Symbols Of United Nations Documents Are Composed Of Letters Combined With: Fill & Download for Free

How do Americans feel about people burning the flag?EDITED TO ADD: Please note that I am not “Americans”. I am AN American, and my opinions are my own. I of course completely respect the right of those other people to be wrong. ;-)I am, as my bio mentions, a U. S. Army Veteran and a former Boy Scout, and a BIG believer in the Enlightenment principles that motivated our national founding documents.Among those principles is enshrined the idea that residents of the United States should have the right to express their opinions about the right way to govern our nation.This strong connection to personal expression has its downsides. For example, our Hate Speech legislation is among the weakest in the world. Many of the seminal moments in our national history were instigated by one group or another advocating against Republics, Representative Democracy in any form, and/or other basic tenets of how we structure life in this country. Sedition laws are stricken from existence with regularity — the concept was so unknown to me that when I encountered the word sedition at the age of 23 I had to go look it up.Anyway, here’s the thing about symbols: They mainly exist to point to something else. Some collection of letters — “dog” for example — is a group of symbols. They combine to make a written word, which is a symbol for a spoken word, which is a concept hardwired into humans, but even a spoken word is a symbol for an object, relation, or action. And even the concept in your head when you see “dog” on the screen is only a symbol. after all, when my son asks (yet again) for a puppy, the concept in his head doesn’t annoy the landlord or make messes on the carpet, and is therefore also symbolic. Only an actual furry wolf-descended domestic animal is an actual thing.So that was a collection of individual symbols that combine to make a compound visual symbol for a sound that creates a mental symbolic representation of something that is not harmed in the least when I write a scene in a novel where the (fictional) villain kicks a (fictional) dog in a fictional scene in a fictional world. despite the lurid detail I could conceivably pour into such a scene it does no harm whatsoever to my neighbor’s golden retriever.The flag is a piece of cloth. It is a symbol of America, but it isn’t actually America. America is people. Burning a piece of cloth isn’t harming the idea of stars and stripes.The idea of a representative democracy, or the idea of a nation composed not of a people, but composed of many peoples, all joined more-or-less peacefully together to perform an experiment in the creation of Free Society, can not be harmed by the burning of a piece of cloth.In fact, given what I said before about political expression, I agree with the occasional argument one can find, which says that the ability to burn the symbol of the country makes the country itself stronger.Because it does.

On Monday, 18 January 2021, the Trump administration released a document titled The 1776 Report, written by the 1776 Commission, an advisory commission created by President Donald Trump on 17 September 2020 with the explicit purpose to promote “patriotic education.” The report attempts to portray Founding Fathers who owned slaves as abolitionists, attempts to portray Civil Rights leaders as conservatives, and attempts to portray “progressivism” and “identity politics” as dangerous threats to “America’s principles” on par with slavery and fascism.Professional scholars of United States history of all political leanings immediately and universally denounced The 1776 Report as wildly inaccurate, jingoistic propaganda. It would be all too easy to dismiss it as not even worth debunking. After all, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which rescinded the 1776 Commission and removed The 1776 Report from the official White House webpage on his very first day in office.Unfortunately, I fear that simply choosing to ignore The 1776 Report would be naïve. Tens of thousands of children across the United States who attend conservative private schools or are homeschooled are fed narratives identical to those presented in The 1776 Report through inaccurate textbooks published by conservative Evangelical Protestant book publishers, such as BJU Press and Abeka.Supporters of these textbooks and the narratives they present will undoubtedly try to use The 1776 Report to legitimize their claims. They will try to portray it as a definitive account written by renowned experts working under the commission of the United States government. Therefore, in this article, I want to briefly talk about a few of the reasons why the report is wildly dishonest and untrustworthy.The 1776 Report and the 1619 ProjectAs I mention in this article I wrote back in September 2020, President Donald Trump clearly created the 1776 Commission as a response to the 1619 Project, a long-form journalism project published by The New York Times Magazine, starting in August 2019. It is therefore worth comparing the two projects to see what the differences are between them.I do not deny that there are legitimate criticisms that can be made about the 1619 Project. For instance, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay for the project claims that “one of the primary reasons” why the British colonies in North America decided to declare independence was because white slave-owning colonists were afraid that the British might try to abolish slavery. This almost certainly isn’t accurate.Although a movement to abolish slavery did exist in Britain in 1776, it had very little traction and there was very little evidence at the time to suggest that Britain was going to completely abolish slavery in its colonies anytime soon. There is likewise very little evidence to suggest that any major leaders of the American Revolution believed that Britain was likely to abolish slavery anytime within the near future.It is popularly believed nowadays that the 1772 case of Somerset v. Stewart legally abolished slavery in Britain, but this is not actually true. The court in that case merely ruled that enslaved people living in England had certain rights under common law and that an enslaved person living in England could not be seized and taken by force to the colonies against their own will. The case was significant because it did afford important legal protections to enslaved people living in Britain, but it did not make slavery illegal. In the end, Britain didn’t outlaw the Transatlantic slave trade until 1807, didn’t pass legislation to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire until 1833, and didn’t fully complete the abolition of slavery in its colonies until 1843.Leslie M. Harris, a professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University served as a consultant for the 1619 Project. She later wrote an op-ed for Politico saying that she specifically told the people in charge of the 1619 Project that their claim about the colonists choosing to declare independence because they were afraid that Britain might abolish slavery was inaccurate, but they ignored her.These kinds of preventable errors unfortunately don’t exactly do much good for the 1619 Project’s reputation. On the other hand, they are nothing compared to the kinds of claims that we find in The 1776 Report. Whatever flaws the 1619 Project may have, it at least does important work to challenge the narratives that American schoolchildren are normally fed. It is a good faith contribution to the ongoing debate over how American history should be taught in schools.The 1776 Report is no such thing; it is an overtly racist, propagandistic hack job thrown together by a group of non-experts with very little thought or effort, relying on basically no supporting evidence whatsoever. It is nothing more than a stultifying exercise in vapid jingoism.ABOVE: Logo for The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 ProjectThe people involvedNext, I want to talk about the people who were actually involved in writing The 1776 Report. Most people who read about the report seem to be under the impression that it was written by professional historians, but this isn’t really true. The commission that produced the report was almost exclusively composed of conservative white male college administrators with no formal background in history.The chair of the 1776 Commission was Larry P. Arnn, an avowed conservative who is the current president of Hillsdale College, a private conservative college in Hillsdale, Michigan. Hillsdale’s entire curriculum is founded on the idea of “western heritage.” The college does not accept financial support from the United States government, since accepting government funding would require the college to adopt affirmative action programs, which the college refuses to adopt because it maintains that affirmative action is a form of racist discrimination against white people.In 2013, Arnn testified before the Michigan Legislature that, shortly after he assumed his position as president of Hillsdale College, he received a letter from the Michigan Department of Education stating that the college “violated the standards for diversity.” Arnn interpreted this, saying, “because we didn't have enough dark ones, I guess, is what they meant.”After Democratic members of the Michigan Legislature criticized Arnn’s description of racial minorities as “dark ones” as racist, Arnn refused to apologize and instead doubled down on it, acting as though he had no idea why such a description could be construed as offensive, saying: “The state of Michigan sent a group of people down to my campus, with clipboards… to look at the colors of people’s faces and write down what they saw. We don’t keep records of that information. What were they looking for besides dark ones?”ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Larry P. Arnn, the conservative president of Hillsdale College who served as the chair of the 1776 CommissionThe vice chair of the 1776 Commission was Carol M. Swain, a conservative political commentator who is known for her bigoted opinions. For instance, she generated nationwide controversy after she published an op-ed in The Tennessean titled “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam” on 15 January 2015. The op-ed begins with this declaration:“What would it take to make us admit we were wrong about Islam? What horrendous attack would finally convince us that Islam is not like other religions in the United States, that it poses an absolute danger to us and our children unless it is monitored better than it has been under the Obama administration?”The op-ed goes on to make the usual xenophobic argument that Islam is inherently violent and dangerous and that Muslims must be kept out of the country.There was only one professional historian on the 1776 Commission: Victor Davis Hanson, an emeritus professor of ancient Greek military history from California State University, Fresno. Hanson is especially known for his books The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (published in 1989) and The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (published in 1995).Hanson has always held far-right political views. He and John Heath coauthored the book Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, which stirred up a great deal of controversy in the classics community upon its publication in 1998. In the book, Hanson and Heath argue that the field of classics is in terminal decline because politically correct liberals aren’t teaching their students to properly revere the ancient Greeks and Romans as the “founders of western civilization.”Hanson has not published any kind of serious scholarly work since the 1990s and he spends most of his time nowadays writing curmudgeonly articles complaining about the supposed decline of “western civilization” for The National Review. It is therefore no surprise that Hanson is a die-hard, unapologetic Trump supporter. In 2019, he published a book titled The Case for Trump, in which he argues that Donald Trump is the savior America needs and that he is the only one who can truly make America great again.Hanson has no background or qualifications in modern American history and it’s clear that it was only his unreserved support for Trump that won him a place on the 1776 Commission.ABOVE: Screenshot of the emeritus classics professor Victor David HansonPlagiarismIt also quickly came to light that substantial portions of The 1776 Report were plagiarized verbatim from earlier sources. Notably, nearly the entire fortieth page of the report was clearly copied verbatim without attribution from an op-ed titled “Becoming America,” which was published in Inside Higher Ed in 2008.The author of the op-ed is Thomas K. Lindsay, a conservative activist who briefly served as the president of Shimer College, a small private college based on a Great Books curriculum. Lindsay also happens to have been a member of the 1776 Commission, meaning he almost certainly plagiarized his own op-ed in the report.This suggests that even the authors of the report did not consider it worth putting much effort into. They seem to have seen the report not as a serious academic endeavor, but rather a tool by means of which they could codify their own previously-held opinions into state ideology.ABOVE: Photograph of Thomas K. Lindsay, a member of the presidential advisory commission that wrote The 1776 ReportMisquotation and misuse of sourcesEven if we ignore the fact that none of the people involved in the writing of The 1776 Report were in any way qualified to write it and the fact that large chunks of the report were clearly plagiarized from other sources, even a cursory reading of the report reveals that it is shockingly poorly researched. The report does not contain a single footnote, endnote, or in-text citation of any kind. I have already cited more sources in this blog post than The 1776 Report cites in its entire forty-one pages.The 1776 Report is littered full of quotes from various American historical figures, but it does not at any point say what its sources are for these quotes, when the quotes were originally made, in what context they were made, or why the person made them. The quotes are simply given, without citation, sources, explanation, or context. For all we know, the authors of the report simply lifted these quotations off BrainyQuote without even bothering to verify them.In some cases, the quotations are horribly butchered and inaccurate. For instance, on page seventeen, the report quotes the ancient Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE) as having said that the family is “the seminary of the republic.” The report gives absolutely no information about where Cicero said this, when he said it, or in what context he said it. Nevertheless, it claims that the quote means that it is the role of the family to train young people to be leaders for their country by inculcating good values and that the “Founding Fathers” of the United States “often echoed” this sentiment.As it turns out, this quotation appears to be taken from a very bad English translation of Cicero’s treatise De Officiis, which he originally wrote in 44 BCE. In book one, section fifty-four, Cicero writes, in the original Latin:“Nam cum sit hoc natura commune animantium, ut habeant libidinem procreandi, prima societas in ipso coniugio est, proxima in liberis, deinde una domus, communia omnia; id autem est principium urbis et quasi seminarium rei publicae.”This means, in my own English translation:“Therefore, because it is by nature the common property of living beings to have the desire to procreate, the first connection is that of wedlock, next is in offspring, then is the single home, with everything in common; it, therefore, is the first principle of the city and, as it were, the nursery of the republic.”In the United States in the twenty-first century CE, the English word seminary generally refers to a place of higher learning where people are trained to become religious leaders; in Rome in the first century BCE, however, the Latin word seminarium generally referred to a place that we might call a “nursery.”In this passage, Cicero is not arguing that it is primarily the role of the family to train young people to become leaders for the republic. Instead, in this particular passage, when Cicero uses the term “seminarium rei publicae” (i.e., “nursery of the republic”), he’s talking about reproduction; he’s essentially arguing that it is important for a husband and wife to have lots of sex together and produce lots of offspring to serve the republic.