Twilight of the warlike: The long shadow of defeat in Germany and Japan

In the first half of the twentieth century, Germany and Japan emerged as the most aggressive and militarized powers in the world. Driven by expansionist ideologies and imperial ambitions, Germany sought domination over Europe, while Japan aimed to carve out a vast empire across Asia. Their convergence in the Axis alliance was a cataclysmic expression of nationalism weaponized on a global scale.

But defeat in the Second World War brought about a profound transformation. Stripped of military might, shamed by atrocities, and ravaged by bombings—Germany and Japan lost not only the war, but their appetite for warfare itself. What followed was one of the most remarkable cultural and political turnarounds in modern history: two militarist societies recast themselves as champions of peace.

Germany was divided—its eastern half falling under Soviet control, the western under American. Japan, though left territorially intact, suffered a more symbolic rupture: the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, coupled with extensive firebombing of major cities, left scars that would shape national consciousness for generations. In both countries, postwar reconstruction was overseen not merely by military occupiers, but by civilizational re-engineers.

By the 1960s, both nations had staged astonishing economic recoveries. Japan became the world’s second-largest economy in 1968, a position it held until China’s meteoric rise displaced it in 2010. Germany, after reunification in 1990, reemerged as the political and economic center of gravity in Europe. Yet strikingly, neither nation has attempted to revive its martial legacy. Both have embraced diplomacy, institutional engagement, and economic power as their preferred instruments of influence.

This turn toward pacifism, however, invites deeper scrutiny. The cultural shift that followed 1945 was sudden—imposed from above, nurtured by occupation, and reinforced by geopolitical constraints. Such transformations, while historically significant, are not always permanent. Pacifism in postwar Germany and Japan has often been described as pragmatic rather than philosophical: a product of necessity, not conviction.

In contrast, the Indian (Hindu) civilizational mind has been steeped in nonviolence for millennia. Traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Vedantic thought have long emphasized restraint, compassion, and ethical introspection. Pacifism in the Indian context is not merely a political strategy—it is a spiritual orientation deeply woven into the fabric of social life. By this standard, the peaceful postures of Germany and Japan may appear thin—achievements of policy rather than culture.

The 21st century, marked by rising geopolitical tensions and resurgent nationalism, may test the durability of their pacifist identities. Beneath the surface of restraint may lie dormant impulses—humiliated national pride, unprocessed trauma, or strategic ambitions. Should the global order shift dramatically, Germany and Japan might not remain indefinitely pacific. Their historical capacity for mobilization, discipline, and technological innovation remains intact—and could, under new pressures, take on a very different direction.

Peace, after all, is not the natural state of nations. It is a cultural construct—fragile, contingent, and forever at risk of unraveling.

On America's Aspiration to be the World's Professor

In the last two centuries, the American political establishment has taken its ideal of manifest destiny seriously—more seriously than it takes the ideals of democracy, liberty, and free markets. The rulers of America take it for granted that they are the good guys, that theirs is the only indispensable country on earth, and that it is their manifest destiny to be the professor to all of humanity. But this implies that all of humanity should become the obedient students of the American professor. Really?

In Defense of Tribalism

The reputation of a tribal society is abysmally low in our time, primarily because tribalism is believed to be incompatible with the modern capitalist or communist state, where social order is maintained by a big government (the leviathan, in the words of Thomas Hobbes). The large bureaucratic institutions, the crony-capitalist companies, the military and police apparatus, and intellectual institutions (academia and the mainstream media) are part of this big government. Since both capitalism and communism aspire for total power, they have vilified tribalism by spreading false propaganda.

In tribalism, social order and adherence to egalitarian principles is achieved through a very small government. Instead of police and law courts, the tribal elders use moral and religious teachings, and the notion of loyalty to traditions, to persuade their people to behave in an orderly manner. Those who break the tribal norms are punished by a committee of tribal elders. In good tribal societies, justice is swift and exemplary. People in tribal societies (at least, the men) are mostly armed, both men and women understand the tribal way of life, and they are capable of acting to defend themselves and their tribe. The tribal societies can be individualistic without devolving into anarchism and nihilism. When a society discards the tribal way of life, then the alternative is some form of capitalism or communism (ruled by a tyrannical leviathan). 

A good society should have elements of both—tribalism and a constitutional system of governance. In large democracies, every aspect of life does not have to be under the control of a centralized government. When some areas of society are under tribal control, it will ensure that the bureaucratic and intellectual establishments do not become too large, insular, and ossified. Even in matters of foreign policy, the government can be guided by tribal aspirations. There are several areas of social life, in which people can find much better resolution for their problems by coordinating with each other at a tribal level.

The West’s Totalitarian Mission to Promote Capitalism

Why did the capitalist mission (led by America and Britain) to build a democratic and free market utopia in central South America, the Middle East, and Africa fail? 

It failed because the mission was totalitarian—it was a brainchild of the Western political establishment. This establishment calls itself capitalist. They claim that they want to create a democratic and free market paradise. But what they are really after is total control. Their agenda is to create a global geopolitical order which perpetuates Western hegemony. 

The capitalist governments are as totalitarian (especially in the area of foreign policy) as the communist governments.

The masses in capitalist countries are brainwashed by academia and the 24/7 media—they are ignorant, naive, divided, and lacking in political skills. They are incapable of taking united action to force their government to change its foreign policy. The capitalist academia and media are part of the political establishment. They endeavor to keep the attention of the masses focused on irrelevant issues. The important issues are never analyzed and debated. 

The political weakness of the masses, gives the capitalist governments a complete monopoly on power. They have the absolute power to commit all kinds of atrocities anywhere in the world. The irony is that the erstwhile Soviet Union’s foreign policy was more transparent and non-violent than the foreign policy of the so-called bastions of democracy and capitalism, the USA and Britain.

The Four Stages of Capitalism

Capitalism has not made man a better being—it has transformed him into a much more deadly killer and plunderer. The philistines in the ancient age and the middle ages were armed with swords, spears, and clubs. The philistines in our times, thanks to capitalism, are armed with tanks, fighter planes, missiles, and nuclear weapons. 

By bringing the power of technology to the philistines, capitalism has worsened the state of humanity. The capitalists of our time might be dressed in Armani suits, they might have college degrees, they might be capable of sophisticated speech, but at the mental level they are no better than Genghis Khan’s Mongol warriors who smashed into several kingdoms, massacred millions, and conquered the largest land empire in history. 

Looking at the history of North America in the last 500 years, it can be surmised that a capitalist society passes through four stages:

First stage: Dominated by conquistadors, imperialists, warlords, and enslavers.

Second stage: Dominated by demagogues, robber barons, expansionists, technocrats, and conservatives.

Third stage: Dominated by fascists, democrats, liberals, hippies, libertarians, neoconservatives, and multinationals. 

Fourth stage (the final phase which is yet to arrive): Dominated by Crusaders, Nazis, Stalinists, or some new type of totalitarians. 

The number one capitalist country in the last 120 years, the USA, is now on the verge of reaching the fourth or the final stage of capitalism. This country has already lost a lot of its civil liberties and in the next 10 to 25 years, it will be under a tyrannical regime. Try to imagine the kind of destruction that a tyrannical regime can unleash once it gains control over the politics of the USA. 

The military infrastructure that American capitalism has created will fall into the hands of tyrants. In the initial days of the fourth stage, most Americans would not realize that they were living in a tyranny because their intellectuals and  24/7 media would convince them that their government was democratic.

The Problem of Great Art

“Art is what you can get away with.” ~ Andy Warhol (1987)

It is clear from Warhol’s work that he got away with a lot. But getting away with a lot was not his unique achievement; there are other famous artists who have gotten away with a lot. The world hails them as great masters because they could get away with a lot. 

Good art can never be defined. What is good art for one person might be utter thrash to another. Why do people claim that the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is great art? There is no scientific or mathematical way of proving that the Mona Lisa is great art. A lot of propaganda and marketing has happened in the last 500 years to emblazon on mankind’s collective consciousness the idea that the Mona Lisa is great art. 

If an artist has access to propaganda and marketing, then like Andy Warhol, he can get away with a lot, he can make the world believe that his thrash is a great work of art. Propaganda and marketing, not just creativity, are the fountainhead of great art.

Imperialism, Racism, and the Human Genome

“Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which had referred in its subtitle to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin had been talking about pigeons, but the imperialists saw no reason why his theories should not apply to men… Had not Darwin himself written complacently in The Descent of Man of the likelihood that the backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilizations.” ~ Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought

Ethnic prejudice could be as old as civilization itself. Most societies of the past have used derogatory labels like “barbarians” and “philistines” to describe people of other ethnicities, but the modern notion of “racism” is of recent origin. The word “racism” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1910. The idea of racial superiority was developed in the nineteenth century when Europe had colonized a large part of the globe and the European intellectuals were under pressure to come up with a moral justification for the domination of people of other races. 

