The Ethnocidal Civilisation (essay)

The Ethnocidal Civilisation

(click above for article)

Western civilisation commits ethnocide and menticide, as seen in India and recently in the Middle East.

Ethnocide – culture murder – has been the repeated behaviour pattern of western civilization, as testified by Alexis de Tocqueville. The culture is not content with mere conquest: it must control the very thoughts of those conquered. A recently published book on a Christian mission in Bangladesh retells an old story against the background of both the Muslim and British invasions of India, centering the Garos and the loss of their ancestral religion.

The Biddable Intelligentsia

The average IQ of the Bangladeshi intellectual is woefully low. There does not appear to be an atom of original thought in the Bangladeshi mind. Now, why's that?

You'd think that the hot shots like Mozaffar Ahmed, Rehman Sobhan, Mosharraf Hossain, Debapriya Bhattacharya, et al., would say something refreshing when they opened their mouths.

Why this antipathy towards the intellect?

One tempting answer is authoritarianism. Our culture, it may be argued, does not permit originality. This argument would be stupid. The Muslim civilisation has been around for fourteen hundred years. It has produced men of the highest calibre.

The answer lies elsewhere: in Bangladesh, the intellectual can be bought. He serves the interest of the neocolonial powers. He's the collaborator to the imperialist.

One striking aspect of the Bangladeshi intellectual is his total silence on Palestine. As a country of 150 million Muslims, one would expect us to show a flicker of solidarity for the Palestinians. There isn't a glimmer.

One wonders how much money is disbursed by the Israel lobby to the local intelligentsia. I suppose there will never be any research done on the subject, and for obvious reasons.

Mind you, young Bangladeshis don't start off as imbeciles. But they learn from their university teachers and their elders that they are required to be corrupt. I have taught very intelligent young boys and girls but somehow they later lose their steam. They become socialised.

Human Rights Watch and Modernity

Reform in Saudi Arabia: At a snail's pace | The Economist: "A recent report on political reform in Saudi Arabia by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby group, argues that although gradual changes are welcome, unless they are properly institutionalised the kingdom risks sliding backwards again, as it has done many times before. “Newly gained freedoms are, for the most part, neither extensive nor firmly grounded,” the report concludes. “The limited reform that has taken place suggests the elite is still floating trial balloons, undecided about the type of government and society it wants to steer towards.”

On some specific human-rights issues, the report praises the kingdom’s progress: reform of the justice system, women’s rights and freedom of expression. Yet it notes with concern that, whereas legal reform is one of the areas where changes are under way, new courts have yet to materialise, and new, transparent procedures have yet to be put into practice. Greater freedom of speech is not codified, and so remains subject to arbitrary intervention by the state. Earlier this year, a newspaper editor made the mistake of printing a blunt critique of puritan religious beliefs, and was summarily fired. As for women’s rights, an official loosening of the ban against the mixing of the sexes in public places has not been widely implemented. The same goes for an ostensible liberalisation of rules that require women to have a male “guardian”. Women are still forbidden to drive.

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What business is it of Human Rights Watch to try to change Saudi Arabia's culture?

These westerners want all cultures to be the same - a universal monoculture. Western culture, of course. After all, there is only one legitimate civilisation in the world, Western civilisation. All other civilisations and cultures fail to measure up to this ideal.

Anthropologists and sociologists may foam at the mouth trying to explain that cultures are different, the product of their history and environment, but imperialists like Human Rights Watch will turn a deaf ear. If a woman does not drive, she is not a modern woman.

Thus Grace Davie, in her book 'Sociology of Religion, has pointed out that: "Once again, it is the application of the concept [of modernity] elsewhere that causes the difficulty - a way of working that leads quickly to the conclusion that any society or group of societies that does not conform to the patterns of Western modernity is in some sense less than modern (my italics)." Thus, she, and other sociologists, are more comfortable with the notion of 'modernities', rather than 'modernity'.

But reason is powerless against imperialists: they have to be beaten back with weapons of destruction. If your way of life is threatened, you have to fight back.

Lincoln, the mass murderer

The Lincoln Memorial shows how Americans honour their murderers and warmongers. Lincoln has been guilty of war crimes: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House)

He did not start the civil war to end slavery, but to prevent southern states from exercising their right to secession. If the European Union today bludgeoned member states into similar submission, would we accept it?

