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Yup. It's uncomfortable for either side to admit this, but wokism is a Western value.
There's plenty of random Affirmative Action in the developing world, but a lot of the ones who end up in the West tend not to think highly of it since they're the successful Market Minorities getting screwed over in their own countries.
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The Greeks were not woke. The Romans were not woke. The Franks were not woke, nor the French, English, German or Spanish empires. Nobody was plausibly woke up until around 200 years ago and even then they were very dissimilar to modern wokists.
And those societies have basically nothing to do memetically with the modern west, those places are dead and buried now, no different to how Akkad has nothing to do with modern Iraq.
There are fasces in the US Senate Chamber. The US is a republic, some consider it a democracy. Where do you think these words come from?
I'll keep going. We have the Latin alphabet. Roman numerals are still taught in schools. Classical architecture. The Julian calendar. Half the world uses civil law derived from Rome, Anglos use common law from England. We talk about legions, Caesars, Platonic ideals, de facto vs de jure, e pluribus unum, the Olympics, Nike, Achille's heel, Odysseys...
There's a hell of a lot more continuity from Greece and Rome to us than Akkad to Iraq. The Chinese go on about their 4000 years of history (with very little to show for the first 1000 years or so), we have at least 2500 years. We are capable of far more than this present malaise.
And everything you mention was adopted by the modern West well before progressive wokism came and took over everything. The modern west was given these things as a gift from the past, not as something it choose for itself from a bunch of options after considering the pros and cons.
The Modern Progressivism which rules the roost in the West is its own beast, it is Western only to the extent that it was born in the West and naturally some of the norms prevalent in the area rubbed off on it, it is no more Western than it would have been Chinese if it emerged in China nstead of the First World and spread to everywhere else from there.
There is a saying that Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire. Western history includes all of the things you mentioned, but the modern west has lost the Mandate of Heaven that was given to Leonidas, Pericles, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Octavian, Marcus Aurelius, Justinian, Charlemagne, Otto, Andrea Doria, Napoleon, Bizmarck and Disraeli. That mandate is now accorded to us, to the elite immigrants who were raised and imbued with the same memeplex that gave rise to western Greatness in the first place and which the modern west has willingly and of its own accord repudated.
You are right that eventually what made the West great will come back to power, but its champions will not be the pale skinned whites who came to reject and squander the gift they had but rather people darker in complexion yet just as steadfast and principled as the greats of the days of yore.
Much like the Jews in the time of Christ, you have twisted the teachings you were given and shirked your responsibilities, instead becoming venal and corrupt. You are no longer the chosen people. And just like how Christ drove the money changers from the temple, we too will drive you out and restore the West to its former glory.
How can you say that when you’ve already failed at colonizing your own country while on easy mode?
Your fantasies are entirely dependant on the fertile ground that exists in the west.
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What are the great achievements that make your coethnics specifically worthy of carrying the mantle of my civilization? Getting someone to be CEO of Microsoft (a company founded by Gates and Allen) doesn't quite cut it. How about founding some great companies, creating great new ideas, success in war?
If it's even possible for foreigners to uphold the values of our civilization, it's definitely Chinese and not Indians who'll be doing it. TSMC, Nvidia, Tencent, DJI, Huawei, BYD - actual global companies leading in high technology, founded and run by Chinese. The Chinese military gives our leaders sleepless nights. China is roughly 15-20 years ahead of India too and won the last war between the two countries. They fought well in Korea too. You're even using a Chinese concept right now, the Mandate of Heaven.
Furthermore, China makes no pretence at appropriating another culture, I recall the Chinese ambassador telling the Japanese that they were always going to be Asians. China has some authentic pride in their own traditions and national achievements, rather than trying to dress up as us.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-diplomat-tells-japan-south-korea-theyll-never-become-westerners-2023-7
We need no achievements. You threw away that particular mantle yourself and we have just laid claim to it, no different to how once you throw something away as trash other people are free to take it for themselves. Plus the person who founds a company/idea etc. is not necessarily the same as the person who makes it a success, see Steve Jobs, Elon Musk etc., they didn't discover any of the ideas they made their success on the back of, but they were the ones who propelled the ideas into greatness, and that is something we do far better than the Chinese, see how you have tons of Chinese at lower levels of pristigious firms, but the more you go towards the top the fewer of them and the more of us you find.
It's impossible to win with you, first when we say we'll keep our own culture thank you very much you people get angry and say we should assimilate with the west, replacing our Chandragupta Maurya with Lucius Junius Brutus, our Rumi with Chaucer and our Vishnu Sharma with Aesop.
Then when we accept it and become more westernised than even you are you turn around and then start complaining about us appropriating your culture and values and taking it for ourselves, even though that's exactly what you were saying you wanted us to do in the first place! What is it exactly that we should be doing? Should we be becoming more Western or less?
