Tag Archives: Ideology

Andrei Martyanov: Ukie War Crimes, West’s Ignorant Punditry, and FASHbook Lies

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Andrei Martyanov on war crimes in Donetsk; Facebook and Meta facing reprisals in Russia; and the bloviating frauds from the Ivy League/Oxbridge circuit…or do I mean circus?….who dominate the Western media.

 

The war crime by 404 against civilians in Donetsk will not stay unsolved, by now it is known who and how gave an order to use Tochka U against civilians in Donetsk. This is the only type of the warfare combined West is capable of conducting: propaganda BS and killing civilians. I don’t know, can anyone explain to this boy what is the real war?

Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor to US President Joe Biden, has warned Russia that NATO would go “full force” if any strike is recorded on NATO territory – intentional or not – after Moscow attacked a Ukrainian military base near the Polish border. In an appearance on CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday, Sullivan was asked by host Margaret Brennan whether the current US policy was “that any strike into Polish territory or airspace, intentional or unintentional” would be considered an attack on NATO. “The president has been clear repeatedly that the United States will work with our allies to defend every inch of NATO territory, and that means every inch,” Sullivan responded, explaining that “if there is a military attack on NATO territory, it would cause the invocation of Article Five, and we would bring the full force of the NATO alliance to bear in responding to it.”

Can somebody also explain to this ignoramus that NATO’s “full force” militarily in terms of conventional response is primarily virtual because… well, again, he should have attended a serious military institution to get a real education, not studying the BS of political “science” and “international relations” in Yale and Oxford–stalwarts of the West’s production of ignoramuses for top political jobs in Anglo-American world. We can see results of such an “education” all over the place, including “destruction” of Vasily Bykov by ukie MLRS. Do not expect integrity and honor from those people. Same goes for tangible evidence of destruction of the ship. Don’t hold your breath–these are Western media, they lie for a living.

This, however, I think is too late for Meta.

Facebook’s parent company Meta has changed its policy guidance on tolerance to hate speech to prohibit “condoning violence” against “Russians in general” and to ban calls for the death of heads of state, Reuters reported on Monday, citing a memo posted on the company’s internal platform. The Sunday post, published by Meta’s global affairs president, Nick Clegg, and seen by Reuters, suggests that Facebook is “narrowing the focus” of its content moderation policy to make it “explicitly clear” that a previous decisions made last week should not be interpreted as “condoning violence against Russians in general.”

Too late, creeps. The policy was already in place and, as with the murder, you cannot roll it back and say that things are cool now. Doesn’t work like this. Obviously they should worry.

Russia’s Prosecutor General filed a legal complaint with the nation’s courts demanding all Meta platforms be outlawed and the company itself be designated an extremist organization in Russia over allowing hate speech against the country’s nationals. Facebook was banned in Russia even before these developments over discrimination towards state-owned and state-affiliated Russian media outlets.

Black girl beats up white girl on viral video

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A 13-year-old black girl beat up a 10-year-old white girl riding a scooter on a Cleveland side-walk on June 14.

It was an apparently unprovoked assault during which the attacker called the victim, Danielle Fair,  a racial slur,”cracker,” according to an on-looker.

The whole incident was caught on cell-phone camera and posted on Youtube, where it’s gone viral.

The police are treating the attack as a possible hate crime.

I want to be a bit cautious, though, because I notice a few things that are odd:

1. On camera, the black girl waits for the younger girl to come riding along. It is a planned, unprovoked assault on a stranger.

2. The cell-phone camera was rolling before the assault. Either someone knew in advance what was going to happen, or there is more going on here than meets the eye.

3.  The victim told the media (WOIO) that she felt “bullied.”

That language sounds rather stilted to me, from a ten-year-old.

The “anti-bullying” campaign is in full swing globally, promoted to the hilt by the power-elite, as a way to get young people fully involved in snitching on their peers, elders, and family members.

Check out the Bully Police page.

The anti-bullying campaign is driven by the militant gay lobby.

Recall that even in the Trayvon Martin case, the black teen who was killed was demonized as a thug and anti-gay.

How better to get white Christians to embrace the militantly anti-Christian anti-bullying campaign than to tie it to white racial fears of blacks?

In 2011, there were rumors about a an intel/government program of  inciting racial strife.

The assumption and fear was that the intelligence agencies might create spurious  “white- on-black” hate-crimes. (See here).

But there’s no reason why they might not incite people the  other way around too.

[I am not suggesting that these crimes are spurious. I am saying they might well be organized and incited.]

