Read Ebook: The Forum October 1914 by Various

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Ebook has 641 lines and 59599 words, and 13 pages

Do you wonder that every night, in my dreams, I strangled Mr. Kipling slowly and deliciously with a thin silken cord? But of course you do not wonder; for I am an Afghan ... and ... well ...

"East is East and West is West."

Assumed racial superiority is a foregone conclusion in the minds of the so-called Aryans of Europe and of America.

I was in Paris when the world rang with the war-glories of Nippon, and afterwards, when for a while it seemed as if the bloodless Young Turk revolution would meet with success.

There we had at last two specific instances of Oriental nations working out their own salvation against tremendous odds: Japan threatened by the Russian Goliath, and Turkey a prey to the wrangling and the selfish machinations of all Europe, of all lying Christendom.

But the effect on the conceit of the Aryans was less than nothing. The people of Europe and of America are blind to the Writing on the Wall. They have sealed their ears against the murmuring voices of Awakening Asia.

Are they afraid to listen?

Now and then, when not engaged in discussing the latest tango or divorce case, they do read and talk about the awakening of China, the commercial conquests and aggressive policy of Japan, and the smouldering fires of United Islam, but without experiencing the least abating influence on their artificially nurtured racial and religious conceit. Peacefully and stupidly the Christians, the "white races," continue to misread the lessons of history and the signs of the times.

They are afraid to see the brutal, naked truth.

Once I watched an ostrich bury his head in the sand....

They have established the amusing dogma that the so-called White and Christian countries are the superior countries, just because they are White and Christian.

I have established a slightly different dogma, and, being a charitable and entirely guileless Oriental, I will make a present of it to my Aryan friends:

You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West.

And like all parvenus, you are so astonished at your success, so pleased with yourselves, that you imagine your present hegemony in the race for material progress to be a guarantee for the future. But there is not even the shadow of an excuse for such an assumption, unless it be the fact that the Christian mind is diseased with racial and religious megalomania. There is not a single historical parallel which justifies your pleasant superstition that your present leadership, which after all is of very recent birth, will show greater stability than any of those many alien, ancient civilizations which long ago came from the womb of eternity, to go back whence they sprang.

Nations as well as men are judged by two factors: by their virtues, and by their vices.

As to virtues, what have you Christians done for the general uplift of the world which could not be matched by a random look into the pages of Oriental history? And as to vices, is there any degeneracy rampant amongst us which is not equalled by the degeneracy of the Western lands?

History has an unpleasant knack of repeating itself; and the helot of to-day has the disagreeable habit of being the master of to-morrow, regardless of race and color and creed. I would like to return to earth about three hundred years from to-day, just to observe how my descendants, who will have intermarried with Chinese and Japanese, will succeed in ruling their colonies in Europe and in America. And I do hope that the Chinese blood of my descendants will not be too preponderant: otherwise, taking a leaf out of European and American colonization, and thus forcing their own food-laws on the subject races, they might force their White and Christian subjects to eat roast puppy-dog.

Human nature is the same the world over, and there never was an originally superior race or people. Some nations have founded powerful civilizations which lasted for a shorter or a longer period, but it was never the racial force which caused it, but rather the irresistible swing of circumstances.

It was Kismet.

"But we are Aryans, don't you understand?... Aryans, the salt of the earth...."

"Aryans" ... I know the word, I find myself on familiar ground.

My teachers at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Berlin had taught me that the Aryans were a Central-Asian race, a "white" race, who conquered Europe and India, and who were of such superior intellectual and physical fibre that they made themselves masters wherever they went. And when I inquired about those Aryans who invaded India, I was told that right there they showed their wonderful metal: for brought face to face with teeming millions of dark aborigines, they established a caste-system of which the higher strata represent to this day the descendants of the white-skinned and therefore high-minded invaders, while the sweeper, the menial, the village laborer is the scion of the dark-skinned, conquered Dravidians.

To an Oriental this is of course a ridiculous and lying assumption. For even the purest of Aryan tribes in Hindustan, for instance the Rajpoots, have intermarried extensively with at least two other races. This superstition is not a new invention. It is as old as the beginning of things, and that much-praised work, the Veda, is only a chronicle of the ancient conceit of the Aryans, a conceit to which the lying and barbarous intolerance of modern Christianity has given a sharp and poisonous edge.

Yet even the Veda speaks of intermarriages between the Aryans and the original lords of the soil of India.

The caste system was not a bright invention to put a lasting stamp of inferiority on the conquered aborigines, but it is the outcome of a slow evolutionary process, due to the machinations of Brahmin priests who wished to preserve the profits arising from their sacerdotal profession within a restricted circle of families. These Brahmins had increased their ranks and influence by drawing recruits from the devil-worshipping priests of the aboriginal jungle tribes. Thus, how can there ever have been a question of preserving or establishing a permanency of racial superiority through the medium of caste, since at the very beginning of the system the race had lost its purity?

No. Your wonderful Aryan kinsmen in India were absorbed by the "inferior" races whom they conquered, just as the Normans were absorbed by the Saxon Englishmen, the Alexandrian Greeks by the Egyptians, the Mongols of the Golden Horde by the Chinese, just as the strong always absorb the weak, and just as, a few hundred years hence, we shall absorb you.

