Indian Genocide i've never heard of.

[theyounghistorian77]

Now normaly, in my recommended for you box on youtube. I tend to get things like die deutsche wochenschau reels or american propaganda pieces. But this appeared in my box yesterday for some reason.

Im going to throw this one out there, for your ponderment. What i will say is that the historians cited in the video tend to be on the right of the political spectrum, Just bear that in mind.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

A large part of not having heard about it simply has to do with a Western non-involvement in the matter. For instance, Buddhism in the Western world is largely thought to be very pacifist and friendly, but even aside from the civil war in Sri Lanka, the spread of Buddhism hasn't been an entirely peaceful ordeal. The thing is that it happened traveling eastwards, and Buddhists didn't try to conquer western nations, else these types of stories would be more well-known.

Growing up in India, we tend to be pretty aware of this story since it happened within our country. In my old history courses, I even remember it including a segueway to the history of Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971... in a 5 year period, something like 3 million Hindus were killed even that recently. The teachers I had tended to build from that to the record of some 80 million Hindus killed during the Islamic conquest. We don't generally speak ill of all Islamic rulers, since a few of them after Humayun and so on tended to adopt a sort of blended religious philosophy and that made them a little friendlier to people of all religions, but we also don't ignore the genocide that preceded it. And to be fair, I did have a teacher who made a point of mentioning that 80 million is simply the death toll on the Hindu side, and that the total death toll probably crossed well beyond 100 million when you include Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Christians, all of whom died. In the video, there was mention that Hindus and their offshoot lot were kind of singled out, but a characteristic of both of those religions is that they're somewhat amenable to blending with other belief systems, which is another reason why they were seen as a large threat even aside from the idolatry. There are sects of Hinduism that accept Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and Zarathustra ALL as prophets, and the general fear from people who try to convert Hindus and Buddhists is that they were more prone to water down the belief system that the missionaries were trying to sell. A lot of sociologists I've heard say things to suggest that this is also one aspect that lends some longevity to Hinduism in particular.

All said, though, in my years of school in the U.S., I've often found that the knowledge that Americans have about the history of India, China, Japan, etc. is just pathetic, and it doesn't really begin to approach any measurably large degree of detail until the point where America got involved in worldwide politics that included these nations. Other than that, it's all very glossed over -- "Asoka was a great king. He conquered lots of land and reclaimed area previously lost. Then there were other people following him like Chandragupta, and ummmm... other people. Then the Muslims came in... then there were Mughal emperors and everybody loved Akbar, and Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal... Then the British took over everything. Then Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born" -- and that's about how detailed a history we get in the states, so it's no big surprise it's an unknown. Back when I was a child in school after transferring to the U.S., it was a sort of mini-crusade of mind to try and rectify the sheer collection of things that textbooks in the U.S. got dead wrong about India and about Hinduism, but it's a classic case of simply not having a clue because there was never any motivation to know more.

I found it interesting as well how American history as covered in other nations go into a lot of detail on things like the genocide of native American tribes and the kind of death tolls that ensued in that chapter of history, while in the U.S., such details are left out and the coverage of it is kind of just mentioned as a tragedy and then forgotten the next week.