imperialism

Review | Endless War, Elite Propaganda, and Mass Fear: Drivers of American Imperial Power

‘Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror’ is an important book that comes at a time when the US and some of its allies are engaged in full-throttle propagandising about the Ukraine war.

The veteran national security reporter Seymour Hersh recently published an article strongly indicating that the US, with its various European minions, carried out the attack that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that carried the bulk of Russian energy into Germany. An investigative journalist of the old school – who refuses to pass on his work for CIA or other pre-publication assessment – Hersh exposed US massacres of civilians at My Lai in the Vietnam War, aspects of the Watergate scandal, and US torture at Abu Ghraib detention camp in Iraq. His latest piece – which reports an act of war by the US against its own ally, Germany and Russia – has been met with mostly silence in the mainstream media which, almost unquestioningly, had originally accepted without doubt the US/Western/Ukrainian view that it was Putin’s Russia that had detonated the pipelines.

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. But what happens to a society and culture when its state is at war all the time? The United States of War – the title of a great book, goes a long way to describing how deeply-embedded is US elites’ essentially militarised identity.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US national security adviser and Columbia University professor, noted sometime in the late 1990s a fundamental truth of American society that must remain largely hidden from public scrutiny. In his view, that particular truth is a fundamental character flaw of the American people that must be corrected by elites who know best what’s good for everyone: that “the [US] pursuit of [global] power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

Back in the late 1940s, at the dawn of the American century, US Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg told President Truman that his programme of global expansionism – the Truman doctrine – would command public support only if he could “scare hell out of the American people.”

Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, argued that the only way a programme of global military hyper-expansion as recommended in the classic 1950 cold war document – NSC 68 – could be enforced was by “bludgeon[ing] the mass mind of ‘top government’…”

President Donald Trump, a bludgeoning Big Liar on the road to the White House noted in 2016: “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life….Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.”

Trump’s primordial truth is that the Big Lie technique is essential to winning and holding onto power. He told journalist Bob Woodward that “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear.”

An essential truth to justify the Big Lie. Now the defining feature of US politics. Fake news. Post-truth. Alternative facts. A warfare state and militarised culture – where is the room for truth in such a place?

Former US president Donald Trump. Photo: Jackson A. Lanier/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Propaganda fuels fear

Fear is a master force in life, in politics and government. Niccolo Machiavelli, in his classic handbook on how to hold onto great power, The Prince, wrote, “It is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both.” But of the two, fear is the more decisive, more durable force to be nurtured and deployed.

Elite war propaganda is rooted in the construction of threats to be feared, while the deadly paraphernalia of militarism and warfare – patriotism, national anthem, and the stars and stripes, pledges of allegiance in school and football stadium alike, Hollywood films sponsored by the Pentagon and CIA, alarming posters and intensive security checks at airports, the arming of police with ever more lethal weapons under Pentagon programmes going back to the 1980s’ ‘war on drugs’ – reach deep into everyday life.

Elites’ propaganda reflects their own fear (paranoia) of the attachment of the mass of Americans to peace and peaceful resolution of disputes in world politics. Such peaceful attitudes threaten imperial war-making and the entire edifice of the military-industrial-intellectual-media-sports-Hollywood-internet-complex. Fear is conceived, fostered, nurtured, crystallised and mobilised through mass networks of messaging, constantly and generally reinforced, and then targeted around specific demands at specific times to authorise and legitimise military interventions, violence and wars of aggression. Forever wars. Endless wars. Which both presidential candidates claimed to oppose in their 2020 campaigns.

Imperial superpower war propaganda is total propaganda war, everywhere, all the time.

Public choice approach to war and militarism

For many of us, the above is hardly news. It has been demonstrated time and again even in mainstream historical works – including on cold war ‘fear’ mobilisations, the war with Spain in 1898, the exterminations of Native Americans, enslavement of Africans, exclusion of Asians. Fewer will be aware that European Catholics were also feared as the alleged advance forces of the Pope and Vatican in Protestant America, and their schools and churches frequently burnt to the ground by the furies of 100% Americanism.

Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall
Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror
Stanford University Press (August 2021)

In Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall provide an unusual, interesting, broadly persuasive, and welcome approach to explaining the manufacture and deployment of militarism in America. They use a ‘public choice’ perspective to the matter and apply it with clinical ferocity. Public choice is a dominant theory in the field of (capitalist) political economy, with inviolable sympathies with liberal/libertarian anti-statism. Its driving thrust is that in a free society the individual is and should be supreme/sovereign, and that major concentrations of power in the tax-funded state (beyond its basic duties of protecting individual liberties, private property, and provision of security) undermine individual freedom. Those in positions of some authority or power – especially in the areas of foreign and national security affairs – enjoy, jealously protect, and relentlessly extend their virtual monopoly over information, information asymmetry. This asymmetry provides incentives for political opportunism and the further concentration of power, but at the expense of individual rights to knowledge and, more broadly, political democracy itself.

In short, the US has become a system of “perverse incentives” in giving so much space for opportunism and elite power concentration in the name of national security.

Iraq war and occupation – case studies in propaganda

The empirical chapters of this study are all interesting though they tread quite familiar ground. On Iraq, it’s about oil and WMD, as well as Iraqi-al Qaeda links to the terror attacks of 9/11. The more interesting aspects of the Iraq chapters relate to systematic polling data on Americans’ attitudes that contradicted official Bush administration messaging and activities. This is impressive as in the 6 months up to the Iraq war, over 90% of all stories on the major TV news networks (CBS, ABC, NBC, where most people got their news back then) came directly from the White House propaganda machine. Hence, even with the deafening din of official information war drums, America’s well-oiled mendacity machine, significant proportions of Americans refused support for US unilateral war without UN authorisation. More: even with a UN authorising resolution, only 38% backed the invasion of Iraq. A few months before the March 2003 aggression, over two-thirds wanted UN weapons inspectors sent to Iraq and military action only as a last resort.

Furthermore, American mass opinion wanted the US to be part of an international coalition should war become necessary. The Bush administration, therefore, manufactured a coalition of 40 countries – most of whom contributed little or nothing in terms of troops, money, or weaponry. Only the US and Britain, and to some extent Spain and Australia, supplied combat troops. Private military companies supplied around 25,000 troops – about the same number as supplied by America’s purported coalition allies. Mass opposition to the American aggression in Iraq was worldwide, as polls cited by Coyne and Hill demonstrate. Yet, one would not have garnered that from the mainstream corporate media.

The subsequent Committee on Government Reform reported in 2004 that President Bush, VP Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of state Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – the top five architects of the Iraq war – “repeatedly made misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq. In 125 appearances, they made 11 misleading statements about Iraq’s nuclear activities, 84 misleading statements about Iraq’s chemical and biological capabilities, and 61 misleading statements about Iraq’s relationship with al Qaeda”. The Committee documented and exposed domestic Shock and Awe propaganda operations in great detail, the effects of which continue to undermine US global authority as well as the legitimacy of the US political establishment at home.

War games, war films

American football is probably the quintessential national sport – followed nationwide by millions, and hence, an ideal arena for war propaganda and militarism. Because most fans and probably the teams’ owners do not attend matches to watch military parades and USAF flypasts etc, the Department of Defense (DoD) steps up and pays them millions of dollars each to “host a variety of ‘patriotic displays’”. Between 2012 and 2015 alone, the DoD pumped over $6 million for “military appreciation activities” – which Coyne and Hall dub “propaganda by another name”. A multibillion-dollar game, American football is watched by almost 70% of Americans, Black and White, Republican and Democrat – a bipartisan opportunity to build and sustain the pomp and glory of militarism.

New York Giants cornerback Michael Coe greets Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Jonathan Greenert on the sidelines during a NFL military appreciation game in 2012. Photo: US DoD, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hollywood – the alleged bastion of woke culture and political correctness – has never been reluctant to take Pentagon money, advice, weapons and dollars. Coyne and Hill list numerous major movies over the past decades that received DoD support and advice on content – in fact, moviemakers alter content at the discretion of the Pentagon to retain material support. The authors argue that the DoD, CIA and NSA not only invoke their power to alter scripts and plot lines, they “are also successful at preventing films deemed ‘too critical’ of the military and the US government being created in the first place.” Citing original research, they argue that the state has worked “behind the scenes” on over 800 major movies and over a thousand TV titles. Major movies backed by the Pentagon, etc. include Bridge of Spies (2015), Frost/Nixon (2008), The Guardian (2006), and so on.

