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THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUCCESS isolated. Next the Poles were flattered by being allowed to share the spoils of crippled Czechoslovakia, in the fall of 1938, following the Munich crisis. This was nothing but the still more friendly approach, preceding and screening the deadly blow-which fell like a thunderbolt within a year.
So too the modern techniques for dealing with enemies that have been overcome; these were already known to the ancient Hindu masters. The modern conquered territories left to famine, plague, and rapine-like Poland, the Ukraine, Greece, Norway, under the Nazi occupation-illustrate the general law. "A surviving remnant of the enemy," we read, “is like a remnant of smoldering fire or of unpaid debt; all three are bound to increase with time." 19 The defeated force is therefore to be liquidated: communists in Italy and Nazi Germany, thc bourgeoisie in Russia. Inconvenient party chiefs and generals are purged everywhere; leftists and rightists crowd the prisons of the world. This is a merciless natural principle abundantly exemplified, whether in the history of India, the history of bygone Byzantium and the Russia of Boris Godunov and the false Dinitri, or in the comparatively up-to-date shooting of the last Czar with his wife, son, and four daughters, in a cellar, when they were supposed to be on their way to confinement.
Ancient Indian affairs were pervaded by an atmosphere of danger, suspicion, and threat. There was waged a kind of continuous white war of nerves. Precisely the same situation is described in the biographies of the Roman emperors by Tacitus and Suetonius, or in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as in the Greek accounts of the Achaemenids of ancient Persia, the Moslem records of the caliphates at Bagdad, Cairo, and elsewhere, and the histories of Ottoman power in Constantinople. It is the atmosphere that is general today, particularly in the sphere controlled by the totalitarian states, as it was in that of their numcrous forerunners and collaborators
20 Mahabharata 19. 140. 58.
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |