Mani Shankar Aiyar on Charlie Hebdon

Courtesy NDTV.com

I was as horrified as you to hear of 12 lives being lost in the armed assault on a Paris satirical weekly for their repeatedly sneering at the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) and running cartoons denigrating him and the religion he has brought to hundreds of millions of families the world over. That such horror at terrorism was not just my reaction as a non-Muslim to the Paris outrage, but widely shared by Muslims too was brought home to me by a statement issued by a collegium of Imams and preachers of Bahrain who said: "Violence and extremism have always been - and still are - the biggest enemies of Islam, and contravene its teachings, tolerance and genuine precepts. All countries should take unified stances against terrorism. We call for the need to devise a unified international strategy to combat its forms and manifestation everywhere." 

That precisely reflects the position taken by the Dar-ul-Uloom. It precisely reflects my own personal position. To go by the Congress President's reaction, it also reflects my party's position: "The Congress President, Smt Sonia Gandhi, has condemned the cowardly and dastardly terror attack on Media in Paris. Shocked at the audacity of the gruesome act, Smt Gandhi said that extremism and intolerance will never be able to curb freedom of expression and will only result in perpetuation of violence."
 
What then is the controversy about? It is about my describing the incident as a "backlash" to the War on Terrorism. That is not a justification of terrorism. It is an explanation. The distinction is important. I condemn terrorism. I do not commend it. If, however, war is declared on terrorists, it is stupid to imagine that the terrorists will take it lying down; inevitably they will hit back - that is a consequence we have to be prepared for. 

Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly, was so obviously on the hit list that it was virtually inviting a reaction week after week. The threat to the Editor was so palpable that he had been personally provided with just about the highest level of security that France could offer. Why the magazine's office was not protected with an adequate posse of armed security is being investigated.  But it also reflects the mind-set that thinks the West can mount a war and get away with little or no loss to themselves. The West is so militarily powerful and so technologically superior that it is able to unleash an unequal war in which their resources in money and machines cannot be matched even remotely by those whom they are combating.
 
Therefore, terrorists resort to an asymmetrical response. They target non-combatants by way of avenging themselves on those whose war machines kill - daily - scores, hundreds, even thousands of the non-combatants in whose midst the terrorists live and shield themselves.
 
A dead innocent is a dead innocent. Terrorists deliberately target the innocent. The War on Terrorism does not target innocents. It kills them indiscriminately by way of what is delicately called "collateral damage". But the loved ones and the community are equally affected - whether the killing is deliberate or incidental. The rage is the same. The urge to revenge is the same. For, as Gandhi said - and I quoted him to the TV agency - "Violence begets violence".
 
The West is near perfecting the art of killing their enemies (plus "collateral damage") without risking their own lives. When eight American body bags returned from Somalia, Bill Clinton immediately called off the operation "Black Hawk Down". When eight Pathan bodies of helpless mothers, hapless children, and innocent by-standers lie in the midst of the carnage wrought by a Drone attack, the wailing families do not react differently. They seek justice, each in his or her own way. The Drone wins out because even if it is downed, as it is unmanned, no American family is left with a tear in its eye. When terrorists attack, they know they are going to be killed - or kill themselves. They take the vicious consequences of their vicious action. The Drone just flies away - to come back another day.
 
Till even the First World War, war was fought on the terrain of war - the battle-field. Those who died or got injured were soldiers. 

Civilians only accidentally got in the way. That changed when the Germans started assassinating mayors of towns where snipers shot at German soldiers. It horrified the world and contributed more to Britain coming in against Germany than perhaps any other single action. Not even into the Thirties had men been desensitized to the atrocity of civilian beings killed in armed attack. Picasso earned eternal fame because his painting captured and symbolized the horror experienced by all civilized people at the aerial bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica.
 
But by the Second World War, these niceties were abandoned. The terror opened by the Nazis through their Blitzkrieg on England, followed by their merciless genocide of Jews in the East European countries they occupied, started the process of desensitizing the hitherto-unknown horror of innocents being mown to death. 

Stalingrad finally dulled sensitivities to the point where Churchill could order the bombing of Dresden and kill more innocents in a single night than all the terrorist attacks since 9/11 and after. 
Truman's atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki removed the final constraints on sparing non-combatants the terrible fate of the battle-field. Since then, it has been open house for those with the military means to do so.
 
I was posted as a young diplomat to Hanoi in the middle of the US-Vietnam war. Day after day, twice a day, US Air Force planes would pound the city without regard to civilian habitation or military target, shooting to death and severely injuring any living being - man, woman or child - they could fit into their sights. Uncounted millions died. Many were non-combatant civilians. A young British colleague said to me that American U-2s flying at such speed that they could cross the country in 10 minutes at a height of 60,000 feet could take a photograph of the saucer I held in my hand that would be more accurate than my naked eye could see. "How," he asked, "do you think these guys on bicycles will ever drive them out?" The bicyclists did; they won. But only after millions of civilians had been slaughtered. 
 
