State & Racism

"The "warfare" between the Jews, Christians and the Muslims has to be considered as a home and home fight as they all have allegiance to the Book. They are all people of the Book. However, the Christian culture has been open to the other cultures in the world and the Christians (by culture) have been able to absorb from the other cultures. The western Christian culture or the Judaic Christian culture is based on Greek Judaic Christian (GJC) Chinthanaya that has borrowed from the Greek tradition as well as the Judaic tradition."
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by Prof. Nalin de Silva

(March 26, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The western Christian states and the Muslim states are more racist than the Sri Lankan state though the Sinhala Buddhists are accused of being Chauvinists while the Sri Lankan state is accused of being racist by the westerners as well as so called educated Muslims. In a country with a history, where currently, though not necessarily in history, there are more than one ethnic group living as citizens of the country, the state is bound to be racist to a degree, if we mean by racist the practice of considering the culture of one ethnic group more important, often the dominant as in the case of western and Muslim countries, than the cultures of the other ethnic groups.

One could extend this "definition" and question the practice of some states imposing certain conditions on non citizens who want to be citizens. If one wants to become a citizen of United States of America one has to know the history of that country. Is imposing that condition racist or not? Why not allow anybody who wants to become a citizen of the USA to become a citizen of that country in the name of freedom of migration and immigration or freedom of choosing one's citizenship or some such freedom? If people should have the choice of selecting the brand of the cellular phone that they want, why should not they have the freedom of selecting the country of citizenship? Why not sell citizenships of countries? Why hasn't an "intellectual" of the west thought of freedom of immigration and migration?

On the other hand, why not question the practice of knowing the history of USA as told by the white Americans, and not by the black Americans or more importantly by the so-called aborigines? Would Malaysia with its Bhoomiputhra policy allow any Sinhala Buddhist to become a citizen of the country? Would Bangladesh treat the Theravada Buddhists in that country the same way the Muslims are treated? Would a Thashlima Nashrin write a book on the oppression of the Buddhists in that country? (In a sense Nashrin is not a good example as she like Rushdie has followed the westerners to write against the Muslim culture) Would an emancipated film producer in India make a film on the plight of the Harijan Buddhists in India? They are Harijans or people of God only by name. Do Harijans in India get proportional representation when it comes to employment in the public sector either in the Federal Government or in the State Governments? How many Buddhists hold high posts in the public sector or for that matter in the private sector in India, in spite of Dharma Chakra being incorporated into the national flag? Would some Muslim countries in the west Asia (the so called middle east) allow a statue of Buddha to be taken into those countries? What happened when Bahamian Buddha statues were destroyed? Did the Buddhists all over organise protests the way the Muslims are doing over the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed? How many times, in the western countries the image of Buddha has been used in the dresses or in Bars or Pubs or Taverns? Have some of these Pubs being named as Buddha Bars? Have the Sinhala Buddhists insulted Jesus or Prophet Mohammad or any other religious leader, the way Buddha has been slighted?


The present "warfare" over the cartoons of Prophet Mohamed first published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands - Posten and then reproduced first by a NORWEGIAN newspaper, is an open struggle between two cultures that are at loggerheads with each other. Incidentally the three cultures Christian, Muslim and Jewish, which have common origin are not at all happy among themselves and it is not a secret that they recent each other.

Though we commented only on the act of the western Christian newspapers last week, the Muslims are no better when it comes to domination of the world and spreading their culture. It is not necessary to remind how Buddhist places of worship were destroyed in India. The Bangladeshi Theravada Buddhists are not even second class citizens in their country though nobody could make a protest against the repression by the state. When Muslims in Thailand agitate against the state it is news even in the western media. However, the Buddhists in Bangladesh are not given the same publicity.

As Sri Lanka gets news mainly from the western agencies very few Buddhists in Sri Lanka know what is happening in Bangladesh. Even if they knew they would not do much as there is no theology or church that binds the Buddhists all over the world. The World Fellowship of Buddhists is confined to some Buddhists educated in the Christian mode and has no impact at all in the day to day lives of the ordinary Buddhists. At schools there are Buddhist Brotherhoods but there is no strong brotherhood among the Buddhists whether at school or in the society in general. The name Buddhist Brotherhood would have been given by a Christian or a Buddhist who had had a Christian education. These words brotherhood and fellowship have no meaning within Buddhist cultures.

However, it does not mean that the Buddhists are not concerned about the other Buddhists, but it makes them more tolerant of the people of other religions. It is reported that the Danish newspaper that published the cartoons of Prophet Mohamed had earlier refused to publish caricatures of Jesus Christ. This should not come as a surprise to anybody who knows the western Christian culture. However, they would try to defend their partialities in terms of meaningless words such as freedom of expression. If one wants to find out the partialities and racism of the western Christian culture one could follow the so called international (with about twenty countries playing - remember the international community of about twenty nations) cricket matches, the commentaries by the westerners, Tony Greig being an exception, and the behaviour of the white Australians, especially when Muralitharan bowls. The commentators would not call a spade a spade, but a spade a black spade without using the word black.

The "warfare" between the Jews, Christians and the Muslims has to be considered as a home and home fight as they all have allegiance to the Book. They are all people of the Book. However, the Christian culture has been open to the other cultures in the world and the Christians (by culture) have been able to absorb from the other cultures. The western Christian culture or the Judaic Christian culture is based on Greek Judaic Christian (GJC) Chinthanaya that has borrowed from the Greek tradition as well as the Judaic tradition. In fact, even at the incipient stage GJC Chinthanaya had borrowed knowledge from Bharat and China though they did not borrow from the respective Chinthanayas. It was more than four hundred years later Niels Bohr that enlightened Dane from Copenhagen, who borrowed some aspects of Ying Yang Chinthanaya of the Chinese, in formulating the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Physics, together with a German by the name of Heisenberg. I wonder what caricatures of Confucius and Tao would be published by that editor of Jyllands - Posten. However, it has to be emphasised that the western Physicists are now turning away from the Copenhagen Interpretation as they are more interested in a so-called reality independent of the observer. The Christian west is prepared to borrow knowledge from Asian and African cultures and absorb in their GJC Chinthanaya but not prepared to borrow from the Chinthanayas of those cultures other than from the western Asian Judaic Chinthanaya.

The Christians differ from the Jews and the Muslims in one more important way. While one has to be born as a Jew to practise Judaism, the Jews are interested in propagating their Chinthanaya and the culture to the others. One does not have to practice Judaism to have Judaic Chinthanaya. The Muslims on the other hand do not appear to make a distinction between their religion, culture and the Chinthanaya.

Those who practise Islam are supposed to become Muslims by culture and their Chinthanaya is supposed to be Muslim. Both Jews and the Muslims would love to preserve their cultures wherever in the world they live. However, this has not prevented Muslims living in non Muslim countries borrowing some aspects of non Muslim cultures and Chinthanayas. The Christian culture does not demand that one has to become a Christian by religion for one to become a Christian by culture. In the early stages of western Christian colonialism one had to become a Christian by religion to be a Christian by culture. However, western Christian culture learnt from experience that one could be a Christian by culture without being a Christian by religion. This is not very much different from Judaic Chinthanaya, and it is somewhat puzzling why the west took such a long time to realise this fact, when they could have seen it as practiced in the Judaic culture. I would argue that Luther and Calvin were Christian by culture before they gave birth to the Christian religion.

Hindu culture and Hindu religion are more bound to each other and it is almost impossible for one to become a Hindu unless one is born to a Hindu family. Hinduism in that sense is not different from Judaism as one has to be born into a Jewish family to become a Jew.

One cannot be a converted Jew and it is very difficult for one to be a converted Hindu, after those who followed Vedic religion became Hindus. The Hindu cult among the western Hippies was a temporary phenomenon that came into prominence in the sixties and the seventies. These were merely expressions of western youth who had been discontented with western Christian culture at that time. The Paris student "revolt" of the late sixties was another expression of the same disgruntlement. Both groups were basically reacting against western Christian modernity with its emphasis on individualism, and were looking towards some kind of communal living.

However, western Christianity offered more individuality as a solution to the problems of the youth and the next generation together with the older generations had no difficulty in absorbing this essentially Christian (as opposed to Catholic) feature of individualism and were soon seeing enjoying personal computers and personal cellular phones among many other personal belongings. What is known as Postmodernity is nothing but this further individualisation or atomisation of the society, which is only a continuation of western Christian modernity that began in the fifteenth century.

The nations, states and cultures have vested interests and they would not like to open their windows and doors to everything that comes from outside. Within a nation with a history no two cultures are considered to be equal. In the west it is the Christian culture which is dominant. The secular states could be found only in the books and journals published by the western Christian Political Scientists and their imitators in the rest of the world. The word secular is being used as a camouflage to hide the Christian nature of western states. When the westerners want us to become a secular state they want us to become a Christian state. The westerners dominate the world through the knowledge that they have created, and as they have the last word in Politics, Culture and Economics, they get away with what they want.

The Sinhala Buddhists who have resisted the Sri Lankan state becoming a non Buddhist state, in spite of Don Juan Dharmapalas who had lived and are living in this country for five hundred years, longer than the others in Asia and Africa, are being always accused of racism and the Sri Lankan state is labelled a racist state by the western Christians and even Muslims who have had a Christian education. a racist state is the unfulfilled aspiration of the westerners to create a Christian state in Sri Lanka.

It is unfortunate that the educated, meaning of course Christian educated, Tamils and some Muslims have become pawns in the hands of the western Christians, and when the former talk of their aspirations we know whose aspirations they represent.
- Sri Lanka Guardian