Transport yourself back in time to about five hundred years ago. What is the kind of Europe you see? You see a continent roughly the same size as that of Bharatavarsha. It is a continent desperately trying to awaken from a millennium of Christianity-induced Tamas. During this long interval, the cult of Christ has successfully shattered even the memory of its old Deities after first shattering the Deities themselves. The weapons the cult of Christ used for this destruction was compassion, love and meekness. A greater feat of religious short-circuiting to usurp political power is harder to find in world history.
But a millennium of Tamas is hard to shake off overnight. But Europe did it eventually and to cut a long story short, we can make a case that the history of the Renaissance and the advances made in the physical sciences quickly became handmaidens of the war that the West launched against the whole world, wiping out entire civilisations, uprooting and corrupting profound cultures across the globe. Fundamentally, it inflicted the same horrors that Christian imperialism had done in earlier eras, except that now, science had replaced Christ.
Oscar Wilde’s observation that America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization applies to Europe in equal measure. America was at least honest in that respect: it flung aside the hypocrisy that underlaid European pretensions to civilization. Thus, by the early twentieth century, Europe began to grudgingly bow before the new, cash-rich barbarian who had migrated from its innards just three centuries ago.
But fundamentally, both the seasoned and the crude new barbarian were cut from the same Christian cloth despite discarding its religious practices (though large parts of America has remained profoundly Christian). From the Sanatana perspective, the West has barely managed to civilize itself in the true sense. In fact, one can’t utter “Christianity” and “civilization” in the same breath. Think about the much-celebrated Reformation in Europe. At the basics, it was an attempt to “reform” Christianity from within but the consequence was simply the replacement of an existing dogma with a new orthodoxy.
There is a cardinal reason why Communism could only emerge and spread in Europe. By the 19th century, the Christian God was all but dead there and there was a feverish quest for a new God to fill the void. Marx supplied the answer not by creating a God but by creating a Book, which created a new cult. See the parallels? People of the Book, the Only True Faith, the Only Truth, all answers to all your questions are in this Book, in this cult, convert the whole world to this cult, disparage or kill the unbelievers? The Second Coming (pun unintended) of Christ, the Ultimate Triumph of the Proletariat? If Christianity is religious messianism, Communism is economic messianism. Needless, both have had the same fatal consequences: Communism achieved the same scale of genocide in less than a century that Christianity took centuries to accomplish.
Thus, our time travel also reveals the fact that there is a 1:1 ratio between the rise and “progress” of Europe and the sorry downfall of Bharatavarsha. In fact, India has been the single largest contributor to the colonial opulence of Europe. Two major data points will suffice to illustrate this fact.
The first: look up the number of words and their derivatives in the English language related to “navy,” and trace their etymology, i.e. when they first came into popular usage. You will find that they all roughly coincide with the period of frenzied European maritime activity. This activity became more furious and fast-paced as technology advanced, all of which were immediately used for military conquests. Now, think about the name of one of the earliest Web Browsers: Netscape Navigator. The naval metaphor is immediately obvious. This cultural hardwiring is impossible to escape. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, the British viceroy remarked that “we will hold India as long as our naval power dominates the world’s waters.”
The second data point is the direct link that exists between the phenomenal growth of British military technology and the wars and alliances that they had with the Marathas. In a way, the imperial Maratha Empire indirectly financed this growth. In times of defeat, they had to cough up enormous sums as war indemnity, which the British then used to further hone their war technology and used this new technology repeatedly until the Maratha backbone was finally crushed.
The one-line conclusion of this lesson of history is that post-Renaissance, the world has never known peace.
If we were to analyse this from the Sanatana perspective, we get the following: the West’s awakening from its Tamasic slumber catapulted it directly into belligerent Rajas unrestrained by the tempering force of Sattva. The Sanatana temperament calls this rapacious and innately barbaric behavior as Asura Guna or demonic trait. This is also the fundamental difference between Sanatana Dharma and the West, no matter how it describes itself—as scientific, rational, etc. The Sanatana ethos elevates and universalizes the particular whereas the Asuric west does the exact opposite – i.e., it divorces the wholesomeness of Life itself into mutually irreconcilable components which must by definition be at war with one another. Thus, all of post-Renaissance Western “philosophy” is just a lava-laden Vesuvius of warring intellectual acrobatics whereas all of our Upanishadic Rishis have the vision of the same Himalayan Darshana albeit seen through their own eyes.
