By: Ali Ismail

aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)

Caption: Dwellings in Port au Prince

Caption: The view of the cathedral, Port au Prince

Caption: Rene Preval – the next President of Haiti



Should ‘non-whites’ learn the White Man’s know-how?


Many ‘experts’ think we should not have access to developments


Bearing in mind that the British National Party (BNP) is still up and running and that, after Nick Griffin’s recent courtroom victory, the arguments of anti-multiculturalism are likely to be strengthened, I was interested to learn recently that a Haitian woman has been arrested in the USA for attempting to bring in a severed human head from her homeland.

There is going to be more about that severed head later but for now I would like to address the chorus of complaints to the effect that First World science, technology and culture should not be taught to non-Europeans.

The basis of the reasoning is that although executive class Third Worlders apparently do not currently possess the gifts of creativity, innovation or inventing, they do possess the gifts of being able to learn what other people discover and putting it to use. Furthermore, we are told, the uses to which these imported masses of learning are put are aberrations and distortions of what the original people intended all along. Therefore, they say, these Third Worlders should not be taught.

It is not the function of this organ to make assertions without reasoned arguments so it is incumbent on me to look at the above statements as objectively as circumstances permit.

Take film and video technology. That evolved out of photography, which was a quintessentially European development. The early daguerreotypes (antique word for proto-photographs) were almost all culturally Western and tended to feature landscapes and portraits. When motion pictures grew out of them, they were products of European values.

If we compare and contrast that with what is churned out of Bollywood every year, the difference is startling. The Indian film industry is permeated by indigenous cultures which has resulted in productions where musicals, tragedies, romances and historical dramas all jostle in the same motion picture over a couple of hours of screening time each.

Our natural reaction is to say that that is to be expected. A complex body of knowledge and skills such as film making or desk top publishing or whatever crosses continents and gets altered to suit the genetic patterns and cultures of other breeds of humans. So what?

Take knowledge and skills which have flowed in the other direction, for example, chess and yoga.

It is thought by many if not most, chess scholars that this hugely popular game played all over the Western world and which typifies the European male intellectual class originated in India with the warlike game of chaturanga in the 7th century AD. This went West and changed and evolved into its current Occidental form which is thoroughly European. Some Chinese call that game ‘Russian chess’ to distinguish it from board games they themselves have. I can confirm, after many hours in Internet chess rooms, that the great majority of my opponents are ‘white’ adult males with, indeed, few other races present.

Yoga is believed to have originated in the Indus valley at around 3000 BC and to have evolved from that point in time. During the British Raj, the colonising parties were amazed at the ancient scripts of the conquered peoples and transferred yoga to Europe. It changed in Western hands and a visit to the mind, body & spirit shops in this country shows how much it has altered. It has got mixed up with other non-Indian traditions and developments while still being called yoga. One institution, the School of Economic Science in London, altered yoga so much that it became thoroughly anglicised to the point where it became (very) English.

So learning changes according to who does the learning and it cuts both ways – West to East and East to West.

Which brings us back to the severed head incident. I am focusing on that and on Haiti in general because that particular country is a favourite stick used by racial supremacists/separatists/exclusivists to beat the One World crowd with.

Anyway, an American writer, Jeff Davis writing in European American News, saw fit to inform his readership that on February 10th, airport baggage screeners at Fort Lauderdale, Florida found a human head complete with teeth, hair and skin in the luggage of a woman who said she intended to ward off evil spirits with it.

Myrienne Severe, 30, a Haitian with an American green card, was charged later with smuggling a human head into the USA without the necessary documentation.

Mr Davis writes: ‘That’s what the wire service article said, anyway. I had no idea that smuggling a human head was a federal offence, but apparently so. It makes one wonder how much of this goes on. With all the bizarre Third World immigrants we’re hosting these days, legal and illegal, for all anyone knows this kind of thing may be a common occurrence. “Madam, did you declare that bag of human ears?”’

Mr Davis carries on with much the same kind of criticism of Third World people and culture harming his state’s society, culture and environment.

Another writer, Ian Mosley, stated about the recent election in Haiti: ‘The latest round of murderous violence in the filthiest city in the world, Haiti’s capital Port-Au-Prince, broke out several days ago in support of presidential favourite Rene Preval as a “slow vote count” indicated he was falling just short of the 50 percent necessary to win, out of a field of over thirty candidates. (For “slow vote count” read near-total fraud carried out by assorted thugs, combined with sheer ineptitude and stupidity in the attempts to count the votes, complicated by the fact that the majority of Haiti’s election officials are illiterate, just like the majority of the population.)

‘There now must be a run-off, which in Haiti means running off torrential flows of blood from dead natives into the gutters of Port-au-Prince. Preval supporters in Port-au-Prince and the town of Marmelade threatened that their demonstrations could turn violent if Preval is not declared the first-round winner, accusing the electoral council of manipulating the count. This nonsense happens at every “election” and had been going on now in Haiti for almost two hundred years. Why the whole island isn’t cordoned off and the natives allowed to kill each other off until no one remains is one of the greatest mysteries of international diplomacy. US Marines have repeatedly tried to “restore” order on Haiti, but some places have never had order and never will’.

In fact Haiti appears to be a strong argument in favour of individuals who seek to deprive the Third World of the benefits of new innovations as they come along.

In January 1804: Jean Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independent black Republic of Haiti in the northern half of the island. The whole of the subsequent history of its section of the island of Hispaniola is a blood-soaked chaos. The once highly prosperous French colony with arguably excellent French laws did indeed degenerate to what is happening now.

In retrospect, however, it becomes apparent that whatever one’s personal viewpoint the ongoing European supremacy in cultural and scientific development is recent, not ancient, and probably not as genetic as the communication blockers want to say it is.

The core of the matter is a difference in the way the universe in perceived. The typical Western method of understanding any phenomenon is firstly observation, secondly reasoning, thirdly experimentation and fourthly using the second step to analyse the results of the experiments. The Eastern and African way is to invent or otherwise fabricate supernatural causes for whatever is being considered.

As stated above, Western supremacy in matters technical and cultural is recent.

A quick reading of any of the Icelandic sagas, for example The Saga of Burnt Njal, reveals graphically that European man a thousand years ago lived and thought fairly similarly to us. Explanations of the natural world were in terms of gods, goddesses, giants, ogres, dwarves, fairies, elves enchanted trees and a long list of much besides. They relied on fantasy as much as any of us in our religious states now.

Furthermore, crime rates until fairly recently were as high in Europe and North America as in any of our South Asian nations. In England crime in the 19th Century was proportionally higher than now and it was considered unsafe for unescorted young women to walk the streets alone, particularly at night – just like our own homeland countries. Men in London used to go out in groups for mutual protection, particularly at night.

In terms of physical genetic differences, the genes of Europeans and South Asians are similar to the point where they are statistically collectively near-identical.

The conclusion which I am tentatively holding is that as and when the others (that is to say us) drop our age-old belief-systems for a world-view which is in accordance with everyday and scientific realities, we will no longer be backward. Different, maybe; even very different in terms of our ways of life and artefacts but approximately just as advanced in terms of prosperity and technology.

When that day arrives, we should hear different news from Haiti.

THE END

This article first appeared in The Bangla Mirror newspaper - the first English language weekly for the Bangladeshis of the United Kingdom on February 23 2006