On the other hand, movies that were more critical of wars or the US military or portrayed them less than flatteringly – like Platoon, The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, among others – were rejected by the DoD. The Hurt Locker writers submitted their script for Pentagon backing but the latter’s support was subsequently withdrawn as the screenplay apparently departed from the one endorsed by officials. The relationship between the US war machinery and Hollywood is deep, enduring, and routine.

Add up all the information warfare power of the US state, its cosy relations with the news media, Hollywood, US sports, universities, think tanks, and schools and we get the picture – a propaganda-saturated culture of violence and war, of good us and evil them, friend and foe, patriot and traitor, American and un-American.

Also Read: Violence, Hierarchy, Expansion: What Lies Behind the US’s Military Power?

What is to be done?

Unusually for academics, Coyne and Hall propose four possible solutions to deal with state propaganda – each of them with serious practical limitations, highlighting the significant weaknesses of public choice theory’s foundational underpinnings. It may be even worse than that – their solutions bring to the surface their illusions about the nature of the American political system, locked into their liberal ideology of political reforms.

First, they suggest that government might pass laws to regulate itself. Yet, they acknowledge, there are numerous historic and recent laws that have not been enforced. They conclude that constitutional checks are like “a chastity belt whose key is always within the wearer’s reach.” The police cannot police themselves.

Secondly, whistleblowers are essential to exposing the crimes of the state. Yet government-enacted and enforced laws against such exposure are many, effective and punitive – as numerous cases show. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden had to flee to Russia, even as his exposes led to official action to remedy serious violations of individual freedom. Chelsea Manning was tortured in US detention for leaking to Wikileaks over a quarter of a million state department cables. Julian Assange – who leaked the state department cables as well as a video entitled Collateral Murder that showed an American Apache helicopter murder several innocent Iraqis as well as 2 journalists – has been held in punitive detention in a maximum security British prison, awaiting extradition to the US. Unsurprisingly, the state is unrelenting in its pursuit of anyone who would undermine it, from within or without. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers that showed the imperial and illegal character of the Vietnam War and American aggression was hounded, smeared and pursued by the FBI for years.

Thirdly, perhaps the media might help – they are supposed to be watchdogs on power in a free society which Coyne and Hall continue to claim the US remains. But no, the media is constrained in various ways, journalists can be prosecuted for publishing leaked material, and they are also patriotic – they believe in the mission and voluntarily toe the line.

Finally, the only solution that Coyne and Hall suggest would be effective is for the ordinary individual to hold the state’s feet to the fire, by becoming better informed and more vigilant. Coyne and Hall are surely right to point out that the warring state only expends such vast resources on militarist propaganda because that’s what it takes to come anywhere close to the “consent of the governed” – and even that doesn’t always or usually work. Hence, therein lies the solution to a militarist state:

“it is up to the members of the populace as to whether they choose to accept or reject the messages communicated through government propaganda…. It is up to each person to decide whether and how they choose to exercise the power they possess.”

Two issues: theoretical and political

Politically, public choice – or Coyne and Hall’s variety of it at least – joins the anti-war coalition of the majority of Americans. It brings with it a ‘non-ideological’ economistic politics that can easily add to the politics of the Left in opposition to imperial wars. This can only be a positive advance in narrowly political terms. It reflects a longer-term tendency, also deeply rooted in US history, that supports the idea that a republic and republican freedom is destroyed should that republic become an empire.

This is effectively where the billionaire Koch brothers-backed Cato Institute has stood since the 1970s, where the Koch and Soros-backed Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft stands today. And for those reasons, one might be sceptical of the anti-war credentials of this tendency. They appear more significantly driven by their inherent anti-statism (of all varieties including taxation for social welfare) than they are by their opposition to war.

It becomes clearer then that public choice theory does not recognise the power of the collective, of classes, of political movements, of mass protests and solidarities across race, class, gender etc which are not rooted in narrow individual self-interest. Nor does it recognise anything resembling anti-war movements, sit-ins, teach-ins, and so on let alone a critique of capitalism or support for socialist movements for radical reform or revolutionary change. For public choice theorists, the state, per se, is the problem – whether it is liberal, socialist, or other.

I found one mention of the ‘military-industrial complex’, no mention of the US foreign policy establishment, let alone the interconnectedness of a C. Wright Mills-type tripartite Power Elite or a Marxist ruling class. There is no exploration of a revolving door between elite think tanks, university public policy schools, Wall Street law firms and banks, arms manufacturers, the Congress and the Pentagon. The kind of research on interlocking corporate elite networks and successive administrations by US foreign policy experts like Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Nana DeGraaff – American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks is missing, completely unacknowledged.

Public choice theory solutions to the problem of a state drenched in warfare and militarism would appear, then, to come down to this: it is un-reformable from within. It is a devastating conclusion that the authors do not draw, but it is the logical conclusion nevertheless. Despite being a political economy approach, its ‘political’ critique is interesting but its solutions are ineffective because of the political system’s domination by self-interested political opportunists. Its ‘economic’ element fails to see the actual political economy of a capitalist state and allied elite private interests at the centre of a global military, economic and financial empire.

Nevertheless, Coyne and Hall have written an important book at a time when the US and (some) of its allies and partners are engaged in full-throttle propagandising about another war – in Ukraine, a proxy war fuelled by billions of dollars of US and NATO aid, tanks, missiles and artillery, with the dangerous prospect of open warfare between the nuclear-armed US and Russia. As the Ukraine war intensifies, with increasing talk of US F-16s being transferred to Ukraine, there is an intensifying arms race in east Asia with the ‘threat’ of China – the racially-charged Yellow Peril – in regard to Taiwan.

President Biden is a mobiliser of fear as much as his Big Lie predecessor.

The book’s message is powerful and simple. It is evidence-based and well-reasoned. It is a work of serious scholarship. It condemns concentrated power in a few hands to propagandise and mislead the people to get behind wars of aggression, and pay the costs in blood and treasure. It says the American state is dangerous. It says the people must be vigilant, informed, and courageous.

Nothing wrong with that.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences, and a columnist at The Wire. He is the author of several books including Foundations of the American Century.

What Next for the Commonwealth?

A difficult colonial history shared by 52 of the 56 current members of the Commonwealth was deftly obfuscated by pomp and circumstance. With the Queen’s passing, tensions may now bubble to the surface.

Turning 21 on April 21, 1947, the then Princess Elizabeth in a broadcast from South Africa dedicated her life to the Commonwealth and Empire, declaring that her “whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”.

Four and a half years later, she was proclaimed queen and spent the first few decades of her reign watching that ‘imperial family’ shrink rapidly. In 1957, Ghana and Malaysia became the first colonies to seek independence after her accession; Britain’s last colony, Hong Kong, was returned to China in 1997. In the intervening four decades, Empire crumbled, leaving only memories of the time when Britannia ruled the waves.

As Empire retreated, the Commonwealth was skilfully elevated as an important and cherished facet of the Queen’s public duty and Britain’s international role; simultaneously, a difficult colonial history shared by 52 of the 56 current members of the Commonwealth was deftly obfuscated by pomp and circumstance – and Elizabeth II’s unquestionable and unwavering commitment to the organisation. With the Queen’s passing, the tensions in that colonial history may now bubble to the surface.

Just as his mother spent the first years of her reign watching the land under the Crown shrink, Charles III will probably spend the next few years watching the whittling down of the Commonwealth Realms – that is, the members of the Commonwealth that have the British monarch as their head of state. Arguably, the exodus has been signalled, with Barbados choosing to become a republic in November last year: Prince Charles (as he was then) watched as the flag was brought down on his family’s 396-year rule of the island. Before that, the last country to renounce the monarchy was Mauritius in 1992.

However, earlier this year, Jamaica’s Prime Minister informed the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their less-than-successful tour to commemorate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee that Jamaica would be ‘moving on’.

