system created by British
An umbrella group of
Hindus says prominent British members of parliament who want legislation in
Britain
to protect against caste discrimination are being "misled
by Christian groups".
The
Hindu Council UK (HCUK), which is opposed to religious conversion,
said in a new report that caste discrimination does not exist in
Britain
- and that caste, in any case, was created by the British in
India
. "Today, we are
putting the record straight. We are also naming and shaming those who spread
misinformation about Hinduism and its relationship to caste in an ill-disguised
attempt to vilify the Hindu people and cause division within our
community," said HCUK general secretary Anil Bhanot. He claimed
in his foreword to the report that ruling Labour Party MPs Rob Marris and Jeremy
Corbyn, "who are lobbying the Department of Communities and Local
Government to legislate against caste discrimination, may
have been misled by Christian groups who want, quite simply, to 'save' people
from the 'falsehood' of Hinduism and convert people to Christianity."
"Caste has been the
subject of ill-informed comment for too long," Bhanot said. The report's
author, Raj Pandit Sharma, added that the caste system had been created by the
British during their colonial rule in
India
. "It was the British who single-handedly formulated the caste schedules
that remain in place today," Sharma wrote. "The evils manifest in the
current form of the caste system cannot be ascribed to the Hindu faith. The
current adulteration of the Hindu 'varnashram' system is a direct result of
generations of British colonial bureaucracy."
Accusing
some anti-caste groups in
Britain
of "seeking government legislation and government funds to tackle this
supposed problem", the HCUK said: "Caste,
as described in the Hindu scriptures, is not determined by birth."
"It is no joke to have to ward off concerted misinformation campaigns from
UK
parliamentarians who really ought to know better," Bhanot said.
Caste, the group said, is
"assumed by most non-Hindus to be always a gross form of unjust
discrimination, an alleged feature of Hinduism so maligned it justifies attempts
by Christians to convert Hindus here in the
UK
, in
India
, and elsewhere." It, however, acknowledged and condemned what it called
the "abuse of varnashram" in
India
.
(source:
Indian
caste system created by British: Hindu group - hindustantimes.com).
Claude
Alvares has written: "The English establishment themselves as a
separate ruling caste; like other Indian castes, they
did not inter-marry or eat with the lower (native) caste. Their
children were shipped off to public schools in England, while they themselves
kept to their clubs and bungalows in special suburbs known as cantonments and
civil lines."
(source:
Decolonizing
History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West
1492 to the Present Day - By Claude Alvares p.
191).
Amaury
de Reincourt (1918 - ) was born in
Orleans, France. He received his B.A. from the Sorbonne and his M.A. from the
University of Algiers. He is author of several books including The
American empire and The Soul of India,
he wrote:
"But the most important result was to create
a tremendous ill feeling between many Indians and many distrustful, infuriated
British, a chasm that was never really closed again. From now on, the
social aloofness of the British in India became legendary and the British
rulers became a new super-caste imposed on top of the existing caste
structure, as rigidly exclusive as any native caste; they became the
super-Brahmins in charge of government and administration."
And
it was not long before Indians themselves saw the difference. Victor
Jacquemont (1801 -1832) who traveled throughout India in the early
1830's, pointed out that Indians "have two expressions only to mention a
European. A saheb logue, a lord or gentleman...and a
gora logue..a white man. The former character is much respected by
them; the latter may be dreaded, as it is indeed very often quite dreadful, but
respected never. This aristocratic character of British society stamped its
features on the British Empire and accommodated itself quite naturally with
India's caste system."
(source:
The Soul of India
- By
Amaury de
Riencourt
p. 205 -223).
The indenture system
In
the colonies of the British,
French and the Dutch,
exploitation in one form or the other stalked the Indian indentured laborers.
The Coolies who arrived to work in the sugar estates in the West
Indies were marched to their barracks known as ‘Nigger
Yard.’ It was the same in Mauritius -- only the
language was different, ‘camps des Noirs’
or the backbreaking work in the canefields.
In
1843 the first shipload of 217 Indian labourers arrived in Port of Spain in
Trinidad in the Caribbean. And in the same decade, others were taken to British
Guiana in South America, and Mauritius off the coast of Africa; in the 1860's to
the British colony of Natal in South Africa; in the 1870's to the Dutch colony
of Surinam; in the 1880's to Fiji. By 1917-20 the indenture system was abolished
but not before 1.5 million Indian bonded labourers had been induced move to
remote parts of the globe in the service of British capitalism.
In South Africa
they worked from daybreak to nightfall, from four in the morning to seven in the
night, and far beyond their capacity. They were strictly confined to the limits
of their master’s estate. Beating and flogging was part of the regular routine
in the plantations. In the West Indies the cattle whip was employed; in
Malaya it was the cane, and in South Africa it was the rawhide cattle lash. One
callous estate manager reportedly said “As long
as the coolie is working for you, you have the right to do what you like with
him—that is, short of killing”.
Some
Caribbean planters solved the problem of the sick by abandoning them to fate. In
Grenada the majority of the 2000 Indians
were kicked off the estates when they became ill and allowed to die on the road.
The editor of a Jamaica newspaper wrote in 1863:
‘One must see these wretched hungry, houseless and outcast
specters picking up in the streets a chance bone or any putrid offal…. and so
crippled, nude, skeletoned before their death, they live on, no parish authority
taking them in’.
Unlike the Chinese and the Blacks, the Indians were also wary of
the penchant for proselytizing among white missionaries who were on the lookout
for ‘heathen converts’.
Indians were always branded as the dregs of their country, lowborn, even
criminal. Inspite of this, the Europeans managed to take Indian women for sexual
purposes – usually the daughter of a coolie.
(source: Life
of Indians Overseas: Laborers in the Plantations -
indolink.com).
Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
***
Dave
Freedholm teaches world religion and philosophy at a nationally
recognized independent college preparatory school in the U.S. and a practitioner
of Hindu spirituality for some years, says:
'Caste'
was used to justify Christian proselytizing and for continued domination over
the Indian population, and this continues to be the case today. Also, the ills
of contemporary Indian society (poverty, caste, etc.), which were exacerbated in
part due to centuries long foreign occupation, exploitation and domination, are
blamed primarily on Hindu thought. Thus, some Western scholars,
ignoring the historic subversion of Indian society and Hinduism by the West,
align themselves with the 'oppressed' against the 'evils' of Hinduism. The
victim is made to feel guilty and hence the 'Hindu shame' I find amongst some
Hindus.
Most Christians today (and most
scholars of religion) would be scandalized if the feudal system, slavery,
capitalist exploitation or anti-Judaism were used to define the essence of
Christianity. They would understand these things to be historically and socially
bound and not part of Christian universal ideals. In short, descriptions of
Christianity in textbooks would distinguish the core or essence of Christian
theology from specific social, historical and political contexts. However,
Hinduism is not treated in the same way.
It
does seem that the caste system, as understood today, was foisted on
Indian society by its Western (Christian) oppressors, the British. Efforts
within Hindu society to reform itself, and to provide a new vision of Hinduism,
are too often ignored or downplayed.
(source: Hinduism
in American Classrooms - By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com).
Refer to Varna
and Jatis: The Need for Clarity - By B Shantanu - indiacause.com.
***
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide
Drain
Inspector's Report?
Exclusive clubs into self-righteous
assertion?
Recently, a CBS 60 Minutes
segment on TV, showing the plight of Untouchables and caste system of India was done
by Christiane Amanpour was nothing but a typical example of sensational
journalism done in the West. This kind of portrayal will always be
negative at best. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi,
when he labeled the book," Mother
India."
by Katherine Mayo
(published in 1927), as "Drain Inspector's
Report" and a calculated smear on India's
face with malice pre-determined. Incidentally, Katherine Mayo, was no big fan of Mahatma Gandhi or Hinduism!
(Please refer to Katherine Mayo's hatred for Hindus in the chapter
on Glimpses III and
European Imperialism).
Refer
to Insults to the
Mahatma, ignored by India
- rediff.com.
Also
refer to Hate
group numbers top 800
in USA
- Southern Poverty Law Center.
Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com.
Refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
Refer
to Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Kashmiri Hindu
Pandits - And the World Remained Silent - Movie http://www.jaia-bharati.org/films/and-the-world.mpg
Inequality, is a “natural
order.” said Martin Luther, author of the Reformation.
It still is a natural order to
the West. Ask Wall Street!
This kind of portrayal will always be
negative at best.
In the words of Mahatma Gandhi,
when he labeled the book," Mother
India."
by Katherine Mayo
(published in 1927), as "Drain Inspector's
Report" and a calculated smear on India's
face with malice pre-determined. Incidentally, Katherine Mayo, was no big fan of Mahatma Gandhi or Hinduism!
Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com and Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com.
Refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Watch
video - Christian
Missionary Misdeeds in India
Refer
to The
Dead Sea Scrolls - An Eastern View of a Western Crisis - By N. S. Rajaram -
burningcross.net.
Refer
to Defaming
of Hinduism-I – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com and Defaming
of Hinduism-II – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com.
For
more on Christian Intolerance refer to
chapters on The Goa
Inquisition, European
Imperialism, Conversion,
and First Indologists.
Refer
to What
Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British
- www.larouchepac.com
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
***
Refer to Income
differences - How
the Right rationalizes racial inequality and
Hispanic
cheap manual labor
and Racial
differences in employment careers - Six
former and current employees of an Indiana Home Depot Inc.(NYSE:HD - news) store
have sued the world's largest home-improvement retailer, saying management
retaliated against them when they complained of racial discrimination and
harassment.
Watch video on Excesses
on Wall street - abcnews.com.
Suhash
Chakravarty has observed in his book:
"Katherine Mayo set the trend for a
new branch of literature whose preoccupation was to stretch the morbidity of
Hindu customs, superstitions and rituals to a point of absurdity and invest it
with a unique inhumanity." "It is small wonder that Katherine Mayo
ingeniously appended Indian nationalism with the superstitions of a ritualistic
Hinduism and fused them into a powerful anti-Indian demonstration. The impact of
Katherine Mayo was more than ephemeral. She rendered the racial arrogance of the
exclusive clubs into self-righteous assertion."