Can it be true that the Europeans are racially superior? In the areas of politics, warfare, and technology, they were probably superior. I use the past tense “were” because they were not always superior. Their superiority manifested itself from the fifteenth century to 1950. There could be genes which determine performance in politics, warfare, and technology—perhaps the Europeans had evolved a dominant form of those genes. According to geneticists, about 14 percent of the human genome has changed in the last 30,000 years. Many changes in the human genome have happened in the last 5000 years. 

Being superior in the areas of politics, warfare, and technology does not make the Europeans morally, religiously, and intellectually superior. Some of history’s worst wars, massacres, genocides, enslavements, and civil wars have happened in lands that were under European domination. European societies are easily corrupted by wealth and power. Nihilism, anarchism, and utopianism are a much bigger problem in European populations than in Asian populations. Since 1950, European civilizations have been on the decline.

On Capitalism and Communism

Western capitalism must commence with an enormous act of conquest and theft. Those who want to create a capitalist paradise must be prepared to kill or evict those whose land and wealth they plan to steal. The same must be said about communism (and socialism). Both capitalism and communism are extremely violent and tyrannical Western ideologies. They never lead to the creation of liberty and free markets for all classes of people. The contest between capitalism and communism is a myth propagated by the Western ideologues and politicians. The truth is that these two ideologies thrive by feeding on each other. The communists win support by narrating the stories of the capitalist atrocities, while the capitalists win support by narrating the stories of the communist atrocities. Both ideologies must be rejected.

On The Brahmi Script

The Brahmi writing system was being used in the Indian subcontinent in the third century BCE. It was probably created through the efforts of Emperor Ashoka of Mauryan Dynasty who ruled from 268 to 232 BCE. He was the first emperor to rule over almost the entire South Asia—a densely populated area as large as Western Europe, stretching from present-day Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east, and covering much of central India. He ruled primarily from Pataliputra (in present day Patna), but he had provincial capitals in Taxila (in present day Pakistan) and Ujjain (in Madhya Pradesh). 

Ashoka’s rock edicts, which can be found in modern-day Pakistan and India, were written in Brahmi script. The Brahmi script has influenced the Sanskrit-based languages currently being used in North India, and the four Dravidian languages being used in South India. The languages in Southeast Asia are also influenced by Brahmi. Over the centuries, these languages have evolved and now their connection to a common Brahmi root is not easy to detect. The Brahmi script was deciphered in the 1830s by James Prinsep.

There are a number of theories about the origin of the Brahmi script. Some scholars have suggested that the Brahmi script was developed from the Semitic script via Aramaic. There are other scholars who insist that the Brahmi script comes from Indian sources. Several attempts have been made to connect the Brahmi script with the Indus script, but the connection between the two writing systems is not clear, since the Indus script remains undeciphered. 

The theory that I find plausible is that the Brahmi script was created on Ashoka’s initiative. He commanded his officials to create a writing system based on the existing sources. To fulfill his order, his officials used the system of record keeping then used by Indian merchants to develop the Brahmi script. The sounds in Brahmi script match the sounds of Pali and other popular Indic languages which are founded on Sanskrit. Pali is the language in which Buddha has preached. A number of Ashoka’s rock inscriptions are in Pali.

On Eric Hoffer’s View of Holy Cause

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.” ~ Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.

This statement by Eric Hoffer is not logical because he fails to define the term “ourselves.” How do we recognize ourselves? A consciousness cannot focus on itself. The only way a man can become conscious of himself is by becoming conscious of something else. The term “ourselves” does not represent a vacuum—it represents our worldly experiences, including our experiences of the causes that we see as “holy.” 

Who are we? How can we know ourselves without considering the causes that we see as holy. We can’t. A man without faith must be a man without a self. He will be a faceless stranger to himself. Faith in a holy cause is the fountainhead of faith in ourselves.

On the Sintashta-Arkaim Culture

An eastward migration from the Poltavka culture (an outgrowth of the Yamnaya culture) gave rise to the Sintashta-Arkaim culture during the Middle Bronze Age (2100 BCE to 1800 BCE). This culture was located east of the Ural Mountains in the northern steppes. 

The archeological evidence seems to indicate that the Sintashta were highly militaristic—they created extensively fortified settlements, 23 of which have been found. The weapons found on their sites include spearheads, trilobed arrowheads, chisels, and large shaft-hole axes, It is not known why the Sintashta created such fortified settlements which are unusual in the nomadic steppe culture. Against what enemy were they defending their settlements? 

The funerary complexes located outside the Sintashta sites contain the remains of extravagant sacrifices, including whole horses. They also contain the remains of some of the earliest chariots. Some scholars have theorized that there are parallels between the funeral services in the Sintashta sites, and the funeral rituals described in the Rig Veda. They suggest that the Sintashta might be the inventors of the chariots with spoked wheels. 

The word “asva” (horse) occurs in the Rig Veda 792 times, and the word for chariot, “ratha,” is equally numerous. In verse 1.162.22 of the Rig Veda a prayer that accompanies a horse sacrifice is described—the verse says: “May this Steed bring us all-sustaining riches, wealth in good kine, good horses, manly offspring.” 

Did the people who built these strongholds [Sintashta fortifications] invent chariots? Were they the original Aryans, the ancestors of the people who later composed the Rig Veda and the Avesta? These two questions are asked by David W. Anthony in his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.

There is a problem with the thesis that seeks to connect the Sintashta with the creators of the Rig Veda: There is not a shred of evidence that the Sintashta spoke an ancient version of Proto-Indo-European which is supposed to have led to the development of Sanskrit and several other languages. We don’t know what the language of the Sintashta was.

The Problem of History: Emic and Etic Perceptions

“History is the memory of states.” ~ Henry Kissinger in A World Restored. Kissinger's words can be taken as a critique of Western historiography—he has divulged that the history written by Western historians is essentially a memory of the Western states. 

History is of two types: Emic and Etic. Emic history gives you the perceptions of the people from within the civilization or social group. Etic history gives you the perceptions of the people from outside the civilization or social group. Since much of world’s history has been written by Western scholars, when you read a book on the history of the West, you generally have an emic perspective (the perceptions of insiders, the Westerners), but when you read a book on the history of Asia, the Americas, and Africa, you generally have an etic perspective (the perceptions of outsiders—the Western view of other civilizations).

The history of the conflicts between the Ancient Greeks and the Persian Empire, comes mostly from the records of the Greek elites. The Persians did not leave self-glorifying records. The Greek elites did that and they have a stranglehold on history. The quality of life was much better in the Persian Empire as compared to the Greek city-states which were plagued with violence and poverty—that is why the Persian Empire was home to more Greeks than the combined population of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and Argos. The Greek city-states had a huge slave population (in Athens and Sparta 75 percent of the people were slaves).

We know little about the people that the Romans (during the Roman Empire) described as barbarians. We have no information on the Hun Empire, even though in the third and fourth centuries, the Huns were a significant empire in Eurasia. We know about the Western view of the Mongol Empire but we know little about the Mongol perspective. When you read the history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you are reading how the European imperialists (Columbus, the conquistadors like Hernán Cortés, the Catholic preachers, and the European settlers) viewed the Arawaks, the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Native Indians. 

After reading the books based on the accounts of the Spanish conquerors, people become convinced that when Columbus and the conquistadors arrived, the Americas were a land of philistines, savages, and cannibals. The Western historians do not tell you about how the Arawaks saw Columbus, the Aztecs and Incas saw the conquistadors, and the Native Indians saw the European settlers.   

We know little about the towns and cities that existed in North America before the Spanish, British, and the French arrived. We know little about the culture that existed in Africa before the Dutch and the British arrived. We read the history of the Boer Wars mostly from the perspective of the British and the Dutch—we know little about the view of the Africans in whose land this war was being fought. We know how the British, in the nineteenth century, viewed the Chinese but we know little about how the Chinese viewed the British. When we read the history of India, we read mostly about the perceptions of the British imperialists and their Indian devotees.

History shows the West in good light, not because they have always been the best, but because they have written most of history. In his novel 1984, George Orwell said: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” As long as the West continues to have a stranglehold on the past (history), it will control the present and the foreseeable future.

The Yamnaya Migrations and Lactose Intolerance

The closest ancestors of modern humans first appeared 200,000 years ago in Africa. It seems that for 97 percent of the period of their existence, the human populations were lactose intolerant— they could not consume dairy products. In Southern Africa lactose intolerance is still fairly high. The country with the highest lactose intolerance is South Korea. In his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony writes: “Recent genetic research on the worldwide distribution of the mutation that created lactose tolerance, which made a dairy-based diet possible, indicates that it probably emerged first in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains between about 4600 and 2800 BCE…”  

This means that the Yamnaya could be the world’s first lactose tolerant population. Historians believe that they spoke a late Proto-Indo-European language which they implanted in the regions where they migrated: Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. David W. Anthony conjectures that since the cows give more milk than any other herd animal (twice as much as the mares and five times more than goats), the Yamnaya developed the religious practice of revering their cows. In their culture, cows symbolized prosperity and the blessings of the divine. The Yamnaya probably counted their wealth in cows—those of high social status would maintain large herds. The Sintashta and the Andronovo cultures are also identified with the Yamnaya culture. 