Following the Queen’s death, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda has stated that he will call for a referendum on retaining the monarchy in the next three years. A minister in the government of Belize is reported to have raised the issue in Parliament. Australia and New Zealand have sporadically engaged with this question for years. The new king is prepared for this: as he declared at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Rwanda earlier this year (where he was representing the Queen) “each member’s constitutional arrangement, as republic or monarchy, is purely a matter for each member country”.

Britain’s King Charles III speaks during the Accession Council ceremony at St James’s Palace, where he is formally proclaimed Britain’s new monarch, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in London, Britain September 10, 2022. Photo: Jonathan Brady/Pool via Reuters

Whether or not the monarchy is seen as an anachronism by this subset of the Commonwealth, the organisation itself will probably come under some scrutiny. In any case, the Commonwealth today – though expanding – is an organisation in search of a role. Its modern incarnation has roots in the inter-war period, when dominions of the British Empire succeeded in gaining equality of status with Britain at the 1926 Imperial Conference, which declared all dominions to be “equal in status … though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”; this declaration was codified in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. India, though party to the 1926 talks, chose not to sign on to the declaration as it was pushing for full independence. When India joined in 1949, it was still nominally reigned over by King George VI (India would only officially become a republic on January 26, 1950) but it did so on the condition that the monarch, while head of the Commonwealth, was not head of state for India. This adaptation allowed more former colonies to join the organisation, which dropped ‘British’ from its name at the same time.

Purpose difficult to pinpoint

The name might have been easy to settle, but its purpose is more difficult to pinpoint. Originally an assembly of equals, the Commonwealth under Elizabeth II has evolved, adapted, and in some ways retreated even as it has admitted new members (Gabon and Togo joined this year). Its goals, broadly stated, are to promote democracy and trade, and, more recently, to protect the environment, champion young people and support smaller states. All perfectly worthy aims, but without any enforcement mechanism or budget to promote or support them. The only tangible deliverable is the quadrennial Commonwealth Games, which attract participation from countries outside the organisation as well. Perhaps the environment might become a focal point, given the preponderance of island members, but at present, there is not much that the Commonwealth measurably achieves: trade has never taken off, it no longer provides scholarships for young people, it has never managed to promote closer relations amongst its members, and its record on promoting democracy is mixed.

Arguably, the highwater mark of the Commonwealth was reached in the 1970s and 80s, when, with the Queen’s nudging, it helped Zimbabwe achieve independence with equality for the black majority, and with the strong stance it took against apartheid. On apartheid, the Queen took on Margaret Thatcher, then her prime minister, who did not share her monarch’s desire to maintain pressure on South Africa through comprehensive sanctions. According to Brian Mulroney, then prime minister of Canada, there were concerns that the Commonwealth could split on this issue, and he recalls the Queen’s efforts in steering the organisation intact through this crisis.

The Queen expended personal capital because she wished to do so. The question now is whether future leaders of the Commonwealth will have that personal capital to steer and shape an organisation that is relevant for the 21st century. It is worth noting that the heads of government of India and South Africa chose to stay away from the 2022 CHOGM in Rwanda, which the Queen did not attend. The venue itself is significant of change, for Rwanda (which joined in 2009) is one of four members that were not formerly colonised by Britain.

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, play music during a visit to Trench Town Culture Yard Museum where Bob Marley used to live, in Kingston, Jamaica, March 22. Photo: Reuters: Chris Jackson/Pool

Change can be unsettling, and can expose weaknesses that have been papered over. The Commonwealth is riddled with vulnerabilities, which stem from two paradoxes at the heart of the organisation. The first is that while leadership of the Commonwealth has passed from the Queen’s father to the Queen to her son, there is no hereditary role for the monarch of the United Kingdom in this assembly of equals. The second is that though the organisation has its roots in Britain’s colonial history, that shared history is not allowed to be the basis for clubbing together because acknowledging Britain’s imperial past will eventually lead to discussions on reparatory justice for slavery and the expropriation of national wealth from the colonies. These are thorny questions that tact, administered with a good dose of British pomp and circumstance, along with deference to an ageing (and gracious, committed and charismatic) global figure had postponed.

The question of reparations for slavery has already been raised in some Commonwealth Realms and other countries. Ten million Africans were taken across the Atlantic as slave labour for European-owned plantations on the Caribbean islands. When slavery was abolished by Britain in 1833, slave owners were compensated for the loss of their ‘property’ with the government borrowing £20 million in 1835 (£17 bn in today’s money). That loan was only paid off in 2015. The former slaves got nothing.

This history was revisited during the Black Lives Matter protests. The Royal tours of the Caribbean that were intended to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee earlier this year were a public relations disaster precisely because the Palace failed to read the recent mood music on race, on history and on culture. The exploitation of the colonies and the blood on which the edifices of London and other imperial cities are built cannot be glossed over anymore – and it would be naïve to assume that this collection of former colonies will not eventually voice that which has so far been politely left unsaid: they are the inheritors of loss.

The winds of change are blowing. Later this year, a sculpture by Samson Kambalu will go up in Trafalgar Square – the heart of imperial London. It will feature Malawian freedom fighter John Chilembwe who towers over his white missionary friend, John Chorley, standing next to him on a plinth on the square. The figure of Chilembwe is at ease, and at five times the height of the other statues that adorn the remaining three plinths below Nelson’s statue, will look down at other Victorian colonialists who helped cement Empire. One of them is Sir Henry Havelock, the man celebrated in Britain for his role in quelling the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The irony is unmissable: already the bonds of Empire are being re-fashioned. The Commonwealth will not be immune to these currents of change: King Charles has his work cut out.

Priyanjali Malik is an independent researcher who primarily focuses on security and politics in the Indian subcontinent, especially nuclear politics.

Review: A Trilogy That Challenges the Core Self-Declared Virtues of Western Civilisation

Historian Jacques Pauwels shows that class war, imperial wars, racism and fascism are the preferred strategies of Western elite power in three books that force a re-think of the history of the past century.

In a remarkable trilogy of ground-breaking, critical, well researched and readable books, historian Jacques Pauwels challenges the core self-declared virtues of Western civilisation – rooted in and disseminated across the world by its power elites and ruling classes – that it stands for civilisation, peace, freedom, and democracy.

Pauwels pierces through the smoke and mirrors of this widely accepted construction to reveal the darker forces that lie at the heart of modern Western elite history, mentalities, institutions and practices – a complex network of corporate, feudal, reactionary clerical, political, bureaucratic, militaristic, and mass media forces – that drive states to wage relentless class warfare as well as two World Wars, the subsequent killing fields of the Cold War, and devastating Wars of Terror after 9/11.

Anyone who wants to open their minds, be challenged and re-think the history of the past century and more could hardly do better than study Pauwels’s work. Many readers (and reviewers) will regret that they missed out on these works as they were published one by one over the past 20 years – and wonder why they have not heard of Jacques Pauwels before now. The mass media megaphone is somehow almost mute when it comes to studies that radically challenge the status quo.

In short, Pauwels’ work explodes the myths that shroud in darkness the class and colonial drivers and character of World War I, the active backing of Hitler’s Nazis by German, American, British and other Western industrial and financial interests, and explodes the American mythology behind the idea that World War II was somehow a ‘good war’. In so doing, Pauwels provides readers with a detailed, complex and politically-useful guide to understanding our own time, and how the world came to be where it is today – still suffering from the after-effects of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, hyper-globalisation and its neoliberal philosophy, imperial wars without end, inequality and deprivation amid increasing concentration of corporate wealth, and a politics gravely disconnected from the interests of ordinary people.

Jacques R. Pauwels
The Great Class War 1914-1918
James Lorimer and Co (2016)

The mother lode of Pauwels’s trilogy is The Great Class War 1914-1918 – it describes and explains the deeper historical developments that shaped the class system, impacting intellectual developments such as Social and National Darwinism, managing and incorporating rising trade union and socialist political parties’ labour aristocracies, justifying colonialism and imperialism as liberal beneficent civilising missions, sharpening the tools of modern class and interstate warfare. It laid the foundations of a system of oligarchical power that would rather back fascism and Nazism than democracy and socialism, and would therefore need to construct mythologies of a ‘good war’ while dropping atomic bombs, intervening militarily in defence of colonial powers in an era of ‘decolonisation’ and a liberal rules-based international order, and wreaking havoc and misery amidst plenty in the era of neo-liberal hyper- and corporate-globalisation.

