The Curse of Caste Division

Light of Truth

The caste feeling is something inherent in the Indian and it finds its expressions in manifold ways of our living and relations of marriage, social mingling, attitudes and approaches. The caste feeling is reigning at present in India. It is world phenomenon, caste and colour discriminations run deeper in the white and Black races. Apartheid is not a museum remnant, though the legal separations are over in the interiority of people this dark thought still exist with sinister power. The great tragedy of Nazism remains a warning to all nations and communities. Hitler was not a solitary loner who someway happened to be racist. The racism that was in the society simply got the upper hand in him. The widely-read historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), who salted his historical fields with antipathies about alien Jewish influences on German life and provided the Nazi’s with the by words: “the Jews are our misfortune.” Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) born in British aristocracy, described the German as having an ideal type: “great, heavenly radiant eyes, golden hair, the body of a giant, harmonious musculature, a long skull [and]…. high countenance.” Against the blond giant stood the threatening Jew. Chamberlain devoted one-hundred-thirty five continuous pages to dissecting the Jewish type, the physiology and the character. So distinct were the racial traits that one could be certain that Christ was not a Jew, a view that Hitler took over from Chamberlain. The Jews’ very “existence is a sin (Sünde); their existence is a transgression against the holy laws of life.” Thus any mating between Jew and Aryan could only corrupt the nobility of the latter: the Jewish character “is much too foreign, firm, and strong to be refreshed and ennobled by German blood.” This could only mean a struggle between the Aryans and the Jews, a struggle of life and death. At the beginning of the twentieth century, two of the most influential proponents of the theory of racial hierarchy were Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau and Gobineau with his Essay on the inequality of the human races translated into several languages and went through five German editions served as the intellectual rationale for the anti-Semitic societies that spread through Germany at the turn of the century. He was assured of the decline of human societies—so palpable before his eyes during the years of political turmoil throughout Europe—and proposed a very simple formula to explain it: race mixing. In Mein Kampf, Hitler is perfectly explicit about the sources of his anti-Jewish attitudes. He identifies two political figures who turned him from an individual hardly aware of Jews into a passionate anti-Semite: Karl Lueger the mayor of Vienna and Georg Schönerer. Hitler said “at the time, Schönerer seemed to me the better and more fundamental thinker in regard to the principal problems.”

Hitler was not believer of Darwin’s evolution of species except for the principle of the survival of the fittest. Hitler believed not in slow evolution; he believed rapid revolution through “catastrophes” was ideal because, “if diseases of national bodies do not take the form of catastrophe, man slowly begins to get accustomed to them and at length, though it may take some time, perishes all the more certainly of them.” Hitler believed that the slow, continuous form of evolution described by Darwin was to be feared because people would “grow accustomed” to the “disease,” causing it to be ignored and even accepted, and therefore more dangerous. Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism. The Nazis aimed to alter the gene pool of the human race quickly and thereby force evolution to occur. Darwin advocated against this approach. By contrast, Hitler viewed these rapid and “violent catastrophes” as central to the evolution, or devolution, of humanity. He was against race mixing and did not believe in culture of making humans better. Why do we dig up the past ghost if not to make us see the ominous present.

Hitler essentially erased the biblical distinction between man and other creatures. The return to nature is so strong among us with the dangerous notion of mixing the races and natural right of supremacy. We wish to forget what T.H. Huxley wrote in Evolution and Ethics: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.” Perverse minds give birth to a false conception of the relationship between man and nature and thus participates in the perpetuation of oppressive structures. Consequently this false relationship needs to be revised publicly and with the whole public.

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