Neocon ideologues are being given free rein by the media to rewrite the history of Britain's empire and whitewash its crimes
Niall Ferguson: We must understand why racist belief systems persist
Priyamvada Gopal
Wednesday June 28, 2006
Guardian
Aresurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of "benevolent empire". It takes the form of documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order. Trouble is, to get there, some creative reworking of the facts is needed. After a recent brouhaha about Britain's imperial history on Radio 4's Start the Week - in which I took part - the presenter Andrew Marr worried that the debate had been "pretty biased" against empire: there was a lot of enthusiasm and a "warm nostalgia" for empire, he suggested in the subsequent phone-in, even in former colonies, "still something there, absolutely".
Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now Channel 4. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right, is being presented as a new revelation. In fact, Ferguson's "history" is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism - a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement - is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.
Soundbite culture thrives on these simplistic grand narratives. Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such as footnotes, can sound donnishly authoritative. The racism institutionalised by empire also seems to be back in fashion. The book accompanying Ferguson's current Channel 4 series on 20th-century history, The War of the World, tells us that people "seem predisposed" to "trust members of their own race", "those who are drawn to 'the Other' may ... be atypical in their sexual predilections" and that "when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high ... that only the first child they conceive will be viable." Not far from the pseudo-scientific nonsense that once made it possible to punish interracial relationships.
Behind such talk and the embrace of the broadcasters is the insistence that we are being offered gutsy truths that the "politically correct" establishment would love to suppress. This is the neo-conservative as spunky rebel against liberal tyranny. Yet Ferguson peddles nothing more than the most hackneyed, self-aggrandising myths of empire, canards once championed by old imperialists such as Macaulay and Mill and rehashed now by the Bush administration: western imperialism brings freedom, democracy and prosperity to primitive cultures. The myth decorates US and British foreign policy spin while trendier versions have also emerged in platforms such as the Euston Manifesto. By anointing Ferguson and his fellow imperial apologists such as Andrew Roberts as semi-official historians, the British media are colluding in a dangerous denial of the past and lending support to contemporary US imperial propaganda .
The evidence - researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nicholas Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline Elkins and Walter Rodney - shows that European colonialism brought with it not good governance and freedom, but impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and misery. Joseph Conrad, no radical, described it as "a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly". Good governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.
Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between "tribes" in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million native Kikuyus to 2,000 restricted square miles. Resistance was brutally crushed through internment in detention camps, torture and massacres. Some 50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and 300,000 interned to put down the Mau Mau rebellion by peasants who wanted to farm their own land. A thousand peaceful protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919.
A collective failure of the imagination now makes it difficult for us to think about the globe before European and American domination. Greed and violence are hardly exclusive to one culture. But colonialism destroyed or strangled possibilities and potential for progress, such as Mughal Emperor Akbar's "sul-e-kul" or "universal good" which underpinned his governance. The scale of European imperialism inaugurated a new chapter in the history of greed which still shapes all our lives. Natural resources - cotton, sugar, teak, rubber, minerals - were plundered in gigantic quantities. The Indian textile industry was the most advanced in the world when the British arrived; within half a century it had been destroyed. The enslaved and indentured (at least 20 million Africans and 1.5 million Indians) were shipped across the globe to work on plantations, mines and railroads. The stupendous profits deriving from this enabled today's developed world to prosper.
The point isn't for Europeans to feel guilt, but a serious consideration of historical responsibility isn't the same thing as a blame game. Forgetting history is tempting but undermines a society's capacity for change.
Among the many facile assumptions encouraged by these imperial apologists is that those who criticise colonialism are absolving tyrants and bigots in Asia and Africa from responsibility for their crimes. Of course it is possible and absolutely necessary to condemn both. Indians must acknowledge their culpability for atrocities during the partition, for example. But that in no way exonerates the British Raj from its pivotal role in the tragedy that led to over a million deaths.
A wilful ignorance of other people's cultures and histories encourages the notion that freedom, democracy and tolerance are intrinsically western. As Amartya Sen has argued, the subcontinent has long been home to traditions of free-thinking and debate. Participatory governance was not Britain's gift (recall Gandhi's indigenous village republics), even if parliamentary democracy as an institutional form was adopted in some ex-colonies. Free trade is another mythical western contribution to world history. Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed the forgotten history of a vibrant trade culture between medieval India and Africa. When the Portuguese arrived, they demanded that the Hindu ruler of Calicut expel Muslims, "enemies of the Holy-Faith", from his kingdom. He refused and was subjected to two days of bombardment.
Indeed, one legacy of European colonialism that we all reckon with is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the "clash of civilisations". The claim that east and west are bound to come into conflict is merely an extension of imperial practice which found it useful to seal off porous cultures into fixed categories. This tragic "lie of the colonial situation", as Frantz Fanon called it, rebounds on us tragically in the terror unleashed in the name of Islam and Bush's "war on terror". If we are to undo the destructive legacies of empire, it won't do to invest celebratory falsifications with credibility. To make sense of a shared present and look towards a more humane future, we need to start with a little informed honesty about the past.
· Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University and is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence
pg268@cam.ac.uk
Thursday 20 December 2007
Wednesday 19 December 2007
What The Reader Wants
If journalism is a consumption item like butter chicken, then why not give the customer the flavour and taste he wants? At least that is what advertising managers and self-styled media pundits would have us believe...
VINOD MEHTA
This is the full text of Outlook Editor in chief's speech on receiving the IPI Award 2007 which the magazine won for its Navy War Room leak and Scorpene stories
***
It is an honour and a privilege for me accept this coveted award on behalf of the Outlook Group. I would like to especially congratulate Saikat Datta, the correspondent and Ajith Pillai, his editor. Saikat pursued this story for over six months, putting it together for all of us was like a roller coaster drive.
Ladies and gentlemen, in India 2007 numerous challenges face the media. There is the reluctance of the media, especially the electronic media, to regulate itself. And simultaneously we see daily the eagerness of our political masters to impose a code on the profession which will effectively castrate it.
Then there is the strange but seemingly irresistible animal called sting journalism, which when it is good is very good, but when it is bad, shames us all.
Then there is the media’s myopia regarding how its credibility is being eroded. To the extent that journalism today is often confused with being part of the entertainment industry.
Then there is the challenge of the markets. What is the media for? Is it only for making money? Once you treat the media as if it is no different from running an ice-cream parlour, journalism loses out to commerce.
Then there is the accusation, hurled by politicians, that the media creates cynicism about politicians. Thanks to the media, our politicians maintain, the public views its leaders and the very process of governing, with suspicion and mistrust. Our netas say a pervasive climate of cynicism leads to the sense that a whole range of problems are beyond the control of mere politicians, beyond solutions altogether. This in turn breeds frustration, hopelessness and lack of faith in government. I don’t accept this highly exaggerated accusation, but I concede it is on the table. And the media needs to counter it, probably with the response that politicians by their conduct create the cynicism, we journalists merely spread it around.
And last but not least, what checks and balances should the media impose on itself in India 2007, where the intense competition, both in print and TV, is threatening professional ethics? As journalists we need to remember that a newspaper’s credibility is like the virginity of a woman. You can lose it only once.
I now come to my main concern. There is one more critical challenge, one that is rarely discussed in journalism seminars or among serious editors. But I notice advertising managers and self-styled media pundits pontificate on it endlessly -- and they have by now signed and sealed the argument. They have given us a new mantra. When these guys speak in the excellent and proliferating media and advertising journals, they assume the pose of Moses. Their words are written on tablets of stone. And what is their subject? It is the nature of editorial content in television and print. They have come to the considered conclusion that the highest responsibility of the media is to give the reader or the viewer what he or she wants. Any other kind of journalism is irrelevant, indeed an insult to the public!
I believe this is a crucial issue for the media. Alas, the wrong guys are discussing it, the wrong guys are giving us the solutions.
I say this with much humility, but brand managers, with honourable exceptions, are congenitally incapable of understanding the nature and purpose of journalism.They simply cannot understand it by virtue of their background: which is sales in order to maximise profits. They can never understand that content is more, much more, than what readers want. It also has a social dimension. Thus, content is a mix of what the reader wants and what he does not want. The trick is to marry the two and make money.
Accompanying the mantra, is much loose talk that the old journalism is dead and a new journalism has been born. This new journalism is entirely based on reader or viewer demands. So, we are told the reader is king and it is the job of a responsible media organisation to provide cent per cent satisfaction.
