"A prime target for conversion has been Tamil Hindus, who in the Civil War had been caught between the government and the separatist LTTE. The biggest supporters of the LTTE have also been the Christian clergy both of the new and old church. Hindu priests are conspicuous by their absence in LTTE propaganda." __________________________________
by Dr. Susantha Goonatilake
(February 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The detailed plans and targets of the Christianization process are easy to find on the Internet. These are similar to military plans with details of demographics of the target population down to district and town level, giving weaknesses and strength of the local population and the means of bringing them into Christianity. These are plans with the stamp of the crassest mass merchandising on it.
In Sri Lanka the cultural rape by the churches, the old and new, is continuing. There is a widespread feeling that the techniques which American fundamentalists brought to Korea after the Korean War and which led to widespread Christianization is now occurring in Sri Lanka. Such an apparatus for unethical conversions has resulted in over 1,000 evangelical organizations operating in the country. Many have been registered as tax-free foreign investments with the permission to import vehicles and equipment at cost. A prime target for conversion has been Tamil Hindus, who in the Civil War had been caught between the government and the separatist LTTE. The biggest supporters of the LTTE have also been the Christian clergy both of the new and old church. Hindu priests are conspicuous by their absence in LTTE propaganda.
Some recent debates in Sri Lanka in which the church has been involved appear innocent but on hindsight is something different. A few years ago, there was a church led opposition to upgrading of the Voice of America relay station which had been operating in Sri Lanka since the 1950s. But this church led opposition coincided with the expansion of radio facilities by the church’s own broadcasting station Radio Veritas operating from the Philippines. Both these two radio stations are in fact two multinational colonizers battling over the radio waves for Asian minds. One Veritas however is a remnant of the European Dark Ages and the other, although also in effect a cultural colonizer, is at least modern in the sense that it eschews superstitions. It is said that today Macdonald’s is better known across the world than the cross. I am not a believer in Macdonald’s; to me it is an artery clogging and cancer-causing pseudo food. But to me as a civilizational target of the church for five centuries, it appears that clogging up the arteries is better than clogging up the mind with superstitious mish mash.
If a newly rearmed church is to be a major intrusive player in the cultural colonization sphere, another hidden intruder are foreign funded NGOs. For those unfamiliar with the working of foreign funded NGOs in the Third World a few words are necessary. By foreign funded NGOs, I mean those non-state organizations that have exploded over the last decade or so in the Third World that get their funding primarily from western donors. This is the result of deliberate western decisions whereby foreign aid is less and less channeled to Third World states. This is overtly because Third World states cannot be trusted to be not corrupt, transparent and fair in the delivery process (Hulme and Edwards1997). Foreign funded NGOs in the Third World that have emerged as a response to this are not to be mistaken for real civil society. They are often as undemocratic and corrupt as Third World governments.
World opens up: in peculiar NGO ways
Some NGOs in fact do perform good functions in the Third World, for example in such fields as health, education, family planning etc. But often they do not have democratic structures. Formed usually by a few middle-class individuals, they constitute a new private sector in the Third World - albeit sometimes performing like private companies useful functions. The old profit making private sector, it should be noted, was accountable to the market system. It succeeded or failed depending on relatively impersonal criteria of profit and loss. The new private sector, the NGOs, are accountable only to themselves and to their donors. Foreign funded NGOs with their access to resources and local and foreign media publicity which money can bring often marginalize real local initiatives. This has resulted in a new NGO colonialism and the creation of a new dependent class. Especially in the cultural, ideological and political sphere they become an insidious force, virtually a fifth column for western interests albeit sometimes from the western left. This prevents real alternatives appearing either from the right or from the left, because to be funded requires acceptance into the desired ideological frame of the funders.