The intelligence agencies have a long history of provoking race riots.

There have been a spate of attacks that fall under the rubric of the  “knock-out” game, in which black youths are said to deliberately target white victims for no reason.

This might actually be the case, but from what I have seen of some of the cases so far, including the beating up of Matthew Owens, there is very much more going on.

In the Owens case, there was a three -year feud between the neighborhood black teens and Owens, in which Owens had previously brandished knives at them. He also had an extensive criminal record.

This does not excuse the attack, but it does mean that we need to look carefully to see if an attack really fits a “black-on-white race-war” narrative or whether, for whatever reason, the media is fanning the flames of racial hatred (as in this depiction of slavery) on both sides, black and white.

If the forces behind  “managed revolution” can pay impoverished Ukrainian girls to use their naked bodies as weapons in a culture war abroad, why wouldn’t they pay impoverished ghetto youth to use their fists in a race war at home?

 

Belief in hierarchy is psychopathic, claims leftist

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Anti-traditionalist propaganda from Paul Rosenberg at Salon.com:

A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to an unpublished conference paper, with the intriguing title, “ Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy.”

So I contacted the lead author, Marc Wilson, a New Zealand psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington, to ask him about his research.

First, a bit of background. Psychopathy — once thought to be an all-or-nothing condition — is now understood in a dimensional fashion (more or less) and is measured by instruments such as  The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. While our understanding of psychopathy first developed largely from studying criminal populations, Hare himself has said, “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” so it’s fairly straightforward to measure and compare psychopathic tendencies and SDO. And that’s just what Wilson has done.

“The research shows that SDO and psychopathy have a reciprocal causal relationship over time — as people become more social dominant, they become more psychopathic, and vice versa,” Wilson told me. “This is based on longitudinal research that shows that, for example, increased SDO (or psychopathy) at time 1 predicts greater psychopathy (or SDO) at time 2. I’ve done this for both convenience samples (university students) and thousands of general population.”

University students get tested a lot — as Wilson indicated, they’re quite convenient. But sooner or later it’s bound to raise questions of just how well the results hold up in a larger population. So it’s significant that he’s already taken that step, and found confirmation as well.

“When SDO was originally proposed, it was argued that group dominance (as measured by SDO) is not the same thing as individual level dominance, and indeed that’s what the original research appeared to show,” he explained. “More recently there have been a few studies that have suggested SDO and psychopathy are related, and I’ve collected a lot of data now that leads me to believe they’re flip sides of the same coin — interpersonal dominance (psychopathy) on one side and group dominance (SDO) on the other.”

This is just what one might informally conclude from listening to the Donald Sterling tape. His personal abusiveness and unwarranted accusations against V. Stiviano is on one side of the coin; flip it over, and his contempt for black people is on the other. Jerk on one side, racist on the other.

[Lila:  Never mind that Stiviano was a gold-digging exhibitionist.

Never mind that she’s  made racist comments herself.

Never mind that she either pre-texted or unlawfully surveilled someone in their house.

Never mind that that is a form of moral and mental rape several orders of magnitude worse than saying rude things in your own home for your own private audience.]

“Therefore, it makes sense that environments that promote social hierarchies will also be fertile breeding grounds for individual dominance, and vice versa,” he continued. Digging down a bit into specifics was quite illuminating.

“By ‘environments’ I can imagine a few that are good candidates — financial markets for example,” Wilson said. “Indeed, some of my other work shows that people who work in commerce focused on hierarchy-enhancing wealth consolidation also tend to be more social dominant (an old finding) but also more psychopathic — indeed, people who study commerce at university are not only more psychopathic than people in other fields of study but less psychopathic commerce students are more likely to switch majors to more hierarchy-attenuating disciplines, while more psychopathic arts students (for example) are more likely to switch to commerce degrees.”

Lila:  This is the state of moral and logical confusion in public debate in the West, which, unfortunately, sets the tone for the whole world.

Take Belle Knox, the current feminist icon.

She is barely adult, has a history of body image problems and serious self-cutting; is a  porn addict who was raped and admits that she enjoys being locked up in dog-houses.

She chooses to be routinely spit on, hit in the face, verbally abused, and gang-raped in the derriere, all on camera.

But, of course, there’s no “evil hierarchy” in any of that, nor “dominance,” nor “subordination”; no psychiatric problem there.

No,  that”s  all feminist empowerment and an honest day’s work, all the way.

And you dare not so much as roll your eyes  at her.

