– Michel de Montaigne
Abstract: The 15th-century Renaissance
lifted Europe from the medieval to the modern era, helping the continent to
develop industrially and economically through the spread of knowledge in art,
music, literature, religion, politics, and every other field. With the new-found
knowledge Europeans ventured abroad to Asia, Africa, America, and the South
Seas. They colonized countries and continents, denigrating the native
populations by distorting history and making claims like Christianity is a
Western religion and they are a “White” race. This paper delves into history and
mythology to show, with the support of the views of superior minds, that the
imperialists’ claims were spurious and self-serving, made to hide their
rapacious desire for the resources of their colonies. Though European
colonization ended long ago in most parts of the world, its detrimental effects
still linger. Hence, history must be related honestly and truthfully to remove
the vestiges of colonialism from our minds and from our language. Then we can
realize the multicultural nature of the world, where contributions of all people
are acknowledged and respected.
Keywords: Renaissance, social advancement,
colonialism, perversion of history, Western religion, “White” race,
discrimination, decolonization, multiculture, social harmony.
Europe’s rise to industrial and economic
development can be traced back to the 15th-century Renaissance – a
French word meaning rebirth, rebirth of the European heritage. Europeans went
back to studying the Latin and Greek writers and philosophers like Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, who had been banned by the Roman Catholic Church in
European schools for nine hundred years, from the 6th to the 15th
century. As it spread all over the continent from its birthplace in Florence,
Italy, the Renaissance propelled Europe from the Middle Ages, often referred to
as the Dark Ages, to the modern era with advances in every field – art, science,
literature, religion, philosophy, education, music, and politics – ultimately
giving birth to imperialism.
This was the Age of Exploration (or the
Age of Discovery) when the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus, sponsored by
the Catholic monarchs, found the sea route to the Americas. In 1492 he landed at
Guanahani, an island in the Bahamas, and established a colony in what is known
today as Haiti, opening the door for European conquests, colonization,
exploitation, depopulation, and slavery. The Portuguese Vasco da Gama voyaged to
India by way of Cape of Good Hope, landing in Calicut (now Kozhikode) in 1498.
Subsequent voyages by him, the Dutch, the French, and the English followed,
paving the way for occupation and colonization, the spice merchants of the
British East India Company under the leadership of the ruthless sociopath Robert
Clive finally establishing their colonial rule in India after the Battle of
Plassey in 1757. After the battle, the Bengal treasury was looted, loaded into
100 boats, and taken to Fort William, the company’s Kolkata headquarters. Clive
also seized, in today’s currency, £23 million for himself and £250 million for
the company. When he returned to England, his plunder of Bengal made this
corporate predator the richest self-made man in Europe with an estimated wealth
valued at £234,000, about £50 million in today’s currency.
This colonization was carried out in the
name of civilizing the “natives,” which was done, especially in South America
and Africa, but also in North America, India and other places, by converting the
native people to Christianity in the name of civilization. This was evident in
the English poet Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden”:
Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child. (1)
Though the “captives” of this poem were
the Filipinos, the stanza unqualifiedly encapsulates the racist sentiment of the
European imperialists, who claimed to be a “White” race, implying that “the idea
of European identity [is] a superior one in comparison with all the non-European
peoples and cultures” (Said 7). But as the sage Emerson said: “The coarse and
frivolous have an instinct of superiority” (295). Be that as it may, let us
examine the imperialists’ claims of Christianity being a Western religion with
which they were civilizing the world and the Europeans a “White” race, thereby
superior, hold water. This paper delves into history and mythology to gauge the
veracity of such assertions.