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty.
Penguin Books.1991 p. 76 -79). Refer to Insults to the
Mahatma, ignored by India
- rediff.com.
The
Hypocrisy of The Indian Church?
Casteism
in Christianity
With the advent of the
Christian missionaries in India under the patronage from the British rule in the
eighteenth century, a new chapter of proselytisation began. The missionaries
were able to use this weakness in Hinduism to convert those who were worst hit
by the caste prejudice. These missionaries concentrated their “charity” work
mainly in the tribal areas. They told the tribals that they were not Hindus,
that their indigenous culture and religion was different from Hinduism. They
taught them that Christianity, an alien religion was their own; that Jesus
Christ who was born and lived in the Middle-East was also a ‘dalit’ like
them and that Christianity was a religion without the caste bias and offered
them socio-economic equality. In their desire to lead a life of respect,
thousands of tribals got converted to Christianity assuming that they had found
an answer to the wretched caste system in Hinduism.
Little did they know that conversion to Christianity would not redeem them from
social discrimination and untouchability, because though Jesus never advocated
the caste system, Christianity in India was not free from the caste bias.
Christian outfits which criticized Hinduism for its caste system, practised
discrimination based on casteism in their Churches. In spite of the fact that
around 75% of the Christians are ‘dalits’ who got converted to Christianity
to lose their caste or ‘outcaste’ tag, Dalit Christians within the Church
were discriminated against and were denied powers within the ecclesiastical
structure.
In the churches or places of worship, which were generally laid out in the shape
of a cross, the Christians of upper caste have always humiliated their Dalit
fellow Christians by occupying the central part of the church, while the Dalits
were assigned to the wings. The Dalits were to take communion only after the
upper caste people had done so. In some Protestant churches, there were separate
cups for the Dalits at the eucharistic celebration. In the Catholic churches,
there were separate communion rails, separate cemeteries in Madras dioceses like
Trichy and Pondicherry. Such practices were also found in the Protestant
churches.
Indian
history appears to be remarkably free of large scale peasant revolts (like
The French Revolution and
The Russian Revolution)
of the kind that have provided the historians of Europe and China with materials
for assessing class antagonisms.
How can a person be a
‘Dalit’ when he is a Christian; for Christianity does not recognise the
caste system which is an evil prevalent only in the Hindu society.
Refer to Petition:
Christians against proselytism
Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com. Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
and
refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Watch
video - Brahmins
in
India
have become a minority
***
Rev. John
Duraisamy, an editor of Sarvaviyabi, a Tamil Weekly from the
archdiocese of Pondicherry-Cuddalore published two cartoons consecutively on 4
& 11th July 1999. These cartoons were an insult to
the 240 million dalits or the untouchables of India. The Archbishop of
Pondicherry who belonged to the same caste as the editor, was silent on the
matter.
Archbishop George Zur, Apostolic Pro-Nuncio
to India said while inaugurating the CBCI (Catholic Bishops Conference of India)
in 1991:
“Though Catholics of the lower caste and tribes form 60 per cent of Church
membership they have no place in decision-making. Scheduled caste converts are
treated as lower caste not only by high caste Hindus but by high caste
Christians too. In rural areas they cannot own or rent houses, however
well-placed they may be. Separate places are marked out for them in the parish
churches and burial grounds. Inter-caste marriages are frowned upon and caste
tags are still appended to the Christian names of high caste people. Casteism is
rampant among the clergy and the religious. Though Dalit Christians make 65 per
cent’ of the 10 million Christians in the South, less than 4 per cent of the
parishes are entrusted to Dalit priests. There are no Dalits among 13 Catholic
Bishops of Tamilnadu or among the Vicars-general and rectors of seminaries and
directors of social assistance centres.”
Logically, the term ‘Dalit Christians’ is
self-contradictory. How can a person be a ‘Dalit’ when he is a Christian;
for Christianity does not recognise the caste system which is an evil prevalent
only in the Hindu society.
When a person gets converted, he is
no longer a Hindu and thus does not fall into any category of the caste
hierarchy. But unfortunately, in India we do have this category of people who
got converted to Christianity in the vain hope of leading a respectable life.
Now while the progressive Hindu society is fast changing and the dalits are
increasingly gaining respect in the society and the state patronage in the form
of reservations, economic concessions, allotment of land, etc. , the
‘dalits’ who got converted do not get any such benefits in Christianity.
Conversion to Christianity has only added to the misery
of the dalits. Many Dalit Christian leaders refer to the twice-alienated
situation of the Dalit Christians in India, namely, discrimination within the
Church and discrimination by the State as they are denied Scheduled Caste status
in the Constitution, and the related privileges which come with that status. It
is high time that the dalits realised the true designs of the church that has
alienated them from their indigenous religion and culture, which is very much a
part of the myriad hues of Hinduism. The hypocrisy of the Indian Church, which
does not practice what it preaches, has been exposed. The Dalit Christians are
welcome back to the Hindu fold, to get back their due share, where the society,
which is in a reformative mode, and the state are making the best efforts to
redress the wrongs that have been done by their predecessors.
(source:
Casteism
in Christianity - indiapride.com).
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
Top of Page
Sociology
of groups in Ancient India
The
whole philosophy of Indian social organization may be summarized in one word,
varna-ashrama-dharma, which may be appropriately translated as Social
Federalism. This principle of social integration or synthesis was
understood as early as the times of the Samhitas in the Vedic age. The
Vedic seers realized that the best and surest way of saving society from
frequent suicidal chaos was to divide its members into specific groups, with
well-defined functions and privileges or rewards for each.
The
first group was that of the Brahmans, the
teachers and the priests. They were the custodians of the social and spiritual
heritage of the group and were to pass it on to the succeeding generations. They
were to preserve the purity of idealism, point the way to the Eternal discovered
by them through study and meditation, while their fellowmen were busy with
life’s daily tasks which left little leisure. The Brahman was a man of
intellect; he came from the mouth of Brahma.
Watch
video - Brahmins
in
India
have become a minority
The
second group was that of the Kshatriya. They
were men of action. They were the guardians of the race. They were soldiers,
sailors, civil servants and legislators. They kept the peace and order within
the group and protected it from alien aggression. Theirs was a life of service
and sacrifice; they came from the arms of Brahma.
The third group was that of the
Vaishyas, the merchants. They attended to
the distribution of the necessities of life. The vaishya was the merchant who
made wealth; he was a man of desire. He was born from the thighs of Brahma.
The
fourth and last group was that of the Sudras.
The sudra was engaged in producing life’s necessities, food, clothing and
shelter, so that the physical organism of the group was kept in good health. On
this group of working men depended the physical welfare of the whole community,
its industries, its prosperity. This working class was psychologically, a group
of undefined aptitudes, un-evolved, men of mechanical temperament, the common
men. They came from the feet of Brahma. Look where we will, whether it be a
primitive community or a modern nation, its population falls easily into these
four categories. According to Manu, there are no other groups.
Integration of various
factors
This division of men into four
types, the teacher, the warrior, the merchant and the laborer, is based on sound
psychology, ethics, biology and economics. Some men are intellectually by
temperament, some are active, some acquisitive and others undefined, none of
these. To each are assigned the task true to its type, in conformity with its
inherent temperament, svadharma. All together formed an organic whole. Under an
arrangement such as this, there is conservation of social energies; there is no
necessity of trial and error method. All are not equally endowed with equal
physical and mental capacities, but every one should be given an opportunity for
putting to use the faculties with which he has been endowed. Man should be
treated as man, and not as an economic hand. Danger of exploitation of one group
by another can be eliminated. Social harmony and conscious co-operation were
made the chief characteristics of human association. The
ideal was to evolve a functional and not an acquisitive society. It is this
varna dharma that has been the bulwark of Indian civilization and saved it from
wreckage of time. Each group had its duties and its own rewards or
compensation. The laborer had to work, but he was to be looked after as a
younger member of a family. The man of desire, the vaishya, was to acquire
wealth; power and authority was vested in the kshatriya, while all these were to
honor the teacher, to obey his religious and spiritual injunctions and accept
his guidance. The teacher was to be supported by the gifts of the other three
groups.
It was with the aid of this
mechanism that India sought to solve her racial problem. The
Aryans did not resort to the short cut of annihilating the primitive people with
whom they came into contact as the European races have done whenever they have
occupied lands in America, Asia, Africa and Australia, but they gave
them a place in their body-politic, assigning to them the task befitting their
intelligence and subordinate status. Observant scholars of the West have not
failed to notice the spiritual significance of the varna-ashrama-dharma and
given it its due praise.
Writing
of this varna-ashrama-dharma, Auguste
Comte (1798-1857) the great French sociologist, wrote in his book Système
de philosophie positive or
Positive Society:
“No institution has ever
shown itself more adopted to honor, ability to various kinds than this
polytheistic organization…In a social view, the virtues of the system are not
less conspicuous. Politically, its chief attribute was stability…As to the
influence on mortals, this system was favorable to personal morality, and yet
more to domestic, for the spirit of caste
was a mere extension of the family spirit….As to social morals, the system was
evidently favorable to respect for age and homage to ancestors.”
These principles formed the
background of the Indian social organization; on them was built a superstructure
of social institution, such as education, marriage, family and the state.
It was
realized by the Indian sociologists that both the individual and the group could
find self-expression and fulfillment only in and through a complex of social
institutions, based on dharma, co-operation, mutual aid, integration, synthesis,
the vision of the whole.
Balance,
orderly progress of individual and group, harmonious relationship between both,
was the ideal aimed at by the Indian sociologist.
(source: India:
A synthesis of cultures – by Kewal Motwani p
120 -128).