From the French Revolution of 1789, Pauwels identifies class and race-based elitist ideologies and modes of class war and traces their development and mentalities to explain how despite their strategies of destruction of life, especially working class and colonial subjects’ lives, elites ultimately generate the basis of mass resistance and subsequent cycles of elite reaction, workers’ revolution and mass rebellion.

Pauwels offers an alternative scenario to that of endless elite rule and power advanced by the proto-fascist Robert Michels, and to orthodox Marxism and Leninism, although it is clear that he favours the latter theories, despite wearing them ever so lightly. In his practical interpretation, he seems to agree more with American sociologist Alvin Gouldner’s assertion that while there may be an iron law of oligarchy (a la Michels), there is also another iron law – an iron law of democracy and mass resistance. There is no ‘end of history’, however, that is apparent in Pauwels’s work, a departure from Marx and Lenin. But that does not in any way detract from the force of this remarkable historian’s work – which follows in the finest traditions of the works of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky

The mother lode

World War I, the Great War, was much more than a war between rival states and alliances, was not a war of democracy against autocracy, nor a war to end all wars, or for civilisation against barbarism. According to Pauwels, the essence of the War lies in its decisively class character, including its related imperial and racial-colonial drivers. Pauwels provides a richly detailed, indeed masterful and accessible synthetic account that challenges common Western mythologies of the War.

While many, maybe most, accounts rely on the superficialities of poor diplomacy, useless or out of touch military leadership, political incompetence, or just tales of heroic or homicidal military battles, Pauwels persuasively shows via a large secondary and primary literature, that the War was actively wanted by elites and ultimately rooted in the kinds of social and political forces released or rejected across Europe by the French Revolution of 1789, in the class wars from above and below that revolution made visible. The forces of democracy, equality and liberty, of the downtrodden, unleashed terror in the minds, lives, and vested interests of the church, nobility, feudal military leaders, and emerging industrial capitalists. The history of the period to 1914-18, Pauwels argues, is really a history of class war – a Great Class War.

To be sure, Pauwels’ analysis is an adaptation and application of a loosely Marxist theory of class – yet, he adapts and extends it so meticulously, creatively applies it to the roots and conduct of warfare in such persuasive detail, sustains the argument with relentless force, while writing with clinical effectiveness, that his labours yield a fascinating study that puts flesh on the bones of Marxist and Leninist analyses. That makes this study a must-read book for two main reasons: first, as a counter-history that challenges the deafening status quo about WWI, an important achievement and resource in its own right.

But secondly, it speaks loudly and clearly to the century or more that has passed since 1918. At a time when class inequality is rampant, despite the predominance of narrowly-construed identity politics, and elite authority is challenged from below and societies and politics appear increasingly polarised and the political-ideological centre is in crisis, a class analysis is sorely needed. Wars, Pauwels argues, are the ruling classes’ way of rolling back the victories of struggles for democracy, and social and political equality, by working people who overwhelmingly bear the brunt of military violence, economic and financial hardships, and the repressive and ideological forces of the modern capitalist state. War as a tonic, relief for elites from domestic crises, diversion from popular struggles for economic rights, for independence from colonial rule, votes for women, for socialism. An escape from the terrors of the collapse of elite legitimacy, and the rise of radical forces and leaders. Wars pass their costs onto the poor – who are killed in droves – while enriching ruling elites via war contracts and lower wages, higher living costs, and skyrocketing corporate profits.

Indeed, it was precisely that latter argument that makes the book so important for our own rather perilous time, perils of which Pauwels is only too aware. So much so, he devotes two chapters to the 1918-1945 period, when established elites unleashed fascism and Nazism against the forces of radical and revolutionary change, and to the so-called liberals’ ‘Long Peace’/Cold War from 1945 to the recent wars of terror. The elites’ dogs of war are alive and well, embedded in military-industrial complexes lubricated with trillion-dollar annual budgets, despite popular demands for peace and social investment, an end to ‘forever wars’.

Yet, ironically, despite successfully initiating wars on a regular and terrible basis, the wars themselves prove only temporary reprieves from what appears to be inevitable – resistance and uprisings from below once the initial propaganda value of wars wears off, soldiers’ bodies pile up, military conscription kicks in, and civilian hardships multiply amid massive corporate profit-making. The very solution to a class war from below and the political and economic gains won through revolutions and radical rebellions, through trade union action and socialist electoral popularity, merely exacerbates the perilous position of the church, aristocrats, feudal military castes and their newly-emergent bourgeois allies.

But the ruling classes and their political and other leaders are tenacious, Pauwels shows, determined to cling on to their powers and privileges, waging counter-offensives when they see working class forces retreating back to ordinary life, their socialist and trade union leaders – the labour aristocracy – become complacent and comfortable in their integration into the lower tiers of the establishment. And so the cycle continues without end, it would seem.

Also Read: Book Review: The Foundations of White Anglo-American World Power

Wheels within wheels, conflicts within conflicts

At over 600 pages, Pauwels’s study of World War I really does justice to the significance of the topic and his analysis. It is remarkable how he manages to show that though there was a national/imperial rivalry component of the War, he also complexifies matters by showing that it was also and more importantly a class war. In this class war, the ruling classes of the belligerents largely shared their anti-socialist and anti-worker ideology and politics, and their sense of social superiority over their ‘own’ lower orders in the society, polity and in the trenches. So while there were vertical conflicts between the British and German workers and power elites etc, there were also class enmities between British rulers and middle and working-class people. And working-class soldiers of various nationalities frequently had greater sympathy with their ‘enemy’ counterparts than with their own upper-class officers because the latter saw their ‘men’ as dispensable, to be sacrificed in great numbers on the battlefields in a modern war fought with weapons of mass destruction.

This attitude extended to the European colonialists’ attitudes to the dispensability of colonial troops and ‘coolies’ – considered even less human than their white lower orders, and sacrificed on the altar of expansion for territory, colonies, raw materials, markets, and cheap labour. As the hardships of trench warfare – flooded trenches, rats and other vermin, disease, and humiliation by upper-class officers – intensified, and the ‘home by Christmas 1914’ rallying call faded into a long drawn out years’ long stalemate – so soldiers and their families were radicalised. Their initial nationalist fervour, which was actually much exaggerated by the political and media barons, converted into class conflict against their officers, strikes in domestic industries, and questions about who the war benefitted became reflected in song, poetry, everyday conversation, refusals to obey orders, shooting of officers, and outright mutinies.

Of course, the position among Russian forces was dire by 1917 and soldiers set up councils – soviets – to discuss the war, to resist their officers and, ultimately the War itself. As Antonio Gramsci said, trench warfare radicalised soldiers and forged the alliance between industrial workers and peasants that was the heart of the Bolshevik revolution. Trench warfare turned out to be a proletarianising process for peasants. The vertical war between nations transformed everywhere, at varying levels, into a series of horizontal wars between the classes. The Great War, planned for and wanted by all the belligerent nations’ elites as an antidote to rising democracy and workers’ power, and for colonial and territorial gain, led to a bloodbath that actually increased the veracity and validity of radicalism and revolution, in the metropolitan countries as well as the colonies.

Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army in Mesopotamia during World War I, being led by Guru Granth Sahib.

The revolutionary and counter-revolutionary effects of the French Revolution

That the Church and nobility lost out in the French Revolution and henceforth became even more counter-revolutionary, is clear. But while the industrial bourgeoisie and workers were among the winners, the former soon came to fear the ‘dangerous classes’ as a threat to their positions and powers. Step by step as the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871 bloodied 19th century France, the bourgeoisie increasingly clung to the church, aristocracy and military, seeking to turn back the clock and the rising tide of workers’ power, especially as socialist ideas and Marxism took hold across France, Germany, Britain and Russia. Elitism and social Darwinism became the watchwords of elites against the rising masses, the great unwashed, who would dare to claim their collective right to a decent life, a greater share of the fruits of their labour.

