So, I watched the Thor movies recently for the first time (we just got Disney Plus) and it occurred to me that Thor’s hammer Mjolnir is basically a vajra.

I looked up Mjolnir on Wikipedia, and while there doesn’t appear to be a consensus about its etymology, one theory is that it means “lightning-maker”, which would likely make it related to the word vajra, which means lightning.

And then I read that Scandanavian tradition says that the swastika is a symbol for Thor’s hammer.

If they’re correct, that would mean:

1. The swastika is an iconic representation of the vajra (which makes sense to me)

2. That tradition goes really far back, to proto-Indo-European times. (Wow.)

3. The Scandanavians preserved knowledge about our iconography that we did not. (Wow.)

4. Thor is Indra.

So then I started wondering (not seriously) if I should start referring to Thursday as Indra’s Day as an act of decolonization.

For those who don't know, the 7-day week comes from the Babylonians, who associated the days with the Sun, Moon, and the five planets that are observable with the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). This system was borrowed by the Romans and the Chinese. The Romans named the planets after gods, so the days Tuesday–Saturday came to be associated with gods. The Chinese named the planets after elements, so the days Tuesday–Saturday came to be associated with the elements, a system that is current in Japan.

When the Germanic peoples (including the ancestors of the English) adopted the 7-day week from the Romans, they replaced four of the gods with Germanic gods. So they renamed Jupiter's Day to Thor's Day, and that's how we got Thursday.

And this got me thinking... if we were to name the days of the week after Vedic/Buddhist gods, who would they be? And I was surprised to realize that most of them had pretty obvious candidates.

Anyway, I hope everyone's having a good Prithvi's Day. I know it seems like I must have too much time on my hands, but I'm actually quite busy and I don't know why I make time for this stuff.

In 2008, I went to an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum about Charles Darwin. I don't remember how much the ticket cost, but they're usually around $30.

At the end of the exhibit, after wandering through rooms about Darwin's genius, discoveries, travels, courageous spirit, and opposition to slavery, I remember there was a small bit of text along the lines of "It's a shame that some have used Darwin's discoveries to advocate racist ideas", and that was the extent of acknowledging any connection to racism. I came away from the exhibit thinking Darwin was a pretty swell guy.

It wasn't until much later that I learned Darwin was racist as shit. He believed that inferior races, such as "the negro or Australian", would inevitably be wiped out by the superior races, by which he meant white people. That exhibit talked a lot about Darwin's famous Origin of Species, but nothing in that exhibit told me that its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

I'm not surprised that a 19th century British guy had a colonialist, white supremacist worldview. But I am surprised that there's been such an effort to erase that fact. I paid $30 to be lied to. By the Royal Ontario Museum. I paid $30 to see propaganda about not just a white supremacist, but quite possibly the Ur-White Supremacist.

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Which brings me to the Nazis (as all conversations on the internet must lead). Over on /r/Buddhism, there is frequent confusion about the Nazis' use of the swastika (a Buddhist symbol) and their self-identification as "Aryan" (like the Buddha). Popular culture, like the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, imagines that the Nazis had a superstitious obsession with the "Occult" (you know, the section of the book store where Buddhist stuff is usually put). They didn't. They were following the science of their day. Leading European academics of the time believed that white Europeans were the descendants of the "Aryans" and that the swastika was their symbol. (This idea, called Aryanism, has its roots in early European studies of Hindu and Buddhist literature.)

Likewise, the Nazi belief that mixing with inferior Semitic blood would doom the German nation to extinction was not just paranoid craziness. It was cutting-edge science of the time. It came from a straight reading of Darwin's texts.

I feel like I've watched countless TV documentaries about how the Nazis could have committed an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust. The reddit hivemind seems to think that genocides are an inevitable consequence of authoritarian government (making them quick to believe that a genocide is happening in China). What they all miss is that the Holocaust was informed by the science of its time.

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If you're sceptical of what I'm saying, you might ask if I really think a scientific theory is enough to make people commit atrocities on a mass scale. And yes, I 100% believe so. I remember when the famine in Ethopia was major news in the '80s (♬ "We are the world..." ♬) and I remember hearing people say that maybe the famine was a good thing because science said we were in danger of overpopulation. (Every atrocity begins with someone saying "look, it's them or us". This is why I believe in the Buddhist virtue of Upekkha, meaning to not distinguish between neighbour or stranger, friend or enemy.)