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the ancient Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero on display in the Musei Capitolini in RomeMisrepresenting the Founding Fathers’ views on slaveryThe 1776 Report attempts to portray the Founding Fathers of the United States as abolitionists. It is true that most of the Founding Fathers were generally uncomfortable about the existence of outright slavery in a country that was supposedly founded on the ideas of equality and freedom. Nonetheless, most of them never seriously committed to the goal of abolishing slavery and continued to own enslaved people themselves until their deaths.As I discuss in this article from September 2020, of the major Founding Founders who are commemorated today, only Benjamin Franklin at the very end of his life could be accurately described as a committed abolitionist. Franklin was a slaveowner for over sixty years, but, by the end of his life, he had emancipated all the enslaved people he had ever owned.In 1787, Franklin became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In February 1790, only a couple months before his death, he wrote a petition to Congress on behalf of the society advocating for Congress to do everything within its power to abolish slavery as soon as possible. His conclusion reads:“Under these Impressions they [i.e. the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery] earnestly entreat your serious attention to the Subject of Slavery, that you will be pleased to countenance the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men [i.e. enslaved black people], who alone, in this land of Freedom, are degraded into perpetual Bondage, and who, amidst the general Joy of surrounding Freemen, are groaning in Servile Subjection, that you will devise means for removing this Inconsistency from the Character of the American People, that you will promote mercy and Justice towards this distressed Race, & that you will Step to the very verge of the Powers vested in you for discouraging every Species of Traffick in the Persons of our fellow men.”Franklin, however, was a startling exception to the overall trend. The vast majority of the other Founding Fathers never fully rejected slavery and instead went to their graves as slaveowners.ABOVE: Portrait of Benjamin Franklin from around 1785 by Joseph Duplessis. Although he owned enslaved people for over sixty years, in the last few years of his life, Franklin became a convinced abolitionist.The 1776 Report claims that George Washington “came to detest” slavery and states: “By the end of his life, he freed all the slaves on his family estate.” It is true that, in the years after the American Revolution, Washington began to admit privately to some of his acquaintances that he was a bit uncomfortable about his own ownership of enslaved people. Nonetheless, saying that he “came to detest” slavery is a bit of an overstatement and the claim that he “freed all the slaves on his family estate” is demonstrably false.At the time of Washington’s death in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people working on his plantation at Mount Vernon, of whom only 123 were his personal property. One hundred fifty-three of the enslaved people who worked on George Washington’s land belonged to the family of his wife Martha. The remaining forty-one enslaved people belonged to other enslavers in the region, who loaned them to Washington for profit.George Washington stipulated in his will that all 123 of the enslaved people he personally owned were to be set free upon the death of his wife Martha. Martha ended up setting these people free in December 1800 because she was afraid that they would try to murder her to obtain their freedom. Meanwhile, the 153 enslaved people on Washington’s plantation who were owned by Martha’s family were never set free and, upon Martha’s eventual death in 1802, they were inherited by her grandchildren.ABOVE: Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, painted in 1851 by Junius Brutus Stearns—a heavily idealized and inaccurate representation of George Washington as a kind slaveownerThe 1776 Report claims that Thomas Jefferson originally included “a strong condemnation of slavery” in the Declaration of Independence. This isn’t exactly true. The passage Jefferson included in his initial draft for the Declaration didn’t so much condemn slavery so much as shift the blame for the existence of slavery in the North American colonies from the colonists who actually owned slaves to the English king. The passage reads as follows:“He [i.e., King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”The 1776 Report also fails to mention that Jefferson personally owned over six hundred enslaved people—more than any other United States president. He only set two enslaved people free during his lifetime and he only set five enslaved people free in his will.Thomas Jefferson and the other white people who oversaw his plantation brutally abused and mistreated the enslaved Black people who worked there. For instance, the nail factory at Monticello was staffed entirely by enslaved children. Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. wrote an entry in Jefferson’s Farm Book about how the children who worked in the nail factory didn’t like going to the nailery on freezing cold mornings in the dead of winter, so the overseer ruthlessly scourged them all for “truancy,” which increased productivity tremendously. Acts of violent cruelty like this must have been extremely common.Thomas Jefferson was also a habitual sexual predator. At some point between 1787 and 1790, he began to make sexual advances towards a young enslaved Black woman named Sally Hemings. Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife Martha and she is said to have borne a strong resemblance to her. We don’t know how she felt about Jefferson, but, since she was his slave and she had no power to refuse his advances, she did not have the ability to give consent. Therefore, anytime Jefferson had sexual relations with her, it must be considered rape.Sally Hemings was somewhere between fourteen and seventeen years old when Jefferson began raping her. This means that Thomas Jefferson was guilty of raping a minor. Hemings ended up giving birth to six children; Jefferson is thought to have been the father of all of them. Quite frankly, he was a sick, twisted man and the fact that he played such an important role in founding our country should make us seriously question what ideals our country was really founded on.ABOVE: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson from 1800 by Rembrandt PealeThe 1776 Report mentions that James Madison intervened to make sure that the words slavery and slave were not used in the United States Constitution. This is true. The report, however, fails to mention the fact that Madison himself owned over one hundred enslaved people and never emancipated any of them. The reason he kept the words slavery and slave out of the Constitution was because he was embarrassed by them, not because he seriously supported the idea of getting rid of slavery anytime soon.Of the people who are widely revered today as “Founding Fathers,” John Adams was probably the only one who never owned enslaved people at any point in his entire life. Adams was a staunch religious conservative who believed that the ownership of enslaved people was immoral. Nonetheless, he was strongly opposed to the idea of immediately abolishing slavery because he strongly supported the property rights of slaveowners and he naïvely believed that slavery would simply die out on its own through gradual emancipation.On 24 January 1801, Adams wrote a letter addressed to two abolitionist leaders. In this letter, he declares that slavery is immoral, but claims that it will naturally die out on its own and that any use of force or violence to end slavery “would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice.”Adams further argues in the letter that there are “more serious and threatening Evils” in American society than slavery and that one of the worst of these evils is “a general Debauchery as well as dissipation, produced by pestilential philosophical Principles of Epicurus.” In other words, Adams seems to have believed that white people engaging in things like drinking, partying, gambling, and extramarital sex was a far worse problem than white people enslaving Black people.ABOVE: Portrait of John Adams by Gilbert Stuart. Adams was the only person who is widely revered today as a “Founding Father” who never owned slaves, but he was nonetheless strongly opposed to abolitionism.Erasing land theft and genocideThe 1776 Report is not only misleading because of the things it actually says, but also because of the things it doesn’t say. The report contains many glaring omissions. Notably, there is not even a single mention of any Native American person anywhere in the entire forty-one-page report.Moreover, on page two, the report asserts that the “people” of the United States (by which the report obviously really means “white settlers”) have carved “communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness,” which