Top of Page
Discrimination
in Western Societies
Annie
Besant
(1847-1933), a prominent leader of India's freedom
movement, member of the Indian National Congress, and of the
Theosophical Society, delivered lectures in 1895 on Eastern Castes and Western
classes and pointed out:
"..these
distinctions exist and have existed from time immemorial, and are based upon
natural divisions. Caste is present in the East and class is present in the
West."
(source:
India: Essays and Lectures Vol. IV - By Annie Besant London. The
Theosophical Publishing Co. p.43-50.1895).
***
"
Where
there is Man, there are social divisions.. That's why you have the Boston
Brahmins in the US, the Zaibatsu in Japan, Parisian aristocracy, the Communist
Party of China, and what have you."
- writes Varsha Bhosle
-
columnist - rediff.com.
***
“Christian
nations have produced, and indeed in the name of Christianity, things even more
hateful than the pariah village of India."
- Nicol Macnicol (1870 - 1952)
Professor and author of Is
Christianity Unique p. 52.
Refer to Petition:
Christians against proselytism
"Wherever
Christians have passed, conquering and discovering, it seems as though a fire
has gone, consuming everything."
– Pedro de Cieza
de León Spanish Conquistador and historian of Peru. (c. 1550, Crónica
del Peru, Primera Parte, 2.66).
"It is the same ship
that brought the Bible which also carried guns and alcohol to
Africa
."
- Michael Baffoe
author of Demonizing
African Culture in the Name of Christianity
***
Dr
Charles Sabillon ( ?) author of several books, has observed in
his article Christianity and Islam: Which is the Worst?
"The origins of both
religions are based on the claims of two men, Jesus and Mohammed, and both men
proved equally incapable of demonstrating their divine mandate. From that
perspective, the two creeds are equally based on false propositions and can be
classified as nothing more than lies. Mohammed ordered
his followers to do it by the sword, and that is what they did once
he died. They launched into one of the most enthusiastic conquering ventures the
world has ever seen and forged an empire that extended from Central Asia to the
southwest of Europe.
Nations
were ruthlessly converted to Christianity by the sword just like Islam converted
Arabia, Central Asia, and Africa by the sword. With
his armies, Charlemagne preached the Gospel of the cross to the Saxons, the
Germans, the Bohemians, and the Hungarians. This was not the only
evangelizing military operation. There were also the infamous Crusades
from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, the Inquisition, and the conquest
of the American continent from the sixteenth century onwards. Throughout
the Middle Ages in Europe, the Christian Church
was the most militarily powerful organization in that continent. Being the
largest landowner and the biggest tax collector provided the Pope with huge
amounts of money, which were used to solidify his power by establishing a potent
armed force.
(source: Christianity
and Islam: Which is the Worst? - By Charles
Sabillon - americanchronicle.com).
"Of all the religions ...the
Christian religion has the most horrible record"
-Rupert Hughes, historian and author
of Why I Quit Going To Church
Refer
to Christianity’s
criminal history – By Karlheinz Deschner
Refer
to Quotes
from the The American Taliban
Gore
Vidal
(1925 - ) well
known American writer, the eminent historian, and a public figure for over fifty
years, in his Lowell Lecture at Harvard University given April 20, 1996
observed:
“When
the white race broke out of Europe 500 years ago,… inspired by a raging
sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to
bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler
religions. ………"
“I
regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see
no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion
based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god,
is not as useful to the human race …”
“More
people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the
history of the world.” "Christianity is such a silly religion."
(source:
Lowell
Lecture at Harvard University given - By Gore Vidal - April 20,
1996 and positiveatheism.com
and Gore
Vidal, in Time
magazine,
September 28, 1992, p. 66, from James A Haught,
ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief).
Refer
to chapter on European
Invasion and refer
to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Watch
The
Crescent and the Cross.
Refer
to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The
God Awful Truth. Refer
to World Conquering Creeds - By Dr. Koenraad Elst -
chapter on Glimpses
XVI.
Refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Watch
The
Bible is Bullshit - Penn
& Teller examine the Bible.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress
- By Howard Zinn
***
Here are some examples of glaring discrimination
of minorities in Egalitarian
Western societies:
America's
culturally displaced people?
1492
– was a landmark year for all natives of the world. It marks the beginning of
a systematic war waged against them by Western arms and religious ideology.
It marked to the beginning of their struggle to maintain their tradition,
their beliefs and their customs, their ways of seeing against the overwhelming
influence of Western culture.
The conquest was accompanied by genocide unparalleled in history. In the
century after
Columbus
over 2/3rds of native population of America
died due to disease – perhaps 50 million people.
Christopher
Columbus
wrote to the Queen
Isabella of Spain:
“Our
European civilization will bring light to the natives in the darkness but for
ourselves we will obtain gold and with gold we will be able to do what we
want.”
(source: The
Barbarian West - By Michael Wood).
Refer to The
Criminal History of Papacy and Sex,
lies and videotape: turmoil at the
Vatican
and
Vatican
forced to acknowledge debauched behaviour of priests and nuns and
Victims
of pedophile Christian priests and
Pedophiles
and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis - By Philip Jenkins.
(Note:
The legacy of European civilization to the world - Dark
Ages, Crusades, The Inquisition, Witch Hunt, Slavery, Colonization of Africa,
Asia, America and Australia, Imperialism, World Wars, Holocaust, Bombing of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Conversion and destruction of Native cultures to
Christianity, Drug Addiction, School shootings in American schools, Gun
violence, Racism, Clergy Sex Abuse, Viagra spamming Capitalism, quest
for individualism, Iraq war
….
).
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide
***
Ward
Churchill (enrolled Keetoowah
Cherokee) (1947 - ) is Professor of American Indian Studies with the Department
of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He
has achieved an unparalleled reputation as a scholar-activist and analyst
of indigenous issues in
North America
. He explores the history of holocaust and denial in this hemisphere, beginning
with the arrival of
Columbus
and continuing on into the present.
Churchill provides examples of how Euroamericans have played fast and
loose with dates, and more currently with the spiritual nature of Native
Americans. He theorizes that the attempt to understand the culture of Native
Americans has led to the dispossession of that culture.
“In actuality, the missions were death mills in which Indians, often delivered
en masse by the military, were allotted an average of seven feet by two feet of
living space in what one observer described as ‘specially
constructed cattle pens’. Although forced to perform arduous
agricultural labour by the priests from morning to night, six days a week, the
captives were provided no more than 1400 calories per day in low nutrient foods,
with missions like San Antonio and San Miguel supplying as little as 715
calories per day."
(source: A
Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas
1492 to the Present
- By Ward Churchill).
British
bioterrorism in Colonial Era
- "Bioterrorism
was one of the first things that was imposed against the Native Americans,"
Oyler said.
We gave them two
Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital," trader and land
speculator William Trent wrote in a journal. "I hope it will have the
desired effect."
Jimmie
D. Oyler, chief of the United Tribe of Shawnee Indians, whose territory is based
in Kansas, said decedents are aware of their ancestors' struggles.
Another common practice among European explorers was to give
"smallpox blankets" to the Indians. Since smallpox was unknown on this
continent prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans did not have
any natural immunity to the disease so smallpox would effectively wipe out
entire villages with very little effort required by the Europeans. William
Fenton describes how Europeans decimated Native American villages in his 1957
work "American Indian and White relations to 1830." From 1615 to 1619
smallpox ran rampant among the Wampanoags and their neighbors to the north. The
Wampanoag lost 70 percent of their population to the epidemic and the
Massachusetts lost 90 percent.
Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so
when the Pilgrims arrived they found well-cleared fields which they claimed for
their own.
A Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard
University's Perry Miller, praised the plague that had wiped out the Indians for
it was "the wonderful preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his
providence for his people's abode in the Western world."
It was not divine intervention that wiped
out most of the natives around the village of Patuxet but, most likely,
smallpox-embedded blankets planted during an English visit or slave raid.
(source: The
End of American Thanksgiving - blackcommentator.com and Times of
India). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
and Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
Indian
people mark 500 years of terrorism
The
Indian people never knew what act of violence or terror would befall them from
the invaders. But death did come. It came in the form of biological warfare when
small pox tainted blankets were distributed to the unsuspecting victims. It came
to them from the muzzles of guns that did not distinguish between warriors,
women, elders or children. It came to them in the ruthless name of Manifest
Destiny, the American edict that proclaimed God as the purveyor of expansion
Westward.
Christian priests burning the
'heathen' Native Americans.
Countless
cultures, rich spiritual traditions and ancient way of life have been destroyed
and tramped upon in the name of the “One Jealous God” of Monotheism.
Indian people were often slaughtered like animals and became "inferior"
cultures in their own land. The
Europeans, through book burning and bayonet, successfully, converted" them,
leaving very little trace of their noble civilization.
"The
(American) Indians of our country have little to be thankful for. They
have been decimated and placed on reservations that might as well be
concentration camps.
Note:
If Columbus had reached India instead of America, it is possible that Indians
would today be languishing in reservations!
(image
source: The
Dark Side of Christian History).
Watch
the
documentary The
Barbarian West - By Michael Wood.
Refer
to Things
They Don't Tell you about Christianity.
Watch
video - Christian
Missionary Misdeeds in India.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress
- By Howard Zinn. Refer
to The
Myth of Jesus Christ - By Nithin S - haindavakeralam.org.
Refer
to
In
the name of the Church
- By Rahul Karmarkar.
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide.
For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby
***
Indian people were often slaughtered like animals often while waving the
American flag in pitiful efforts to convince their killers that they were not
bad people.
At Wounded Knee in 1890, a slaughter took place that the white man often
called the last great battle between Indians and the United States Army. It was
not a battle. It was one the last heinous acts of terror against innocent men,
women and children.