On the other hand, if  a young man, a conservative, signs up for a degree in commerce and enjoys the rough-and-tumble of  the business world, watch out – you have Hitler or Mao on your hands.  Call the FBI… the shrinks… the NY Times…. Get Paul Rosenberg on the case.

In Rosenberg’s tendentious, dishonest, simple-minded essay, good, decent ideas with which any conservative could agree – the dignity of manual work and the value of every individual – putrefy and turn into so much slime to fling against political opponents, albeit so clumsily, the effort says more about him than about them.

 

 

Galileo Goes To Jail and Other Myths……

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“Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion,” Ronald L. Numbers, Harvard University Press, Dec. 8, 2010

Review

An illuminating study of the relationship between science and religion…This book features the contributions of a team of 25 scholars that includes agnostics, atheists, and Christians. Their collective objective is to dispel the “hoary myths” of the supposedly bellicose relationship between religion and science. Readers will be fascinated by the evidence that for advocating Copernicanism, Galileo was not imprisoned (as commonly thought) but interrogated–albeit under the threat of torture–and set up in an apartment. Other misconceptions concern the connection between Darwinian thought and Nazi biology, Einstein’s belief in God, and Islam’s alleged hostility toward scientific enquiry. (C. Brian Smith Library Journal 2009-03-02)

 

Pro-life advocacy is “torture,” claims feminist NGO

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The American Center for Law and Justice reports that women’s rights NGO’s are trying to claim that the pro-life position falls under the rubric of torture:

To be clear, the effort by the Center for Reproductive Rights clearly and explicitly targets the church’s rights to free speech and religious liberty. Here’s an excerpt from its recommendations to the Committee:

QUOTE

Note that the Holy See has negatively interfered with states’ attempts to develop legislation on abortion that would have served to better protect women from torture or ill-treatment. Note that the Holy See’s actions are a violation of Articles 1, 2, and 16 of the Convention against Torture and that the rights of freedom of speech and of religion extend only so far as they do not undermine women’s reproductive rights, including the right to be free from torture or ill-treatment. “(Emphasis added.)

END QUOTE

This is an astonishing statement, one that clearly targets the Catholic Church’s pro-life advocacy, equating it with state-sanctioned “torture or ill-treatment” of women and girls. By equating advocacy with torture, the Committee could begin an international legal process that would cause the U.N. to review statements or actions by pro-life public officials as “torture” within the meaning of the Convention. Radical pro-abortion groups would file amicus briefs citing new international legal standards equating pro-life advocacy with torture, thus claiming such advocacy is beyond the protection of the First Amendment.”

 

Flagolatry Then and Now

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Third-World Traveler has an excerpt from “Hoax,” by Nicholas Von Hoffman

(Nation Books, 2004).

p33
Flag Waving

Flagolatry , or the excessive or demented reverence for the national symbol, has its innocent roots in the first lines of the National Anthem. Then things began to get out of hand. Respect for the flag commenced to become flagolatry, part of the degraded and antic patriotism which distorts what, in saner hands, are decent and praiseworthy feelings for one’s country. That country was hardly born before people started running Old Glory up the flag pole with a vengeance.

p34
Some flag waving is good, a lot of flag waving is tolerable, incessant flag waving is crazy and dangerous and easily manipulated by the war party to get people bubbling at the mouth in fear and rage.

p36
… when flagalotry takes over the landscape, as it has in the last generation, it says something about people who dwell in that country. Not only does every unpaid-for, overly-mortgaged house in the United States boast its own copy of Old Glory, but so does every SUV, every truck, every truck stop, the side of every barn.

p38
I suppose that the purpose of flag display is inspirational, but taken together with allegiance-pledging and such, its effect is stifling, confining, and intimidating. It was used for the same purpose in the months leading up to America’s entry into World War I. An electric sign was strung across New York City’s 5th Avenue in 1916 flashing the orders for “Absolute and Unqualified Loyalty to Our Country.” In a society of lapel pin flags and standing to attention and red, white, and bluing, the uninterruptedly repeated message is don’t talk, listen up, and get ready to rumble.

Conservatives cozy with the establishment

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The infiltration of conservative and paleo- libertarian circles by progressives continues apace, writes the paleo-libertarian blogger at MoreRight.net:

“Why does a self-admitted liberal have a regular column at a website called The American Conservative, founded by Pat Buchanan, and his column is passed off as a conservative voice?”

It should make anyone wonder about several conservative pundits. Some of them seem to be more interested in their media presence than in supporting traditionalist positions.