One of the implications of this finding is that the religious practice of revering the cow did not originate in South Asia (India) but somewhere in the Central Steppes. In my opinion, the problem with this thesis is that it is based on genetic research that is centered on European populations. The only reason the Yamnaya were intensely investigated by the geneticists is because they had a European connection. The Yamnaya invaded (or migrated) into Europe about 5000 years ago, and they completely replaced Europe’s original population of native hunter-gatherers. Hardly any trace of Europe’s original population, the population before the Yamnaya arrived, can be found. Currently the lactose intolerance level in Europe is between 18 percent to 26 percent.  

The genome of the ancient populations of the non-European populations has not been extensively studied. There could be other ancient populations which became lactose tolerant at the same time or before the Yamnaya did. 

The Yamnaya arrived in India between 2000 and 1600 BC. Their mingling with the natives of North India is believed to be the cause of the higher lactose tolerance in the North Indians vis-à-vis the South Indians. A study shows that lactose intolerance was 27.4 percent in a sample group taken from New Delhi, and it was 66.6 percent in a sample group taken from two South Indian centers at Trivandrum and Pondicherry. In East Indians lactose intolerance is higher—this is because of their mingling with the East Asian populations which are lactose intolerant. These inferences have been developed from the study of samples taken from a few urban centers. The countryside was not a part of the study.

The Funeral of the Western Empire

“Knowledge advances, funeral by funeral.” ~ Paul Samuelson

Samuelson is right. Most intellectuals, especially those who occupy influential positions in universities, research institutions, and think tanks, tend to extreme conservatism. They stick to their theories with the tenacity of bloodsucking leeches sticking to their prey. They use their influence and power to prevent the analysis of new evidence and the acceptance of new theories. Until they die, and a new generation takes over, the advancement of knowledge is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. 

The phenomena of advancement happening funeral by funeral applies to the empires too. It is the fate of all empires to become ossified and decadent—they lose their zeal to conquer, build new infrastructure, conduct scientific research, create new technological marvels, organize new philosophical movements, and create new institutions to transform the global economy and politics. There is decline in their moral values, work ethic, and political and artistic standards. 

When such ossified and decadent empires accumulate too much geopolitical power, they have a pernicious impact on the entire planet—because they use their military and technological might to hinder progress and push humanity deeper into the abyss of tyranny and nihilism. The decline of such empires is generally in the long term interests of mankind, as this clears the space for the rise of new empires which could prove to be more energetic, creative, and innovative. 

I see the West (primarily America and Britain) as an ossified and decadent empire. Since the eighteenth century, the West has been exercising a disproportionate amount of power on global economy and politics. The Western empire started declining after 1930. Between 2030 and 2050, I expect it to fall. Until the West falls, or is radically transformed, there will be no further progress. The funeral of the West will be the biggest event of this century—just as the fall of the Soviet Union was the biggest event of the last. 

The post-Western world will be a new world—I believe, a better world.

Race Is not a social construct—It’s written in our DNA

“Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is indeed a biological reality to race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations.”

“Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. Science is about what is, not what ought to be. Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.”

— Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

For decades, we have been told that race is a “social construct,” a convenient fiction invented by history’s oppressors. This is the catechism of modern academia—repeated so often that it passes for self-evident truth. But the human genome does not care for ideology, and the genetic record says otherwise. If you want to accuse something of creating race, don’t start with politics—start with DNA. It is the fountainhead of human difference, the wellspring from which every variation in capacity, resilience, and aptitude flows.

In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade commits the heresy of pointing out the obvious: human populations are not the same. The differences are measurable, reproducible, and stubborn. That they make many people uncomfortable is irrelevant. Science is not a comfort service.

Consider the evidence Wade marshals. The Ashkenazi Jews—0.2% of the world’s population—have claimed Nobel Prizes at nearly a hundred times the global average. Since 1980, every single Olympic 100-meter finalist has had West African ancestry. Tibetans and Andean highlanders thrive at altitudes that leave lowlanders gasping. Some populations digest milk with ease; others cannot. Some suffer devastating hereditary diseases at much higher rates than others. And yes—average IQ scores vary: East Asians score around 105, higher than the global mean. Intelligence, Wade reminds us, is not morality. High IQ societies have committed their share of atrocities.

The academic priesthood prefers to keep genes and culture in separate temples—never to be mingled. Wade bulldozes that wall. Genes and culture, he argues, are in constant interplay. Civilizations do not emerge from thin air; they evolve within the constraints and opportunities that biology affords. “Each of the major civilizations,” he writes, “has developed the institutions appropriate for its circumstances and survival. But these institutions… rest on a bedrock of genetically shaped human behavior.”

This is why American-style democracy cannot simply be “exported” to Iraq any more than Iraqi tribal politics can be imported to Washington, D.C. Institutions are not Lego blocks. They are living organisms, adapted over centuries to the behavioral ecology of specific populations. Try to transplant them without regard for that ecology, and they wither—or mutate into something unrecognizable.

We can cover our eyes and chant the slogans of the new moral order, but the biology will not go away. Race is not a conspiracy of historians; it is a fact of nature. Biology shapes races, races shape cultures, and cultures build (or destroy) civilizations.

Does this mean that human potential is set in stone? No. Within every population, some individuals break the mold—thriving where others fail. If some can, others can. But pretending there is no mold to begin with is intellectual fraud.

Wade does wander into speculation—his talk of an “inbuilt sense of morality” is thin on evidence. But given that we only cracked the human genome in 2003, we are in the early dawn of this knowledge. The next two decades will bring more clarity, and perhaps more discomfort.

The tragedy of our age is that instead of facing these truths, we smother them under euphemism and denial. We treat biology as if it were a hate crime. Yet history will not be kind to civilizations that build their moral systems on deliberate self-deception. Wade’s book may be “troublesome,” but only because it dares to speak the language of fact in an age intoxicated by fiction.

The Battle for the Rig Veda and Sanskrit

The Europeans are capable of weaponizing anything, even ancient religious texts. In the late eighteenth century, they became aware of the Rig Veda, and within a century they had weaponized several of its concepts and verses. The Rig Veda is the oldest Vedic text—it has been revered as a holy text by the Hindus of South Asia for more than 3500 years. The story of the European weaponization of the concepts and verses of Rig Veda begins in 1783 when Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, decided to learn Sanskrit. 

By 1786, Jones had reached a startling conclusion, which he expressed in a line that is often quoted: 

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” 

Jones concluded that Sanskrit had originated from an ancient parent language (Proto-Indo-European) which gave rise to Greek and Latin. He posited that Persian, Celtic, and German too were linked to the same parent language. His theory of a civilization that spoke an ancient language called Proto-Indo-European led many scholars in Europe and India to ask such questions: Who were the people who spoke this language? Where did they live? Where was the Rig Veda composed? 

Germany was in the middle of an intense Romantic movement in those days—and some German scholars proclaimed that Germany was the home of the ancients who spoke the parent language. 

The Rig Veda talks about the Aryans who are people of divine virtues and great abilities. In Europe, the term “Aryan” was appropriated to refer to the ancient European master race who brought civilization to mankind. In his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, American author Madison Grant claimed that the Nordic people (British, Scots, Irish, and German) were the descendants of the original Aryans, and that America was meant to be an Aryan homeland. (This book was a bestseller, and was praised by Hitler.) 

The Europeans associated the term “Aryan” with racial purity even though the Rig Veda does not preach racial purity. Most verses in the Rig Veda are focused on cosmology, history, moral values, and the right ways of performing prayers and sacrifices.

Grant warned against the weakening of the superior American (Aryan) bloodline by interbreeding with inferior races. In the category of inferior races, he included the Jews, Czechs, Poles, and Italians. Some German scholars started arguing that there was a connection between the Rig Veda’s conception of Aryans and Plato’s discussion of Atlantis. They said that the German Aryans were the original inhabitants of the Platonic Atlantis and that they were the original speakers of the ancient language which had given rise to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other languages. 

In the 1930s, the Nazis of Germany adopted the Hindu Swastika as a symbol for their movement. But the Swastika has nothing to do with Nazism. It has served as a Hindu symbol for divinity and spirituality since 1000 BC. It is often used in Hindu marriage ceremonies. In the Vedas, there are several references to the word “Swasti”. The Swastika is mentioned in Pāṇini’s Ashtadhyayi and other Hindu texts. The Buddhist and Jain movements have used the Swastika for their religious rituals since ancient times.

