The actual consequence of the emphasis on renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism led to a more civilized society but also stagnation. This impeded inventions, progress and led to colonization. A selfish, greedy and oppressively taxing ruling class led to an indifferent, cowed and submissive population unconcerned about who ruled, just like in the USA currently, where half the population does not vote. The indigenous poor were compelled to serve in the power elite's armed forces for survival even though the goals and intents of the governing class were antithetical to those of their own, just as minorities make up a large percentage of the lower ranks of the armed forces in America.
Inspite of these handicaps of the Eastern religions, the Chinese and Indian Empires in their pre-colonial era expanded to the limits of their geographical boundary obstacles. They shunned technology for upsetting order in China and for metaphysics in India, and were thus hampered from exploitation and conquest of distant peoples and lands. If they had the opportunity and wherewithal, they may have behaved just as badly as Europeans.
There is another factor and that is the ability to conquer by military might and the ability to profit by long distance transport in trade, jelled together with the basic greed and convenient morality and evolutionary beneficial xenophobic trait of human beings, in the Europeans during the fifteenth century onwards. A not well-known fact is that the mighty Mughal Empire in India, because of its lack of foresight and dependence on land taxes rather than trade, never developed a navy and had to make an agreement and pay protection money to the Portuguese pirates to secure safe conduct for ships to ply safely from Surat to the Gulf States. This is why India is aiming to have three aircraft carriers, new American P3 Orion naval patrol aircraft, a fleet of submarines, including the new French Scorpenes and Russian Akula nuclear submarines and enough frigates and destroyers with Kamov helicopters, to constitute a power projecting blue water naval arm.
The decimation and genocide occurred in those lands and societies where there was a tremendous technological gap between the invading and native cultures, e.g. Americas, Australia, Tasmania, Africa and much less so in Asia, North Africa and even New Zealand. To justify and rationalize their own cruel and immoral atrocities, the naturally occurring latitude based pigmentation differences were glorified and used to dub the darker and different peoples as subhuman. This extended to Southern Europeans who were barred from immigrating to USA much later.
The injustices perpetrated by the US Supreme Court and so called benign private institutions like the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations as late as the Twentieth century can be read, by those interested, in Stephen Jay Gould's and Edwin Black's books, 'The Mismeasure of Man' and 'War against the Weak'. The Jeziatax on non-Muslims, killing apostates, the Hindu treatment of lower castes, the Chinese and Japanese contempt for foreign devils, 'Gaijins' and 'Burakamins', are all vivid examples, that none of us are truly without sin.
It automatically follows that populations constrained by their domicile in vitreous structures of patent frangibility should refrain from using petrous projectiles as guided missiles, targeting aliens!
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