A few facts about how the foreign funded NGOs sector is distorting Sri Lankan cultural reality and I dare say many Third World academic and cultural scenes, are pertinent here. Quite often these NGO mercenaries are far less qualified or experienced than university academics or other local cultural producers. Yet quite often, they’re paid more than local cultural producers in the country’s organically grown sector. They also travel more and so create false linkages between the West and the non-West. The NGO’s pre-emptive access to the West and vice versa distorts the relationship between a globally dominant West and the local cultural scene. The growth of real organic civil society having a voice in the country is thus pre-empted. By dealing with local politics and the attendant foreign relations, they are it has been noted, privatizing foreign policy leading to the formation of a new form of imperialism (Duffield). Even in relatively innocuous areas without much political implications, they have distorted the local structure. A good example of this is the Sri Lankan NGO Sarvodaya.
The Sri Lankan Sarvodaya is not to be mistaken with the Gandhian organizations in India with the same name. At one stage it was a recipient of a large amount of foreign aid, in fact every year foreign countries holding a special aid consortium to fund it. Once it marketed itself as the largest Sri Lankan NGO claiming to reach virtually every village in the country. Its funding by foreign donors began in the 1970s, coincident with the tail end of the counterculture in the West and its appreciation of things non-western. At that stage Sarvodaya marketed itself as a Buddhist organization. Later it changed its messages to the western donor market as the latter changed its requirements.
Subsequently, a judicial commission of inquiry by the state under the chairmanship of a well-respected Supreme Court Judge, has documented massive frauds conducted by this NGO benefiting its founder and his family. I have seen the documentation and I should mention that if it were a poor clerk in a government office the leader would have been immediately arrested and I believe successfully prosecuted and sent to jail.
Let me emphasize here that the primary colonizers through NGOs are not necessarily the western funders but the skewed social condition and relations that they create by distorting the local scene away from real local responses. Indeed among western funders there are groups for example in Germany itself, that emphasize local culture and local knowledge as central to their funding.
The question then, is should the West and international organizations like the UN stop funding NGOs entirely. The answer is clearly no. There is room for aid for real voluntary recipients. The funding should come for real civil society as opposed to artificially created aid traps of a few individuals. Generally funding should be only for democratically elected bodies. There are hundreds of trade, professional and other organizations that constitute real civil society in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. They deserve to be funded. Although occasionally a few cases outside these organizations could also be donor fed as seed experiments.
Redemption is at hand: Future action for German Church?
This conference is meeting in a church academy. So, I should therefore be excused for making some explicit words directed to our church delegates. The church should make an unmistakable apology for its past actions and continuing cultural rape. The Pope has done so in the case of the Jews, the Orthodox Church, and so on. The church should also make the case for restitution as it did in the case of the Iberian led genocide of the Latin Americas and in the antislavery resolution that was put forward in Johannesburg at the UN conference. These apologies and restitutions should, in Asia be especially targeted to Sri Lanka and parts of India which were direct targets of the church’s munificence.
If the church were to wish to be really loved, then it should also stop supporting local groups and NGOs except for restitution and in rare cases, elected bodies. It should also stop sponsoring all interfaith dialogues which over the last decade has become very fashionable, unless the request comes from other faiths. Actually these have become a sham for real dialogue and as they are funded by the church has become a cover for Christian domination.
The German church has qualitatively different tendencies because of its recent past. It therefore has a redemption characteristic. It should desist from the negative actions that I have outlined. It should urge the Pope to apologize for the past actions done on other cultures. As Germans pay a church tax (Kirchen Steur), they should contribute part of it for restitution, as the German church has led in supporting demands for compensation for Jews. Till such steps are taken, a new slogan for us non Christians should be "Church get off our Third World backs" .
Meanwhile back in the decolonizing world changes are occurring. Non European contributions are being increasingly recognized. Civilizational knowledge in science and technology has been now recognized by UNESCO. There are several groups around the world working non-Western systems of knowledge in a rigorous way. These efforts are primarily of interest only to us in the decolonizing camp. But if you wish you are invited in fact urged to join in this exciting process. So, death to false gods, become the Creator of new ones.