This proposition is now so widely accepted that to argue against it is like whistling in the dark. Those who believe otherwise are seen as cranks, out of touch with the contemporary market -- in other words the reader. If journalism is a consumption item like butter chicken, then why not give the customer the flavour and taste he wants. That, after all, is the first rule of free market capitalism.
Ladies and gentlemen, in my nearly 30 years as editor, I have heard a lot of nonsense talked about journalism and its role in India, but this piece of nonsense is outrageously and self-evidently absurd and dangerous. To demolish it is urgent. To let it become the benchmark of our profession is to put in peril everything we have worked for in 60 years.
I ask you this: If some readers or viewers wish to see or read about paedophilia, should we oblige? If some readers or viewers wish to see or read about wife-beatings, should we oblige? I could go on. The whole idea is preposterous and I dare say most editors would end up in jail if they followed the mantra.
I will just provide three examples of the confusion in readers minds regarding their expectations from the media.
One. Research shows unambiguously that most readers desire to read more international news. Yet, the international pages of a paper are the least read. International news may be good for the soul but it does nothing for circulation.
Two. Readers insist that the price of their morning paper does not matter. It is such a vital part of their life that they would happily pay the extra rupee for it. Yet, as Mr Rupert Murdoch and Mr Samir Jain have demonstrated, print publications are extremely price sensitive. You can bleed the opposition by cover price cuts. The phrase "invitation price" terrifies rival publishers.
Three. Readers will tell you that they want a single-section, compact morning paper. They don’t want sections and supplements dropping out. Yet the opposite is true. Papers with multi-sections prosper, others suffer.
I think I have made my point. We must lead readers, not be led by them. Really great journalism must do more than merely give people what they want. There has to be room for the unexpected, for stories the public has no idea it wants until it sees them.
The reader is a paradox. He frequently complains about negative news being constantly reported. But for all his clamouring for positive news, surveys show that people are more interested in negative news, sensational news, news about crime, violence and corruption. The reader, ladies and gentlemen, is not king; actually he is a nice hypocrite.
Editors in India are an endangered species, but only a good and professional editorial team can decide what is news and what is humbug. That is the sum of what I have learnt in 30 years. Thank you.
VINOD MEHTA
This is the full text of Outlook Editor in chief's speech on receiving the IPI Award 2007 which the magazine won for its Navy War Room leak and Scorpene stories
***
It is an honour and a privilege for me accept this coveted award on behalf of the Outlook Group. I would like to especially congratulate Saikat Datta, the correspondent and Ajith Pillai, his editor. Saikat pursued this story for over six months, putting it together for all of us was like a roller coaster drive.
Ladies and gentlemen, in India 2007 numerous challenges face the media. There is the reluctance of the media, especially the electronic media, to regulate itself. And simultaneously we see daily the eagerness of our political masters to impose a code on the profession which will effectively castrate it.
Then there is the strange but seemingly irresistible animal called sting journalism, which when it is good is very good, but when it is bad, shames us all.
Then there is the media’s myopia regarding how its credibility is being eroded. To the extent that journalism today is often confused with being part of the entertainment industry.
Then there is the challenge of the markets. What is the media for? Is it only for making money? Once you treat the media as if it is no different from running an ice-cream parlour, journalism loses out to commerce.
Then there is the accusation, hurled by politicians, that the media creates cynicism about politicians. Thanks to the media, our politicians maintain, the public views its leaders and the very process of governing, with suspicion and mistrust. Our netas say a pervasive climate of cynicism leads to the sense that a whole range of problems are beyond the control of mere politicians, beyond solutions altogether. This in turn breeds frustration, hopelessness and lack of faith in government. I don’t accept this highly exaggerated accusation, but I concede it is on the table. And the media needs to counter it, probably with the response that politicians by their conduct create the cynicism, we journalists merely spread it around.
And last but not least, what checks and balances should the media impose on itself in India 2007, where the intense competition, both in print and TV, is threatening professional ethics? As journalists we need to remember that a newspaper’s credibility is like the virginity of a woman. You can lose it only once.
I now come to my main concern. There is one more critical challenge, one that is rarely discussed in journalism seminars or among serious editors. But I notice advertising managers and self-styled media pundits pontificate on it endlessly -- and they have by now signed and sealed the argument. They have given us a new mantra. When these guys speak in the excellent and proliferating media and advertising journals, they assume the pose of Moses. Their words are written on tablets of stone. And what is their subject? It is the nature of editorial content in television and print. They have come to the considered conclusion that the highest responsibility of the media is to give the reader or the viewer what he or she wants. Any other kind of journalism is irrelevant, indeed an insult to the public!
I believe this is a crucial issue for the media. Alas, the wrong guys are discussing it, the wrong guys are giving us the solutions.
I say this with much humility, but brand managers, with honourable exceptions, are congenitally incapable of understanding the nature and purpose of journalism.They simply cannot understand it by virtue of their background: which is sales in order to maximise profits. They can never understand that content is more, much more, than what readers want. It also has a social dimension. Thus, content is a mix of what the reader wants and what he does not want. The trick is to marry the two and make money.
Accompanying the mantra, is much loose talk that the old journalism is dead and a new journalism has been born. This new journalism is entirely based on reader or viewer demands. So, we are told the reader is king and it is the job of a responsible media organisation to provide cent per cent satisfaction.
This proposition is now so widely accepted that to argue against it is like whistling in the dark. Those who believe otherwise are seen as cranks, out of touch with the contemporary market -- in other words the reader. If journalism is a consumption item like butter chicken, then why not give the customer the flavour and taste he wants. That, after all, is the first rule of free market capitalism.
Ladies and gentlemen, in my nearly 30 years as editor, I have heard a lot of nonsense talked about journalism and its role in India, but this piece of nonsense is outrageously and self-evidently absurd and dangerous. To demolish it is urgent. To let it become the benchmark of our profession is to put in peril everything we have worked for in 60 years.
I ask you this: If some readers or viewers wish to see or read about paedophilia, should we oblige? If some readers or viewers wish to see or read about wife-beatings, should we oblige? I could go on. The whole idea is preposterous and I dare say most editors would end up in jail if they followed the mantra.
I will just provide three examples of the confusion in readers minds regarding their expectations from the media.
One. Research shows unambiguously that most readers desire to read more international news. Yet, the international pages of a paper are the least read. International news may be good for the soul but it does nothing for circulation.
Two. Readers insist that the price of their morning paper does not matter. It is such a vital part of their life that they would happily pay the extra rupee for it. Yet, as Mr Rupert Murdoch and Mr Samir Jain have demonstrated, print publications are extremely price sensitive. You can bleed the opposition by cover price cuts. The phrase "invitation price" terrifies rival publishers.
Three. Readers will tell you that they want a single-section, compact morning paper. They don’t want sections and supplements dropping out. Yet the opposite is true. Papers with multi-sections prosper, others suffer.
I think I have made my point. We must lead readers, not be led by them. Really great journalism must do more than merely give people what they want. There has to be room for the unexpected, for stories the public has no idea it wants until it sees them.
The reader is a paradox. He frequently complains about negative news being constantly reported. But for all his clamouring for positive news, surveys show that people are more interested in negative news, sensational news, news about crime, violence and corruption. The reader, ladies and gentlemen, is not king; actually he is a nice hypocrite.
Editors in India are an endangered species, but only a good and professional editorial team can decide what is news and what is humbug. That is the sum of what I have learnt in 30 years. Thank you.
Poison Earth
Poison Earth
Courtesy an overzealous Green Revolution, Punjab has poison in its water and a cancer epidemic on its hands
CHANDER SUTA DOGRA The Curse Is Spreading
On death row: Jajjal's Karnail Singh and his wife both have cancer, live in adjoining houses, each with a son
In Ghaunzpur in Ludhiana district, a good 200 km away, Manjit and Gurjit Singh lost both their parents to hepatitis; an uncle is afflicted with the same. The water from the hand pump in the courtyard turns foamy when heated, so they have dug a submersible pump which pumps out water from 300 ft below. Other households in the village cannot afford to do so.
For Punjab's prosperous farming households and lush green fields, the famed Green Revolution is beginning to turn bilious from within. Its gushing tubewells, the cattle heavy with milk, the trolleys laden with vegetables destined for urban markets—all are likely to be contaminated with toxins. The state is sitting on an environmental crisis and few of have any idea of how to tackle it.
