[QUOTE=Surya Deva;57559]In an article I was reading from Rajiv Malhotra he mentioned that it is not a clash of civilisations we want, but a dialogue between civilisations. I understand what he is saying, that if we take a militant attitude against the West that it will be alienating to them and thus we will not be able to persuade them, therefore we should be friendly and polite and discuss with them our representations and persuade them to represent us fairly and accurately. But this will always put us at the receiving end. This is an asymmetrical dialogue where we are trying to convince West to remove their false representations of us. Here we are at the receiving end of the abuse and the West is aggressing against us and has been doing this continuously ever since they came to our country. So the solution to this is to appease them and convince them to be nice? - “Please Mr Western man, can you please remove this distortion of our history and culture from your textbooks, pretty please, with cherries on top? We will throw our women in as well. Deal?”
I truly hate this Gandhian approach that we have adopted in our dialogue with the West. We are expected to be nice, polite and tolerant, while even today they call our respected gurus homosexual pedophiles, give awards to anti-hindu publications, and place in the highest positions of authority anti-Hindu scholars like Wendy Doninger - who rather than getting a public flogging - is getting accloades. Are we always going to be the victims in this dialogue? First we complained how they distorted our history, mistranslated our texts and moaned about it, and then when we realised that nothing was being done to change it, we simply went silent and let our future generations learn the false and distorted history and read the distorted translations of our texts. Today, our Yoga, Ayurveda and Vedanta is being appropriated, and again all we are doing is moaning about it.
We are in a rather pathetic position here by taking this Gandhian dialogue approach. Should we not accept we are not dealing with noble and honourable people? Wasn’t that clear during the East India company times itself? It is not a dialogue with civilisations we need, but a clash of civilisations. Power respects power. Why do you think China gets so much respect in the West, despite China positioning itself as its arch rival? Why do you think the West represents China’s history so positively and views its history and civilisation as great? Because China had the courage to stand up to the West. Something Indians have not done, but need to do.
You need to take the same approach as the West did with us. They wanted to destroy our civilisation by destroying our culture by misrepresenting and essentialising the caste system, cows, wife-burning and superstition in our culture. We Hindu dharmic people don’t have to misrepresent Western history and essentialise negative things to it, we just have to represent its real history and it will become clear how negative its essences are, this alone will destroy this civilisation. You see our fight is not with the common man of the West, our fight is its culture and its institutions - when the common man sees how decrepid his own culture is, they will adopt our dharma culture. Indeed, that is exactly what is happening. The so-called new emerging view of the West is all based on dharma. Although, they have tried very hard to pretend it is their own indigenious development and not credit the dharma sources, this has ultimately proven to be a double-edged sword, because it has increased the awareness of dharma culture in the West, even amongst the common man.
We have to raise the awareness of dharma culture by doing two things
- Not dialogue, but fight against the misrepresentations of our culture. Wendy Doniger should not even be a scholar, people like this need to be removed from courses like Hindu studies. Hindus need to campaign against it and make sure their voice is heard.
- Assertion of Hindu pride. We should not be afraid to admit that we do think we are the greatest civilisation in history and we think our culture is superior. Our approach should not be, “Hey have you heard about Panini” it should be “Hey, let me tell you about Panini”
Hindus can learn a lot from the Chinese. Every Chinese person I met has been proud of their country, civilisation, culture.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I also hate this pacifist approach. Just look at the African Americans. They have been fighting for their rights for 3 centuries and they are still scorned, persecuted, alienated, stereotyped, etc. This is especially true in the region I live in the U.S, the home of plantations, the birth place of the KKK, site of race riots
The reason Chinese history is so positively represented is because the evidence is there. Oracle bones, world’s earliest written language, direct textual and factual evidence, and what not. Westerners respect materialism and China, along with India, long had everything the West coveted and needed. The West had no need to “take over” China when they got there for everything was already prepped up for “export.” All they had to do was subdue the Chinese, carve their nation up, and exploit their resources.
Why is Indian history so poorly represented? Because of our 1 millennia of foreign rule and the ample time barbaric whites and Muslims had to screw us over materially, intellectually, spiritually, artistically, and etc. Because they took advantage of our weaknesses and destroyed our culture covertly, including the burning of scriptures, temples, etc. Because when the West got here, they found nothing that pleased them and felt as if they had to “start over.” Indian civilization is an incredibly resilient one but no nation/civilization on Earth can can expect to withstand 1000+ years of foreign aggression and come out of it unscathed and invigorated.
Rest be assured though, I can sense a cultural uprising even in my community. Every day I live here, I see more frustrated Hindus. In fact, not too long ago, an Indian in my class, normally a soft-spoken and aloof kind of guy, started yelling at these two white shitheads who were taking a big dump on Indian culture, calling it “pagan” and “inferior.”
If you consider the Infinity Foundation, RSS, BJP etc not an improvement over blind acceptance of the AIT, then I would hate to see what you call “stagnation.”
And you are too harsh on Indians for their inability to see their greatness. Its like expecting present-day Mayans to be proud of their civilization when almost every written text or scripture they ever wrote was burned by demo - I mean, Catholics, who posses no wisdom, morality, or righteousness whatsoever.