makes it sound like North America was just completely uninhabited when white Europeans started showing up.The report conveniently omits all mention of the fact that there were probably somewhere between fifty and a hundred million Indigenous people living in the Americas in 1491 immediately before the arrival of Europeans. For comparison, the population of Europe at the time was probably somewhere between seventy and eighty-eight million people. This means that that the number of people living in the Americas was similar to the number of people living in Europe at the time. Nonetheless, as far as The 1776 Report is concerned, Native Americans simply never existed at all to begin with.Likewise, the report contains absolutely no mention of the fact that white settlers stole all the land on which the United States is now founded from the Native people through vicious wars, ethnic cleansing, and flat-out genocide. The report certainly doesn’t mention the struggles for sovereignty that Indigenous peoples today still face. The report is literally trying to erase this history, so that white Anglo-Americans Americans won’t have to face the crimes of our ancestors.ABOVE: The Trail of Tears, painted in 1942 by the American painter Robert LindneuxTaking Frederick Douglass’s words out-of-contextIn many cases, The 1776 Report clearly deliberately takes quotes out of context to make historical figures sound like conservative jingoists when, in fact, they were nothing of the sort. For instance, on page twenty, the report attributes the following quotation to the Black abolitionist leader and orator Frederick Douglass (lived 1818 – 1895):“The Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”The 1776 Report doesn’t say where this quote comes from, but I was able to track it down. It comes from near the beginning of Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” which he delivered on 5 July 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. In the part of the speech that this quotation comes from, Douglass is talking about how the ideals described in the Declaration of Independence are noble and amiable.The 1776 Report, however, conveniently neglects to mention anything else that Douglass says in this speech, because the rest of the speech goes totally against the image of the United States that The 1776 Report wants to project. In the speech, Douglass goes on to roundly excoriate the United States, declaring that the country has never lived up to any of the ideals that are espoused in the Declaration of Independence and, indeed, that the authors of the Declaration never really meant a word they said about “freedom.” He deplores the United States as a nation full of liars and hypocrites, who talk about “freedom” while ruthlessly profiteering off the suffering and enslavement of thousands of Black people. He declares:“My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”“Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! ‘I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;’ I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”This is not a speech defending the Declaration of Independence; this is speech calling out the Declaration of Independence as a lie and the so-called “Founding Fathers” as a bunch of racist, slave-owning hypocrites.ABOVE: Photograph of the Black American abolitionist leader and orator Frederick DouglassMisrepresenting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movementThe 1776 Report doesn’t just do this to Frederick Douglass; it also attempts to portray the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s as a moderate reform movement that was later hijacked by radical left-wing extremists, who supposedly departed from the vision of the movement’s founders. On pages fifteen and thirty-one, it attempts to support this claim using a handful of unsourced, out-of-context quotes from Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which it presents to make it sound like Dr. King was a moderate who opposed affirmative action.In reality, Dr. King was a wholehearted supporter of affirmative action, which he considered to be a natural extension of the fight for Civil Rights. In fact, he was a self-identified democratic socialist and an ardent supporter of wealth redistribution. In a private letter written on 18 July 1952 to his future wife Coretta Scott, Dr. King declares:“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human system it fail victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.”In the same letter, Dr. King goes on to clarify that he does not support communism as conventionally defined, that he does not support violence, and that he believes the United States must transition to a socialist economy gradually and peacefully. Nonetheless, he firmly believed that a transition was necessary.Dr. King didn’t just express his support for democratic socialism and wealth redistribution in private letters, though. In 1963. Dr. King delivered a public speech at Western Michigan University, in which he declared:“We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”Later, in a speech to his staff in 1966, Dr. King openly endorsed democratic socialism, saying “something is wrong with capitalism” and “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”Clearly, whatever you think of him, there is no question that Dr. King was a leftist radical—and not just for his time. Leftist radicals today are still following in Dr. King’s footsteps. If he were alive today, I am certain that he would be a supporter of Black Lives Matter, universal health care, and all those other movements that the Trump administration liked to demonize.Indeed, this should hardly be surprising; Dr. King’s friend and fellow Civil Rights leader John Lewis, who died on 17 July 2020, was a supporter of Black Lives Matter and a member of the Medicare for All Caucus. Likewise, Dr. King’s own daughter Bernice A. King is a supporter of Black Lives Matter and she stated in an interview with ABC News that her father and mother “would be extremely proud” of the Black Lives Matter movement if they were alive to see it.ABOVE: Photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressing the crowds on 28 August 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and FreedomDenouncing universitiesThe 1776 Report roundly deplores most American universities and professors as “anti-American,” declaring on page eighteen:“Universities in the United States today are often hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.”The same page goes on to declare that scholars who dare to question the actions of the United States government are “the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.”What the authors of The 1776 Report are really mad about here is the fact that universities in this country are not currently doing enough to indoctrinate their students into blind devotion to the United States and, as a result, some students are learning to think critically and question the narratives that the government has been feeding them.Notice how the report equates any speech that goes against what the report itself argues with “libel” while simultaneously complaining that “free speech” is being “oppressed.” The report is thereby using the idea of “free speech” as an argument for the suppression of actual free speech.ConclusionWhatever you think about the United States nowadays, you cannot hide the fact that this country has an extremely dark history. Our nation-state is built on land that was stolen through wars and genocide. Our so-called “Founding Fathers” were a bunch of racist, sexist, slave-owning hypocrites who wrote some nice things about “liberty” and “justice,” but never really meant a word of any of it.When the institution of slavery was threatened, roughly one million white American citizens fought to defend it, because they preferred to die than to live in a country where Black people could be free. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry remain thoroughly ingrained the bedrock of our society and these forces continue to influence our politics and institutions.Donald Trump’s signature slogan is “Make America Great Again,” but the truth is that America was never really great to begin with. Maybe sometime this nation will be great, but we certainly haven’t gotten there yet, nor are we even close.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Here’s Why ‘The 1776 Report’ Is Nonsense.” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

