India: the Empire strikes back

From Raj to riches: as India celebrates 60 years of independence, acclaimed historian William Dalrymple salutes a country returning to its pre-colonial wealth

When I moved back to India with my family four years ago, I took a lease on a farmhouse five kilometres from the boom town of Gurgaon on the south-western edge of Delhi. From my road I could see in the distance the rings of new housing estates, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier was billowing winter wheat.

Tourists walk in front of the historic Taj Mahal in the northern Indian city of Agra
One of India's most historic sites: the Taj Mahal

The first time I lived in Delhi, in the late 1980s, Gurgaon was a semi-rural Haryana market town, with a single large Maruti car plant to one side; it was home to no more than 100,000 people.

Now it had become a city of several million; some said three million, some said more - the speed of growth was so enormous that it was difficult to obtain accurate figures. Either way, Gurgaon was now home to a population almost equal to that of my native Scotland.

Here an increasingly wealthy middle class had suddenly taken root in an aspirational bubble of fast-rising shopping malls, espresso bars, restaurants and multiplexes. These new neighbourhoods, most of them still half-built and ringed with scaffolding, were invariably given such unrealistically enticing names as Beverly Hills, Windsor Court, West End Heights - an indication, perhaps, of where their owners would prefer to be and where, in time, they might eventually migrate.

Four years later, Gurgaon has galloped towards us at such a speed that it now abuts the edge of our farm and the proudly-touted "largest mall in Asia" is arising a quarter of a mile from my house.
advertisement

What was farmland and a pool for water buffaloes when I moved in is now a mass of cranes, flanked by billboards advertising the latest laptops and iPods. There are still no accurate figures but the population has probably topped five million.

The speed of the development of Gurgaon is breathtaking to anyone used to the plodding growth rates of western Europe: the sort of construction that would take 25 years in Britain comes up here in five months, even if, at the end of it, the "luxury" flats will probably only have electricity for a couple of hours a day and the water supply will be intermittent at best.

The speed of change in Gurgaon reflects that of the growth of the Indian economy in general: economic futurologists all agree that China and India will at some stage in the 21st century come to dominate the global economy.

The various intelligence agencies estimate that China will overtake America between 2030 and 2040, while India will overtake the US by roughly 2050, as measured in dollar terms. Measured by purchasing-power parity, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third largest economy in the world.

Incredibly, India now trains a million engineering graduates a year (against 100,000 each in America and Europe) and stands third in technical and scientific capacity - behind the US and Japan, but well ahead of China.

Today India's IT sector alone annually earns the vast sum of almost $25 billion, mostly in export earnings. With an average growth rate over the last decade of 6 per cent and current growth of 9 per cent, it is little wonder that average incomes are doubling every 15 years: the number of mobile-phone users has jumped from 3 million in 2000 to 100 million in 2005; the number of television channels from one in 1991 to more than 150 last year.

It is a similar picture on India's roads: in the early 1990s, as India was starting to relax import and investment restrictions on foreign manufacturers, there were only six or seven makes of car.

More than 90 per cent of them were Hindustan Ambassadors, the Indian- made version of the 1950s Morris Oxford - effectively clumpy vintage cars. Now the new six-lane highways are full of sleek and speedy Fiats, Fords, Mercedes-Benz and even the odd Porsche and Bentley.
Emperor Khurram (Shah Jahan, 1592-1666)

The 17th century Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who created the Taj Mahal monument

So extraordinary is all this to us today, particularly to those who knew the sluggish India of 20 years ago, that it is easy to forget how little of it would have surprised our ancestors who sailed there with the East India Company. The idea of India as a poor country is relatively recent: historically, South Asia was always famous as the richest region of the globe, whose fertile soils gave two harvests a year, and whose mines groaned with minerals.

Ever since Alexander the Great first penetrated the Hindu Kush, Europeans fantasised about the wealth of these lands, where the Greek geographers said that gold was dug up by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins, and where precious jewels lay scattered on the ground like dust.

In Roman times, there was a dramatic drain of Western gold to India. This is something the Greek historian Strabo comments on with great anxiety in his writings - an image graphically confirmed by the recent finds of huge Roman coin hoards around Madurai in Tamil Nadu and a large Roman coastal trading post near Pondicherry.

At the peak of the trade, during the reign of Nero, the south Indian Pandyan Kings even sent an embassy to Rome to discuss the latter's balance of payments problems. Even today, the English "pepper" and "ginger" are loan words from Tamil - respectively, pippali and singabera, testaments to the spice trade that was once a staple of this lucrative Indian export traffic.

It was similar legends of India's extraordinary wealth that drew the merchant adventurers of the Company eastwards. They came not as part of some Tudor aid project, or on behalf of a charitable Elizabethan NGO, but as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the vast riches of the fabled Mughal Empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world.

What the Poles are to modern Britain - economic migrants in search of better lives - the Jacobeans were to Mughal India.

At their heights, the Mughal Emperors were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in China. The Great Mughals ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh and great chunks of Afghanistan.

Their armies were all but invincible, their palaces unparalleled and the domes of their many mosques glittered with gold. For their contemporaries in distant Europe, they were potent symbols of power and wealth. The word Mughal (or Mogul) is still loaded today with connotations of this, even when it is divorced from its original Indian context.

In Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Lahore had grown larger and richer even than Constantinople and, with its two million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris.

"The city is second to none either in Asia or in Europe," said Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Monserrate, "with regards either to size, population, or wealth. It is crowded with merchants, who foregather there from all over Asia. There is no art or craft useful to human life which is not practised there. The citadel alone has a circumference of three miles."

