Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "eurocentrism"

History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative – or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything.

Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan – fast forward to present time – during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch – Spanish is not even a Native American language.

Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon “La Isabela” in the 1500s.

Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home – many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers – their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything – just like the Portuguese did in Brazil.

The Spaniards would’ve done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name – the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain.

Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal “glory” of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is.

That’s why José Martí is so important, that’s why Kwanzaa is so important, that’s why Darna is so important – in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors.

No other “civilized” people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don’t know the answer – do you?

Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won’t suffice to undo the damage – but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented – what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other’s past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write “human history”, not the “conquerors’ history” – so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species – as one humankind.

Greeks did not invent philosophy,
philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa,
Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier,

not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life,
later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean,
but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy
goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth.

Maps of the world are whitewashed,
history of the world is whitewashed,
ethics of the world are whitewashed,
knowledge of the world is whitewashed.

No wisdom is flawless ‘n absolute, ancient or modern,
but the point is, enlightenment and civilization
did not originate in europe, they were born of
the lands colonially categorized as uncivilized.

You know how the dinosaurs went extinct – they committed suicide when they saw the white man coming. They said to themselves, clearly white men are the apex predator of earth, so there’s no point of us being!

Asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, caucasteroids wiped out civilizations. Colonialism was a mass extinction event, yet no textbook has the spine to bear the burden.

You demonize hitler for his measly 6m white body count!

Americas were radiant with life, love and wonder, then columbus happened, and population dropped 90%, bengal had the world’s finest silk industry, then churchill happened, and industry collapsed, 4 million starved to death, millions massacred across india, like australia, like leopold-infestation in congo.

Everywhere the white man has laid his eyes on, plague, famine and massacre has followed, and they had the gall to send missionaries to the south – ubuntu, advaita, aztecs and mayans, each could eat eurotheologies for breakfast and still have room for a 50 course meal.

In a way we should be thanking the cannibals, they were doing humanity great service, if only the africans, indians, native americans, aboriginal australians had done the same, earth would have been spared the brutalest extinction event in the history of life.

In the Naskar world, sonnet is not
an elitist structure of rigid rhyme and meter,
Naskar sonnet is a self-contained unit of
civilization, indifferent to literary convention.

I weave sonnets around the message,
instead of forcing the message into the sonnets.
Till you cut the cuffs of form, don’t touch my works,
if you want method and structure, pursue mathematics.

Childish eurocentric conventions are too puny
to contain the vastness of a transcendental human,
sometimes I’m Dervish, sometimes Advaita,
and the Brain Scientist keeps out the superstition.

Every mind is infinite, every mind, transcendental,
ape customs castrate the human into farm animal.
Cut the wings of a dove at birth,
and it’ll spend its life crawling like vermin.

Atheism is a white european invention,
outside the shortsighted gutter
of eurocentrism there are people who don’t
need to believe in a creator to be holy,

you can be sacred without being superstitious,
the human world is teeming with such cultures
where life is holy, duty is holy, laughter is holy,
but of course your whitewashed, eurocentric
little intellect cannot fathom nonduality –

that’s why you mustn’t confuse intellect with wisdom,
some of the brilliant minds are first class idiots,
their binary brains have zero capacity for nuance,
they confuse the backwater fiction-centric narrative
of the church to be the entire lifespring of theology,

so naturally, either they believe like sheep
or reject like robot, because in a world of sheep
and cyborgs either there is god or there is not,
either you submit to blind faith or icecold logic,
there is no place for heart, humanity and tolerance!

Not Christ, but church doctrine was
a major downgrade in theology existing
hundreds and thousands of years prior,
at the same time, european reductionism
was a major downgrade in a wholesome
life-centric understanding of truth.

We need a life-centric understanding of truth,
not truth-centric understanding of life –
we need a human-centric realization of divine,
not divine-centric realization of human.

There’s no such thing as slave traders,
get your language straight, you idiots –
they were human traffickers, not traders,
you trade in commodity, not people.

Colonizers were not slave traders,
they were terrorists and traffickers;
settlers are not civilizers,
they are plague upon the civilized world.

The world outside europe was already civilized
beyond the wildest dreams of the europeans,
then those brutes set sail, and the human race
experienced an extinction level catastrophe.

To trade in human lives like livestock
is the savagest form of cannibalism –
white history sells the West as the free world,
but dig into earth history, and you’ll realize,
West is the biggest threat to life and freedom.

Here is some rectified history,
dig up the rest for yourself –
Churchill was a big fat cannibal,
Leopold was an ugly deadly virus,
Columbus was a most wanted terrorist.

Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought,
whether it’s separation between the mortal and divine,
or the separation between reason and theology,
or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry.

Every single aspect of human consciousness
touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and
desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness,

which is why I never felt at home with euroschools,
despite the fact that I too like everyone on the
planet grew up in a westwashed education system.

However, it took me over a hundred books and
2000 sonnets to wake up to the tangible realization,
that the entire eurocentric paradigm is separatist,
from its science to philosophy to theology to poetry.

In euro schools of thought we say:
keep the divine separate from the people,
keep science separate from philosophy.
In Naskarian we say:
integration is divine by reason of poetry.