“A man who has lectured on race politics for four decades with the passion of a tent-revival preacher isn’t likely to run from critics. Recalling the bumper sticker he’d seen as he entered, Dickson told the people who perked up at the Sevananda confrontation, “You want to save Tibet. I’m in agreement.”
Dickson took the opportunity to compare Tibet – which the communist Chinese government has flooded with non-Tibetans – and America. “I told those who attacked me that the people of Milton and Shakespeare have a right to save themselves, just like what they advocate for Tibet. They were furious at the idea of someone arguing that white people should try to avoid extinction. Which is what is happening.”
Dickson’s message hasn’t changed much since he was a University of Georgia activist with the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom in the late 1960s: The white race must unite to save itself.
But technology has transformed racial politics just as it has the rest of our culture. Today Dickson’s soapbox is no longer confined to small rooms where he addresses handfuls of fellow travelers. His message is amplified and shoots around the planet at light speed, thanks to Stormfront.org, the online bulletin board whose booming growth delights white nationalists and causes anguish among their enemies….”
1. A racialist acknowledges the existence of race, racial differences, and the influence of feelings of racial solidarity. He/she might take race into consideration in formulating policies.
Racialists take into account cultural and economic factors in the forming of civilizations/societies.
Racialists do not deny or denigrate commonly acknowledged and subtantiated historical or factual evidence. The do not advocate harm to other races either directly or indirectly.
2. A racist goes beyond acknowledging differences, and makes judgments about inferiority and superiority and worth/value as a whole. Racists commonly find answers to societal problems primarily in terms of genetics and biology. They tend to be deterministic even in that understanding. They may actively propagandize against intermarriage between races. [correction: I think that’s a little broad. You might inveigh against intermarriage and still be a racialist. However, actively penalizing group members would make you a racist]. Their studies are usually confined to scholarship and reports produced by people of their same racial group. They show an inability to weigh alternative arguments or interpretation seriously. They rarely have extensive life experience or interaction with people of a different race….
This is something I haven’t finished thinking through..
And I am going to expand this post over the next two days to include pieces on Asian, Black, Hispanic racism, as well as Zionism …I am curious to see what the comparison might yield and whether the sharp rise in Stormfront’s membership is paralleled in the other groups. (Make that two weeks…)
Is this an off-shoot of immigration policies, the Internet, economic problems, crime….or some combination thereof..?
“In social insects, errors and randomness are not “bugs”; rather, they contribute very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment) and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).
With self-organization, the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence.
This is obviously a very different mindset from the prevailing approach to software development and to managing vast amounts of information: no central control, errors are good, flexibility, robustness (or self-repair). The big issue is this: if I am letting a decentralized, self-organizing system take over, say, my computer network, how should I program the individual virtual ants so that the network behaves appropriately at the system-wide level?”
Comment:
As usual social and economic theory are way behind science and technology. But then, they don’t have the DC monolith getting in their way…
The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before.
And about the incestuous love of the state and mercantilism by both right and left:
” Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism – the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the imperialists in England. [6] When, in the mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients……
Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I. [8]
The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality)…..”
“In spite of his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages, the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism and “Enlightenment” intervened. The liberals of the 19th century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great salvos against the State from political revolutions and from industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed with Thomas Paine that although “the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.”
You don’t have to be a genius to manage your money.
That’s the take from a new study of intelligence and wealth, which looked at thousands of baby boomers and found that those with average and low IQs were just as good at saving money as those with high IQs. At the same time, smart people were just about as likely to run into credit problems.
“If I were a person with low intelligence, I shouldn’t believe that I’m handicapped in any way, shape or form in achieving wealth,” said the study’s author, Jay Zagorsky, a research scientist at Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research. “Conversely, if I’m sort of high intelligence, I shouldn’t believe I have any kind of special advantage.
And you don’t need to earn a lot, to keep a lot or become an financially independent. I know people with $200,000 incomes who are broke or worse. Can’t say I feel too sorry, unless they were sick. And I know people who make under $25,000 who own their own homes, have stock investments, no debt and live reasonably well. Some of this is up to individual self-discipline and the ability to make sensible choices.
That said, it doesn’t help when the financial and professional classes (bankers, accountants, CPA’s, lawyers) abandon professional ethics and set out to snooker people…
Apropos some earlier comments from a reader on the Congo and how the best thing that ever happened to it was the Belgian empire (since the Belgians suppressed Congolese cannibalism):
(And that should put a dent in the idea that liking Western culture means you have to endorse imperialism)
“Leopold is too well known as a domestic person, as a family person,” said Mark Twain, facetiously, “as a king and a pirate, to believe what he says. He sits at home and drinks blood. His testimony is no good. The missionaries are to be believed. I have seen photographs of the natives with their hands cut off because the did not bring in the requited amount of rubber. If Leopold had only killed them outright it would not be so bad; but to cut off their hands and leave them helpless to die in misery–that is not forgivable.
“We’re interested in all this because we were the first country to give recognition to Leopold’s villainous Congo Free State in 1885.”
Mr. Clemens commented on some of the brutalities perpetrated by other nations on the natives of Africa and cited the Matabele war, in which the English massacred so many thousands of the Matabeles….”
And now some details about Leopold of the Congo:
KING LÉOPOLD II OF BELGIUM
Country: Congo Free State (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) and Belgium.
Kill tally: Five to 15 million Congolese (the indigenous inhabitants of the Congo River basin).
Background: The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cao reaches the Congo River in 1483. Commerce between the coastal Kongo Kingdom and Portugal quickly develops, with the trade in slaves soon coming to dominate all other exchanges. The Dutch begin to arrive in the 17th Century, to be followed by the French and British. As the influence of the Europeans steadily moves inland, the Congo River basin is raised in the imagination of the West, with the exploits of 19th Century explorers such as David Livingstone receiving wide publicity. More background.
Leopold Bio: Born on 9 April 1835 in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. He is the eldest son of Léopold I, first king of the Belgians. His full name is Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor.
Excerpts:
… Léopold continues to advocate his long-held belief that Belgium should become a colonial power. “I believe that the moment is come for us to extend our territories. I think that we must lose no time, under penalty of seeing the few remaining good positions seized upon by more enterprising nations than our own,” he says in 1860.
Over the next 20 years Léopold lobbies the Belgium Parliament to get a colony “in our turn.”
