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….”
“The critical thing about names is their plasticity and manipulability, they are mental constructs and so extremely malleable after considerations of latency and cognitive friction are taken into account.
Update: From the comments, this makes my point much clearer:
….The associated metaphysics is secondary to the potentiation of collective action. Once a flag gets carried across a tribal border, be it a tribal flag, a national flag, a religious flag or whatever in the home context, across the tribal border it’s generally a de facto tribal flag.
“I want to emphasize that this issue isn’t limited to religion & metaphysics. After all, how many communists read Das Kapital front to back? Religious or political movements need the appropriate psychological “hooks” to have mass appeal, but they also seem to gain credibility through the generation of obscure intellectual justifications….”
Comment: Researching the witchcraft trials for a chapter in “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets,” I ended up with the same conclusion: a symbol isn’t enough. A red rag alone won’t do to get a crowd going. You need a half-baked theory that no one actually studies but which the cognoscenti can trot out as justification…..
“In his magnum opus, Man, Economy and State, Rothbard wrote that “in all countries the State has made certain that it owns and monopolizes the vital nerve centers, the command posts of the society.”5 Such “command posts” include defense (territorial monopoly or near-monopoly of the legitimized use of violence), communications, “education,” the monetary system (central banking), ultimate say over land-use and ownership, control of rivers and coasts, and the post office. Other social thinkers who noticed this phenomenon shrugged, made reference to “natural monopolies” and such, and went on to other topics. Rothbard, intent on a critical understanding of state-behavior, did not.
Control of education and communication was central to the state’s peaceful existence, and here we find the relationship between states and intellectuals – a problem much larger, unfortunately, than a few art-phonies demanding state subsidies for their bad paintings. States everywhere have understood the need to “keep” intellectuals to spread the word of the state’s good intentions, nobility, supremacy, necessity, and so on. In the past, priesthoods sometimes filled this role. With the rise of state-monopoly school systems matters grew much worse. Add to this the state’s leverage over the airwaves and printed communication, and you have important command posts, indeed. No wonder the usual suspects want to police the web to protect us from all those private criminals out there.
This goes to what Rothbard called “the mystery of civil obedience”6 – or why do people put up with the various oppressions of states over the long haul? Part of the explanation is the role state-allied intellectuals play in shaping public opinion. Matters are even worse in so-called “democracies,” where bureaucrats and special interests reign supreme, while the people comfort themselves with the notion that, in some way, “we are the government” – a proposition that will not withstand the slightest serious inquiry.
The spectacle of the intellectuals rallying around the state, denouncing the “selfish” ordinary citizen as a slacker who fails to understand the heroic things the state is doing for him, is especially noticeable in wartime. The late Cold War, by blurring the distinction between war and peace, greatly heightened the process. Now, with constant demands that the American Empire invade and bomb all malefactors everywhere in the name of keeping “peace” – not to mention Universal Brother/Sisterhood – the distinction looks to remain blurred – quite deliberately, of course. If “war is the health of the state” – Randolph Bourne’s phrase which Rothbard often quoted – then permanent mobilization and endless “peacekeeping” are the perfect setting for long-run growth of state power as against “social power….”
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev criticized the United States, and current President George W. Bush in particular, on Friday for sowing disorder across the world by seeking to build an empire.
Gorbachev, who presided over the break-up of the Soviet Union, said Washington had sought to build an empire after the Cold War ended but had failed to understand the changing world….”
Comment:
Well – missing that ole Soviet empire, eh Gorbie? Or glad you bailed out in time?
Don’t worry, we didn’t learn any lessons. It may take us awhile to catch up with you — but we’re getting there…..
“But some Ron Paul Revolutionaries insist that the mainstream media are putrid corpses in brackish water, and conventional polls are for losers who still answer their landlines. Paul’s support—by more postmodern measures—continues to grow. He’s still the king of meetup.com, which does generate real-world crowds, and even real-world food drives. He’s also the political king of YouTube (22,157 subscribers). We won’t find out for months if these netroots measures mean anything in electoral terms. And that’s just fine for a thrifty message-oriented candidate, who psychically benefits from running (and builds up more fundraising resources for any future effort) even if he fails utterly with vote totals.
This past Sunday he hit a political respectability jackpot, with a long, thorough, serious, and critical-but-respectful profile in the New York Times Magazine. Most of the Ron Paul press tells, however questioningly, of a politician dedicated to severely limited government that doesn’t want to interfere in our personal lives, doesn’t want to investigate us and control us, wants to abolish the income tax, and wants to bring troops home and dedicate our military only to actual national defense—a politician against the federal drug war, against the Patriot Act, against regulating the Internet, and for habeas corpus.
