Tuesday October 29, 2002
I found this: A LETTER TO A HINDU: THE SUBJECTION OF INDIA-ITS CAUSE AND CURE By Leo Tolstoy with an Introduction by M. K. GANDHI because of a link on Ftrain.com and I'm posting an excerpt as well as encouraging you to read it.
Never read any Tolstoy before but I'm impressed with this little ditty. He pretty much nails it right in the beginning and I've quoted that part. And all he says is applicable today. Just replace The British East India Company with television.
The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same-whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.
This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more than two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious morality.
From your letter and the articles in Free Hindustan as well as from the very interesting writings of the Hindu Swami Vivekananda and others, it appears that, as is the case in our time with the ills of all nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'.
Your letter, as well as the articles in Free Hindustan and Indian political literature generally, shows that most of the leaders of public opinion among your people no longer attach any significance to the religious teachings that were and are professed by the peoples of India, and recognize no possibility of freeing the people from the oppression they endure except by adopting the irreligious and profoundly immoral social arrangements under which the English and other pseudo-Christian nations live to-day.
And yet the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it - a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England and America alike.
voyeurs of the world, give something back!
Nearby Entries
<prev<----
Home
----
>next>
Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Search
Categories
- blog meta info (23)
- essays (15)
- eyes (6)
- india (10)
- my book (6)
- movies (17)
- music (40)
- photos misc (59)
- cuba photos (24)
- india photos (52)
- san francisco photos (51)
- the mission (19)
- videos (25)
Archives
- May 2006
- October 2005
- September 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- November 2003
- October 2003
- September 2003
- August 2003
- July 2003
- June 2003
- May 2003
- April 2003
- March 2003
- February 2003
- January 2003
- December 2002
- November 2002
- October 2002
- September 2002
- August 2002
- July 2002
- June 2002
- May 2002
- April 2002
- March 2002
- February 2002
- January 2002
- December 2001
- November 2001
- October 2001
- September 2001
- August 2001
- July 2001
- June 2001
- May 2001
Recent Entries
- Act Of The Apostle Part 1 May 22, 2006 10:42 AM
- Listen to Thomas Friedman October 17, 2005 1:39 AM
- Personal Continuity September 6, 2005 2:28 AM
- White Gold May 17, 2005 5:35 PM
- Hate, lies and perverted racism May 1, 2005 3:33 PM
- Ballroom Chairs April 29, 2005 1:21 AM
- Supreme Court to pro-lifers -> deeeenied. March 24, 2005 11:02 AM
- Blurry SFO March 23, 2005 3:38 AM
- A site for the blind March 20, 2005 9:07 PM
- The tube is out! March 19, 2005 10:33 AM