I was arrested by this piece of news: “The American Embassy offices, including the Public Affairs Section, Information Resource Center, and the student counseling service will remain closed today on the occasion of Columbus Day. . . . The Columbus Day is celebrated to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492, a US Embassy press release said.”

We owe it all to Columbus: the enslavement of the Native Americans, the enslavement and transportation of Africans, the destruction of indigenous civilisations. And it is telling that the entire world owes its misery to Europe, and not to China.

And the Pope recently rubbed salt in the wound when he proclaimed that the natives had been silently waiting for Christianity ere they were conquered and converted. One commentator observed that "As usual white Europeans continue in the most arrogant and insensitive ways to insult and humiliate the citizens of their former colonies. Perhaps this unconscious and addictive penchant for foot-in-the-mouth disease is written in the DNA of European Caucasians who just can’t seem to understand the immeasurable suffering that their contact with the peoples of the developing nations of the world has caused." (Michael Roberts, The Pope's Senior Moment).

Our gratitude to China must be, therefore in exact proportion to our antipathy for Europe: where China could have conquered the world, she didn't; and Europe did.

For Europe and China had the same technology: gunpowder, compass and printing press. These were Chinese inventions. Yet China refused to conquer the world and Europe did not. Had China gone on to conquer us, today we would be wearing pigtails, kowtowing and repeating ‘The Master said’ at every opportunity. For Cheng Ho, the eunuch, did in fact start to control the east. Between 1405 and 1433, Cheng Ho made his imperialist voyages to India and Africa, deposing rulers, installing them. And then the adventures stopped -- by bureaucratic fiat from the Middle Kingdom. China had no need to conquer the world, she was a unified, prosperous country, one of the two greatest civilisations the world had seen until that day, the other being the Muslim civilisation.

On the other hand, consider Europe. Europe was united only once by Augustus (there was an ephemeral union under Charlemagne around 800 AD). Europe was a fragmented unity, for one thing; for another, when kings tried to raise taxes, parliament opposed them. Hence kings tried to find a way around parliaments. Imperialist adventures offered an easy way out. The silver mines of the New World financed the European wars of Charles V. Notice the contradiction: the rights enjoyed by parliamentarians meant that ‘Red’ Indians and Africans had no rights whatsoever. They were not organised into parliaments. Thus began the new economy which ultimately led to capitalism.

I would very much like UNESCO to set aside a day for us, like Columbus Day, except that it would betoken our freedom, not our slavery: a Freedom From China Day. Of course, the last time I tried to get in touch with the resident representative of UNESCO here, he didn’t even give me the time of day. If a sufficient number of readers were to urge him to listen, I am sure the Res. Rep. would take notice. Whether a Freedom From China Day would actually follow is a difficult question to decide a priori. We would have to notify the Chinese Embassy here as well, and lobby the UN. With America threatening the entire world with violence, it would be remarkable if a Freedom From China Day were to be achieved.

After all, the West likes to portray China as a demonic force, an anti-democratic people, and therefore without any civilisation. We who were conquered by the West happily concur in this distortion of history. Now is a chance to set the record straight. Again and again the Tiananmen Square episode is brought up to humiliate the Chinese. Not a word is said about how West Bengal, India, rid itself of student politics: student leaders were picked up in the dead of night, taken outside the city, told to run and were then shot in the back. What China did openly, West Bengal did covertly. And of course America is doing the same thing on a grand scale.

When Alexander ‘the Great’ arrested some dacoits, the latter impudently observed that they only robbed a few people, whereas Alexander robbed entire nations and was therefore called ‘the Great.’ If an atrocity is committed quietly or on a sufficiently large scale, no harm attaches to the actor. Naturally the Chinese, being innocent of rhetoric and propaganda, do not realise this. And it is remarkable how a conquered people will mimic the ways of the master. The people of Hong Kong have several times led processions through the city in protest against certain laws to be enacted by China or with Chinese encouragement. These people had, bovine-like, suffered rule from Great Britain without a dollop of democracy decade after decade. Now that their imperial masters are gone, they crave abstractions like ‘liberty,’ ‘representation’ and so on. A conquered people presents a pathetic spectacle. Which is why we should be even more grateful to China for not making us wear our hair long, men and women alike.

We don’t recall how our weavers’ fingers were cut off by the British after Clive took us over; how indigo farmers’ wives were raped by the white sahibs. We forget our humiliation and our pain. When I ponder that the Chinese could have done so to us just as, if not more, easily, I cannot but utter a prayer of thanks.

Consider the last independent Nawab of Bengal. The Battle of Plassey was a European proxy war. European imperialism was the struggle among European nation-states translated abroad. The Battle of Plassey (1757) was fought between France and England, not England and the Nawab (physically, yes, of course, but politically, no). The two powers were fighting proxy wars even then in Europe : the War of the Austrian Succession followed by the Seven Years’ War. The battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) was another distant battle between France and Britain fought in Canada -- magnificently described in James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘The Last of the Mohicans.’

The frankest expression of cultural cringe flowed from the pen of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who favoured all things British against all things Indian: “ . . . all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule” he observed! Then fie to the Chinese: they should, on this logic, have conquered us and taken us to a higher level of civilisation. They should have taught us Confucianism, the binding of feet and the rule of bureaucrats. But that would have been too un-Asian: Asian societies have a pacific cast of mind. We needed to be conquered by the white people, to learn democracy and the violence that goes with it (it is reported that in the Congress government in India, there are 125 members with criminal records). You can teach people to be violent, but you can’t teach them to be peaceful. China would not have succeeded in teaching us true civilisation.

You can’t teach civilisation by conquering a people: you can only teach them moral degradation, corruption and a slave-like attitude.