On Political Power and Biracial Couplings

The biracial couplings which took place during the age of imperialism were mostly between European men (who were politically powerful) and non-European women (who were often powerless). The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors coupled with native women and created a new people—the mestizos. The word “mestizo” comes from the Spanish word “mestizaje,” which means miscegenation. 

The most famous biracial coupling of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries was between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a black slave girl. They began their relationship in 1787, not long after the American constitutional convention, when Jefferson was in France on some political business. There was a thirty-years age difference between them—Jefferson was 44 and Sally was 14. They had six children together. Their relationship was disputed by some scholars but a genetic study conducted in 1998 confirmed a Y-chromosome match between the male-line descendants of Eston Hemings Jefferson (Sally’s youngest son) and the male-line descendants of Jefferson’s paternal uncle. 

Jefferson was a powerful and wealthy man—he was one of the founding fathers of America and later on he became the president. He owned a large plantation in Virginia, a state where 40 percent of the population was enslaved. Sally, being his slave, was dependent on him. In France, slavery was illegal. Sally could have continued to live in France as a free woman. According to their son, Madison Hemings, she agreed to return to America with Jefferson on the condition that their children would eventually be set free. 

Sally was biracial, since she had three European grandparents. She continued to be a slave because, under Virginia law, the status of a slave was maternally inherited. There was a reason why Virginia had this law. Almost all the biracial couplings in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were between European men and African women. There were hardly any African men uniting with European women. By linking the status of a slave to the maternal line, the state of Virginia was ensuring that power remained in the hands of European men. 

The genetic pattern of the present day African Americans shows that the Jefferson-Sally kind of biracial couplings were common. The contribution of European men in the genetic makeup of the present day African American population is four times higher than the contribution of European women. In the time of slavery, the sex bias would be far greater than this. The civil rights movement, and the cultural transformation and sex revolution after 1960, resulted in an increase in the number of couplings between African men and European women. 

Throughout the history of mankind, men in positions of power have spread their seed on women from weaker sections of society. A 2003 study on the places where the Mongols had ruled shows that a significant part of the population had descended from one ancestor: Genghis Khan. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Genghis Khan and his descendants had conquered the largest contiguous land empire in history. The powerful men of the past have left an extraordinary impact on the subsequent populations.

On Reagan’s Naive War on Communism

"I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written." ~ Ronald Reagan. This is such a naive statement. 

Communism is not a sad, bizarre chapter of human history, as he asserts—it is the foundational doctrine of the Western civilization. He and Margaret Thatcher tried to make the case that communism was a Russian phenomena, and that once the Soviet Union was defeated, communism would vanish. They failed to remind their people that communism was a Western ideology—conceived and propagated between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries by white intellectuals and politicians in England, Germany, France, and America.

In the time of Reagan, communist doctrine was thriving in the American government, universities, media, entertainment industry, and big businesses. It was thriving on a much higher scale in Western Europe. There is some truth in the statement which the communist intellectuals, who feel frustrated by the fall of the Soviet Union, often make:  “The Soviet Union was not real socialism.” Western liberty and capitalism are a myth—in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dying, “real socialism” was thriving in the USA and Western Europe.  

If Reagan and Thatcher were serious about fighting communism, they would have done something to reform the intellectual, financial, and political establishments in their own nations. They did nothing of that sort. Being conservatives they found it easier to put the blame on outsiders—the Asians, in this case. It is hard for the Western conservatives to introspect and examine the flaws in their own character, history, and culture. They prefer to blame the outsiders for every woe that bedevils their society.  

To defeat the Soviet Union, Reagan’s government trained, financed, and armed the religious fundamentalist forces in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. America’s flawed “war on communism” was the progenitor of America’s equally flawed “war on terror” which is still raging in several parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Reagan destabilized South America by authorizing the intervention in Nicaragua and other South American countries (in the name of stopping communism and the war on drugs).

The irony is that 42 years after Reagan’s presidency, communism continues to be the world’s most powerful ideology and political movement, while America is a spent force—some analysts say that the “last pages of the American Empire even now are being written.” In the twenty-first century, America represents the last stand of the Western civilization, which has dominated the world since the sixteenth century.

Is Man the Highest Product of Evolution?

The Darwinian theory posits that man is the highest product of evolution—that man is the last of the great species to emerge. But it is not necessary that the highest product should come at the end of a process. A glitch in the process of evolution could have led to a steep downfall in the quality of the creatures being produced by the process of evolution. What if the highest product of evolution was created tens of thousands of years or even millions of years ago? We might not be the last of the great species. The best outcome of earthly evolution might be lost in the mists of prehistory, and we might never discover the truth about the creatures that were smarter than us.

On The Yamnaya Migrations

The Yamnaya civilization emerged five thousand years ago (around 3300 BC) in the region between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers (the Pontic steppes). In his book Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich says that the Maikop culture or the people who preceded them made a genetic contribution to the Yamnaya population. Maikop technology of horse-drawn wheeled carts, and their way of raising mounds of earth and stone over graves, known as Krugans, was passed on to the Yamnaya. 

The Yamnaya spoke a late Proto-Indo-European language. About 46 percent of the world’s population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as their first language. They could be biologically related to the Yamnaya. There are striking parallels between the Yamnaya and Europe’s Corded Ware culture—both could have descended from genetically similar pre-Yamnaya populations. The presence of Corded Ware culture is seen as evidence of the Westward expansion of the Yamnaya.

In his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony says that Yamnaya were more efficient in managing their resources than their predecessors, the Maikop culture and others, and they replaced the population of any area that they came to dominate. Genetic studies show that the Yamnaya started dominating Europe in 3000 BC, and their descendants reached South Asia in a thousand years (between 2000 to 1800 BC). They transformed the demography of Europe and several parts of Asia.

Britain is separated from the rest of Europe by the English Channel, but the Yamnaya found a way of moving into the British Isles. 90% of the people who built the Stonehenge no longer exist. They were replaced by people who have Yamnaya ancestry.

Genetic studies show that the present day population in North India has a connection with the Yamnaya. The period between 2000 and 1800 BC, when the Yamnaya are believed to have arrived in North India coincides with the fall of the Harappa Civilization. Some historians have suggested that the Yamnaya were responsible for the fall of the Harappa Civilization but there is no evidence to back this claim. The Harappans were not a warlike people. Historian Gordon Childe found the Harappa civilization to be unique in its lack of attention to weapons of war. 

The ruins of Harappan towns and cities show no sign of external attack. Most buildings are well-preserved and seem to have been abandoned. For some reason, the Harappans left their homes and migrated to other parts of India. Disease, environmental factors, and sudden decline in trade (due to the fall of the Mesopotamian civilization) could have something to do with the fall of the Harappa civilization. 

It is often suggested that the branch of Yamnaya civilization which arrived in North India spoke Vedic Sanskrit and they could be the primary creators of several ancient Hindu texts (particularly the early Vedic texts). After 1800 BC, Vedic Sanskrit started taking root in North India. Some scholars have posited that the present day Tamil language has some similarities to the Harappa script. If this is true, then it is possible that as the Yamnaya dominance solidified in North India, the Harappans migrated to the South.

The Harappans were acquainted with horses and chariots but the Yamnaya could have played a major role in popularizing the use of horse-drawn wheeled chariots for transportation and warfare. The Harappa script has not been deciphered, and there is a lot of controversy about Harappan religion and politics. We don’t know if there is any connection between Yamnaya and Harappan religious and political thinking. The word “Yamnaya” means related to pits (or graves) in Russian, but in Sanskrit, it points towards “Yama,” the Hindu god of Death and Justice.

From Civilization to Barbarism

“I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.” ~ Voltaire 

I want to know the exact opposite—I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from civilization to barbarism. Barbarism is the fountainhead of civilization. The barbarians were the founders of all the past and present civilizations. Unless you understand barbarism, you will not understand civilization.

The Myth of Democracy and Capitalism

Democracy and capitalism are the trappings or “packaging” of the exercise of political power; they cannot be the fountainhead of liberty, free markets, and good life. A nation can be democratic and yet be a brutish and extremely poor slave society—example, Ancient Athens. A nation can be capitalist but its economy might be in the control of oligarchs and crony capitalists—example, Mussolini’s fascist Italy. The history of the twentieth century tells us that the democratic and capitalist nations are as tyrannical, corrupt, and warlike as the nations which shun democracy and capitalism. It is a myth that a nation makes economic progress when it is democratic and capitalist. When the West became the world’s dominant power (between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries) it was being ruled by very tyrannical monarchs and warlords. After 1980, China became the world’s largest economy despite being a fascist state.