Just
as the Crusaders believed it was their Christian duty to conquer and kill those
Arabs they considered as sub-humans and heathens, so too did America duplicate
their misguided logic against the First Americans. The Christians of the Crusade
de-humanized the Arabs, the early Americans de-humanized the Indians. A
philosopher once said, “Great Nations are judged by how they treat their
indigenous people,” and I am sad to say that America has failed to pass the
test of time.
After
500 years the Indian still lives in fear of the terror that is still lurking
just around the corner. The Indian people have lost so much in the past 500
years and they still live in terror of what will come next for them.
(source: Indian
people mark 500 years of terrorism - By Tim
Giago - indianz.com).
Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the former editor and publisher of Indian
Country Today.
Soul
Wound: The Legacy of Native American Schools
"The
white man's superior technology, hunger for land, and ethnocentrism seemingly
knew no bounds. The white threat to Indians came in many forms: smallpox,
missionaries, Conestoga wagons, barbed wire, and smoking locomotives. And in the
end, it came in the form of schools."
-
Dr
Cornel
Pewewardy.
***
"Kill the Indian, save the man" - was the motto
of Captain
Richard H. Pratt (1840
- 1924) Founder of the Carlisle Indian Schools.
When
extermination of Native Americans failed, "civilizing" became the new US
policy. This meant that the Indians would become "civilized" - read,
deculturalized - or else. The Carlisle
kids were forced to speak English only, practice Christianity
and work for no or low wages. Indian people were made U.S.
citizens, on June 2, 1924. After 80 years under the Indian Citizenship Act,
Native peoples remain the most economically impoverished segment of American
society, with all the attendant problems of poverty.

Whither
Human Rights and Democracy?
Waging
War through Education: Native Indian in traditional clothing (before) and
(after) finished pupil in White man's image.
Countless
cultures, rich spiritual traditions and ancient way of life have been destroyed
and tramped upon in the name of the “One Jealous God” of Monotheism.
Shed
Your Indian Identity? Social engineering of Native Americans was begun by the US
government to pry indigenous societies apart began in the late 1700s, when Moravian
missionaries were asked to serve as de facto federal emissaries to
the Cherokee Nation." Imbued with the mystical notion that white
"Aryan" genetics correlated to such "innate" endowments as
intellect and "moral capacity"- which in their minds corresponded with
the potential to adopt "civilized" (Christian) outlooks and values.
The
United States
government began this brutal attempt at social engineering in 1879. Breaking
rebellious Indians by indoctrinating their children in Anglo ways was considered.
a cost-effective alternative to war. But the personal cost to Native Americans
was incalculable…..

Native
American students arriving at boarding school.
Every
school had a disciplinary jail cell.. Some even offered bounties for returned
children. Contagious diseases often swept through the schools, and exposure to
the elements took the lives of many runaways. Photographs show vast cemeteries
of plain white headstones inscribed with children’s names. For decades, there
was little criticism of this abusive program from a nation steeped in dime
novels about “the savage Indian.” Instead, magazines such as Harper’s
Weekly praised the schools in a glowing articles...
An Indian
boarding school refers to one of many schools that were established in
the United States
during the late 19th century and early 20th century to educate Native American
youths according to Euro-American standards. These schools were primarily run by
missionaries. It has been documented that they were traumatic to many of
children who attended them, as they were forbidden to speak their native
languages, taught Christianity instead of their native religions and in numerous
other ways forced to abandon their Indian identity and adopt European-American
culture. There are also documented cases of sexual, physical and mental abuses
occurring at these schools.
Native
peoples alone are targeted, mascotted and humiliated in sports nationwide. This
is the status of Native America after eight decades of citizenship and more than
a century of "civilization."
Refer
to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
***
U.S.
and Canadian authorities took Native children from their homes and tried to
school, and sometimes beat, the Indian out them. Now Native Americans are
fighting the theft of language, of culture, and of childhood itself.
Dolphus
is one of more than 100,000 Native Americans forced by the
U.S.
government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began with President
Ulysses Grant's 1869 “Peace Policy,” continued well into the 20th century.
Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities took children as young as
five from their parents and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools; they
forced others to enroll in Christian day schools on reservations. Those sent to
boarding school were separated from their families for most of the year,
sometimes without a single family visit. Parents caught trying to hide their
children lost food rations.
Virtually
imprisoned in the schools, children experienced a devastating litany of abuses,
from forced assimilation and grueling labor to widespread sexual and physical
abuse.
Canada
imported the
U.S.
boarding school model in the 1880s and maintained it well into the 1970s—four
decades after the
United States
ended its stated policy of forced enrollment. Abuses in Canadian schools are
much better documented because survivors of Canadian schools are more numerous,
younger, and generally more willing to talk about their experiences.
(Note:
Most Native Indian communities (called
First
Nations in
Canada) have
been left bereft of their past, cut-off from their heritage and totally lacking
in confidence to take on life. Their language is dead and they have lost their
"civilizational
moorings" - all
in the span of a couple of generations.
They
now live off welfare and in many cases abuse drugs and alcohol.
A
2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada
documents the responsibility of the Roman
Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and
the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the
Canadian residential school system.
The
report says
Church
officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation,
prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation,
including the removal of organs and radiation exposure. In 1928
Alberta
passed legislation allowing school officials to forcibly
sterilize Native girls;
British Columbia
followed suit in 1933.(source:
Soul
Wound: The Legacy of Native American Schools - amenestyusa.org).
The purpose of Native American
boarding schools was to remove Native Americans from their home and cultures in
order to change their identities and lifestyles to be like the "white
man". Native American children were forced to think and act like the
dominant white culture and were not allowed to practice their traditional ways.
Not only were languages and beliefs changes, but appearances as well. Hair
styles, clothing and even names and body languages were changed. The intention
was to completely erase the Indian way of life.
Many
Europeans felt "called" to Christianize these "indios" in
the name of God. No one considered the fact that the Native Americans did not
want or need the White Man's God.
In their usual arrogance, the
thought never occurred to the Europeans that the Indians might not see a need to
join their religion and abandon their own.
U.S.
assimilation effort of Native Indians: "The
first Indian school was established in Carlisle, Pa., in 1879, by an
Indian-fighting Army officer named Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt
set the tone for the schools to come by vowing to "kill the Indian and save
the man" "We'd lost our hair and we'd lost
our clothes; with the two we'd lost our identity as Indians" a
Chiricahua Apache student said in 1886. Some government schools developed ties
with local churches. The churches, eager for converts,
would compete to attract students and to tried to strip culture away from the
children."
Till recently, it was US policy to promote sterilization among Native American
women, even applying it secretly during postnatal care or other
operations.
(source:
The
Saffron Swastika - By Koenraad Elst
Voice of India ISBN 8185990697
p. 819). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn.
Refer to
Things They Don't Tell
you about Christianity.
Plight
of Native Americans
(The 1830 Indian Removal Act
forced the
tribes into smaller and smaller reservations. Of the close to two million American Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts in the United
States, almost one million live on or near a reservation. Isolation makes it
harder for American Indians to move off the reservations and find good jobs in
towns and cities. This isolation also contributes to depression and the abuse of
alcohol among Indians. Today their culture is in tatters, their people have
been reduced to museum exhibits, and only vestiges of their wonderful belief
systems and customs remain. The same United States that issues high minded
admonitions to other countries today for human right abuses came to be because
of its systematic decimation of the native population. If Indigenous tribes of the Americas had a stronger and
richer culture, a consistent civilization; today Europeans would have been
absorbed by them like India did in past thousands of years. European settlers
would not have able to destroy 95% of the natives, and the language and religion
of Americas would not have been be English/Spanish or Christianity BUT Aztec,
Toltec, Maya and North American languages and religion).
(For more refer
to: History
Not Taught is History Forgot: Columbus' Legacy of Genocide).
Refer
to The
United States Government War Against the American Indian Movement -
aimovment.org and The
Covert War Against Native Americans - by Ward Churchill. Also
refer to Ancient
Struggle Continues, Scholars Remain Clueless - By Vrndavan Parker
The Puritan commander-in-charge John
Mason (1600 - 1672) after the Mystic
Massacre
(CT) massacre wrote:
"And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall
upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames,
where many of them perished ... God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and
the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven ... Thus did the
Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies": men,
women, children.
- So
"the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to
give us their land for an inheritance".
- Because
of his readers' assumed knowledge of Deuteronomy, there was no need for
Mason to quote the words that immediately follow:
"Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly
destroy them..." (Deut 20)
- Mason's
comrade Underhill recalled how "great and doleful was the bloody sight
to the view of the young soldiers" yet reassured his readers that
"sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with
their parents".
John
Endicott and his pastor wrote to the Governor asking for 'a share' of the
captives, specifically 'a young woman or girle and a boy if you thinke
good'."
- Reverend
Solomon Stoddard, one of
New England
's most esteemed religious leaders, in "1703 formally proposed to the
Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal
to purchase and train large packs of dogs 'to hunt
Indians as they do bears'."
(source: Victims
of Christian Faith and Christianity's
Criminal History
- By Karlheinz
Deschner).
"That the world’s
great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a
grand scale is not news, of course. By 1637 Massachusetts
Gov. John Winthrop (1588- 1649) was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the
successful
massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long
and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders.
Simply
put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most
of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the
beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our
heroic founding fathers.
The first president, George Washington
(1732 -1799) in
1783 said he preferred buying Indians’ land rather than driving them off it
because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest.
He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts
of prey, tho’ they differ in shape." Thomas
Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of
Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian
Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that
didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming
conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them." As the
genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore
Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the
continent as an inevitable process "due solely to
the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting
instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red
wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
American Founding Fathers, who wrote that “all men are created
equal” in the Constitution, owned slaves and viewed women as second-class
citizens.
Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most
of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the
beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our
heroic founding fathers.
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide
Watch
video - Christian
Missionary Misdeeds in India
***
(source: Give
Thanks No More - By Robert Jansen - outlookindia.com and
Redskin:
A 500 year Hate crime).
