Arun, I didn't get the point, or points, of your comments. Were you defending the Dalit deal or just saying it's not especially bad compared with other places?
I don't know how the caste system works in India, but it seems like the usual situation elsewhere, at least in the past.
New Zealand Maoris had edible slaves [as recently as the 1860s on the Chatham Islands], heretical.com the British class system was fairly robust and there is still an aristocracy, the USA had second class citizen negroes until the 1960s who had previously been treated every bit as badly as anything done in India to Dalits [human imagination for cruelty is common everywhere and I doubt Indians have special talents for it].
Slaves and various types of second, third, and fourth classes are still in many places around the world. Women are still second class people in many places [including in New Zealand Maori tribal rules where they sit at the back of the marae, if not the bus].
As Japan, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and others have shown, ownership of resources is irrelevant to being wealthy and democratic. Having lots of found wealth isn't necessarily a good thing. Lots of wealthy people do NOT just hand it over to their offspring to be useless Trustafarians.
How long before India comes into the 20th century and ditches the Dalit nonsense? They've voted themselves poor for decades but seem to be ditching that, even realizing that CDMA is a good thing and are joining the revolution in peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, prosperity, longevity, fun and love which those magical phragmented photons deliver to their users.
Mqurice
Maori charms: <Early in 1835, 400 Taranaki Maori sailed on the brig Rodney to the Chathams; 500 additional Maori arrived by the end of the year. Shortly after the last group disembarked, the Maoris began to take possession of the islands by their ceremony of "takahi," or "walking the land."
King describes the takeover: "Parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals."
A council of Moriori elders was convened at the settlement called Te Awapatiki. Despite knowing of the Maori's predilection for killing and eating the conquered, and despite the admonition by some of the elder chiefs that the principle of Nunuku was not appropriate now, two chiefs — Tapata and Torea — declared that "the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative."
And so it was decided. There would be no resistance, no compromise with the principle of Nunuku. King continues: "Morioris were taken prisoners, the women and children were bound, and many of these, together with the men, were killed and eaten, so that the corpses lay scattered in the woods and over the plains. Those who were spared from death were herded like swine, and even killed from year to year."
King suggests that the Moriori decision not to fight back was a spur to Maori brutality, for Maoris confused Nunuku with cowardice, "and — by implication — worthlessness."
By 1862, only 101 Morioris out of an initial number of about 2,000 were left alive. The strategy "not designed for survival" led directly to the destruction of the Morioris. The Europeans watched the slaughter of Morioris by the Maoris, and did nothing to prevent it.
If Gandhi had known of the Moriori, he might have admired them: "To lay down one's life for what one considers to be right is the very core of satyagraha [resistance by non-violent means] . . . [In non-violence] the bravery consists in dying, not in killing," he said. But as King observes, "The Moriori had learned a tactical and philosophical truth that was to be articulated by other people from other cultures in the twentieth century: non-violence is an effective weapon only against an adversary who shares your conscience."
The last full-blooded Moriori, Tommy Solomon, died on March 19, 1933.
In the United States, Britain, and Australia, some pacifists proclaim their moral superiority to the soldiers who protect the pacifists' right to free speech. What happened to the Moriori would happen to these same pacifists, if not for the protection provided for many generations by the Anglosphere's soldiers and sailors. What the Maori did to the Moriori would have been done a thousand times over to the pacifists by Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, and bin Laden — and every other tyrant whom the pacifists condemned the military for resisting.
A popular bumper sticker says "If you can read this, thank a teacher." If you're a pacifist who hasn't been murdered or enslaved, thank a soldier. > |