The Rediscovery of Neanderthals

The first Neanderthal remains were discovered in Belgium in 1829. But the recognition of Neanderthals as ancient hominid creatures happened after the discovery of remains in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, researchers depicted Neanderthals as cannibalistic unintelligent brutes. Such views of Neanderthals became popular during the age of imperialism, because then the Europeans tended to demonize all non-European cultures. 

In his Views and Reviews essay, Sir Harry Johnston, the British explorer, botanist, and colonial administrator, wrote: “The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore…” Till this day we know very little about the brains, bodies, and food habits of Neanderthals, but Harry Johnston could decide, by virtue of his imperialistic mindset, that they were gorilla-like, cunning, and cannibalistic. 

Johnston and other European researchers demonized Neanderthals just as Columbus had demonized the native population of the Caribbean islands, and the conquistadors had demonized the Aztecs and the Incas. In a letter to the Monarchs of Spain, Columbus had described the cannibals of the Caribbean islands thusly: “there were men with one eye, and others with dogs’ noses, who ate men, and that when they took a man, they cut off his head and drank his blood and castrated him.” 

In the 1940s, when imperialism came to an end, and the non-European cultures started asserting their political, cultural, and moral values, some scientists and writers began to take a new look at the neanderthals. Rejecting the biased approach of scholars like Harry Johnston, they started looking at Neanderthals as people. 

In his 1955 novel, The Inheritors, William Golding does not accept the idea that Neanderthals were unredeemed brutes. He intuits their spirituality and humaneness. He gives them the marvelous capacity of telepathy, which enables them to convey their thoughts without pictures and words, even though they possess a basic language. Their sense of smell is so sharp that they can analyze an environment with their noses. Their feet can read the vibrations in the ground. They do not create, which is their limitation. They take whatever nature provides them. 

Golding portrays the last surviving band of neanderthals as meek, intelligent, and compassionate people who were wiped out by the barbaric Homo Sapiens. When there was a clash of civilizations, the meek did not inherit the earth, they were killed.

In the 1990s, Neanderthal DNA was isolated and analyzed, and it became clear that most groups of human beings have up to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. To explain the presence of Neanderthal DNA in humans, researchers have come up with the theory that between 50,000 to 40,000 years ago, primitive humans had mated with Neanderthals. Mating does not happen without exchange of culture. We have inherited not just Neanderthal DNA but also Neanderthal culture. That is why Golding calls his novel The Inheritors.

Thomas Sowell: Defender of Slavery and Imperialism

“Thus slavery has been depicted as if it were a peculiarity of white people against black people in the United States, or in Western societies. No one dreams of demanding reparations from North Africans for all the Europeans brought there as slaves by Barbary Coast pirates, even though these European slaves greatly outnumbered the African slaves brought to the United States and to the thirteen colonies from which it was formed.” ~ writes Thomas Sowell in Chapter 9 of his book Intellectuals and Society. 

Sowell has a polemical style and he is good at coining quotable sentences. Most of his books are bestsellers. His articles are widely read. But he is not a serious historian. In his books and articles, he often inserts blatant exaggerations, outright falsehoods, and biased analysis, which have nothing to do with real history but are intended to make his readers (most of whom are American conservatives) feel good about their culture and history. No serious historian would believe that the Europeans enslaved by the Barbary Coast pirates outnumbered the African slaves brought to the thirteen colonies of America. 

The Barbary Coast pirates were operating in densely populated areas where farming was traditionally done by local farmers. They did not need hundreds of thousands of slaves, since they were not in the business of building industrial-scale plantations in sparsely populated lands like the Americas and Australia. Most importantly, more than a million Europeans in the lands of the Barbary Coast pirates would be hard to control—they would have rebelled like Spartacus. The Barbary Coast pirates never developed the systems of crushing the spirit and mind of their slaves like the Western slavers did. 

In the notes section of his book, Sowell reveals that he is making the claim regarding European slaves on the basis of Robert C. Davis’s book, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. Davis is the only historian who has claimed that the Barbary pirates had captured and sold between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans. These figures have been strongly disputed by other historians. In his two books, The Corsairs of Malta and Barbary and The Pirate Wars, David Earle says that Davis’s figures are a “gross exaggeration.” Earle also notes that the ringleaders of the Barbary pirates were Europeans: John Ward and Zymen Danseker, Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis. 

In the same chapter, Sowell comes up with an outrageous defense of Western imperialism. He tries to make the case that Western imperialism was not too bad since most great civilizations had conquered other territories in the past. Here’s an excerpt: “it is impossible to read much of the history of the world, ancient or modern, without encountering the bloody trail of conquerors and the sufferings they inflicted on the conquered. Like slavery, imperialism encompassed every branch of the human race, both as conquerors and conquered. It was an evil that was never localized…” He adds that the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs were tyrannical empires. 

Sowell does not stand for liberty and free markets. He is a defender of Western slavery and Western imperialism. He is a conservative polemicist.

A J Ayer’s Near Death Experience

A year before A J Ayer (1910-1989) died of pneumonia, he choked on a piece of salmon, lost consciousness, and in a technical sense died. For four minutes his heart had stopped until he was revived. Within a day, he had recovered sufficiently to chat about his near death experience. 

He claimed that he saw a bright light which he believed was created by the government of the universe. He could not see the ministers who were in charge of the light but at a distance, he could see the ministers who were in charge of time. Ayer was instantly struck by the thought that Albert Einstein had theorized that space and time were the same. So he tried to attract the attention of the ministers of time by walking up and down and waving his watch and chain. His failure to attract the attention of the ministers of time made him feel desperate but before he could make other efforts, he regained consciousness. 

Ayer, a lifelong atheist, was shaken by the near death experience as it provided a "rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness.”

Contributions of the Failed Civilizations

A clash of civilizations is not a winner-takes-all type of game. Our world is enriched by the wisdom and knowledge of civilizations which have failed and died in the past.

In the words of the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo:

We carry in our worlds that flourish

Our worlds that have failed.

In the words of the British poet T. S. Elliot:

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated.

History’s Dialectic: From European Thesis to Asian Resurgence

One of the central teachings of Hegelian philosophy, developed in the nineteenth century, is that history unfolds through a dialectical process: a “thesis” emerges, is challenged by an “antithesis,” and is ultimately resolved through a “synthesis” that transcends the conflict. This model offers a useful lens for understanding the sweeping shifts in global power over the past two millennia.

Before the fifteenth century, Europe and Asia were not sharply distinct. They formed a cultural and economic continuum—Eurasia. Until the rise of classical Greek civilization in the sixth century BCE, Europe remained a peripheral player. Economically, culturally, and technologically, Asia—particularly India and China—dominated the global stage well into the fifteenth century. Most major innovations until the thirteenth century arose in Asia and North Africa. Even Europe’s dominant religious traditions, from pagan cults to Christianity, had their roots in Asian soil.

The fifteenth century marked a turning point. Western Europe began to assert itself as an autonomous and expansionist power, breaking away from the Eurasian synthesis. This era inaugurated Europe’s transformation into a dominant global force—Europe became the "thesis" of a new historical dialectic. From the Age of Discovery through the colonial empires, roughly from 1450 to 1950, Europe projected its power across the globe, often violently imposing its systems and ideologies on diverse cultures. Indigenous traditions were either obliterated or radically altered under the weight of colonial conquest.

In this dialectical framework, Asia became the "antithesis"—the cultural and political force resisting European domination. Yet for centuries, this resistance remained fragmented or subdued. It is only in the latter half of the twentieth century, especially after the 1960s, that the balance began to shift. As European imperialism receded, many former colonies asserted their independence and reclaimed their historical agency. Simultaneously, Asian countries began emerging as centers of economic dynamism, technological innovation, and intellectual influence.

The twenty-first century marks a critical phase in this historical dialectic. The European (or more broadly, Western) thesis has exhausted its momentum. It no longer possesses the ideological or geopolitical dominance to suppress the global antithesis. Power is shifting toward Asia, not just economically, but culturally and strategically. Major institutions of Western thought and governance are increasingly influenced, and at times led, by voices from Asia and the broader Global South.

Imperialism, once the defining expression of the European thesis, inadvertently sowed the seeds of its own undoing. The clash of civilizations it provoked gave rise to fierce nationalistic movements, many of which now anchor the resurgence of non-Western powers. The dialectic continues, but the terrain has changed.

According to the logic of Hegelian dialectics, a synthesis must eventually emerge—one that reconciles the old thesis and antithesis into a new historical equilibrium. But this synthesis will not be a restoration of Western dominance. It is more likely to reflect the ascendancy of Asia. The colonial masters of the past are, in a historical irony, being eclipsed by those they once ruled.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, Asia may well shape the contours of global civilization. If the past 350 years belonged to Europe, the next 350 may belong to Asia.

