Table of Contents
C. Indian and African History of War and Peace
The thought experiment that we are continuing in this article with different possibilities might have already started making you sick. In all likelihood, many of you might have already rejected the presented possible outcome as “I don’t accept/believe” because men have always been naive and dumb. Men think they are the powerful ones, they are the ones who control the outcome of an event. Men think that they own the resources.
African and Arabian History
It is this naiveness that has led slavery of men in history.
Africans natives have largely been peaceful. This is because Africa is the home ground of modern humans. There is plenty of fresh water, plenty of jungle, ocean for seafood, sun for energy, minerals, plenty of fertile lands along the rivers for agriculture, plenty of jungle animals to feast on, and so there is plenty of availability of the essentials {food, energy, shelter, minerals} to support {survive, thrive, reproduce} for generations to come.On the other hand, their close neighbors, the Arabs have a hard life, with limited water, limited food, and limited habitable land due to acres of empty desert, (but a lot of energy in the modern time in the form of oil, which was nonexistent in the past when coal was the main fuel)
Therefore African men did not have to be at war all the time, whereas the Arabians had to be at war all the time. And you don’t have to guess as you already know the history that Arabs and all other lands where essential reserves have been limited, and men have been in war have enslaved the Africans from milleniums.
Indian History
Just like the land of Africa, India has also been rich in natural resources, water, land, shelter, jungle, mountain, oceans, agricultural land, and minerals. Therefore Indians never had to be at war. Indians and Africans are undoubtedly the most peaceful geographies in modern history, with Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi being the two role models of peace, belonging to Africa and India respectively.
The difference between the two countries is that India had several migrations over the centuries from Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Arabia, and even Greece. When outsiders came to India, they established themselves over here and they knew that they are and will always be at war. From around 800 BCE, since the time a literal history has been started to get documented in India, we had 16 Janapaths(states). Each of the states will go into annual war which were non-lethal, and the armies of the two states will fight like a natural war, but without serious attempts to kill the enemy. The losing Ganapathy would pay taxes to the winning janapath. Sword and weapon training, and martial arts, have been an integral part of Indian societies, because Indian genes are an admixture of people from as far as remote Iraq, Iran, and Armenia.
Therefore whenever foreigners came to invade India, they faced massive opposition, resistance, and wars as the native population always practiced warfare and did war drilling for centuries. Not that India hasn’t suffered casualties, or devastation by the foreign invasion, but India couldn’t be turned into a slave market as was Africa.
The very reason Britishers could rule India was that Indians were so complacent about their victories over the Mughals(by Shivaji’s Marathas), then defending against the Portugal, Dutch, and French and limiting them to restricted areas, that when Britishers came, they could simply use that complacency, and divide and rule to get the control of the mainland.
Karamchand Gandhi talked about peace because it was obvious that India was not war-ready. Indian mutiny of 1857 was the final nail in the coffin of that war’s unreadiness which firmly set the foot of the British Raj in India. Many in India hate Mr. Gandhi, as they think that Gandhi was just a British stooge who propagated the British agenda of peace. The reality is a male population not ready for war couldn’t take on British firepower. So Gandhi’s peace talks kept the casualties low in India while providing enough time for the Punjab, Maharashtra, and Bengal to prepare for the battle.
Subhash Chandra Bose, the epitome of the Indian armed freedom fight could flee from India under the nose of the British Raj to Germany, meet Hitler, and formed Indian National Army(INA) because the Britishers were busy dealing with the peace movement of Gandhi and they neither anticipated nor were ready for an Indian freedom fighter to go to a foreign land and build an army to take on the British. It was in fact Bose who addressed Gandhi as “Mahatma”(saint) in one of his radio addresses.
Even though INA got defeated and surrendered in 1945 after Japan surrendered in the second world war after their backbone was broken by America through two nuclear explosions, the British parliament accepted that the key reason they had to leave India was due to INA and the army mutiny caused by the call of INA.
Gandhi talked about peace, the British remained pacified, and Bose prepared for the war, but the British were unprepared, Gandhi supported the British in the world war so that Indian forces fight for the British in the world war so that Bose could work with the captured Indian soldiers. (Nobody expected America to join the war, and no one back then expected Hitler’s well-oiled, well-drilled, pure blood-line Army to lose the second world war against the British and allied forces that comprised of soldiers from different countries under their control, who were merely mercenaries.
Gandhi and Mandela with their peace talks, and peace movements had made peaceful protests such a fashion, and more so such a popular fashion amongst the Western-educated public, that even an Anglo-Saxon aggressive British native rules had tamed down the muscle force. Because it was non-violence after all. And this fashion of non-violence and peace was loved by the post-victorian educated Western population. When natives are at peace, why torture them with muscle power?
Over a hundred countries got their independence after world war II, including the Jews whom Hitler persecuted, due to Hitler, and because of the fact that Hitler prepared for the war for over twenty years, whereas the French and British were living in their fantasy land of peace.
From the Indo-African History, and the way Mandela, Gandhi, and Hitler combining broke the backbone of imperialism, it is easy for you to understand that peace is also a tool for the war, because it allows the weaker group to prepare for the war against the stronger group, and tame down the stronger group through fantasy of peace.