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My Indian Odyssey
A Ghost from India Haunts Me Still
by David Duke
Who can forget the day on which he first sees one of the Seven Wonders of the World? I vividly remember the details of the August day when I first saw the Taj Mahal.
Armed with a camera and a frayed note-pad, I trotted out of the YMCA at about 5:30 in the morning. The cool air felt good as I walked briskly toward the center of New Delhi. Thousands of chirping birds serenaded me as I walked along the main boulevards. A fat, bushy-tailed squirrel dared to cross my path a few inches from my shoes, having learned no fear of man. Such an abundance of small birds and animals was quite a contrast from what I had seen in Laos and Thailand. Indo-Chinese cities have a scarcity of small game because overpopulation has encouraged the people to eat almost anything that moves which is not poisonous. In India, however, small game is protected by religious sanction -- and religious taboos in India seem even more powerful than hunger.
Small animals were not the only creatures in great abundance in India, for so were the people. Along one long sidewalk I saw hundreds of wooden shelves, each about the size of a refrigerator laying on its side. Each served as home for one or more people. Even less fortunate souls lay on the grass or in the brown dust with a tattered blanket serving as their only shelter. Some had only rags to protect themselves from the elements. About a block from the YMCA, an old man grunted as he squatted and defecated in the gutter; a little further on, a bony couple engaged in pleasureless sexual intercourse while two children sat beside them and played in the dust. Millions in India live out their lives on the public streets awash in dust and mud. There they are born; and there they bathe, eat, sleep, excrete, and copulate. As attested by the teeming population, breeding is their most successful endeavor.
As I penetrated deeper into the center of New Delhi, I found that there were, however, many modern structures. Most of them housed branches of European firms doing business in India. Many Indian Government buildings had been constructed in the colonial style of the twenties and thirties under the auspices of English imperial rule. The contrast between abject human debasement only a few steps away from monumental achievements was disconcerting; but my eyes slowly got used to the stark disparity as I headed for one of the main, commercial squares.
About 8:30 I reached the square where I planned to inquire about bus service to Agra, site of the famed Taj Mahal. The streets were buzzing with activity. The grass on the boulevard's center ground was being mowed by a cylindrical lawnmower pulled by a large white bull. It was guided by a turbaned Indian dressed in white of a similar shade to the animal's. Near some tour buses, I learned that I could ride to Agra and back in a taxi cab (a round trip of over two hundred miles) for only twelve dollars. I met a young Cambridge student of English derivation traveling during his summer vacation, and we decided to share a cab after getting some breakfast at the main coffee house on the square.
Six Indians behind the counter worked at a furious pace, serving hundreds of patrons. Each worker had a separate job. Only one washed dishes, and cleanliness was not one of his finer points, for he looked as though he moonlighted as a grave-digger. Crusty black dirt trimmed the tips of his fingernails; the lighter spots on his face and neck ,on diffident inspection, turned out to be streaks where sweat and drool had washed off some layers of muck. After hundreds of washings from the same filthy water, his dish rag could only be adequately compared to mummy wrappings. Plates and utensils were wiped according to immediate necessity right before the eyes of the customer.
It was easy to convince myself that I really wasn't hungry, but Rodney Johnson, my new English friend, wolfed down coffee and fried eggs without the slightest suggestion of discomfort. In fact, it perturbed me that he seemed to actually enjoy it. Perhaps he simply wanted to keep up the British image of true colonial grit.
We hired a run down taxi of a make I couldn't identify. Some sort of strange religious symbols hung from the rearview mirror, and the clear plastic seats immediately stuck to our bare legs as the three hour trip to Agra began. A dozen books I had read on India didn't prepare me as I gazed at the worsening panorama of horrors unfolding as we sped from the business district of New Delhi. There were hundreds of rickety, bug-eyed children, and I even saw two emaciated corpses lying on the street, treated like so much refuse to be hauled away. Incoherent squabbling and bargaining of the marketplace pounded on my auditory nerves, and strange stenches filled my nostrils from time to time. Sometimes the odors came from the fires made from briquettes of bovine and human dung used as fuel. Amid the ruins and rubble lay intermittent piles of ancient garbage being picked over by the starving, looking for even the tiniest of rotting morsels.
Once in a while an old temple or structure would heave into view out of this sea of desolation and offer a brief glimpse into a high culture that had been. The mind of this young Westerner visiting India for the first time was not going to be ensnared by the ugliness and the decay, for gradually, in the midst of the ruins and putrefaction, I resurrected in my imagination the once beautiful, magnificent empire of India. I could feel the vitality and creativity that had ruled this land thousands of years before; I could see the farmers and tradesmen, the artisans and musicians, the road builders and architects.
As the cab began to wind out of the stifling, heat-magnifying city and emerged into the countryside, I thought about the once great Indian civilization. Green rice fields sped by the window of my cab as I weighed what I had learned from books and from the conversations I had with Indian college professors over the previous few days. The historical facts that swirled in my mind mingled with indelible impressions I harvested with my own eyes.