Hinduism in Southeast AsiaHinduism in Southeast Asia has a profound impact on the region's cultural development and its history. As the Indic scripts were introduced from India, people of Southeast Asia entered the historical period by producing their earliest inscriptions around the 1st to 5th century CE.Expansion of Hinduism in Southeast AsiaHindu civilization also transformed and shaped the social construct and statehood of Southeast Asian regional polity. Through the formation of Indianized kingdoms, small indigenous polities led by petty chieftain were transformed into major kingdoms and empires led by a maharaja with statecraft concept akin to those in India. It gave birth to the former Champa civilisation in southern parts of Central Vietnam, Funan in Cambodia, the Khmer Empire in Indochina, Langkasuka Kingdom and Old Kedah in the Malay Peninsula, the Sriwijayan kingdom on Sumatra, the Medang kingdom, Singhasariand the Majapahit Empire based in Java, Bali, and parts of the Philippine archipelago. The civilisation of India influenced the languages, scripts, written tradition, literatures, calendars, beliefs system and artistic aspects of these peoples and nations.Modern eraHindu communities remain in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Medan city of Indonesia and the Philippines mainly due to the presence of Indians, such as Tamil people, who migrated from the Indian sub-continent to Southeast Asia in past centuries. One notably Southeast Asian aspect of Tamil Hinduism is the festival of Thaipusam, while other Hindu religious festivals such as Diwali are also well-observed by Hindus in the region. In Thailand and Cambodia, Thai and Khmer people practised Hindu rituals and traditions along with their Buddhist faith, and Hindu gods such as Brahma are still widely revered.Similarly, Hinduism is also found among the Cham minority in Southern Vietnam and Cambodia — just like the Javanese, the majority of them are Muslims but a minority are Hindu. In other parts of Indonesia, the term Hindu Dharma is often loosely used as umbrella category to identify native spiritual beliefs and indigenous religions such as Hindu Kaharingan professed by Dayak of Kalimantan.CambodiaAngkor Wat, Cambodia, is the largest Hindu temple in the world.Cambodia was first influenced by Hinduism during the beginning of the Kingdom of Funan. Hinduism was one of the Khmer Empire's official religions. Cambodia is the home of the holy temple of Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world. The main religion adhered in Khmer kingdom was Hinduism, followed by Buddhism in popularity. Initially the kingdom revered Hinduism as the main state religion. Vishnu and Shiva were the most revered deities, worshipped in Khmer Hindu temples. Temples such as Angkor Wat are actually known as Preah Pisnulok (Vara Vishnuloka in Sanskrit) or the realm of Vishnu, to honour the posthumous King Suryavarman II as Vishnu. Hindu ceremonies and rituals performed by Brahmins (Hindu priests), usually only held among ruling elites of the king's family, nobles and the ruling class.The Khmer Empire has developed a complex society where sophisticated culture, art and architecture flourish. The Khmer king and his officials were in charge of irrigation management and water distribution, which consisted of an intricate series of hydraulics infrastructure, such as canals, moats, and massive reservoirs called barays. Society was arranged in a hierarchy reflecting the Hindu caste system, where the commoners — rice farmers and fishermen — formed the large majority of the population. The kshatriyas — royalty, nobles, warlords, soldiers, and warriors, formed a governing elite and authorities. Other social classes included Brahmins (priests), traders, artisans such as carpenters and stonemasons, potters, metalworkers, goldsmiths and textile weavers, while on the lowest social level are slaves. The extensive irrigation projects provided rice surpluses that could support a large population. The state religion was Hinduism but influenced by the cult of Devaraja, elevating the Khmer kings as possessing the divine quality of living gods on earth, attributed to the incarnation of Vishnu or Shiva.In politics, this status was viewed as the divine justification of a king's rule. The cult enabled the Khmer kings to embark on massive architectural projects, constructing majestic monuments such as Angkor Wat and Bayon to celebrate the king's divine rule on earth.The empire's official religions included Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism until Theravada Buddhism prevailed, even among the lower classes, after its introduction from Sri Lanka in the 13th century.Since then, Hinduism slowly declined in Cambodia, and finally being replaced by Theravadan Buddhist as the major faith in the kingdom.IndonesiaIndian scholars wrote about the Dwipantara or Jawa Dwipa Hindu kingdom in Java and Sumatra around 200 BC. "Yawadvipa" is mentioned in India's earliest epic, the Ramayana. Sugriva, the chief of Rama's army dispatched his men to Yawadvipa, the island of Java, in search of Sita.It was hence referred to in Indian by the Sanskrit name "yāvaka dvīpa" (dvīpa = island). Southeast Asia was frequented by traders from eastern India, particularly Kalinga, as well as from the kingdoms of South India.The Indianised Tarumanagara kingdom was established in West Java around 400s, produced among the earliest inscriptions in Indonesian history. There was a marked Buddhist influence starting about 425 in the region. Around the 6th century, Kalingga Indianized kingdom was established in norther coast of Central Java. The kingdom name was derived from Kalinga east coast of India.These Southeast Asian seafaring peoples engaged in extensive trade with India and China. Which attracted the attention of the Mongols, Chinese and Japanese, as well as Islamic traders, who reached the Aceh area of Sumatra in the 12th century.Some scholars have pointed out that the legends of Ikshvaku and Sumati may have their origin in the Southeast-Asian myth of the birth of humanity from a bitter gourd. The legend of Sumati, the wife of King Sagar, tells that she produced offspring with the aid of a bitter gourd.A Hindu Balinese family after puja in Bratan templeThe resurgence of Hinduism in Indonesia is occurring in all parts of the country. In the early 1970s, the Toraja people of Sulawesiwere the first to be identified under the umbrella of 'Hinduism', followed by the Karo Batak of Sumatra in 1977 and the Ngaju Dayak of Kalimantan in 1980. In an unpublished report in 1999, the National Indonesian Bureau of Statistics admitted that around 100,000 people had officially converted or 'reconverted' from Islam to Hinduism over the previous two decades.The Ministry of Religious Affairs, as of 2007 estimates there to be at least 10 million Hindus in Indonesia. The growth of Hinduism has been driven also by the famous Javanese prophesies of Sabdapalon and Jayabaya. Many recent converts to Hinduism had been members of the families of Sukarno's PNI, and now support Megawati Sukarnoputri. This return to the 'religion of Majapahit' (Hinduism) is a matter of nationalist pride.Next to Indonesian Balinese, today, the Balamon Cham are the only surviving native (non-Indic) Hindus in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam there are roughly 160,000 members of the Cham ethnic minority, majority of them adheres Hinduism while some are Muslims. After centuries being dominated by Kinh (Vietnamese), today there are some effort to revive Cham culture.Today in Indonesia, Hinduism is practised by only 3% of the total population, they constitute 92.29% of the population of Bali and 15.75% of the population of Central Kalimantan, as of the 2000 census. However, between the 4th century to 15th century, Hinduism and Buddhism was adhered by the majority of the population, along with native indigenous animism and dynamism beliefs that venerated natural and ancestral spirits. By 15th to 16th-century Islam had supplanted Hinduism and Buddhism as the majority religion in Indonesian archipelago. The influence of Hinduism has profoundly left its marks on the culture of Bali, Java and Sumatra. Bali has become the last remnant of once Hindu dominated region.9th-century Shivaistic temple of Prambanan in Central Java near Yogyakarta, the largest Hindu temple in IndonesiaIn Indonesia, it is not only people of Indian descent who practice Hinduism; Hinduism still survives as the major religion in Bali, where native Indonesians, the Balinese people, adheres to Agama Hindu Dharma, a variant of Hinduism derived from ancient Java-Bali Hindu traditions developed in the island for almost two millennia that