Assumed racial superiority is a foregone conclusion in the minds of
the so-called Aryans of Europe and of America.
I was in Paris when the world rang with the war-glories of Nippon, and
afterwards, when for a while it seemed as if the bloodless Young Turk
revolution would meet with success.
There we had at last two specific instances of Oriental nations
working out their own salvation against tremendous odds: Japan
threatened by the Russian Goliath, and Turkey a prey to the wrangling
and the selfish machinations of all Europe, of all lying Christendom.
But the effect on the conceit of the Aryans was less than nothing. The
people of Europe and of America are blind to the Writing on the Wall.
They have sealed their ears against the murmuring voices of Awakening
Asia.
Are they afraid to listen?
Now and then, when not engaged in discussing the latest tango or
divorce case, they do read and talk about the awakening of China, the
commercial conquests and aggressive policy of Japan, and the
smouldering fires of United Islam, but without experiencing the least
abating influence on their artificially nurtured racial and religious
conceit. Peacefully and stupidly the Christians, the “white races,”
continue to misread the lessons of history and the signs of the times.
They are afraid to see the brutal, naked truth.
Once I watched an ostrich bury his head in the sand….
They have established the amusing dogma that the so-called White and
Christian countries are the superior countries, just because they are
White and Christian.
I have established a slightly different dogma, and, being a charitable
and entirely guileless Oriental, I will make a present of it to my
Aryan friends:
You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that
you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past
and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of
your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and
shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest
of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there
towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East
is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West.
In _Tancred_, that brilliant Oriental, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in
devoting a few lines to a great Bishop of the Church of England,
really pictures the typical Christian such as he stinks in our
nostrils from Morocco to Kharbin. For the noble Jewish Peer
characterizes the Right Reverend Gentleman as a man who combined great
talents for action with very limited powers of thought, who was
bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable
perseverance and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a
capacity for mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs,
who could permit nothing to be done without his interference, and who
consequently was perpetually involved in transactions which were
either failures or blunders.
In material progress you have led the world for the last two or three
centuries. By the True Prophet … all of three hundred years!
And like all parvenus, you are so astonished at your success, so
pleased with yourselves, that you imagine your present hegemony in the
race for material progress to be a guarantee for the future. But there
is not even the shadow of an excuse for such an assumption, unless it
be the fact that the Christian mind is diseased with racial and
religious megalomania. There is not a single historical parallel which
justifies your pleasant superstition that your present leadership,
which after all is of very recent birth, will show greater stability
than any of those many alien, ancient civilizations which long ago
came from the womb of eternity, to go back whence they sprang.
Nations as well as men are judged by two factors: by their virtues,
and by their vices.
As to virtues, what have you Christians done for the general uplift of
the world which could not be matched by a random look into the pages
of Oriental history? And as to vices, is there any degeneracy rampant
amongst us which is not equalled by the degeneracy of the Western
lands?
History has an unpleasant knack of repeating itself; and the helot of
to-day has the disagreeable habit of being the master of to-morrow,
regardless of race and color and creed. I would like to return to
earth about three hundred years from to-day, just to observe how my
descendants, who will have intermarried with Chinese and Japanese,
will succeed in ruling their colonies in Europe and in America. And I
do hope that the Chinese blood of my descendants will not be too
preponderant: otherwise, taking a leaf out of European and American
colonization, and thus forcing their own food-laws on the subject
races, they might force their White and Christian subjects to eat
roast puppy-dog.
Human nature is the same the world over, and there never was an
originally superior race or people. Some nations have founded powerful
civilizations which lasted for a shorter or a longer period, but it
was never the racial force which caused it, but rather the
irresistible swing of circumstances.
It was Kismet.