Aryans, or Indo-European Caucasians created the great Indian, or Hindu Civilization. Aryans swept over the Himalayas to the Indian sub-continent and conquered the aboriginal people. The original term "India" was coined by the Aryan invaders from their Sanskrit word Sindu for the river now called the Indus. Sanskrit is perhaps the oldest of the Indo-European languages, having a common origin to all the modern languages of Europe. Composed in about 1500 BC, the Hindu religious texts of the Rig Veta tell the story of the long struggle between the Aryans and the aboriginal people of the Indian subcontinent. Sixteen Aryan states were partitioned by the sixth century AD, and Brahmanism became the chief religion of the India. After the conquest, the conquering race initiated a caste system to preserve their status and their racial identity. The Hindu word for caste is "Varna," which means color. Today the word is usually associated with occupation or trade; but the occupations evolved originally on the basis of ethnicity. The palest of skin were called the Brahmin, the warrior-priest class, the top of the social ladder. Untouchables, or Pariahs, the racially mixed, or "raceless ones," were at the bottom.
Over the past few centuries, the clear racial differences faded, but one can still notice the lighter hues and taller statures of the higher castes. Many scholars consider Sanskrit the oldest and purest of the Indo-European languages. In modern India, the greatest insult one could pay a fellow Indian is to call him "black."
In spite of all the organized government and media efforts to root out racial feeling, there is still ample evidence that race does matter in modern India. Rodney told me that the "personal ad" columns catering to the English-speaking Indians are interesting in that the skin color of the advertiser is always described very precisely. Before I left India, I found that the ads often had an emphasis on the degree of lightness of the perspective husband or wife.
The average Christian conservative of the Western world would be aghast at the exuberant interest displayed by the ancient Indians in sex and the ways they publicly displayed sexual experiences through art. Hindu history, though, seems to indicate that it was not any preoccupation with sex that brought down the high culture, as much as the racial impact of that obsession. In spite of strict religious and civil taboos, the ancient Aryans crossed the color line. Slavery, or a similar system, makes servant women easily obtainable and has proven a dangerous temptation for some of the basest of the slave holders. Only a small percentage of each generation had sexual liaisons with the lower castes, but over dozens of generations a gradual change in the racial composition had occurred, almost imperceptible in a single generation, but dramatic after a millennium.
Perhaps one of the problems of the Indian civilization, I reflected, (and of every one since) is that the most creative, most intelligent and most-successful people have had many distractions from sex and family, while the lower classes find sex a much more important form of recreation and fulfillment, in fact it is the one highly enjoyable pastime the poor can always afford. Every civilization has a lower average birthrate among its most talented elements while its less intelligent and unproductive tend to proliferate, India was no exception.
Traveling 45 m.p.h. with all the taxi's windows down, it was still so hot and dusty that my British friend and I felt as though we could not get enough air. However, India was not the dry, desert-like expanse that I had pictured. Certainly there are arid areas in India, but great portions of the country are humid and wet. During my stay I saw beautiful sea ports, green fertile valleys, thick forests and jungles, mountains that glittered with the reflection of their vast mineral wealth. The road we traveled on was far from dry. Rice field followed rice field, and there were numerous waterholes -- usually beset by cows cooling their sacred hides.
At mid-morning we decided to stop for a little refreshment, and the cab driver pulled off the highway by a little shanty cafe'. By that time my hunger had overcome my lack of enthusiasm for Indian dish washing. My English friend, undaunted as ever, ordered some fried eggs. I optimistically thought that eggs fried in a hot skillet, albeit dirty, wouldn't do much harm, so I put my order in. Since the coffee was boiling hot, I consented to have some of it, as well.
After letting them cool a bit, I ravenously consumed a nice yellow spoonful of eggs. A feeling like liquid fire spread from my tongue to the roof of my mouth, and clear back to my larynx. It spread from my throat into my esophagus and stomach. My eyes watered. My nose ran. I tried to swallow, but I couldn't. I looked at the swarthy, beady-eyed driver, then at the proprietor of the shanty and imagined a criminal conspiracy between them. I imagined the authorities finding my poisoned, pain-contorted body in a rice paddy a few days later, stripped of identification, passport, camera and money.
Then, through a blurry film, could see Rodney wolfing down his eggs like they were milk chocolate. Maybe what I had taken for British bravado was only true affection for this land and its traits.
I believed that I stumbled onto the reason why almost all the food in India is intolerably hot; for as famished as I was, that one bite was more than enough for me that morning. Suddenly, I wasn't hungry any more, but no longer from fear of dirty utensils, for I figured that few germs could have survived the heat of the little red infernos the Indians call peppers. Growing up in south Louisiana, I had always been exposed to very spicy food, but those Indian peppers could have passed for glowing embers of lava! Only the English could have colonized this place, for only they, like Rodney, had the stomach for it.
Near the shanty were hordes of small children. A number of them had deformities such as full or partial blindness and amputated limbs. The cab driver told me that many are purposely mutilated by their own parents to increase their intake from begging. As he spoke I grew angry and bitter at such cruelty and corruption.
As we drove on, I found the poverty of New Delhi duplicated in the countryside. We passed many settlements teeming with rag-swathed, skeleton people--a sight that no Westerner can view without compassion. There are children starving everywhere. Cruel, open sores adorned their bodies; and unrelenting flies swarmed to make a meal of the abundant rotting flesh.
The probable first impulse of any American who learns of India's plight is to send money and food; but by sending such assistance he is really only compounding the agony. The reason that so many are starving is the chronically high birth rate. The resulting overpopulation outstrips the ability of the people to feed themselves. Unless the givers tie aid to absolute guarantees of population control, the increased food simply feeds another reproducing generation that in turn only multiples the problem! Despite this self-evident fact, Western nations have poured unending food and medical supplies into India. The purpose of the relief at its start early in this century was to help the thousands who were starving. Paradoxically, because of our generosity we can now proudly report that hundreds-of-millions starve in India! The sunken faces of the malnourished, sick and mutilated children around the nation are the results of misplaced humanitarianism that has only increased human suffering and death.