Whether they are simply naive or actively working to undermine social conservatism is the question.

MoreRight.net continues:

” If you dig into the archives of this magazine, you see the same refrain again and again:

And what issue is more important than life? As a practical matter, conservatives would probably do better with voters by becoming less rigid on social issues where Americans are becoming more liberal. But they also stand to gain by doubling down on the issue that should matter most.

Translation: we ought to give up on social conservatism because no one will vote for it, let’s just focus on stopping abortion and forget the rest.”

The blogger gets a part of the picture right, although I think there are other reasons for someone to focus on abortion, as recently I have begun to.

He then points out evidence of conservative pandering:

“What else? Articles written by the left-libertarians from the Cato Institute, fawning over Jim Morrison (who was found dead in a bathtub from a heroin overdose), bizarre apologetics for Communist folk musician Pete Seeger, and other one-off oddball articles.”

Lila Rajiva:

I can point out even greater pandering and compromise on paleo-libertarian sites:

  • Using the same scatological and vulgar personal attacks that the left favors
  • Constantly mocking conservatives, right-wingers, and  Republicans (admittedly these aren’t all the same thing), without anywhere near equal time for their opposite numbers, thus doing the left’s work for it
  • Promoting  disinformation sources, such as  Robert Morrow and John Loftus.

MoreRight than traces some  direct links between traditionalists and neo-reactionaries with progressives.

Last year, I  came to the conclusion that Neo-reaction (also called the Dark Enlightenment)  was some kind of leftist/government ploy, but given the anti-Catholic slant of the term “Cathedral,” I also have to wonder why this blogger uses it.

Deep waters indeed….

Imagine the reaction if one were to term the establishment the “Synagogue” or the “Temple”?

Of course, it shouldn’t be fear of reprisal that stops someone from using either of those terms.  It should be the clear evidence that the establishment uses all sides of the debate against each other, Catholic and Jewish among them.

The people who are supposed to be standing up for traditionalists in the “new media” sphere are not-so-subtly stabbing them in the back, not just in their associations, but in their heartfelt beliefs.

In the DC/NYC new media milieu, credibility emanates directly from the center of the Cathedral, that is, The New York Times. Everyone is angling for a spot at the trough, including so-called “traditionalist” conservatives.

Lila:  I was cited by the New York Times a couple of times, a while back. I daresay could have cultivated that route had I the stomach for dissimulation needed for it. Frankly, I don’t.

[Josh] Barro is part of the “media/liberal thought elite,” which includes other mediocrities and Cathedral mouthpieces such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anil Dash, Dave Weigel, Matt Yglesias, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and so on.

What of the connection with “paleo”-conservatives? Jonathan Coppage, associate editor of The American Conservative, is friendly with Barro. They’re both connected to Forbes writer and former Business Insider analyst Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who acts clueless about the decline, calls himself a “former reactionary who now embraces the Enlightenment,” and tells us about how great economic and social equality are. They’re connected to Michael B. Dougherty, another “surf the decline” conservative who openly mocks reactionary politics and argues in favor of “pragmatic” policies such as embracing immigration amnesty.

All these guys are very friendly with left-libertarians like Jason Kuznicki, Cathy Reisenwitz, and Josiah Neeley, who are doing their best to turn movement libertarianism into a subdivision of Frankfurt School progressivism. They’re in turn connected to witch hunters for liberal purity such as Julian Sanchez, also at Cato, and open borders enthusiasts such as Bryan Caplan (Cato), Eli Dourado (Mercatus), and Dylan Matthews (Vox). The relationship between so-called “paleoconservatives” and these left-libertarians and progressives is far too close for comfort.”

 

ADL releases global anti-Semitism poll

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Abraham Foxman of the ADL has released his Global 100 poll of world-wide anti-Semitism.

The poll assessed the reaction of people to the following statements. Agreeing with 6 or more of the following makes one an anti-Semite.

ANTI -SEMITIC STEREOTYPES:

1) Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in].
2) Jews have too much power in the business world.
3) Jews have too much power in international
financial markets.
4) Jews
don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.
5) Jews have too much control over global affairs.
6) People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.
7) Jews think they are better than other people.
8) Jews have too much control over the United States government.
9) Jews have too much control over the global media.
10) Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.
11) Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.

According to the results, 1.09 billion people in the world, about 26%percent of its entire population, harbor anti-Semitic beliefs.

The highest scores were in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which registered 74%.

This was followed by Eastern Europe 34%.

Then comes Western Europe at 24%.