Some two years ago, when reports of increased cancer deaths first started coming in from the state's cotton belt, the Chandigarh-based Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) decided to investigate. A preliminary study it conducted found a much higher prevalence of cancer in the Talwandi Sabo block and the presence of heavy metals and pesticides in drinking water in the area. It recommended a comprehensive study of the status of environmental health in Punjab's other cotton-growing areas, the setting up of a cancer registry in the state, and regular monitoring of the drinking water. Of course, intense pressure from the pesticides lobby ensured none of this came to pass and the report was ignored.
This month, the PGIMER's department of community medicine has submitted a comprehensive epidemiological study (see box) in areas along the state's five major rivulets to the State Pollution Control Board. The results are so shocking that the board has put it under wraps and is having second thoughts about releasing it. Says Dr J.S. Thakur, an assistant professor at PGIMER, who conducted the study, "Our two studies show that all of Punjab is toxic and people do not have safe water to drink. Both agricultural and industrial malpractices are to be blamed for this."
The worst affected is the southeastern Malwa region, better known these days as the 'cancer belt'. To counter increasingly resistant pests, farmers here spray their fields with pesticide doses far above those recommended—often cocktailing two or more chemicals. As the former sarpanch of Jajjal, Najar Singh, told Outlook, "Although the recommended dose is about five sprays per season, we sometimes spray our fields 25 to 30 times. Almost every third day!" Punjab, which makes up for just 2.5 per cent of the country's area, accounts for 18 per cent of the pesticides used in the country.
The state's problem is their unregulated use, say experts, with most farmers unaware of how to use or dispose of the empty pesticide cans. So, in the last four decades pesticides have seeped into the underground water aquifers, as also in the state's water bodies. And in the last 10 years, more and more well-off households along the drains have begun setting up submersible pumps to get water from deep aquifers, as water from taps and handpumps is unfit for human use.
Punjab's finance minister Manpreet Badal is a legislator from Muktsar district's Gidderbaha, located in the cancer belt. "In the 50 villages in my constituency," he says, "there'd be a thousand-odd cancer cases. I've lost count of the funerals of cancer victims I've attended in my area since the beginning of this year. It is an epidemic here." A train leaving from Bhatinda to Bikaner has been dubbed 'cancer express' as most patients from here go to Bikaner's cancer hospital for treatment. Even a child in these parts knows what chemotherapy is about. "Our neighbour used to take hot injections before she died last year," says little Kiranjot at Chandbaja village in Faridkot district. "Many others in our village have taken them."
Giana's Baljeet Kaur has cancer of the oesophagus
Dr G.P.I. Singh, who heads the department of community medicine in Ludhiana's Dayanand Medical College, has recently begun studying, along with other private doctors across the state and NGO Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), the impact of heavy metals and pesticides on reproductive health in Punjab. "One of the things worrying us," he says, "is that the skewed sex ratio in both Punjab and Haryana could also be due to chemical exposure, as the female foetus is more vulnerable. We notice an increase in spontaneous abortions, infertility, distorted menarche and foetuses with neural tube defects." There is also a high incidence of grey hair among children and young adults in this area. Ask for one, and most villages throw up several.
Not just pesticides, but unchecked effluent flow from industries into the rivers and drains too has contaminated underground water in Punjab. At Ghaunzpur, for instance, five paper mills dump their entire effluent unchecked into the Buddha Nullah. However, the state pollution board which is supposed to check industries such as these from polluting water bodies couldn't be bothered. This is evident from the response of the board's chairman, Yogesh Goel, when queried about the PGIMER report."I'm busy right now. You can ask the secretary of the board about it," he told Outlook. Quite predictably, the secretary too made himself unavailable. KVM director Umendra Dutt, who has been most active in raising the issue of cancer deaths in Punjab, feels that agricultural scientists in cahoots with pesticide manufacturing mncs have led to this health crisis. "All these years agricultural scientists have been advocating heavy doses of pesticides without informing farmers of the damage improper usage causes," he says.
Meanwhile, though officials are aware of the problem, the state is yet to evolve a concrete water policy to address the problem. Says J.R. Kundal, Punjab's secretary for water supply and sanitation, "Ideally, there should be an umbrella task force to deal with the problem in its entirety," he says. "Presently, different agencies are conducting overlapping studies which will take us nowhere. I am heading a task force to study arsenic in water, while the state planning board is looking into drinking water and allied issues. Although 90 per cent of the underground water is used for irrigation and just 10 per cent for drinking water, we realise that this 10 per cent is crucial for the health of our people."
With the government unsure of what to do, Manpreet Badal has installed four distribution points supplying Reverse Osmosis water in his constituency. "Till a statewide water supply scheme comes up," says he, "I've taken this interim measure." His people are lucky. Others in the state are condemned to drinking polluted water and suffer from deadly diseases, reaping the poisoned fruit of a Green Revolution gone unchecked.
Everything in one place… All new Windows Live!
Courtesy an overzealous Green Revolution, Punjab has poison in its water and a cancer epidemic on its hands
CHANDER SUTA DOGRA The Curse Is Spreading
- The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh has conducted a study over two years in five villages along Punjab's major rivulets in Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Amritsar districts
- 88 per cent ground water samples showed alarming levels of mercury, over 50 per cent samples of ground and tap water contaminated by arsenic
- Lady's fingers, carrots, gourds, cauliflower and chillies found to have toxic levels of lead, cadmium, mercury; cadmium, arsenic, mercury are known carcinogens; mercury also affects the nervous system
- Pesticides beyond permissible limit found in vegetables, fodder, human and bovine milk, as well as blood samples
- 65 per cent blood samples showed DNA mutation; there has been a sharp increase in cancer, neurological disorders, liver and kidney diseases, congenital defects, miscarriages
- This health crisis has been caused by the overuse of pesticides and the dumping of industrial effluents, which have made soil and water toxic
***
Baljeet Kaur of Giana village in Punjab's cotton belt has been battling cancer for the last 10 years. First it was her husband who died of colon cancer, now she has cancer of the oesophagus. Her neighbour Mukhtiar Kaur is being treated for breast cancer. The family had a hand pump at home which provided them water for their daily needs but abandoned it after health officials told them its water was toxic. Now they get raw canal water for drinking and cooking. "Who knows if it is the water which has brought this disease on me?" she says. "All I know is that scores of people in our village are dying of cancer." In neighbouring Jajjal, the word cancer only evokes deja vu. Karnail Singh and his wife Balbir Kaur both have cancer, live in adjoining houses, each with one of their sons. "This village is cursed," says their brother Jarnail Singh.On death row: Jajjal's Karnail Singh and his wife both have cancer, live in adjoining houses, each with a son
In Ghaunzpur in Ludhiana district, a good 200 km away, Manjit and Gurjit Singh lost both their parents to hepatitis; an uncle is afflicted with the same. The water from the hand pump in the courtyard turns foamy when heated, so they have dug a submersible pump which pumps out water from 300 ft below. Other households in the village cannot afford to do so.
For Punjab's prosperous farming households and lush green fields, the famed Green Revolution is beginning to turn bilious from within. Its gushing tubewells, the cattle heavy with milk, the trolleys laden with vegetables destined for urban markets—all are likely to be contaminated with toxins. The state is sitting on an environmental crisis and few of have any idea of how to tackle it.
Some two years ago, when reports of increased cancer deaths first started coming in from the state's cotton belt, the Chandigarh-based Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) decided to investigate. A preliminary study it conducted found a much higher prevalence of cancer in the Talwandi Sabo block and the presence of heavy metals and pesticides in drinking water in the area. It recommended a comprehensive study of the status of environmental health in Punjab's other cotton-growing areas, the setting up of a cancer registry in the state, and regular monitoring of the drinking water. Of course, intense pressure from the pesticides lobby ensured none of this came to pass and the report was ignored.
This month, the PGIMER's department of community medicine has submitted a comprehensive epidemiological study (see box) in areas along the state's five major rivulets to the State Pollution Control Board. The results are so shocking that the board has put it under wraps and is having second thoughts about releasing it. Says Dr J.S. Thakur, an assistant professor at PGIMER, who conducted the study, "Our two studies show that all of Punjab is toxic and people do not have safe water to drink. Both agricultural and industrial malpractices are to be blamed for this."
The worst affected is the southeastern Malwa region, better known these days as the 'cancer belt'. To counter increasingly resistant pests, farmers here spray their fields with pesticide doses far above those recommended—often cocktailing two or more chemicals. As the former sarpanch of Jajjal, Najar Singh, told Outlook, "Although the recommended dose is about five sprays per season, we sometimes spray our fields 25 to 30 times. Almost every third day!" Punjab, which makes up for just 2.5 per cent of the country's area, accounts for 18 per cent of the pesticides used in the country.