At our next stop on this trip to the Taj Mahal, my attention was diverted from the suffering of the Indian people, to an innocent victim of those people. We had stopped at a small bazaar along the road. Present were fakirs, snake charmers, and animal trainers. One turban-crowned Indian had what he called a "dancing bear." A worn, leather leash was tightened around the bear's neck, causing him to choke and gag. It was stifling hot and this poor creature sweated profusely, soaking his heavy coat and contributing to the severe skin infections that scarred his body and had removed large patches of fur.
This bear was so emaciated that it was frightening, for as he would stand and perform his tortured dance he had an eerie resemblance to a man. I'll never forget the pitiful look on that bear's face as the trainer whipped him with his stiff cane pole. In human-like fashion the bear placed his paws over his head to protect himself from the blows. Streaks of red blood colored his digits. As I stood in the hot sun watching the wincing bear I began to boil with anger.
I moved through the crowd with clenched fists. It would have been so easy to wrench that pole from that puny little torturer and give him a dose of the pain he was inflicting on that pitiful bear. One more strike at that bear and I would have at him, I thought. Then I felt a tug on my arm and heard the calm, evenly modulated voice of the Englishman whispering that he felt exactly the same way, but asking me, "What are you going to do, go to war against the whole Indian nation?"
"After all," he added "this atrocity is but a microcosm of the cruelty that exists here."
I stumbled back to the cab wondering how many times in a man's life he must turn his head when justice demands he act. Regardless of how much pity I have for the people if India, it is true that every people ultimately is responsible for its conditions of life, for its general health and well-being. After gazing on the poor mistreated animal who has no control over its destiny, a sadness came over me that was greater than any I had felt since arriving in this forlorn nation.
On both sides of the highway onward to Agra were cattle, thousands of them. The driver explained that they were sacred. As he explained their religious sanctification and protection, I thought about the great cattle industry the nation could have. Later in the shops in Agra, I saw rats and birds scampering around the food in the bins and not receiving a second glance from the proprietors or their skinny customers. In some areas of India even the rats are sacred.
Agra and New Delhi are far cleaner cities (by their standards; all are abominable by ours) than the other large cities like Calcutta or Bombay. In northern India the people are taller, lighter skinned, and more sturdily built than those of the hot coastal areas. Occasionally, I encountered a native Indian who could easily pass for a southern European, or even a Louisiana Creole. (a Creole has French and Spanish ancestry)
I had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal. My father had described it to me a number of times, and my excitement grew as we neared the famous structure. Anticipation welled-up, tingling me like a cool breeze across my sweaty body. The Taj Mahal was built long after the great flowering of the Aryan Civilization, yet it contains many architectural and artistic qualities that reflect the earlier era. As we passed through the shaded arches of the outlying buildings, the whitish-blue, cloudless sky was bright with glare. Then the great temple came into view, standing magnificently, gleaming white in the sun. I had stepped out of the filth, rot, and decay of modern India into an earlier era of beauty, order and art. Sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool, I just stared, losing all track of time. It is difficult for me to describe my emotions, for I was completely overwhelmed by its beauty. Rodney and I, usually both quite glib, sat motionless and mute, and when one finally did speak the words automatically came out in whispers of reverence for the splendor looming before us.
After a while, historical reality began to crowd in on me. I knew that most of the modern day Indian visitors I saw around me were but poor reflections of the men and women who walked these grounds centuries ago. Tourists from all over the world find the temple very beautiful, but once they learn of its origins, they leave saddened, for the great Taj Mahal was built as a remembrance, a sepulcher if you will, by a man whose wife died giving birth to her fourteenth child. I saw it as a metaphor, a funerary monument to the memory of a people who gave the earth great beauty.
Another feeling came over me as I viewed the Taj Mahal in the sunlight. The rounded dome with its white, bone-like features resembled a huge skull, symbolizing the spiritual cranium of the Aryan people, one that once housed and held talented and powerful minds; but which now only served as a magnificent gravestone of a high culture and genetic treasure that is no more.
Unlike the thousands of decaying and collapsing ancient temples around the rest of India, the Taj Mahal is not pock-marked. Even just a few inches away, one can view the overwhelming beauty in its inlaid stones and artwork, just as one appreciates the architecture from a distance. The cool, moist air of the interior of the Taj Mahal made me reluctant to leave and begin the journey back to Delhi.
On the long road back, Rodney slept, while I rested my head on the window frame and peered into the dusty countryside, taking in the sights and sounds as nonchalantly as if I had traveled on the road a thousand times. When I got back to the YMCA, I took off my shoes and curled up on my musty cot, falling asleep with my camera still around my neck.
A couple days later I decided to explore some of the other old temples that dot the countryside. I hired a cab, and it wasn't very long before I spotted a suitable TARGET. Soon I was walking across a grassy, dry area toward a huge temple I could see in the distance. A few hundred feet from the paved highway, I literally stumbled across another road; and it was, in a word, magnificent. It was extremely old. Only a part of the road was visible; the rest was covered with sediment. Stone had been carved in perfect blocks and laid over a base of gravel. The road was as level as a billiard table and would still be usable if the weeds that had grown up in the cleavages of the stone were cut.