PostScript
Our meeting is not like any other cultural or scientific meeting. We constitute the laboratory we are studying. So after I returned to my country I reflected on the proceedings. It would not be fair to the participants as well as to me and to the art of cultural and scientific studies that I practice, if I fail to observe this God-given (in the non literal sense) laboratory, namely the conference itself as a precursor of cultural imperialism or its opposite.
First, its set and setting
The conference is organized by some groups which are formally committed to multiculturalism. These include the European Commission for Culture; Center for European Studies; UNESCO and the Center for European Studies, University of Trier. There are others like the Catholic Academy Trier; who are wedded to a particular religion and its propagation. The participants are also divided between several countries. There are those from Western Europe whose academia, in especially those from the social sciences, has become more culture sensitive, especially after emerging from the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. This, to a certain extent applies also to the German church which exposed to both the aftermath of World War II, and the 1960s, has attempted some inroads into multiculturalism.
Secondly, we have countries from Eastern Europe coming from both the shadow of Stalinist repression as well as of strong Catholic or Orthodox Church influence, both of which Christian traditions had not really gone through a process of undoing the Middle Age’s dark heritage. They incidentally belong to what the present Christian fundamentalist influenced government of Bush admiringly designates the "New Europe" as opposed to the more sophisticated Western Europe.
The diverse strands in this meeting have reflected a new culture coming into being in the world. Let me explore a few strands. First, let me begin with some remarks of our other keynote speaker, my friend for two decades, Ashis Nandy and his sensitivity to my remarks on the negative features of Christianity especially his wholehearted congratulatory views on the Indian authorities’ extremely positive treatment of Mother Teresa.
His, is also a cultural expression, as undoubtedly is also mine. It reflects the struggling cultural strands of our different countries and experiences. But the phenomenon of Mother Teresa is much more complex. Her actions took place in the Marxist controlled Indian state of West Bengal. Whereas other Marxist controlled Asian entities such as China eliminated basic poverty and illiteracy within a decade or so, the social space for a Mother Teresa exists in fact due to the failure of the West Bengal government to deliver on basic human needs. But Mother Teresa according to counter writings was no saint. She was a gross manipulator, friend of unsavory characters like Papa Doc and of large-scale American swindlers. These are detailed in easily available literature, for example I recommend Christopher Hitchens 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice, Verso, London and New York; or if one wishes a shorter summary Dhiru Shah "Mother Teresa’s hidden mission in India: conversion to Christianity" India Star: A Literary Art Magazine.
I have been exposed to the western academic scene for the last 25 years. So I have been surprised at the particular configuration of our participants and observers. Many a true Christian believer which one would rarely find in a West European of American academic setting is here. Making the cross at mealtimes I have never seen done by laymen in academic settings before, except in that bastion of Christian fundamentalism namely Korea, reflecting the enthusiasm of the new converts. Among these Christian true believers I would place some of our delegates from Eastern Europe, Korea and the Philippines. There are no Hindu or Buddhist perspectives. There is one Islamic paper of a sociological kind from Iran hardly reflecting religious perspectives. I come from a Buddhist background just as Ashis Nandy comes from a Christian background, but both of us the present abroad academic perspective brought from transnational experience. To counteract the overwhelming Christian true believers’ presence, we should have had representatives of say the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and their equivalent in the Islamic world. In fact the conference in its non academic program was very much monopolar and Christian, down to the church service in the program on Sunday and Christian music in the evening by Korean Christian converts. The performing Koreans were peeved and annoyed when I asked them whether they were Buddhist or Christian. They literally laughed in derision and proudly proclaimed themselves as Christian. There were no Hindu, Islam or Buddhist services although there was a Zen priest - a European convert.
There were three delegates from Slovakia, two of them wearing crosses. At dinner I found them crossing their hearts, a gesture one would not see either in Western European or the more sophisticated educated classes in the USA. I had once seen this only among Koreans, new converts who had been targeted by US fundamentalists. In trying to make conversation I asked them about one of my cultural heroes from the region, the astronomer Tycho Brahe. They unbelievably had not heard of him, so to me appeared real medievalists.
