The Cycle of Power

In a quaint village nestled beneath the shadow of a towering mountain, the villagers' lives were ruled by the fear of a menacing dragon. Their lands were scorched, their crops destroyed, and their hearts gripped by terror. But hope wasn't lost; a group of courageous young heroes emerged from their midst.

Guided by legends of old and fueled by a desire to liberate their people, these brave souls set out on a treacherous journey. Armed with inherited wisdom, enchanted weapons, and unwavering determination, they scaled the mountain's heights and confronted the dragon in its fiery lair. After a fierce and harrowing battle, they emerged victorious, driving the beast away and restoring peace to the land.

The villagers rejoiced, celebrating their newfound freedom. The young heroes were hailed as saviors, their bravery inspiring songs and stories that echoed through the village square.

After some time, however, a new dragon soon emerged and started terrorising the village again.

---

Interpretation:

"The Cycle of Power" is a story that delves into the themes of leadership, the corrupting influence of power, and the nuanced dynamics between the oppressed and the oppressors. The narrative explores the gradual transformation of the young heroes from liberators to tyrants, demonstrating how the quest for survival and control can twist even the best intentions.

At its core, the story cautions against the dangerous allure of power. The initial triumph over the dragon represents the heroes' commitment to justice and their ability to challenge oppression. However, as leaders, they face a new set of challenges, and their journey illustrates the complexities of maintaining a just rule while navigating the harsh realities of resource scarcity and societal pressures.

The metaphor of the dragon's return as a manifestation of their own oppressive behavior is a poignant reminder of the cyclical nature of power dynamics. It emphasizes the potential for even well-intentioned leaders to become tyrannical when faced with difficult decisions and the burden of ensuring their community's survival.

The story's conclusion serves as a cautionary tale, highlighting the delicate balance that leaders must strike between maintaining authority and safeguarding the well-being of those they lead. It encourages self-awareness, humility, and a recognition of the potential for one's own actions to perpetuate the very injustices they sought to eradicate. Ultimately, "The Cycle of Power" invites reflection on the ethical challenges of leadership and the responsibility that comes with wielding authority.

The Myth of Bhima Koregaon Reinforces the Identities It Seeks to Transcend

BY ANAND TELTUMBDE  in The Wire

The resolve to fight Hindutva forces is certainly laudable, but the myth used for the purpose may be grossly counterproductive.

Bhima Koregaon victory pillar. Credit: Wikipedia

Two hundred years ago, the last battle of the Anglo-Maratha war was fought at Koregaon village on the banks of Bhima river near Pune. The battle marked the firm hold of the British Empire in India. The British erected an obelisk at the battle ground in the memory of the dead. It has 49 names, 22 of them are identified by their ‘nak’ suffix as Mahars. It was construed as the testimony to the gallantry of Mahar soldiers, and was rightly used by the first batch of Mahar leaders such as Gopal Baba Walangkar, Shivram Janba Kamble and even Ramji Ambedkar, B.R. Ambedkar’s father, when pleading the British for the restoration of Mahar recruitment in the British army when it was stopped in 1893. The stoppage of Mahar recruitment was a consequence of the Indian uprising of 1857, after which the British reassessed their recruiting strategies to include only those from ‘martial races’ in the army.

But when Babasaheb Ambedkar painted the Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the battle of Mahar soldiers against their caste oppression in Peshwa rule, he was creating a pure myth. As myths are required to build movements, he perhaps saw its necessity then. But after a century, when it solidifies into a quasi-history and tends to push Dalits deeper into an identitarian marshland, it should become a worrisome matter. Many Dalit organisations recently formed a joint front to observe the 200th anniversary of this battle as a campaign to launch an attack on the new Peshwai, the rising Brahmanic rule of the Hindutva forces. Their long marches culminated into an Elgar Parishad (conference) at the Shaniwarwada at Pune on December 31. While the resolve to fight the Hindutva forces is certainly laudable, the myth used for the purpose may be grossly counterproductive insofar as it reinforces identitarian tendencies whereas the necessity is to transcend them.