As I walked over the ancient road and through the thick patches of dry weeds toward the temple, I reviewed all that I had read about India and all that I had seen firsthand: the fact that the highest classes were the lightest-skinned, that nothing was more insulting to an Indian than calling him "black," that Varna (caste) is the Indian word for color, that Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-European language with direct links to every other European language. A great deal of Sanskrit literature describes many of the Aryan leaders as having light eyes and light hair. I thought about the splendor that once was, and about the incessant squalor I had witnessed since my arrival. I wondered about what I might find at the temple looming ahead.
As I got closer to the temple, I noticed that the dome was partially caved-in. Only two walls were left standing. Still closer, I saw thousands of pock-marks all over the structure, each of which once housed a precious stone, but had long since been picked clean. I wondered if all the temples and monuments of Europe and America will eventually endure the same fate as this one.
Around the corner of the temple, on the partially shaded side, I saw something that will forever remain burned in my memory. There in the shade sat a little, brown, half-caste Indian girl. She was thoroughly emaciated and resembled some sort of hideous doll, but she moved slightly, and her animated bones and skin had a terrifying effect. She was so malnourished that her face had not developed properly, but her eyes were very large, and in their own way hauntingly beautiful. On one cheek was an open sore nearly the size of a quarter; there were more sores on her arms, chest and legs, and each sore was covered by dozens of flies. Occasionally, she would brush her frail hand over one of the sores causing the flies to retreat. Inevitably though, once her hand had passed, they returned to their grim feeding like iron fillings to a magnet. She held out her hand to me, begging for a few rupees. I dug my hand deep into my pocket, pulled out all the Indian coins I had and carefully tipped them softly into her dark, skeleton-like hand. Turning, I stumbled out into the hot Indian sun, with my eyes blinded by tears.
On the way back to my room I wondered if, in a few hundred years, some half-black descendant of mine would be sitting among the ruins of our civilization, brushing away the flies, waiting to die. Every day our nation grows a little darker from the torrential immigration of non-whites , high non-white birthrates, and increasing racial miscegenation; and with each passing day, we see the quality of our lives decline. Crime is ever on the increase, drug activity proliferates, educational quality declines, and the American standard of living suffers. The healthy racial values of our forefathers are ridiculed and replaced by the pseudo-science of egalitarianism. Treason to our heritage prospers and corruption feeds in the highest places.
All that keeps our society afloat are the small number of scientists and technicians (predominately Caucasian) who continue to create technological wizardry that cushions the impact of the economic slide caused by lower individual productivity, and the dependency of the growing welfare underclass. Somehow, the increasingly hard-pressed, White middle class keeps the wheels turning (and taxes flowing into the social structure), but with lessening efficiency.
To the plaudits of the media, the Brahmins of America and the West are slowly being replaced by the pariahs, the Untouchables. Seeing that child in that prophetic setting was my glimpse of a remorseless fate toward which the United States and the Western World are hurdling. If that future is to be altered, it will require each person who understands the racial truth - - to forge by this knowledge -- policies that will preserve our own heritage in our respective nations in the same way we now seek to preserve the endangered whales or rare eagles.
The nation of India, like most of the Third World, has already passed the point of no return. She cannot feed or otherwise adequately take care of herself, not even with repeated injections of Western capital, aid, and technology. The huge populace of modern-day India cannot sustain the level of culture and economic well-being that its high-caste forebears originally created.
It is not, however, too late for America and the West. No matter how dark our destiny may appear, there is enough genetic treasure among our people to fashion a road to the stars. Those who know the racial truth often excuse their inaction by expressing pessimism. Suggesting that "the battle is already lost" is often simply an excuse for cowardice. Our race's evolutionary struggle for survival became the meaning of my life when I looked into that little Indian girl's forlorn face, for I then knew exactly what I must do. Prospects of victory or defeat became irrelevant to my responsibility and my honor. My life was from that defining moment, in the service of my people and the Promethean task ahead.
When I grow tired and weary in this battle, and I find my character smeared or my personal life attacked, her gaunt face is there to haunt me, to drive me onward. When my personal safety, or that of my loved ones is explicitly threatened, her pleading countenance is there to remind me in the most graphic human terms what failure means for our progeny. I learned that I had to take personal responsibility for the well-being of my people. By that, I don't mean that I felt it was my destiny to lead, but it was my personal responsibility to do all that I could for the survival of my heritage. In the crisis our race now faces, all of us who know the truth must carry that same personal responsibility, and with it the understanding that any individual danger or suffering must be endured when the fate of our whole people is at stake. Such was the altruism that brought our forebears through the crucible of the Ice Ages of prehistoric Europe, and now we must draw from that genetically imprinted trait as we stand on the brink of being inundated by the masses of the Third World.
Before my journey to India, the racial ideals that I believed in l abstract concepts and principles. In the moment I saw that emaciated child in the ruins, all my thoughts and concepts were dramatically transformed from sterile contemplations into the reality of flesh and blood. I finally realized that my cause is different than that of an athletic contest, business competition, winning of an election, or even struggling for an important new scientific discovery. It is not about being right or wrong about ideas, but about life itself; the natural laws that provide it's beauty, character, and meaning. I had already committed myself to the struggle for my race's survival long before I saw that fated child, but that experience changed an intellectual commitment into an almost holy obligation.
