Chapter II

Assumed racial superiority is a foregone conclusion in the minds of the so-called Aryans of Europe and of America.

I was in Paris when the world rang with the war-glories of Nippon, and afterwards, when for a while it seemed as if the bloodless Young Turk revolution would meet with success.

There we had at last two specific instances of Oriental nations working out their own salvation against tremendous odds: Japan threatened by the Russian Goliath, and Turkey a prey to the wrangling and the selfish machinations of all Europe, of all lying Christendom.

But the effect on the conceit of the Aryans was less than nothing. The people of Europe and of America are blind to the Writing on the Wall. They have sealed their ears against the murmuring voices of Awakening Asia.

Are they afraid to listen?

Now and then, when not engaged in discussing the latest tango or divorce case, they do read and talk about the awakening of China, the commercial conquests and aggressive policy of Japan, and the smouldering fires of United Islam, but without experiencing the least abating influence on their artificially nurtured racial and religious conceit. Peacefully and stupidly the Christians, the “white races,” continue to misread the lessons of history and the signs of the times.

They are afraid to see the brutal, naked truth.

Once I watched an ostrich bury his head in the sand….

They have established the amusing dogma that the so-called White and Christian countries are the superior countries, just because they are White and Christian.

I have established a slightly different dogma, and, being a charitable and entirely guileless Oriental, I will make a present of it to my Aryan friends:

You Westerns feel so sure of your superiority over us Easterns that you refuse even to attempt a fair or correct interpretation of past and present historical events. You deliberately stuff the minds of your growing generations with a series of ostensible events and shallow generalities, because you wish to convince them for the rest of their lives how immeasurably superior you are to us, how there towers a range of differences between the two civilizations, how East is only East, and the West such a glorious, wonderful, unique West.

In _Tancred_, that brilliant Oriental, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in devoting a few lines to a great Bishop of the Church of England, really pictures the typical Christian such as he stinks in our nostrils from Morocco to Kharbin. For the noble Jewish Peer characterizes the Right Reverend Gentleman as a man who combined great talents for action with very limited powers of thought, who was bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable perseverance and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a capacity for mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs, who could permit nothing to be done without his interference, and who consequently was perpetually involved in transactions which were either failures or blunders.

In material progress you have led the world for the last two or three centuries. By the True Prophet … all of three hundred years!

And like all parvenus, you are so astonished at your success, so pleased with yourselves, that you imagine your present hegemony in the race for material progress to be a guarantee for the future. But there is not even the shadow of an excuse for such an assumption, unless it be the fact that the Christian mind is diseased with racial and religious megalomania. There is not a single historical parallel which justifies your pleasant superstition that your present leadership, which after all is of very recent birth, will show greater stability than any of those many alien, ancient civilizations which long ago came from the womb of eternity, to go back whence they sprang.

Nations as well as men are judged by two factors: by their virtues, and by their vices.

As to virtues, what have you Christians done for the general uplift of the world which could not be matched by a random look into the pages of Oriental history? And as to vices, is there any degeneracy rampant amongst us which is not equalled by the degeneracy of the Western lands?

History has an unpleasant knack of repeating itself; and the helot of to-day has the disagreeable habit of being the master of to-morrow, regardless of race and color and creed. I would like to return to earth about three hundred years from to-day, just to observe how my descendants, who will have intermarried with Chinese and Japanese, will succeed in ruling their colonies in Europe and in America. And I do hope that the Chinese blood of my descendants will not be too preponderant: otherwise, taking a leaf out of European and American colonization, and thus forcing their own food-laws on the subject races, they might force their White and Christian subjects to eat roast puppy-dog.

Human nature is the same the world over, and there never was an originally superior race or people. Some nations have founded powerful civilizations which lasted for a shorter or a longer period, but it was never the racial force which caused it, but rather the irresistible swing of circumstances.

It was Kismet.