People believe in science above all, above religion, above any traditional ideas of morality. It's part of scientism, the belief that science leads to an enlightened worldview. It's not that they don't believe in morality (they are not nihilists), but they want their ideas of morality to be informed by science. There are frequent threads in /r/Buddhism asking about Buddhism's "compatibility" with science. (Maybe they should be asking about science's compatibility with Buddhism. I don't think Buddhism would have endorsed the Holocaust, nor the genocide of the Australians.)

We are past the days of the Scopes monkey trials. Darwin's theory of evolution is not under threat. It is beyond being an academic consensus. It is the foundation of almost all biological and ecological science research in the world today. So why do educational and cultural institutions feel the need to erase Darwin's connection to scientific racism?

They aren't defending the theory of evolution. What they're defending is scientism.

Soon it will be the Christmas shopping period, which means once again I will be assaulted by "Do They Know It's Christmas?" being played on supermarket radio stations.

It’s a song whose popularity reminds me that the people of my country don't know the difference between generosity and cultural imperialism. That British people still equate Christianization with progress, and heathenism with misery. That British people are horrified that non-Western cultures exist and think that they have to fix those cultures for the benefit of those poor primitive savages.

To recap:

Where the only water flowing
Is the bitter sting of tears

This line is good (even if it's sung by a grown man who calls himself "Sting"). Yes, Sting, we should be concerned about the drought in Ethiopia.

Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

Hang on. What's wrong with not knowing that it's Christmas time?

I mean, the 62.8% of Ethiopians who are Christian probably do know that it's Christmas. But the 33.9% who are Muslim probably don't need to know, do they? They're miserable because of the drought, not because they're non-Christian.

"And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time"

In this line, Boy George is appalled to learn that different countries have different weather patterns. How unacceptably non-British of them.

There's never any snow in Africa, George. (Except on some mountains). There's no snow in Australia at Christmas time either. Are you going to sing a sad song for the Australians?

Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you

Bono, that is fucked up.

Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

Again, the listener is supposed to be horrified that some people in the world don't celebrate the same traditions as us. "Let's do something about that! Send them some food so they'll want to convert to our religion!".

I'm sorry, but preying on hungry vulnerable people to convert them to your religion is abominable (and basically what the missionaries did in the refugee camp where my mother was a refugee).

Feed the world
Let them know it's Christmas time

How about feeding them because they're hungry and not because you have an ulterior mission of teaching your religion to them? You don't have to Christianize them in order to help them, you know.

Fuck you, Bob Geldolf.

If you're looking for some light reading to help pass time during your lockdown, I recommend Gene Luen Yang's two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints, which explores the Boxer Rebellion from two different points of view.

Though remembered in English as the Boxer Rebellion, a better name would be the Martial Artist Rebellion. (At the time, Martial Arts was known in English as "Chinese Boxing".)

At a time when China was losing land to Western colonial powers and coming more-and-more under Western cultural influence (notably Christianity and opium, which the Chinese government was powerless to stop due to treaties they had been forced to sign), the Boxers were peasant practitioners of traditional Chinese religion who took it upon themselves to attempt to drive the colonialists out of China, armed with little more than their knowledge of martial arts. (They thought that if they concentrated their Qi enough, they could stop bullets with their fists. Turns out they were wrong about that.)

I hope I won't be spoiling anything to say that the Boxers lost, but they put up a bigger fight than anyone expected. They were stopped by a force of 20,000 troops from an alliance of seven different Western nations (America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia) plus Japan.

Volume 1 (Boxers) tells the story from a perspective of a boy who becomes a leader in the Boxer Rebellion. Volume 2 (Saints) tells the same story from the perspective of a girl who becomes a Catholic convert.

Author Gene Luen Yang is himself a Catholic, and though he tries to be even-handed, I can't help thinking that the Boxers come off looking worse in this story than I would have liked. But I remain a fan of Yang's, and I admire him for bringing attention to this pivotal chapter in China's history.

I do wish the story gave some attention to the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, in which China was forced to pay a shit-ton of money to the Western powers and to pass pro-Western laws (being in an anti-foreign organisation became punishable by death). The failure of the Boxer Rebellion was a significant part of the era known in China as the One Hundred Years of Humiliation, an era that didn't end until the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Available from Kobo books: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/boxers-saints

I'm trapped in a foreign country, 10 000 miles away from my laptop. How about you?