An often quoted passage from the Bhagavad Gita came to my mind with powerful meaning:
Likewise having regard for duty to your caste
For in a warrior, there exists no better thing than
A fight required of duty
(Chapter 2, verse 30)
I realized that day in the scorching Indian sun that I had to adopt the spirit of a warrior -- that my race was in a life and death struggle that transcended the centuries. Selfish pursuits seemed trivial, and my life became from that moment interwoven with the Cause, a Cause that I knew that I would never abandon. Through years of heartbreak and hardship, physical weariness and character assassination, but also in the exhilarating moments of success and acclaim, my heart has remained true. The flame that ignited in me on that hot August day is still white hot and imperishable.
A Ghost from India Haunts Me Still
by David Duke
Who can forget the day on which he first sees one of the Seven Wonders of the World? I vividly remember the details of the August day when I first saw the Taj Mahal.
Armed with a camera and a frayed note-pad, I trotted out of the YMCA at about 5:30 in the morning. The cool air felt good as I walked briskly toward the center of New Delhi. Thousands of chirping birds serenaded me as I walked along the main boulevards. A fat, bushy-tailed squirrel dared to cross my path a few inches from my shoes, having learned no fear of man. Such an abundance of small birds and animals was quite a contrast from what I had seen in Laos and Thailand. Indo-Chinese cities have a scarcity of small game because overpopulation has encouraged the people to eat almost anything that moves which is not poisonous. In India, however, small game is protected by religious sanction -- and religious taboos in India seem even more powerful than hunger.
Small animals were not the only creatures in great abundance in India, for so were the people. Along one long sidewalk I saw hundreds of wooden shelves, each about the size of a refrigerator laying on its side. Each served as home for one or more people. Even less fortunate souls lay on the grass or in the brown dust with a tattered blanket serving as their only shelter. Some had only rags to protect themselves from the elements. About a block from the YMCA, an old man grunted as he squatted and defecated in the gutter; a little further on, a bony couple engaged in pleasureless sexual intercourse while two children sat beside them and played in the dust. Millions in India live out their lives on the public streets awash in dust and mud. There they are born; and there they bathe, eat, sleep, excrete, and copulate. As attested by the teeming population, breeding is their most successful endeavor.
As I penetrated deeper into the center of New Delhi, I found that there were, however, many modern structures. Most of them housed branches of European firms doing business in India. Many Indian Government buildings had been constructed in the colonial style of the twenties and thirties under the auspices of English imperial rule. The contrast between abject human debasement only a few steps away from monumental achievements was disconcerting; but my eyes slowly got used to the stark disparity as I headed for one of the main, commercial squares.
About 8:30 I reached the square where I planned to inquire about bus service to Agra, site of the famed Taj Mahal. The streets were buzzing with activity. The grass on the boulevard's center ground was being mowed by a cylindrical lawnmower pulled by a large white bull. It was guided by a turbaned Indian dressed in white of a similar shade to the animal's. Near some tour buses, I learned that I could ride to Agra and back in a taxi cab (a round trip of over two hundred miles) for only twelve dollars. I met a young Cambridge student of English derivation traveling during his summer vacation, and we decided to share a cab after getting some breakfast at the main coffee house on the square.
Six Indians behind the counter worked at a furious pace, serving hundreds of patrons. Each worker had a separate job. Only one washed dishes, and cleanliness was not one of his finer points, for he looked as though he moonlighted as a grave-digger. Crusty black dirt trimmed the tips of his fingernails; the lighter spots on his face and neck ,on diffident inspection, turned out to be streaks where sweat and drool had washed off some layers of muck. After hundreds of washings from the same filthy water, his dish rag could only be adequately compared to mummy wrappings. Plates and utensils were wiped according to immediate necessity right before the eyes of the customer.
It was easy to convince myself that I really wasn't hungry, but Rodney Johnson, my new English friend, wolfed down coffee and fried eggs without the slightest suggestion of discomfort. In fact, it perturbed me that he seemed to actually enjoy it. Perhaps he simply wanted to keep up the British image of true colonial grit.
We hired a run down taxi of a make I couldn't identify. Some sort of strange religious symbols hung from the rearview mirror, and the clear plastic seats immediately stuck to our bare legs as the three hour trip to Agra began. A dozen books I had read on India didn't prepare me as I gazed at the worsening panorama of horrors unfolding as we sped from the business district of New Delhi. There were hundreds of rickety, bug-eyed children, and I even saw two emaciated corpses lying on the street, treated like so much refuse to be hauled away. Incoherent squabbling and bargaining of the marketplace pounded on my auditory nerves, and strange stenches filled my nostrils from time to time. Sometimes the odors came from the fires made from briquettes of bovine and human dung used as fuel. Amid the ruins and rubble lay intermittent piles of ancient garbage being picked over by the starving, looking for even the tiniest of rotting morsels.
Once in a while an old temple or structure would heave into view out of this sea of desolation and offer a brief glimpse into a high culture that had been. The mind of this young Westerner visiting India for the first time was not going to be ensnared by the ugliness and the decay, for gradually, in the midst of the ruins and putrefaction, I resurrected in my imagination the once beautiful, magnificent empire of India. I could feel the vitality and creativity that had ruled this land thousands of years before; I could see the farmers and tradesmen, the artisans and musicians, the road builders and architects.
As the cab began to wind out of the stifling, heat-magnifying city and emerged into the countryside, I thought about the once great Indian civilization. Green rice fields sped by the window of my cab as I weighed what I had learned from books and from the conversations I had with Indian college professors over the previous few days. The historical facts that swirled in my mind mingled with indelible impressions I harvested with my own eyes.