As regards history, it is a fact that when the East India Company developed its military aspirations, it recruited Dalits in disproportionately large numbers, perhaps for their unflinching loyalty and faithfulness and also because they were cheaply available. One finds disproportionate numbers of the Namshudras in Bengal, the Parayas in Madras and the Mahars in Maharashtra in its army. If the Dalits wanted to claim significant contribution to the establishment of the British Raj in India, it may not be as such incorrect. But to attribute motive of fighting caste oppression to their soldiery shall be far-fetched and unhistorical.

The East India Company fought and won several battles from the first one in Plassey in 1757 before the last battle of the Anglo-Maratha war. Obviously, all of them were not against the Peshwas. Most of them were not even against the Hindus. They were simply wars between the two ruling powers, which their soldiers fought just as their duty. To make them appear as anti-caste or anti-religion will not only be factually incorrect, but also an erroneous understanding of historical caste. Caste, until after the late 19th century when there was a substantial spread of education among the Dalits, has been the life-world of people. They took caste as a natural order and their oppression as the fate that they had to meekly endure. Therefore, there was no question of any resistance to caste, leave apart physical war against them. Contrary to such myths of bravery, there is no evidence of any militant resistance the Dalits ever posed against the Brahmanic oppression.

With regard to formation of warring armies, they were not purely composed on communal lines. While the Dalit soldiers may be relatively in large numbers in British army, it is not that they did not exist in Muslim or Maratha armies. As with communities, all castes existed in all the armies. In the Battle of Koregaon, one of the three wings of the Peshawa infantry was Arabs, which had reportedly fought most fiercely and had most casualties. What could be their motivation? Did they want the Peshwa’s Brahmanic rule to triumph? The fact is that they simply fought as soldiers for their masters, as the Dalits did for theirs. It would be grossly erroneous to attribute loftier motives to them than this.

Anglo-Maratha war. Credit: Wikipedia

Before the battle of Koregaon on January 1, 1818, the Peshwas had been reduced to weaklings by the earlier two Anglo-Maratha wars. As a matter of fact, the Peshwa Bajirao II had fled Pune and was attempting to attack Pune from outside. Peshwa’s army comprised 20,000 cavalry and 8,000 infantry, out of which around 2,000 men, divided into three infantry parties each comprising 600 Arabs, Gosains and soldiers, mounted the attack. The majority of the attackers were Arabs, reputed to be the finest among the Peshwa soldiers. The Company troops comprised 834 men, including around 500 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which was manned predominantly by Mahar soldiers. Although there is no record of their exact number, it is obvious that all of them were not Mahars. Even going by the casualties, the majority of those died in the battle (27 out of 49) were not Mahars. The Peshwa army ultimately withdrew, fearing the arrival of a larger British force led by General Joseph Smith. In view of these factual details, it may be misleading to portray the battle as Mahars’ vengeance against the Peshwas’ Brahmanic rule.

There is no evidence that after the defeat of Peshwai, there was any relief that accrued to Mahars. As a matter of fact, their caste oppression continued unabated. Rather, as hinted earlier, the ungrateful British stopped their recruitment to the army, refusing to acknowledge their past bravery. They ignored their pleas to restore recruitment until threatened by the First World War, in the wake of which they restarted their recruitment. There is no dispute that the British colonial rule brought Dalits numerous benefits, to the extent that the very birth of the Dalit movement may be attributable to it. But it must simultaneously be understood that it was unintended and primarily dictated by their colonial logic. It is unfortunate that Dalits blind themselves to this reality with their identity blinkers.

It is equally incorrect to say that since the Peshwa forces belonged to the Maratha confederacy, they were the nationalist forces, and the defeating British forces were the imperialists. To see historical facts through the spectacles of a non-existent nation is equally condemnable. There was no concept of an Indian nation; as a matter of fact, this concept eludes us even to this day. Paradoxically, India itself is by and large a gift of British rule, having forged a political unity of vast landmass of the subcontinent. Those who have been driving it as a nation for their selfish gains are indeed debauched like Peshwas and are the biggest anti-nationals.

