Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For the vital, expanding nineteenth-century West to have deliberately restrained itself while the backward East blunderingly experimented with Westernism, accepting and rejecting, buying goods and refusing to pay for them, negotiating loans and then squandering and repudiating them, inviting in Europeans and then expelling or massacring them, would have been against all history and human nature.
On the contrary, these congresses represented merely a small class of professional men, journalists, and politicians, all of them trained in Western ideas. The European methods of education which the British had introduced had turned out an Indian intelligentsia, conversant with the English language and saturated with Westernism.
Banneker leaned forward as if for a confidential communication, as he lapsed into a gross Westernism: "Mr. Gordon, I am paying for this round of drinks." Somehow the managing editor received the impression that this remark, delivered in just that tone of voice and in its own proper environment, was usually accompanied by a smooth motion of the hand toward the pistol holster.
We have already seen how profoundly Moslem liberal reformers have been influenced by Western ideas and the spirit of Western progress. Of course in these fields Westernism has progressed more slowly and has awakened much stronger opposition than it has on the material plane.
These politico-religious movements, however, by no means exhaust the list of Oriental reactions to Westernism. There are others, economic, social, racial in character. In view of the complex nature of the Orient's reaction against Westernism, let us briefly analyse the problem in its various constituent elements.
The result is that many fail, and these unfortunates, half-educated and spoiled for any sort of useful occupation, vegetate miserably, come to hate that Westernism which they do not understand, and give themselves up to anarchistic revolutionary agitation.
In revenge for these remarks, "Beaver" piles more wood into the stove, and, with many a westernism not permitted in print threatens to keep up a fire that will drive them all out of the shanty if they persist in their persecutions.
Saddened and irritated by the threatened loss of so much that they hold dear, it is not strange that many Eastern conservatives glorify the past as a sort of Golden Age, infinitely superior to anything the West can produce, and in this they are joined by many quondam liberals, disillusioned with Westernism and flying into the arms of reaction.
Word Of The Day