According to the philosopher Ernst
Cassirer, who makes a clear distinction between the Greek concept of God and the
Persian prophet Zarathustra’s concept of God, “The Homeric gods represent no
moral ideals, but they express very characteristic mental ideals. They are not
those functional and anonymous deities that have to watch over a special
activity of man: they are interested in and favor individual men. Every god and
goddess has his favorites who are appreciated, loved, and assisted, not on the
ground of a mere personal predilection but by virtue of a kind of mental
relationship that connects the god and the man” (98-99). In contrast to that
“mental concept” of God, Zarathustra gives a moral concept of the deity. As
Cassirer says, “In the religion of Zoroaster there is only one Supreme Being
Ahura Mazda, the ‘wise lord.’ Beyond him, apart from him, and without him
nothing exists. He is the first and foremost, the most perfect being, the
absolute sovereign” (99). In this religion, “The Divine is no longer sought or
approached by magical powers but by the power of righteousness,” . . . “the
triad of ‘good thoughts, good words, and good deeds’” playing the leading part
(100). This is the concept of monotheism in which Ahura was later called Ormazd
(or Ormuzd), the good principle (or God) that is involved in an eternal struggle
with Ahriman, the evil principle (the Devil). The German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer maintains that “Jehovah is a transformation of Ormuzd and Satan of
Ahriman . . . Ormuzd himself, however, is a transformation of Indra” (187).
Indra is the god that represents the moral principle in the Indo-Aryan Vedas.
Hence, we can conclude that, philosophically speaking, the concept of god as a
moral principle is derived from the Vedas and that of monotheism was postulated
by Zarathustra.
Mythologically, Christianity is based on
the Hebrew tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and their eventual
banishment from it. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his best-selling book The
Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, the Hebrews tried
to find a creation story for themselves after they were freed from Babylonian
captivity by the Persian King Cyrus; so they constructed a “counternarrative to
the Babylonian creation story” (37) by “stitching together” stories that had
been in existence for centuries to create the story of Adam and Eve. And
according to ancient Hebrew tradition, claims Hans Biedermann, the four rivers
surrounding Paradise are “Pison (Indus?), Gihon (Ganges?), Hikkedel (Tigris),
and Euphrates” (285). In other words, Heaven is in the land between India and
Iraq.
Jesus Christ, the God Christians worship
for their salvation, was an Aramaic-speaking Palestinian who was born in
Bethlehem. about whom the three wise men who came to Jerusalem after his birth
said: “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in
the east, and are come to worship him” (Matt. 2:2, King James Version). So,
according to the Bible, Jesus Christ is an Eastern star. That is why the great
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls Christ the “Oriental in heaven”
(187-188).
From the above discussion, we see that
both philosophically and mythologically, Christianity is not a Western (or
European) religion, as imperialists claimed, but Eastern (or Oriental). Led by
their colonial hubris and material interest, they even defied the Bible in their
hypocritical claims (and continue to do so to this day). But to take
Christianity to the East is like taking coal to Newcastle. The imperialists
forgot that they themselves were converted to Christianity to worship the
“Oriental” star and follow Oriental ideas and myths. If Christianity could
civilize the world, the East was civilized long before Europe, at least 300
years before the Roman Emperor Constantine borrowed it from the Orient. But they
employed the German-born British philologist Max Müller to create a distorted
translation of the Vedas which, as I have explained above, gave us the idea of
God as a moral principle, to smear Hinduism in order to impose Christianity on
India. However, superior minds of Europe – those that were knowledgeable, wise,
and honest – soundly repudiated the imperialists’ claims and their denigration
of native cultures. For example, the preeminent German Romantic poet Wolfgang
von Goethe. After reading the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz, he was
so impressed that he wrote a collection of poems called West-östlicher Divan
(West-East Divan). He said this about Hafiz: “In his poetry, Hafiz has
inscribed undeniable truth indelibly. Hafiz has no peer” (qtd. in Pourafzal and
Montgomery 8). The American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that
“Hafiz sees too far; he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or
be” (qtd. in Pourafzal and Montgomery 8).
The similarities between Emerson’s
philosophical views and Indian thought have been shown by V. K. Chari, who
writes: “In his essay ‘Oversoul’ Emerson develops the concept of a
transcendental self, the soul within man, the vast spiritual background and the
substratum of all functions and states of consciousness. The resemblance between
this idea and the Upanishadic concept of Atman-Brahman is unmistakable”
(931). And Malcolm Cowley, in his study of
Walt Whitman’s poetry, claims:
In “Song of Myself” as originally
written, God is neither a person nor, in the strict sense, even a being; God is
an abstract principle of energy that is manifested in every living creature, as
well as in “the grass that grows wherever the land is and water is.” In some
ways this God of the first edition resembles Emerson’s Oversoul, but he seems
much closer to the Brahman of the Upanishads, the absolute, unchanging,
all-enfolding Consciousness.