1876 – Léopold sponsors an international geographical conference in Brussels where he proposes the establishment of an international benevolent committee for the “propagation of civilisation among the peoples of the Congo region by means of scientific exploration, legal trade and war against the ‘Arabic’ slave traders.”
“To open to civilisation the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress,” Léopold says at the conference.
“I’m sure if I quite openly charged Stanley with the task of taking possession in my name of some part of Africa, the English will stop me,” Léopold says. “So I think I’ll just give Stanley some job of exploration which would offend no one, and will give us the bases and headquarters which we can take over later on.”**Léopold also tells Stanley, “It is a question of creating a new state, as big as possible, and of running it. It is clearly understood that in this project there is no question of granting the slightest political power to the Negroes. That would be absurd.”
**Over the next 23 years Léopold will amass a huge personal fortune by exploiting the Congo directly and by leasing concessions to private companies prepared to pay him 50% of their profits. The period will witness some of the worst atrocities ever committed on the African continent. However, Léopold will never visit the region, ruling instead by decree from Belgium.
***Ostensibly formed to put down the slave trade, the Force Publique, will quickly be turned on the Congolese.
***The Congolese will be systematically exploited and abused. Their forced labour will build the colony’s infrastructure, transport rubber and ivory from the interior to the river ports, and produce all the territory’s food. At the same time, they will be required to pay taxes to the state (a ‘provisions tax’ and a ‘rubber tax’). However, the remuneration they receive is completely arbitrary and inadequate and little of the revenue from the taxes is reinvested in the state.
***The Congolese are only allowed to trade with approved agents. To ensure that the maximum is squeezed out of each sector, the salaries of the agents are set at a bare minimum, with the bulk of their income coming from a commission on the rubber and ivory they supply. The agents in turn hire and arm African mercenaries, the so-called ‘Capitas’, to force the Congolese under their jurisdiction to work. Communities who refuse to be intimidated or who retaliate are brought into line by military “expeditions”.
**The general act ratified by the conference includes an article binding the signatories to “support and, if necessary, to serve as a refuge for the native populations; … to diminish intertribal wars by means of arbitration; … to raise them by civilisation and bring about the extinction of barbarous customs, such as cannibalism and human sacrifices; and, in giving aid to commercial enterprises, to watch over their legality, controlling especially the contracts for service entered into with natives.”
1891 – The price of rubber begins to increase following the invention of the inflatable rubber tire. The agents and concession holders exploiting the Congo’s wild rubber vines now stand to make enormous profits, with returns of up to 700% per year being reported.
To cash in on the opportunity, the Congolese labourers are squeezed further still. Local chiefs are required to supply men to collect the so-called ‘rubber tax’, with wives and children being held hostage and chiefs imprisoned until the men return with their quotas. The amount of rubber needed to meet the tax requires the men to work for up 25 days each month harvesting the wild rubber vines in the Congo forests. Failure to supply the quotas results in floggings, torture, and death.
**Resistance to Léopold’s rule again mounts and is again crushed, with local chiefs organising many uprisings. The Babua tribes revolt in 1903, 1904, and 1910, and the Budja in 1903 and 1905. In 1895 and 1897 the Force Publique mutinies.At its peak, the Force Publique numbers about 19,000 African conscripts, led by about 420 European officers. The force commits many atrocities to terrorise the Congolese into complying with Léopold’s ever-increasing demands. Villages are burned, and men, women and children are indiscriminately slaughtered or forced into slavery.
**To prove the success of their patrols, Force Publique soldiers are ordered to cut off and bring back a dead victim’s right hand for every bullet fired. The soldiers resort to cutting off the hands of the living to ensure that the number of spent cartridges tallies with the number of preserved hands. They are also reported to engage in cannibalism.
The headquarters of Force Publique leader Leon Rom exemplifies the gruesome nature of the regime. The fence surrounding Rom’s office bears a severed native head on each slat, and the garden contains a rockery full of rotting heads.
The terror campaign succeeds and Léopold’s profits soar….”
First, using abhorrent cultural practices to justify the colonial invasion of a country is nothing new: it was a justification used by the British over the veiling of women. The treatment of women (for eg. the stoning of adultrous women) in Islamic countries today was also used as one of the many pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and for current neocolonial policies there.
Second point, cannibalism occurs in different contexts. You notice that two of those contexts (famine and mental illness) still obtain in modern Western societies, even if the others don’t.
“Care should be taken to distinguish among ritual cannibalism sanctioned by a cultural code, cannibalism by necessity occurring in extreme situations of famine, and cannibalism by mentally disturbed people. ”
Third point. There is some evidence that cannibalism may have been a practice common in the human past. It has been practiced by cultures all over the world, in ancient and in modern times. And memories of it remain in religious practices even in the major religions.
According to wiki (which also gives examples of Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Liberian, Aztec, and even American anthropophagy), a British tribe reportedly practiced it:
St. Jerome, in his letter Against Jovinianus, tells of meeting members of a British tribe, the Atticoti, while traveling in Gaul. According to Jerome, the Britons claimed that they enjoyed eating “the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women” as a delicacy (ca. 360 AD). In 2001, archaeologists at the University of Bristol found evidence of Iron Age cannibalism in Gloucestershire.[11]
Charges of cannibalism were common in the blood libel against Jews, and evidence of cannibalism among tribal people was often exaggerated to dehumanize them and win popular support for mass killings, expropriation of their land and enslavement. If you tot up the deaths from cannibalism (it was frequently ritualistic and occurred in a cultural context that lent meaning to the practice — so it can’t be seen as solely murderous) among the Congolese at the hands of their own against deaths at the hands of their civilizers, there’s no doubt what the numbers would show.
An analogy. Reportedly there are around 5000 honor killings (not exact) a year around the world. But using those 5000 killings to initiate wars and economic policies that kill or mutilate millions and ruins tens of millions more sounds like a pretty flimsy and immoral pretext.
Apart from that, if you were to balance those 5000 honor killings against the innumerably greater number of rapes and other forms of street crimes against women in Western countries (there are almost no street crimes of that nature in Saudi Arabia, for example) — you would get a clearer idea of the disingenuousness of such arguments.
As a further example, the US has among the highest rates of infanticide (a practice that was widely prevalent in many cultures until the advent of birth control)
[Update: According to Laila Williamson, for infants less than one year, the American homicide rate was 11th in the world in 1998, while for one through four it is 1st, and for five through fourteen it was fourth. From 1968 to 1975, infanticide of all ages constituted nearly 3.2% of all reported homicides in the United States].
