The U.S is the greatest nation in the world. But it has one 'original sin'. This has to do with Race- which continues to be a highly divisive issue issue to this very day.
One hundred years ago, a great poet said-
If there is one problem we have had from the beginning of our history—it is the race problem. Races ethnologically different have in this country come into close contact. This fact has been and still continues to be the most important one in our history. It is our mission to face it and prove our humanity by dealing with it in the fullest truth. Until we fulfil our mission all other benefits will be denied us.'
Who was this poet? You will be surprised to hear it was Rabindranath Tagore. Also he was talking about India- where race has never been a problem. Caste- maybe. Religion- sure. But not race.
You may say, 'surely the Brits were of a different race and thus the Raj was racist'. This is true. But the number of Whites in India was miniscule. There was no law against miscegenation. Moreover, the Whites generally returned home after retirement. Around the time Sir Rabindranath was writing this, a Jewish Viceroy was getting rid of the last vestiges of 'the color bar' in official establishments. Furthermore a White lady had been the head of the Indian Home Rule League. Opposition to British rule did not mean hatred of Whites.
Why did Tagore think race was the big problem in India? The answer is because he was as stupid as shit.
There are other peoples in the world who have to overcome obstacles in their physical surroundings,
whereas Indians can levitate and easily gain food and drink through magical means
or the menace of their powerful neighbours.
India had often been conquered by Princes from Afghanistan or Uzbekistan. The Burmese had made incursions into Eastern India in the recent past as had the Nepalese.
By contrast, America, which had a genuine Race problem, wasn't menaced at all.
They have organized their power till they are not only reasonably free from the tyranny of Nature and human neighbours, but have a surplus of it left in their hands to employ against others.
The Marathas, who were indigenous, threw off the Turkic yoke and themselves extracted tribute from a large part of India. It is foolish to deny that Indian rulers were indigenous. They just weren't as good as the Brits at running things. That's why Tagore's grandfather lobbied Westminster to permit unrestricted settlement of Whites in India. He and his chums said, having more Whites was the best defense of the rapacious Hindu comprador against the equally rapacious, but less cowardly, Muslim. The Tagores became very rich thanks to the Brits. Later, when Independence came, they lost big estates in the Muslim majority East which acceded to Pakistan.
But in India, our difficulties being internal,
just as Europe's or America's difficulties were internal
our history has been the history of continual social adjustment and not that of organized power for defence and aggression.
why not? Were the Indians like the aborigines of Australia who had never needed to band together in defense? No. India was like China or Europe. The fact is the aborigines did put up a spirited resistance to White rule at about the same time that Tagore & Roy were begging Westminster to send more White peeps to India.
Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.
I suppose, Human history will, at some point, involve planetary Government and the colonization of distant planets.
And India has been trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences, on the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other.
Where has there been no 'social regulation of differences'? Is there any Religion which denies the essential unity of creation, at least in some spiritual sense?
She has made grave errors in setting up the boundary walls too rigidly between races,
America had laws against bi-racial marriage at that time. India didn't. Tagore was welcome to dine with the Governor or invite the Governor to dinner. He received a knighthood. Why was he pretending India was under Jim Crow? He had travelled widely in America. He knew it genuinely had a Race problem whereas India did not.
in perpetuating in her classifications the results of inferiority; often she has crippled her children's minds and narrowed their lives in order to fit them into her social forms;
of which country could this not be said? The solution was free and compulsory education with scholarships for higher studies for meritorious but disadvantaged students.
but for centuries new experiments have been made and adjustments carried out.
So India was like everywhere else- especially countries without a Race problem.
Her mission has been like that of a hostess who has to provide proper accommodation for numerous guests, whose habits and requirements are different from one another.
Nonsense! India is not a 'hostess'. It is a country. You arrange your own accommodation if you want to stay there. There is plenty of competition to cater to your idiosyncratic needs- provided you have the money to pay.
This gives rise to infinite complexities whose solution depends not merely upon tactfulness but upon sympathy and true realization of the unity of man.
Fuck off! Let private enterprise compete to accommodate differences in taste. Gassing on about the 'unity of man' won't get a Japanese guy the sushi he craves or a Madrasi a dish of flavorsome idli-sambar. On the other hand, a thriving private sector provides me with both excellent sushi and tasty idli-sambar within a few minutes drive from where I live.