Refer to
The
Last War: Racism, Spirituality, and the Future of Civilization - By Mark L.
Perry Oxford). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
and Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com. Refer
to Things
They Don't Tell you about Christianity.
Refer
to The
United States Government War Against the American Indian Movement -
aimovment.org and The
Covert War Against Native Americans - by Ward Churchill. Also
refer to Ancient
Struggle Continues, Scholars Remain Clueless - By Vrndavan Parker and
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn.
Refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Watch
We
are Warlike people - By George Carlin.
Also
refer to Christian
video game draws anger - BBC.com - It's
about religious warfare. The way to win is to convert or kill. You have both the
Inquisition and the Crusades.
Sad
history of Native Americans...
"The
(American) Indians of our country have little to be thankful for.
They
have been decimated and placed on reservations that might as well be
concentration camps. The genocide of the indigenous population of the United
States has been much more effective than that of the Nazi’s extermination of
the Jews.
The population of the indigenous American Indian population in the United States
fell from 12.5 million in 1500 to approximately 250,000 in 1900. Some tribes
were completely wiped out. This means the settlers of the United States
exterminated entire cultures. These unique ways of life will be extinct
forever" ...The
people on reservations live in conditions worse than the conditions of the
people in Afghanistan and no one is dropping them rations. There is no
humanitarian aid for those people who are in need right here within the borders
of our own country. If any ethnic group in this country should get paid
reparations in it is the native people. But
how much is all the land from Florida to Washington State worth?"
(source:
The
American Genocide of Native Peoples - By
Missy Gallihugh).
In
1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of
the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our
Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were
surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside.
Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and
children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and
children had been murdered.
(source:
The
Real Story of Thanksgiving - By Susan Bates - Alternative Press
Review
- November
23, 2005).
Civilizational
Graveyards? Christianization of Alaska
decimated the populations and cultures of the
Native Americans. During the 15th through 19th centuries, their
populations were ravaged by displacement, disease, warfare with the Europeans,
and enslavement.
In
1890 there probably was not a single Christian Inupiaq (sing.) Eskimo. Twenty
years later, there was scarcely an Inupiaq
who was not a Christian. Among Alaska natives, the 20-to-29 age group
had the most suicides, 39 percent of the
total, while that age group ranked seventh nationwide. Roughly
80 percent of all Alaska suicide victims are male. Suicide among natives is
commonly linked with depression and mental illness, which often goes untreated
in rural areas, as well as with alcoholism and cultural and economic stress.
“They’ve
lost their culture, they don’t have a way to support their family, and then
what we see is a lot of alcohol and drug use, particularly alcohol,”
said Diane Casto, the section manager for prevention and early intervention for
the state’s division of behavioral health. “There’s such a feeling of
hopelessness, particularly for young men.” Christian
missionaries, followed by government bureaucracy and modern technology, have
long since transformed villages on the tundra into places where seal meat is
hung out to dry in the shadow of steeples, public schools and satellite dishes.
Many natives still hunt and fish for staples even as the outside culture
promotes materialism.
(source: In
Native Alaskan Villages, a Culture of Sorrow - nytimes.com).
Extinction
of Native Hawaiian Culture
Christian Missionary modus operandi - Destroy ancient world religions and put
their cultural artifacts in museums and amusement parks.
By the 1860s,
"in
Hawai'i the Reverend Rufus Anderson
(1796 - 1880) surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced
those islands' native population by 90 percent or more,
and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off
of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary
said, somewhat equivalent to 'the amputation of diseased members
of the body'."
- author
D.
Stannard in American
Holocaust.
***
Crippled
by western disease and stripped of its land, language and culture by 167 years
of determined Christian missionaries, the
old Hawaiian
inner way of the life is lost forever. In 1820, the first of fifteen companies
of Puritan missionaries arrived from
Boston
anxious to "save
the heathens from the pit of darkness." A small, traumatized
Hawaiian
population was easy prey. Churches were built, the Bible
preached, English aggressively taught, and the melodic, soulful Hawaiian
language soon vanished. So
the missionaries penned their own portrait of the Hawaiians - a bizarre
caricature of unclothed savages who needed the Word of God. These writing bled
the Hawaiians of their own self-respect and stigmatized them "uncivilized
and pre-Christian."
Queen
Lili'uokalani ascended the throne after the death of her brother
in 1891, she began work on a new constitution that would have effectively
reversed the 1887 document. Two years later, under threat of U.S. troops, she
yielded her authority, saying, "Until such time as the Government of the
United States shall ... undo the action of its representative and reinstate me
in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian
Islands." The queen was later imprisoned in Iolani
Palace for eight months for her participation
in an attempted 1895 revolt, until she relinquished her claim to the throne in
return for her release. She died in 1917 at 79.
(source: "We're
Not Extinct!" - Say Mystical Native Hawaiians - Hinduism Today).
Watch documentary of Noho
Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i
Refer to Native
Hawaiian and To
Steal a Kingdom - By Michael Dougherty and Media
Downplay
Hawaii
Uprising, Back Hawaiian Apartheid Bill. Refer
to Slokas
On The Mount – ‘Christianisation of
India
’ - Outlook
India
Magazine May 12, 2008. Watch
Why
we fight
(2005)
documentary
- Imperial
and technological arrogance of world's Super power:
describes the rise and maintenance of the
United States
military-industrial complex and its involvement in the wars led by the United States
during the last fifty years, and in particular in the 2003 Invasion of
Iraq.
The film alleges that in every decade since World War II, the American public
has been told a lie to bring it into war to fuel the military-economic machine,
which in turn maintains American dominance in the world.
The
Plight of Native Americans
The
bigotry and obscenities inflicted upon the American Indians by Christian
missionaries constitutes one of the most repugnant periods of American history. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de
Bienville (1680 - 1767) upon meeting the Nez Perce for the first time
wrote these words in his diary: "Their honesty is
immaculate and their purity of purpose most remarkable. They are more like a
nation of saints... than savages.”
One
might wonder how the nation's indigenous population became "inferior"
cultures in their own land, or how a nation could have committed such atrocities
in the name of "progress".
Less than two-thirds of
native Americans are high school graduates. Some 29% are homeless, and more than
half live in substandard housing.
More than a third of all
native American children aged 6-11 live in poverty.
The government estimates
that 50% of native Americans are unemployed, and at Pine Ridge the problem is
even worse - 73% do not have jobs.
It is home to 38,000 people,
but has no public transport network and only a few small native American-owned
businesses such as cafes, video stores and petrol stations.
(source: Showing
maturation, churches apologize to American Indians – By William Edelen – The
Philadelphia
Inquirer and The
Plight of Native Americans - BBC). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer
to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The
God Awful Truth.
Refer
to The
United States Government War Against the American Indian Movement -
aimovment.org and The
Covert War Against Native Americans - by Ward Churchill. Also
refer to Ancient
Struggle Continues, Scholars Remain Clueless - By Vrndavan Parker and
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
***
"I advance it, as a suspicion
only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by
time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of
body and mind."
- Thomas Jefferson, author
of the famous statement, "All men are created equal."
(source:
Dialog
on Whiteness Studies - By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com).
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn. Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com. Refer
to Plot
to Kill Barak Obama
***
Lynching in Black
America: a
dark dirty corner of the American experience and psyche
Germany took responsibility
for it's crimes, but The
United States has its own distinctive horror.
James
Gillispie Birney (1792 - 1857) in 1842 wrote
his pamphlet on American slavery. It was entitled: The American
Churches: The Bulwarks of American Slavery.
He told
his English audience: “The extent to which most of
the Churches in
America
are involved in the guilt of supporting the slave system is known to but a few
in this country.”
Frederick
Douglas (1818 - 1895), was an American abolitionist, editor,
orator, author, statesman and reformer. Called "The Sage of Anacostia"
and "The Lion of Anacostia", Douglass is one of the most prominent
figures in African-American history and
United States
history.
He said:
“I have to inform you
that the religion of the southern states, at this time, is the great supporter,
the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred. While
America is printing tracts and Bibles; sending missionaries abroad to convert
the heathen; expending her money in various ways for the promotion of
the Gospel in foreign lands, the slave not only lies forgotten--uncared for, but
is trampled under foot by the very churches of the land.
Douglas
said the most difficult obstacle to end slavery was how closely Christians had
connected it to their religion.
“The church and the slave prison stand next to each
other; the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the
pious devotions of his religious master. The church-going bell and the
auctioneer’s bell chime in with each other; the pulpit and the auctioneers’s
block stand in the same neighbourhood; while the blood-stained gold goes to
support the pulpit covers the infernal business with the garb of Christianity.
We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support missionaries, and
babies sold to buy Bibles and communion services for the churches.”
(source:
Slavery
and Christian Mythology
- nogodzone.com).
Lynching
became America's national pastime after the Civil War, at least in the South.
From the 1880s to the 1930s the US averaged over 100 lynchings a year, mostly in
the South, over 75% of the victims were black.
The oppression of slavery gave way to the
viciousness and animalism of Jim Crow, and for 100 years the "vicious
racists" (as Dr. Martin Luther King called
them) ruled supreme in the southern USA, as evil in their stupidity and cowardly
fear as the Nazis of Germany
were in their arrogance and megalomania.
"Newspapers on a number
of occasions announced in advance the time and place of a lynching, special
'excursion' trains transported spectators to the scene, employers sometimes
released their workers to attend, parents sent notes to school asking teachers
to excuse children for the event and entire families attended; the children
hoisted on their parents' shoulders to miss none of the action and accompanying
festivities. Returning from one such occasion, a nine-year-old white youth
remained unsatisfied. "I have seen a man hanged," he told his mother,
"now I wish I could see one burned."
These lynchings are
portrayed on picture postcards that were sent to friends and relatives of the
lynch mobs.
At
a number of country schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl
pupils could get back from [viewing] the lynched man. . .the practice of
lynching in America, which reached its peak from 1890 through 1930.