The state's problem is their unregulated use, say experts, with most farmers unaware of how to use or dispose of the empty pesticide cans. So, in the last four decades pesticides have seeped into the underground water aquifers, as also in the state's water bodies. And in the last 10 years, more and more well-off households along the drains have begun setting up submersible pumps to get water from deep aquifers, as water from taps and handpumps is unfit for human use.
Punjab's finance minister Manpreet Badal is a legislator from Muktsar district's Gidderbaha, located in the cancer belt. "In the 50 villages in my constituency," he says, "there'd be a thousand-odd cancer cases. I've lost count of the funerals of cancer victims I've attended in my area since the beginning of this year. It is an epidemic here." A train leaving from Bhatinda to Bikaner has been dubbed 'cancer express' as most patients from here go to Bikaner's cancer hospital for treatment. Even a child in these parts knows what chemotherapy is about. "Our neighbour used to take hot injections before she died last year," says little Kiranjot at Chandbaja village in Faridkot district. "Many others in our village have taken them."
Giana's Baljeet Kaur has cancer of the oesophagus
Dr G.P.I. Singh, who heads the department of community medicine in Ludhiana's Dayanand Medical College, has recently begun studying, along with other private doctors across the state and NGO Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), the impact of heavy metals and pesticides on reproductive health in Punjab. "One of the things worrying us," he says, "is that the skewed sex ratio in both Punjab and Haryana could also be due to chemical exposure, as the female foetus is more vulnerable. We notice an increase in spontaneous abortions, infertility, distorted menarche and foetuses with neural tube defects." There is also a high incidence of grey hair among children and young adults in this area. Ask for one, and most villages throw up several.
Not just pesticides, but unchecked effluent flow from industries into the rivers and drains too has contaminated underground water in Punjab. At Ghaunzpur, for instance, five paper mills dump their entire effluent unchecked into the Buddha Nullah. However, the state pollution board which is supposed to check industries such as these from polluting water bodies couldn't be bothered. This is evident from the response of the board's chairman, Yogesh Goel, when queried about the PGIMER report."I'm busy right now. You can ask the secretary of the board about it," he told Outlook. Quite predictably, the secretary too made himself unavailable. KVM director Umendra Dutt, who has been most active in raising the issue of cancer deaths in Punjab, feels that agricultural scientists in cahoots with pesticide manufacturing mncs have led to this health crisis. "All these years agricultural scientists have been advocating heavy doses of pesticides without informing farmers of the damage improper usage causes," he says.
Meanwhile, though officials are aware of the problem, the state is yet to evolve a concrete water policy to address the problem. Says J.R. Kundal, Punjab's secretary for water supply and sanitation, "Ideally, there should be an umbrella task force to deal with the problem in its entirety," he says. "Presently, different agencies are conducting overlapping studies which will take us nowhere. I am heading a task force to study arsenic in water, while the state planning board is looking into drinking water and allied issues. Although 90 per cent of the underground water is used for irrigation and just 10 per cent for drinking water, we realise that this 10 per cent is crucial for the health of our people."
With the government unsure of what to do, Manpreet Badal has installed four distribution points supplying Reverse Osmosis water in his constituency. "Till a statewide water supply scheme comes up," says he, "I've taken this interim measure." His people are lucky. Others in the state are condemned to drinking polluted water and suffer from deadly diseases, reaping the poisoned fruit of a Green Revolution gone unchecked.
Everything in one place… All new Windows Live!
In Praise Of The Native Intellectual
Or how to rubbish all those who don't agree with you, get up your nose, yank your goat, or articulate critique and are likely, in any way, to challenge your undisputed supremacy as Pundit of the Postcolonial Nation. A response to Ramachandra Guha
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
A 'native intellectual', suggested Frantz Fanon, the great freedom fighter from Martinique, is essential to the development of any great nation as it comes into its own after decades of colonization. Fanon, a complex thinker by nature, evolved a whole theory of how intellectuals could and should participate in the life of their country. They had to find ways to engage with ordinary people and their aspirations and to think about the many meanings of freedom, justice and democracy beyond simply replacing white rulers with black or brown ones. Native intellectuals would need, above all, to discard their smug complacency, learn to be self-critical and forge international alliances with like-minded others. (Though from Martinique, he himself worked alongside the Algerian anti-colonial movement).
But these old freedom fighter types, our own Gandhi and Tagore included, really were rather long-winded and needlessly sophisticated. Who can blame them? They missed the cyber age where we do things faster and with a lot less agonizing over details and nuance. Here, in India, we can now produce the New and Authentic National Intellectual (NANI) in double-quick time, futta-fut. Here's how you can become one in Ten Easy Steps:
1. First, position yourself at all times as the Real Indian, the one who stayed behind selflessly to serve nation and countrymen while others have departed for foreign shores. You have remained (or returned) to live the simple life in your old family pile in Alipore or Prithviraj Road or Benson Town.
2. Locate a handy counterfoil, a Ravan to your Ram. These are easy enough to find. Rummage through the heaving NRI hordes coming back to (your) home this December. A couple of likely prototypes immediately present themselves. In practice, they may be polar opposites and sworn enemies, but that should not deter you from handily clubbing them together. So, take a rabid Hindu chauvinist and a secular academic-activist and pop-psychoanalyse both as alienated losers who have lost their way by living away from the motherland. The fact that their politics and views may have been formed during their long years growing up or studying in India is neither here nor there. Where the academic is concerned, long years of published research into Indian history, culture or economics is also irrelevant.
3. This will also enable you to place yourself as the Eminently Reasonable man in the middle between two Extremes. The truth, of course, is geographically certified, to lie 'in-between.' Anyone who thinks that this position (like Tony Blair's Third Way) is somewhat facile and easily arrived at is an extremist to begin with anyway.
4. A NANI, while selfless, also needs to eat. Fear not, you do not actually need to lecture at an Indian college or work for the Indian civil services to earn your daily bread. That would needlessly fetter your creativity. Write popular books which will be widely sold in the free and individual West where they love their 'native' writers anyway. (If one of these books can praise NRFs or Non-Resident Firangs who devote their lives to India and her 'tribes,' so much the better). The royalties will keep you in Fab India silk kurtas for the rest of your life. Please note that this is different from and vastly morally superior to actually living in one of these grey northern lands and getting your grubby monthly paycheck (from which income tax is actually deducted) there.
5. If you need to do research for your books in well-resourced libraries, you can easily get lucrative visiting fellowships or short-term teaching contracts at Cambridge or Harvard or Yale. (After all, you cannot really be expected to produce your words of wisdom sitting at the decaying National Library or even swish Teen Murti alone).This way, you can retain the glow of rectitude that being a Resident Indian gives you. Jet-setting and networking with the Global Great and the Good is, in any case, a form of national service.
6. Relatedly, don't worry too much if you yourself have undertaken your undergraduate or graduate study at one of these prestigious foreign institutions or even if you have taught there for a while. But please, do take due care to underplay this where you can or it may seriously affect your ability to be perceived as a real NANI. You need to be able to roundly denounce the Indian academics who live and teach abroad without any hint of compromise on your end. You, after all, are sweating it out on the coalface at the IIC or Habitat Centre while they are swanning around in New Haven or Warwick. These suckers actually teach for a living.
7. Now, while you dutifully condemn religious chauvinists (as all refined people must, dear boy) you must not lose sight of your real bete noire. This is what you term the 'Non-Resident Political Radical' (NRPR) -- professionals and academics based abroad (there being, of course, no political radicals or 'desi leftists' in India itself). This type of academic don is the real threat to national well-being and security. In terms of the calendar year, they may spend just as much time in India as you do abroad, but they must be reminded at every possible turn that they, unlike you, are Inauthentic and Deluded. So write vitriolic denunciations of Indian academics abroad at every available opportunity, including in academic books published abroad. Remember, you cannot do this too often.
8. Remind everyone that you yourself have your fingers on the Pulse of the Masses. (If challenged, point out that you have servants which even the most well-paid of these NRI types don't, certainly not the dons). The Masses, you can assure us unequivocally (because, after all, you talk to your bai, driver and mali) are unanimously in favour of every unfettered aspect of globalization. Oh, yes, even when it means loss of land or livelihood, polluted water supplies or ill-treatment in a Gap supply-chain sweatshop. Small price to pay for India Shining after all. And remember, Non-Resident Capital is far superior to Non-Resident Indians unless the latter happen to be providing the former. These useless NR-academics don't have two pennies to invest into a Bangalore start-up anyway.