Now, would some foreign country have been justified in bombing American civilians en masse because of this? I think not…
But that’s the power of propaganda. It gets otherwise rational people to swallow patent absurdities and go charging off the cliff because some government/corporate hack told them to on TV…
The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply unnerving. Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to destroy the arsenal of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah, the Party of God, and force its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to return two kidnapped soldiers and end its cross-border rocket attacks. “If the soldiers are not returned,” Dan Halutz, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff, said at the time, “we will turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years.” Israel bombed the runways of the Beirut airport, the Beirut-Damascus highway, and numerous towns, mainly in the south; Hezbollah, from a network of guerrilla installations and tunnel networks worthy of the Vietcong, launched some four thousand rockets, mainly Katyushas, at cities in northern Israel. Israel degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities, at least temporarily, but there was no victory. Hezbollah survived and, in the eyes of the Islamic world, in doing so won; Nasrallah emerged as an iconic hero; and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, one of his sponsors, called yet again for the elimination of Israel from the map of the Middle East. Halutz, who had dumped all his stocks on the eve of the war, resigned, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, saw his approval rating fall to as low as two per cent.
More recently, Hezbollah’s ideological ally in Palestine, Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—led a violent uprising in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming its secular rival, Fatah. Suddenly, Israel, backed by the United States, found itself propping up the Fatah leadership, in order not to lose the West Bank to Hamas as well. Not even the ceremonial office of the Israeli Presidency was immune from the year’s disasters: a few weeks ago, President Moshe Katsav agreed to plead guilty to multiple sexual offences and resign, lest he face trial for rape. Despite a resilient, even booming economy, peace and stability have rarely seemed so distant.
In this atmosphere of post-traumatic gloom, Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, managed to inflame the Israeli public (left, right, and center) with little more than an interview in the liberal daily Ha’aretz, promoting his recent book, “Defeating Hitler.” Short of being Prime Minister, Burg could not be higher in the Zionist establishment. His father was a Cabinet minister for nearly four decades, serving under Prime Ministers from David Ben-Gurion to Shimon Peres. In addition to a decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg had also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. “Defeating Hitler” and an earlier book, “God Is Back,” are, in combination, a despairing look at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority….”
Mob violence remains a monthly occurrence in modern India; it gives the lie to our claims of political maturity and democratic development.
By SUBROTO ROY
First published in The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Dec 10 2006
www.thestatesman.net
republished www.independentindian.com
Mob violence certainly signals collapse of the Rule of Law and absence of normal political conversation and decision-making. Mob violence in modern India remains a monthly occurrence: a child is killed by a speeding bus, the driver if he is caught is thrashed to death by a mob of onlookers and the bus burnt down; a factory closes and workers go on a rampage; a statue or political personality or religious figure is perceived to have been insulted or desecrated, and crowds take to the streets to burn vehicles and cause mayhem; a procession is said to be insulted, and rival mobs go to battle with one another. (In fact, elected legislators in Parliament and State Assemblies frequently conflate mob behaviour like slogan-shouting with political conversation itself, carrying into the House the political methods they have learned to employ outside it. And contrary to what our legislators may suppose, they do need to be constantly lectured to by the general citizenry whose paid servants they are supposed to be).
Such may be relatively simple cases to describe or diagnose. More complex cases include the deliberate burning alive of Graham Staines and his two young sons by a mob in 1999 as they slept in their vehicle in rural Orissa, or countless deeds of similar savagery during Partition and the innumerable other riots we have seen in the history of our supposedly tolerant and non-violent culture.
We are not unique in our propensity for evil. French women knitted and gossiped watching the guillotine do its bloody work during the Jacobin terror. Long before them, as the Catholic scholar Eamon Duffy reports in Faith of our fathers, Pope Gregory IX in 1233 had initiated the “Inquisition”: two anonymous witnesses could cause any person to be arrested as a heretic, tortured and then burnt alive. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII endorsed “witches” to be burnt, causing “deaths of countless thousands of harmless or eccentric women over the next 300 years. In all, as many as 25,000 people, most of them women may have been burnt as witches in Germany” alone. American history has seen countless cases of mob violence, from witch-burnings and other religious violence to cold-blooded lynching on trees of individual black men by white mobs, black mobs looting inner cities, street clashes between political groups etc. Soviet Russia and Maoist China saw systematic ideologically driven violence by Party cadres and “Red Guards” against countless individuals ~ forced to confess to imaginary misdeeds, then assaulted or shot. Nazi Germany, Czarist Russia and many other countries saw mobs attacking, dispossessing or killing individual Jews and innumerable others, again in systematic ideologically motivated pogroms. Indeed as Hannah Arendt and others have noted, the similarities between totalitarian regimes as outwardly different as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia or Communist China included the ideologically driven targeting of identifiable small minorities for systematic violence by majorities in power. Even Tony Blair’s supposedly Cool Britannia today, besides having the most notorious soccer hooligans in the world, is also a place where no individual, non-white or white, will pass a drunken mob of adolescent school-children on the streets on a Friday night without trepidation.
Every case of mob violence is different; yet what could be common is a temporary, if deliberate, suspension of the normal human sense of responsibility on part of a mob’s individual members. Reason and responsibility return if at all only after the evil has been accomplished ~ whether it is killing or assaulting someone or destroying something ~ and it can be accompanied by a sense of remorse and regret. Even where mob tyranny has been systematic, long-term, ideologically-driven and state-sponsored, as with the Inquisition or French Revolution or Nazi, Soviet or Chinese terrors, future generations look back at the past misdeeds of their ancestors and say: “That was wrong, very wrong, it should never have happened”. Moral learning does take place at some time or other, even if it is long after the evil has occurred. It is as if, when sobriety and rationality return, an individual participant in a mob realises and recognises himself/herself to have revealed a baser ignoble side which is shameful.