It was, in terms of rapid growth, instant prosperity and unlimited opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.

What changed all this was quite simply the advent of European colonialism. Following Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to the East in 1498, bypassing the Middle East and conquering the centres of spice production in South Asia, European colonial traders - first the Portuguese, then the Dutch and finally the British - slowly wrecked the old trading network and imposed with their cannons and caravels a western imperial system of command economics.

It was only at the very end of the 18th century that Europe, for the first time in history, had a favourable balance of trade with Asia. At the same time, the era of Indian economic decline had begun and was most precipitous in the region around the British headquarters in Calcutta.

As the 18th century historian Alexander Dow put it: "Bengal was one of the richest, most populous and best cultivated kingdoms in the world… We may date the commencement of decline from the day on which Bengal fell under the dominion of foreigners."

This was certainly the view of Edmund Burke, who impeached Warren Hastings, India's first Governor General, charging him with oppression, corruption, gross abuse of power and ruthlessly plundering India.

On February 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness the members of the House of Lords troop into Westminster Hall to sit in judgement on Hastings.

Tickets for the few seats reserved for spectators were said to have changed hands for as much as £50. In the audience was Sarah Siddons, the great society actress (and courtesan), as well as Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, the novelist Fanny Burney, the Queen, two of her daughters and most of the ambassadors in London.

For all the theatre of the occasion - and, indeed, one of the prosecutors was the playwright Richard Sheridan - this was not just the greatest political spectacle in the age of George III. It was the nearest the British ever got to putting the Empire on trial and they did so with Edmund Burke, one of their greatest orators, at the helm, supported by the similarly eloquent Charles James Fox.

Hastings stood accused of nothing less than the rape of India - or as Burke put it in his opening speech: "Cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name… crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men, in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence - in short everything that manifests a heart blackened to the very blackest; a heart dyed in blackness; a heart gangrened to the core… We have brought before you the head, the captain general of iniquity - one in whom all the fraud, all the tyranny of India are embodied."

When Burke began to describe the violation of Bengali virgins and their mothers by the rapacious tax collectors the British employed - "They were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people… they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies" - Mrs Sheridan "was so overpowered that she fainted and to be carried from the hall".

Hastings was in many ways the wrong target for Burke's Parliamentary offensive and, after a trial lasting nearly 10 years, he was eventually acquitted on all charges.

But it is worth recalling the damage that the Company undoubtedly did to the flourishing economy of India as the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence dawns amid unprecedented excitement at India's rapid rise towards its projected superpower status.

Today, academics, historians and economists are fiercely divided between those who believe European colonial rule brought great benefits to India and those who believe Britain put India into irreversible political and economic decline.

Given the complex and emotive issues involved, it is hardly surprising that there is little neutral territory in this politically super-charged debate: did Western mercantile-imperialism bring high capitalism and free trade to India, as supporters such as historian Niall Ferguson would have us believe; or did it irrevocably destroy millennia-old trading networks?

Did it bring democracy to a part of the world inured to despotism and tyranny; or did it remove political freedom of expression from lands with long traditions of debate and public expression of dissent, as argued by the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen?

Did the British Empire bring in constitutional guarantees of the freedom of the individual; or promote slavery, exploitation, indentured labour and forced migration? Did the British bring just governance and irrigate the deserts, or did they plunder natural resources, drive a number of species to extinction and preside over a succession of famines that left many million dead while surplus grain was being shipped to Britain?

Most important of all, did the British promote religious tolerance, or did they instead sow the seeds of religious conflict with cynical policies of sectarian divide and rule - thus laying the scene for the politico-religious divisions we see around us and what Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntingdon would have us believe are today's civilisational clashes?

There are no easy answers to any of these questions. Looking back at the role the Europeans have played in South Asia until their departure in August 1947, there is certainly much that the West can unambiguously be said to have contributed to Indian life: the Portuguese, for example, brought that central staple of Indian life, the chilli pepper; while the British brought that other essential staple, tea, as well as the far more important innovations of democracy and the rule of law, along with the railways, all of which have helped India rise again to greatness.

In the light of so much post-colonial disapproval, it is also worth remembering the impeccable reputation Victorian rule in India (if not that of the Company) once enjoyed, even from Britain's fiercest critics.

Bismarck thought Britain's work in India would be "one of its lasting monuments". Theodore Roosevelt agreed that Britain had done "such marvellous things in India" that they might "transform the Indian population… in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as Rome did hers on Europe".

The French traveller Abbé Dubois extolled the "uprightness of character, education and ability" of British officials in India, while the Austrian Baron Hübner ascribed the "miracles" of British rule to its administrators' "devotion, intelligence, courage, and skill combined with an integrity proof against all temptation".

It is also true that factors such as cricket and the English language have been crucial to India's modern success, cultural indicators that in their different ways set Indian eyes looking westwards to the rising power of Britain, and later the US, and away from the declining Islamo-Persianate culture of Central Asia and the Middle East, a world that would go into ever greater cultural and economic decline as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.

In the days that followed the fall of the Mughals after the great Indian Mutiny of 1857, this turning away from the old cultural moorings and the reorientation of India towards the West caused heartbreak to the old Urdu- and Persian-speaking elites.

As the poet and critic Azad wrote: "The glory of the winners' ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs - even their dress, their gait, their conversation - a radiance that makes them desirable. And people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them."

Yet it was the depth of that reorientation and adoption, and the ease which Indians can now cross the globe and work in either Britain or the US, that today has given the country's anglicised elite such easy access to the jobs and opportunities of the Western economy.