To-day Christian England is ruling India, and the English Raj is just, fair-minded, tolerant, and equitable. This is true, and it is also true that the last Moghuls disgraced the throne of Delhi and shattered Hindustan. But what can you prove by it?

Others have ruled India successfully before Asia had ever heard of England.

Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, enforced tolerance and justice in those barbaric days when the life of a Jew in Europe was at the kind mercy of an ignorant and brutal Christian rabble. He, the Muslim, built and endowed Hindu temples and charitable institutions while his European contemporaries were periodically burning down the synagogues and were trying to extend the sway of the gentle Christ with the effective help of murder and torture. He, and before him his father's successor on the throne of Delhi, Shir Shah, the Afghan usurper, attempted to found an Indian empire "broad-based upon the people's will," long before the days of Voltaire, Robespierre, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais. He settled land revenue on an equitable basis while the peasants of Europe were groaning under the heavy and humiliating burden of serfdom.

You say that his successors did not live up to the high standard established by this greatest of Moghul princes?

But we find fitting parallels in the history of Christian Europe. For were not the successors of Theodosius as degenerate as those of Akbar? Did not, in Macaulay's words, the imbecility and disputes of Charlemagne's descendants bring contempt on themselves and destruction to their subjects?

Or take the civilization of ancient Rome.

It was partially saved from ruin by the Asians, the Syro-Christians, who brought the word of the great Jewish Rabbi across the Adriatic. Judaism is an Oriental creed, and what is your famed European Christianity if not "Judaism for the Masses"?

The Asian genius of Christ and his Hebrew apostles saved the Aryan genius from stagnation and stupidity, and brought the first faint glimmer of light into the barbaric darkness of Northern Europe.

The Asian Christians succeeded in Aryan Rome, and just as long as the Asians ruled, the traditional cupidity and cruelty of Aryan Rome were softened by the broadly tolerant humanity of Asia. But as soon as the Syro-Christians were in the minority and the Christians of European stock in the majority, persecution and intolerance commenced, and the word of the great Oriental Prophet Jesus Christ was sadly mutilated and misunderstood by that superior race, the "Whites."

But even then you could not rid yourselves of our subtle Asian influence. I know your gifts of energy and your spirit of progress; but we men of Asia have a power of resistance and a capacity for rapid recuperation which you can never fathom.

Could you break the spirit or the virility of the Jew? You have tortured him, you have exiled him, and you have burnt him on the stake for the greater glory of God ... and he rules you to-day.

Again, look at the history of your Europeanized Christian Church, and observe what happened:

The Asian spirit flourished again in Protestantism and the Reformation. Many of your Protestant reformers were semi-Jewish, semi-Oriental in spirit. Anti-Trinitarianism was preached in Siena, and God ceased to be a mathematical problem. The Decalogue and the Apocalypse were studied. Chairs of Hebrew philosophy and philology were founded at French and German universities; and the Calvinists and the Presbyterians were altogether of the old Testament, of Asia, in spirit and sentiment.

Your famous Reformation was only a return to the Ebionism of the Asian Evangelists. One of the greatest events in your history, it was a most complete and vindicating triumph for the spirit of that Asia which you attempt to despise and patronize in your ignorance and intolerance.

Must we sit at your feet? Shall the pupil teach the master?

We taught you to read, to write, and to think. We gave you your religion and your few ideals. We have done more for you than you can ever do for us. We freed you from your ancient bondage of superstitions and idolatry. We gave you the first sparks of science and literature. We paved the way for your material progress.

Without our help you would still be tattooed and inarticulate barbarians.

But you have been getting out of hand, and are sinking back into the old slough of ignorance and crass intolerance.

And so perhaps some day, after we Mohammedans have finished converting Asia and Africa to the Faith of Islam , we may send another Tamerlane into Europe, reinforced by an army of a few million Asians who laugh in the face of death, and finish the job.

You speak of Oriental mystery, of Oriental romance.

Are we Asians then like Moli?re's bourgeois who spoke prose all his life without knowing it? Is there really a veil of mystery about us?

No, no. The Most High God did not take the trouble to create two different types of human beings, one to work on the banks of the Seine, and the other to sing His praises on the shore of the Ganges. There is no veil, no mystery, no romance ... except the veil of Christian ignorance, the romance of Christian imagination, the mystery of Christian want of desire to know.

There is perhaps a latent search after knowledge and truth in your hearts' souls. But your inborn selfishness forces you to believe that a healthy portion of ignorance is the best medicine against the ravages of the dangerous malady which is called Tolerance. Just a little effort would teach you that there is no mystery about us, no abyss which separates you from us. But your ignorance is your bliss and provides you with a sort of righteous bias. It also sheds a holy and therefore eminently Christian halo around your attitude of meddlesome interference in the affairs of Asia and North Africa. Of course you only interfere because of your laudable intention to show us the true path to civilization and salvation. And if accidentally you increase your own power and wealth, if you impoverish the native whom you attempt to "save," if you incite strife where no strife existed before you imported soldiers and bibles and missionaries and whisky and some special brands of "white" diseases ... well ... Allah is Great....

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