Lynching
became almost a necessary practice “that served to
give dramatic warning to all black inhabitants that the iron clad system of
white supremacy was not to be challenged by deed, word or even thought” (Friedman,
p. 191).
(source:
amazon.com
book review and crimelibrary.com
and American
Lynching). Refer to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
For more refer to Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
- By Hilton Als, et al
and
Rituals
of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries, Book 2, The
Feast of Blood - Orlando Patterson).
Refer to
The
Last War: Racism, Spirituality, and the Future of Civilization - By Mark L.
Perry Oxford).
Also
refer to Hate
group numbers top 800
in USA
- Southern Poverty Law Center.
In America, Mortgage lending institutions routinely discriminate Blacks from owing
properties in affluent suburbs of America, Racial profiling, Driving while
Black, Black Church burning,
(note: The intention for Burning Black Churches "was to strike
at the spirit and the soul of the Black community.") separate
churches for Black and White Americans, Social
discrimination, Blacks trapped in inner cities ghettos, and Police Brutality. According to the American Bar Association:
"The charges
were breathtaking: That in the heart of the most predominantly black city in the
country, the Christianity-based activist organization was forcing its
African-American employees to use the back entrance, and providing them separate
and unequal facilities for taking breaks and eating lunch." (source: Christian
Coalition’s racism). There are influential Christian
racist groups like KKK, Christian Identity and the National Organization For
European-American Rights (NOFEAR).
There
is the Holy Ghost, for African Americans, and St Landry, for whites. In between
is the cemetery where, by law and then by custom, people of the same faith have
been buried separately according to their race. In death as in worship the
binary tradition of the south's racial history have persisted in deep southern
states such as Louisiana. There is black and there is white and those basic
differences will follow you to the grave and on to eternity.
(source: Is
this the new face of rightwing deep south politics?
- guardian.co.uk).
Whither
Human Rights and Democracy?
Lynching of Black Americans, White crowd
watching. 1930.
Lynching
served to
give dramatic warning to all black inhabitants that the iron clad system of
white supremacy was not to be challenged by deed, word or even thought”
Refer
to O'Reilly
and McCain fear for the 'white, Chrisitan, male power structure'.
Plot
to Kill Barak Obama and
Ku
Klux Klan warns race war if Obama wins.
Refer to Things
They Don't Tell you about Christianity.
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide. For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby.
Refer
to Campus
murders of Indian students in US cause for concern
Refer to Dark
chapter of
US
history
- By Matthew
Bigg - tribuneindia.com and
Slavery
by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in
America
from the Civil War to World War II – By Douglas A. Blackmon
***
"Despite Jesus' call
for brotherly love, isn't Sunday the most segregated day in America? If not, how
does one explain the need for English-speaking African-Americans and Hispanics
of Christian faith to maintain separate places of worship?
Many
fundamentalist Christian groups in the US still maintain racial separation and
frown upon inter-racial dating."
(source: Proselytization
In India: An Indian Christian's Perspective - By C Alex
Alexander - sulekha.com).
Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and
Refer
to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The
God Awful Truth and
Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com. Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com.
Ku
Klux Klan warns race war if Obama wins
A Ku
Klux Klan leader has warned of a “race war” in the
United States
if Barack Obama wins his White House bid. Describing African-Americans
as aliens who have “invaded” the
United States
to destroy “Christian culture”,
Thomas Robb, 62, who styles himself as the Grand Knight of the Ku Klux Klan,
warned: “We’re in the middle of a race war.”
(source:
Ku
Klux Klan warns race war if Obama wins - sify.com).
Segregation
persists in town behind Brown
Private-public school choice maintains separateness 50 years later
Summerton, South Carolina - Take a
trip to Scott's Branch Public High School, and you'll be greeted by a student
body that is more than 99 percent Black. Fifty years
after the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, residents say schools in
this school district are as segregated as ever. For proof, they point
to a nearby private school, Clarendon Hall, which is 90 percent white and
admitted its first black student only four years ago.
(source:
Segregation
persists in town behind Brown - msnbc.msn.com). Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
Mark L. Perry author of The
Last War: Racism, Spirituality and the Future of Civilization has
observed:
“Racism
is not in our vocabulary,” “It is not brought up in polite
conversation because, like UFOs, it causes
embarrassment among mature, well-educated realists and rational thinkers.
Racism is a myth.”
The Last
War, however, is much more than a polemic about lingering
discrimination. Rather, it is an examination of how deeply racism, and more
specifically, the institution of slavery, has cut across the face of Western
civilization. “My family was illegal in 16 states of the United States until
1967,” he writes, noting that laws forbidding
marriage between blacks and whites were common throughout US history.
“These laws characterized people of mixed racial background as social and
legal abominations. He ultimately lays blame for racism, in America at least, to
a mercantilist, Protestant culture that allowed
early American colonists to rationalize that Africans were somehow subhuman and
therefore exempt from a Christian application of the Golden Rule.
To succeed
at maintaining this deception, he writes, slavery
required the segregation of churches (so that slaves could not become free by
converting to Christianity), laws against intermarriage, and laws allowing the
violent restraint of slaves.
(source: Some
“impolite” conversation about racism - By George Ronald). Refer to Interracial
marriage - South Africa, Canada, Australia and the United States are but
a few countries that have had regulations banning interracial marriage. Bob
Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina has had a troubled record of
outwardly prohibiting interracial dating and marriage on its campus. For
decades, the university used biblical references to justify its position while
threatening any student with expulsion for breaking this rule.
Mormon Christians
still baptize Holocaust Jews
Researchers say that Mormons have continued
to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims into their faith despite a
promise to discontinue the practice.
The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long collected names from
government documents and other records worldwide for posthumous baptisms. Church
members stand in to be baptized in the names of the deceased non-Mormons, a
ritual the church says is required for them to reach heaven.
"It's
ridiculous for people to pretend they have the key to heaven," said Rabbi
Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
"And even if they say they want to do somebody a favor ... it's not a
symbol of love. It's a symbol of arrogance."
(source:
Mormon
Christians still baptize Holocaust Jews
- newsyahoo.com). Refer to Posthumous
Baptisms Still An Issue - By Julie Wiener -
The Jewish Week). Refer to Mormons
Still Baptizing Dead Jews. Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel. Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
Ethnic
Cleansing in New Orleans?
"We
finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God
did."
- Richard Baker (R-La), September 09, 2005.
- Online
Journal. Refer to Study:
New Orleans could lose 80 percent of black population and
This
is turning into the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans - guardian.co.uk.
New
Orleans Unmasks 'Apartheid - American Style' - By Jason Miller
Even the typically compliant mainstream media made strong note of the skin color
and socio-economic status of most of the hurricane survivors, whom the federal
government left to fend for themselves for several days. Stranded on roof-tops,
taking refuge on islands formed by broken slabs of highway, hiding in attics, or
clinging to survival inside the miserable, dangerous squalor of the
"Super" Dome, tens of thousands of poor black Americans exposed a
truth they have known for years.
68% of the population
was black. Less than half owned their homes. Almost 30% lived below the poverty
line. An estimated 134,000 residents did not have cars or other viable means to
evacuate.
Black
lawmakers angry about federal response to Hurricane Katrina - Black
members of Congress expressed anger Friday at what they said was a slow federal
response to Hurricane Katrina. Note: 2/3 of New Orleans
population was Black African Americans. More than 1300 bodies have
been found. - Katrina
Death Toll May Never Be Known - yahoo.com.
Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
Refer
to A
20-Point Plan To Destroy Black New Orleans
Refer
to New
Orleans will seek aid from other nations - alternet.org. - Shortcomings in aid from the U.S. government are making New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin look to other nations for help in rebuilding his
hurricane-damaged city. Nagin, who has hosted a steady stream of foreign
dignitaries since Hurricane Katrina hit in late August, says he may seek
international assistance because U.S. aid has not been sufficient to get the
city back on its feet.
Refer
to Racism in an institute of Higher learning?
Harvard
Police Target Of Racism Probe
White
Supremacists, Crowd Clash with Holocaust
survivors in
Boston
White supremacists clashed
with an angry crowd outside Faneuil Hall, where Holocaust survivors and their
families were commemorating the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Inside the historic
meeting house, Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren lit white
candles to commemorate the estimated 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.
Outside, 10 to 15
members of the Arkansas-based group White
Revolution were escorted by officers to a designated protest area
across the street. The officers, many in riot gear, formed a barricade between
the protesters and about 100 people
who angrily shouted at them to leave Boston.
(source: White
Supremacists, Crowd Clash with Holocaust
survivors in Boston - yahoo.com). Refer to Christian
Identity Movement. Refer
to White
House Defends Human Rights Record
and Iraq
Torture - memory hole.org and Human
Rights News
and
Refer
to Bible
thumpers: Americans
are being increasingly stereotyped as stupid - By Arvind Kumar -
indiareacts.com). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel. Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com. Refer
to O'Reilly
and McCain fear for the 'white, Chrisitan, male power structure'
Refer to Racism
in
America
and Germany. Don
Imus controversy and German
Army Did Not Fire Man in Video
Also refer to Klan
holds rally in Gettysburg - yahoonews.com - About 30 Ku Klux Klan
members proclaimed hatred for blacks, Jews, gays and Latinos as they stood
behind barricades at the Civil War battlefield where Abraham Lincoln delivered
the Gettysburg Address.
Also
refer to Hate
group numbers top 800
in USA
- Southern Poverty Law Center.
Georgians
Plan Whites-Only Prom Party: Albany, GA -
"...parents
and students organized separate proms for whites and blacks after school
officials stopped sponsoring dances, in part because they wanted to avoid
problems arising from interracial dating. After
school integration, separate proms were common in the rural South. Taylor County
was among the last to cling to the practice."
The
prom land of American teens: For 31 years, parents and students
organized separate proms for whites and blacks. For just one time
last year, the school decided to have a joint prom, but this year some students
have organised the "whites only" prom, causing outrage across the
country.