often incorporates native spiritual elements. Other than the Balinese, a small enclave of Javanese Hindu minorities are also can be found in Java, such as around Tengger mountain ranges near Bromo and Semeru volcanoes, Karanganyar Regency in Central Java and near Prambanan, Yogyakarta.The Hindu Balinese temple offering in Bali, IndonesiaHindu influences reached the Indonesian Archipelago as early as first century. In 4th-century, the kingdom of Kutai in East Kalimantan, Tarumanagara in West Java and Holing (Kalingga) in Central Java, were among the early Hindu states established in the region. Several notable ancient Indonesian Hindu kingdoms are Mdang i Bhumi Mataram, famous for the construction of the majestic 9th-century Trimurti Prambanan temple, followed by Kediri, Singosari and reached the peak of its influence in the 14th-century Majapahit, the last and largest among Hindu-Buddhist Javanese empires.A dance performance by Balinese HindusMany of these dances are rituals reflecting mythical or spiritual stories from Hindu Epics and other literature. The Hindu civilisations has left its marks in Indonesian culture. The epics Mahabharataand Ramayana, became enduring traditions among Indonesian artforms, expressed in wayang shadow puppet and dance performances. Many Indonesian names are Sanskrit-based and Bahasa Indonesia contains loads of loandwords of Sanskrit origin. The vehicle of Vishnu, Garuda, was adopted as both national emblem Garuda Pancasila and flag carrier national airline named Garuda Indonesia.Statue of Hindu goddess Durga Mahisasuramardini in Prambanannorthern cella, dated to the 9th-century Medang I Bhumi Mataramkingdom in Central JavaToday, the Indonesian government has recognised Hinduism as one of the country's six officially sanctioned religions, along with Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The new Hindu communities in Java tend to be concentrated around recently built temples (pura) or around archaeological temple sites (candi) which are being reclaimed as places of Hindu worship. An important new Hindu temple in eastern Java is Pura Mandaragiri Sumeru Agung, located on the slope of Mt. Semeru, Java's highest mountain. Mass conversions have also occurred in the region around Pura Agung Blambangan, another new temple, built on a site with minor archaeological remnants attributed to the Kingdom of Blambangan, the last Hindu polity on Java and Pura Loka Moksa Jayabaya (in the village of Menang near Kediri), where the Hindu king and prophet Jayabaya is said to have achieved spiritual liberation (moksa). Another site is the new Pura Pucak Raung in East Java, which is mentioned in Balinese literature as the place from where Maharishi Markandeya took Hinduism to Bali in the 5th century.An example of resurgence around major archaeological remains of ancient Hindu temple sites was observed in Trowulan near Mojokerto, the capital of the legendary Hindu empire Majapahit. A local Hindu movement is struggling to gain control of a newly excavated temple building which they wish to see restored as a site of active Hindu worship. The temple is to be dedicated to Gajah Mada, the man attributed with transforming the small Hindu kingdom of Majapahit into an empire. Although there has been a more pronounced history of resistance to Islamization in East Java, Hindu communities are also expanding in Central Java near the ancient Hindu monuments of Prambanan. The current estimates of Hinduism in Indonesia range from 4 to 8 percent.LaosHinduism make less than 0.1% of the population of Laos. Approximately 7,000 People of Laos are Hindus.In Ancient Time Laos used to be a part of Ancient Hindu Empire Khmer Empire. The Wat Phou is one of the last influences of that period. The Laotian adaptation of the Ramayana is called Phra Lak Phra Lam.MalaysiaThaipusam festival at Batu Caves Temple in MalaysiaMajority of Malaysian Hindus are Tamils. Hinduism is the fourth largest religion in Malaysia. About 1.78 million Malaysian residents (6.3% of the total population) are Hindus, according to 2010 Census of Malaysia.Chandi Bukit Batu Pahat of Bujang Valley. A Hindu-Buddhist kingdom ruled ancient Kedah possibly as early as 110 CE, the earliest evidence of strong Indian influence which was once prevalent among the Kedahan Malays.Most Malaysian Hindus are settled in western parts of Peninsular Malaysia. Indian Hindus and Buddhists began arriving in Malaysia during ancient and medieval era. A large number of Hindus from South India were brought to Malaysia by British colonial empire during the 19th and 20th century, as indentured labourers to work on coffee and sugarcane plantations and tin mining; later they were deployed in large numbers, along with Chinese Buddhists, on rubber plantations. The British kangani system of recruitment, designed to reduce labour turnover and enhance labour stability, encouraged Hindu workers to recruit friends and family from India to work in British operations in Malaysia. The kangani system brought numerous Tamil Hindus into Malaysia by early 1900s. By 1950s, about 12.8% of Malaysian population professed to be a Hindu.After Malaysia gained its independence from British colonial empire in 1957, it declared its official state religion as Islam and adopted a discriminatory constitution as well as the Sedition Act of 1971 which limited public debate on Malaysia's treatment of religion, language and citizenship policies. In recent decades, there have been increasing reports of religious persecution of Hindus, along with other minority religions, by various state governments of Malaysia and its Sharia courts.Hindu temples built on private property and built long before Malaysian independence, have been demolished by Malaysian government officials in recent years. Since the 1970s, there has been large scale emigration of Hindus (along with Buddhists and Christians) from Malaysia. Malaysian Hindus celebrate Deepavali (festival of lights), Thaipusam (Lord Murugan festival), Pongal (harvest festival) and Navaratri (Durga festival).MyanmarA Hindu procession in Yangon, MyanmarHinduism in Burma is practised by about 840,000 people. Because a reliable census has not been taken in Burma since colonial times, estimates are approximate. Most Hindus in Myanmar are Burmese Indians. In modern Myanmar, most Hindus are found in the urban centres of Yangon and Mandalay. Ancient Hindu temples are present in other parts of Burma, such as the 11th century Nathlaung Kyaung Temple dedicated to Vishnu in Bagan. Hinduism in Myanmar has also been influenced by Buddhism with many Hindu temples in Myanmar housing statues of the Buddha.Aspects of Hinduism continue in Burma today, even in the majority Buddhist culture. For example, Thagyamin is worshipped whose origins are in the Hindu god Indra. Burmese literature has also been enriched by Hinduism, including the Burmese adaptation of the Ramayana, called Yama Zatdaw. Many Hindu gods are likewise worshipped by many Burmese people, such as Saraswati (known as Thuyathadi in Burmese), the goddess of knowledge, who is often worshipped before examinations; Shiva is called Paramizwa; Vishnu is called Withano, and others. Many of these ideas are part of thirty seven Nat or deities found in Burmese culture.The PhilippinesThe first document found in the Philippines, the Laguna Copperplate Inscription (c. 900), shows Hindu influences in the Philippines.Before the arrival of an Arab trader to Sulu Island in 1450 and Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed in behalf of Spain in 1521, the chiefs of many Philippine islands were called Rajas, and the script was derived from Brahmi. Karma, a Hindu concept is understood as part of the traditional view of the universe by many Philippine peoples and have counterparts such as kalma in the Pampangan language and Gabâ in Visayan languages. The vocabulary in all Philippine languages reflect Hindu influences.There are smaller number of followers of Hinduism today at 0.1% of the Philippine population. Today, there is a "Hindu Temple" (attended mostly by Sindhīs) on Mahatma Gandhi Street and a "Khalsa Diwan Indian Sikh Temple" (attended mostly by Sikhs) on United Nations Avenue. Both are in Manila city's Paco-Pandacan area, the traditional Indian enclave, and are about 15 minutes walk away from each other.As per estimate there are 22 gurudwāras all over the Philippines today, although most of the adherents are Indians, Sri Lankans and Nepalese. There are various Hare Krishna groups in the country that are gaining in popularity.SingaporeDiwali in Little India, SingaporeThe introduction of Hinduism into Singapore