Nevertheless, for all this we British should keep our nostalgia and self-congratulation over the Raj within strict limits. For all the irrigation projects, the great engineering achievements and the famous imperviousness to bribes of the officers of the Indian Civil Service, the Raj nevertheless presided over the destruction of Indian political, cultural and artistic self-confidence, while the economic figures speak for themselves.

In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 per cent of the world's GDP, while India was producing 22.5 per cent. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 per cent, while India had been reduced for the first time to the epitome of a Third World nation, a symbol across the globe of famine, poverty and deprivation.

Today in India, the dramatic increase in wealth that we see on all sides is less some sort of economic miracle - the strange rise of a once impoverished wasteland, as it is usually depicted in the Western press - so much as things slowly returning to the traditional pattern of global trade in the pre-colonial world. Last year, the richest man in the UK was for the first time an ethnic Indian, Lakshmi Mittal, and our largest steel manufacturer, Corus, has been bought by an Indian company, Tata.

Extraordinary as it is, seen from the wider perspective the rise of India and China is merely nothing more than a return to the ancient equilibrium of world trade. Today, we Europeans are no longer the gun-toting, gunboat-riding colonial masters we once were, but instead are reverting to our more traditional role: that of eager consumers of the much celebrated luxuries and services of the East.

# William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for History.

The March To The Edge Of The Cliff

By Siv O'Neall

31 July, 2007
Axis of Logic

Mankind is blindly marching straight towards the edge of the cliff. Our so-called leaders are busy filling their pockets with gold and making sure they are first in line, that they can yell louder and grab faster than all the rest of us and that they can reach farther into whatever we're heading for. The fact that it's a morass and that it's going to suck us all up, nobody seems to care about.

Every one of the big guys wants to be the first one to cross the line at the goal. What goal? Total destruction, but that is not yet clear to anybody. Or so it seems. Let the show go on. Let's kill more innocent people, let's buy up competing corporations, let's lead the pack of thieves in money speculation, let's bankrupt more small companies, let's suck up the retirement savings of the little people, let's fool the idiots who think we're here to govern the world. We are here to take care of ourselves and our bank accounts. Who cares about the world? Who cares about tomorrow?

All the politicians and corporate leaders of the world seem to be set on exhausting the planet, killing off all the superfluous people and having a party when it's all over. Who is leading the pack? Well, Cheney & Co., clearly. Is there anybody left who can put the brakes on that clique? When they are busy destroying the world, when they happily plan to nuke Iran, when they start bombing the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, when they let the Palestinians kill each other off and yell hooray on the sidelines, is there anybody left who will stop Cheney & Co.? They are so busy dancing a victory dance because the oil and arms industries are making huge profits that they don't even see how the planet is burning. Corporate profits are soaring, so to hell with the dollar that's going down. It's good for exports and who cares if we owe trillions in debt to China and Japan? We don't intend to pay it back anyway.

The poor people are dying of AIDS and starvation. Who cares as long as the pharmaceutical industry is making a fortune? Who cares if millions of children are without health insurance? They are the children of the poor and they are not good for anything anyway.

Let the little people lose their life's savings in the big bankruptcies, the big money holders always save themselves and their fortunes. What matters is that business goes on. We can always fool enough people into believing that such and such stock is safe. When the bottom falls out, the CEOs will already be gone with their package intact and they'll pick up the lead somewhere else where people can be fooled into investing. As long as there is a war on, corporate profits are safe.

Iraq is in our way for taking over the world. There are more countries in the way, but let's take one at a time. Let's first invade and take over Iraq. Oh damn, Iraq is not going too well. Well, let the bastards kill each other off and then we'll take over when things calm down. They'll sort things out between themselves and we'll play ball with the winners after the civil war is over. In the meantime, let's nuke Iran. We can't have an Islam world power reaching from Morocco to Indonesia.

September 11 was a godsend. What would we have done if we hadn't been able to scare the people into paralysis and dumbness? What would we have done if it hadn't been for Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? There seems to be clear evidence that we are secretly supporting Al Qaeda, making sure they will not disappear. No surprise. And as for bin Laden, we have to go on pretending he's still alive so we have a precise target in our war on terror. It's lies and propaganda that keep the world going. It's what we say that matters, not what we do. We can make the imbeciles believe anything we want them to believe. Repeat it often enough and it becomes the truth. We create our own reality.

If the Dems pick up some backbone and begin to realize that resistance to a dictatorship is possible, we'll have to arrange for a repeat of the attack on the homeland. It's essential that the executive should not in any way be limited in his power. What Cheney says stands, George will always go along and Rove is around to oil the wheels and keep the spin machine going.

The world has to see that it doesn't serve any purpose to isolate the U.S. We don't need the rest of the world. We are the leaders, we run the show, we decide how the Middle East is supposed to be cut up and reshaped.

Oh they say China is coming on big. That's a lot of bull. China has no international standing and they are too heavily weighed down by poverty among their own people. After all, China is not even a civilized nation. No, there is nobody who can ever stand a chance to surpass America, the United States of America. America is the leader of the world and we have made sure that the world knows. One head of government after the other is coming on board the U.S. ship of State. Europe is veering to the right and the leaders are more and more interested in being on good terms with the giant in the west.

Besides, it's Big Money that's running the world and all we have to do is make sure that the big corporations are centered around us. Europe is playing our game once again and the rest of the world is sufficiently in awe of our military and financial power to want to be on good terms with us. Look at India. They were more than happy to clinch the deal about nuclear power in March 2006. That was a clever move, whoever thought of it. And as for Africa, it's being robbed by the IMF and the World Bank and there is no way African states can ever get in our way to power. Besides, the people are dying of AIDS and that's good riddance of useless people who are just overcrowding the planet.