The Dalits do need to fight this new Peshwai recreated by the Hindutva marauders. For that, they better open their eyes to see the reality, rather than an ostrich-like look into the mythical past and imagine their greatness.

Your new iPhone’s features include oppression, inequality – and vast profit

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


Human battery hens make Apple’s devices in China. The company, which has a bigger cash pile than the US government, symbolises a broken economic system

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze


Soon enough, we will see the first obituaries for openness, free trade and globalisation. When those writers ponder how wealthy countries turned towards the politics of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, they should devote a large chapter to Apple. Because the world’s richest company is a textbook example of how the promises made after the fall of the Berlin Wall have been made a mockery of.

Whatever marvels have been shoved into the new iPhones, the devices serve to increase the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us, bilk countries of rightful tax revenues, and oppress Chinese workers even while depriving Americans of high-paying jobs. Arrogant towards critics and governments, glutted with cash and yet plainly out of ideas, Apple is elegant shorthand for a redundant economic system.
None of this is how we’re meant to think of Apple, the multinational that is both on your side yet restlessly questing ahead. While launching the iPhone 7 this month, its marketing chief, Phil Schiller, explained why this model came without a earphone socket: “It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us.” Such patchouli-scented Californian dipshittery was lapped up by the 7,000-strong crowd and lightly mocked by the press – but it also helps to obscure some of the less tolerable aspect of the iPhone business model, such as the conditions in which it is made.

If you own an iPhone it was assembled by workers at one of three firms in China: Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron. The biggest and most famous, Foxconn, came to international prominence in 2010 when an estimated 18 of its employees tried to kill themselves. At least 14 workers died. The company’s response was to put up suicide nets, to catch people trying to jump to their death. That year, staff at Foxconn’s Longhua factory made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.

One of those attempted suicides, a 17-year-old called Tian Yu, flung herself from the fourth floor of a factory dormitory and ended up paralysed from the waist down. Speaking later to academic researchers, she described her working conditions in remarkable testimony that I then covered for the Guardian. She was essentially a human battery hen, working over 12 hours a day, six days a week, swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dorm room.

After the scandals of 2010, Apple vowed to improve conditions for its Chinese workers. It has since published a number of glossy brochures extolling its commitments to them. Yet there is no evidence that the Californian firm has given back a single penny of its gigantic profit margins to its contractors to ensure better treatment of the people who actually make its products.

Over the past year, the US-based NGO China Labor Watch has published a series ofinvestigations into Pegatron, another iPhone assembler. It sent a researcher on to the assembly line, interviewed dozens of Pegatron staff and analysed hundreds of pay stubs. Among its findings are that staff still work 12 hours a day, six days a week – one and a half hours of that unpaid. They are forced to do overtime, claims the NGO, and provided with illegally low levels of safety training.

The researcher was working on one iPhone motherboard every 3.75 seconds, standing up for the entirety of his 10.5-hour shift. Such is the punishment endured at Apple’s contractors to make a living wage, apparently.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Tim Cook with dancer Maddie Ziegler. The Apple CEO ‘rejects a €13bn tax bill from the EU as ‘political crap’’. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

The Shanghai local government has raised the minimum wage over the past year; Pegatron has responded by cutting subsidies on things such as medical insurance so that the effective hourly pay for its staff has fallen.

When questioned about these reports, Pegatron provided a statement that read in part: “We work hard to make sure every Pegatron facility provides a healthy work environment and allegations suggesting otherwise are simply not true … We have taken effective measures … to ensure employees do not work more than 60 hours per week and six days per week.”

At another of Apple’s major contractors, Wistron, a Danish human-rights NGO last year found extensive evidence of forced student labour. Teenagers doing degrees in accountancy or business management were sent for months to an assembly line at Wistron. This is a serious violation of International Labour Organisationconvention, yet investigators for Danwatch found evidence that thousands of students were doing the same work and backbreaking hours there as the adults – but costing less.