I condemn what happened in Paris with all the strength in my voice. It was dreadful. But I regard all forms of terrorism, especially by armed force that takes the lives of non-combatants as equally - perhaps even more -  terrible. That is why my heart bleeds when 1,500 Palestinians are killed in their homes by bombs rained on them from the skies because they have the temerity to ask for the right to return to their homeland. The Modi government had little or nothing to say about that outrage. It is this lack of balance in the BJP's approach to terrorism that fills me with dread and despair.
 
Most of us Indians, except the fringe lunatics of the BJP-RSS-Sangh Parivar, have learned millennia ago to live with diversity, indeed to celebrate our diversity, for out of it is forged our unity as a nation. 

For the West, however, diversity is a totally new experience. They have been compelled for economic reasons to import millions of Third World labourers, and since an arc of Arab countries lies immediately south of France on the other littoral of the Mediterranean, most of France's imported labour comprises Muslims from the Maghreb. France wants them to become Frenchmen as if the Arabs had fostered 1789 and never been subjected to colonial rule. The Arab Muslims wish to remain themselves, notwithstanding their having emigrated to France for the same economic reasons that have led to France and other Western countries importing them in such large numbers. Hence, stupid measures like insisting that no Muslim schoolchild in France may wear the hijab that her sisters wear in their home countries will result in a backlash.

‘Cleansing the stock’ and other ways governments talk about human beings

Those in power don’t speak of ‘people’ or ‘killing’ – it helps them do their job. And we are picking up their dehumanising euphemisms

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 21 October 2014 15.25 BST

An Israeli strike on a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip in which two children were killed and a dozen other people were injured. 'Mowing the lawn'? Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

To blot people out of existence first you must blot them from your mind. Then you can persuade yourself that what you are doing is moral and necessary. Today this isn’t difficult. Those who act without compassion can draw upon a system of thought and language whose purpose is to shield them – and blind us – to the consequences.

The contention by Lord Freud, a minister in the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, that disabled people are “not worth the full wage” isn’t the worst thing he’s alleged to have said. I say “alleged” because what my ears tell me is contested by Hansard, the official parliamentary record. During a debate in the House of Lords, he appeared to describe the changing number of disabled people likely to receive the employment and support allowance as a “bulge of, effectively, stock”. After a furious response by the people he was talking about, this was transcribed by Hansard as“stopped”, rendering the sentence meaningless. I’ve listened to the word several times on the parliamentary video. Like others, I struggle to hear it as anything but “stock”.

If we’re right, he is not the only person at his department who uses this term. Its website describes disabled people entering the government’s work programme for between three and six months as “3/6Mth stock”. Perhaps this makes sense when you remember that they are a source of profit for the companies running the programme. The department’s delivery plan recommends using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”. To cleanse the stock: remember that.

Human beings – by which I mean those anthropoid creatures who do not necessarily receive social security – often live in families. But benefit claimants live in “benefit units”, defined by the government as “an adult plus their spouse (if applicable) plus any dependent children living in the household”. On the bright side, if you die while on a government work programme, you’ll be officially declared a “completer”. Which must be a relief.

A dehumanising system requires a dehumanising language. So familiar and pervasive has this language become that it has soaked almost unnoticed into our lives. Those who do have jobs are also described by the function they deliver to capital. These days they are widely known as “human resources”.

The living world is discussed in similar terms. Nature is “natural capital”. Ecological processes are ecosystem services, because their only purpose is to serve us. Hills, forests and rivers are described in government reports as “green infrastructure”. Wildlife and habitats are “asset classes” in an “ecosystems market”. Fish populations are invariably described as “stocks”, as if they exist only as movable assets from which wealth can be extracted – like disabled recipients of social security. The linguistic downgrading of human life and the natural world fuses in a word a Norwegian health trust used to characterise the patients on its waiting list: biomass.

Those who kill for a living employ similar terms. Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians (including 500 children), in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”. It’s not original. Seeking to justify Barack Obama’s drone war in Pakistan (which has so far killed 2,300 people, only 4% of whom have since been named as members of al-Qaida), Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.” The director of the CIA, John Brennan, claimed that with “surgical precision” his drones “eliminate the cancerous tumour called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it”. Those who operate the drones describe their victims as bug splats.

During its attack on the Iraqi city of Falluja in November 2004, the US army used white phosphorus to kill or maim people taking shelter in houses or trenches. White phosphorus is fat-soluble. Even small crumbs of it bore through living tissue on contact. It destroys mucous membranes, blinding people and ripping up their lungs. Its use as a weapon is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, as the US army knows: one of its battle books observes that “it is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets” (personnel targets, by the way, are human beings). But never mind all that. The army has developed a technique it calls Shake ‘n Bake: flush people out with phosphorus, then kill them with high explosives. Shake ‘n Bake is a product made by Kraft Foods for coating meat with breadcrumbs before cooking it.

Terms such as these are designed to replace mental images of death and mutilation with images of something else. Others, such as “collateral damage” (dead or wounded civilians), “kinetic activity” (shooting and bombing), “compounds” (homes) and “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping and torture by states), are intended to prevent the formation of any mental pictures at all. If you can’t see what is being discussed, you will struggle to grasp the implications. The clearest example is “neutralising”, which neutralises the act of killing it describes.