“Sometimes a society acts as if all power lay in the hands of the most babyish and animal members, and sometimes as if all power lay in the hands of strict old men, and sometimes it acts more as a whole ~ mostly when there’s a war on. Sometimes a man is not himself and acts as if a babyish or cunning animal had gained control ~ that’s the id ~ sometimes as if an exacting parent, a sarcastic schoolmaster, or an implacable deity possessed him ~ that’s the super-ego. Sometimes a man is more himself and acts more as a whole, a new whole which is not a combination but a synthesis of the id and the super-ego. Some are constantly at the mercy of the id, some are slaves to the super- ego, and in some first one and then the other gains an unhappy victory in a continual struggle, and in some conflict and control have vanished into cooperation…” Such was the description the Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom gave in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, when he translated into normal idiomatic language some of the difficult technical findings and theories of the mind propounded by Sigmund Freud in the previous half-century.
When the mob forms itself, its members individually choose to suppress their normal rational personalities and sense of adult responsibility, and permit instead their cunning animal or babyish instincts to take over and reign supreme within themselves. It must be a collective decision even if silently taken: for one person to behave in such a manner would look identifiably stupid and criminal but for him/her to do so in a group where everyone has simultaneously decided to abandon reason (whether spontaneously or shouting slogans together) allows the loss of individual responsibility to become hidden in the mass, and the collective to take on features of a hydra-headed monster, capable of the vilest deeds without the slightest self-doubt. The victim of their violence or abuse will often be an individual who stands out in some way ~ perhaps by natural or social attributes or even by heroic deeds: indeed Freud suggested that primitive tribes sometimes engaged in parricide and regicide, cannibalising their individual heroes in the belief that by consuming something of the hero’s remains those attributes might magically reappear in themselves.
In modern India, the presence of mob violence on a monthly basis somewhere or other in the country gives the lie to our claims of maturity of our political and democratic development. Those posing as our political leaders may make as many foreign trips and wooden prepared speeches on TV as they wish to, but their actual cowardice is manifest in having failed to address the real disjunction that exists in this country between political interests and political preferences at the grassroots on the one hand, and the lack of serious parliamentary conversation addressing these within our representative institutions on the other. The reliance by the Executive on often brutal police or paramilitary forces reflects failure of the Legislative and Judicial branches of our Government, as well as a lack of balance between them arising from our political and constitutional immaturity.
Update: I’m adding the section in “Mobs” that I wrote about the British empire.
Here’s the section, it’s in “Flattening the Globe,” Chapter 10 (my solo chapters in the book are 4, 5, 10, 11, with one section in 4 by Bonner. 3, 9, and 17 are joint, and I wrote sections within Bonner’s solo chapters, 7,12, 15).
The Angelic Empire
Globalization gurus like Friedman are always quick to point out that the phenomenon is not new. Some leading pontificators on the subject think we are in the third wave of it, the first having begun in the Age of Exploration, with Columbus and Magellan. Others think globalization only goes back to the heyday of the British Empire, in the mid nineteenth century. What all of them are united on, however, is that it is a good thing because it is free trade between free people. And it is an inevitable thing, they say, because it is a force of nature, a call of destiny, a historical imperative.
It is The Way Things Ought to Be.
When pushed further, the gurus will tell you why they think this. They will tell you that globalization is also The Way Things Have Been Before. They will point out to you the British Empire. That, they will say, is what globalization looked like once. That’s how it worked once. And since what the Romans were to the Greeks, we are to the British, that’s also where we should be heading. After all, wasn’t the British Empire, indisputably, A Good Thing?
Was it?
Were the British the one (and only) angelic imperialists? We are not in a position to say, one way or other, nor do we think we will ever be in such a position, but we offer a caveat to the argument itself: If what we had under the British Empire was globalization, then whatever globalization was, it was not free trade. And we also offer a corollary to the caveat: If what we are looking for is free trade, then the British Empire is not what we should be imitating. For, whatever trade it was that took place under the Empire was from the beginning not free but wrapped up in force…and fraud…plenty of it.
Take the way in which the Indian state of Bengal passed into the hands of the East India Company. The salient fact was that a clerk-turned soldier-adventurer, Robert Clive, managed to defeat a vastly larger Bengali army. How? Was it by superior skill…advanced technology? Not at all. The Muslim ruler (Nawab) of Bengal had insulted a fabulously wealthy Hindu merchant, who controlled the flow of goods to the ports of Bengal. In revenge, the merchant led a group of his fellow traders to talk the Nawab’s generals into negotiating with the English. The treacherous general threw away the Battle of Plassey and received the ruler-ship of Bengal in return. The Company then became the rent collector for the area. Within a few years, they acquired the right to collect revenue for the whole of North-East India[i]
Plassey was the cornerstone of British imperial rule and it made Clive one of the icons of the Empire. But, it was simply a fraud…the outcome of Clive’s treachery toward the local ruler whom he had first befriended.
As for the benevolence of the British empire, consider this: In the first half of the 19th century, there were seven famines in India, leading to a million and a half deaths. In the second half, after Victoria was crowned Empress of India (1877), there were 24 (18 between 1876 and 1900), causing over 20 million deaths (according to official records), up to 40 million according to others, or between 12-29 million, according to a recent scholar.[ii]
As early as 1901, W. R. Digby, noted in “Prosperous British India” that “stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread.”
The British mission civilisatrice took perverse forms. During the famines of 1877 and 1878, the British viceroy, Lord Lytton actually had merchants export millions of hundredweight of wheat to England. Lytton, whose father was the well-known novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, seems to have been certifiably insane. He passed “The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act” of 1877, which prohibited, “at the pain of imprisonment,” “private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” Those who worked in the labor camps were reportedly fed less than the inmates of Buchenwald. Women and children were “branded, tortured, had their noses cut off, and were sometimes killed,” – a circumstance regarded with equanimity by the British governor, who subscribed to the Malthusian notion that famine was nature’s way of keeping the Indians from over breeding. Meanwhile, funds were available for extravagant celebrations of Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India.[iii] And the viceroy even ran “a militarized campaign” to tax those who survived to raise funds for the empire’s ongoing war in Afghanistan. So finally, even in the North West – which had crop surpluses – 1.25 million people died.
Yet, so powerful are myths that even the victims buy into them. Long after India became independent, we recall a grand-uncle reminiscing fondly about his days recruiting for the famed British army, although by then its history was already studded with imbecilities like the invasion of Kabul in 1842. The invasion is legendary now for the incompetence of its leader. It should be remembered equally for the incompetence of those who appointed him in the first place. The appointment casts some doubts about the pukka-ness of the pukka British administration. Major-General William Elphinstone, the hapless commander, actually tried to turn down the job, but it was no use. The Governor General of India – at the time Lord Auckland – was determined he should go. He went, and it cost him his life.