The teenagers told Danwatch that they were working against their will. “We are all depressed,” one 19-year-old girl said. “But we have no choice, because the school told us that if we refused, we would not get our diploma.” Despite several requests for comment, Wistron did not respond.

That investigation was not at a factory making iPhones, but Apple confirmed that Wistron and Pegatron were two of their major assemblers in China. While it did not wish to say anything on the record, Apple’s press officers pointed me to the audits it had commissioned into its supplier factories. Yet the inspections are almost conveniently skimpy.

Look at the report Apple commissioned into Foxconn in 2012, after those suicide attempts. Foxconn is the largest private employer in China, with around 400,000 workers at the Longhua factory alone. Yet the report for Apple, complementary to an investigation already being carried out by the Fair Labor Association, admits to looking at just three of those plants for three days apiece. Jenny Chan, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese labour abuses and co-author of the forthcomingDying for an iPhone, calls it “parachute auditing – a way to allow ‘business as usual’ to carry on”. A very profitable way, as it happens. While iPhone workers for Pegatron saw their hourly pay drop to just $1.60 an hour, Apple remained the most profitable big company in America, pulling in over $47bn in profit in 2015 alone.

What does this add up to? At $231bn, Apple has a bigger cash pile than the US government, but apparently won’t spend even a sliver on improving conditions for those who actually make its money. Nor will it make those iPhones in America, which would create jobs and still leave it as the most profitable smartphone in the world.

It would rather accrue more profits, to go to those who hold Apple stock – such as company boss Tim Cook, whose hoard of company shares is worth $785m. Friends of Cook point to his philanthropy, but while he’s happy to spend on pet projects, he rejects a €13bn tax bill from the EU as “political crap” – whileboasting about how he won’t bring Apple’s billions back to the US “until there’s a fair rate … It doesn’t go that the more you pay, the more patriotic you are.” The tech oligarch seems to think he knows better than 300 million Americans what tax rates their elected government should set.

When the historians of globalisation ask why it died, they will surely find that companies such as Apple form a large part of the answer. Faced with a binary choice between an economic model that lavishly rewarded a few and a populism that makes lavish promises to many, between Cook on the one hand and Farage on the other, the voters went for the one who at least didn’t bang on about “courage”.

Racism is a system of oppression, not a series of bloopers

Gary Younge in The Guardian

Gerry Adams was wrong to use the N-word. But to fetishise one off-colour comment over a life’s work is grotesque.

 

Gerry Adams: ‘a life’s work of internationalism and antiracist solidarity.’ Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty


On the weekend in 2001 when Oldham went up in flames during a series o fracially charged disturbances, I was at a garden party at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival – when I, along with many others, heard Germaine Greer using the term “nigger in a woodpile”. I walked away, not particularly interested in her justification for using that offensive word. By the time the weekend was through I’d had several calls from newspaper diarists asking me to comment on the incident.

I refused. Irritated as I had been, I saw no need to dignify the moment with more importance than it was due. On the weekend when working-class youth in one of Britain’s poorest cities took to the streets in protest, the fact that I had found a comment at a cocktail party from a fellow columnist racially offensive defied any decent sense of priority or proportion.

Make no mistake, I was offended and had every right to be. Words have consequences, and micro-aggressions matter. Often they are emblematic of broader issues; often they have an exclusory effect. This is a word that I’m not comfortable being around, even when black people use it. (Its use by the comedian Larry Wilmore to refer to Barack Obama at this weekend’s White House correspondents’ dinner set tongues wagging.) But being offended is not a political position. Not every display of ignorance is necessarily a slight; not every slight is worth escalating into an incident; not every provocation need be indulged.

Striking that balance is tricky. But it is no less important for that. There is a level of moralising sanctimony that increasingly comes with such moments, a gleeful righteousness – now urged on by social media – that amplifies the outrage and intensifies the shaming.