China is a superpower, I think they know how to do implementation better than India. There's not a single Indian company on the level of the big players in China or Taiwan, producing new creations. That's why you're not listing them. I looked around, apparently Indians have founded or cofounded companies worth $430 billion in the US. Huang founded Nvidia with two whites, it's worth 1.2 trillion. And then there's TSMC, possibly the most relevant company in the world, founded, staffed and run by Chinese.
https://www.globalindiantimes.com/globalindiantimes/indians-usa-founders-companies
Where is the Indian Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Elon Musk? The richest Indian built and runs a petroleum refining conglomerate which is good but not a grand civilizational achievement.
When did we say that? Did the British aggressively try to Anglicize India? With about 1000 bureaucrats in the Indian Civil Service? They built some railways, suppressed sati, manipulated trade and that's about it. India was ruled overwhelmingly by Indian officials and nobles.
You are absolutely not more Western than me, as I have shown above. You don't understand Western culture beyond knowing an impressive number of names, you think there's no continuity from the foundation of our culture to the present day. You can't dismiss 80-90% of our history and say you're more Western than a native.
If you're going to have so much pride, you should back it up with great achievements, tangible proof of how your nation upholds the mantle of Western civilization.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but Steve Jobs was ethnically half Syrian. Half white too, and I suppose you can do more complicated calculus if you want to argue how 'white' the Caucasian population of Syria is.
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We use the Gregorian calendar now. To my knowledge, only Orthodox Christians still use the Julian.
The Gregorian calendar is basically the same as the Julian calendar but for a tiny change in the leap year rules.
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And IIRC using the pure Julian calendar is a fringe position among orthodox Christians- most of them use some kind of ‘revised Julian’ calendar that in practice is just the Gregorian calendar for everything except Easter.
And even the use of the Julian date for Easter in the West is solely to accommodate the Russians, who stick to the Julian dates for religious feasts. I’d assume if the Russians ever adopted the Gregorian dates the whole orthodox world would just move the Easter date too.
Really, the whole calendar dispute could make for an interesting effortpost, it’s grounded in the same “we don’t let the Pope tell us what dates to use” stance that motivated a lot of Protestant states to stick to the Julian for years, even centuries. The English wanted to make their own Protestant calendar with 33-year rotations. But eventually they all acknowledged the astronomical superiority of the Gregorian and adopted it. As the Orthodox world wants to do, Russian obstinacy and anti-occidental stance notwithstanding.
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The levels of Wokism as seen in the US? Sure.
But I assure you that we have a sizeable number here in India, both aligning with their American counterparts and adjusting for local conditions. We had Social Justice movements for decades, for our own "systemic disparities", but of course the matter has been inflamed as yet another portion of the American memeplex uncritically imported to these shores.
Well, at least they don't run things for the most part.
The original justification for the SC/ST stuff was certainly a kind of progressive leveling ideology around class and race inequality by Westernized Congress elites.
But the system remains because simple ethnic/caste spoils logic makes it politically impossible to remove. Nigeria is in a similar position. In India, even the BJP doesn’t dare end affirmative action for fear of angering its own lower caste voters. Modi isn’t a firm believer in western progressivism, but he knows he can’t remove the policy. Aren’t like 75% of Hindus included in reservation now?
The US is different, black people are only 14% of the population and most elite Hispanics (ie the rest of URM) aren’t strong affirmative action / DEI activists even if they somewhat support it. Affirmative action in America isn’t a political necessity, it’s an act of charity engaged in for ideological reasons.
Most black normies don't expect to benefit from AA either. AA is purely a benefit to the black overproduced elites in competing with Jews and Asians. There's a very small percentage of the population that benefits or expects any benefit and summing it up as the 12.5% that's black is massively overstating it- it's a single digit percentage.
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I think it’s a political necessity in the sense that one of the political parties needs it to maintain its present coalition.
Incidentally, what’s the AA situation in Nigeria?
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The only reservation category that covers the majority of Hindus is the Economically Weaker Section category, and the benefits pale in comparison to SC/ST/OBC status, at least when it comes to big ticket carve outs like education and government jobs.
Beyond that, sure, I agree that AA is hopelessly entrenched here. The only way I see it being eradicated would be the hilarious situation where just about everyone and their dog is covered by something, such that there's no significant benefit from it. The EWS, well it's not quite there, maybe if the 80% who got it got an 80% reservation in jobs and education as opposed to 10%. But even that's highly unlikely, we're stuck in this equilibrium for the foreseeable future.
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How is it uncomfortable for either side? It's been an anti-woke talking point since day one, though it proved to be rather impotent in the face of naked power.
Because the right likes to talk about preserving Western values and resisting changes to our culture and how immigrants need to assimilate etc.
There's Western values, and then there's Western values. That the intersectional-subversive-pomo memeplex emerged from the West is no secret to anyone who wants to preserve the traditional Western values, and there's no contradiction or even tension between wanting to oppose said memeplex, and wanting immigrants to assimilate.
The only people who might have trouble reconciling these are white nationalists, who have to come up with a way to blame it all on the Jews.
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