Reactionary nationalism, romanticism, elitism, imperialism – backwards-looking, nostalgic, a mythical golden age before 1789 and all that – flourished. Friedrich Nietzsche stood among the champions of elites against the mass, extolling the manly virtues of the Ubermensch, heroic figures of a more chivalrous age, before socialism. Imperialism was increasingly seen as a solution to working-class poverty and discontent – to ship to faraway colonies the surplus populations of the teeming cities of Europe, to extend European global domination and white supremacy. As the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes argued in 1895 after attending a workers’ protest meeting:

“In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets.”

It was a safety valve for growing class discontent, racist divide and rule. In that calculus, war and empire were safety valves for elite power – workers fighting, dying and killing other poor people on the frontlines of imperial wars for territory was considered by elites to be preferable to their waging class for social progress war at home.

It is one of the greatest strengths of Pauwels’s research and analysis that he provides evidence from across the major belligerents’ societies, polities and class systems, their historical development, the ideologies of their ruling elites, working-class and other movements for change. Further, he connects the vertical histories of nations to the horizontal histories of class relations, showing how a class system operated across Europe, in varying ways and levels of intensity, alongside ethnic, racial and colonial conflicts within and between the Great Powers.

Class struggle on a global basis

And, class struggles and divisions are seen on a global plane too – with colonial peoples seen as the oppressed workers and metropolitan elites their tormentors. This is reminiscent of Gramsci’s prescient analysis of colonial powers’ exploitations that were so inhuman that “indigenous peoples of the colonies were not even left their eyes for weeping…[causing them to rise up and defy]…aeroplanes, machine-guns and tanks to win independence…This is the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their white exploiters…” (Antonio Gramsci, ‘The war in the colonies’, L’Ordine Nuovo, June 7, 1919).

White ruling class fears were heightened in 1920 when the Bolsheviks convened in Baku an unprecedented conference of socialists, communists, and anti-colonialists from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia – sealing the link between the struggles of the oppressed everywhere. What the intellectually and morally bankrupt Second International had ignored – the colonial question – was now moving to the centre of the global interests of the Third International. The Great War – which was supposed to extirpate the voices of the workers and oppressed – ended up creating the very conditions that paved the way to revolutions and uprisings, including a workers’ state.

Western ruling elites reinterpreted and misrepresented anti-colonialism and class politics as a race war, an instrument for racist divide and rule, a numbers game in which the white minority might be overwhelmed. It was the ‘1905 moment’ – in which Asian Japan defeated European great power Russia – in extremis. Blocking, preventing and weakening the unity of colonial peoples and their working-class European allies became a key aim of metropolitan elites. Anti-colonialism and anti-racism, then, became represented as ‘reverse racism’ – with whites as victims. It was to continue to be one of the powerful tendencies of elite colonial and class politics for the rest of the 20th century, including the Cold War and post-9/11 wars of terror across the Global South.

Herein is forged, then, in the colonial masters’ minds the link between socialism, communism and anti-colonialism – radical movements for change that, after the Bolshevik revolution, embraced anti-colonialism and anti-racism. “Lenin and his companions openly proclaimed their determination to work for the emancipation of all oppressed people, not only the lower classes in Europe itself, but also the colonial peoples of Africa, India… the millions of black, yellow…from their white masters…” (p.467). Europe’s elites, such as Winston Churchill, racialised Bolshevism as a Jewish virus (‘Judeo-Bolshevism’) against superior white Aryans in their ‘Herrenvolk’ (“master race”) societies.

Jacques R. Pauwels
Big Business and Hitler
Lorimer and Co (2018)

‘Millions stand behind me’

We know what Hitler and the Nazis did with that racist philosophy – but its roots lie in the entire colonial-imperial system led by European and American establishments, including, for some, the trenches of World War. Recall that the American industrialist and anti-Semite, Henry Ford, authored the racist The International Jew, and used his newspaper The Dearborn Independent to peddle the myth of Jewish world domination. That linkage, as well as the far more substantial evidence of German capitalists’ disgust at the democratic nature of the Weimar Republic, at anything approaching coalition government with the powerful Communist Party, is ably detailed in Pauwels’s Big Business and Hitler.

Millions did indeed stand behind Hitler and Nazis – millions of Deutsch Marks from big business and banks. The ‘socialist’ myth of the Nazis is also exposed as such in devastating terms – the destruction of socialists and communists, the enrichment of the big industrialists via military contracts, and the privatisation programmes that furthered the impoverishment of the majority at the hands of the German elites – their 1%. The idea that Nazism stood for the mass of people is thoroughly exposed, although it is noted that fascism’s ability to attract some mass support, but never a majority, gave it greater credibility among established elites. They and the Nazis could hide behind the myth of mass support the fact that their money, Nazi policies and their power base in the SS served established elite interests.

American myths

Finally, a world power, among other great imperial powers, like the US that admired and even invested in Nazi Germany, needed mass mobilisation of mythology to redefine the nature of the Second World War. Pauwels demonstrates this in great detail in The Myth of the Good War. He systematically debunks the good war myth by showing detailed evidence that US policies were driven by its power elites and that extirpating fascism was not the principal driver of US strategy.

Jacques R. Pauwels
The Myth of The Good War: America In the Second World War
James Lorimer and Co. (2003)

Rather, it was to defeat a rival great imperial power that threatened US interests in Europe and, ultimately, had Nazism succeeded, would threaten the US itself and its ambitions for global domination. Indeed, early war years planning by elite think tanks like the New York Council on Foreign Relations had considered acceptable a possible accommodation with the Nazis. This helps explain why so many fascists and Nazis were reintegrated into mainstream post-1945 German life, why the industrialists and financiers of Nazism were never brought to book and why many of those corporations continue to operate in Germany today.

The class character of America’s Cold War, then, is explained – the aim of labelling opponents ‘un-American’ – was to silence the voices of those who would fight for radical change or alternatives to the racial-capitalist order, who favoured socialism, equality, or even social democracy. This followed logically from Truman’s unnecessary use of the atomic bombs in Japan, and to Churchill ordering the firebombing of Dresden – to demonstrate to the Soviet workers’ state the awesome powers of the capitalist West, as pro-Soviet world opinion soared in response to their overwhelming sacrifices and struggles in defeating the Nazis.

What liberal international order?

In that context, what is to be made of the ‘liberal international order’ (United Nations, IMF, World Bank, and the whole Bretton Woods system), that the Western imperial powers constructed in 1945 – and which remains the ideological and institutional basis of their global influence? Not very liberal, hardly international beyond the West, and not very orderly. And claims that liberal rules-based order maintained the ‘Long Peace’ from 1945? Indians and Pakistanis need only to recall the traumas of the bloodbath at partition in 1947. We just have to count the black, yellow and brown bodies in the Cold War’s killing fields of Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the death squads of Latin America, interventions and crimes against peace in Africa, Iraq and Libya, among others. Long peace for whom? What is to be concluded from Western elites’ responses to Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine, and to Ukrainian refugees, in contrast to the West’s illegal wars around the world, and black and brown refugees?

Triumphant trilogy

The sheer level, depth and breadth of Pauwels’s knowledge and scholarship brought to bear on the history of class struggles, wars, colonialism and racism, is outstanding. Pauwels has provided a set of studies that debunk myth after myth about world history, and especially the class and racial forces, elitist ideologies and material interests that drive state power and are the locomotives of imperial wars and also massive popular and working class resistance, rebellions and revolutions.

The trilogy is historical – but the books’ perspective, analysis and conclusions are applicable today, urgently necessary, and useful in practice. Jacques Pauwels has made a powerful contribution to bringing class ‘back in’ to comprehending world history, and also taking into greater account than most Marxists the powerful and related role of race and racism in world politics.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is a columnist at The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire.

Poor Country With Affluent Elite, India Is Going Nowhere

India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

The Paris-based World Inequality Lab has become a major source of data on global inequality, based on careful aggregation of national data from a multitude of sources, of both income and wealth inequality, at national, regional and global levels. Their latest World Inequality Report 2022 is an eye-opener, even for those who know that economic inequality has increased massively in recent years. It shows that globally, inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The process began nearly four decades ago, but worsened during the pandemic, which sharply exposed and amplified existing inequalities.