The Divine Ground from which all
things emanate and to which all things may hope to return. And this Divine
Ground is by no means the only conception that Whitman shared with Indian
philosophers, in the days when he was writing “Song of Myself” (921-922).
The great introspective poet T. S. Eliot,
in his landmark poem “The Waste Land,” turns to the Indian Upanishads for the
virtues of “sympathy,” “sacrifice,” and “self-control” to save the modern
profit-seeking, libidinous, and conflict-ridden world of hollow men devoid of
spirituality.
The European imperialists also derided
the native culture of Latin America, but Michel de Montaigne, the famous French
philosopher, has this to say about the richness of the culture that they
belittled:
As for pomp and magnificence . . .
neither Greece nor Rome nor Egypt can compare any of its works, whether in
utility or difficulty or nobility, with the road which is seen in Peru, laid out
by the kings of the country, from the city of Quito as far as Cuzco (a distance
of three hundred leagues), straight, even, twenty-five paces wide, paved, lined
on both sides with fine high walls, and along these, on the inside, two
ever-flowing streams, bordered by beautiful trees, which they call molly.
Wherever they encountered mountains and rocks, they cut through and leveled
them, and filled the hollows with stone and lime. At the end of each day’s
journey there are fine palaces furnished with provisions, clothes, and arms, for
travelers as well as for the armies that have to pass that way. (698)
The imperialists wielded their power
unabashed in their colonies till World War II, when the colonized people had not
only to fight and die for the colonizers but also pay for a conflict not of
their choosing, fueling resentment and revolt against the exploiters. So the
devastated European nations had to relinquish most of their colonies in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America – e.g., India (creating India and Pakistan), Ceylon,
Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Ghana, Congo, Belize,
Guyana, Suriname – soon after the war, willingly or unwillingly. This process of
decolonization is continuing, with the Caribbean island nation of Barbados
declaring independence from Britain and Queen Elizabeth II in 2021, becoming a
republic. Six other Caribbean nations – the Bahamas, Belize, Jamaica, Grenada,
Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis – are planning to leave the British
monarchy.
A new consciousness has developed around
the world in the 21st century regarding the injustices that the
previously subjugated and subservient people had been subjected to by their
conquerors. Hence, in the United States, thirteen states and the District of
Columbia now observe Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day – Alabama,
Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico,
North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin –
to make people aware of the devastating effects of Columbus’ arrival on the
indigenous people of the Americas. Also, since the 1970s, the country has taken
down at least 36 monuments to Columbus for his abusive treatment of native
Americans.
Elsewhere, people are reclaiming their
heritage and history just the way Europeans reclaimed theirs during the
Renaissance when they went back to studying the Greek philosophers Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, now considered the founders of Western philosophy. A
new-found pride that has dawned on formerly colonized people has motivated some
of them to change the names of their countries former colonizers used. For
example, Ceylon’s name has been changed to Sri Lanka, Burma’s to Myanmar,
Southern Rhodesia’s to Zimbabwe, Gold Coast’s to Ghana, and Zaire’s to
Democratic Republic of Congo. During the G20 Summit in 2023 in New Delhi, the
Indian government replaced “India,” a name given by the Greeks and used by
British imperialists, with the ancient name “Bharat” in dinner invitations to
the G20 guests. Even names of states or provinces of India were changed. They
are too numerous to name here. However, some famous cities deserve to be
mentioned. The most famous of them is, of course, the financial and
entertainment hub formerly called Bombay, a colonial name that was changed to
Mumbai. Mysore was changed to Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkata, Bangalore to
Bengaluru, Poona to Pune, and Cochin to Kochi, just to name a few.
