White supremacy: its religious roots, and what must be done to eradicate it today

C. K. Raju

Indian Institute of Education
G. D. Parikh Centre, J. P. Naik Bhavan
University of Mumbai, Kalina Campus
Santacruz (E), Mumbai 400 098

Greetings

  • from India
  • to the first people of the two continents
  • today called North and South America.

10 minutes too little to cover all issues in abstract.

  • So, will cover the background,
  • and outline my suggestion on what must be done.

Background and references:

  • Keynote at Univs of Pretoria and Tubingen:
  • Raju, C. K. ‘“Euclid” Must Fall: The “Pythagorean” “Theorem” and The Rant Of Racist and Civilizational Superiority — Part 1’. Arụmarụka: Journal of Conversational Thinking 1, no. 1 (2021): 127–55.
  • https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajct.v1i1.6.

Introduction

  • The biggest religious hate crime in all history was
  • the genocide of 100 million native Americans.

Central paradox:

  • how was this horrifying crime
  • regarded as an ethical and moral imperative by Christians,
  • and then declared legal in US
  • as in the Johnson vs McIntosh verdict.

Observation:

  • Such obnoxious “morality” is not just the basis of US law,
  • it is a part of a wider Christian ethos

Examples

  • E.g. 1 The whole genre of “Western” stories and Hollywood films
  • celebrates this genocide instead of condemning it as evil.
  • E.g. 2 That celebration of genocide also evident in the game of “cowboys and Injuns”
  • played by White children (e.g. William Brown by Richmal Crompton)

Pattern repeats: slavery of Blacks

  • The same pattern of declaring as “moral”
  • inhumane treatment of non-Christians by Christians
  • is manifest in the case of slavery of Blacks

Bull Romanus Pontifex formulated in 1453

  • to justify slavery of first captive Blacks brought to Europe from Africa,
  • on the grounds that they were non-Christian,
  • NOT on the ground that they had black skins.

Excessively inhumane treatment of Blacks,

  • justified using the Bible
  • and the related notion of “divine” law
  • as in the slavery laws in the US,
  • or the subsequent laws on segregation
  • and apartheid (which ended just 3 decades ago).

Other comparable genocides are those of colonialism

  • the genocide of 50-100 million “brown” Indians by Christian Britishers
  • including the genocide of 3 million Indians during WWII
  • for which the racist mass-murderer Churchill was personally responsible

Comparable genocides

  • the genocides in Australia,
  • in the Belgian Congo etc,,
  • for all of which Christians
  • (and Christian morality) were responsible

This inhumane cruelty of Christians toward non-Christians

  • did NOT begin with the doctrine of discovery,
  • E.g. it was very manifest during the Inquisition,
  • and even earlier during the Crusades
  • which butchery of non-Christians is still celebrated as in the term “Crusading spirit”.

Christian "morality" of course tailored to suit PROFIT

  • profit from land grab through genocide of native Americans and Australians
  • profit from labor grab through slavery of Black Africans
  • from wealth grab through colonialism,
  • the Crusades aimed to grab wealth from Muslims who were then the richest in Europe
  • the horrifying cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition to wrap up this process of wealth grab.

However, key point:

  • in all these cases, extreme inhumanity was passed off as highly moral,
  • because it imitated the Christian God who,
  • it was fantasized,
  • would treat non-Christians horribly for an eternity after death.

Easy to understand why

  • the church concocted this fantasy
  • of a sadistic God who eternally punished non-Christians.
  • In the 4th c., shortly after the first Nicene Council,
  • the church seized state power in the Roman Empire by engineering a coup.

The Christian priests now wanted to rule,

  • but rulers need to drive terror into the hearts of the ruled.
  • This is usually done by means of weapons but the church priests then had no weapons.
  • But Christian priests realized that lies have power, soft power.
  • Therefore, the church invented a new method of rule by fantasy, a phantasmocracy.