“Elphy Bey” (bey is the Turkish term for commander) was a gentle, doddering old fool. And coming apart at the seams. Just sixty, the ailments he suffered from could have filled a small hospital ward. He was mentally incompetent…and incontinent……flatulent…. and gouty…and his rheumatism was so bad that he was crippled and had to be carried everywhere on a litter. And to top it off, his arm was in a sling. Afghanistan, with its ferocious climate and even more ferocious warriors, was no place for the soft, senile general who had been retired on half-pay since acquitting himself – creditably it seems –at Waterloo. But Auckland was determined to take Afghanistan, and thus, in 1839 the Afghan amir, Dost Mohammed, was driven into hiding. He was replaced by another incompetent, Shah Suja and British garrisons were left at the capital, Kabul, as well as all along the route back to India.
Unfortunately, the new cantonment at Kabul provoked the suspicion of the Afghan rebels, led by the old amir’s son. The British were there to stay for a while, he thought, and began to look for ways to strike at them.
He did not have to look for long. The cantonment was located in a low swampy area, which presented an easy target to the rebels swarming in the hills and forts around. The circumference of the place was too great to be defended and all the supply stores were outside. The British might just as well have sent out an engraved invitation to the enemy to seize their supplies and starve the population inside. Which is precisely what happened.
“You will have nothing to do here. All is peace,” opined the outgoing commander when Elphy Bey and his main man, the brutal and belligerent Brigadier John Shelton, arrived. It was a singularly inaccurate prediction.
Not long thereafter, a brigade returning to India was besieged. Then, when Elphinstone’s health took a turn for the worse and the Governor General had to send out a replacement for him, he too was attacked and forced to hole up in a fortress.
The Kabul cantonment seems to have turned into the nineteenth century version of Iraq’s Green Zone. No one could go outside without drawing fire, and even inside, soldiers were constantly being gunned down.In short order, the British Resident and his staff were polished off by the rebels. Then, the supply stores were pillaged, leaving those inside the cantonment with only about three days worth of food.
Not content with a broken arm, poor Elphy tried mounting his horse and fell off. Then he hurt his leg, when the beast decided – perhaps with some justification –to step on it. That may have sent the old man straight out of his mind, because he now started begging for more ammunition to be sent around, although there was actually enough left for a year. By then, all he knew about the military situation was what random civilians were telling him, for Shelton was keeping mum and treating him with unrelenting scorn. The old man had to make do with Councils of War where almost anyone would wander in and say anything they wanted. Junior officers lectured their seniors. Civilians offered their advice unsolicited to the soldiers. In the midst of it all lay Shelton on his bedding, snoring… to show his contempt for the whole proceeding.
But Shelton was hardly a military genius himself.Once, he led his men to no more than 20 paces from the Afghans and fired. When not one enemy soldier, or even horse, was killed, the Brits were forced to turn and flee. Another time, the idiot ordered his soldiers to fall into squares so concentrated and tidy that the Afghans, who were experts at hitting targets that were scattered and hidden, thought they were getting a Ramadan gift. Each of their bullets sent a small handful of the poor Englishmen tumbling like bowling pins. Sheldon, who had compounded this criminal performance by taking with him only one cannon when British Army regulations – with good reason – mandated two, soon found it too hot to operate. He had to fall back on muskets. But these were so poorly handled that the Afghans actually managed to get to point-blank range unscathed. By then the Shelton’s men were down to throwing stones. But, their wretched leader still held on pig-headedly. Finding themselves being picked off one by one, the soldiers finally came to their senses and fled, pointedly ignoring even Elphy’s attempts to rally them. The punch line of the whole business came when they learned that they had been driven back not by Afghanistan’s notorious warriors but by a bunch of Kabul shopkeepers.
The farce degenerated further. Elphinstone got himself shot…of all places, in the buttocks. The British Envoy, unable to stand things any longer, took it on himself to make nice to the head of the rebels. For his pains, he was assassinated and his head and torso skewered like a kebab and paraded through Kabul. Elphy, a world-class ditherer, now made the worst decision yet of his life. In return for Afghan guarantees of safe conduct he agreed that the cantonment would return to Jalalabad in India. They would go through the Khyber Pass, the infamous point of entry of every conqueror….in mid winter.
And so, 16,000 men, women, and children marched through snow a foot deep, on the orders of a senile general. Along the way, tribesmen from every neighboring village, including children, taunted, harassed and picked them off like ripe plums. At the end of all the hacking and butchering, Elphinstone was dead and so was every European except the Surgeon-General. But the British got their revenge in time. Elphinstone’s replacement, General Nott, finally extricated himself from his corner, marched to Kabul and burned down its famous bazaar.
Still, even then, the luckless Elphy could get no peace. On the way to Jalalabad, his coffin, decorously prepared by the new amir, was ambushed by tribesmen. They cracked it open, stripped the body and pelted it with stones. The amir had to send out another expedition before the dimwitted general was allowed to go to his rest with full…and completely undeserved… military honors.[iv]
The story of Elphy Bey was not unusual. Wherever the empire-builders succeeded, it was most often in spite of incompetence. It was force and fraud…and some luck… not genius. If there is a grand design in anything they did, it eludes us.
[i]Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, K. M. Panikkar, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953, pp. 78-9.
[ii]Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, Famines, and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis, New York: Verso, 2001.
[iv]The Brassey’s Book of Military Blunders, Geoffrey Regan, Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 2000, pp. 31-34.
The Angelic Empire
Globalization gurus like Friedman are always quick to point out that the phenomenon is not new. Some leading pontificators on the subject think we are in the third wave of it, the first having begun in the Age of Exploration, with Columbus and Magellan. Others think globalization only goes back to the heyday of the British Empire, in the mid nineteenth century. What all of them are united on, however, is that it is a good thing because it is free trade between free people. And it is an inevitable thing, they say, because it is a force of nature, a call of destiny, a historical imperative.
It is The Way Things Ought to Be.
When pushed further, the gurus will tell you why they think this. They will tell you that globalization is also The Way Things Have Been Before. They will point out to you the British Empire. That, they will say, is what globalization looked like once. That’s how it worked once. And since what the Romans were to the Greeks, we are to the British, that’s also where we should be heading. After all, wasn’t the British Empire, indisputably, A Good Thing?
