SOUTH-EAST ASIAN FORUM
Sir,-May I comment on Mr. Youren’s brickbat for Western Christendom, amusingly disguised as a bouquet for South-East Asia? "No educated Asian," he tells us, "will for a moment concede any superiority to the West except in the twin respects of military organisation and scientific knowhow." If this is so, it is rather curious that some educated Asians, in India, for example, have adopted the Western political ideal of democracy. "Three centuries ago the Asian States provided a more secure, a more cultured nd altogether a more splendid picture than did any European kingdom." I wonder if Mr. Youren has ever heard of the France of Louis XIV. And if he urges that the common people were poor in France in 1654, his "many Asian friends on either side of the bamboo curtain" will tell him that the common people in Asia were poorer still. "When Europeans were still struggling to get back to the forgotten civilised ways of Greece and Rome. . ." In ‘the classical civilisation of Greece and Rome, the bulk of the population lived in slavery, so I suppose Mr. Youren will not regard Europe as fully civilised again until the Red Flag waves from the Urals to the Outer Hebrides.
G.H.
D.
(Greenmeadows).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 5
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208SOUTH-EAST ASIAN FORUM New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 5
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