9. If Indian academics who happen to be based abroad raise questions about the possible downsides of unchecked globalization, you can toss them into the dustbin of history in one fell swoop. Again, conflating different historical and political contexts is a handy tool--Cuba, China, Burma, Kazakhstan, the Congo--all are socialist 'autarkic autocracies' which these deluded dons want to transform our beloved nation into. (You can take the opportunity to reveal the hitherto little-known fact that Burmese generals are apparently seeking to convert their country into a socialist utopia, along with the big oil companies who are, of course, well-known supporters of socialism). Like McCarthy did for the United States, simply imply that all dissent is part of a vast anti-Indian left-wing conspiracy. If the (non-existent) desi leftist writer or intellectual based in India happens to also dare to voice critique, write a vicious denunciatory screed and dispatch them into obscurity forthwith.
10. Finally, and this is important so that you too not become alienated like them, end your perorations on a constructive note. This can be done with a soothing paean to all 'humans' to which category the 'right sort' of NRI are deemed to belong.Humans are people who agree with you. They don't get up your nose, yank your goat, or articulate critique. Above all, they are unlikely, in any way, to challenge your undisputed supremacy as Pundit of the Postcolonial Nation.
Priyamvada 'Main Hoon Don' Gopal is a suspected NRPR who has just tumbled off the plane from Cambridge/London at Bangalore Airport
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
A 'native intellectual', suggested Frantz Fanon, the great freedom fighter from Martinique, is essential to the development of any great nation as it comes into its own after decades of colonization. Fanon, a complex thinker by nature, evolved a whole theory of how intellectuals could and should participate in the life of their country. They had to find ways to engage with ordinary people and their aspirations and to think about the many meanings of freedom, justice and democracy beyond simply replacing white rulers with black or brown ones. Native intellectuals would need, above all, to discard their smug complacency, learn to be self-critical and forge international alliances with like-minded others. (Though from Martinique, he himself worked alongside the Algerian anti-colonial movement).
But these old freedom fighter types, our own Gandhi and Tagore included, really were rather long-winded and needlessly sophisticated. Who can blame them? They missed the cyber age where we do things faster and with a lot less agonizing over details and nuance. Here, in India, we can now produce the New and Authentic National Intellectual (NANI) in double-quick time, futta-fut. Here's how you can become one in Ten Easy Steps:
1. First, position yourself at all times as the Real Indian, the one who stayed behind selflessly to serve nation and countrymen while others have departed for foreign shores. You have remained (or returned) to live the simple life in your old family pile in Alipore or Prithviraj Road or Benson Town.
2. Locate a handy counterfoil, a Ravan to your Ram. These are easy enough to find. Rummage through the heaving NRI hordes coming back to (your) home this December. A couple of likely prototypes immediately present themselves. In practice, they may be polar opposites and sworn enemies, but that should not deter you from handily clubbing them together. So, take a rabid Hindu chauvinist and a secular academic-activist and pop-psychoanalyse both as alienated losers who have lost their way by living away from the motherland. The fact that their politics and views may have been formed during their long years growing up or studying in India is neither here nor there. Where the academic is concerned, long years of published research into Indian history, culture or economics is also irrelevant.
3. This will also enable you to place yourself as the Eminently Reasonable man in the middle between two Extremes. The truth, of course, is geographically certified, to lie 'in-between.' Anyone who thinks that this position (like Tony Blair's Third Way) is somewhat facile and easily arrived at is an extremist to begin with anyway.
4. A NANI, while selfless, also needs to eat. Fear not, you do not actually need to lecture at an Indian college or work for the Indian civil services to earn your daily bread. That would needlessly fetter your creativity. Write popular books which will be widely sold in the free and individual West where they love their 'native' writers anyway. (If one of these books can praise NRFs or Non-Resident Firangs who devote their lives to India and her 'tribes,' so much the better). The royalties will keep you in Fab India silk kurtas for the rest of your life. Please note that this is different from and vastly morally superior to actually living in one of these grey northern lands and getting your grubby monthly paycheck (from which income tax is actually deducted) there.
5. If you need to do research for your books in well-resourced libraries, you can easily get lucrative visiting fellowships or short-term teaching contracts at Cambridge or Harvard or Yale. (After all, you cannot really be expected to produce your words of wisdom sitting at the decaying National Library or even swish Teen Murti alone).This way, you can retain the glow of rectitude that being a Resident Indian gives you. Jet-setting and networking with the Global Great and the Good is, in any case, a form of national service.
6. Relatedly, don't worry too much if you yourself have undertaken your undergraduate or graduate study at one of these prestigious foreign institutions or even if you have taught there for a while. But please, do take due care to underplay this where you can or it may seriously affect your ability to be perceived as a real NANI. You need to be able to roundly denounce the Indian academics who live and teach abroad without any hint of compromise on your end. You, after all, are sweating it out on the coalface at the IIC or Habitat Centre while they are swanning around in New Haven or Warwick. These suckers actually teach for a living.
7. Now, while you dutifully condemn religious chauvinists (as all refined people must, dear boy) you must not lose sight of your real bete noire. This is what you term the 'Non-Resident Political Radical' (NRPR) -- professionals and academics based abroad (there being, of course, no political radicals or 'desi leftists' in India itself). This type of academic don is the real threat to national well-being and security. In terms of the calendar year, they may spend just as much time in India as you do abroad, but they must be reminded at every possible turn that they, unlike you, are Inauthentic and Deluded. So write vitriolic denunciations of Indian academics abroad at every available opportunity, including in academic books published abroad. Remember, you cannot do this too often.
8. Remind everyone that you yourself have your fingers on the Pulse of the Masses. (If challenged, point out that you have servants which even the most well-paid of these NRI types don't, certainly not the dons). The Masses, you can assure us unequivocally (because, after all, you talk to your bai, driver and mali) are unanimously in favour of every unfettered aspect of globalization. Oh, yes, even when it means loss of land or livelihood, polluted water supplies or ill-treatment in a Gap supply-chain sweatshop. Small price to pay for India Shining after all. And remember, Non-Resident Capital is far superior to Non-Resident Indians unless the latter happen to be providing the former. These useless NR-academics don't have two pennies to invest into a Bangalore start-up anyway.
9. If Indian academics who happen to be based abroad raise questions about the possible downsides of unchecked globalization, you can toss them into the dustbin of history in one fell swoop. Again, conflating different historical and political contexts is a handy tool--Cuba, China, Burma, Kazakhstan, the Congo--all are socialist 'autarkic autocracies' which these deluded dons want to transform our beloved nation into. (You can take the opportunity to reveal the hitherto little-known fact that Burmese generals are apparently seeking to convert their country into a socialist utopia, along with the big oil companies who are, of course, well-known supporters of socialism). Like McCarthy did for the United States, simply imply that all dissent is part of a vast anti-Indian left-wing conspiracy. If the (non-existent) desi leftist writer or intellectual based in India happens to also dare to voice critique, write a vicious denunciatory screed and dispatch them into obscurity forthwith.
10. Finally, and this is important so that you too not become alienated like them, end your perorations on a constructive note. This can be done with a soothing paean to all 'humans' to which category the 'right sort' of NRI are deemed to belong.Humans are people who agree with you. They don't get up your nose, yank your goat, or articulate critique. Above all, they are unlikely, in any way, to challenge your undisputed supremacy as Pundit of the Postcolonial Nation.
Priyamvada 'Main Hoon Don' Gopal is a suspected NRPR who has just tumbled off the plane from Cambridge/London at Bangalore Airport
Tuesday 18 December 2007
Left for dead by New Labour, liberal Britain must urgently fight back
Blair and his cult have wrecked the very beliefs millions thought they were voting for. The time for direct action is now
John Pilger
Tuesday December 18, 2007
The Guardian
The former Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil has described James Murdoch, the heir apparent, as a "social liberal". What strikes me is his casual use of "liberal" for the new ruler of an empire devoted to the promotion of war, conquest and human division. Neil's view is not unusual. In the murdochracy that Britain has largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning. In the years leading to Tony Blair's election, liberal commentators vied in their Tonier-than-thou obeisance to such a paragon of "reborn liberalism". In these pages in 1995, Henry Porter celebrated an almost mystical politician who "presents himself as a harmoniser for all the opposing interests in British life, a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, a synthesiser of opposing beliefs". Blair was, of course, the diametric opposite.