Sub-Saharan Africa is at 23%.

Asia is at 22%.

The Americas are at 19%.

Oceania is at 14%.

The highest non-MENA score was found in Greece – 69%
Iran held the highest MENA score – 56%.

I don’t know what conclusions Mr. Foxman draws from all this, but here are my thoughts:

The areas with the highest levels of anti-Semitism – Greece, MENA, Eastern Europe, are also ones where either the communists or the global financial industry, has had a significant negative impact.

This is not intended as hate speech. I’m just looking for logical causes for the existence of such a wide-spread feeling, since I don’t really believe in a spontaneous eruption of irrational hatred toward one group of people for no other cause but their religion or ethnicity.

To believe in such “motiveless malignance” would require me to ascribe a mysterious and non-human quality to Jewishness, which sounds a lot like real anti-Semitism to me.

Besides, if motiveless malignance is everywhere, why is so little of it in the US?

But so it is. America has less anti-Semitic feeling than anywhere else.

It follows that humanitarian anti-anti-Semitic libertarians should be aiming their sermons about anti-Semitism at some other region of the world than the USA – perhaps at the Ukraine?

But they aren’t, are they?

Instead, it seems that the Humanitarian libertarians are making common cause with the anti-Semites in the Ukraine.

Now why is that, I wonder. Could it be that “anti-anti-Semitism” is not about anti-Semitism at all?

If so, what is it really about?

They Came Before Columbus – A Review

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Professor Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus, A review by Femi Akomolafe, 19 January 1995

“History, as taught in the Western and Western-dominated world, gives the impression that the first Africans to reach the Americas were brought as slaves, in shackles on slaves-ships. So total is the Euro-Americans onslaught on black people that all military, missionary, scholarship, academic forces are mobilized to paint the picture of the African as an eternal slave of the white man.……

….Happily, one by one, these edifices of distortions, constructed by white-supremacists posing as scholars, historians, anthropologists, even scientists, are being knocked down.

In his They Came Before Columbus, Professor Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University assembled an impressive array of evidence to challenge one of the most persistent of these historical distortions. His argument are so compelling that very many high-calibre scholars, who have maintained the prejudiced line of history, are bound to fall flat from their pedestal. The style of the book is very engaging, almost novel-like—this makes a very good reading.

The first evidence of a black presence in the America was given to Columbus by the Indians themselves: they gave concrete proof to the Spanish that they were trading with black people. “The Indians of this Espanola said there had come to Espanola a black people who have the tops of their spears made of a metal which they called gua-nin, of which he [Columbus] had sent samples to the Sovereigns to have them assayed, when it was found that of 32 parts, 18 were of gold, 6 of silver and 8 of copper. The origin of the word guanin may be tracked down in the Mande languages of West Africa, through Mandigo, Kabunga, Toronka, Kankanka, Banbara, Mande and Vei. In Vei, we have the form of the word ka-ni which, transliterated into native phonetics, would give us gua-nin.” p.11. This was just one of the numerous instances, cited by Professor [van] Sertima, where the names, cultures and rituals of the Mandigos confluenced with those of the ancient Americans.

Thus we have the Bambara werewolf cult whose head is known as amantigi (heads of faith) appeared in Mexican rituals as amanteca. The ceremonies accompanying these rituals are too identical to have been independently evolved among peoples who have had no previous encounter. Talking devil is called Hore in Mandigo, and Haure in Carib. In the American language of Nahuatl a waistcloth is called maxtli, in Malinke it’s masiti. The female loincloth is nagua in Mexico, it is nagba in Mande.

Why would the Indians claimed to have traded with black people if they haven’t? Why would their faith and language have so much infusion of West African influence if these people haven’t had any contact? These might not be sufficient, in themselves, to justify the claims that Africans have been visiting the Americas in pre-Colombian times. But there are witnesses. In 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa, another Spanish usurper came upon a group of African war captives in an Indian settlement. He was told that the blacks lived nearby and were constantly waging wars. A priest, Fray Gregoria Garcia wrote an account of another encounter in a book that was silenced by the inquisition: “Here we found slaves of the lord – Negroes- who were the first our people saw in the Indies.” p.22. (It should be noted that in pre-European slavery, slaves are what we called ‘Prisoners of wars’ today. Thus, the Yorubas have the same name, ERU, for both slaves and POWs.)