We'll just get a major stake in the oil in the Middle East and the world is ours. Israel will help us take care of Syria and Lebanon, and Palestine will never go along with our requirements for a peaceful solution with Israel so they are out of harm's way. The Palestinians will go on self-destroying and nobody even knows that we helped kindle the fire. Smart move there. And now that we've poured fuel on the civil war in Iraq, they will soon self-destroy as well. As long as the different branches of Islam can't stop the infighting, we can safely count on being the winners in the end.

They say the United States is a wounded beast. Just wait and see what we can accomplish. Nobody can beat us. We have our own people eating out of our hand since they've been told and retold for centuries that we're the best, we're the greatest, the most moral, we're God's chosen people! America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. They would never dare tear that myth apart. Patriotism and religion keep them going.

Ok, so where do we go from here? We'll nuke Iran and then we'll see the Iranians toe the line that we set out for them. Who ever said the United States was a loser? Just wait and see.


© Copyright 2007 by AxisofLogic.com

Siv O’Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com

 

Of Marx, Christ, And The Persecution Of Radicals: How Will Humanity Survive The Capitalist Threat?

By Jason Miller
28 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org

A few days ago, one of my closest friends hit me with a heavily loaded question.
"Are you a Communist?" she queried.
To which I replied:
I do not belong nor militate in any formal communist party in the U.S. Nor do I belong to any other political entity or party. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to a specific doctrine, ideology, or dogma. My allegiance is to my core principles and values, which are premised on honesty, justice, humanity, responsibility, critical thinking, open-mindedness, egalitarianism, compassion, a belief in a Higher Power of my understanding, and many of the teachings of Christ.
My personal beliefs aside, communism is an incredibly loaded word. Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of "all things communist or socialist" into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.
Why is the establishment so desperate to vaccinate us against the "disease" of communism?
Because at its hopelessly rotten core, capitalism, which is manifested most strongly in the United States, is about exploitation, hyper-competitiveness, "rugged individualism", survival of the fittest, concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, profits above all, property over people, greed, and selfishness. Perhaps worst of all, this pyramid scheme masquerading as a "moral" economic system inevitably leads to wars fueled by its insatiable demands for new markets, more resources, and cheaper labor. Why else would 350 million out of 6.5 billion people spend a trillion dollars a year on a military that has the capacity to destroy our planet thousands of times over, dwarfs the combined firepower of the rest of the world, and plagues over 130 countries with its "benign" occupations? We in the United States maintain a carefully crafted façade as the "benevolent champions of democracy", but will quickly install ruthless tyrants and commit mass murder (euphemistically labeling our victims as "collateral damage") if sovereign nations dare to resist our economic rape and plunder.