As events have demonstrated, Blair and the cult of New Labour have destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought they were voting for. This truth is like a taboo and was missing almost entirely from last week's Guardian debate about civil liberties. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair's pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to Peter Hain's recent attacks on the disabled, the "project" has completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been mostly superficial "social liberalism" and the highest personal indebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of inequality for 40 years, with the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and more and more segregated from society. The International Monetary Fund has designated Britain a tax haven, and corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice the global average, while Unicef reports that British children are the most neglected and unhappiest in the "rich" world.
Abroad, behind a facade of liberal concern for the world's "disadvantaged", such as waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a "liberal intervention" may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more flags will not cover the shame. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era," says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.
Even if a contortion of intellect and morality allows the interventionists to justify these actions, the same cannot be said for liberties eroded at home. These are too much part of the myth that individual freedom was handed down by eminent liberal gentlemen instead of being fought for at the bottom. Yet rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended. Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world. A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits outside my local Sainsbury's. On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy on each other. These are normal now, along with the tracking of our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the "evidence". Hundreds of terrified Iraqi refugees are sent back to the infinite dangers of the country "we" have destroyed. Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing military presence in other people's countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as "pre-fascist". When famous liberal columnists wring their hands about the domestic consequences, let them look to their own early support for such epic faraway crimes.
In broadcasting, a prime source of liberalism and most of our information, the unthinkable has been normalised. The murderous chaos in Iraq is merely internecine. Indeed, Bush's "surge" is "working". The holocaust there has nothing to do with "us". There are honourable exceptions, of course, as there are in those great liberal storehouses of knowledge, Britain's universities; but they, too, are normalised and left to natter about "failed states" and "crisis management" - when the cause of the crisis is on their doorstep. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, for the first time in two centuries almost no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist is prepared to question the foundations of western actions, let alone interrupt, as DJ Taylor once put it, all those "demure ironies and mannered perceptions, their focus on the gyrations of a bunch of emotional poseurs ... to the reader infinitely reassuring ... and infinitely useless". Harold Pinter and Ronan Bennett are exceptions.
Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country. The Whitehall executive has prerogative powers as effective as politburo decrees. Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as the EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum, regardless of Blair's "solemn pledge". Thanks largely to a parliament in which a majority of the members cannot bring themselves to denounce the crime in Iraq or even vote for an inquiry, New Labour has added to the statutes a record 3,000 criminal offences: an apparatus of control that undermines the Human Rights Act. In 1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia. They warned that complacency and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no illusions."
For those people who still celebrate the virtues and triumphs of liberalism - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the defence of individual conscience and the right to express it and act upon it - the time for direct action is now. It is time to support those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to support the NHS workers who up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest achievement. The list of people stirring is reassuring. The awakening of the rest of us is urgent.
John Pilger
Tuesday December 18, 2007
The Guardian
The former Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil has described James Murdoch, the heir apparent, as a "social liberal". What strikes me is his casual use of "liberal" for the new ruler of an empire devoted to the promotion of war, conquest and human division. Neil's view is not unusual. In the murdochracy that Britain has largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning. In the years leading to Tony Blair's election, liberal commentators vied in their Tonier-than-thou obeisance to such a paragon of "reborn liberalism". In these pages in 1995, Henry Porter celebrated an almost mystical politician who "presents himself as a harmoniser for all the opposing interests in British life, a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, a synthesiser of opposing beliefs". Blair was, of course, the diametric opposite.
As events have demonstrated, Blair and the cult of New Labour have destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought they were voting for. This truth is like a taboo and was missing almost entirely from last week's Guardian debate about civil liberties. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair's pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to Peter Hain's recent attacks on the disabled, the "project" has completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been mostly superficial "social liberalism" and the highest personal indebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of inequality for 40 years, with the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and more and more segregated from society. The International Monetary Fund has designated Britain a tax haven, and corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice the global average, while Unicef reports that British children are the most neglected and unhappiest in the "rich" world.
Abroad, behind a facade of liberal concern for the world's "disadvantaged", such as waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a "liberal intervention" may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more flags will not cover the shame. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era," says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.
Even if a contortion of intellect and morality allows the interventionists to justify these actions, the same cannot be said for liberties eroded at home. These are too much part of the myth that individual freedom was handed down by eminent liberal gentlemen instead of being fought for at the bottom. Yet rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended. Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world. A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits outside my local Sainsbury's. On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy on each other. These are normal now, along with the tracking of our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the "evidence". Hundreds of terrified Iraqi refugees are sent back to the infinite dangers of the country "we" have destroyed. Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing military presence in other people's countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as "pre-fascist". When famous liberal columnists wring their hands about the domestic consequences, let them look to their own early support for such epic faraway crimes.
In broadcasting, a prime source of liberalism and most of our information, the unthinkable has been normalised. The murderous chaos in Iraq is merely internecine. Indeed, Bush's "surge" is "working". The holocaust there has nothing to do with "us". There are honourable exceptions, of course, as there are in those great liberal storehouses of knowledge, Britain's universities; but they, too, are normalised and left to natter about "failed states" and "crisis management" - when the cause of the crisis is on their doorstep. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, for the first time in two centuries almost no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist is prepared to question the foundations of western actions, let alone interrupt, as DJ Taylor once put it, all those "demure ironies and mannered perceptions, their focus on the gyrations of a bunch of emotional poseurs ... to the reader infinitely reassuring ... and infinitely useless". Harold Pinter and Ronan Bennett are exceptions.
Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country. The Whitehall executive has prerogative powers as effective as politburo decrees. Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as the EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum, regardless of Blair's "solemn pledge". Thanks largely to a parliament in which a majority of the members cannot bring themselves to denounce the crime in Iraq or even vote for an inquiry, New Labour has added to the statutes a record 3,000 criminal offences: an apparatus of control that undermines the Human Rights Act. In 1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia. They warned that complacency and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no illusions."
For those people who still celebrate the virtues and triumphs of liberalism - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the defence of individual conscience and the right to express it and act upon it - the time for direct action is now. It is time to support those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to support the NHS workers who up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest achievement. The list of people stirring is reassuring. The awakening of the rest of us is urgent.
Monday 17 December 2007
The art of going green lies in hiding the cost
Irwin Stelzer
“COLOUR THEM GREEN,” warbled Barbra Streisand. That was in 1963, and she was singing about her envious eyes. But flash forward to today and those words would equally apply to the myriad players in the let’s-make-environmental-and-energy-policy game.
We are all green now. Al Gore took time off the speech circuit to collect a Nobel Prize for persuading the world that global warming threatens our very existence. Arnold Schwarzenegger, not content with painting California green, has formed an alliance with Tony Blair to press Europe’s politicians to do the same, and they have responded by seeking ways of forcing car makers and airlines to cut their emissions. Ken Livingstone has persuaded leading companies to sign up to a “Green 500” group that will publish its progress in reducing carbon emissions.
There’s more, but you get the idea: the green wave is rolling, and has drowned those who doubt whether the Earth is really warming, and question the role of human activity in any warming.
The physical science question having been resolved to the satisfaction of the greens, the question now becomes just what to do. Here we find strange bedfellows: oil producers and environmentalists.
The Opec oil cartel, which recently met in Abu Dhabi, and the 15,000 – or is it 20,000 – ministers, advocacy groups, journalists and suntan-hunting politicians meeting in Bali might not know it, but they have a common goal: high oil prices. The oil producers want to keep prices high so that the huge shift in wealth from consuming countries to their sovereign wealth funds continues.
The greens favour high oil prices because consumers use less of the stuff when it costs more, and because high prices for oil make other forms of energy more competitive. Nuclear power, solar energy, wind power or any of the other substitutes for fossil fuels can become more economically viable only if oil prices stay about where they are – and politicians stump up some generous subsidies, sceptics would add.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the proverbial free lunch is on. The most efficient way to cut the use of fossil fuels is to make them more expensive by taxing them, or the emissions they create. But politicians are as unenthusiastic about transparency in the cost of cleaning up the environment as they are about increasing the transparency of the funding of political parties. So most proposals to cut carbon emissions are built around a single proposition: hide their cost from voters.
Motor vehicles always come in for special attention. Some would require car companies to increase the fuel efficiency of their fleets, but fail to mention that the cost will be reflected in the price of cars and the higher death toll associated with lighter vehicles. Others mandate greater use of ethanol, but do not mention that current mandates have already driven up the price of corn and wheat, and of meat and poultry by making animal feed more expensive. Consumers of electricity will also pay for cooling the world when utilities are required to obtain more of their electricity from expensive renewable sources and nuclear power. And new taxes on oil producers will certainly drive up the price of petrol and heating oil.