This process of decolonization should
also extend to Christianity. The imperialists claimed it to be a Western
religion; however, as explained previously, philosophically, it is of Indian and
Persian origin and, mythologically, it is of Hebraic or Afro-Asian origin.
Hence, logically, it is an Eastern or Oriental religion. Besides, Christianity
is also called an Abrahamic religion, like Judaism and Islam, for Jews,
Christians, and Muslims believe they are the descendants of Abraham, who was
born in Ur (now Basra), Iraq. In fact, Matthew Arnold, the 19th-centuryEnglish
poet recognized it in his famous book Culture and Anarchy: “Indo-European
people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European
growth. Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European
stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism” (95). But England
has not relinquished Hebraism, or Christianity. In fact, the English King is the
head of the Church of England. Hence, England has combined, like the rest of
Europe, both Hellenism and Hebraism, merging West and East since the days of
Constantine, the Roman Emperor who imported Christianity to Europe in 313 AD
with the Edict of Milan. It is, therefore, logical to say that Europe became
Easternized when it borrowed Christianity from the East; in other words, a
multicultural society, to use a term much in vogue nowadays. But the
imperialists did not recognize it – for which the word “Easternized” does not
exist in the English dictionary – because of their nature of usurping others’
ideas, myths, heritage, history, land, and resources, claiming them to be
theirs. To this day, church leaders as well as politicians promote the
imperialist lie that Christianity is a Western religion, volubly crowing about
“our Judeo-Christian heritage.” The duplicity in such a claim is evident in the
very fact that Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister (1874-1880) of
Jewish heritage who was baptized as a Christian, was called the “Oriental
Prophet” by many politicians. It shows the Judeo-Christian heritage is in fact
an Oriental heritage, not only according to Biblical mythology, philosophy, and
scholars but also many political leaders. And when this heritage was mixed with
the Greek or Hellenic heritage of Europe, it became multicultural. To be sure,
there is nothing wrong in borrowing others’ ideas or heritage but credit must be
given where credit is due. Otherwise, it is just appropriation, which the
imperialists practiced shamelessly. Whether it’s others’ land, wealth, heritage,
they claimed them to be theirs without saying thank you to the people from whom
they appropriated them.
Let us now turn our attention to the
claim of Europeans as a “White” race. It was, of course, done to portray the
imperialists as superior to non-Europeans, as the quote above from Edward Said
maintains. But they also claimed to be Christians who believe, like Jews and
Muslims, that they are children of Abraham, an Iraqi, and were created in the
image of Jesus, a Palestinian who, according to scientists, was a swarthy man
with curly black hair and beard. Now, if they are children of a non-European and
created in the image of a non-European, who according to the imperialists, are
non-White, how can they claim to be a “White” race? This is not only
contradictory but also tantamount to hypocrisy. It reminds one of the apt phrase
the eminent English novelist D. H. Lawrence used: “White bunk.”
When it comes to race, the U.S.A. has
moved past the Europeans’ artificial construction of a “White” race and created
a “White” category of its own. According to this categorization, not only
Europeans but also Jews and Arabs in West Asia and North Africa are considered
“White.” In other words, this categorization is based not on color or a
particular geographical region but the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve which,
according to Stephen Greenblatt, is pure fiction. For the U.S.A. to categorize a
race based on such fiction is ridiculous to say the least for the fiction itself
has no credibility to thinking people, as Greenblatt contends, but only to blind
believers. Such categorization is arbitrary and meritless for it does not
respect people’s heritage and people’s view of themselves. The creation of such
a phony race is evidenced in the fact that the Europeans called Japanese a
“Yellow” race and the U.S.A. calls “Asian,” but the Japanese see themselves as
white (Noor 67). In fact, the former South African apartheid regime considered
Japanese “White.” Various shades of white skin can be found not only in Europe
but also all over the world – Japan, China, Iran, Afghanistan, the Indian
subcontinent, Central Asia, West Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. So when
a particular group of people claim the white color for itself, it deprives
others of their color. That is exactly what the European imperialists did by
claiming themselves to be a “White” race: they deprived others of their color.