Towards this realization have worked, from the early time of the Upanishads up to the present moment, a series of great spiritual teachers,
who had exactly the same tastes in food, clothes, accommodation etc
whose one object has been to set at naught all differences of man by the overflow of our consciousness of God.
No. Their one object was soteriological. Human differences would remain- indeed, they were likely to increase as the population grew- but in your next birth you could be something much more than a man.
In fact, our history has not been of the rise and fall of kingdoms, of fights for political supremacy.
Yes it has. Crack a book why don't you you great big bearded retard.
In our country records of these days have been despised and forgotten,
No they haven't. If you are descended from a Prince, you learn his history pretty thoroughly. The Tagore's weren't descended from Princes, but they knew their genealogy very well- though no doubt there were things they might want to gloss over
for they in no way represent the true history of our people. Our history is that of our social life and attainment of spiritual ideals.
But both 'social life' and the 'attainment of spiritual ideals' has a lot to do with which Prince won which battle. This guy must have heard of Emperor Ashoka. There was lots of talk about him at the time.
Why is Tagore talking bollocks? The answer is he is trying to fight the Indian Nationalists for the excellent reason that if they won then Tagore himself would lose big estates in the East.
Like his grandfather, Tagore needed Whitey to stay. But Whitey left. Sad.
But we feel that our task is not yet done.
Coz lots of Whites thought Home Rule a good idea. The Indian economy was stagnating. Britain would do better financially if it had a viable trading partner.
The world-flood has swept over our country, new elements have been introduced, and wider adjustments are waiting to be made.
We feel this all the more, because the teaching and example of the West have entirely run counter to what we think was given to India to accomplish.
Indians may have wanted to be missionaries at a time when they believed the mlecchas didn't know about getting reborn in Heaven or attaining Moksha etc. But then lots of foreigners showed up who had Religions of their own which assured them of plentiful virgins in Paradise.
In the West the national machinery of commerce and politics turns out neatly compressed bales of humanity which have their use and high market value; but they are bound in iron hoops, labelled and separated off with scientific care and precision.
No it doesn't. The West offers freedom to try to become what you like. Tagore must have noticed that some Americans had taken up Yoga and Vedanta and so forth. They had the money and the leisure to develop these ancient traditions. Col. Olcott was American. He helped revive Buddhism in Ceylon and helped found the Theosophical Society which was much more effective than the Brahmo Samaj in spreading Nationalist ideas.
Obviously God made man to be human; but this modern product has such marvellous square-cut finish, savouring of gigantic manufacture, that the Creator will find it difficult to recognize it as a thing of spirit and a creature made in His own divine image.
Says a bearded retard who, it seems, is smarter than God. Still, nil desperandum. If St. Peter turns you back from the Pearly Gates, you can run off to the Brahmo Heaven. God may find it difficult to recognize you are a human being, rather than a bale of hay or a ceramic tile, but just ask him to consult Tagore.
But I am anticipating. What I was about to say is this. Take it in whatever spirit you like, here is India, of about fifty centuries at least, who tried to live peacefully and think deeply,
& then got conquered by Turks and Afghans & c. Tagore's grand-daddy had to spend good money setting up worthless newspapers full of pleas to Westminster to send more Whites- coz otherwise the Muslims will rob the meek, but avaricious, Hindu.
the India devoid of all politics, the India of no nations, whose one ambition has been to know this world as of soul, to live here every moment of her life in the meek spirit of adoration, in the glad consciousness of an eternal and personal relationship with it. It was upon this remote portion of humanity, childlike in its manner, with the wisdom of the old, that the Nation of the West burst in.
Indians were itty babies, sucking their thumbs and meditating on God. Nasty Westerners burst in on them.
So what? So long as the Indians paid their taxes they could suck their thumbs as much as they liked. If they couldn't pay their taxes, they could still suck their thumbs while begging or starving or whatever.
Through all the fights and intrigues and deceptions of her earlier history
Tagore first says there was no 'earlier history'. Now he says it featured lots of fights and intrigues and deceptions. Is he merely a fool rather than a habitual liar?