Was it?
Were the British the one (and only) angelic imperialists? We are not in a position to say, one way or other, nor do we think we will ever be in such a position, but we offer a caveat to the argument itself: If what we had under the British Empire was globalization, then whatever globalization was, it was not free trade. And we also offer a corollary to the caveat: If what we are looking for is free trade, then the British Empire is not what we should be imitating. For, whatever trade it was that took place under the Empire was from the beginning not free but wrapped up in force…and fraud…plenty of it.
Take the way in which the Indian state of Bengal passed into the hands of the East India Company. The salient fact was that a clerk-turned soldier-adventurer, Robert Clive, managed to defeat a vastly larger Bengali army. How? Was it by superior skill…advanced technology? Not at all. The Muslim ruler (Nawab) of Bengal had insulted a fabulously wealthy Hindu merchant, who controlled the flow of goods to the ports of Bengal. In revenge, the merchant led a group of his fellow traders to talk the Nawab’s generals into negotiating with the English. The treacherous general threw away the Battle of Plassey and received the ruler-ship of Bengal in return. The Company then became the rent collector for the area. Within a few years, they acquired the right to collect revenue for the whole of North-East India[i]
Plassey was the cornerstone of British imperial rule and it made Clive one of the icons of the Empire. But, it was simply a fraud…the outcome of Clive’s treachery toward the local ruler whom he had first befriended.
As for the benevolence of the British empire, consider this: In the first half of the 19th century, there were seven famines in India, leading to a million and a half deaths. In the second half, after Victoria was crowned Empress of India (1877), there were 24 (18 between 1876 and 1900), causing over 20 million deaths (according to official records), up to 40 million according to others, or between 12-29 million, according to a recent scholar.[ii]
As early as 1901, W. R. Digby, noted in “Prosperous British India” that “stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread.”
The British mission civilisatrice took perverse forms. During the famines of 1877 and 1878, the British viceroy, Lord Lytton actually had merchants export millions of hundredweight of wheat to England. Lytton, whose father was the well-known novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, seems to have been certifiably insane. He passed “The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act” of 1877, which prohibited, “at the pain of imprisonment,” “private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” Those who worked in the labor camps were reportedly fed less than the inmates of Buchenwald. Women and children were “branded, tortured, had their noses cut off, and were sometimes killed,” – a circumstance regarded with equanimity by the British governor, who subscribed to the Malthusian notion that famine was nature’s way of keeping the Indians from over breeding. Meanwhile, funds were available for extravagant celebrations of Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India.[iii] And the viceroy even ran “a militarized campaign” to tax those who survived to raise funds for the empire’s ongoing war in Afghanistan. So finally, even in the North West – which had crop surpluses – 1.25 million people died.
Yet, so powerful are myths that even the victims buy into them. Long after India became independent, we recall a grand-uncle reminiscing fondly about his days recruiting for the famed British army, although by then its history was already studded with imbecilities like the invasion of Kabul in 1842. The invasion is legendary now for the incompetence of its leader. It should be remembered equally for the incompetence of those who appointed him in the first place. The appointment casts some doubts about the pukka-ness of the pukka British administration. Major-General William Elphinstone, the hapless commander, actually tried to turn down the job, but it was no use. The Governor General of India – at the time Lord Auckland – was determined he should go. He went, and it cost him his life.
“Elphy Bey” (bey is the Turkish term for commander) was a gentle, doddering old fool. And coming apart at the seams. Just sixty, the ailments he suffered from could have filled a small hospital ward. He was mentally incompetent…and incontinent……flatulent…. and gouty…and his rheumatism was so bad that he was crippled and had to be carried everywhere on a litter. And to top it off, his arm was in a sling. Afghanistan, with its ferocious climate and even more ferocious warriors, was no place for the soft, senile general who had been retired on half-pay since acquitting himself – creditably it seems –at Waterloo. But Auckland was determined to take Afghanistan, and thus, in 1839 the Afghan amir, Dost Mohammed, was driven into hiding. He was replaced by another incompetent, Shah Suja and British garrisons were left at the capital, Kabul, as well as all along the route back to India.
Unfortunately, the new cantonment at Kabul provoked the suspicion of the Afghan rebels, led by the old amir’s son. The British were there to stay for a while, he thought, and began to look for ways to strike at them.
He did not have to look for long. The cantonment was located in a low swampy area, which presented an easy target to the rebels swarming in the hills and forts around. The circumference of the place was too great to be defended and all the supply stores were outside. The British might just as well have sent out an engraved invitation to the enemy to seize their supplies and starve the population inside. Which is precisely what happened.
“You will have nothing to do here. All is peace,” opined the outgoing commander when Elphy Bey and his main man, the brutal and belligerent Brigadier John Shelton, arrived. It was a singularly inaccurate prediction.
Not long thereafter, a brigade returning to India was besieged. Then, when Elphinstone’s health took a turn for the worse and the Governor General had to send out a replacement for him, he too was attacked and forced to hole up in a fortress.
The Kabul cantonment seems to have turned into the nineteenth century version of Iraq’s Green Zone. No one could go outside without drawing fire, and even inside, soldiers were constantly being gunned down.In short order, the British Resident and his staff were polished off by the rebels. Then, the supply stores were pillaged, leaving those inside the cantonment with only about three days worth of food.
Not content with a broken arm, poor Elphy tried mounting his horse and fell off. Then he hurt his leg, when the beast decided – perhaps with some justification –to step on it. That may have sent the old man straight out of his mind, because he now started begging for more ammunition to be sent around, although there was actually enough left for a year. By then, all he knew about the military situation was what random civilians were telling him, for Shelton was keeping mum and treating him with unrelenting scorn. The old man had to make do with Councils of War where almost anyone would wander in and say anything they wanted. Junior officers lectured their seniors. Civilians offered their advice unsolicited to the soldiers. In the midst of it all lay Shelton on his bedding, snoring… to show his contempt for the whole proceeding.