I doubt many people could kill and wound if their language accurately represented what they were doing. It is notable that those who are most enthusiastic about waging war are the least able to describe what they are talking about without resorting to metaphor and euphemism. Few people have nightmares about squashing insects or mowing the lawn.

The media, instead of challenging public figures to say kill when they mean kill, and people when they mean people, repeats these evasions. Uncontested, their sanitised, trivialised, belittling terms seep into our own mouths, until we also talk about “operatives” or “human capital” or “illegal aliens” without stopping to consider how those words resonate and what they permit us not to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are dehumanising metaphors in this article that I have failed to spot.

If we wish to reclaim public life from the small number of people who have captured it, we must also reclaim the language in which it is expressed. To know what we are talking about: this, in more than one sense, is the task of those who want a better world.

Be angry at bankers, be angrier at economists

Orthodox economists stand aloof from a crisis of their own making. Time for a public inquiry where they can be interrogated

• 
• • Ann Pettifor
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 June 2012 17.28 BST

The Libor scandal 'is just a symptom of a much bigger dysfunctional banking system, one that is staunchly upheld by the British establishment'. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Like millions of others I am outraged by the Libor scandal, by the wrongdoings of the "submitters" and other traders at Barclays Bank under Bob Diamond, and their fellow travellers at the British Bankers' Association. That is why I and my colleagues at Prime have launched a government e-petition calling for a judicial public inquiry into the wrongdoings of banks, and for the inquiry to have powers to summon witnesses and question them under oath.

But this scandal is just a symptom of a much bigger dysfunctional banking system, one that is staunchly upheld by the British establishment – many of whom have their heads firmly below the parapet. And it is a direct result of the flawed, mainstream economic theories on which the global, so-called free market in money has been built.

So, while I do of course regard the speculative and often fraudulent activities of our bankers with disdain, I reserve my real anger for the economics profession, both professional and academic.
For it is mainstream, orthodox economics that has effectively given private bankers the cover they need to engage in reckless, greedy, fraudulent and immensely enriching activity. It is orthodox economists who have built the platform on which today stand the young traders at 16 banks involved in the Libor scandal. Above all, it is mainstream economists who are directly responsible for the financial crisis and who have brought our global financial system to this pass.

Yet economists (with some notable exceptions) stand aloof from a crisis of their own making. And when they do deign to engage with it, it is to adopt an attitude of defeatism. We are constantly enjoined to simply accept the destructive fate of austerity, financial failure, bankruptcy and unemployment, for, they argue: "There is nothing to be done." Only "creative destruction" will do the trick.

But that is a lie. There is much that can be done to alleviate the suffering and destruction of value that we witness daily. All it requires is to remove orthodox economic blinkers. Furthermore, we have the precedent of the 1930s, when Keynes and Roosevelt took on the bankers, began to resolve the crisis, and built sustained recovery in the US.

To understand the root of the Barclays scandal, and what must be done now, we – and, most emphatically, orthodox economists – must first understand a foundational element of the economy: money.

As Geoffrey Ingham has argued in The Nature of Money, orthodox economists believe in the "commodity theory of money". While they no longer maintain that money consists of a material with an intrinsic exchange value, they argue that it is a commodity in the sense that it can be understood like any other commodity – hence the belief that money is subject to the forces of supply and demand, marginal utility and so on.

On this stands the belief that the "price" of money – the rate of interest – is not constructed socially, but is a result of market forces.

Most economists still hold to the naive belief that money equals deposits and savings. They take this further. They believe firmly that, in order to lend, banks must have a stash of savings in the vault. They do not understand that bankers can create credit by entering numbers into a computer. No, they believe that banks simply act as intermediaries and can be relied up on, for example, to come between Mrs Jones and her carefully accumulated savings and Mr Smith's demand for a loan.

But John Maynard Keynes (as well as Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Galbraith and others) knew otherwise. And Keynes explained money and how it works most clearly: in brief, money, in all instances, starts life as credit. It is created in the first instance by central banks – which, with the stroke of a computer keyboard, can deposit billions of pounds into the bank accounts of commercial banks – think of quantitative easing. In return, the central bank demands collateral.

Private commercial banks are then licensed to do the same. So private bankers create credit out of thin air – by entering numbers into a computer and then requiring, first, collateral and, second, repayment. This credit then enters bank accounts as deposits. We invest or spend this money, and that generates income – wages, salaries, profits and taxes. Income is then used to repay the credit or debt.

In other words, we as a society bestow great power on central and commercial bankers, which is why economic prosperity has depended on the public accountability, regulation and management of finance. Orthodox economists do not understand money as credit. They see it as subject to the forces of supply and demand and regard these forces as a good thing – for they can determine the "price" of money, ie, the rate of interest.

But money is not like oil or diamonds. It can be created out of thin air. It is a public good, like clean air or water. But, unlike clean water, there is no limit to its creation. That's why it must be regulated and managed, not left to the invisible hand of market forces.

Barclays' bankers were granted huge powers. Let us not be surprised that they abused those powers. While, of course, they must be punished, it is time to interrogate those who gave away this great public good, this great power to create and price credit. Let us begin with the profession of economists.