(source:
Yahoo.com
and The
prom land of American teens
- Times
of India
-
By
Chidanand
Rajghatta
May 12' 2003
New software tools widely available on the
Internet are helping hate groups jump on the video game bandwagon with offerings
such as Ethnic
Cleansing — where players become cyber-Klansmen and
stalk minorities through a virtual urban landscape. And a recent
report by the Anti-Defamation League says there is a rise in hate games on the
Web.
(source: Hate
Groups Use Freely Available Software to Make Racist Games
-
abcnews.com).
Kahled Ahmed,
columnist from Pakistan, has made an interesting point about the American way of
life:
"The
American way of life can be quite isolating because of the concept of
equal-but-separate rights, allowing individuals and whole communities to live in
their separate identity bubbles.
"
(source: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/news9.htm).
Hinduphobia in America
in early 1900's
Fear
and loathing towards Asians, towards people of Indian origin,
towards Hindus -- this is a substratum of Indian American or
Asian American history that has yet to find its way into
American classrooms. I am, of course, referring to a
period in American history when a Hindu, or any person of Asian
origin in America, was condemned as an undesirable
alien, as a lesser breed, or a benighted heathen.
The
media as well as politicians had no hesitation in claiming that
the people of India were undesirables of the worst kind –
“the filth of Asia.”A group of residents of Glen Park and Mission districts of San
Francisco wrote: “The Pacific coast is fast becoming the
dumping ground of the most undesirable people whose morals and
customs make an assimilation with our citizens an
impossibility.” They termed the
Indians “the new pest from Asia”.
It
was racism fuelled by fear and loathing towards people of a
different color, a different religion, and a different culture.
And though it happened nearly a hundred years ago, faint echoes
of this Hinduphobia or Indiaphobia still resonate in the
American psyche.
As
author Harold
Robert Isaacs
reminds us, "The image of the very benighted heathen Hindu
is perhaps the strongest of all that come to us out of India
from the past and it retains its full sharpness up to the
present day."
Missionary
Views
The
statements made by American missionaries in India in their
letter, books, sermons, and lectures was in a large part
dominated by a powerful sense of revulsion at Hindu practices. A
mild example would be the complaint, in 1852, about "the
deplorable ignorance and stubborn prejudices of the Hindus,
together with the caste system, their entire absence of all
correct principles, and finally their moral degradation."
The Hindus, one might more commonly have heard, were "lifetime
liars and worshippers of a stupendous system of carnal
idolatry." Their
temples would be "ornamented with all the orders of
infernal architecture, displaying all the sins in the human
figure and exhibiting evil spirits under the significant emblems
of serpents, toads, etc."
Letters prepared
for Sunday school children stressed "mountains of
superstitions," "the heathens in darkness," and
"the Hindu mind." The
whole literature was filled, author Bernard Stern remarks,
"with a positively morbid preoccupation with temple
prostitutes and lingamites," with lurid illustrations, and
in general with material more titillating than inspirational.
Indian
religions, said a writer in the Christian
Century
in 1905, were "debauched with deeds of lust and
blood...Many of the Indian deities, given to lustful amours, are
especially worshipped by the people....It is not surprising that
religion in India is not only divorced from morality but married
to vice...much indecency exists in India under the guise of
religion, many of the temple dancing girls are merely
consecrated prostitutes, and in many cases respectable women are
led to lives of shame."
(source:
Fear
and Loathing: Hinduphobia in America - By
Francis C. Assisi - Indolink).
Refer to
The
Last War: Racism, Spirituality, and the Future of Civilization - By Mark L.
Perry Oxford). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
and Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
The
Great White Wall - Anti-Hindu Riots of 1907
The Bellingham riots
"The preservation of the
Caucasian race upon American soil" was the constitutional objective of the Asian
Exclusion League. To achieve that end they pressured
lumber mills into laying off Indian workers, lobbied to stop further
immigration, and fomented riots to drive Indians from their homes. While not
condoning the crude methods of the Asian Exclusion League, still the United
States Congress, Judiciary, and Bureau of Immigration were sympathetic to their
objective and the immigrants from
India
found themselves confronted by a great white wall.”
Having
crossed the hurdle of admission to the United States, immigrants from India
faced resistance from European and American laborers who were in competition
with them for jobs and who feared they would be willing to work for lower wages.
This resistance assumed tangible form in racist organizations such as the Asian
Exclusion League.The group was responsible for violent incidents in
Canada
and the
U.S.
, such as the "Anti-Hindu" riot in 1907 at
Bellingham,
Washington.
On
the night of September 4, 1907, a mob of between 400 and 500 white men attacked
Bellingham
's Hindu colonies. Many of the Hindus were beaten. Some escaped from their
quarters in their night clothes. Several sought refuge on the tide flats. Others
were driven toward the city limits or jailed. During the course of the
disturbance, the indignation of the crowd was fanned to action by speakers who
addressed impromtu audiences on the street corners and incited citizens to
"help drive out the cheap labor."
Note:
President
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) of the Republican
Party, was a strong supporter of British
colonialism in
India.
In
fact in an address to a Methodist Episcopal Church
group in January 1909, he stated that he considered British rule of India
to be:
"..the
greatest feat of the kind…since the
Roman Empire
…one of the most admirable achievements of the white race during the past two
centuries…".
His
feelings would set the tone for collusion between the British and American
governments to squelch efforts by Indian students (in the "land of the
free" -
America) to support freedom in India.
The
Asian Exclusion League(AEL) provided a medium through which the more
extreme racists and the politicians could meet to achieve their objectives. The
British colonial government, in its mad rush to retain its control over India,
actively spied on and conspired with the all too willing American government to
crush any support among Indians in America for the Indian freedom movement. The
environment of hatred and bigotry created by these forces led to very
interesting legislative (by the U.S. Congress) and judicial (by U.S. Supreme
Court decisions) maneuvers to remove Indians from America.
(source:
The
Great White Wall: South
Asian pioneers in
California
1899 - 1965
and The
Indian Caste System and the British - infinity foundation). Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.Refer to
Pedophiles
and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis - By Philip Jenkins -
Since 1982, 400
Catholic clergy (out of a total of 50,000 American priests) have been accused of
sexual misconduct with minors.
The
target for nuclear attacks was always
Japan, never
Germany
Japan
was always the target for American nuclear attack, and it was never
Germany. In a memorandum dated the 23rd of April 1945, General
Leslie R. Groves,
Director of the Manhattan Project wrote to Henry
L. Stimson, Secretary of War,
which stated, "The target is and was always expected to be Japan." And we ask, why so?
Christian
Intolerance and Racism during World War II
An
imperialistic ideology that killed million of Jews in Europe and Japanese in Asia.
General Leslie Groves, Henry
L Stimson, Ernie Pyle and Atomic mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.
The
target for nuclear attacks was always
Japan, never
Germany.
Japanese were looked upon (by the Americans) as, something
subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches and
mice." Japan
was the target for the
nuclear attack simply on grounds of race.
Refer
to Campus
murders of Indian students in US cause for concern
***
The
answer is obvious from the writings of Ernest
Taylor Pyle
(1900- 1945)a hugely popular American war correspondent who won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1944, and kept millions of Americans informed of the progress of the
war.
Pyle wrote, "In Europe, we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as
they were, were still people, but out here (in
Asia
Pacific), I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon (by the Americans)
as, something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches
and mice".
Japan
was the target for the nuclear attack simply on grounds of race.
(source:
Western Hypocrisy: Caste is anathema
but racism is okay?
How the cream of Indian intellectuals were treated in USA.
South
Asians have been harassed, intimidated, assaulted, humiliated, abused, and even
killed because of what they represent through their color, their religion, their
language, and their culture. And it continues to this day.
Take for example an incident from 1929: as a result of the
humiliation that he received from U.S. immigration officials, the poet
and Nobel
Laureate, Rabindranath
Tagore
(1861-1941)
was forced to cancel his fourth
lecture tour. That
incident prompted the Nobel laureate to remark that if Jesus Christ himself were
to come to America, he would be kicked out of the country - because he was an
Asiatic.
Tagore explained his sentiments later by stating, "I
arrived at Los Angeles, and I felt something in the air - a cultivated air of
suspicion and general incivility towards Asiatics… I felt that I should not
stay in a country on sufferance. It was not a question of personal grievance or
of ill-treatment from some particular officer. I felt the insult was directed
towards all Asiatics, and I made up my mind to leave a country where there was
no welcome for ourselves… I have great regard for your people. But I have also
my responsibility towards those whom you classify as colored people of whom I am
one. I am a representative of Asiatic peoples and I could not remain in a
country where Asiatics are not wanted."
Another
Nobel laureate, astrophysicist Dr.
Subramanyan Chandrashekar of the University
of Chicago, confessed to biographer Kameshwar
Wali (Chandra:
A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar) that he was subjected to humiliating experiences in America
because of the color of his skin. Chandrashekhar was born in India, educated in
England, and lived all his professional life in the U.S until his death in 1991.
In the 1930s Chandrashekar taught, conducted research, and
collaborated with the United
States War Department on the atomic weapons research
project. He became the first
nonwhite person to be appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago. According
to Wali, the chairman of the physics department summarily opposed the
appointment of Chandrashekhar to the faculty "because he was an Indian, and
black". The dean, Henry G.
Gale, also did not approve of the participation
of the brilliant young Indian astronomer in teaching an elementary course in
astronomy for precisely that reason. That objection was not lifted until the
president of the university intervened.
(source:
The
Indian as "Black White" and as "Nigger" in USA -
indolink.com). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.
Also refer to Insults to the
Mahatma, ignored by India
- rediff.com.
