The atmosphere at the conference was frankly hostile. (...) It was up to people from the audience to protest and oblige the chairperson to allow me t… - Koenraad Elst

If in secular Europe, the pope speaks out against the Scorsese film on Jesus' temptations, without even trying to pressure governments to ban it, the European secularist press, as if to pre-empt any suggestion of a ban, makes it quite clear that there can be no question of anyhow restricting the public's access to the film. If people don't want to see it, let them not go see it. That is their freedom, like it is other people's freedom to go see it, unimpeded by papal or governmental bans... In Europe, we have come to protect our constitutional freedoms, and hardly any bigot will even think of either seriously campaigning for a ban or using violence to punish people who show interest in the material to which he objects. All right, there was a bomb attack on a movie theater showing the Temptation film. But the culprit was simply caught and put in jail. Nobody has suggested that we should ban the film in order to avert violence. If at all there is a threat of violence, then there are no two opinions about the duty of the state to uphold the constitutional freedoms, and to prevent terror-mongers from dictating who can see what.

Today, this reluctance to posit a central indebtedness of Indian culture to European conquerors (for that is how the Greeks ended up in India) tallies well with the Zeitgeist in the West, where the European element in every form of progress or achievement is downplayed and the contributions of others emphatically highlighted or magnified. But then again, regarding India, there is a Zeitgeist within the Zeitgeist: even within the existing ‘down with us’ atmosphere in Europe, there persists a secondary agenda borrowed mainly from India’s Nehruvian secularists, viz., belittling Hinduism.

The extermination of native populations in America and Oceania by Christians could not have taken place on the same scale if those populations had not been Pagans. Modern Christians claim that not the missionaries but the uneducated and un-Christian gold-seekers were responsible for the plight of the native Americans; but even if we disregard the destructive role played by many misionaries, the fact remains that even the most illiterate Christian adventure remembered one thing from his Christian upbringing, viz. that Pagans are inferior to Christians and that in dealing with them, different ethical standards apply. Intra-Christian wars were never that extreme, and the worst wars in Christian Eruope before the secularization of politics in the 18th-19th century was precisely religious wars against Pagans or heretics: the war of the Teutonic Knights against the Baltic Pagans (ending in the annihilation of Paganism by the 15th century), the Crusade against the Manichean Cathar sect in southern France (1209-29, an intentional genocide), the "thirty years' war" between Catholic and Prostestant powers (1618-48, killing 5 million Germans, one third of the population).