THE United States is a votary of choice. That is what we are told. Yet it does not allow nations to choose the way they like. It wants to impose its own way of life on the world. This is a tyranny that we must resist. The Cold War was not fought for the right to choose potato chips, but the exercise our right to choose our way of life. America seems to have forgotten it.
Perhaps the Americans think that they are the “chosen people” to carry the Message of Christianity to the world. But what do they carry? The Message of Jesus? The universal values? Neither. They carry the values of the American market. (Let us not forget that the “business of American is business). America has turned even its affairs with God into a business!
The American way of life is a product of its experience and opportunities. It need not be relevant to others. And the US market is driven by one consideration alone: Profit! But think of it: a human civilisation being driven by the concern of the stomach alone! There is little scope here for an ethical way of life.
Eastern civilisations, Indian in particular, are not based on the market, but on religions, philosophies, cultures and aesthetics. Thus the Eastern and Western civilisations are different. As Max Mueller said: “The Western civilisation is based on an active life, the eastern on a reflective contemplative life.”
I believe Eastern civilisations have a right to follow the way they choose. Why? Because there is no means to know that the Western way is the right one. In any case, the western civilization has made too many mistakes that it has forfeited its right to guide the world.
Little do we realise that globalisation of production and distribution must lead to the globalisation of tastes, in fact to the globalisation of the mind. It will create in India a breed of men, Indian in colour and shape, but American in tastes and manners. Sounds familiar? Yes, it was Macaulay, the British administrator in India, who penned something similar.
Know that the west has a motive in its concerns for the East. In his book The Conflict of Civilisations Samuel Hunginton says: “The west, in effect, is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain predominance of the West, protect western political and economic values.” Do we listen? We do not, for the vast majority of the new rich class are busy guzzling up their new-found riches. Do they care for the dangers the country is facing? They do not. Let the invaders come, they seem to say. Centuries of subjection have prepared us for the hegemony of the West. There is a segment of people in India who have only contempt for the country and its culture. But they still thrive. The more they hate our culture, the more they embrace the western way of life. Amilcar Cabral, the African ideologue, says “The moment imperialism arrived in Africa it made us leave our own history and enter another history (that of Europe).” Do we understand what he says?
Today with personal computer and internet, there is a momentous revolution in information. It is this total dominance of America which make resistance almost hopeless.
Today it is the TV which decides what news to publish for, without visuals no news is good enough. And the visuals are no good unless they have colour, drama and spectacle.
And it is sex, crime and violence that attract the tired masses to the TV. This decides the revenue of the TV channels. This is how the market has the final say.
The globalists today are against the idealisation of geography. Why? because they want to destroy the identity of the nations. For us Hindus, geography is all, for we consider the whole of India as a mother and punya bhoomi.
We Hindus are born to a free world. Thanks to our ancestors. We have retained our right to choose and express. And we want to keep it like that.
Aurobindo refuses to accept uniformity of the world. It is an obstacle to a higher consciousness, he says.
Globalisation of trade may be a good thing. But globalisation of the mind is a disaster.
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