But Shelton was hardly a military genius himself.Once, he led his men to no more than 20 paces from the Afghans and fired. When not one enemy soldier, or even horse, was killed, the Brits were forced to turn and flee. Another time, the idiot ordered his soldiers to fall into squares so concentrated and tidy that the Afghans, who were experts at hitting targets that were scattered and hidden, thought they were getting a Ramadan gift. Each of their bullets sent a small handful of the poor Englishmen tumbling like bowling pins. Sheldon, who had compounded this criminal performance by taking with him only one cannon when British Army regulations – with good reason – mandated two, soon found it too hot to operate. He had to fall back on muskets. But these were so poorly handled that the Afghans actually managed to get to point-blank range unscathed. By then the Shelton’s men were down to throwing stones. But, their wretched leader still held on pig-headedly. Finding themselves being picked off one by one, the soldiers finally came to their senses and fled, pointedly ignoring even Elphy’s attempts to rally them. The punch line of the whole business came when they learned that they had been driven back not by Afghanistan’s notorious warriors but by a bunch of Kabul shopkeepers.
The farce degenerated further. Elphinstone got himself shot…of all places, in the buttocks. The British Envoy, unable to stand things any longer, took it on himself to make nice to the head of the rebels. For his pains, he was assassinated and his head and torso skewered like a kebab and paraded through Kabul. Elphy, a world-class ditherer, now made the worst decision yet of his life. In return for Afghan guarantees of safe conduct he agreed that the cantonment would return to Jalalabad in India. They would go through the Khyber Pass, the infamous point of entry of every conqueror….in mid winter.
And so, 16,000 men, women, and children marched through snow a foot deep, on the orders of a senile general. Along the way, tribesmen from every neighboring village, including children, taunted, harassed and picked them off like ripe plums. At the end of all the hacking and butchering, Elphinstone was dead and so was every European except the Surgeon-General. But the British got their revenge in time. Elphinstone’s replacement, General Nott, finally extricated himself from his corner, marched to Kabul and burned down its famous bazaar.
Still, even then, the luckless Elphy could get no peace. On the way to Jalalabad, his coffin, decorously prepared by the new amir, was ambushed by tribesmen. They cracked it open, stripped the body and pelted it with stones. The amir had to send out another expedition before the dimwitted general was allowed to go to his rest with full…and completely undeserved… military honors.[iv]
The story of Elphy Bey was not unusual. Wherever the empire-builders succeeded, it was most often in spite of incompetence. It was force and fraud…and some luck… not genius. If there is a grand design in anything they did, it eludes us
[i]Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, K. M. Panikkar, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1953, pp. 78-9.
[ii]Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, Famines, and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis, New York: Verso, 2001.
[iv]The Brassey’s Book of Military Blunders, Geoffrey Regan, Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 2000, pp. 31-34.
ll my writing gives full credit to my co-author. (As an author and former academic I know as well as anyone the dangers of improper attribution, quite apart from the ethics of it)
As always, it was only libertarians on the right who saw through the pretensions of what neoconservatives today avow was the one and only “good” empire — on which America ought to model itself.. In fact, IS modeling itself.
So, let’s take a look at what that empire actually did (caveat: this piece is from the socialist press, so it makes no distinction between the mercantilist policies of today’s capitalism and a real free market; it also tends to simplify the actual interaction of race and religion with state policies — it’s downright wrong on that in some places but the facts are not in dispute):
“Tax collections rose even as millions died of man-made famines. Like Bengal of 1770-72. The East India Company’s own report put it simply. The famine in that province “exceeds all description.” Close to ten million people had died, as Rajni Palme-Dutt pointed out in his remarkable book, India Today. The Company noted that more than a third of the populace had perished in the province of Purnea. “And in other parts the misery is equal.”Yet, Warren Hastings wrote to the directors of the East India Company in 1772: “Notwithstanding the loss of at least one-third of the inhabitants of this province, and the consequent decrease in cultivation, the net collections of the year 1771 exceeded even those of [pre-famine] 1768.” Hastings was clear on why and how this was achieved. It was “owing to [tax collection] being violently kept up to its former standard.”
The Company itself, as Palme Dutt observed, was smug about this. It noted that despite “the severity of the late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase has been made” in the collections.
Between 24 million and 29 million Indians, maybe more, died in famines in the era of British good governance. Many of these famines were policy-driven. Millions died of callous and wilful neglect. The victims of Malthusian rulers. Over 6 million humans perished in just 1876 — when Madras was a hell. Many others had their lives shortened by ruthless exploitation and plunder. Well before the Great Bengal Famine, the report of that province’s Director for Health for 1927-28 made grisly reading. It noted that “the present peasantry of Bengal are in a very large proportion taking to a dietary on which even rats could not live for more than five weeks.” By 1931, life expectancy in India was sharply down. It was now 23.2 and 22.8 years for men and women. Less than half that of those living in England and Wales. (Palme-Dutt.)
Mike Davis’ stunning book, Late Victorian Holocausts, also ought to be required reading in every Indian school. Davis gives us a scathing account, for instance, of the Viceroy Lord Lytton. Lytton was the most ardent free-marketeer of his time — and Queen Victoria’s favourite poet. He “vehemently opposed efforts … to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organising the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India.” The weeklong feast for 68,000 guests, points out Davis, was an orgy of excess. It proved to be “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history.” Through the same week as this spectacular durbar, “100,000 of the Queen Empress’ subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore” alone.
In fact, barring the scale, it all sounds depressingly like the present. In terms of ideology and principle at least. The Raj nostalgia of today’s neo-liberals is quite heart-felt. .
Cannon fodder
Yes, there’s that, too. British good governance killed more than those tens of millions in famines. Countless numbers of Indians died in wars waged for, by, and against the British. Over 8,000 died in the single battle around Kut in Iraq in 1916. London used them as canon fodder in its desperate search for a success against the Turks after the rout at Gallipoli. When there were no Indians around, the British sacrificed other captive peoples. “Waste the Irish” was the term used by an English officer when sending out troops on a suicidal mission.
In his book Global Capitalism and India, C.T. Kurien gives us a stark example of British-led globalisation from the 1860s. The civil war in America had hurt the flow of cheap, slave-labour cotton to Britain. So the Raj forced the growing of that crop here on a much larger scale than before. “From then on, commercialisation of agriculture continued to gain momentum. Between the last decade of the 19th century and the middle of the twentieth, when food production in India declined by 7 per cent, that of commercial crops increased by 85 per cent. Widespread and regular famines became a recurring feature during this period…….