Even the emerging favourite in the United States and Europe, a cap on emissions followed by a trading of permits, is a hide-the-cost device: costs of compliance will be passed on as higher prices. So the blame will go to car makers, supermarkets, electricity utilities, and oil companies, the applause to politicians. All so politicians can avoid the transparent device of a tax on carbon or carbon emissions.
This brings us back to Bali, where the negotiators had two main tasks. The first was to formulate an agenda that keeps America in the emissions-reduction game, which means persuading a Senate that was prepared to reject Kyoto by unanimous vote that the greening of America will not stifle economic growth. The second was to attract the developing countries, most notably China and India, into the game. Whether the agreed “road map” will achieve those goals, or prove as useless as the one designed to bring peace to Israel, remains to be seen.
That’s because so-called clean sources of energy have their own problems. A source high up in Britain’s nuclear industry tells me that there will be no new nukes unless the regulators agree on a uniform licensing standard, curb litigation, and cut construction delays. This is no more likely than a politically acceptable solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem.
Nor will renewables provide a free lunch. Offshore wind power, the poster-boy du jour of British policymakers and Greenpeace, “is more expensive than gas-fired”, notes Alan Moore, managing director of National Wind Power. And we have yet to see what will happen when objectors raise questions about the impact of specific wind farms on birds, wildlife and views.
Meanwhile, lurking in the background is the environmentalists’ bête noire, coal. Britain has approved ten new opencast coal mines, and China is building new coal-fired power stations this year with a capacity exceeding that of the entire UK electricity grid. That will make China the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and more than offset any reductions the developing nations manage. And in America some 45 new coal-fired power plants are under construction or have obtained planning permission.
So it’s going to be a long road from Bali to a meaningful agreement to reduce emissions. Followers of the new road map will have to pass through Washington, Beijing and New Delhi, places that have not yet been coloured a deep shade of green.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute.
“COLOUR THEM GREEN,” warbled Barbra Streisand. That was in 1963, and she was singing about her envious eyes. But flash forward to today and those words would equally apply to the myriad players in the let’s-make-environmental-and-energy-policy game.
We are all green now. Al Gore took time off the speech circuit to collect a Nobel Prize for persuading the world that global warming threatens our very existence. Arnold Schwarzenegger, not content with painting California green, has formed an alliance with Tony Blair to press Europe’s politicians to do the same, and they have responded by seeking ways of forcing car makers and airlines to cut their emissions. Ken Livingstone has persuaded leading companies to sign up to a “Green 500” group that will publish its progress in reducing carbon emissions.
There’s more, but you get the idea: the green wave is rolling, and has drowned those who doubt whether the Earth is really warming, and question the role of human activity in any warming.
The physical science question having been resolved to the satisfaction of the greens, the question now becomes just what to do. Here we find strange bedfellows: oil producers and environmentalists.
The Opec oil cartel, which recently met in Abu Dhabi, and the 15,000 – or is it 20,000 – ministers, advocacy groups, journalists and suntan-hunting politicians meeting in Bali might not know it, but they have a common goal: high oil prices. The oil producers want to keep prices high so that the huge shift in wealth from consuming countries to their sovereign wealth funds continues.
The greens favour high oil prices because consumers use less of the stuff when it costs more, and because high prices for oil make other forms of energy more competitive. Nuclear power, solar energy, wind power or any of the other substitutes for fossil fuels can become more economically viable only if oil prices stay about where they are – and politicians stump up some generous subsidies, sceptics would add.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the proverbial free lunch is on. The most efficient way to cut the use of fossil fuels is to make them more expensive by taxing them, or the emissions they create. But politicians are as unenthusiastic about transparency in the cost of cleaning up the environment as they are about increasing the transparency of the funding of political parties. So most proposals to cut carbon emissions are built around a single proposition: hide their cost from voters.
Motor vehicles always come in for special attention. Some would require car companies to increase the fuel efficiency of their fleets, but fail to mention that the cost will be reflected in the price of cars and the higher death toll associated with lighter vehicles. Others mandate greater use of ethanol, but do not mention that current mandates have already driven up the price of corn and wheat, and of meat and poultry by making animal feed more expensive. Consumers of electricity will also pay for cooling the world when utilities are required to obtain more of their electricity from expensive renewable sources and nuclear power. And new taxes on oil producers will certainly drive up the price of petrol and heating oil.
Even the emerging favourite in the United States and Europe, a cap on emissions followed by a trading of permits, is a hide-the-cost device: costs of compliance will be passed on as higher prices. So the blame will go to car makers, supermarkets, electricity utilities, and oil companies, the applause to politicians. All so politicians can avoid the transparent device of a tax on carbon or carbon emissions.
This brings us back to Bali, where the negotiators had two main tasks. The first was to formulate an agenda that keeps America in the emissions-reduction game, which means persuading a Senate that was prepared to reject Kyoto by unanimous vote that the greening of America will not stifle economic growth. The second was to attract the developing countries, most notably China and India, into the game. Whether the agreed “road map” will achieve those goals, or prove as useless as the one designed to bring peace to Israel, remains to be seen.
That’s because so-called clean sources of energy have their own problems. A source high up in Britain’s nuclear industry tells me that there will be no new nukes unless the regulators agree on a uniform licensing standard, curb litigation, and cut construction delays. This is no more likely than a politically acceptable solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem.
Nor will renewables provide a free lunch. Offshore wind power, the poster-boy du jour of British policymakers and Greenpeace, “is more expensive than gas-fired”, notes Alan Moore, managing director of National Wind Power. And we have yet to see what will happen when objectors raise questions about the impact of specific wind farms on birds, wildlife and views.
Meanwhile, lurking in the background is the environmentalists’ bête noire, coal. Britain has approved ten new opencast coal mines, and China is building new coal-fired power stations this year with a capacity exceeding that of the entire UK electricity grid. That will make China the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and more than offset any reductions the developing nations manage. And in America some 45 new coal-fired power plants are under construction or have obtained planning permission.
So it’s going to be a long road from Bali to a meaningful agreement to reduce emissions. Followers of the new road map will have to pass through Washington, Beijing and New Delhi, places that have not yet been coloured a deep shade of green.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute.
The environmental debate has to be rescued from the flagellants who would cut growth
Bruce Anderson:
Like all fanatical cults, they have their Devil, in the US, and their rituals, in recycling plastic bags, et al
Published: 17 December 2007
Last week, we saw some of the people who put "mental" into environmentalism. Important topics were discussed in Bali. That is not necessarily as absurd as it sounds. But it rapidly became so. Who popped up? A crying Dutchman in a flower-power shirt. The Flying Dutchman had better tunes.
Yet it could be dangerous to be distracted by laughing at the lunatics, who must not be allowed to obscure an important truth. At the core of environmentalism there is a common-sense proposition: man-made climate change. Climate change has occurred throughout the earth's history.
The causal link between carbon emissions and global warming is only a hypothesis. But as Karl Popper argued, we approach scientific truth through hypotheses, discarding them when they are proven wrong. Far from being proven wrong, carbon-burning climate change sounds plausible. You do not have to be a tree-hugging, tofu-eating America hater – or even a lachrymose Ivo de Boer – to recognise the risk that a huge increase in carbon emissions might destabilise the earth's atmosphere.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report does not read as if the typescript was tear-stained. It is a coolly argued document, proposing sensible measures. Nick Stern does not think that the human race ought to live in long houses eating roots and berries. He does not even believe that we need to renounce cars, supermarkets or air travel. He merely proposes sensible readjustments and this raises the question of the balance of proof.
Even if you do not accept that carbon has been proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, there are good grounds for siding with Sir Nicholas. Suppose he is wrong. In that case, there would have been unnecessarily early expenditure in order to find substitutes for carbon fuels. Yet, there would be gains. Fossil fuels not only tend to be located in geopolitically inconvenient regions; one day, they must run out.
So the Stern measures would not be that wasteful. But suppose he is right. If nothing is done over the next few years, the catch-up costs could be enormous – and insufficient to avert instability and perhaps war. Just because some of the silliest people on earth are proclaiming that there is a mortal threat to the planet, we cannot assume that they are mistaken.
Nor need we share their pessimism about Bali. Progress was made. Even if there are no figures for reductions, there is a framework which includes the US, China and India. That offers a basis for hope – as long as the next phase of the emissions' debate is sufficiently radical.
