(11) Osho

(11) Osho

You say England was a very cultured society.... England has been the greatest empire in the world, it has exploited millions of people as barbariously as possible.

And you call England a cultured, a civilized country? It looked civilized, because all its barbariousness was being expressed all around the earth in the British empire.

All ugly people were sent – in the armies, in the civil services, as governors, as governor-generals – outside England.

And the empire was vast. It was said the sun never sets on the British empire and it was true. Somewhere or other the sun was still there in the
British empire.

So it had a very simple way of sending the barbarious elements to the empire, to torture people,to kill people, and to bring all the riches from the whole world to England.

Naturally, when all the riches were available to England, there was no need for riots, no need to fight.

England had the best universities – Oxford, Cambridge and others.

England has done so many ugly acts that you will not be able to believe it.

India – which was the biggest part of England’s empire – was one of the ancientmost countries on the earth.

It had its own developed craftsmen, arts. For example, they used to make such thin cloth in Dacca, in Bengal, that you could cover a whole elephant with the cloth and still you could pass the whole cloth through a small finger ring, it was so thin.

Thousands of years of
craftsmanship.... Even if you had seven layers of it on your body, you would still be seen as naked.
Millions of people were involved in creating that kind of cloth.

The Britishers were in a difficulty. They cut the hands of millions of craftsmen so that they could sell Manchester cloth in India – and you call England a civilized, cultured country?

In one place in Punjab, there is a public park, Jalianwala Bagh. It has only one
entrance.

They were having a peaceful meeting – almost one hundred thousand men, women and children inside the park, which has eight-foot-tall walls all around, and just a single small gate.

A British general fixed a machine gun on the gate and ordered the people to vacate the park within ten minutes.

Now,that was impossible; it was a walled garden, people could not get out of it, and the gate was already closed, with the machine gun fixed.

The name of the general was Dyer. And after ten minutes he started shooting absolutely innocent people, who had not done anything.

Within minutes there were only corpses of children, women, men – one hundred thousand. It was such a blatant, cruel act.

What punishment did General Dyer get? Only one punishment: he was sent back to England.

You kill one hundred thousand people for no reason, and this is a cultured and civilized country?

People in England were rich, not because they had produced the riches, but because they had
exploited the whole empire.

They squeezed the last drop of blood from countries like India. Of course, England was happy – at the cost of millions of people dying in poverty.

You have taken all their gold, silver, their diamonds, their mines. You have taken everything from them.

And England is a small country, not big enough even to be compared to a state in India. India consists of thirty states now – British India was even bigger, because now Pakistan is separate, Bangladesh is separate.

But even now India is thirty times bigger than England.

England was a parasite. Of course, the British behaved well, they were very cultured; they were ladies and they were gentlemen.

And what were they doing around the world?

They never considered other human beings equal to them. All other human beings, whom they were exploiting and on whose blood they were living, were treated like animals.

All these riches pouring in from all over the world made England really beautiful, rich, educated, cultured. But now the empire has disappeared.

Now England is going down the drain. And now all those people whom England has trained to kill and murder are turning upon their own people.

Every action has its reaction. You cannot escape from the basic laws of life.

England will have to suffer.

You are asking me: Why is it that there were no riots in England before, and now hundreds of people are being killed, policemen are being killed?

There will be more riots, because England has become accustomed to all the riches which are no longer coming. It has become accustomed to having all the luxuries without producing them.

Now from where can it get all those riches?

Now it is the darkest and the most dismal country on the earth.

But that’s how existence functions.

If you do something wrong, you are bound to suffer.

If you do something right, existence is very rewarding.

OshO 
From Bondage to Freedom