India had remained aloof. Because her homes, her fields, her temples of worship, her schools, where her teachers and students lived together in the atmosphere of simplicity and devotion and learning, her village self-government with its simple laws and peaceful administration—all these truly belonged to her. But her thrones were not her concern. They passed over her head like clouds, now tinged with purple gorgeousness, now black with the threat of thunder. Often they brought devastations in their wake, but they were like catastrophes of nature whose traces are soon forgotten.
Okay. Now we get you. Brits should rule India. India is not concerned with thrones. So long as it gets to suck its own mystic thumb it will be perfectly happy. Anyway, this is God's plan for the place.
But this time it was different. It was not a mere drift over her surface of life,—drift of cavalry and foot soldiers, richly caparisoned elephants, white tents and canopies, strings of patient camels bearing the loads of royalty, bands of kettle-drums and flutes, marble domes of mosques, palaces and tombs, like the bubbles of the foaming wine of extravagance; stories of treachery and loyal devotion, of changes of fortune, of dramatic surprises of fate. This time it was the Nation of the West driving its tentacles of machinery deep down into the soil.
So, the danger to India aint Whitey. It is machinery. Ban machinery. Then thumb sucking can recommence as God intended.
Therefore I say to you, it is we who are called as witnesses to give evidence as to what our Nation has been to humanity. We had known the hordes of Moghals and Pathans who invaded India, but we had known them as human races, with their own religions and customs, likes and dislikes,—we had never known them as a nation.
So, a Race is a Nation without machines. Once machinery enters the picture, mystic thumb sucking is endangered. Fuck are we to do?
We loved and hated them as occasions arose; we fought for them and against them, talked with them in a language which was theirs as well as our own, and guided the destiny of the Empire in which we had our active share. But this time we had to deal, not with kings, not with human races, but with a nation—we, who are no nation ourselves.
Coz thumbs which get sucked incessantly are shit at handling machinery. This means you just have a Race problem but no problem of Nationalism.
Now let us from our own experience answer the question, What is this Nation?
Our experience, if we have travelled abroad, is that a Nation is a bunch of guys who have, if not a common tongue, then a common method of Government.
A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose.
No. It is 'a political and economic union of a people'. It can't be organized for a mechanical purpose. Tagore may have been thinking of the First World War. But that conflict was anything but mechanical. It was deeply passionate and involved cooperation between peoples and Nations with very different purposes.
Society as such has no ulterior purpose.
Yes it does. Every Society has the purpose of promoting the welfare of its members.
It is an end in itself.
No it isn't. If it harms its members it will cease to exist.
It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being.
One may as well say that Jet Planes are the spontaneous self-expression of Man as a Technological being.
It is a natural regulation of human relationships,
It may seem 'natural' but it is 'artificial' if it extends over any great number of people or expanse of territory.
so that men can develop ideals of life in co-operation with one another.
This can be done within a family or clan. Society is not necessary for this.
It has also a political side, but this is only for a special purpose.
No. Politics can have any and every purpose.
It is for self-preservation.
Only in the sense that everything is.
It is merely the side of power, not of human ideals.
Nonsense! Politics can be very very idealistic indeed.
And in the early days it had its separate place in society, restricted to the professionals.
No. In its early days it extended to every free adult male in the Polis.
But when with the help of science
So, Science is the villain of this story
and the perfecting of organization
Organization is very evil. It tells you to get your thumb out of your butt not so that you can suck it but so you can do something useful.
this power begins to grow and brings in harvests of wealth, then it crosses its boundaries with amazing rapidity. For then it goads all its neighbouring societies with greed of material prosperity, and consequent mutual jealousy, and by the fear of each other's growth into powerfulness. The time comes when it can stop no longer, for the competition grows keener, organization grows vaster, and selfishness attains supremacy. Trading upon the greed and fear of man, it occupies more and more space in society, and at last becomes its ruling force.
Very true! India should set example of mystic thumb sucking while quietly starving to death. Tagore and Gandhi weren't so different after all.
It is just possible that you have lost through habit consciousness that the living bonds of society are breaking up, and giving place to merely mechanical organization. But you see signs of it everywhere. It is owing to this that war has been declared between man and woman, because the natural thread is snapping which holds them together in harmony; because man is driven to professionalism, producing wealth for himself and others, continually turning the wheel of power for his own sake or for the sake of the universal officialdom, leaving woman alone to wither and to die or to fight her own battle unaided.