And for those who have swallowed the specious argument that "true capitalism" doesn't exist, you're dreaming. Pinch yourself hard enough and you may awaken before it is too late. Capitalism is a cancer upon the sentient beings of the Earth and we are suffering through its advanced stages. Finance capital reigns supreme, massive oligopolies abound, wealth is increasingly accumulating in the hands of the few, imperial wars to expand markets and attain resources are increasing in frequency, and the insatiable greed driving this appalling perversion is raping and destroying the Earth.
Some opine that if we could just dismantle the "socialist" aspects of our socioeconomic system in the United States, restoring an unbridled free market, the world would be a much better place. Certainly our cynical plutocracy would welcome such a transition. However, it is hard to envision too many working people truly welcoming a return to ten year olds working twelve hour days, company towns, death and dismemberment on the job with no recourse against employers maintaining perilous work environments, miserly wages that would make today's working poor look relatively affluent, blatantly monopolistic business practices, and wanton disregard for the environment.
History has clearly demonstrated that "free markets" are "free passes" for acquisitive sociopaths who thrive on bullying and exploiting a large percentage of the Earth's sentient beings. And despite the ridiculously few and relatively minor restraints that social unrest has forced the opulent class to implement in the US, adept players in the deadly game of capitalism have refused to surrender their "inalienable right" to fuck the rest of the human race in their relentless charge to attain the power and wealth they so desperately crave to distract them from the existential agony of their spiritual emptiness.
[Note: If you don't find a historical perspective convincing enough, consider the deadly machinations of the "free market" in China as it hurtles headlong into the very bowels of capitalist Hell:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/26/
madeinchina.overview/index.html
Karl Marx predicted the inevitable implosion of capitalism and theorized that a much more humane, egalitarian, and democratic system would rise in its place. It is little wonder that the bourgeoisie in the United States have striven so tenaciously to inculcate the unwashed masses to despise, fear, and ridicule socialism, communism, and nearly all aspects of Marxist thought. Sound bites, emotionally evocative images, ahistorical presentations, fear mongering, jingoism, advertising, and numerous temptations of instant gratification comprise a vast array of highly refined and insidious propaganda that perpetually hammers our minds to create a potent and effective false consciousness, and an irrational fear of anything but capitalism.
Socialism and communism, the political manifestations of Marxist ideas, have been grossly distorted within the framework of this false consciousness. While it is true that the implementations of Marx's philosophies have yielded mixed results (many of those outcomes are primarily due to the unwavering hostility of the older, well established capitalist powers in the second half of the 20th century, led of course by the U.S.), the chasm between reality and the mind fuck we have received since birth is wide enough to engulf Donald Trump's ego, or most of it anyway. For evidence, one need look no further than our Cold War nemesis.
Consider the pernicious myth that the United States "defeated" fascism in Europe in WWII. This lie persists despite the fact that a number of our very own uber-Capitalists did business with the Nazi regime until the 1942 Trading with the Enemy Act finally forbade it. Ironically, Prescott Bush, GW's grandfather, was amongst those profiting from Hitler's rise to power. Further, our ruling elite refused to intervene on behalf of a democratically elected government in Spain against Franco, who ultimately rose to power as a fascist dictator. Perhaps most importantly, the US lost about 500,000 people (almost all of whom were military personnel) in "defeating" Germany. Russia, one of history's most heavily vilified "communist" nations, sacrificed 20 million people to ensure Hitler's defeat. Had it not been for those evil "communists", we might be speaking German right now.
Shortages of consumer goods is another "communist failure" apologists for capitalism love to trot out as "proof" that their beloved license to plunder and conquer is inherently superior to a more just economic system. Yet time and again they suppress the real reasons these shortages occurred. Recognizing the existential threat that Marxist ideals posed to their Anglo, imperial, and patriarchal plutocracy, the United States ruling class and its allies circled the wagons and imposed crippling economic sanctions on nations attempting to implement communism (i.e. Russia and Cuba).
Domestically, communists and socialists endured harassment, financial ruin, and prison. Witness the Palmer Raids and the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. Thank God our opulent overlords nipped potential revolutionary action in the bud. It is a tremendous relief that such a small number of "richly deserving" individuals acted to ensure the perpetuation of their virtual monopoly on the wealth of our nation, particularly in light of the existence of over a million homeless US Americans. Heartwarming indeed.
Yet our intrepid profit-seekers weren't content to stop there. Realizing that the Soviet Union had an economy that was roughly 1/8th the size of the United States and was still largely agrarian all the way up to the Russian Revolution, they decided to initiate a ruinous military escalation that eventually culminated in the criminal nuclear arms race. Enabling obscene profits for the military industrial complex (by way of raping the US American taxpayer) and smothering communism in its infancy, the vampiric bourgeoisie ensured the perpetuation of its abominable existence. Meanwhile, the Ruskies faced the staggering tasks of industrializing a technologically backward nation, rebuilding their devastated infrastructure, and meeting consumer demands. So of course they didn't have a McDonalds on each corner or a new car dealer within a three mile radius of every home. They were too busy bringing their economy into the 20th Century, recovering from Hitler's invasion, and matching the US warhead for warhead.
Now, do I think that any manifestation of a communist government to date is a utopia? No. I see their flaws. But remember, those who have tried to implement socialism or communism have faced a formidable adversary in the form of the rotten bastards who comprise both our "elected" and our de facto governments. Crushing those who dare to attempt alternatives to the sacred cow of capitalism and trumpeting our "monopoly" on virtue, we US Americans would benefit tremendously from some serious soul-searching about our participation in a morally bankrupt mode of being. What spiritual growth or substance could possibly flourish in a system premised on greed, selfishness, and self-absorption?
