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I am a disheartened, disillusioned, and defeated Hindu. Now, I will fight to change my destiny—forever.

For the East Indian, it marks a civilization dismembered—lands stolen by Islamic conquests stretching from Afghanistan and Central Asia to Indonesia. For the West, it names a people annihilated—Native Americans whose worlds were seized by Europeans, their cultures extinguished. In Australia and New Zealand, the story repeats. Wherever you hear Indian, you hear the echo of loss.

I am a Hindu. And I carry the weight of that history.

For more than 1,300 years, my civilization has endured conquest and colonization by Islam and Christianity. Armies stormed our temples. Libraries were burned. Entire traditions were erased. Later, European missionaries arrived with Bibles in one hand and muskets in the other. The result was the same: submission, erasure, humiliation.

And still, the world dares to call us “tolerant.”

We are tolerant, yes—sometimes too much so. We never marched armies into Arabia or Europe. We did not send missionaries across oceans with the goal of saving or enslaving others. We never built crusades or jihads. Instead, we built monasteries, composed epics, and debated philosophy. Our dharma taught renunciation, not accumulation.

Buddhism spread across Asia with monks and manuscripts. Hindu epics took root in Southeast Asia through trade, not terror. Jainism elevated nonviolence to the level of cosmic law. This was our civilizational footprint: persuasion, not coercion.

Contrast that with the record of the Semitic faiths. Christianity redrew the world map through conquest—seizing the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand. Islam expanded from Arabia through Persia, Central Asia, North Africa, and into the Indian subcontinent. Judaism, less imperial in its reach, nonetheless carried a theology of chosenness that marked others as outsiders.

In each case, the underlying logic was the same: one God, one truth, one revelation—exclusive and non-negotiable. Theological certainty became a license for empire.

You cripple a civilization. You hand it a crutch. Then you call yourself savior. They broke my legs, gifted me a wheelchair, and then called it “serving the poor and destitute.” That has been the Semitic gift to the world.

The irony is painful. Even our most sacred symbol—the swastika, a sign of blessing for millennia—was stolen and defiled by the Nazis. Today, I cannot display it without being accused of fascism. Imagine losing not only your lands and temples but even the right to your own symbols. That is the Hindu condition.

Nearly 1,400 years of Islamic and Christian destruction has turned one of the world’s most honest and nonviolent societies into a deformed civilization: weak, divided, defenseless. A people taught for centuries to renounce power now find themselves at the mercy of those who glorified conquest. If we Hindus want to live honorably in this world, we have no choice but to examine the Semitic faiths—their imperialist claims, their self-centered doctrines of revelation, their theology of domination. We must understand them clearly, or we will be crushed by them again.

Indic religions and philosophies ask us to discover truth, not to accept it on the authority of someone else’s revelation. They tell us that liberation requires discipline, debate, and inner transformation. By contrast, the Semitic faiths insist that truth was revealed once, in one place, and that it must be imposed everywhere. The difference is profound: one is a philosophy of liberation, the other a politics of domination.

I know this sounds incendiary. It is meant to. For too long, the narrative has run only one way: the West civilizes, the East learns; the Semitic saves, the Indic submits. But history says otherwise. The record of conquest, conversion, and colonization cannot be erased by polite forgetfulness.

The question now is not which civilization will dominate, but which vision of truth will sustain humanity. The path of conquest has already led us to oceans of blood. The path of renunciation, inquiry, and nonviolence remains our only chance for survival.

The world must ask itself: who is more likely to safeguard peace—the renouncer or the conqueror? The monk with a begging bowl or the missionary with a musket?

My civilization was broken. My people were dispossessed. My symbols were stolen. Even my name was turned into a synonym for loss. Nearly everything was taken.
But the Indic path still carries the medicine the world needs.

It is time we remembered who the real guardians of peace have always been.