The Foundational Stage Of Capitalism

A capitalist society is not built in a vacuum. Massive resources, including unearned wealth (gold, silver, coal, iron, petroleum, etc.), land (entire continents have to be subjugated), slave labor (millions of slaves), and colonies (for plunder, cheap labor, and resources), which are acquired through imperialistic and totalitarian strategies, are the basic requirement for developing a political and economic environment in which a capitalist society can arise. For a poor country, which has never been an imperialist power, capitalism is an unachievable ideal. The old truism, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” is valid for capitalist fortunes. 

There is no doubt that communism leads to a bloodbath: the excesses of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Il-sung are well-known. But the founders of capitalist societies are not saints—their body count is not less than that of the communist tyrants. How many people were massacred by the European imperialists between the fifteenth century and the middle of the twentieth? How many wars has America fought in the twentieth century to expand its capitalist power? The irony is that America has fought more wars in the twentieth century than the erstwhile Soviet Union and China (under Mao). 

Lenin was wrong when he said that “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.” History tells us that imperialism is the foundational stage of capitalism. It is a myth that capitalism can be developed by liberalizing the economy. The road to capitalist utopia starts from the point of imperialism. When there is economic liberalization in a non-Western country, its culture and economy get captured by the Western forces which masquerade as capitalists. Crony capitalism is the highest form of capitalism. The communists lust for total power; the capitalists lust for total profits. In communism, the war cry is dictatorship of the proletariat. In capitalism, the war cry is manifest destiny.

In his unfinished book the Dialectics of Nature (1876), Friedrich Engels has succinctly reported on the central problems of capitalism. Here’s an excerpt: 

“When individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be taken into account in the first place… What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, care that the tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock? In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, tangible success; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different, mainly even of quite an opposite, character…”

If a non-Western country aspires to become capitalist, then it has to do everything that the Western powers have done from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. This entails becoming an imperialist power, founding colonies, enslaving millions of people, and plundering many lands.

Who We Are and How We Got Here

I am reading David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. In Chapter 5, "The Making of Modern Europe,” he writes: “People like those at Stonehenge were building great temples to their gods, and tombs for their dead, and could not have known that within a few hundred years their descendants would be gone and their lands overrun. The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.” The human genome is capable of providing some pathbreaking insights into the story of our species. The geneticists are presenting a wholly new account of prehistory.

The Hindu Cosmology of Seven Continents and Seas

In Ancient Hindu cosmology, the world is divided into seven concentric continents: Jambudvipa, Plaksadvipa, Salmalidvipa, Kusadvipa, Krouncadvipa, Sakadvipa, and Pushkaradvipa. These continents are separated by seven seas: the first sea is filled with salt water, second with sugarcane juice, third with wine, fourth with ghee, fifth with curd, sixth with milk, and the seventh with water. The last sea, in the outer periphery, is surrounded by the mountain range called Lokaloka (world and no-world) which is ten thousand yoganas (one yogana is 12 to 15 kilometers) in breadth and as many in height—it forms the boundary between the knowable world and the dark void of nothingness. 

Hinduism was founded in Jambudvipa, the innermost of the seven continents. Jambudvipa is also known as Sudarshanadvipa. In Markandeya Purana, Jambudvipa is described as a sublime land that is depressed in the southern and northern regions, and in its middle there is an elevated and broad land called Ila-vrta or Meruvarsha. In the center of Meruvarsha, there is the golden mountain called Mount Meru, on whose summit there is a vast city called Brahmapuri, the abode of the God of Creation, Brahma. Around Brahmapuri, there are eight cities, each presided by its own God, one of these Gods is Indra, the King of heaven and all Gods. 

In another visualization given in the Markandeya Purana, Jambudvipa is divided into four regions, which are shaped like the four petals of a lotus. Mount Meru rises from the center, and the city of Brahmapuri is surrounded by the river Akash Ganga, which flows from the foot of Vishnu. Akash Ganga meanders through the lunar regions, before descending from the sky. After encircling Brahmapuri, it divides into four streams which irrigate the entire continent of Jambudvipa. 

How old is the Hindu cosmology of seven continents and seven seas? It is impossible to date the Markandeya Purana and the other Puranas. Most scholars believe that the Markandeya Purana (which is probably the oldest Purana) was developed in the seventh century BC. But the Puranas could belong to prehistory, which in Indian context means during or before the Harappan era (5500—1900 BC). The Harappan era did not begin in a vacuum—Agriculture and settled life began in South Asia around 7000 BC. The cosmological theories in the Puranas could be rooted in cultures that are much older than the Harappan civilization.

Hume: The Power of Propaganda

“Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.” ~ the opening lines of David Hume’s essay, “Of the First Principles of Government.” In this essay, Hume was commenting on the Western governments, the European powers in particular (America was not a global power in Hume’s time). The West has always been good at propaganda. The West has won in the last 400 years not only because of its military power (the power of its swords, guns, warships, canons, tanks, fighter aircraft, and missiles), but also the power of its propagandists.

The Myth of American Humanitarian Intervention

In the 1950s, the Americans invented the term “humanitarian intervention” to make the world believe that the American wars were motivated by altruistic concerns. They monopolized this term—only they had the right to attack another country for humanitarian reasons. If any other country intervened, the Americans would oppose the intervention and brand it as an invasion. In most cases, the American wars led to much bigger humanitarian disasters, because the real purpose of these wars was to capture natural resources and install puppet regimes. 

The first American project of humanitarian intervention was orchestrated in Indochina, between 1955 and 1975. In the name of saving Vietnam from communism, hundreds of thousands of heavily armed American troops poured into the country and conducted saturation bombing in densely populated areas. The American dead have been counted—about 52,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam. But what about the Vietnamese casualties? Most analysts believe that around 2,000,000 Vietnamese civilians and 1,100,000 fighters were consumed by the war. 

In the 1970s, the American establishment encouraged the insurgent movement called Khmer Rouge, led by the Maoist leader Pol Pot, in Cambodia. The thinking in Washington was that the Maoist communists of Cambodia would battle against the Soviet communists of Vietnam and that would worsen the situation in the region to such an extent that the world would beseech America to intervene. But once they captured power in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge went out of control. They slaughtered about 25 percent of the country’s population in just four years. 

The American humanitarians did not intervene to save the Cambodians from the Khmer Rouge. Ultimately, it was left to the Vietnamese to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 was truly a humanitarian intervention. It saved the lives of millions of Cambodians. But the Americans didn’t appreciate Vietnam's intervention. They proclaimed that Vietnam had violated the rights of the Cambodians by invading their country. They encouraged China to attack Vietnam. But the Vietnamese were able to repulse the Chinese attack. 

In 1985, President Reagan declared that the policies of Nicaragua were an extraordinary threat to America’s security and foreign policy. Nicaragua’s military was no match for America’s military—how could this country be a threat to America? After the Vietnam debacle, it had become the policy of the USA to fight only the weak states. The Americans intervened in Nicaragua because the country was weak. They attacked Saddam Hussain because Iraq was weak—it did not have any WMDs. North Korea had WMDs so the Americans would never dare to challenge its regime. 

Look at the atrocities that the Americans have committed in Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. What have they done to Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and several other nations in South America? Samuel Huntington has rightly noted that much of the world sees the USA as a “rogue superpower” and “the single greatest external threat to their societies.”

On Kipling’s “Lesser Breeds Without the Law”

In his poem, “Recessional,” Kipling shows his contempt for Africans and Asians by calling them the “lesser breeds without the Law.” In another poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” Kipling glorifies the Europeans with these words: “Take up the White Man’s burden—Send forth the best ye breed.” Why is Kipling being taught in schools and colleges? Why are movies based on his stories being made? Kipling was a notorious defender of colonialism and slavery. He was a racist thinker. His books should be dumped into the dustbin of history. He deserves to be forgotten.

Agamemnon's Dollar

“There certainly was no money in the Trojan War. Gold and silver passed by weight; Agamemnon might have had a treasure, but certainly no money.” ~ Voltaire. Agamemnon was the superpower in the age of the Trojan War, and the words that Voltaire has used for him can be used with some justification to describe the condition of the so-called superpower of our time: America. America might have a treasure (wealth), but certainly no money. The dollar is America’s most lucrative export. Making money by exporting money is the world’s oldest scam and America is guilty of it.

The Homeric Rage of the Europeans

The first word in Western literature is the ancient Greek word for “rage.” Homer’s Iliad begins with this word. The first sentence in The Iliad is translated as: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses…” Rage is the supreme emotion of the Homeric characters in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Paris, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Priam are wrathful and brutal. They do not compromise. They do not negotiate. They fight and conquer. They kill, torture, rape, maim, sacrifice, plunder, and enslave.

In conceiving the characters of his epics, Homer could have been inspired by the Greeks (the Europeans) among whom he lived. The Greeks were a violent, wrathful, and brutal people. They were constantly at war with each other and with their neighbors. It is generally believed that the Greeks were good in philosophy, but what they were truly good at was massacring, plundering, torturing, and enslaving. They unleashed devastation on an epic scale not only in Greece but also in Syracuse, Egypt, South Italy, and the Persian Empire. Between 50 to 80 percent of the people in most city-states of Ancient Greece were slaves or metics.