Are we, the beneficiaries of a relative degree of physical security and comfort (in exchange for our complicity in crony capitalism, Neoliberal exploitation, and imperial invasions), truly superior to the communists and socialists we have been taught to fear and revile? How many invasions have Fidel or Chavez EVER launched?
We the People are mere pawns of our multimillionaires in Congress, the 10% who own 90% of our nation's wealth, massive corporations, and a group which includes in its ranks both GW and other abject criminals like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Abrams, Negroponte, and many others who have acted with impunity dating back to the Nixon era. There is a revolving door between our government (including both "elected" and appointed officials) and major corporations. Cheney and Halliburton represent exhibit A. Lobbyists and special interest groups pull our legislators' strings and, in some instances, even write our laws, as was the case in the behind-closed-doors deal that Cheney cooked for the energy corporations. And look at our most likely Democratic Presidential nominee to be, Hillary Clinton, whose conservatism is one of the best kept secrets inside the Beltway. As a First Lady, she ostensibly fought aggressively for universal health care. She has now sold us out by accepting nearly a million dollars from the health care industry. Corruption, duplicity, mendacity, and egregious criminal conduct are not the exception. They are the rule in our vaunted capitalist system.
Our domestic politics, guided and determined by the demands of our predatory socioeconomic structure, are not alone in reeking of the fetid stench of profound moral decay. Consider our malevolent foreign policy, including myriad CIA covert operations, economic extortion, and outright imperial slaughter frequently employed to crush efforts by sovereign nations to defy the capitalist paradigm and implement socialism. For convincing evidence that we are NOT wearing white hats and making the world safe for democracy, do a little research on Chile and Salvador Allende, Cuba and Castro, Iran and Mossadeq, Franco and Spain, Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam (we "only" killed 3 million people there), Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
Here is a good starting point (the entire website is excellent, but the page linked below gives a condensed version of parts of our history the plutocracy doesn't want the masses to know– the mainstream media and textbook writers have done a masterful job of shielding us from the truths displayed on this site):
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com
/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html
While it wasn't his intention at the time, David Starr Jordan (from Imperial Democracy, 1899, pp. 50-51 –cited in Monthly Review, September 2006, p. 53.) penned an apt characterization of the despicable foreign policy of the American Empire:
"First you push into territories where you have no business to be, and where you had promised not to go; secondly, your intrusion provokes resentment and, in these wild countries, resentment means resistance; thirdly, you instantly cry out that the people are rebellious and that their act is rebellion (this in spite of your own assurance that you have no intention of setting up a permanent sovereignty over them); fourthly, you send a force to stamp out the rebellion; and fifthly, having spread bloodshed, confusion and anarchy, you declare, with hands uplifted to the heavens, that moral reasons force you to stay, for if you were to leave, this territory would be left in a condition which no civilized power could contemplate with equanimity or with composure. These are the five stages in the Forward Rake's progress."
Having analyzed our vile and reprehensible economic paradigm from many angles, I find it virtually impossible to believe that a critical thinking, decent human being could support our institutionalized rapacity, at least not once they pierced the simulacrum so fastidiously maintained by the corporate media.
Fortunately, challenging life experiences spurred me to undertake a spiritual and intellectual journey that enabled me to break free of the prison of false consciousness. While I tend to look at the world through a very eclectic lens, I derive most of my principles, beliefs, and sociopolitical views from Marxism, the Friends of Bill W, Christ's teachings, and Buddha.
Together with many dedicated and exceptional human beings, I am waging an intellectual/political struggle for social justice, a reasonable degree of peace in the world, a significant reduction in exploitation, a more equitable distribution of resources, an end to the rising epidemic of unnecessary suffering, the formation of a social structure based on our interdependence with nature and each other, the obliteration of the moronic, sociopathic American myth that individuality and personal rights supersede the well-being of the collective, true justice for criminals and their victims, the evisceration of corporate power, awakening people from their trance of self-absorption and apathy, and an end to the hedonistic narcissism manifested in obscene levels of consumerism. A number of factors indicate that we are in a pre-revolutionary stage in the United States. Premature revolutionary activity at this point would be suicidal folly, but meanwhile, we have plenty of opportunity to implement radical solutions at the personal level and to employ political education to win hearts and minds.
If you still tremble at the notion of "Godless communists, socialists or Marxists," remember that though I am not a Christian, I am deeply spiritual and derive tremendous inspiration from Christ and members of the Liberation Theology Movement. Marxist thought is not antithetical to spirituality, morality, or Christianity. In fact, I examined its synthesis with these elements in some detail when I wrote "Jesus Wouldn't Bomb Anyone: Why are we waging war on the poor and oppressed?" at:
http://freepress.org/departments/display/9/2007/2526
No, I'm not the "communist bogeyman" that Ronald Reagan (who was a far better actor in the White House than he was in Hollywood) warned you about. How could I be? Communists, socialists, and Marxists are only potentially threatening to those amongst us who will waste eternity desperately attempting to squeeze camels through the eyes of needles.
Forget worrying about the "communist threat." We need to turn the moneyed establishment's idiocy on its head and focus our energies on answering a question that affects the 90% of us who aren't obscenely affluent:
How will humanity survive the capitalist threat?
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano's Journal Online's associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine's Corner within Cyrano's at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.org

