Great Leader!
Great culture!
Great Kingdom!
Great Civilization!
Are
What if somebody proclaimed, "Hitler the great!"? What made it wrong to put Hitler in endearing axioms? What made it right to speak of historical societies as "great" when they weren't?
In the argument between a people of proto democracy and a people of historical monarchies, the acceptance of democracy — instead of monarchies — as the best form of government in the world, has sealed the argument in favor of the former.
People don't necessarily have to verbalize their thoughts — they'd already acted out their preference for democracy, over monarchies, when they substituted their so-called "Great monarchies" with democracy.
The practice of, say, child marriage is not independent of the moral framework of its practitioners. The practice suffers from deficiency of informed/adult consent. Mahatma Gandhi himself was a practitioner of child marriage, if we speak of India, which used to be a land of monarchies.
The Naga nations, in contrast to India, were practitioners of democracy, whose democractic tradition is nested inside their egalitarian, republican society. They have no child marriage, they have no caste system, they have no slave trade, they have no capital punishment, they have no social evils in common with Indian practitioners of monarchies, who now mischieviously smuggled out the notion that their society was seated on a superior or greater civilizational plateau.
Karl Marx denies of India's "Golden Era", in the following words:
I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan, without recurring, however, like Sir Charles Wood, for the confirmation of my view, to the authority of Khuli-Khan. But take, for example, the times of Aurangzeb; or the epoch, when the Mogul appeared in the North, and the Portuguese in the South; or the age of Mohammedan invasion, and of the Heptarchy in Southern India; or, if you will, go still more back to antiquity, take the mythological chronology of the Brahman himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.
I write this to separate the wheat from the chaff so as to burst the echo-chambers of the belligerent and contemptuous souls, who don't bother about conducting a litmus test before making civilizational assertions, especially in ways that demean "others".
DISCLAIMER: This has not been written to antagonize any soul. This has been written in the hopes that we gain insights on history through civil and open discussions.
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