Aryans, or Indo-European Caucasians created the great Indian, or Hindu Civilization. Aryans swept over the Himalayas to the Indian sub-continent and conquered the aboriginal people. The original term "India" was coined by the Aryan invaders from their Sanskrit word Sindu for the river now called the Indus. Sanskrit is perhaps the oldest of the Indo-European languages, having a common origin to all the modern languages of Europe. Composed in about 1500 BC, the Hindu religious texts of the Rig Veta tell the story of the long struggle between the Aryans and the aboriginal people of the Indian subcontinent. Sixteen Aryan states were partitioned by the sixth century AD, and Brahmanism became the chief religion of the India. After the conquest, the conquering race initiated a caste system to preserve their status and their racial identity. The Hindu word for caste is "Varna," which means color. Today the word is usually associated with occupation or trade; but the occupations evolved originally on the basis of ethnicity. The palest of skin were called the Brahmin, the warrior-priest class, the top of the social ladder. Untouchables, or Pariahs, the racially mixed, or "raceless ones," were at the bottom.
Over the past few centuries, the clear racial differences faded, but one can still notice the lighter hues and taller statures of the higher castes. Many scholars consider Sanskrit the oldest and purest of the Indo-European languages. In modern India, the greatest insult one could pay a fellow Indian is to call him "black."
In spite of all the organized government and media efforts to root out racial feeling, there is still ample evidence that race does matter in modern India. Rodney told me that the "personal ad" columns catering to the English-speaking Indians are interesting in that the skin color of the advertiser is always described very precisely. Before I left India, I found that the ads often had an emphasis on the degree of lightness of the perspective husband or wife.
The average Christian conservative of the Western world would be aghast at the exuberant interest displayed by the ancient Indians in sex and the ways they publicly displayed sexual experiences through art. Hindu history, though, seems to indicate that it was not any preoccupation with sex that brought down the high culture, as much as the racial impact of that obsession. In spite of strict religious and civil taboos, the ancient Aryans crossed the color line. Slavery, or a similar system, makes servant women easily obtainable and has proven a dangerous temptation for some of the basest of the slave holders. Only a small percentage of each generation had sexual liaisons with the lower castes, but over dozens of generations a gradual change in the racial composition had occurred, almost imperceptible in a single generation, but dramatic after a millennium.
Perhaps one of the problems of the Indian civilization, I reflected, (and of every one since) is that the most creative, most intelligent and most-successful people have had many distractions from sex and family, while the lower classes find sex a much more important form of recreation and fulfillment, in fact it is the one highly enjoyable pastime the poor can always afford. Every civilization has a lower average birthrate among its most talented elements while its less intelligent and unproductive tend to proliferate, India was no exception.
Traveling 45 m.p.h. with all the taxi's windows down, it was still so hot and dusty that my British friend and I felt as though we could not get enough air. However, India was not the dry, desert-like expanse that I had pictured. Certainly there are arid areas in India, but great portions of the country are humid and wet. During my stay I saw beautiful sea ports, green fertile valleys, thick forests and jungles, mountains that glittered with the reflection of their vast mineral wealth. The road we traveled on was far from dry. Rice field followed rice field, and there were numerous waterholes -- usually beset by cows cooling their sacred hides.
At mid-morning we decided to stop for a little refreshment, and the cab driver pulled off the highway by a little shanty cafe'. By that time my hunger had overcome my lack of enthusiasm for Indian dish washing. My English friend, undaunted as ever, ordered some fried eggs. I optimistically thought that eggs fried in a hot skillet, albeit dirty, wouldn't do much harm, so I put my order in. Since the coffee was boiling hot, I consented to have some of it, as well.
After letting them cool a bit, I ravenously consumed a nice yellow spoonful of eggs. A feeling like liquid fire spread from my tongue to the roof of my mouth, and clear back to my larynx. It spread from my throat into my esophagus and stomach. My eyes watered. My nose ran. I tried to swallow, but I couldn't. I looked at the swarthy, beady-eyed driver, then at the proprietor of the shanty and imagined a criminal conspiracy between them. I imagined the authorities finding my poisoned, pain-contorted body in a rice paddy a few days later, stripped of identification, passport, camera and money.
Then, through a blurry film, could see Rodney wolfing down his eggs like they were milk chocolate. Maybe what I had taken for British bravado was only true affection for this land and its traits.
I believed that I stumbled onto the reason why almost all the food in India is intolerably hot; for as famished as I was, that one bite was more than enough for me that morning. Suddenly, I wasn't hungry any more, but no longer from fear of dirty utensils, for I figured that few germs could have survived the heat of the little red infernos the Indians call peppers. Growing up in south Louisiana, I had always been exposed to very spicy food, but those Indian peppers could have passed for glowing embers of lava! Only the English could have colonized this place, for only they, like Rodney, had the stomach for it.
Near the shanty were hordes of small children. A number of them had deformities such as full or partial blindness and amputated limbs. The cab driver told me that many are purposely mutilated by their own parents to increase their intake from begging. As he spoke I grew angry and bitter at such cruelty and corruption.
As we drove on, I found the poverty of New Delhi duplicated in the countryside. We passed many settlements teeming with rag-swathed, skeleton people--a sight that no Westerner can view without compassion. There are children starving everywhere. Cruel, open sores adorned their bodies; and unrelenting flies swarmed to make a meal of the abundant rotting flesh.