dates back to the early 10th century, during the Chola period. Immigrants from southern India, mostly Tamils, arrived as labourers for the British East India Company, bringing with them their religion and culture. Their arrival saw the building of Dravidian temples throughout the island, and the beginnings of a vibrant Hindu culture. The first temple, Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore's Chinatown. There are currently about thirty main temples in Singapore, dedicated to various gods and goddesses from the Hindu pantheon. Today, two government bodies deal with all Hindu affairs: The Hindu Endowments Board and The Hindu Advisory Board.Hindu devotees during Thaipusam festival in SingaporeHindus are a minority in Singapore, comprising about 5.1% of its citizens and permanent residents in 2010. Among 15 years or older population, there were about 158,000 Hindus; 37% of all Hindus in Singapore speak Tamil at home, another 42% speak English. Deepavali is a major Hindu festival and a public holiday observed in Singapore.ThailandMurtis of Brahma and Ganesha in Bangkok, ThailandA number of Hindus remain in Thailand. They are mostly located in the cities. In the past, the nation came under the influence of the Khmer Empire, which had strong Hindu roots. Despite the fact that today Thailand is a Buddhist majority nation, many elements of Thai culture and symbolism demonstrates Hindu influences and heritage. For example, the popular epic, Ramakien, is based on the Ramayana. The Royal emblem of Thailand depicted Garuda, the vahana (vehicle) of Vishnu.Ruins of Ayutthaya in Thailand which was named after AyodhyaThe Thai city, Ayutthaya near Bangkok, is named after Ayodhya, the birthplace of Rama. Numerous rituals derived from Brahmanism are preserved in rituals, such as use of holy strings and pouring of water from conch shells. Furthermore, Hindu deities are worshipped by many Thais alongside Buddhism, such as Brahma at the famous Erawan Shrine, and statues of Ganesha, Indra and Shiva, as well as numerous symbols relating to Hindu deities are found, e.g, Garuda, a symbol of the monarchy. Reliefs in temple walls, such as the 12th-century Prasat Sikhoraphum near Surin (Thailand), show a dancing Shiva, with smaller images of Parvati, Vishnu, Brahma and Ganesha.The Devasathan is a Hindu temple established in 1784 by King Rama I. The temple is the centre of Brahminism in Thailand. The royal court Brahmins operate the temple, they perform several royal ceremonies per year. An annual Giant Swing ceremony known as Triyampavai-Tripavai was held in major cities of Thailand until 1935, when it was abolished for safety reasons.The name of the ceremony was derived from the names of two Tamil language Hindu chants: Thiruvempavai and Thiruppavai. It is known that Tamil verses from Thiruvempavai — poet pratu sivalai("opening the portals of Shiva's home") — were recited at this ceremony, as well as the coronation ceremony of the Thai king.According to TP Meenakshisundaram, the name of the festival indicates that Thiruppavai might have been recited as well. The swinging ceremony depicted a legend about how the god created the world. Outside shops, particularly in towns and rural areas, statues of Nang Kwak as the deity of wealth, fortune and prosperity (version of Lakshmi) are found.The elite, and the royal household, often employ Brahmins to mark funerals and state ceremonies such as the Royal Ploughing Ceremony to ensure a good harvest. The importance of Hinduism cannot be denied, even though much of the rituals has been combined with Buddhism. According to the Thai Census of 2005, there are 52,631 Hindus living in Thailand, making up just 0.09% of the total population.VietnamBalamon Cham dancers in Po NagarThe first recorded religion of the Champa was a form of Shaiva Hinduism, brought by sea from India. Hinduism was the predominant religion among the Cham people until the 16th century. Numerous temples dedicated to Shiva were constructed in the central part of what is now Vietnam. The mainly Hindu Óc Eo archeological site in Mekong River Delta in southern Vietnam, dates back to 7th century and earlier. The Champa civilisation was located in the more southern part of what is today Central Vietnam and was a highly Indianized Hindu Kingdom, practising a form of Shaivite Hinduism brought by sea from India. Mỹ Sơn, a Hindu temple complex in central Vietnam built by the Cham people is still standing albeit in ruins in Quảng Nam Province, in Vietnam. Since the 15th century under the growing Vietnamese kingdom from the north, Champa was conquered and reduced as a polity. The Chams were subsequently absorbed by the Vietnamese and today are recognised as one of the many ethnic minorities of Vietnam.The Chams Balamon (Hindu Brahmin Chams) form a majority of the Cham population in Vietnam while most of the remainder are Cham Bani followers of Islam. The term Balamon is considered to have been derived from Brahmin, however another study suggests that 70% are considered to descend from the Nagavamshi Kshatriya caste (pronounced in Cham as "Satrias"), and claim to be the descendants of the Champa Empire. In any case a sizeable proportion of the Balamon Hindu Cham are considered Brahmins. Hindu temples known as Bimong in the Cham language and the priests Halau Tamunay Ahier.The exact number of Hindus in Vietnam are not published in Government census, but there are estimated to be at least 50,000 Balamon Hindus, with another 4,000 Hindus living in Ho Chi Minh City; most of whom are of Indian (Tamil) or of mixed Indian-Vietnamese descent. The Mariamman Templeis one of the most notable Tamil Hindu temples in Ho Chi Minh City. Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan Provinces are where most of the Cham ethnic group (65%) in Vietnam reside according to the last population census. Cham Balamon (Hindu Cham) in Ninh Thuan numbered 32,000 in 2002 inhabiting 15 of 22 Cham villages. If this population composition is typical for the Cham population of Vietnam as a whole then approximately 60% of Chams in Vietnam are Hindu.Greater IndiaBy the early centuries of the common era most of the principalities of Southeast Asia had effectively absorbed defining aspects of Hindu culture, religion and administration. The notion of divine god-kingship was introduced by the concept of Harihara, Sanskrit and other Indian epigraphic systems were declared official, like those of the south Indian Pallava dynasty and Chalukya dynasty. These Indianized Kingdoms, a term coined by George Cœdès in his work Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d'Extrême-Orient, were characterized by surprising resilience, political integrity and administrative stability.To the north, Indian religious ideas were accepted into the cosmology of Himalayan peoples, most profoundly in Tibet and Bhutan. Buddhist monasticism extended into Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia and Buddhist texts and ideas were readily accepted in China and Japan in east. To west, Indian culture converged with Greater Persia via Hindukush and Pamir Mountains.Indianization of Southeast AsiaThe history of South East Asia was mostly always written from the perspective of external civilizations that influenced the region. The prevelant interpretation caused because of the ontological differences, the fundamentally dichotomous histories of europe and pre colonial asia and the conclusion from it was that the despotism, obscurantism, servile equality of Asian societies had caused innovation to become prey to tyranny and had rendered the history of the region cyclical, immobile and non-linear.The belief in the idea that South East Asia had never engendered its own civilization and of indigenous incapacity or external benefaction gained additional support, such was the tremendous evidence of Indian architectural and religious influence in South East Asia and we're fundamentally identified as being derivative and thus Indianization was perceived as occurring more so due to the Indian initiatives rather than the indigenous initiatives of South East asia.Caste systemsAnother main concern for Indianization was the understanding and development of caste systems. The debate was often whether or not the caste systems were seen as an elite process or just the process of picking up the Indian culture and calling it their own in each region. This had showed that the Southeast Asian countries were civilized and able to flourish their own interests. For example, Cambodia's caste system is based on people in society. In India, the caste system was based on which class they