Our western cultures are young and immature when compared to their culture.
India people is very determined and have a very strong will.
I seriously doubt that people from India will play the theatrical geopolitical games of weapon manufacturers who make profit with other people's suffering and anger.
Pablo, I despair of ever having any meaningful impact on your view of the world, but I can’t help but comment on this post. There are two ideas expressed here, both of interest to people who wonder how such notions come to be vital and influential things in people’s minds. They are known by very specific names to those who study these things: “The Merchants of Death” and “The Romance of the East.”
One of the most important things that is not well understood by people who aren’t serious students of history is that the analysis of history and human society themselves have changed a great deal in the last fifty years or so. What is considered today to be rigorous analysis of these subjects is really a fairly new phenomenon.
Two of the things that mark modern social studies – and differentiate it from earlier work – are the realizations that 1) cause and effect in social systems is extremely complex and; that 2) it is very important to be as clear as possible about the theoretical assumptions concerning society being made by those who do the studying and writing. In earlier times, even the most serious students of history and society tended to apply much simpler notions of cause and effect to the facts they considered, and they were also much less conscious of and less clear about disclosing the ideological foundations of their analyses.
These factors are evident in what you’ve written, Pablo. The first thing we see is one of your fixed ideas: That large scale human conflict is largely the result of the weapons industry. This is a very specific idea, and actually has a very specific origin in the history of ideas. Europeans were shocked by the large-scale violence of World War I. The devastation wrought by the war and the numbers of casualties were unprecedented in the experience of the generation that lived through “the Great War” (as it was called until the 1940s, since people didn’t know it was the first in a two-game series).
At the time, Marxist notions of the primacy of economic factors in human social systems, and the evil wrought by the private ownership of capital, were
extremely influential among “advanced” intellectuals in Europe and America. It is difficult today for people who don’t immerse themselves in the thought of the time to realize just how widespread and influential Marxist theoretical concepts about society and history were. The gulags were unknown to all but those who were forced into them and those who created them. “Progressive” thinkers in the West almost all tended toward Marxist ideas. Mainstream “news” publications in the West were full laudatory descriptions of life in the socialist paradise of Bolshevik Russia.
In this intellectual climate, an explanation of how the nations of Europe had descended into the blood of the long butchery of the Great War developed and was widely accepted. It was known as the idea of “the Merchants of Death.” It had been German arms makers like Krupp and the owners of British shipyards that profited from the building of battleships who pushed the western world into war. It had all been about the evil of capitalism, you see. Completely consistent with the basic Marxist notion that class control over the means of production was the primary (really the only) motor of history, this idea grew into the main explanation for the madness of the war accepted both among “intellectuals” and, as expressed in less “high brow” media like the popular press and movies, by many average people. The theory grew to connect with and buttress Lenin’s theory of imperialism (his only really original contribution to Marxist doctrine) and explained for the people of Europe and America how great masses of people had been manipulated by shadowy, powerful, evil capitalists into fighting and dying.
Of course, the truth is much, much more complex than this. Factors like the ethnic dynamic of pan-Slavism, the strange and stunted personality of the Kaiser, the narrow culture of militaristic pride among the Prussian nobility, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and, increasingly the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the lack of imagination among the military theorists of the European armies, all played key roles in the insanity that began to unfold in August, 1914. The “Merchants of Death” theory ignored all this, and presented a tidy, small group of clearly-defined villains. Unfortunately, it misses most of the truth by being such a satisfyingly simple explanation.
As for your comment about India embodying some kind of wonderful alternative cultural approach to the warmongering West, I’m afraid this idea can’t begin to stand up to reality. “The Romance of the East” has deeper roots in Western thinking, dating back in some ways to the Roman love-hate relationship with the Hellenized “Asiatics” who peopled the eastern part of its empire. More importantly for our time, from the Enlightenment on, an idealized (and very unrealistic) “East” has been the screen onto which western thinkers about society have conveniently projected as many of the good things they don’t see in their own societies as possible. The late 19th century English “theosophist” movement specifically placed a whole host of positive “spiritual” values into a poorly-understood caricature of India. This caricature ignores the fact that India has been the battleground of warring armies since the events described in the Vedas, through the time of the bloody Muslim conquests, and all the way up to the modern era. The deeply romanticized picture of Mohandis Ghandi one sees in the Attenborough film is a continuing example of the ongoing “Romance of the East.” The reality is that the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers have run with blood as much as any others in the world.