The Romans, who came after the Greeks, were full of similar Homeric rage. The number of slaves that the Roman soldiers caught and sold is mind boggling. The Samnite War in the third century BC resulted in 55,000 Samnites and Gauls being captured and auctioned. The destruction of Carthage in the third Punic War flooded the slave markets with more than a million slaves. Julius Caesar once sold the entire population of a conquered region (close to 53000 people) to slave dealers. The Romans held gladiator games for 600 years. No other culture in the world has turned the killing of humans into a spectator sport on the scale that the Romans did.

Till the fifteenth century, the Europeans were massacring, plundering, and enslaving each other. In the Age of Imperialism, they poured out of Europe and gave to the world a taste of their Homeric rage and brutality. The Europeans invaded the Americas, Africa, and Asia. They conquered, colonized, and plundered. They wiped out cultures, colonized many nations, massacred natives and animals with impunity, enslaved millions of people, and stole tons of gold and silver.

King Tobacco and the American Revolution

The American Revolution can be viewed as a contest between King Tobacco (the tobacco tycoons of Virginia) and the King of England (George III). In his book American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmund Morgan notes that the causes of the American Revolution cannot be understood without understanding the tobacco economy of Virginia. He writes:

“Virginia was the largest of the new United States, in territory, in population, in influence—and in slaveholding. Virginians owned more than 40 percent of all slaves in the new nation. It was Virginia slaves who grew most of the tobacco that helped to buy American independence. And Virginia furnished the country’s most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and equality. Virginia adopted the first state constitution with a bill of rights. A Virginian commanded the Continental Army that won independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration of Independence but also the United States Constitution of 1787 and the first ten amendments to it. And Americans elected Virginians to the presidency of the United States under that constitution for thirty-two out of the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slave holders. If it is possible to understand the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom, Virginia is surely the place to begin.”

When the Americans were fighting for independence, they were the biggest slave holders in the British Empire. The British used to ask: “Why are these Americans clamoring for independence when they are denying freedom to their slaves?”

In a letter (dated 31 May 1775), Washington wrote: “Unhappy it is though to reflect, that a Brother's Sword has been sheathed in a Brother's breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?” On the one hand Washington stood for independence of the Europeans in America, but on the other hand he stood for slavery of the Africans and forced assimilation of the natives.

The plains of Virginia, which Washington calls “happy and peaceful,” had been full of slaves for almost a century, and 135 of these slaves belonged to him. When he died, he owned 277 slaves. When Jefferson was the governor of Virginia, he had hundreds of slaves. When he died, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he was still a slave holder and the number of his slaves had probably increased. In his 5000 acre plantation at Monticello, he was using African slaves for the cultivation of tobacco. He did not free his slaves in his will; after his death, they were sold to the highest bidder to settle his debts. Edmund Morgan says: “The rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise in slavery.”

The American Revolution was financed by Virginia’s tobacco tycoons who realized that the revolutionaries would not outlaw slavery which was tobacco industry’s lifeblood. In his book The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775-1815, Curtis P. Nettels has said that France came out in support of American revolutionaries because of King Tobacco Diplomacy. He writes: “One American export—tobacco—towered over all else. Prewar shipments to Britain had amounted annually to 100,000,000 pounds, four fifths of which was re-exported, mainly to Europe. To wrest this lucrative trade from Britain was an impelling commercial ambition of France: its conduct in foreign affairs might be called “King Tobacco Diplomacy.”

Condoleezza Rice has called slavery “America’s birth defect.” Morgan argues that slavery was not a birth defect—it was the driver of the American Revolution. American slavery made American independence and, consequently, American capitalism possible.

The slaughter of the bison: When the plains turned silent

In the year 1800, the Great Plains of North America trembled under the thunder of life. Between forty and fifty million bison roamed its grasslands — vast herds so immense that early travelers described them as moving continents of flesh. By 1895, less than a thousand remained. What had once been a symbol of abundance had become a symbol of annihilation.

Contrary to popular myth, it was not the Native Indians who brought the bison to the brink of extinction. The destruction came from another source — the white pioneers employed by commercial hide companies. These hunters, driven by profit and armed with new rifles, turned the plains into killing fields. They shot bison by the tens of thousands, stripped their hides, and left the rest — meat, bones, life itself — to rot beneath the prairie sun.

In Dodge City, Kansas, two traders, Charles Rath and Robert Wright, shipped 200,000 bison hides in the winter of 1873 alone, with another 80,000 hides stacked in their warehouse. The land, once alive with motion and sound, was reduced to silence and stench.

That same year, Lt. Col. Richard Irving Dodge witnessed the devastation with the eyes of a soldier and the heart of a poet. His words remain among the most haunting in the chronicles of the American frontier:

“Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary putrid desert.”

The wholesale slaughter of the bison did more than destroy an animal species; it destroyed a civilization. For the Plains Indians, the bison was not merely sustenance — it was sacred order, economy, and identity. The animal’s disappearance was not ecological alone; it was spiritual erasure.

When the hunters pushed into the Texas Panhandle in the 1870s, some tribes rose in desperate resistance. They attacked the hide hunters, defending not just the herds but their very existence. The American military replied with ruthless efficiency. The tribes were labeled “hostile” — a word that justified extermination. Soldiers burned villages, slaughtered horses, and shattered whatever remained of Indigenous autonomy.

With their homes destroyed, their mounts seized, and their herds gone, resistance became impossible. A civilization that had endured for centuries on the rhythm of the plains was forced into submission — not merely by arms, but by hunger.

No testimony captures this tragedy more poignantly than the words of John Fire Lame Deer, a Lakota holy man, who described the sacred intimacy between his people and the buffalo:

“The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy... Not the smallest part of it was wasted... When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian — the real, natural, ‘wild’ Indian.”

The extermination of the bison was thus not only an ecological disaster; it was an act of cultural and metaphysical warfare. The Great Plains, once vibrant with life and spirit, were transformed into a graveyard — a landscape of bones bleaching under an indifferent sky.

The silence that followed was not merely the silence of extinction. It was the silence of a people bereft of their world.

The Seven Pillars of Capitalism

The notion that capitalism is based on the ideas of John Locke and Adam Smith, that it leads to free markets and liberty, and that it is a humane system is a myth. 

From my study of the history of the Europeans in the last 500 years, I have reached the conclusion that the seven pillars of capitalism are: free land, free resources, slavery, a proselytizing religion, an armed population convinced of the supremacy of their race, a political establishment hell-bent on expanding its control over other people, and a military led by ruthless warlords and generals. The road to the Western capitalist utopia is paved with hubris, bullying tactics, enslavements, massacres, forced religious conversions, evictions, and genocides.  

Due to chance factors and a long tradition of warfare, enslavements, and massacres, the West could take control of these seven pillars towards the end of the fifteenth century. These seven pillars have played a pivotal role in transforming the West into a capitalist utopia and a global power. Capitalism thrives on free or cheap stuff. It thrives on free or cheap labor. In the last 500 years, the Western nations have used their political and military power to garner free or cheap resources and labor to quench the appetite of their economy. 

The philosophy of Manifest Destiny, which held that Western expansion was part of a providential mission in which the West would triumph over the barbarity of other cultures, has played a far greater role in the rise of the West than the ideas of Locke and Smith. The macabre consequence of the Manifest Destiny was that the non-Western cultures were destined to decline or become extinct to create space for Western capitalist advance. Inspired by Manifest Destiny, the USA expanded by 67 percent between the 1840s and the 1850s and became a capitalist powerhouse.

In the twentieth century capitalist violence has continued. The Western nations started a series of wars in the Middle East to grab cheap petroleum for their capitalist economy. Until 1960, when OPEC was created and there was a rationalization in the price of petroleum, Britain, France, and the USA were getting petroleum for a fraction of what it was worth.

The Empire Strikes Out: James Bond and Britain’s Delusions of Grandeur

When the British Empire finally buckled under the weight of the 20th century, it did what any once-mighty power might do when stripped of colonies, command, and global consequence—it invented a hero. 

Not just any hero, but the hero: suave, unflinching, impeccably dressed, and equipped with a license to kill. James Bond, MI6’s finest imaginary bureaucrat with a Beretta, was born not on a battlefield but in a typewriter’s click-clack—Casino Royale, 1952. The Suez Crisis was around the corner, the empire had evaporated, but lo and behold: Britain still had Bond.

The Americans had fighter jets. The Soviets had missiles. The British had martinis, gadgets, and the power of narrative. Bond wasn’t just a spy—he was Britain’s last major export.