Very true! Previously, wifey was happy fetching food for hubby and pleading with him to take a break from mystic thumb sucking so as to get some proper nutrition. Now, man is going to work for some Business Organization. He is buying labor saving devices for the home. Woman is withering and dying. Often you see such miserable women running out into the street and accosting strangers and saying 'Darling, stop sucking mystic thumb. Come for fooding.' The stranger replies 'I was not sucking my thumb. I work for a Business Organization. What is more I operate machinery. Get away from me you mad hag.'
As a result of such cruel treatment many women have become like the beggar maid in Gitanjali (which Tagore translated into English) who raises her skirt to cover her face-
The morning time is past, and the noon. In the shade of evening my eyes are drowsy with sleep. Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.
Most men, observing a woman who is lifting her skirt to cover her face assume they know the answer to the question as to what the lady wants. Similarly, a gentleman who bares his buttocks and who spreads his ass cheeks is assumed to want something of a sexual nature. However, in the mystically thumb sucking nation of Bengal, such assumptions would be wrong.
What the lady actually wants is a ban on machinery and organization so that the 'war between men and women' can end.
And thus there where co-operation is natural has intruded competition.
Very true! Heterosexual sex has become impossible because lady is competing to enter orifice of gentleman. All is fault of Machinery and Organization and Science! Ban them immediately!
The very psychology of men and women about their mutual relation is changing and becoming the psychology of the primitive fighting elements,
Wifey keeps getting behind hubby in order to enter him anally. This primitive fighting must stop! Ban all machines immediately!
rather than of humanity seeking its completeness through the union based upon mutual self-surrender. For the elements which have lost their living bond of reality have lost the meaning of their existence. Like gaseous particles forced into a too narrow space, they come in continual conflict with each other till they burst the very arrangement which holds them in bondage.
Tagore was a gaseous particle right enough. So was Gandhi and Nehru and all those other blathershites. But they got on fine in a jail cell or Ashram. Moreover, they weren't continually trying to enter each other anally.
Perhaps, Tagore had an ethical objection to bicycle pumps. Gaseous particles were being forced into too narrow a space. Anyway, a bike is a type of machine. Ban it immediately otherwise war between men and women will break out and our wives will run out of the house to lift their skirt to cover their face and men will ask them what it is they want.
Then look at those who call themselves anarchists, who resent the imposition of power, in any form whatever, upon the individual. The only reason for this is that power has become too abstract—it is a scientific product made in the political laboratory of the Nation, through the dissolution of personal humanity.
Very true! Anarchists would have no objection to being enslaved if only the thing is done by cruel slave-drivers not some 'abstract' power that is a 'scientific product'.
And what is the meaning of these strikes in the economic world, which like the prickly shrubs in a barren soil shoot up with renewed vigour each time they are cut down?
Strikes are about collective bargaining. They represent a threat point in a bargaining game. Tagore thought workers would happy to be unpaid slaves, used as sex objects in their moments of rest, provided nothing 'Scientific' or 'Abstract' is involved.
What, but that the wealth-producing mechanism is incessantly growing into vast stature, out of proportion to all other needs of society,—and the full reality of man is more and more crushed under its weight?
This cunt was living very comfortably off the labour of thousands of semi-starved Bengali peasants. He didn't want them escaping to work on much higher wages in factories owned by Marwaris. However, he didn't scruple to beg for money from those same industrialists.
This state of things inevitably gives rise to eternal feuds among the elements freed from the wholeness and wholesomeness of human ideals,
Were Tagore's tenants really happy with him? No. In his novel 'Ghare Baire', the highly idealistic, wholesomely wealthy, Hindu zamindars get slaughtered by poor Muslim tenants.
and interminable economic war is waged between capital and labour.
But both became better off as a result. By contrast, landlords like Tagore were preventing the landless laborer from rising above starvation.
For greed of wealth and power can never have a limit,
Yup. That was true enough of cunts like Dwarkanath Tagore whose tongue was deep up the British asshole.
and compromise of self-interest can never attain the final spirit of reconciliation.
This may be true of one or two pathological cases. It isn't true of the great mass of humanity.