It is now the turn of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin leader, to be in the crosshairs. While watching the film Django Unchained, which tells the story of a freed slave who sets out to rescue his wife from a vicious Mississippi plantation owner with the help of a German bounty hunter, he tweeted: “Watching Django Unchained – A Ballymurphy Nigger”. He shouldn’t have done that. He was wrong. But his attempt to explain it in the context of the nationalist community’s treatment in Northern Ireland makes sense.

It’s a similar formulation to that used by Roddy Doyle in The Commitments. “The Irish are the niggers of Europe,” Jimmy Rabbitte Jr tells his fledgling band. “An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin.” But The Commitments is 144 pages long; a tweet is just 140 characters. Context is important, and a tweet (soon deleted) stands alone.

After an initial hamfisted non-apology – blaming people for “misunderstanding the context in which [the word] was used” – Adams quickly graduated to a less grudging response, stating: “I apologise for any offence caused.” That should be the end of it.

To judge Adams, who has a life’s work of internationalism and antiracist solidarity, by a single tweet borders on the grotesque. People should be assessed on the body of their work, not just on a single off-colour statement. That doesn’t mean the statement should be ignored. But to fetishise it above a person’s record does a disservice not just to the person but to the issue.

As someone who, as an adult, has been stupid enough to ask gay men about their girlfriends and Jews how they enjoyed Christmas, I believe everyone has the right to misspeak, be set right, apologise and then carry on about their business. If that whole process is conducted in a spirit of generosity, then who knows? We might even learn something.

But if it’s not, all we have is an almighty game of gotcha with considerable collateral damage. This is not a new problem. In 2004 the football pundit Ron Atkinson was heard, when he thought the mic was off, referring to the Chelsea player Marcel Desailly thus: “He’s what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger.” It was a reprehensible thing to say. He apologised, offered his resignation to ITV, which was accepted, and left his column in this newspaper by mutual agreement.

That’s as it should be. It is also the case that when it mattered he was one of the few coaches in British football who nurtured black talent, bringing on the likes of Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham – both going on to play for England – and Brendon Batson. That excuses nothing that he said; but it makes a difference to how one chooses to describe, deride or disparage him in the wake of his awful comments.

Last year it was the turn of the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who referred to how much things would have to improve before “coloured actors” could get the work they deserved in Britain. In the process of pointing out racism he came out with a word not used to identify black people for almost 40 years.

Racism is a system of oppression. It should not be reduced to series of gaffes. It not only cheapens the charge but essentially redefines it. Racism becomes not the subjugation of a people that has its roots in history, economics and power, but a series of bloopers in which the unfortunate are caught out. A matter of politics becomes an issue of politeness. The institutional is relegated to an indiscretion.
With the help of diversity consultants and a cautious manner, the careful can carry on doing bad things so long as they don’t say the wrong thing. That won’t get rid of racism. It’ll just give us some of the best-mannered racists in the world.

'Freedom' an instrument of oppression

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression

It's the disguise used by those who wish to exploit without restraint, denying the need for the state to protect the 99%

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 December 2011 20.30 GMT
  • larger | smaller

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Rightwing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers' Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Policy Exchange. Their concept of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.

So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it's the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

As Berlin noted: "No man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'." So, he argued, some people's freedom must sometimes be curtailed "to secure the freedom of others". In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. "If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral." It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people's freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.

These conflicts of negative freedom were summarised in one of the greatest poems of the 19th century, which could be seen as the founding document of British environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside his home. "Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom's ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be. / Thou'st heard the knave, abusing those in power, / Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free."

The landlord was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding on Clare's freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life. The landlord justifies this destruction by characterising the tree as an impediment to freedom – his freedom, which he conflates with the general liberty of humankind. Without the involvement of the state (which today might take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the pleasures of the powerless man. Clare then compares the felling of the tree with further intrusions on his liberty. "Such was thy ruin, music-making elm; / The right of freedom was to injure thine: / As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm / In freedom's name the little that is mine."

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare's landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – "do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?" – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.