Again, while the scale is wholly different, the parallels are odd. In June this year, we could see Montek Singh Ahluwalia speaking solemnly of problems, even a crisis in agriculture. (Gee! I wonder who told him.) These headaches, he feels, go to back to the mid-1990s. No mention of who was shaping the ghoulish policies of that — and the present — period. And no questions asked about it in the media. There’s good governance for you. Welcome back, Lytton. All is forgiven, come home.”
I am not fond of the reiteration of the terms “White” and “Christian” in this piece — though color and religion probably exacerbated attitudes toward the peasantry and even to some of the Indian elites. It’s a fact, however, that racial attitudes were strengthened only AFTER the establishment of imperial “good governance” and not in the early history of the British East India company, the entity that began this whole remarkable mercantilist conquest. And obviously I don’t sympathize with the idea that more government interference is the needed prescription.
But still, the Davis’ book is a welcome antidote to the neoconservative glorification of the British empire (as in Niall Ferguson’s poorly-sourced coffee table primer – “Empire.”
Not as dreadful as Hitler or Stalin or Mao is not good, and as you can see, the death toll from the famines was certainly up there as far as sheer numbers go.
You can’t equate intentionally killing vast numbers of people with deaths from famines that were set off at first by climate conditions (hmmm….does Davis have an axe to grind?) and dreadfully worsened by pitiless and incompetent policies. And I’m not really sure what the use of the word ‘holocaust’ was intended to do here, either. An intentionally murderous policy is not the same as horrible mismanagement and callousness. Still, at a certain level, if you go ahead knowing what’s going to happen, you can’t hide behind “intention” after that. Driving a truck through a classroom without “intending” to kill children is something of a self-contradiction, I would think. Collateral damage you calculate before hand and discount counts as intended.
That aside, Davis has shone some light on a history that many people simply don’t know.
When Americans take up the imperial purple from the British empire, they should read about its darker side. However admirable English culture, laws, and civil society may be, they were not made so by empire, but undermined by it.
In fact, as I pointed out, racial feelings only seriously developed after the imperial state had administrative charge of the whole of the country – after very decent, well-meaning British civil servants had been sent out to man the apparatus of government. Many of them were of a much higher caliber than the corrupt merchant adventurers of the earlier centures — true. But the record seems to show that in spite of that, racism really came into the mix only later in imperial history, not earlier. It was a theoretical justification for the overwhelming inequality between rulers and ruled by the nineteenth century.
In any case, whenever it developed (most probably in the 19th century), it seems to me to have been exacerbated by the expansion of the empire.
You can admire British culture, literature and science but still see this. British culture and society are not the same thing as the British empire and they never needed to have been.
No matter what Dinesh D’Souza says.
Mark Twain had it right.
“Now considered the quintessential American novelist, yet he too was called a traitor for opposing the annexation of the Philippines. Twain was thought un-American. ‘Shall we?’ he asked, attacking McKinley’s foreign policy. ‘Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first?’
Update: What about the benefits of British rule, you might ask? There were some. The railroads, for one example. But at what expense did the Indians get railroads? And couldn’t they have got them from, industrialization, free trade (and free trade is NOT mercantilism) and competition just as well? They could have got all the cultural benefits without the murderous sideshow.
Do I deny that culture plays a big role in things? Not at all. What I do deny is that you need an aggressive state to foster the kinds of civic associations and laws needed for culture to grow.
As for Social Darwinism and statism being opposed — you only have to look at policies where the state actively intervenes to prop up the financial classes, while it lets the rest sink or swim — you can have both going on at the same time. The powerful get bail-outs, handouts, while the rest get the law of the jungle. Note – the powerful doesn’t always mean the rich. I mean those who have the state to mop up their mistakes and shove their costs on to other people.
Look – the free market always assumes you already have laws and morality. Where statists are mistaken is to think you need a modern bureaucracy and a standing army for laws and morality to exist…
Nothing can keep Ron Paul
From making his biggest house call:
So, let Obama girl shake it,
And Hillary fake it-
Bet the Doc cleans their clocks next fall.
The media has put out the idea that somehow Ron Paul isn’t right for our national security. Really? I wonder how much these critics know about Al Qaeda, our real interests, strategy or world politics.
Contrary to the obfuscation, Ron Paul’s non-interventionist principles are the only ones that are going to work for terrorism.
Why? Because, unlike the other candidates, he is not a pawn of transnational financial interests.
And he is also the only candidate who seems to understand that the real terrorist threat does not emanate from Iraq but from further east, from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
We need someone who will be seen as credible and disinterested and with whom the Pakistani AND Indian government will be able to work closely if we are going to be able to deal effectively with terrorism. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with another government welfare program for the defense department. And there is no chance for peace in the Middle East at all, without the help of governments in that part of the world.
How is a Ron Paul candidacy perceived by knowledgeable people in Asia?
Think about this: India, just happens to have also created more billionaires than anywhere else in the world in the last decade — and those billionaires just happen to be richer than any others, except the ones in the US… Meanwhile, large sections of the country are slipping backward.
Does that sound familiar? Does it make you think a bit? Now, who’s the billionaire’s candidate? You can bet its not Ron Paul.
Yet, it is Paul’s ethical libertarianism and not the unethical neo-liberalism of the financial elites or the corrupt bureaucracies of the socialist past that is the ONLY solution in India…and Asia… to sustained growth. And without a strong Asian market, there is no stable global growth there or here.
As one Indian economist, Dr. Subroto Roy, writes,”Dr Ron Paul, Republican Party Congressman from Texas, is running to be US President in 2008. He is a principled libertarian/classical liberal by political and economic philosophy. That is enough for him to have many new friends in India and Pakistan — both enormously large countries which are sorely in need of libertarian/classical liberal political and economic philosophy to develop themselves. Moreover, Dr Paul advocates a non-interventionist American foreign policy in the world, and he was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from long before it started. That too is something that people in India and Pakistan appreciate.
The aim of this blog is merely for Indian and Pakistani friends of Ron Paul half way across the globe to meet in cyberspace and cheer him along the way.
There are rich Indian-Americans paying big bucks to get close to people like Hillary Clinton. They need to stop being so opportunistic and instead look to what is truly in their adopted country’s and the world’s best interests: that is a Ron Paul Presidency.
If you would like to contribute articles or comments or to upload files, please write to me at drsubrotoroyAThotmail.com. These could have to do with libertarian/classical liberal economic and political philosophy for the subcontinent, the Ron Paul candidacy, the US elections of 2008, or any other topic you think may be of interest….”