The paper by the Polish Piotr Mazurkiewicz, titled "I can Breathe my Two Lungs - at Last" was a triumphalist Christian statement of how Europe was Christian and that now it, both Eastern Europe and Western Europe was coming together on a Christian basis. This was the underlying theme pursued by Hans Maier, M`FCnchen, Germany in his "Europe’s Churches Today - Reconciliated or Divided?"
Not unsurprisingly given the preset frame, our different groups in the program looked at various areas of cultural colonialism but significantly not religious imperialism. The First Cause in cultural colonialism which brought us genocide was now attempting to colonize cultural colonialism itself on its own terms. The whole frame apart from West European contributors like those of Hamm appear to be ultimately rigged. It may appear that perhaps unconsciously, the whole frame has cynically colonized the very concept of cultural imperialism. It has become the supreme act of cultural colonialism. Now I can begin to understand why Islam fundamentalists - whom or whose actions, I do not agree with - resort to such extreme measures.
But Europe, especially sophisticated Western Europe, is not mired in the mumbo-jumbo from the Dark Ages. There have been many discussions spread over the last 25 years that have discussed our topic. I myself have participated in some of these. In fact I would strongly recommend as an example to be emulated by our present group, a meeting sponsored by the European Commission a few years ago which looked at the assumed clash of civilizations. This resulted in a very open and sophisticated discussion. Medievalists were notably absent.
The present conference is therefore a reflection of our changing times. It is both a mirror, and a scriptwriter of the times to come. I, for one am a great believer both in the demythologizing aspects of the European Enlightenment and the present Shift to Asia as able to bring in useful multicultural exchanges. I would like my culture to be enriched as well as my culture to enrich others on terms of relative respect. But if it were to be otherwise, as some voices here seem to desire, I’m ready for that too. I have been born into a culture that has been battle hardened for five centuries in resisting cultural imperialism. We together with the rest of Asia are ready for the next round, if need be.
(February 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The detailed plans and targets of the Christianization process are easy to find on the Internet. These are similar to military plans with details of demographics of the target population down to district and town level, giving weaknesses and strength of the local population and the means of bringing them into Christianity. These are plans with the stamp of the crassest mass merchandising on it.
In Sri Lanka the cultural rape by the churches, the old and new, is continuing. There is a widespread feeling that the techniques which American fundamentalists brought to Korea after the Korean War and which led to widespread Christianization is now occurring in Sri Lanka. Such an apparatus for unethical conversions has resulted in over 1,000 evangelical organizations operating in the country. Many have been registered as tax-free foreign investments with the permission to import vehicles and equipment at cost. A prime target for conversion has been Tamil Hindus, who in the Civil War had been caught between the government and the separatist LTTE. The biggest supporters of the LTTE have also been the Christian clergy both of the new and old church. Hindu priests are conspicuous by their absence in LTTE propaganda.
Some recent debates in Sri Lanka in which the church has been involved appear innocent but on hindsight is something different. A few years ago, there was a church led opposition to upgrading of the Voice of America relay station which had been operating in Sri Lanka since the 1950s. But this church led opposition coincided with the expansion of radio facilities by the church’s own broadcasting station Radio Veritas operating from the Philippines. Both these two radio stations are in fact two multinational colonizers battling over the radio waves for Asian minds. One Veritas however is a remnant of the European Dark Ages and the other, although also in effect a cultural colonizer, is at least modern in the sense that it eschews superstitions. It is said that today Macdonald’s is better known across the world than the cross. I am not a believer in Macdonald’s; to me it is an artery clogging and cancer-causing pseudo food. But to me as a civilizational target of the church for five centuries, it appears that clogging up the arteries is better than clogging up the mind with superstitious mish mash.