India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality. This emerges clearly even though, as the report laments, “Over the past three years, the quality of inequality data released by the government has seriously deteriorated, making it particularly difficult to assess recent inequality changes.” We know that the central government has tended to suppress inconvenient information and manipulate data, refusing to release the results of the 2017-18 national consumer expenditure survey and playing fast and loose with definitions to artificially increase the number of ‘formal’ workers.

Despite these desperate efforts to hide the actual patterns, certain trends are unmistakable. By 2020, the income share of the bottom half of the Indian population was estimated to have fallen to only 13%, while the top 10% captured 57% of national income and the top 1% alone got 22%.

In terms of wealth distribution, the reality is even starker. We know that the past few decades have been a period of increasing wealth concentration globally: the top 1% captured nearly two-fifths of all global wealth growth. The wealth of the top 52 billionaires (which include our home-grown Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani) increased by nearly 10% each year between 1995 and 2001. In India, the rate of increase of private wealth and its concentration at the top have been even sharper. The poorest half of the population have less than 6% of the wealth, the top 1% grab more than one-third and the top 10% nearly two-thirds.

The pandemic was a particularly happy period for the extremely wealthy as another recent report on inequality from Oxfam points out — the wealth of the 10 richest men in the world doubled, while 99% of the world’s people are worse off. One of the biggest increases in wealth was that of Gautam Adani, whose wealth multiplied eight-fold during the pandemic, and Oxfam notes that he made use of state connections to become the country’s largest operator of ports and its largest thermal coal power producer, wielding market control over power transmission, gas distribution, and now privatised airports — all once considered public goods (Oxfam 2022, page 20).

The increase in private wealth has been associated with a decline in public wealth, which is bad news for governments wishing to increase spending on citizens based on returns from public assets. For India, the World Inequality Report estimates that the ratio of private wealth to national income increased from 290% in 1980 to 555% in 2020, one of the fastest such increases in the world, throughout history.

India fares badly on other indicators of inequality as well. Women’s share of labour income, at 18%, is around half the global average, according to this novel estimate. This will come as no surprise to those who know how badly India treats its unpaid and underpaid women workers, even as the economy remains critically reliant on their work.

Another shock is the extreme inequality in carbon footprint within the country. On the face of it, India has very low carbon emissions per capita, at 2.2 metric tonnes per person per year. But this masks the fact that the bottom half of the population emits only 1 metric tonne per year, while the top 1% richest Indians emit 32.4 tonnes on average. That’s more than three times the annual average carbon emissions of the bottom half of the US population, and more than six times the emissions of the bottom half in Europe. Controlling the carbon emissions of the Indian rich would contribute greatly to reducing overall emissions, something that is rarely if ever mentioned in discussions by Indian policy makers. Globally and within India, inequality is not just killing people but destroying the planet.

We know that inequality is multidimensional: the income poor are more likely to live in poorer areas, to be women or girls, to belong to socially discriminated castes and communities, to be informal workers. More likely, therefore, to be unable to influence policy. No wonder the World Inequality Report finds that India stands out as a poor and very unequal country, with an affluent elite. Unfortunately, history tells us that such countries rarely progress very much. Radical redirection of policies is therefore essential for any real progress to occur.

Jayati Ghosh is a development economist.

Book Review: How Historians and Intellectuals Justified the British Empire’s Conquest

Priya Satia shows persuasively in her book ‘Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire’ that the Empire’s economic exploitation was buttressed by policies that sought to reform and civilise the colonised.

In the 19th century, history and history writing were handmaidens of British imperialism. Historians wrote to justify empire; politicians and public figures used history to rationalise acts of conquest. Dominating the intellectual landscape at that time was the idea of progress which was derived from the Enlightenment and from the development of capitalism subsequent to the Industrial Revolution.

Well-intentioned people in all good conscience were convinced that it was their duty, their moral responsibility, to civilise people who had still not encountered “progress” – by which they meant capitalist modernity. Capitalist modernity did not just mean an economic system but it denoted an entire intellectual apparatus and institutional practices. British imperialism originated as an organised system of economic exploitation through which Britain enriched itself at the cost of conquered and colonised territories.

Priya Satia
Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire
Allen Lane (October 2020)

By the third decade of the 19th century, this economic exploitation had come to be buttressed by policies that sought to reform and civilise the people who lived in India, Africa and other parts of Asia that had been conquered by Britain. This project of reform was informed by a particular historical sensibility which first denied that places like India had histories of their own and then proceeded to argue that the only possible history was the one that the British Empire was creating and fashioning. Historians and intellectuals, as Priya Satia shows persuasively in her book Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, were complicit in this project.

At the intellectual level, there was a two-pronged approach to justify conquest: empire and reform. India is not only the most typical but also the most important case. The first move was to deny that India and Indians had any history of its/their own. James Mill in his very influential History of British India declared that the whole of the history of India could be written up as a part of British history. The German philosopher, Hegel, admired India’s literary and cultural achievements but did not believe India had a history. Hegel wrote:

“It is obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the treasures of Indian literature that this country, so rich in spiritual achievements of a truly profound quality, has no history.”

He made the same point more than once. Even Karl Marx argued that India was caught in the warp of “changelessness” (read no history) which was a characteristic he conceptualised as the “Asiatic mode of production”. The absence of history made India inferior to Europe and therefore India was not yet ready to receive the gifts of democracy and liberty that the Enlightenment had provided. India had to be prepared (reformed) to receive the gifts of liberty, democracy and capitalist modernity. This was the second move: the reform of India which was necessitated by India’s inferiority and backwardness. Until the training in liberty and democracy was completed, the best that a country like India could hope for was a benevolent despotism.

Also Read: The British Empire Is Still Being Whitewashed in UK Schools – This Must Change

John Stuart Mill (the son of James) wrote in On Liberty – one of the foundational texts of liberalism – that, “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any of state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”

This clear statement left unclear how long the tutorials on liberty and democracy would last. This nurtured what the historian Francis Hutchins called “the illusion of permanence”. In 1872, the liberal prime minister Gladstone was writing to the then viceroy of India, Lord Northbrook, “When we go, if we are ever to go.” And, of course, there was no acknowledgement that the British Empire, on which, it was assumed, the sun would never set, was based on violent conquest, loot, plunder and systematic exploitation of the people and the resources of India. All these features of the Empire were justified by the civilising mission of the British – the onerous White Man’s Burden. It was also never admitted that the conquest and the exploitation was part of a design – products of well thought out policies. The Empire was acquired, as the historian J.H. Seeley (in)famously declared, in a fit of absentmindedness.

It is important to make a critique of Seeley and his ilk – and Priya Satia does so with great power –because his influence has lasted well beyond the 19th century. In the second half of the 20th century, under the influence of the method of historical analysis introduced by Lewis Namier, historians began to analyse the operations and functions of the English East India Company in terms of “self-interests” of individuals or of groups of individuals. Thus, plunder and conquests were not the products of policies but of self-seeking ambitions of men at the outposts, be they governors-general or private traders. Imperialism thus disappeared as a category to be replaced by the competition of interest groups.

As an extension of this kind of analysis, the obverse of imperialism – nationalism – also came to be seen as the outcome of competing self-interests of frustrated elites. More recently, on both sides of the vast pond called the Atlantic Ocean has emerged a “new imperial history” that seeks to deny that imperialist policies had a coherence. Instead, there were a range of projects of varied orientations and there was always the tantalising possibility of many imperial futures. The empire, the implication is, emerged out of this muddle.

Imperial Federation Map of the World showing the extent of the British Empire in The Empire in red in 1886, by Walter Crane. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Imperial Federation Map of the World showing the extent of the British Empire in The Empire in red in 1886, by Walter Crane. Photo: Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain

Similarly, it is equally important to underline – and this is at the heart of Satia’s book – the double standards that British historians, intellectuals and policymakers of the 19th century deployed: liberty and democracy at home, despotism in the conquered territories. Conquest and empire building to which most Britons, wittingly or otherwise, were complicit, engendered these double standards. The social scientist Partha Chatterjee has called this “the rule of colonial difference” which works, in Chatterjee’s words:

“when a normative proposition of supposedly universal validity…is held not to apply to the colony on account of some inherent moral deficiency of the latter. Thus even as the rights of man would be declared in the revolutionary assemblies of Paris in 1789, the revolt on Saint Domingue (now Haiti) would be put down on the ground that those rights could not apply to black slaves.”