But such Euro-centric views of imperialists are still found in books though we
left behind colonialism over half a century ago. A good example of it is in
Pankaj Mishra’s otherwise very fine book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in
the World, where the author uses “white female tourists” (215) or “white men
and women” (227-228) to mean none other than former European imperialists. It is
hard to drive imperialists physically out of a country but it is even harder to
cast off the warped worldview the imperialists have instilled in the minds of
the conquered people. Denigration and exploitation were bad enough, but the
worst was the cognitive manipulation, for which many formerly colonized people
find themselves in the echo chamber of imperialists long after they are gone.
European imperialists’ claims of
Christianity being a Western religion and themselves a “White” race have not
served them, and the world, well. In the Middle Ages, they discriminated against
the Jewish people and it was based on the Christian belief that the Jews were
collectively responsible for the death of Jesus through the blood curse – the
willingness of the Jewish people to accept liability for Jesus’s death – his
crucifixion – ordered by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who presided over
the trial. They were massacred during the Crusades, beginning in 1095, and
expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306 and 1394. They were
massacred in Strasbourg in 1349 when the entire Jewish population was publicly
burned to death. In Eastern Europe there were pogroms against them in Odessa
(1881), Warsaw (1881), and Kiev (1905 and 1919). Hostility against the Jews
increased with the Renaissance as the Europeans turned to the ancient Greeks and
Romans as their intellectual ancestors. That began racial antisemitism against
Jews, developed with the claim of the Europeans being a “White” race that was
superior to other races, later bolstered by pseudo-scientific theories – now
largely discredited – like Social Darwinism, advocated by Herbert Spencer and
others to justify colonialism and racism. This led to the Holocaust,
concentration camps, and gas chambers of the German Nazis during World War II,
where six million Jews perished. Though the Great War ended with the defeat of
the Nazis, discrimination and violence against Jews and others considered to be
“foreigners” in the West by the so-called “White Supremacists” have continued to
this day. Here are a few of these incidents in the 21st century. In
July 2011, 77 people were killed in Oslo and Utoya, Norway, by a man motivated
by hatred of immigrants and those who supported them, the youth wing of the
Norwegian Labor Party. In August 2012, six worshippers were killed in shooting
in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, U.S.A. In April 2014, three people
were killed at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and Village
Shalom in Overland Park, Kansas, U.S.A. In June 2015, nine African Americans
were shot to death during a Bible study at a church in Charleston, South
Carolina, U.S.A. In August 2017, at a “White Supremacist” rally, Odinists –
those who consider themselves children of Odin, the god in Norse mythology –
marched with tiki torch, shouting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville,
Virginia, U.S.A., killing one counter protester. In October 2018, 11 worshippers
were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. In March 2019,
51 people were killed in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In August
2019, 23 Latinos were killed in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. This
is the legacy of European imperialists who hypocritically claimed Christianity
to be a Western religion and themselves a “White” race. Thus, they victimized
others with a false narrative they promoted to valorize themselves with spurious
claims.
From the above discussions, it is
eminently clear that the legacies of colonialism have not served the
imperialists, and humanity, well. The discrepancy between the historical truth,
as the superior minds stated, and the politically motivated self-glorifying
claims of imperialists has led and is still leading to social unrest and death.
The imperialists’ spurious assertions made by perverting history have corrupted
history by corrupting the language, and according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The
corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language” (51). The corrupt
imperialists replaced truth with deceit and falsity for the desires of riches
and power, which has disrupted social harmony. The pogroms, expulsions,
Holocausts, gas chambers, concentration camps, tiki torch marches, mass
shootings, Jesus-hating Nazis with swastika flags, and phobias of all kinds
could have been avoided by being true to history. We must clean the corrupt
language by first cleaning the corruption within us by “purifying the mind,” to
use Epictetus’s words, recognize the contributions of all people and describe
them the way they see themselves, not what the imperialists made of them. Then
we will realize that the “others” are within us and we are all multicultural.
Thus, we will respect the diversity of human civilization, acknowledge the
multicultural nature of the world, and establish social harmony and peace for
the good of humanity.
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