If a newly rearmed church is to be a major intrusive player in the cultural colonization sphere, another hidden intruder are foreign funded NGOs. For those unfamiliar with the working of foreign funded NGOs in the Third World a few words are necessary. By foreign funded NGOs, I mean those non-state organizations that have exploded over the last decade or so in the Third World that get their funding primarily from western donors. This is the result of deliberate western decisions whereby foreign aid is less and less channeled to Third World states. This is overtly because Third World states cannot be trusted to be not corrupt, transparent and fair in the delivery process (Hulme and Edwards1997). Foreign funded NGOs in the Third World that have emerged as a response to this are not to be mistaken for real civil society. They are often as undemocratic and corrupt as Third World governments.
World opens up: in peculiar NGO ways
Some NGOs in fact do perform good functions in the Third World, for example in such fields as health, education, family planning etc. But often they do not have democratic structures. Formed usually by a few middle-class individuals, they constitute a new private sector in the Third World - albeit sometimes performing like private companies useful functions. The old profit making private sector, it should be noted, was accountable to the market system. It succeeded or failed depending on relatively impersonal criteria of profit and loss. The new private sector, the NGOs, are accountable only to themselves and to their donors. Foreign funded NGOs with their access to resources and local and foreign media publicity which money can bring often marginalize real local initiatives. This has resulted in a new NGO colonialism and the creation of a new dependent class. Especially in the cultural, ideological and political sphere they become an insidious force, virtually a fifth column for western interests albeit sometimes from the western left. This prevents real alternatives appearing either from the right or from the left, because to be funded requires acceptance into the desired ideological frame of the funders.
A few facts about how the foreign funded NGOs sector is distorting Sri Lankan cultural reality and I dare say many Third World academic and cultural scenes, are pertinent here. Quite often these NGO mercenaries are far less qualified or experienced than university academics or other local cultural producers. Yet quite often, they’re paid more than local cultural producers in the country’s organically grown sector. They also travel more and so create false linkages between the West and the non-West. The NGO’s pre-emptive access to the West and vice versa distorts the relationship between a globally dominant West and the local cultural scene. The growth of real organic civil society having a voice in the country is thus pre-empted. By dealing with local politics and the attendant foreign relations, they are it has been noted, privatizing foreign policy leading to the formation of a new form of imperialism (Duffield). Even in relatively innocuous areas without much political implications, they have distorted the local structure. A good example of this is the Sri Lankan NGO Sarvodaya.
The Sri Lankan Sarvodaya is not to be mistaken with the Gandhian organizations in India with the same name. At one stage it was a recipient of a large amount of foreign aid, in fact every year foreign countries holding a special aid consortium to fund it. Once it marketed itself as the largest Sri Lankan NGO claiming to reach virtually every village in the country. Its funding by foreign donors began in the 1970s, coincident with the tail end of the counterculture in the West and its appreciation of things non-western. At that stage Sarvodaya marketed itself as a Buddhist organization. Later it changed its messages to the western donor market as the latter changed its requirements.
Subsequently, a judicial commission of inquiry by the state under the chairmanship of a well-respected Supreme Court Judge, has documented massive frauds conducted by this NGO benefiting its founder and his family. I have seen the documentation and I should mention that if it were a poor clerk in a government office the leader would have been immediately arrested and I believe successfully prosecuted and sent to jail.
Let me emphasize here that the primary colonizers through NGOs are not necessarily the western funders but the skewed social condition and relations that they create by distorting the local scene away from real local responses. Indeed among western funders there are groups for example in Germany itself, that emphasize local culture and local knowledge as central to their funding.
The question then, is should the West and international organizations like the UN stop funding NGOs entirely. The answer is clearly no. There is room for aid for real voluntary recipients. The funding should come for real civil society as opposed to artificially created aid traps of a few individuals. Generally funding should be only for democratically elected bodies. There are hundreds of trade, professional and other organizations that constitute real civil society in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. They deserve to be funded. Although occasionally a few cases outside these organizations could also be donor fed as seed experiments.
Redemption is at hand: Future action for German Church?