The operation of this rule was powered by the conviction that what had happened in one small part of the world – Europe – the institutions and the ideas that had developed there were inherently superior to what existed in other parts of the world. A province of the globe claimed to be the globe.

I admire the power and the lucidity of Satia’s arguments but I am a trifle troubled by the use of “conscience”’ as a category of historical analysis. Are human beings – even good, well-intentioned ones – motivated always by their conscience or are they always true to their conscience? Let us look at a group of highly gifted individuals of the 20th century who chased in all good conscience an illusion. Three of the greatest historians (in my opinion) of the second half of the last century – E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Ranajit Guha – were/are all individuals of great intellectual rectitude and integrity. By no reckoning can they be described as men without conscience. But all three for a large part of their adult lives – till the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 – as members of communist parties endorsed and justified Stalinism, a regime that brutally oppressed the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This phenomenon of chasing an illusion until a disturbance destroys innocence is difficult to explain through conscience.

Also Read: A Scandinavian ‘Nabob’ of the British Empire: The Discovery of a New Colonial Archive

Satia, very significantly, notes the example of the historian Margery Perham, or dame Margery as she was referred to in Oxford, who moved from being a liberal imperialist into a sceptic of empire because of the rediscovery of her Christian faith. One could give the example of Edward Thompson – E.P.’s father – or of Charles Freer Andrews, who as Christian missionaries could never reconcile themselves with British imperialism and remained lifelong friends of Indian nationalists.

The larger point I am trying to make through these examples is that conscience almost by definition is an individual-centric entity. Empire building, imperialism, most emphatically is not. Individual convictions and anxieties – conscience, if you like – operate at a different level and register than State policy that drove imperial expansion and the discourse that justified that expansion. In the 19th century, the views of the paladins of Empire were moulded by the prevailing discourse emanating from the intellectual apparatus of the Enlightenment. Even individuals with “conscience” could not quite escape the contagion of that discursive formation. Witness Karl Marx, who in spite of his awareness of the violence associated with British rule in India (see his articles on the revolt of 1857), saw British rule as an unconscious tool of history.

In our times, the historian who sought to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper” and so on from “the enormous condescension of posterity” (the phrases quoted are from. E.P. Thompson); the historian who brought to life those who wanted to turn the world upside down in the middle of the 17th century; and the historian who resurrected the subalterns in Indian history and reconstructed the narrative of the tragic death of Chandra, an obscure woman in rural Bengal – all of them, despite their training as historians, failed to see a terrible and bloody history unfolding before their own eyes because they had been persuaded by the discourse that said “history is on our side”.

Priya Satia’s book dazzles by its brilliance but also points to other enigmas and mysteries that historians, especially self-conscious radical historians, have to confront and unravel.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee is chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University. All views expressed are personal.

100 Years of Chatham House: A Century in the Service of Empire

The authority of the liberal international order that grew out of imperial-internationalism, and further embedded Western power in world affairs, is unravelling at home and challenged by rising powers abroad.

Chatham House, the erstwhile Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), one of the world’s oldest and most influential think tanks, is 100 years old this year. Located near Westminster and Whitehall, it is a key institution in the discussion of British foreign affairs and world politics. Its flagship journal, International Affairs, is a sprightly 98 years old.

It leads in the University of Pennsylvania’s global rankings of think tanks. Despite such long-lived influence, however, the very liberal-imperial order founded on Anglo-American power that it championed, is unravelling. It has its work cut out to take on the forces of populism, nationalism, opposition to Western interventionism, and the ‘rise of the rest’, in its second century.

Made in war and revolution

Chatham House was formed in the wake of the First World War and the rise of an increasingly assertive, democratic and socialistic public opinion, especially among the working class and women. Claiming to be objective, non-political and even scientific, it promised to democratise the making of foreign policy, and to end the Foreign Office’s jealously-guarded monopoly over foreign and imperial policy. Steeped in its own elitism, and patronised by the monarch, it aimed at educating public opinion, the very embodiment of what American political commentator Walter Lippmann called a ‘secular priesthood’ to manage the masses in the age of popular discontent and revolution.

Also read: Washington’s Newest Thinktank Is Fomenting a Revolution in US Foreign Affairs

It never really achieved its stated goals, remaining wedded to imperial-internationalism, elitist in character in ‘educating’ newly-awakened ‘public opinion’, and supportive of a racialised world view wedded to Anglo-Saxonism. At the core of the Chatham House project lay the aim of an alliance with the United States as Britain’s imperial power declined. Such attitudes were on full display at the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919-20, where Chatham House was conceived as the British branch of an Anglo-American institute of international affairs.

Saturated with a haughty attitude to inferior colonials considered incapable of self-government, Chatham House elites looked down on an increasingly assertive organised working class, galvanised by the experience of bloody trench warfare, and inspired by the dramatic effects of the Russian revolution, and Lenin’s calls for workers to get out of the war and overthrow ‘their’ governments.

Made by Empire

Chatham House was a descendant of the Round Table, an openly imperialist group whose goal was the preservation of the British empire. Its main achievement was probably the making of the South African constitution under Sir Alfred Milner – which is instructive. It highlighted the group’s imperial and racist attitudes as that constitution embedded and codified racial inequality, laying the initial foundations of apartheid.

But increasing dominions’ nationalism, World War I, the virtual collapse of the moral authority of empire, and the rise of anti-colonial nationalist revolts, not to mention the Bolshevik revolution, forced a major rethink in elite circles. The post-1918 world was one of the crisis of colonial hegemony as the United States emerged as a dominant world power with a new, modern, scientific, concept of global governance, liberal internationalism.

In particular, a group of discontented colonial and other officials, and their allies, were largely ignored in the Paris Peace Conference deliberations and decided to form an institute of international affairs that would make the making of foreign policy more democratic and scientific. Chatham House was born as the weaker twin of its US counterpart, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR publishes the influential review, Foreign Affairs, that reflects the mindsets and preoccupations of the US foreign policy establishment.

But its imperial credentials and elitist mentalities, with their embedded Anglo-Saxonist notions of racial superiority, meant that Chatham House was destined to broaden the basis of oligarchy rather than democratise foreign policy. It meant that Chatham House became ever more integrated into the mentalities and machinery of the official foreign policy making process, even receiving direct funding from the state to supplement its corporate donations and US foundation grants. It was, moreover, part of a set of transatlantic, especially Anglo-American, elite networks that cemented politics, government, finance and cultures.

Leaders of Chatham House supported the appeasement of fascism in the 1930s, endorsing the official policies of the British government towards Nazi Germany. In the Second World War, the Institute was virtually nationalised by the Foreign Office to engage in conceptualising and planning for the post-war new world order, in which its Anglo-American origins and connections permitted it to leverage influence in regard to the making of policy but also conducting semi-official information campaigns, and diplomacy via the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). In the latter, Chatham House was the IPR’s UK national council, using the transnational forum to defend the ‘achievements’ of British colonialism against challenges from its US, Canadian, and Asian counterparts. Chatham House left its institutional imprint in the Foreign Office through the formation of its Research Department, which exists today as FCO Research Analysts. WWII was probably the height of Chatham House’s influence and prestige though it remained close to government, media, academia and embassies in London, not to mention West End clubland.

Committee of Post-War Reconstruction meeting in the Institute’s Common Room, 1943. Photo: Chatham House/CC BY 2.0

The liberal international order of the post-1945 period – the Bretton Woods system of UN, IMF, World Bank – and even the later Marshall Plan, and the concept and practice of ‘foreign aid’ for Third World ‘development, were debated and conceived in elite networks at the centre of which sat Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and their states’ respective foreign ministries.

By the1950s Chatham House had also become a model for think tanks across the empire and dominions. Versions of Chatham House appeared from the 1920s and 1930s in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, and even across Europe. The Anglo-Saxonist core of the organisation, and its relations with the US and the rest of the English-speaking world, remained significant well into the postwar period.