Refer to
Racism
at JP Morgan
Watch No
end in sight documentary (2007) and refer to The
Looting of Baghdad museum:
US
government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
- The
pillaging of the
Baghdad
Museum
is a tragedy that has no parallel in world history; it is as if the Uffizi, the
Louvre, or all the museums of
Washington
D.C.
had been wiped out in one fell swoop. Some compare the event to the burning of
the Alexandria Library. Eight thousand years of human history has been erased in
two days.
Why
Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
Racism or a
parochial neglect for so long of the non-western and non-Christian world?
Up
to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans and
Americans. Scholars who have examined the issue are now willing to
admit that the assertion that Gandhi was "deprived" of the 1937 Peace
Prize due to British pressure is a serious charge and, as with Abrams´
insinuation that racism may have been the
motivating force behind Gandhi´s omission, may contain more than a grain of
truth.
Indian
essayist J. Das asserts "Britain was highly perturbed when it learned that
the doughty naked fakir was being considered for the prize. If he did get it, it
would have meant severe political repercussions in Britain´s colonies."
According to Das,
"British
government officials silently castigated the European zeal to award the peace
prize to Gandhiji.”
"Anthony
Eden - Winston
Churchill (who had denigrated Gandhi as a Naked
Fakir)'s son-in-law, silently worked overtime on this." The
basis for this assumption is the "unscheduled and mysterious movements of
British officials between London and Oslo" as reported by the Times and
other British papers at the time. "The brain behind all this", Das
adds, "was Eden."
There is, however, a sly British Foreign Office document that bears on the issue
a little more closely. The comment on the file, signed by a British diplomat,
states that "If the Nobel Committee wish to make fools of themselves I
suppose we cannot prevent them."
In his book ´Mahatma Gandhi: A New Approach,´ Mauritian Indian writer B.
Bissoondayal states that ´For all time to come some will want to know why
Tolstoy was refused the Nobel Prize, and later, Gandhi. He informs us that
although Gandhi “Was acclaimed the world over as the greatest man of peace, he
went unnoticed by the Nobel Committee even when a formal proposal was made in
1937…It was too much for British Raj to agree to
Gandhi being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
(source: Why
Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? - indolink.com). Refer
to chapter on European
Imperialism.
Eugenics
or Scientific Racism
Eugenics
is controlling human reproduction in order to reduce the number of those that
the Elite perceive as inferior to create a 'master race' with 'desirable'
genetic characteristics. Eugenics was born in
England; Sir
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles
Darwin, coined the term, which is Greek for "well born," in
the 1880s. But it was Americans who put into practice Galton's theory that
society should encourage healthier people to have more children and unhealthier
ones to have fewer. Alarmed by increased immigration
and by the huge native black population, America's elite discovered in eugenics
a "scientific" basis for their belief in white, Northern European
supremacy.
Eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but
in fact, it started in America. Not only that, it continued here long after
Hitler's Germany was in ruins. At the height of the movement - in the ‘20s and
‘30s - exhibits were set up at fairs to teach people about eugenics. It was
good for America, and good for the human race. That was the message.
(source:
Supremacist
Science - Mother Jones.com and Eugenics
in America - 60 minutes). Refer to
The
Last War: Racism, Spirituality, and the Future of Civilization - By Mark L.
Perry Oxford). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.
Refer
to
Gay
Bashing in the Bible - "If a man also lie with mankind, as he
lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall
surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." Leviticus
20:13.
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide
Of
the 2 million Americans in prisons, two-thirds are non-white. Many feel oppressed by the white power
structure and sentencing disparities, which too often fall most harshly on
minorities.
(source: http://www.saag.org/papers12/paper1174.html).
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
and Refer
to Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
Racial
profiling grounds Asians in US -
Times
of India
Sporadic
incidents of South Asian passengers being off-loaded from commercial airplanes
are being reported amid fears of unofficial racial profiling in the US.
Dot-Busters
(In 1987, Indians became targets of racial
attacks in New Jersey. The Indian woman in her 'native dress', with the
vermillion dot on her forehead, was easily seen as an embodiment of sheer
otherness, and so she has been perceived by the so-called
"dot-busters", a gang of white teenagers operating in New Jersey who
had already been responsible for several violent crimes against Indians. Their
demand was that "Indians get out of town." (refer to the story: Racism
in Pittsburgh).
Hindu-bashing
Chicago Radio and TV talk show airs -
A campaign launched by Chicago radio and TV talk-show host Tony Brown
purports to "inform" the American public about Hinduism. "India
Tribune likes to share its disgust and anguish with its readers." managing
editor J. V. Lakshmana Rao wrote in a front
page story in their July 3, 2001 edition. This country (USA) will take very many years for
a black to
become president, where as India already has a Dalit as president.
(source: India
Tribune - By Ed Viswanathan).
Thus, Indians/Hindus are often faced
with racial discrimination-"dot busters" in America, skinheads in
England, neo-Nazis in Germany and regressive French snobbery. According
to Prabha
Chandran:
"Be it the
“Whites Only” National Front in Britain, the followers of
right wing racist
Jean Marie Le Penn in France or the neo-Nazis in Germany, Indians are still
waiting to be welcomed as legitimate members of the multicultural societies
these countries claim to be."
(source: Asians
vs Whites: Oldham gives birth to Asian racism - Prabha
Chandran).

Religion based racial bigotry
in USA.
The
descendants of those who invented the grim cruelties of plantation slavery and
established the Southern Baptist Convention to provide it with Christian
justification should have hesitated to preach equality.
Refer
to O'Reilly
and McCain fear for the 'white, Chrisitan, male power structure'
Refer to How
to destroy a people in god’s name - By Dr. Gautam Sen - india-forum.com and
Plot
to Kill Barak Obama. Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the
film The
God Awful Truth and
Take
a look at Slavery - godisimaginary.com.
Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn. Refer
to Things
They Don't Tell you about Christianity. Refer
to The
Dead Sea Scrolls - An Eastern View of a Western Crisis - By N. S. Rajaram -
burningcross.net. Watch Robertson
Says All Other Religions Worship Demonic Powers - Rightwingwatch.org. Refer
to The
United States Government War Against the American Indian Movement -
aimovment.org and The
Covert War Against Native Americans - by Ward Churchill. Also
refer to Ancient
Struggle Continues, Scholars Remain Clueless - By Vrndavan Parker. Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide. Refer
to Campus
murders of Indian students in US cause for concern
***
US
radio jocks air abuse call (with transcript)
Yet
another instance of backlash against outsourcing to India has been reported. And
this time its laced with hate, sexism and racism.
American radio jockeys Star
and Buc Wild — apparently big names in their field —
in an attempt to be 'funny' broadcast an abusive call
that was placed to an Indian call-centre worker. The 'call' was aired in their
morning show on Philadelphia's Power 99 FM radio.
Apparently, the wakeup crew at the radio station thought it was hilarious, but
it has provoked outrage amongst Indians back home and those living in the US.
(source: US
radio jocks air abuse call (with transcript) - timesofindia.com. Radio
hosts suspended for abusing Indian).
Racism
is just a phone call away
This is only a random
(and printable) selection from the thousands of messages in cyberspace calling
for a campaign to harass Indian call centre operators, to put an end to the
offshoring of jobs. I made an Indian woman
cry and promise to quit her job in 60 seconds. You can do it too!"
(source: Racism
is just a phone call away - timesofindia.com).
Refer to
The
Last War: Racism, Spirituality, and the Future of Civilization - By Mark L.
Perry Oxford). Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
In Canada:
Temple
in Canada burnt to the ground - Times
of India
In
what police are calling a backlash hate crime, a 17-year-old Hindu temple in
Hamilton, Ontario, was burned to the ground on September 17.
"We
have identified it as a hate crime," Sgt Maggie McKittrick of the Hamilton
police force said. She said there has been a spate of incidents against Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs, "but the temple burning has been the most significant
hate crime."
Plight
of Native Canadians.
Rampant child abuse in church run schools
results in thousands of lawsuits in Canada. For more than a century, Native
Canadians were abused emotionally, physically and sexually in schools run by
Christian Churches. The goal was to de-Indianize the children, a process which
robbed them of their rich, cultural and linguistic heritage.
(source: http://www.kahtou.com/images/apr_tlkingstck.html).
Church's Face Bankruptcy.
Rampant child abuse in church run schools results in
thousands of lawsuits. - For more than a century Native Canadians were abused
emotionally, physically and sexually in schools run by Christian churches. The
goals of the schools, with government support, was to de-Indianize the children,
a process which robbed them of their rich cultural and linguistic heritage.
(source: Hinduism
Today March/April 2001). Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust.
In Australia: The Lost/Stolen
Generation in Australia
(For more information refer to article in
Time Magazine -
http://www.cnn.com/ASIANOW/time/magazine/2000/0904/index.html
). The
Aborigines, Australia’s original inhabitants before white settlers arrived,
today live in appalling conditions. Crippled by crime, disease, drug abuse and
alcoholism, Aboriginal activists say they have been treated as less than human
for 200 years. Before the first whites arrived, the Aborigines inhabited the
continent for over 40,000 years. A people with a rich culture and an almost
mythical bond with their land, they have today only barely managed to survive a
systematic government effort to wipe out their race. “This country, from a
black perspective, is by far the most racist country in the world,” said
Aboriginal activist Lyall
Munro, in a report done by ABC
News.
(source:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/australia000914.html).
Refer to the movie Rabbit
Proof Fence -
tells the story of a government policy that required "half-caste"
children (whose mothers were Aboriginal and whose fathers were white) to be
taken from their homes by the authorities to be trained to work as servants.
Aborigines
may have numbered as many as a million in 1788 but had dwindled to 93,333 in
1901, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They were forced off
their land after British settlers began arriving in 1788 and then brutally
suppressed. The latest Australian census reports the Aboriginal population as
427,094 among a population of more than 20 million. Their story encapsulates in
miniature the abysmal status of many of Australia's indigenous people. The
conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard has pushed the needs of
the Aborigines to the sidelines, with few complaints from his white
constituency, analysts say.
"Aborigines
are effec |