belonged to when they were born. Based on the evidence of the caste system in Southeast Asia, shows that they were applying Indian culture to their own, also seen as Indianization.Linguistic influenceScholars like Sheldon Pollock have used the term Sanskrit Cosmopolis to describe the region and argued for millennium-long cultural exchanges without necessarily involving migration of peoples or colonisation. Pollock's 2006 book The Language Of The Gods In The World Of Men makes a case for studying the region as comparable with Latin Europe and argues that the Sanskrit language was its unifying element.Scripts in Sanskrit discovered during the early centuries of the common era are the earliest known forms of writing to have extended all the way to Southeast Asia. Its gradual impact ultimately resulted in its widespread domain as a means of dialect which evident in regions, from Bangladesh to Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand and additionally a few of the larger Indonesian islands. In addition, alphabets from languages spoken in Burmese, Thai, Laos and Cambodia are a variations formed off of Indian ideals that have localized the language.Sanskrit and related languages have also influenced their Tibeto-Burman-speaking neighbors to the north through the spread of Buddhist texts in translation. The spread of Buddhism to Tibet allowed many Sanskrit texts to survive only in Tibetan translation (in the Tanjur). Buddhism was similarly introduced to China by Mahayanist missionaries sent by the Indian Emperor Ashoka mostly through translations of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit texts, and many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary.In Southeast Asia, languages such as Thai and Lao contain many loan words from Sanskrit, as does Khmer to a lesser extent. For example, in Thai, Rāvaṇa, the legendary emperor of Sri Lanka, is called 'Thosakanth' which is derived from his Sanskrit name 'Daśakaṇṭha' ("having ten necks"). Many Sanskrit loanwords are also found in Austronesian languages, such as Javanese particularly the old form from which nearly half the vocabulary is derived from the language.Other Austronesian languages, such as traditional Malay, modern Indonesian, also derive much of their vocabulary from Sanskrit, albeit to a lesser extent, with a large proportion of words being derived from Arabic. Similarly, Philippine languages such as Tagalog have many Sanskrit loanwords.A Sanskrit loanword encountered in many Southeast Asian languages is the word bhāṣā, or spoken language, which is used to mean language in general, for example bahasa in Malay, Indonesian and Tausug, basa in Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese, phasa in Thai and Lao, bhasa in Burmese, and phiesa in Khmer.The utilization of Sanskrit has been prevalent in all aspects of life including legal purposes. Sanskrit terminology and vernacular appears in ancient courts to establish procedures that have been structured by Indian models such as a system composed of a code of laws. The concept of legislation demonstrated through codes of law and organizations particularly the idea of "God King" was embraced by numerous rulers of Southeast Asia.The rulers amid this time, e.g, the Lin-I Dynasty of Vietnam once embraced the Sanskrit dialect and devoted sanctuaries to the Indian divinity Shiva. Many rulers following even viewed themselves as "reincarnations or descendants" of the Hindu gods. Once Buddhism began entering the nations, this practiced view was eventually altered.Linguistic commonalitiesIn the Malay Archipelago: Indonesian, Javanese and Malay have absorbed a large amount of Sanskrit loanwords into their respective lexicons (Sanskrit loan words in Indonesian). Many languages of native lowland Filipinos such as Tagalog, Ilocano and Visayan contain numerous Sanskrit loanwords.In Mainland Southeast Asia: Thai, Lao, Burmese and Khmer language has absorbed a significant amount of Sanskrit as well as Pali.Many Indonesian names have Sanskrit origin (e.g. Dewi Sartika, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Teuku Wisnu).Southeast Asian languages are traditionally written with Indic alphabets and therefor have extra letters not pronounced in the local language, so that original Sanskrit spelling can be preserved. An example is how the name of the King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, is spelled in Sanskrit as "Bhumibol"ภูมิพล, yet is pronounced in Thai as "Phumipon" พูมิพน using Thai-Sanskrit pronunciation rules since the original Sanskrit sounds don’t exist in Thai.ToponymsSuvarnabhumi is a toponym that has been historically associated with Southeast Asia. In Sanskrit, it means "The Land of Gold". Thailand's Suvarnabhumi Airport is named after this toponym, signifying its intent to be a major transport hub of Southeast Asia.Several of Indonesian toponyms has Indian parallel or origin, such as Madura with Mathura, Serayu and Sarayu river, Semeru with Sumeru mountain, Kalingga from Kalinga Kingdom, and Ngayogyakarta from Ayodhya.Siamese ancient city of Ayutthaya also derived from Ramayana's Ayodhya.Names of places could simply renders their Sanskrit origin, such as Singapore, from Singapura (Singha-pura the "lion city"), Jakarta from Jaya and kreta ("complete victory").Some of the Indonesian regencies such as Indragiri Hulu and Indragiri Hilir derived from Indragiri River, Indragiri itself means "mountain of Indra".Some Thai toponyms also often have Indian parallels or Sanskrit origin, although the spellings are adapted to the Siamese tongue, such as Ratchaburi from Raja-puri("king's city") and Nakhon Si Thammarat from Nagara Sri Dharmaraja.The tendency to use Sanskrit for modern neologism also continued to modern day. In 1962 Indonesia changed the colonial name of New Guinean city of Hollandia to Jayapura (glorious city), Orange mountain range to Jayawijaya Mountains.Malaysia named their new government seat as Putrajaya (prince of glory) in 1999.Religion, mythology and folkloreHinduism is practised by the majority of Bali's population. The Cham people of Vietnam still practices Hinduism as well. Though officially Buddhist, many Thai, Khmer, and Burmese people also worship Hindu gods in a form of syncretism. This echoes the beliefs of the past Hindu civilizations such as the Khmer Empire.Brahmins have had a large role in spreading Hinduism in Southeast Asia. Even today many monarchies such as the royal court of Thailand still have Hindu rituals performed for the King by Hindu Brahmins.Garuda, a Hindu mythological figure, is present in the coats of arms of Indonesia, Thailand and Ulaanbaatar.Muay Thai, a fighting art that is the Thai version of the Hindu Musti-yuddha style of martial art.Kaharingan, an indigenous religion followed by the Dayak people of Borneo, is categorised as a form of Hinduism in Indonesia.Philippine mythology includes the supreme god Bathala and the concept of Diwata and the still-current belief in Karma—all derived from Hindu-Buddhist concepts.Malay folklore contains a rich number of Indian-influenced mythological characters, such as Bidadari, Jentayu, Garuda and Naga.Wayang shadow puppets and classical dance-dramas of Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand took stories from episodes of Ramayana and Mahabharata.Architecture and monumentsThe same style of Hindu temple architecture was used in several ancient temples in South East Asia including Angkor Wat, which was dedicated to Hindu god Vishnu and is shown on the flag of Cambodia, also Prambanan in Central Java, the largest Hindu temple in Indonesia, is dedicated to Trimurti — Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma.Borobudur in Central Java, Indonesia, is the world's largest Buddhist monument. It took shape of a giant stone mandala crowned with stupas and believed to be the combination of Indian-origin Buddhist ideas with the previous megalithic tradition of native Austronesian step pyramid.The minarets of 15th to 16th-century mosques in Indonesia, such as the Great Mosque of Demak and Kudus mosque resemble those of Majapahit Hindu temples.The Batu Caves in Malaysia are one of the most popular Hindu shrines outside India. It is the focal point of the annual Thaipusam festival in Malaysia and attracts over 1.5 million pilgrims, making it one of the largest religious gatherings in history.Erawan Shrine, dedicated to Brahma, is one of the most popular religious shrines in Thailand.Atashgah of Baku, a fire temple in Azerbaijan used by both Hindus and Persian ZoroastriansReferences:Hinduism in Southeast Asia - WikipediaGreater India - Wikipedia