There were always two problems with Kyoto. It was far too influenced by the Greenpeace-style excesses of mid-90s environmentalism and it did not include America. At that stage, the anti-nuclear power movement was at its most powerful in both the US and Europe. Since then it has lost ground, largely because governments have had to think through the consequences of reducing carbon emissions and the real-world alternatives to fossil fuels.
In those days, however, a major US nuclear power programme would have been impossible. As a result, there was the worst possible stalemate. The Green Movement, though incapable of persuading Americans to consume less energy, did succeed in cutting off new energy sources, whether nuclear plants or offshore oil drilling.
America should not be criticised for failing to sign Kyoto. Someone ought to remind Al Gore there was never any question of it doing so. Anyone who doubts this should remember that, while Bill Clinton was president and Al Gore vice-president, the US Senate rejected Kyoto by 95 votes to nil. This happened because American legislators who agreed on little else did come together on one point. The Kyoto limits were incompatible with economic growth.
That is where the post-Bali negotiators must do better. What is needed is a fundamental change of emphasis. Instead of focusing on carbon reductions, much more attention should be given to the increased use of clean energy. Over the next dozen years, the Indian and Chinese economies might well double in size. Nothing ever seems to stop the US economy from growing. Europe desperately needs higher growth rates. So does Japan; so, above all, does the poor world.
Growth depends on energy. It might be possible to use emotional blackmail to persuade some Western countries to cut their growth rates. That will not work in India and China. Whatever Mr Gore now says, it is unlikely to work in the US and it ought not to work in the poor world.
Higher energy consumption is vitally important and there are only two ways of achieving it: fossil fuels or nuclear power. Although carbon capture and other technologies to ensure a cleaner burn could make it possible to increase fossil fuel use without grave consequences, there is only one answer to the problem of clean energy. Everyone who cares about the environment should agitate in favour of a greatly increased global nuclear power programme.
We can be fairly sure that this is not going to happen and the blame lies with the enviro-"mentals". They are not pursuing disinterested science, in the spirit of the Stern report. Their environmentalism is a religion. Like all fanatical cults, it is hostile to science and to reason. It has its Devil: the US, abetted by the Western consumer. It has its rituals: recycling plastic bags, etc. It offers endless excuses for self-flagellation, such as possessing plastic bags in the first place. It even has its own temples.
It could be argued that the British wind-turbines are the most wasteful public works programme since the Pyramids. But there is a difference. The Pyramids are objects of wonder, grandeur and beauty. In future, the turbines will, no doubt, be objects of wonder. People will wonder why our generation was so daft to build them when they require large subsidies for an uncertain output while despoiling large tracts of the British landscape.
There is no harm in the occasional domestic wind turbine. But anyone who believes that such turbines could be the answer to Britain's energy needs has either failed to understand the need for energy or is indifferent to the consequences of energy shortage.
The environmental debate has to be rescued from flagellants. It is perfectly possible for the world to go on enjoying a rising standard of living while reducing carbon emissions. If the problem is approached in that spirit, there is no reason why the Americans, Chinese and Indians should refuse to co-operate.
So there are grounds for believing that the Bali discussions could prove fruitful. The next meeting might achieve more, as long as one precondition is met. There must be no blubbing Dutchmen wearing two floral shirts, one on his upper body, the other between his ears.
Like all fanatical cults, they have their Devil, in the US, and their rituals, in recycling plastic bags, et al
Published: 17 December 2007
Last week, we saw some of the people who put "mental" into environmentalism. Important topics were discussed in Bali. That is not necessarily as absurd as it sounds. But it rapidly became so. Who popped up? A crying Dutchman in a flower-power shirt. The Flying Dutchman had better tunes.
Yet it could be dangerous to be distracted by laughing at the lunatics, who must not be allowed to obscure an important truth. At the core of environmentalism there is a common-sense proposition: man-made climate change. Climate change has occurred throughout the earth's history.
The causal link between carbon emissions and global warming is only a hypothesis. But as Karl Popper argued, we approach scientific truth through hypotheses, discarding them when they are proven wrong. Far from being proven wrong, carbon-burning climate change sounds plausible. You do not have to be a tree-hugging, tofu-eating America hater – or even a lachrymose Ivo de Boer – to recognise the risk that a huge increase in carbon emissions might destabilise the earth's atmosphere.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report does not read as if the typescript was tear-stained. It is a coolly argued document, proposing sensible measures. Nick Stern does not think that the human race ought to live in long houses eating roots and berries. He does not even believe that we need to renounce cars, supermarkets or air travel. He merely proposes sensible readjustments and this raises the question of the balance of proof.
Even if you do not accept that carbon has been proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, there are good grounds for siding with Sir Nicholas. Suppose he is wrong. In that case, there would have been unnecessarily early expenditure in order to find substitutes for carbon fuels. Yet, there would be gains. Fossil fuels not only tend to be located in geopolitically inconvenient regions; one day, they must run out.
So the Stern measures would not be that wasteful. But suppose he is right. If nothing is done over the next few years, the catch-up costs could be enormous – and insufficient to avert instability and perhaps war. Just because some of the silliest people on earth are proclaiming that there is a mortal threat to the planet, we cannot assume that they are mistaken.
Nor need we share their pessimism about Bali. Progress was made. Even if there are no figures for reductions, there is a framework which includes the US, China and India. That offers a basis for hope – as long as the next phase of the emissions' debate is sufficiently radical.
There were always two problems with Kyoto. It was far too influenced by the Greenpeace-style excesses of mid-90s environmentalism and it did not include America. At that stage, the anti-nuclear power movement was at its most powerful in both the US and Europe. Since then it has lost ground, largely because governments have had to think through the consequences of reducing carbon emissions and the real-world alternatives to fossil fuels.
In those days, however, a major US nuclear power programme would have been impossible. As a result, there was the worst possible stalemate. The Green Movement, though incapable of persuading Americans to consume less energy, did succeed in cutting off new energy sources, whether nuclear plants or offshore oil drilling.
America should not be criticised for failing to sign Kyoto. Someone ought to remind Al Gore there was never any question of it doing so. Anyone who doubts this should remember that, while Bill Clinton was president and Al Gore vice-president, the US Senate rejected Kyoto by 95 votes to nil. This happened because American legislators who agreed on little else did come together on one point. The Kyoto limits were incompatible with economic growth.
That is where the post-Bali negotiators must do better. What is needed is a fundamental change of emphasis. Instead of focusing on carbon reductions, much more attention should be given to the increased use of clean energy. Over the next dozen years, the Indian and Chinese economies might well double in size. Nothing ever seems to stop the US economy from growing. Europe desperately needs higher growth rates. So does Japan; so, above all, does the poor world.
Growth depends on energy. It might be possible to use emotional blackmail to persuade some Western countries to cut their growth rates. That will not work in India and China. Whatever Mr Gore now says, it is unlikely to work in the US and it ought not to work in the poor world.
Higher energy consumption is vitally important and there are only two ways of achieving it: fossil fuels or nuclear power. Although carbon capture and other technologies to ensure a cleaner burn could make it possible to increase fossil fuel use without grave consequences, there is only one answer to the problem of clean energy. Everyone who cares about the environment should agitate in favour of a greatly increased global nuclear power programme.
We can be fairly sure that this is not going to happen and the blame lies with the enviro-"mentals". They are not pursuing disinterested science, in the spirit of the Stern report. Their environmentalism is a religion. Like all fanatical cults, it is hostile to science and to reason. It has its Devil: the US, abetted by the Western consumer. It has its rituals: recycling plastic bags, etc. It offers endless excuses for self-flagellation, such as possessing plastic bags in the first place. It even has its own temples.
It could be argued that the British wind-turbines are the most wasteful public works programme since the Pyramids. But there is a difference. The Pyramids are objects of wonder, grandeur and beauty. In future, the turbines will, no doubt, be objects of wonder. People will wonder why our generation was so daft to build them when they require large subsidies for an uncertain output while despoiling large tracts of the British landscape.
There is no harm in the occasional domestic wind turbine. But anyone who believes that such turbines could be the answer to Britain's energy needs has either failed to understand the need for energy or is indifferent to the consequences of energy shortage.
The environmental debate has to be rescued from flagellants. It is perfectly possible for the world to go on enjoying a rising standard of living while reducing carbon emissions. If the problem is approached in that spirit, there is no reason why the Americans, Chinese and Indians should refuse to co-operate.
So there are grounds for believing that the Bali discussions could prove fruitful. The next meeting might achieve more, as long as one precondition is met. There must be no blubbing Dutchmen wearing two floral shirts, one on his upper body, the other between his ears.
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