This fundamental Sanatana-philosophical grounding is essential to understand the ongoing quasi-dictatorial behavior of technology giants that are wreaking such havoc upon entire nations, especially India. This behavior is just the latest manifestation of the same Asuric trait ingrained in the Western psyche as we have seen so far. Unless we understand this phenomenon on this plane, we can only grasp at superficial straws at the behavior of Twitter, YouTube, etc. Whether the Far Left, Woke, etc have taken over these companies is really incidental as far as the Sanatana civilization is concerned. Our spiritual civilization is their common enemy, marked out for annihilation centuries ago. Let’s assume that a Pat Robertson completely takes over these tech platforms by destroying the Woke Left. What are your bets how he’ll behave with us heathens?
Think about recent history.
Even as India was groping its way after gaining political freedom, think about the ways in which the West sought to beat us down and keep us down. One of the most effective ways was to create and maintain monopolies in every conceivable area of human activity: technology, healthcare, food supply, even milk. The more insidious method of justifying these monopolies was to invent that vicious term, “third-world country,” and then claim that these monopolies were actually meant for the benefit of the “third-world” countries who didn’t know how to take care of themselves. All of this passed off as “studies,” which were highly acclaimed by say, the United Nations.
But then, this was nothing new as well. It was merely an upgradation of the earlier technique. Let’s look at some more parallels from history to illustrate this.
In the colonial era, we have the profoundly tragic figure of the great patriot, V.O. Chidambaram Pillai. With practiced ruthlessness, the British ganged up against him and exterminated his flourishing shipping business because he had dared to openly challenge their monopoly. Which is the other thing at play here: the economic edifice of British colonialism was built on building such monopolies and squeezing the host country, which in the first place, allowed them the space and resources to build these monopolies.
Which is pretty much what tech giants have done today. Do a back-of-the-envelope calculation: list the ten biggest Western-owned corporations in any domain or subdomain of technology and verify for yourself that they are all monopolies or near-monopolies. In other words, we have already reached a stage where vast swathes of our population are beholden to these alien monopolies even to meet their daily needs. Now, substitute “daily needs” with survival. You get the picture.
I will hazard a conjecture and I don’t mind being wrong. One reason why there has been no third world war so far is because the West saw what the atom bomb did to Japan. However, the other side of this coin shows that nothing has stopped the West’s 500-year-old train of unleashing unprovoked global violence. Post-World War II, the West, especially America, began hitting defenceless targets in small pockets in Asia and larger pockets in Africa with frequent impunity and has invariably emerged unpunished. Even if we set this aside, ask a simple question: which sane democracy will support a Jihadi despotism like Pakistan against a spiritual civilization like India? Even here, we see another historical parallel: Pakistan is an artificial state dedicated to fanaticism. It was created by the old barbarism of Europe painted with the glimmering varnish of science and etiquette. But it was nurtured with the breastmilk of the new barbarism of the post-colonial era.
All of this boils down to the same underlying Asuric phenomenon: the capacity of the West to inflict organized violence on a global scale is unparalleled and they continue to do it with zero qualms to their conscience. One is reminded of the iconic Dharampal’s words in this context.
To put this in another fashion, there is no justification that cannot be invented to soothe away any such qualms of conscience. In the colonial era, this justification of the West’s enjoyment of the fruits of its brazen, genocidal violence included hypocrisies like “civilizing mission,” and “white man’s burden.” Today, it is “bringing democracy,” as if context-free and culture-free democracy is a universal good which is universally valid.
Then, there is another marked difference between the organized violence of the colonial era and the phenomenon unfolding before us today. In the earlier days, this organized violence was inflicted in person, on a physical battlefield. Remember that Winston Churchill first hardened his natural demonic instincts in Africa by slaughtering a record number of hapless Africans. Many parts of his My African Journey make for truly sickening reading. By the time he returned to England, he had become a hardcore expert in perpetrating genocides with a clean conscience: no human could do what he did by engineering a famine in Bengal and gloating about it. The fact that this prized monster was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature speaks volumes about the Nobel itself. It also reveals a sick truth hiding in plain sight: the Nobel was a creation that emerged from the same Asuric tendencies and is awarded to those who exhibit them. Exhibit One: Yasser Arafat. Exhibit Two: “Mother” Teresa.