In the pages and celluloid of Bond’s world, villains were invariably Slavic, scar-faced, or suspiciously foreign. These weren’t mere adversaries; they were psychopaths with bad accents and worse intentions—hell-bent on world domination or, worse, disrupting Western banking systems. Bond, ever the lone wolf of Albion, dispatched them with a raised eyebrow and zero regard for Geneva Conventions. He was, after all, a relic of a country that once dispatched entire battalions just to raise a flag somewhere exotic.

While Bond occasionally partnered with his American counterparts, the CIA characters—usually tan, underdressed, and underwhelming—served as comic relief. The British establishment, for all its diplomatic genuflection to Washington, always viewed the Yanks as clumsy upstarts. In Bond’s universe, it wasn’t the star-spangled empire that saved the world. It was the man from MI6 who, inexplicably, could do what entire Pentagon task forces could not.

That Bond fever gripped post-imperial Britain wasn’t a sign of confidence—it was a symptom of decline. A century earlier, when Britain actually had the naval power to project force across continents, it needed no fictional spy. It had real ones—backed by gunboats and colonial administrators with names like Cecil and Clive. But as Britannia ceased to rule the waves, she found solace in myth. Bond became the empire's last, best fantasy: a solo act of British supremacy in a world that had stopped asking for it.

The last theatrical gasp of British bravado came in 1982, under Thatcher’s handbag-heavy rule. When Argentina’s junta occupied the Falkland Islands—bleak rocks in the South Atlantic with more sheep than strategic value—the British responded with a naval task force, repurposing cruise liners to transport troops because, well, the Royal Navy wasn’t quite what it used to be. Thatcher’s victory was swift and symbolic. It was also logistically embarrassing. This wasn’t 1857. It was a power play performed with borrowed props.

And what did Britain win? Not another jewel in the crown, but a geopolitical money pit. The Falklands continue to drain the British treasury—an empire that once plundered continents now shells out to guard sheep pastures and penguins.

When the cost of this pyrrhic nostalgia hit home, Britain quietly retired from playing savior of the West. The swagger diminished. The tux was hung up. James Bond, no longer needed in London, defected to Los Angeles. After Ian Fleming’s death in 1964, Hollywood took full custody. The villains changed—now they threatened Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the American way of life. Bond stayed British in accent, but his soul became Californian. The scripts were written not for MI6 but for the global box office.

And yet, the irony is poetic. Today, Bond struggles to matter at all. To Western audiences, he’s insufficiently progressive—too white, too male, too straight. To Eastern audiences, he’s simply not dangerous enough. Hollywood, ever desperate to update the formula, continues to reboot him like bad software. But no matter how diverse the casting or how dark the cinematography, the problem remains: James Bond was a fantasy of imperial competence. And the empire that dreamt him up has long since exited the stage.

A Demythologized View of the American Revolution

Madison said that the American Revolution was driven by the “sacred fire of liberty.” The question is: liberty for whom? For all people or only for the Europeans?

The American Declaration of Independence begins with these lines: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”—this sounds like a triumph of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But in the section known as Grievance 27, the Declaration of Independence clarifies that all are free and equal except the slaves and the natives. 

Here’s the text of Grievance 27: “He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

The Declaration of Independence brands the Indians as savages. The words “domestic Insurrections” is a reference to the slave revolts which most Americans believed the British were inciting. In 1775, the British had announced that they would give freedom to the African slaves if they joined the British Army. The American colonies feared the outbreak of slave revolts—the Grievance 27 addresses their concerns and clarifies that the slaves would not be freed. For the Native Indians and the slaves, the “scared fire of liberty” entailed new chains of bondage.

The Founders of America are the most deified figures in Western history. But they did not believe that the slaves and the natives could become civilized. To them becoming civilized was becoming white—something that the slaves and the natives could not do. How did the Native Americans see the founders? In the Seneca tribe, Washington was known as a “town destroyer.” They held him responsible for decimation of their cornfields and several villages. The Shawnee tribe knew Jefferson as the man who tried to have them exterminated, when he was the Governor of Virginia.

The success of the American revolution led to an intensification in the campaign against the Native Indians. In 1779, Washington sent this terrible order to his military commander: “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their [Native Indian] settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible...Parties should be detached to lay waste to all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner; that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.”

Surviving Columbus: The Story of Pueblo Indians

In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas, celebrations were organized all across the United States and Europe. But not everyone was interested in extolling Columbus. For Native Indians, this was the time of mourning. They saw Columbus as the man who had brought cataclysm to the land of their ancestors. 

To present their version of history, Pueblo Indians made a two-hour documentary called Surviving Columbus, which premiered in October 1992. I saw the documentary yesterday. The documentary begins from 1539, when the first band of Spanish invaders arrived in Pueblo territory. In the section on Spanish invasion, a speaker asks the audience what names the natives gave to the Spanish. The names are not discoverer or settler. It is fear and death. 

The one-sided Eurocentric history tells us that Columbus discovered the Americas, that the Americas were the new world, and that Asia, Europe, and Africa were the old world. But Columbus didn’t discover the Americas for Native Indians. For the natives, their civilization was the old world, and the Europeans had come from a new world. The terms like “discoverer,” “new world,” and “old world” are a linguistic legacy of European Imperialism. 

Then there are words like “wilderness” and “settlement” which create the impression that the Europeans arrived at an empty acreage. The Americas were not an empty acreage—this was the homeland for millions of natives. Their homeland was seized by the invaders. 

“The cant of conquest”—this is the phrase that historian Francis Jennings has used to describe the European strategy of masking exploitative strategies with pious, self-serving terminology. (The work of Francis Jennings is not mentioned in the documentary.)

The European powers which ruled Pueblo Indians after 1539—Spain, Britain, and the USA—tried to subjugate the Indians militarily and religiously. The conquerors gave the conquered a choice: submit or die. After 1970, there has been some improvement in the policies of the United States. The legitimate rights and cultural aspirations of native communities are now being recognized. Despite impossible odds, Pueblo Indians have survived. 

I recommend the Surviving Columbus documentary.

The Unexpected Drivers of History

Things we assume to be true mislead us the most. We assume that the world is orderly and things happen due to human planning and ingenuity, but history is often moved by human errors, unexpected manmade or natural events. In 1492, when Columbus departed on a voyage to discover the sea route to India, no one could have predicted that a navigational error would lead him to the island home of the Taíno in the Caribbean. 

No one foresaw the First World War, the quick dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the defeat of the Greeks in Anatolia and the rise of Turkey, the rise of Hitler, the loss of Churchill in the 1945 election, the sudden collapse of the British Empire, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the spread of the Internet, and the rise of China. What will be the state of the world in the next decade, the next year, and even month—we can’t be certain. Something that no one foresees today might happen and completely transform the world, for better or worse. 

The rules we make, the political institutions we create, and the mass behavior we develop will not protect our society from chaos when a major unexpected event strikes. Unexpected events are the real drivers of history.

Lincoln’s Choice: Eternal Rule or Suicide

“If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” ~ Abraham Lincoln, 1838

These words from Lincoln make me think of a line that is attributed to King Louis XV of France: "Après moi, le déluge.” Louis XV was convinced that if he was not the King, the world would die in a deluge—everyone would commit suicide.

Lincoln’s is offering an insane choice: to live through all time (as if one were an everlasting God) or die by suicide (as if there is no hope of a comeback after defeat).

The Movie Prometheus

My favorite science fiction movie is Prometheus (2012), which is based on the theme of conflict between the creators (the Gods) and the created (the Humans). God-like beings (people from an advanced alien planet) arrive on earth. One of the Gods destroys his body and releases his DNA in earth’s waters. The process of evolution kick-started by this Godly DNA would eventually lead to the creation of intelligent life: human beings. 

The realization dawns on the Gods that the humans might evolve into their competitors. So they decide to wipe out the human race. The conflict between the Gods and humans happens on an alien planet where a team of humans has arrived in a spaceship called Prometheus. Their mission is to find the Gods and ask them the crucial question: "Why did they create the humans?" Only one God was still alive on the planet, when he awakens from his slumber, he reveals the answer to the crucial question: “The Gods created humans merely because they could." The horrifying implication of this answer was that the Gods were now going to destroy humanity “merely because they could.” There was no higher goal. The creation of humanity was a mistake, and the destruction of humanity was an attempt to correct the initial mistake.

When the crew of the Prometheus learn that the God was intending to wipe out humanity, they crash their spaceship into his spaceship to stop him from reaching earth. Two members of the crew survive: the female protagonist Elizabeth Shaw, and the very advanced humanoid robot David. The spaceship of the God is destroyed; this ensures that he cannot go to earth to carry out the plan for destroying humanity. But he survived the collusion between the two spaceships. He comes after Shaw to kill her. She manages to get him to fight a monster that was earlier born from her womb. The monster devours the God and mutates into another monster: the Alien.