They must go on breeding jealousy and suspicion to the end—the end which only comes through some sudden catastrophe or a spiritual re-birth.
One hundred years later, it is clear Tagore was wrong.
When this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all-powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity.
Indians- except for some ex-zamindars and the like- are better off now precisely because India is a Nation- not a Colony- and the 'organization of politics and commerce' has improved.
When a father becomes a gambler and his obligations to his family take the secondary place in his mind, then he is no longer a man, but an automaton led by the power of greed.
No. He is addicted to gambling. He may not be greedy at all. Tagore was a father who, like an automaton, went on spouting worthless shite led by the power of being a gaseous gobshite. This was actually beneficial to the family's reputation. To be a Tagore is to be respected all around the world.
This abstract being, the Nation, is ruling India.
No. India was a Colony ruled by a Colonial Civil Service. No abstraction was involved. Everything was concrete and down to earth.
We have seen in our country some brand of tinned food advertised as entirely made and packed without being touched by hand. This description applies to the governing of India, which is as little touched by the human hand as possible.
No. Every office was discharged by a named and specified person who was accountable and rewarded for his actions.
The governors need not know our language,
The Viceroy and other political appointees didn't but the District officers did.
need not come into personal touch with us except as officials;
but, as officials, they were obliged to engage face to face with all manners of Indian people.
It is not generally the case that a ruler has to have sexual or other highly personal relations with those he rules. Tagore may well have wished otherwise. Sad.
they can aid or hinder our aspirations from a disdainful distance,
No. They had to be close at hand to do so.
they can lead us on a certain path of policy and then pull us back again with the manipulation of office red tape;
No. Policy has to be shaped by the terrain. Otherwise it fails.
the newspapers of England, in whose columns London street accidents are recorded with some decency of pathos, need but take the scantiest notice of calamities which happen in India over areas of land sometimes larger than the British Isles.
This is perfectly natural. We are concerned with things which happen in our own vicinity.
Tagore's mystic thumb sucking may have broadened his sympathies. Yet here he speaks only about his own country. He shows no concern for the suffering peasants of Patagonia.
A little later he writes-
Of all things in Western civilization, those which this Western Nation has given us in a most generous measure are law and order.
But, in order to do, it had to first bring in maritime commerce and technology and then military organization and engineering and then Railways and telegraph and so on. The Brits took over the existing legal system and improved on it through codification etc.
While the small feeding-bottle of our education is nearly dry,
nearly dry? Fuck off! India was producing Ramanujans and Boses and Ramans and so forth at this time. Tagore was uneducated because he was lazy and stupid, not because the 'feeding-bottle' was dry
and sanitation sucks its own thumb in despair,
Nope. Kolkata's sewer system was built in 1875 by William Clark. It was rivalled only by those of London and Hamburg. Independent India has built nothing comparable.
the military organization, the magisterial offices, the police, the Criminal Investigation Department, the secret spy system, attain to an abnormal girth in their waists, occupying every inch of our country.
Actually, the Brits were able to get the better of the Revolutionaries pretty damn cheaply. This was because Indians turned their coats for very little money.
This is to maintain order. But is not this order merely a negative good?
No. Unlike gaseous talk about spiritual unity, not having your throat slit is a very fucking positive good.
Is it not for giving people's life greater opportunities for the freedom of development?
No. They are welcome to suck their mystic thumbs till they make themselves sick. What matters is whether Law & Order results in rising per capita Income so it can pay for itself.
Its perfection is the perfection of an egg-shell, whose true value lies in the security it affords to the chick and its nourishment and not in the convenience it offers to the person at the breakfast table.
Without the shell, there would be no egg. How fucking stupid was this cunt?
Mere administration is unproductive, it is not creative, not being a living thing.
Administration is required for productivity. Being alive is an asset in admin. Being dead is an advantage only if you are a poet.
It is a steam-roller, formidable in its weight and power, having its uses, but it does not help the soil to become fertile.
Nor does Tagore's bullshit. Actual shit is needful.
When after its enormous toil it comes to offer us its boon of peace we can but murmur under our breath that "peace is good, but not more so than life, which is God's own great boon."
Tagore doesn't seem to have noticed that lots of people had lost God's own great boon during the recent hostilities. However the same thing would have happened if they keep sucking insanitary thumbs.
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