One prominent version of Libertarian Ron Paul Anxiety comes via noted and respected anarcho-legal theorist Randy Barnett in TheWall Street Journal. Barnett has decades of hardcore libertarian movement credentials behind him and is one of Lysander Spooner‘s biggest fans. (Spooner, the 19th century individualist anarchist, famously declared the state to be of inherently lower moral merit than a highway bandit.) But the mild obstetrician, family man, and experienced legislator Ron Paul is too radical for Barnett in one respect—the respect that is key to most of Paul’s traction to begin with: hisconsistent, no-compromise, get-out-now stance against the war in Iraq.
Barnett is eager to dissociate libertarianism writ large from Paul’s anti-Iraq War stance, claiming that many libertarians are concerned that Americans may get the misleading impression that all libertarians oppose the Iraq war—as Ron Paul does—and even that libertarianism itself dictates opposition to this war. It would be a shame, he suggests, if this misinterpretation inhibited a wider acceptance of the libertarian principles that would promote the general welfare of the American people.
This is doubly curious. First, because opposition to non-defensive war traditionally is a core libertarian principle (to begin with, since it inherently involves mass murder and property destruction aimed at people who have not harmed the people imposing the harm) and is, in fact, the position of the vast majority of self-identified libertarians. Second, why would one worry that libertarianism can be damaged by an association with an idea that is in fact immensely popular? And, to boot, a popular position in which Paul has unique credibility for being right, and right from the beginning, unlike pretty much every other candidate…….
…..Libertarians leery of Paul should ask themselves (while bearing in mind that of course no one, certainly no libertarian, is under any obligation to support or advocate or vote for any politician ever): Have we ever seen a national political figure better in libertarian terms—better on taxes, on drugs, on spending, on federalism, on foreign policy, on civil liberties? And for the pragmatic, cosmopolitan, mainstream libertarian: Why is Ron Paul the place where making the non-existent best the enemy of the good becomes the right thing to do?
“On Iraq policy, in Washington, the differences between Republicans and Democrats — and between the media’s war boosters and opponents — are often significant. Yet they’re apt to mask the emergence of a general formula that could gain wide support from the political and media establishment.
The formula’s details and timelines are up for grabs. But there’s not a single “major” candidate for president willing to call for withdrawal of all U.S. forces — not just “combat” troops — from Iraq, or willing to call for a complete halt to U.S. bombing of that country.
Those candidates know that powerful elites in this country just don’t want to give up the leverage of an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq, with its enormous reserves of oil and geopolitical value. It’s a good bet that American media and political powerhouses would fix the wagon of any presidential campaign that truly advocated an end to the U.S. war in — and on — Iraq.
The disconnect between public opinion and elite opinion has led to reverse perceptions of a crisis of democracy. As war continues, some are appalled at the absence of democracy while others are frightened by the potential of it. From the grassroots, the scarcity of democracy is transparent and outrageous. For elites, unleashed democracy could jeopardize the priorities of the military-industrial-media complex.”
Now what would those priorities be and what crisis could the M-I-M complex be staving off?
“But there is a much more important event for believers in perpetual inflation to explain: the trend of yields from bonds and utility stocks. In the 1970s, prices of bonds and utility stocks were falling, and yields on bonds and utility stocks were rising, because of the onslaught of inflation. But in the past 25 years bond and utility stock prices have gone up, and yields on bonds and utility stocks (see Figures 2 [not shown] and 3) have gone down. Once again, this situation is contrary to claims that we are experiencing a replay of the inflationary 19?teens or 1970s. Those investing on an inflation theme cannot explain these graphs. But there is a precedent for this time. It is 1928?1929, when bond and utility yields bottomed and prices topped (see Figure 4) in an environment of expanding credit and a stock market boom. The Dow Jones Utility Average was the last of the Dow averages to peak in 1929, and today it is deeply into wave (5) and therefore near the end of its entire bull market. All these juxtaposed market behaviors make sense only in our context of a terminating credit bubble. This one is just a whole lot bigger than any other in history.
Some economic historians blame rising interest rates into 1929 for the crash that ensued. Those who do must acknowledge that the Fed’s interest rate today is at almost exactly the same level it was then, having risen steadily?and in fact way more in percentage terms?since 2003. So even on this score the setup is the same as it was 1929. Remember also that in 1926 the Florida land boom collapsed. In the current cycle, house prices nationwide topped out in 2005, two years ago. So maybe it’s 1928 now instead of 1929. But that’s a small quibble compared to the erroneous idea that we are enjoying a perpetually inflationary goldilocks economy with perpetually rising investment prices….”