---

Play Movie Mash-up and win BIG prizes!

Yesterday Iftiqar Gilani,Today Binayak Sen

 

By Subhash Gatade
26 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Does anybody remember the Delhi bureau chief of Kashmir Times, Mr Iftiqar Gilani who was hounded by the BJP government on fraudulent charges under the draconian Official Secrets Act supposedly for possessing some 'secret' documents. Interestingly when it was revealed that all the 'secret' documents purported to be in possession of Mr Gilani were easily available online, then the law and order people had no other alternative than to release him.
The world very well knows that why Mr Gilani was treated in such a humiliating manner. The only 'crime' the accredited journalist had committed was that he happened to be son in law of a famous Kashmiri leader.
Today the same fate awaits Dr Binayak Sen - a paediatrician by training and profession and a human rights activist by choice. This receipient of the famous Paul Harrison award for work in community health has received a new identity. - A menace to public safety - The Chattisgarh police whose own record of human rights violations would shame even the KPS Gills, has used the provisions of the draconian Chhatisgarh Special Public Safety Act and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act ( a substitute for POTA ) to detain Dr Binayak Sen in the wee hours of 14 th May. And the recent high court order has even refused him a bail.
It has been more than twenty five years that Dr Binayak Sen left his job at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi to dedicate himself to serve the poor and the downtrodden in Chhatisgarh. It was the time when a new workers- peasants movement was taking shape in Chattisgarh ( which was then part of Madhya Pradesh) under the leadership of the legendary leader Shankar Guha Niyogi. The martyrdom of more than eleven workers in Dalli-Rajhara in the immediate aftermath of the assumption of power by the Janata Party government was a news all over the country. Binayak Sen never looked back and continued working for the people despite many highs-lows of the movement. He played an important part in the formation of Shaheed Hospital at Dalli-Rajhara, a hospital run by the workers for the other downtrodden sections of society.
To further his concern for the really needy Dr Binayak donned many roles. He worked on community health projects, ran a clinic, also ran a organic farm near Raipur and was also adviser to the Chhatisgarh government for its community health project called 'Mitanin'. He found himself drawn into the fledgling human rights movement in the state when violations of human rights saw a quantum jump. But for his intervention ( of course alongwith other members of the civil liberty movement) the rest of the world would have never known the killing of twelve innocent tribals at Santoshpur by the security forces of the state supposedly to curb the Naxalite 'menace'. (31st March 2007) He was instrumental in forming an all India fact finding committee of civil liberty organisations to look into 'Salwa Judum' a campaign of arming tribals started by the government and using them as mercenaries. The report brought out by these organisations was an eye-opener. It showed how the state government has even allocated budget for this campaign which it calls a 'spontaneous response of the tribals towards the Naxalite 'menace'.
It was only last year that Dr Binayak Sen, - alongwith other civil liberty organisations and activists - had taken the initiative to organise a Convention in Raipur. The aim of the convention was to highlight the precarious human rights situation in the state, but an important item on their agenda was to focus the attention about a sinister move by the Chhatisgarh government to silence every dissenting voice. In fact Raman Singh led government had already made decisive moves in the direction of enacting a new law 'Chhatisgarh Special Public Security Act' (2006) which had several provisions similar to the (now lapsed) draconian POTA.
It was rigthly pointed out that the proposed act CSPSA not only included violation of the principle of certainty in criminal law (including vague definition of membership and support to terrorist organisations) but also absence of pre-trial safeguards (including insufficient safeguards on arrest, the risk of torture, obstacles to confidential communications with counsel). An important provision which rather made it worse than POTA was the 'virtual impossibility of obtaining bail as there is no provision for remedy of appeal or review of detention.'
Little did any of the organisers or the participants to the convention had the premonition that Dr Binayak Sen himself would be charged under the act, detained for months together by denying bail on flimsy grounds.
Despite campaign by democratic rights activists which were joined in by voices of medical fraternity from the world over, the powers that be seem to be least concerned about his detention. For the powers that be it is not a matter of concern that world renowned intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Romila Thapar and several others have expressed their 'opposition' to this unwarranted detention of Dr Sen. For them it is not a big thing that 1500 doctors spread in different parts of the world who have been acquainted with the work of their fellow doctor have appealed to the Chhatisgarh government that he be released immediately and all false charges against him be dropped forthwith.
It should be added that 'Medico Friend Circle'(MFC) - a thirty year old organisation of doctors who are working to make health services more accessible to the poor and who have consistently opposed the corporate control over people's health, recently held a press conference in Raipur to oppose Dr Sen's detention. In fact they showed the media a thirty minute CD based on the work of Dr Sen, who is closely associated with MFC's work since his youth. In fact more than thirty well-known medical professionals spread in different parts of the country made it a point to be present in the Press meet and declare their solidarity with their comrade.
But leave dropping charges or releasing him, the courts are is not ready to grant him bail.Dr Sen has been charged with 'a prima facie case that the applicant was involved with some banned organisation' .The high court did not deem it necessary to grant interim relief despite knowing the fact that ' the said meeting between leader of a Maoist organisation and Dr Sen took place in the jail premises themselves' in the 'presence of jail officials' and the letters which the police claimed to have seized from Mr Sen's house were sent from the jail themselves with due stamp of the jail officials.
The Chhattisgarh PUCL has termed this order of the Chhattisgarh High Court as "unfortunate" as the Court has not appreciated all the material facts and evidence of the case as presented by the legal counsel for Dr. Binayak Sen during the arguments. It has also decided to move the Supreme Court so that the highest courts of the country can decide on the merit of the case. It has also resolved 'to take stock of the alarming situation in Chhattisgarh with regard to ruthless use of repressive laws and anti-democratic actions of the State Government and, in turn, formulate future strategy and action plan to defend democracy and restore the rule of law.'
These days media is agog with news of another innocent doctor called Dr Haneef who has been apprehended by the Australian police. It is for everyone to see to what extent the Australian police went in proving that he is a 'terrorist'. It is a mark of the vibrancy of the Australian civil society that people there have stood up in Dr. Haneef's defence. The consistent campaign by the civil liberty organisations with due support from the media has helped expose Australian government's highhandedness in l'affaire Haneef. It is a matter of time that Dr Haneef would be released.
One just wishes that much like their Australian counterpart, the civil society in this part of the globe also wakes up to the innocence of Dr Binayak Sen and tell the powers that be that 'We want him out' !
If the Australians can fight for the human rights of an Indian, should the Indians maintain a conspiracy of silence when one of their own is being brutalised by the state.

---

Email straight to your blog, upload jokes, photos and more. Windows Live Spaces, it's FREE!

Lessons From The Lal Masjid Tragedy

By Robert Jensen

12 July, 2007
Counterpunch


Islamabad, Pakistan.

For my first three days in Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound. I had landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government forces would eventually storm the mosque and the attached women's seminary to end the confrontation with fundamentalist clerics and their supporters.

The final assault was finally unleashed as two companions and I drove to Lahore as part of a lecture tour. During several hours of intense discussion in the car, they gave me background and details that explained the real tragedy of the conflict.

When the news of the final assault came via cell phone we all fell silent, and we all quietly cried -- for those killed and for opportunities lost, out of our grief and from our fear.

In the Western news media and even much of the Pakistani press, the story was framed as crazed radical Islamist forces challenging relatively restrained government forces. Indeed, the two brothers who ran the mosque preached an interpretation of Islam that was mostly reactionary and sometimes violent. None of us in the car -- two Muslims and one Christian, all progressive in theological and political thought -- supported such views.

But there was more to the story. Farid Esack, one of the world's foremost progressive Muslim theologians who was in Pakistan to teach and lecture, and Junaid Ahmad, a Pakistani-American activist and law student directing the lecture series, both pointed out that key social/economic aspects of the story were being overlooked.

In addition to calls for shariah law under a fundamentalist Islamic state, Lal Masjid imams Abdur Rashid Ghazi and Mohammed Abdul Aziz critiqued the corruption of Pakistani political, military and economic elites, highlighting the living conditions of the millions of Pakistanis living in poverty. As in most Third-World societies, the inequality gap here has widened in recent years, as those who find their place in the U.S.-dominated neoliberal economic project prosper while most ordinary people suffer, especially the poor.