Today, the West no longer has—in fact, it no longer needs Churchills to go out and wage a physical war or send armies. Apart from push-button warfare, we have the aforementioned technology giants who wage a far more stealthy and slick warfare with far-reaching consequences: of altering psyches and behaviors of entire populations. Take this statement from the spokesperson of Twitter India:
We, alongside many in civil society in India and around the world, have concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global Terms of Service.
Which foreign country needs to send armies when it can recruit Indians by the hundreds, endowed with this sort of psyche?
Take another hypothetical case. Imagine that a foreign-owned MNC sets up shop in India to produce chemicals or pharmaceuticals. They come up with a great product, market it glibly and pocket a huge captive market. Eventually, it is discovered that the product is actually altering the behavior of Indians thereby causing violent behavior on the streets like rape, murder, etc. The Government pulls up the company and slaps it with criminal charges. To which, the company responds as follows: we’re willing to “discuss” the matter. Our product is actually beneficial to democracy. What is your bet how the Government will treat such a company?
This is exactly what Twitter has done.
And it is far deadlier because it has had the same consequences of taking a mind-altering substance. But fundamentally, it is the same Asuric force in operation because the kind of borderline messianic statements that the company is putting out shows that it lacks even a basic understanding of humanity itself, forget obeying the law. Even on the legal plane, the company seems to have forgotten the basic reality that India has allowed it to operate here primarily as a business entity, and not to act as an adversary to a Government it hates for ideological reasons. The same thing applies to other tech giants in India who behave likewise.
Which brings us again to the point about monopolies and the use of science and technology as handmaidens of war. Because its innate Asuric trait impels it towards unprovoked warfare, the West has encouraged the development of newer and more innovative tools and weapons throughout history. This is one of the root-reasons why technology grew at such a rapid pace. The infamous nuclear arms race in recent memory is just a contemporary manifestation of this same tendency. It beats all logic: the premise of fostering world peace after World War II was openly violated by this arms race. In the current parlance, the behavior of tech giants is merely another facet of the same arms race. It would take a huge leap of logic to pretend that these companies are not acting at the behest of some or the other Western political power.
Which is why I never tire of emphasizing on the urgent need to do a comprehensive analysis of this Asuric West from a purely Sanatana standpoint. Thus, we see a common theme in all our Puranic literature: of Asuras or Rakshasas going to enormous lengths and spending hundreds of years to acquire impossible boons. However, their objective remains the same: to conquer, subjugate and enslave the entire universe solely in order to enjoy its pleasures forever. And what is the first thing they do once they get the boon? They go out and destroy all that is good, invaluable, and virtuous. In other words, Asuras are despised in the Sanatana tradition precisely because they try to tamper with Rta or the Cosmic Order thereby causing untold damage and misery.
This sort of analysis must be done on a national scale. Western tech giants are just the dangerous warts on the surface of the skin. The real virus lies elsewhere. We have been unable to tame them because we’ve not investigated the source of the said virus, which is located in the Asuric realm. As the saying goes, the prerequisite to taming any beast is to first understand its basic nature.
And this has been our biggest failure not in recent times but since the time of alien invasions into our sacred geography. For example, the Vijayanagara Empire even at its zenith, was beholden to the Portuguese for the supply of horses. In turn, the Portuguese settled here and lost no time in gifting the sacred Gomantaka-Kshetra with the barbarism of the Inquisition: all in Christ’s name, of course.
See where the source of Asurism is?
The unfortunate reality is that even the influential sections of our political and business class, as well-meaning as they are, are largely clueless that such an analysis can even be done. While it is futile to blame anyone, the fact remains that this state of affairs is an outcome of the contemporary Hindu mindset which regards politics, business, culture, spirituality, and science as separate entities. This is the classic confusion of the forest and the trees.
Just two generations ago, our leaders, scholars and thinkers had no such confusion. They instinctively knew that they had to understand the West from the Santana perspective, and did not attempt to out-West the West. The Asuric trait is to enjoy the world by first destroying it. The Sanatana trait is to elevate the world by first elevating oneself to divinity.
|| satyaṃ śivaṃ suṃdaraṃ ||
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