Church priests lied about life after death to frighten gullible people

  • with visions of a terrifying god who tortured non-Christians
  • as in the well-known arguments from hellfire and brimstone.
  • To make this god more terrifying all sorts of evil, horrible and sadistic tortures of non-Christians were attributed to him.

Imitating god was moral,

  • therefore Christians came to the conclusion that
  • extreme inhumanity to non-Christians is highly moral

Christian intellectuals from Augustine to Dante

  • supported these immoral fantasies.

Note: I differentiate between

Church a political entity,

  • mainly concerned with power,
  • distinct from the original religion still called Christianity,
  • which the church claims to own.

Lies about PAST, false history

  • Early "pagans" were smarter and laughed
  • at the lies the church invented about the future, about life after death.
  • Realizing this, the church also invented lies and fantasies about the past.

E.g. the 5th c. Orosius had invented false history against the pagans,

  • the supremacist claim that
  • the Christian god gave preferential treatment to Christians in this very life.

Many models of false church history

  • Byzantine model (e.g. "Claudius" Ptolemy)
  • Crusading model
  • the Inquisitional model (e.g. Copernicus),

Christian Discovery model of false history

Western universities and academia

  • set up by the church
  • only personally attack the critic
  • never address the critique
  • or honestly accept the truth.

So in a quarter of a century no one could address my critique,

  • and many think that calling me a Hindu fanatic is adequate defence
  • without any proof that I am a Hindu.
  • That is the low intellectual standard demonstrated by
  • Western academics from Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge etc.

From Christian to White supremacy

  • church morality is based on profit and political expediency,
  • it hence mutated like an evil virus
  • and the false history mutated with it
  • instead of calling Greeks "friends" of Christians
  • it called them White.

When many Black African slaves converted to Christianity,

  • the justification that they should be enslaved, because non-Christian, failed.
  • Hence, to preserve the huge profits from slavery,
  • the church expediently invented a new Bible defense of slavery,
  • based on the curse of Ham or the curse of Kam.

Now said the Christian God had cursed Blacks to be inferior,

  • hence they could be enslaved even if Christian.
  • The declaration of emancipation was not issued because of any ethical concerns
  • but only to win the American Civil War,
  • by economically ruining the South.

Secular argument for supremacy from false history

  • enabled false Christian chauvinist history to mutate to false racist history.
  • Immanuel Kant, a so-called philosopher of ethics,
  • used this secular argument from false history of science to justify White supremacy
  • and the slavery of Blacks
  • by saying Blacks were not creative.

From White supremacy to Western supremacy

  • When colonialism replaced slavery as the major means of wealth
  • the virus of supremacy underwent another mutation
  • from "White" to Western
  • using the secular argument for supremacy from a false religious history of science.

British used a divide and rule policy in the India,

  • hence formulated the fantasy of the Aryan race conjecture
  • that Whites had earlier conquered and populated India
  • driving the original inhabitants ("Dravidians") to the south.

The political repercussions of Aryan fantasy

  • are still very manifest in current south Indian politics.

Key point: evil claim of White supremacy mutated to claim of Western supremacy

  • this was spread throughout the world by colonial education
  • which was church education, including at the university level,
  • since major Western universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris
  • were all set up by the church during the Crusades
  • and controlled by the church for centuries.

From false history to bad philosophy

  • Church was a hegemon which invaded all aspects of Western thought
  • globalised by colonialism
  • E.g. false history of "Euclid" as father of math leads to false claim
  • that Greeks did a "superior" (axiomatic) math
  • imitated today by universities across the globe.

Actually axiomatic proofs NOT found in "Euclid" book

  • but found in post-Crusade theology of Aquinas.
  • and related Christian theology of reason.

Axiomatic math

But you don't have to worry

  • just follow the church/Western tradition
  • Attack the critic (invent some lie)
  • never touch the criticism (except to misrepresent).
  • That is considered loss of argument only in the non-West.

Conclusion

  • To eradicate false claims of Christian/White/Western supremacy
  • force the West to engage with the critique
  • as this conference is doing.