Aside from these confirmed sightings, there are also an abundance archeological evidence of an Africa presence in pre-Colombian times. These were in the form of realistic portraitures of Negro-Africans in clay, gold, and stone unearthed in pre-Colombian strata in Central and South America.- pp.23-24. Moved by these overwhelming evidence, the Society of American Archeology at a conference in 1968, Professor [van] Sertima reported, concluded: “Surely there cannot now be any question but that there were visitors to the New World from the Old in historic or even prehistoric time before 1492.”

Then there is the oral history of the two peoples. The Griots—traditional historians and masters of orature—‘Oral Literature’ in Mali, have stories about their King, Abubakari the second, grandson of Sundiata, the founder of the Mali Empire (larger than the Holy Roman Empire), who set out on a great expedition of large boats in 1311. None of the boats returned to Mali, but curiously around this time evidence of contact between West Africans and Mexicans appear in strata in America in an overwhelming combination of artifacts and cultural parallels. A black-haired, black-bearded figure in white robes, one of the representations of Quetzalcoatl, modeled on a dark-skinned outsider, appears in paintings in the valley of Mexico… while the Aztecs begin to worship a Negroid figure mistaken for their god Tezcatlipoca because he had the right ceremonial color. Negroid skeletons are found in this time stratum in the Caribbean... ‘A notable tale is recorded in the Peruvian traditions … of how black men coming from the east had been able to penetrate the Andes Mountains.’ p.26

Read the whole review at Hartford-hwp.com

BJP, Modi win Indian elections with largest mandate in 30 years

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The coalition led by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, and its leader Narendra Modi, have won the just concluded Indian elections, with the largest mandate in the last 30 years.

The international reaction:

British business interests were enthusiastic:

“British business is particularly buoyed by Mr. Modi’s victory and expects his government to quickly take forward economic ties, the groundwork for which has been laid by Mr. Cameron during his visits to India.

Patricia Hewitt, Chair, United Kingdom India Business Council, in her congratulatory message said: “The election of a new Government of India — and the improvements in the business environment that will follow — should prompt those British businesses who have been hesitating about entering the Indian market to put aside their doubts and seize the India opportunity with both hands.””

Chinese business interests are happy and think he will make working with India easier and have a more independent policy toward the US:

“To my observation, this general election was fought on India’s domestic agenda and China was not a significant topic. This indicates the China-India relationship has become more mature and shock-resistant. Relations are national interest-centric, not party-oriented.

Indian parties don’t have much policy differences towards China. Historically speaking, China has been even more skilful in dealing with “right-leaning” political entities.”

The New Yorker cites the comments of economists Jagdish Bhagwati (supportive) and Amartya Sen (critical):

It will be fascinating to see if Modi can replicate his success in Gujarat on the national stage. Many, though not all, economists believe the Indian economy needs another wave of liberalization that builds upon the one that Singh introduced in the nineteen-nineties, when he was minister of finance. Those measures cut the budget deficit, stripped away some of the country’s infamous licensing restrictions, and made it easier for foreigners to invest in Indian companies. Jagdish Bhagwati, the Columbia University economist who is one of Modi’s most prominent supporters, has criticized Singh for not following up on these reforms during his time as Prime Minister.

It has been widely reported that Bhagwati and his Columbia colleague Arvind Panagariya, another supporter of free-market reforms, will play some role in the new Indian government. Modi, however, also has his critics in the academy. Some studies suggest that Gujarat, despite enjoying stronger than average growth, has a questionable record relative to other Indian states in reducing poverty, improving child nutrition, and promoting education and social inclusion. Last year, Amartya Sen, perhaps India’s most famous economist, came out strongly against Modi’s candidacy, criticizing his failure to protect religious minorities, and saying, “His record in education and health care is pretty bad.”

Indians and people the world over will be watching to see how far Modi goes in the direction of liberalization. Reforming India, which has many powerful states and innumerable vested interests, is much harder than reforming an individual state like Gujarat. And while Modi has obtained a historic mandate for his economic agenda—the B.J.P. will be the first party in thirty years to have an outright majority in Parliament—there are still widespread concerns that the fruits of economic progress are not being spread widely enough, concerns that more business-friendly reforms are unlikely to alleviate. “It felt like a vacuum period,” Modi said on Friday, addressing his supporters in Ahmedabad. “Now we will fill that vacuum.”

Comment:

I don’t have a clear-cut opinion of the man yet. I’ll wait and see…. and hope that the massive PR efforts (APCO, billionaire Adani) poured into his election are justified by something more than whose bread he can butter.

India’s Muslim and Christian minorities are probably more than a bit worried, but the stock market, not surprisingly, took off…..