This conference is meeting in a church academy. So, I should therefore be excused for making some explicit words directed to our church delegates. The church should make an unmistakable apology for its past actions and continuing cultural rape. The Pope has done so in the case of the Jews, the Orthodox Church, and so on. The church should also make the case for restitution as it did in the case of the Iberian led genocide of the Latin Americas and in the antislavery resolution that was put forward in Johannesburg at the UN conference. These apologies and restitutions should, in Asia be especially targeted to Sri Lanka and parts of India which were direct targets of the church’s munificence.
If the church were to wish to be really loved, then it should also stop supporting local groups and NGOs except for restitution and in rare cases, elected bodies. It should also stop sponsoring all interfaith dialogues which over the last decade has become very fashionable, unless the request comes from other faiths. Actually these have become a sham for real dialogue and as they are funded by the church has become a cover for Christian domination.
The German church has qualitatively different tendencies because of its recent past. It therefore has a redemption characteristic. It should desist from the negative actions that I have outlined. It should urge the Pope to apologize for the past actions done on other cultures. As Germans pay a church tax (Kirchen Steur), they should contribute part of it for restitution, as the German church has led in supporting demands for compensation for Jews. Till such steps are taken, a new slogan for us non Christians should be "Church get off our Third World backs" .
Meanwhile back in the decolonizing world changes are occurring. Non European contributions are being increasingly recognized. Civilizational knowledge in science and technology has been now recognized by UNESCO. There are several groups around the world working non-Western systems of knowledge in a rigorous way. These efforts are primarily of interest only to us in the decolonizing camp. But if you wish you are invited in fact urged to join in this exciting process. So, death to false gods, become the Creator of new ones.
PostScript
Our meeting is not like any other cultural or scientific meeting. We constitute the laboratory we are studying. So after I returned to my country I reflected on the proceedings. It would not be fair to the participants as well as to me and to the art of cultural and scientific studies that I practice, if I fail to observe this God-given (in the non literal sense) laboratory, namely the conference itself as a precursor of cultural imperialism or its opposite.
First, its set and setting
The conference is organized by some groups which are formally committed to multiculturalism. These include the European Commission for Culture; Center for European Studies; UNESCO and the Center for European Studies, University of Trier. There are others like the Catholic Academy Trier; who are wedded to a particular religion and its propagation. The participants are also divided between several countries. There are those from Western Europe whose academia, in especially those from the social sciences, has become more culture sensitive, especially after emerging from the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. This, to a certain extent applies also to the German church which exposed to both the aftermath of World War II, and the 1960s, has attempted some inroads into multiculturalism.
Secondly, we have countries from Eastern Europe coming from both the shadow of Stalinist repression as well as of strong Catholic or Orthodox Church influence, both of which Christian traditions had not really gone through a process of undoing the Middle Age’s dark heritage. They incidentally belong to what the present Christian fundamentalist influenced government of Bush admiringly designates the "New Europe" as opposed to the more sophisticated Western Europe.
The diverse strands in this meeting have reflected a new culture coming into being in the world. Let me explore a few strands. First, let me begin with some remarks of our other keynote speaker, my friend for two decades, Ashis Nandy and his sensitivity to my remarks on the negative features of Christianity especially his wholehearted congratulatory views on the Indian authorities’ extremely positive treatment of Mother Teresa.
His, is also a cultural expression, as undoubtedly is also mine. It reflects the struggling cultural strands of our different countries and experiences. But the phenomenon of Mother Teresa is much more complex. Her actions took place in the Marxist controlled Indian state of West Bengal. Whereas other Marxist controlled Asian entities such as China eliminated basic poverty and illiteracy within a decade or so, the social space for a Mother Teresa exists in fact due to the failure of the West Bengal government to deliver on basic human needs. But Mother Teresa according to counter writings was no saint. She was a gross manipulator, friend of unsavory characters like Papa Doc and of large-scale American swindlers. These are detailed in easily available literature, for example I recommend Christopher Hitchens 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice, Verso, London and New York; or if one wishes a shorter summary Dhiru Shah "Mother Teresa’s hidden mission in India: conversion to Christianity" India Star: A Literary Art Magazine.
