Sajakkini

Pity the people who have to portray others as inferior savants in order to feel good about themselves. What must that say about their sense of worth and self-esteem, we may wonder.

And this is a sword that cuts in all directions, mind you. It applies equally to the Muslims content to live under their coconut shells while swiping away at the invisible Jewish conspiracy, as it does to those white colonial types still dreaming of the glory of empire.

It applies just as much to the Malays who clutch their precious lands so tightly to their chests while railing against phantoms wanting to steal everything away from them, as it does to those Chinese who call for parity and a rescaling of the NEP even as they continue to consciously employ methods of excluding other races from gaining access to their jealously guarded distribution networks.

RUHAYAT X is a thinker, writer and teh tarik philosopher. He can get grumpy too. His publishing company, Neohikayat Press will be rolling out anthologies soon: Wilayah Kutu and Aweks KL.

Oh Snow White

Fair is as fair does. If ideas and concepts are the only truths we hold on to, what does it matter which race is doing what to who?

But for now, let’s simplify the topic at hand and focus on the stubborn insistence of the idea that it was dem dere white folks who were solely responsible for the birth of rationality.

(The intention is not to pull down the pants of our ex-colonial masters so that we could feel good about ourselves. Rather, it is about returning a sense of balance and perspective, so that we are not too quick to dismiss our own rich heritage, nor hold on to it blindly.)

This is an idea, I feel, that has lived for far too long and is being swallowed by many a coloured person, too, mostly without realising it, no thanks to modern consumerism and Hollywood.

It is a popular thought among even the learned circles, if I may indulge in my favourite past-time of generalising (without which the majority of arguments is impossible, I might add, in my own defense). And it is what powers the current neo-con project that the Americans want to impose on the rest of the (coloured) world. So you can see how dangerous the prevalence of this idea can be.

You have heard, I presume, the suggestion that the struggle of West vs East throughout antiquity is equal to Reason vs Mysticism? The underlying charge being that as a people who believe in the existence of invisible worlds conjoined to this material one we see before us, we are quite incapable of rational thinking. So thank God for the pale skinned ones, then.

Greek mythology

According to this fanciful worldview, Western thought sprang overnight and almost fully-formed in ancient Greece, a region populated by tribes of people all of whom were green/blue-eyed with curly blonde tresses. You can easily find the persistence of this myth in almost all Hollywood movies depicting ancient Greece or Rome even today.

(The fact that it is there in plain sight and the fact that one sees it is not one and the same. Too many times we miss the snake hissing at our feet because we are too busy staring after the beautiful maiden who had dropped it, as she’s strutting down the street. This is why we continue to shop at cut-rate hypermarkets and think nothing of it.)

Perish the thought that as a people of the Mediterranean, the Greeks most likely had olive skin and curly dark hair, as befits the weather. Oh, a bit like the Turks and Persians, really. (And who can really tell modern Italians from northern Hindus and Spaniards from Arabs?)

The tall, straggling blondies of the time - who are almost always employed to depict the heroes of modern-day Hollywood sagas- were mainly residing further oop north. But what does such trivial facts matter among friends, eh. Stereotypes are easier to manage, old boy.

Moving along, the myth continues that the ancient Greeks/Athenians/what-have-you-as-long-as-they-are white were the ones who had “invented” philosophy.

(And conceived the concept of democracy. But we shan’t go there for now. Suffice to say that Prince Gautama Buddha had dreamed up a form of it some 500 years before Aristotle/Plato/whatever, and there is even evidence of it being practiced in ancient Indian kingdoms before 400 AD).

There was no philosophy before the Greeks, we are constantly told so baldly. You might be rolling your eyes wondering why this is such a big deal. “So what? How does this make us poorer?”

Uncle Tom’s cabin

Given that philosophy is now regarded as the highest of all forms of knowledge, the conceit is readily apparent: only the white folks can “create” a path to and reach such lofty heights. And the only way the rest of us can reach those heights is through them, an idea that many coloureds, whether they want to admit it or not, willingly submit to.

So you see what the big deal is: it is about endorsing the myth of racial superiority. “Democracy be damned, you stinking gullible natives, some races are indeed more equal than others. Hitler was right, in the end, but he had to be stopped simply because he was turning on other whites, and thanks for helping us do that so now we can proceed to roll over you.”

What makes us poorer is that by investing in this myth, we are willfully acceding to their fiction and signing away the deeds to our no less capable cultures and civilisations. This may still not be a big deal to some people, but it is an incredibly irritating thorn in my head.

The funny thing is, this overt sense of racism was not the work of the ancient Greeks. I submit that it was manufactured much later, to support the nascent European colonial project in the 17th Century. Perhaps apart from the ancient Chinese and Japanese empires, never before had the world been carved so blatantly according to racial lines.

The other funny thing is, the ridiculousness of this whole proposal can be summarily dismissed thusly: where did Pythogoras get his theorem from? Was it the Germanic barbarian hordes knocking on Rome’s gates - and who now hold the lofty thrones of intellectual superiority - who had invented the game of chess? Etc etc.

If you wish to refute it with empirical proof, ask them to show you what it is in Nordic genes that makes those people so special that only they can be capable of such high intellectual skill.

(Incidentally, when Hitler tried to produce proof of Aryan superiority in the annals of ancient history, he sent teams to Africa and Tibet to find it. Why not to Sweden and Norway, one can only wonder. And unfortunately for the half-educated half-Jew, his Aryan forebears turned out to be… brown-skinned Indians, for that’s what Aryans really are.)

I’m on a roll…

But while the frailness of this insinuation is obvious, it simply refuses to die. And so the thought is resurrected in so many different forms and forums. Sometimes - and pardon me while I puke - it is even couched in “intelligent” philosophical terms, happily disgorged from the mouths of brown-skinned natives without a hint of irony.

It could be argued - and it has been, by finer minds than mine - that racism has always run thick at the core of the European Renaissance. For all the purported greatness of modern European thinkers, it would seem that dominating-slash-subjugating the “barbarians” has always been one of their driving motivations.

Or, to put it in colonial-speak, “bringing culture and civilisation to the rest of the world”. And with such pretty, righteous wrappers in place, you can then proceed to humiliate whole nations of people and flush their sacred texts down the toilet and not feel a whit of guilt about it.

The irony, to me, is that the Westerners (for want of a better shortcut) feel the need to still uphold such a myth in order to assert their authority. If they were being subjugated and oppressed then I could more readily understand their need to clutch at straws and propagate myths to safeguard their self-esteem.

But in today’s world, they are emerging as the (almost) absolute victors. So why the need to tell stories?

What does such sabre-rattling benefit the human race? What would you lose to acknowledge that the Greeks had in fact borrowed from the Egyptians, just as the Egyptians had from the Persians and the Persians from the Indians, and vice versa? Human civilisations have always learned from one another, cropping up as they do several at a time.

No doubt Persian civilisation had been influenced by Greek thinking, as suggested by the movie “Alexander”. But to suggest that the Greeks were the apple from which the seeds of the great civilisations - Persian, Egyptian and Northern Indian, in the movie - advanced from, I doubt even the ancient Greeks themselves would have believed in that myth.

So a note to the white brothers - and others with similar delusions - if I may: if you want to live among us in this world, stop with the inferiority complex already. It’s getting pathetic and tiresome.