Cellphabet 1.0 on Saturday! Do you know that ‘someone’ always knows where you are? Do you know that the mobile phone in your hand is always being watched by invisible eyes?
In the 1982 film Namak Halal , Amitabh Bachchan famously declared: “I can talk in English, I can walk in English…because English is a very funny language.” This statement is no more a metaphor since the Cellphabet 1.0 – a radical new system to convert the movement of a mobile phone into plain English text.
The system will now be demonstrated publicly and all are invited to witness a first in history – a man walking to write an SMS text message, without touching his phone. As he walks, you play a game of words like no other…
????? ????? ???, ?? ?????? ?? ??? ???…
Where: Kala Ghoda Art District’s Parking Lot, Mumbai
When: 2PM, Saturday 28th of July 2007
Team: DJ Fadereu(a.k.a. Rohit Gupta) (software) Tara Chowdhry(documentator) Angad Chowdhry (event manager) Gabriel Greenberg (visual display) Vickram Crishna
???? ??????? ?? ???? ??????? ????!For more information please contact: Gabriel Greenberg (09870181434), DJ Fadereu(09821424074) or email algomantra@gmail.com
The Countdown Begins
I’ll be releasing my secret project within 7 days now, and it’s not J.U.N.G.L.E. as earlier planned…..
More from D. J. Fadereau at Algomantra.
Whither the dollar? A question of some importance….not simply financially. But also for civil freedoms. The shakier the whole financial structure becomes, the more intense the government’s interest in monitoring, controlling, securing, and confiscating property and savings becomes…and the more likely controls of financial inflows and outflows become.
And the less likely it is that citizens will speak up for fear of becoming a target of the feds.
The dollar index closed below 80 this week, looking as thought it had finally bought it. But a quick check of the historical prices shows that actually the index closed at that level in December 2004. And bounced.
Well, you know what happened in 2005. The index went steadily up, giving corporations a window for repatriation of their foreign earnings (and you thought they did it for for love of dead presidents, huh?) and kept gold in limbo. But then surprise again: In 2006, the buck resumed its slide down and gold shot up to highs not seen in more than a couple of decades. Come late spring and the gold bugs and sellers were screaming gold $2000…
Too bad it didn’t work out that way. By fall, gold was again down and bouncing around far below its high, stuck in a range. And meanwhile, this year, the dollar already weakening steadily, has fallen off the edge.
Is it the end this time? Or another feint? Who knows, with all the manipulation and massaging of prices that go on.
It could be a double bottom . A double bottom is a pattern that supposedly tells you when a slide down has found a resting place — from which a bounce upward can be expected. How do you see double bottoms? True believers will swear by shapes as fleeting as clouds and as deceptive as tea-leaves. Hocus-pocus, say fundamentalists. But like tea-life reading, chart reading may be hocus pocus, but it also has an art to it that can make good sense. It isn’t so much a pattern you see as a feel for the pattern that you cultivate. Watch those little ticks, see the numbers, how fast they run up or down, what time of the day they do it and how heavily, and you can begin to feel the pulse of the movement of prices.
(OK, I’m getting poetic, but it’s true). And gold’s pulse hasn’t felt all that strong in a while. But neither has the dollar’s. So when the bottom of the double bottom shook and gave just a bit more, sending the buck below 80 this week, I wondered if this was it.
But no; it bounced. Maybe just a dead cat, but then again, maybe not. The question is — is gold now a safe haven, or a currency, or a commodity? Is it coupled to the dollar or uncoupled, and if coupled, is it in lockstep or reverse?
with a summing up that looks pretty plausible to me:
“If my mental model remains intact, this is the outcome I would expect to see over the next few weeks:
1. The US Dollar Index breaks up out of the falling wedge, reinforcing the argument that the Primary Trend of the US Dollar Index is “up”.
a
2. If this happens, it is likely to scare the pants off the gold bugs, who will dump gold holdings – causing the gold price and gold shares to pull back.
a
3. Once it becomes obvious to all and sundry that the US Dollar will not be expected to break down significantly below the Maginot line at 80, the bulls will be out in force. The Industrial Indices will rise (because of inflation), and they will pull the gold shares with them.
a
4. Commodities and oil will start to shoot upwards (again because of inflation) and the gold price will at that point break to new highs.
a
5. When the market as a whole sees that the inverse relationship between the US Dollar and the US$ denominated Gold Price has finally been severed, the gold price will likely scream upwards in its capacity as a commodity. It can be seen from the following ratio chart of gold to the $XOI that gold has a lot of catching up to do.”