I have been exposed to the western academic scene for the last 25 years. So I have been surprised at the particular configuration of our participants and observers. Many a true Christian believer which one would rarely find in a West European of American academic setting is here. Making the cross at mealtimes I have never seen done by laymen in academic settings before, except in that bastion of Christian fundamentalism namely Korea, reflecting the enthusiasm of the new converts. Among these Christian true believers I would place some of our delegates from Eastern Europe, Korea and the Philippines. There are no Hindu or Buddhist perspectives. There is one Islamic paper of a sociological kind from Iran hardly reflecting religious perspectives. I come from a Buddhist background just as Ashis Nandy comes from a Christian background, but both of us the present abroad academic perspective brought from transnational experience. To counteract the overwhelming Christian true believers’ presence, we should have had representatives of say the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and their equivalent in the Islamic world. In fact the conference in its non academic program was very much monopolar and Christian, down to the church service in the program on Sunday and Christian music in the evening by Korean Christian converts. The performing Koreans were peeved and annoyed when I asked them whether they were Buddhist or Christian. They literally laughed in derision and proudly proclaimed themselves as Christian. There were no Hindu, Islam or Buddhist services although there was a Zen priest - a European convert.
There were three delegates from Slovakia, two of them wearing crosses. At dinner I found them crossing their hearts, a gesture one would not see either in Western European or the more sophisticated educated classes in the USA. I had once seen this only among Koreans, new converts who had been targeted by US fundamentalists. In trying to make conversation I asked them about one of my cultural heroes from the region, the astronomer Tycho Brahe. They unbelievably had not heard of him, so to me appeared real medievalists.
The paper by the Polish Piotr Mazurkiewicz, titled "I can Breathe my Two Lungs - at Last" was a triumphalist Christian statement of how Europe was Christian and that now it, both Eastern Europe and Western Europe was coming together on a Christian basis. This was the underlying theme pursued by Hans Maier, M`FCnchen, Germany in his "Europe’s Churches Today - Reconciliated or Divided?"
Not unsurprisingly given the preset frame, our different groups in the program looked at various areas of cultural colonialism but significantly not religious imperialism. The First Cause in cultural colonialism which brought us genocide was now attempting to colonize cultural colonialism itself on its own terms. The whole frame apart from West European contributors like those of Hamm appear to be ultimately rigged. It may appear that perhaps unconsciously, the whole frame has cynically colonized the very concept of cultural imperialism. It has become the supreme act of cultural colonialism. Now I can begin to understand why Islam fundamentalists - whom or whose actions, I do not agree with - resort to such extreme measures.
But Europe, especially sophisticated Western Europe, is not mired in the mumbo-jumbo from the Dark Ages. There have been many discussions spread over the last 25 years that have discussed our topic. I myself have participated in some of these. In fact I would strongly recommend as an example to be emulated by our present group, a meeting sponsored by the European Commission a few years ago which looked at the assumed clash of civilizations. This resulted in a very open and sophisticated discussion. Medievalists were notably absent.
The present conference is therefore a reflection of our changing times. It is both a mirror, and a scriptwriter of the times to come. I, for one am a great believer both in the demythologizing aspects of the European Enlightenment and the present Shift to Asia as able to bring in useful multicultural exchanges. I would like my culture to be enriched as well as my culture to enrich others on terms of relative respect. But if it were to be otherwise, as some voices here seem to desire, I’m ready for that too. I have been born into a culture that has been battle hardened for five centuries in resisting cultural imperialism. We together with the rest of Asia are ready for the next round, if need be.
![](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2008/02/cultural-imperialism-history-future.html&media=http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otWn2PlEOdY/R7jvY7CN3WI/AAAAAAAAF2g/KPg5cigQ8ow/s72-c/cokehatbig.jpg&description="A prime target for conversion has been Tamil Hindus, who in the Civil War had been caught between the government and the separatist LT...){kind=link}
Post a Comment