"We can reject the jihadist and patriarchal aspects and still recognize that there is in this fundamentalist philosophy a call for social justice, a challenge to the power-seeking and greed of elites," said Esack, the author of Qur'an: Liberation and Pluralism. "When I spoke with Ghazi, it was clear that was an important part of his thinking, and it's equally clear that the appeal of this theology is magnified by the lack of meaningful calls for justice from other sectors of society."

Esack, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School and is a former national commissioner for gender equality in South Africa, had been visiting the mosque regularly and speaking to Ghazi and others inside until government forces sealed the area a few days earlier. A native of South Africa who was active in the struggle against apartheid, Esack spent much of his childhood in Pakistan at a madarasa, where he was a classmate of Aziz. Contrary to the media image of Ghazi, the cleric had a broader agenda and wanted to learn more about how an Islamic state could be structured to ensure economic equality, Esack said.

"My vision of an inclusive polity influenced by progressive Islamic values is very different than Ghazi's, of course, but his theology should not be reduced to a caricature, as it so often was, especially in the West," Esack said.

Ahmad emphasized that another crucial part of the story involved economics, specifically land. Press reports focused on the provocative activities of students and supporters of Lal Masjid members threatening video store owners, raiding brothels and clashing with police, but an underlying cause of the conflict was the existence of "unauthorized" mosques. Many of these mosques and madrasas had been built without permits on unused public land in Islamabad. As the city has grown more crowded and developers eyed that real estate for commercial building, the government took the risky step of destroying some of those mosques (though the many non-religious, profit-generating projects also built without permits remain undisturbed). Clerics protested, adding to the intensity of the Lal Masjid conflict.

Esack and Ahmad agreed that another aspect of the crisis mostly ignored in the press was the fact that the events played out in Islamabad, home to the more secular/liberal and privileged elements of the society. While those liberals might ignore such movements and conflicts in the outer provinces, many found it offensive that such an embarrassing incident could happen in the capital, where the world eventually would pay attention.

"We hear about how this is bad for the image of Pakistan, with no comment about the lives of ordinary Pakistanis and the substance of what the country is about," Ahmad said. "Instead of talking about these fundamental questions of justice, many people wanted to see the incident ended to avoid further tarnishing of the country's image. It's like the obsession the United States has with simply changing its image in the Muslim world rather than recognizing the injustice of its policies."

In the construction of that image, the stories of the reality of the lives of people at Lal Masjid are typically untold. As the crisis unfolded and some of the madrasa students left the compound, the government gave them some money and told them to go home.

"The problem is, many had no homes to go to," Ahmad said. "Whatever the reactionary theology of Lal Masjid, it provided a place for many who were dispossessed or from poor families. If the economy ignores people and the state provides nothing, where will they go?"

My trip to Pakistan had been set months in advance; my presence there during this crisis was coincidence. Throughout my stay, as I listened to the discussion about the conflict, I realized how much less I could have understood the events if I had been in the United States, even though I would have been reading the international press on the web. The complexity of such stories so rarely makes it into print, and the humanity of the people demonized drops out all too easily.

As we drove in silence, I thought of how easy it is from positions of safety and comfort to denounce fundamentalism, how often I have done just that. But who are we targeting when we make such statements? I have no trouble denouncing the bin Ladens and al-Zawahiris, or the Bushs and Robertsons, and critiquing their twisted worldview. But what of the ordinary people struggling against the elites who ignore the cries of the suffering? When those people take up a fundamentalist theology that we Western left/progressives reject, must we not highlight the inequality we also say we oppose?

Esack said some have asked him what he hoped to gain by going to Lal Masjid and talking with someone like Ghazi, but he has no doubts about the value and appropriateness of his visits there.

"When we abandon engagement and dialogue with those who hold these beliefs, we are abandoning hope. My goal is not to wall myself off from other Muslims, but to search for authentic connections, even across these gaps. Is that not how we can heal the world, and ourselves?" he said. "It is precisely when we start to think of some of us as 'chosen' and others as 'frozen' that we happily become willing to defrost them with our bombs."

That moment in the car, as we absorbed the news that the troops had cleared the mosque and that Ghazi and dozens of others were dead, I felt angry at people like Ghazi and at the same time a deep sorrow for his death. I felt a much deeper rage at Pakistan's military president, Pervez Musharraf, and the U.S. leaders who support him. And I felt a kind of fear for the Muslim fundamentalism that unleashes such violent forces, which always reminds me of the equally frightening Christian fundamentalist theology circulating in the United States.

I bounced between a deep sense of despair and an equally deep sense of hope. Once the confrontation was set in motion, perhaps the people inside the mosque and the soldiers killed were doomed. But in the car in that moment, I could feel hope that the work of people like Esack and Ahmad was setting in motion other forces. Mostly I was grateful to be in their company to share the grief. In such moments, that connection is perhaps the most human and the most hopeful of endeavors.

Om makes it to chess terra final

Yesterday 14 July 2007, Om won four and a half points in the under 9s and was tied in the third place at the North UK chess Giga finals. This is a major achievement for Om as its the first time that he has made the cut and gets a look at the front running pack in the country.

Well done Om.

Recording a dream

12/7/07 @ 6.10 am

This morning I dreamt of many mambers of my family, many of who were dead.

I saw my late grand uncle Unniman, with who I had some nice chat.

I also saw my late paternal grandmother in her Irinjalakuda home - she was trying to evict a Caucasian woman who was living in her home. They (the family) had already denied her most facilities, so she was cooking for herself, on the western part of the home. I was trying to woo her and Ammuma was trying to wean me off, telling me how she refused to go et al.

I also saw the MKP family, and Pradeep was taking me on a ride to another house for meals etc.