The barbarity of the Unionists under Lincoln is brought out in this line quoted from Sir John Keegan's recent book on the Civil War: "Even during the world wars, the British and French buried the German dead, the Germans buried their enemies…The Union treated those who died in rebellion against it as non-people." They just dumped the Confederate dead into mass graves.

In proportion to casualties to population, the Civil War “bears comparison only with the European losses in the Great War and Russia’s in the Second World War.”

By preserving the Union, Lincoln helped create a monster across North America, from one ocean to the other. Today, most of us are slaves to this monster.

cultural imperialism

"Over the last several decades, major women's rights organizations in the Western World have focused attention on eliminating clitoridectomy and infibulation in Africa, the Near East, and among immigrants from those areas. In order to demonize these cultural practices, they refer to them as "genital mutilation" and usually insist that it is violence against women done as part of the male repression and control of women. The latter assertion fits Moslem dominated countries more than the non-Moslem sub-Saharan African societies that follow these practices. The reality in many non-Moslem African societies is that the surgery is performed by older women and is an integral part of the initiation of girls into the world of women. Men usually are not allowed to be involved in anyway. Continued political pressure from the Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and other groups has resulted in many Western governments and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopting as an important goal the global repression of clitoridectomy and infibulation. Some indigenous African women's organizations have responded angrily."

The above is from an anthropological website. UNESCO has never pointed out the use of young high school children in violent student politics in Bangladesh, but has had the gall to preach cultural imperialism in Africa.

Most of these do-gooder NGOs and supranational bodies have no knowledge of anthropology, nor could they care less. For instance, there are innumerable organizations and states trying to turn our society democratic even though that is against our culture (Samuel Huntington was one of the wise minds to make this point).

But the unkindest cut of all is when anthropologists, lured by lucre, join the imperialists.

Of bigotry and logic

It was a bit of a shock for me to get a post script from an OEN (OpEdnews.com) editor (copied below with my reply): the OEN prides itself on its tolerance and breadth of understanding, when in fact, like most American publications, it shares a collective contempt for the Muslim world. How was George Bush guilty in trying to 'civilise' us? It seems the ideas of lunatic leaders find nourishment in secluded, dark and dank liberal crannies.


"Op Ed News Administrator


P.S. I am going to publish this piece but with a caveat. It has only been since the rise of Hamas that the Palestinian movement has been shackled by an Islamic twist. The Palestinian movement itself is a nationalist movement, so that sort of creates a little discordance with the premise of your piece.

And, as an American who is very glad that women in this country do not have an archaic patriarchal system shoved down their throats without a choice, the history of hostility toward women in Arab and other Islamic Cultures would seem to indicate that the hijab, the burkha, and any other contrivance used to pretend that women do not exist, are merely used as tools to allow the prevailing system of patriarchy and domination by religion to continue."

[NB: not one word about my observations regarding female foeticide in India, where Islam, unfortunately has had no impact; not one word about the Indian caste system: all the evil is in the Islamic world; neither did the editor even notice what I had to say about the elegance and diversity of the shalwar-kameez and the saree as opposed to the uniformity of denim pants and T-shirts. He/She has focused, laser-like, on only the hijab - very revealing, that!]


This was my reply to the editor:

"I read your caveat ('A Bangladeshi Bluestocking') with interest.

I assume it was solely meant for me. May I ask why? What purpose did you hope to serve with that little lecture? We are used to being lectured like that, of course, but not all of us accept it with grace.

As a social scientist, I am aware of cultural biases even among the most enlightened editors - I am not going to argue your points (you recently published as essay of mine called "The Body of William Jay"), but such frank expressions of disgust and superiority are quite rare in my personal experience.

I hope in future you will show more respect to me as a writer and desist from lecturing me again.

As for your views regarding Arab and Islamic societies, they are the blind, uninformed prejudices of a typical westerner - I expected better from the OEN. Your collective attempts to 'civilise' us have caused a great deal of misery. But then, I accept that as part of your civilisation, and publish such views openly, instead of taking individuals aside and giving them a private dressing-down, and by means of logic instead of bald assertions of superiority.

Logic is not a westerner's forte."