The probable first impulse of any American who learns of India's plight is to send money and food; but by sending such assistance he is really only compounding the agony. The reason that so many are starving is the chronically high birth rate. The resulting overpopulation outstrips the ability of the people to feed themselves. Unless the givers tie aid to absolute guarantees of population control, the increased food simply feeds another reproducing generation that in turn only multiples the problem! Despite this self-evident fact, Western nations have poured unending food and medical supplies into India. The purpose of the relief at its start early in this century was to help the thousands who were starving. Paradoxically, because of our generosity we can now proudly report that hundreds-of-millions starve in India! The sunken faces of the malnourished, sick and mutilated children around the nation are the results of misplaced humanitarianism that has only increased human suffering and death.
At our next stop on this trip to the Taj Mahal, my attention was diverted from the suffering of the Indian people, to an innocent victim of those people. We had stopped at a small bazaar along the road. Present were fakirs, snake charmers, and animal trainers. One turban-crowned Indian had what he called a "dancing bear." A worn, leather leash was tightened around the bear's neck, causing him to choke and gag. It was stifling hot and this poor creature sweated profusely, soaking his heavy coat and contributing to the severe skin infections that scarred his body and had removed large patches of fur.
This bear was so emaciated that it was frightening, for as he would stand and perform his tortured dance he had an eerie resemblance to a man. I'll never forget the pitiful look on that bear's face as the trainer whipped him with his stiff cane pole. In human-like fashion the bear placed his paws over his head to protect himself from the blows. Streaks of red blood colored his digits. As I stood in the hot sun watching the wincing bear I began to boil with anger.
I moved through the crowd with clenched fists. It would have been so easy to wrench that pole from that puny little torturer and give him a dose of the pain he was inflicting on that pitiful bear. One more strike at that bear and I would have at him, I thought. Then I felt a tug on my arm and heard the calm, evenly modulated voice of the Englishman whispering that he felt exactly the same way, but asking me, "What are you going to do, go to war against the whole Indian nation?"
"After all," he added "this atrocity is but a microcosm of the cruelty that exists here."
I stumbled back to the cab wondering how many times in a man's life he must turn his head when justice demands he act. Regardless of how much pity I have for the people if India, it is true that every people ultimately is responsible for its conditions of life, for its general health and well-being. After gazing on the poor mistreated animal who has no control over its destiny, a sadness came over me that was greater than any I had felt since arriving in this forlorn nation.
On both sides of the highway onward to Agra were cattle, thousands of them. The driver explained that they were sacred. As he explained their religious sanctification and protection, I thought about the great cattle industry the nation could have. Later in the shops in Agra, I saw rats and birds scampering around the food in the bins and not receiving a second glance from the proprietors or their skinny customers. In some areas of India even the rats are sacred.
Agra and New Delhi are far cleaner cities (by their standards; all are abominable by ours) than the other large cities like Calcutta or Bombay. In northern India the people are taller, lighter skinned, and more sturdily built than those of the hot coastal areas. Occasionally, I encountered a native Indian who could easily pass for a southern European, or even a Louisiana Creole. (a Creole has French and Spanish ancestry)
I had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal. My father had described it to me a number of times, and my excitement grew as we neared the famous structure. Anticipation welled-up, tingling me like a cool breeze across my sweaty body. The Taj Mahal was built long after the great flowering of the Aryan Civilization, yet it contains many architectural and artistic qualities that reflect the earlier era. As we passed through the shaded arches of the outlying buildings, the whitish-blue, cloudless sky was bright with glare. Then the great temple came into view, standing magnificently, gleaming white in the sun. I had stepped out of the filth, rot, and decay of modern India into an earlier era of beauty, order and art. Sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool, I just stared, losing all track of time. It is difficult for me to describe my emotions, for I was completely overwhelmed by its beauty. Rodney and I, usually both quite glib, sat motionless and mute, and when one finally did speak the words automatically came out in whispers of reverence for the splendor looming before us.
After a while, historical reality began to crowd in on me. I knew that most of the modern day Indian visitors I saw around me were but poor reflections of the men and women who walked these grounds centuries ago. Tourists from all over the world find the temple very beautiful, but once they learn of its origins, they leave saddened, for the great Taj Mahal was built as a remembrance, a sepulcher if you will, by a man whose wife died giving birth to her fourteenth child. I saw it as a metaphor, a funerary monument to the memory of a people who gave the earth great beauty.
Another feeling came over me as I viewed the Taj Mahal in the sunlight. The rounded dome with its white, bone-like features resembled a huge skull, symbolizing the spiritual cranium of the Aryan people, one that once housed and held talented and powerful minds; but which now only served as a magnificent gravestone of a high culture and genetic treasure that is no more.
Unlike the thousands of decaying and collapsing ancient temples around the rest of India, the Taj Mahal is not pock-marked. Even just a few inches away, one can view the overwhelming beauty in its inlaid stones and artwork, just as one appreciates the architecture from a distance. The cool, moist air of the interior of the Taj Mahal made me reluctant to leave and begin the journey back to Delhi.
On the long road back, Rodney slept, while I rested my head on the window frame and peered into the dusty countryside, taking in the sights and sounds as nonchalantly as if I had traveled on the road a thousand times. When I got back to the YMCA, I took off my shoes and curled up on my musty cot, falling asleep with my camera still around my neck.
A couple days later I decided to explore some of the other old temples that dot the countryside. I hired a cab, and it wasn't very long before I spotted a suitable TARGET. Soon I was walking across a grassy, dry area toward a huge temple I could see in the distance. A few hundred feet from the paved highway, I literally stumbled across another road; and it was, in a word, magnificent. It was extremely old. Only a part of the road was visible; the rest was covered with sediment. Stone had been carved in perfect blocks and laid over a base of gravel. The road was as level as a billiard table and would still be usable if the weeds that had grown up in the cleavages of the stone were cut.
As I walked over the ancient road and through the thick patches of dry weeds toward the temple, I reviewed all that I had read about India and all that I had seen firsthand: the fact that the highest classes were the lightest-skinned, that nothing was more insulting to an Indian than calling him "black," that Varna (caste) is the Indian word for color, that Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-European language with direct links to every other European language. A great deal of Sanskrit literature describes many of the Aryan leaders as having light eyes and light hair. I thought about the splendor that once was, and about the incessant squalor I had witnessed since my arrival. I wondered about what I might find at the temple looming ahead.
As I got closer to the temple, I noticed that the dome was partially caved-in. Only two walls were left standing. Still closer, I saw thousands of pock-marks all over the structure, each of which once housed a precious stone, but had long since been picked clean. I wondered if all the temples and monuments of Europe and America will eventually endure the same fate as this one.
Around the corner of the temple, on the partially shaded side, I saw something that will forever remain burned in my memory. There in the shade sat a little, brown, half-caste Indian girl. She was thoroughly emaciated and resembled some sort of hideous doll, but she moved slightly, and her animated bones and skin had a terrifying effect. She was so malnourished that her face had not developed properly, but her eyes were very large, and in their own way hauntingly beautiful. On one cheek was an open sore nearly the size of a quarter; there were more sores on her arms, chest and legs, and each sore was covered by dozens of flies. Occasionally, she would brush her frail hand over one of the sores causing the flies to retreat. Inevitably though, once her hand had passed, they returned to their grim feeding like iron fillings to a magnet. She held out her hand to me, begging for a few rupees. I dug my hand deep into my pocket, pulled out all the Indian coins I had and carefully tipped them softly into her dark, skeleton-like hand. Turning, I stumbled out into the hot Indian sun, with my eyes blinded by tears.
On the way back to my room I wondered if, in a few hundred years, some half-black descendant of mine would be sitting among the ruins of our civilization, brushing away the flies, waiting to die. Every day our nation grows a little darker from the torrential immigration of non-whites , high non-white birthrates, and increasing racial miscegenation; and with each passing day, we see the quality of our lives decline. Crime is ever on the increase, drug activity proliferates, educational quality declines, and the American standard of living suffers. The healthy racial values of our forefathers are ridiculed and replaced by the pseudo-science of egalitarianism. Treason to our heritage prospers and corruption feeds in the highest places.
To the plaudits of the media, the Brahmins of America and the West are slowly being replaced by the pariahs, the Untouchables. Seeing that child in that prophetic setting was my glimpse of a remorseless fate toward which the United States and the Western World are hurdling. If that future is to be altered, it will require each person who understands the racial truth - - to forge by this knowledge -- policies that will preserve our own heritage in our respective nations in the same way we now seek to preserve the endangered whales or rare eagles.
The nation of India, like most of the Third World, has already passed the point of no return. She cannot feed or otherwise adequately take care of herself, not even with repeated injections of Western capital, aid, and technology. The huge populace of modern-day India cannot sustain the level of culture and economic well-being that its high-caste forebears originally created.
It is not, however, too late for America and the West. No matter how dark our destiny may appear, there is enough genetic treasure among our people to fashion a road to the stars. Those who know the racial truth often excuse their inaction by expressing pessimism. Suggesting that "the battle is already lost" is often simply an excuse for cowardice. Our race's evolutionary struggle for survival became the meaning of my life when I looked into that little Indian girl's forlorn face, for I then knew exactly what I must do. Prospects of victory or defeat became irrelevant to my responsibility and my honor. My life was from that defining moment, in the service of my people and the Promethean task ahead.
Before my journey to India, the racial ideals that I believed in l abstract concepts and principles. In the moment I saw that emaciated child in the ruins, all my thoughts and concepts were dramatically transformed from sterile contemplations into the reality of flesh and blood. I finally realized that my cause is different than that of an athletic contest, business competition, winning of an election, or even struggling for an important new scientific discovery. It is not about being right or wrong about ideas, but about life itself; the natural laws that provide it's beauty, character, and meaning. I had already committed myself to the struggle for my race's survival long before I saw that fated child, but that experience changed an intellectual commitment into an almost holy obligation.
An often quoted passage from the Bhagavad Gita came to my mind with powerful meaning:
Likewise having regard for duty to your caste
For in a warrior, there exists no better thing than
A fight required of duty
(Chapter 2, verse 30)
I realized that day in the scorching Indian sun that I had to adopt the spirit of a warrior -- that my race was in a life and death struggle that transcended the centuries. Selfish pursuits seemed trivial, and my life became from that moment interwoven with the Cause, a Cause that I knew that I would never abandon. Through years of heartbreak and hardship, physical weariness and character assassination, but also in the exhilarating moments of success and acclaim, my heart has remained true. The flame that ignited in me on that hot August day is still white hot and imperishable.