Yet the winds of change forced a formal shift against overt racism in world politics. In the 1960s, Chatham House was accused of showing obvious bias against South Africa in the invitation to dialogues with a succession of sufficiently moderate black representatives. The aim was a negotiated revolution to ensure the smooth transfer of power to responsible black elites suitably attached in mind and interests to western capital.

Moreover, although the institute had no affiliation to any political party, it actually operated within and was greatly influenced by a particular ideological consensus or framework that reflected the mainstream of parliamentary politics – especially in its attachment to US global strategies, while ignoring alternatives. Yet in the chilly atmosphere of Thatcherism and Reaganomics of the 1980s, Chatham House suffered serious attacks when it showed its willingness to start dialogues with an unreformed Soviet Union.

As Chatham House enters its second century in 2020, much as its US counterpart the CFR, it faces a crisis of authority of the liberal international order that it helped conceptualise, foster, and engineer in and after the Second World War. As Antonio Gramsci noted, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Indeed, Chatham House is one of the key elements of a complex international elite knowledge network that is waging a battle for hearts and minds in the wake of Trumpism, Brexit, growing popular opposition to military interventionism in the Middle East, and the dissolution of the United Kingdom itself. The authority of the liberal international order that grew out of ‘liberal-empire’ – imperial-internationalism – and further embedded Western power in world affairs, is unravelling at home and challenged by rising powers abroad.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and visiting professor at LSE IDEAS (the LSE’s foreign policy think tank). He is a columnist at The Wire. His twitter handle is @USEmpire.

Shihui Yin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, and an alumnae of City, University of London.

Astronomers May Not Like It but Astronomy and Colonialism Have a Shared History

Casting Native Hawai’ians’ opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea as a contest between science and religion is a red herring that distracts from a deeper problem with modern science.

Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano in Hawai’i, has been the site of a long-running conflict. Native Hawaiians who consider Mauna Kea sacred have been at odds with the international consortium of astronomers behind the $1.4-billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), meant to be “the largest ground-based observatory in the world” (source). Now, a white paper by Native Hawaiian scientists calls for an immediate halt to the TMT’s construction and for restarting dialogue. An associated paper by five US and Canadian astronomers situates the TMT controversy in the long history of how astronomy has benefited from “settler colonial white supremacist patriarchy” and calls on the astronomy community to reject these benefits.

This may seem an unlikely combination of charges against fellow astronomers who simply wish to “reach back 13 billion years to answer fundamental questions about the advent of the universe” (source) – until one takes a closer look at the conflict, moving beyond its unhelpful framing as science versus religion and situating it in its historical context.

“At its core, [the conflict over] Mauna a Wākea is about power,” writes Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, who studied the TMT controversy for his doctoral thesis at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2017. “How are we to understand the controversy over Mauna a Wākea and the TMT if we fail to identify or accept the context in which this battle is being waged; if we fail to critically analyse settler-colonisation under US occupation?” Casumbal-Salazar is now an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, New York.

The story of TMT in Hawai’i began in 2009, when the collaboration of scientists building the observatory selected Mauna Kea as the location. The summit, at about 4,200 m above sea level, is particularly conducive for astronomy, with stable, dry air that allows observations throughout the year. As a result, it is already host to 13 observatories that have been built since the 1960s.

Preparations for TMT’s construction began in 2014 but were paused following opposition from Native Hawaiians – “protestors” to the state and the astronomers, “protectors” for the activists. In December 2015, the Supreme Court of Hawai’i invalidated the TMT’s 2011 construction permit because it had been granted before the opposition’s petitions had been addressed – putting, as the verdict observed, “the cart before the horse”.

In October 2018, the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead and construction was to resume in July 2019. But Native Hawaiians have continued opposing the TMT by blocking access to the mountain and courting arrest. In December 2019, the Governor of Hawai’i announced that “the state will reduce its law enforcement personnel on Maunakea”, an admission that the project cannot be forced through. (India, a partner and full member of the TMT consortium, prefers moving the telescope to an alternate location in the Canary Islands, Spain.)

That’s the legal summary. For a historically informed understanding of the conflict, we have to go back much further, to Hawaii’s annexation by the US in 1898, following which land was ceded to the US government.

In 1959, these lands – including Mauna Kea – were in turn ceded by the US government to the State of Hawai’i, which held them “in trust” for native Hawaiians. The next year, a tsunami laid waste to the city of Hilo in Hawai’i, prompting its chamber of commerce to write to universities in the US and Japan suggesting that Mauna Kea might be useful for astronomical observatories. This event coincided with US astronomers’ interest in Hawai’i as well.

And so the conflict between native Hawaiians and the American astronomy community began in the 1960s, when the first of the 13 observatories was constructed on the mountain that the former consider to be “a place revered as a house of worship, an ancestor, and an elder sibling in the mo’okū’auhau (or genealogical succession) of all Hawaiians.”

At the time, writes Casumbal-Salazar, “there was no public consultation, no clear management process and little governmental oversight.” Environmentalists soon began opposing further construction on the mountain, arguing that the existing telescopes had contaminated local aquifers and destroyed the habitat of a rare bug found only on the mountain’s summit.

Native Hawaiians joined forces with environmentalists, arguing that any construction on the summit is desecration of a sacred mountain that is the site of spiritual and cultural practices. “Indeed,” Casumbal-Salazar, whose ancestry is partly native Hawaiian, writes, “Mauna a Wākea is more than just a list of physical attributes; it is our kin. As our kupuna [ancestors] are buried in the soil, our ancestors become the land that grows our food and the dust we breathe.” Soon, native Hawaiians were required to seek permission from the state for spiritual practice on the mountain.

The view from the summit of Mauna Kea. Photo: Daniel Gregoire/Unsplash

Contrary to the narrative that native Hawaiians did not oppose the first telescopes on Mauna Kea in the 1960s and 1970s, Casumbal-Salazar shows how they did indeed express their dissent “in the few public forums available, by writing newspaper editorials, publishing opinion pieces and speaking out at public events” while also fighting other battles, such as those to reclaim their rights to land, resources, cultural practices – even the right to teach their children in the Hawaiian language.

They were also fighting evictions and resettlements in the name of tourism development and decades of the US Navy’s use of an island as target practice for its bombs. At the same time, the state’s dependence on tourism and militarism resulted in income inequalities and emigration.

Mauna Kea is not the only mountain in the US where native communities and astronomers have clashed. Two telescopes on mountaintops in Arizona became controversial for parallel reasons, beginning from the mid-1970s, as Leandra Swanner examines in her doctoral thesis at Harvard University. Environmental groups opposed the Mt Graham International Observatory in Arizona fearing ecological damage and further threat to the endemic Mt Graham red squirrel, joined later by a community of native Americans for whom the summit had spiritual significance as a prayer site.

Similarly, native communities and environmentalists opposed the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, concerned about the ecology and “spiritual integrity” of the mountain. At the time the new observatory was proposed, Kitt Peak was already host to two dozen telescopes.

Strikingly, Swanner tracks how native groups at these three different sites have “independently framed the observatories as colonialist projects”. She finds that astronomers, native communities and environmental groups “deployed competing cultural constructions of the mountains – as an ideal observing site, a ‘pristine’ ecosystem or a spiritual temple,” and that “the timing and form of anti-observatory narratives was historically tethered to the legal and political strength of environmental and indigenous rights movements.” In the case of the conflict at Mauna Kea, this is the nationalist movement known as the Hawaiian Renaissance.

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Sustained opposition to construction on Mauna Kea led in 1998 to a state legislative audit that indicted the University of Hawai’i for its management of the mountain, citing inadequate measures to protect its natural resources and lack of recognition of its cultural value. In 2000, the University of Hawai’i drafted a ‘master plan’ for activities on the mountain, which empowered native Hawaiians to voice their objections to the observatories formally, eventually leading to the current impasse.

Swanner finds that for native Hawaiians, “science has effectively become an agent of colonisation”, “fundamentally indistinguishable from earlier colonisation activities”. This puts astronomers in a difficult position. They see the economic benefits astronomy brings to Hawai’i – over a thousand jobs, business for local firms and services and, once the TMT comes online, a promise to pay $1 million in annual lease rent – and their own work as a noble pursuit of knowledge. However, they encounter opposition that has charged them with environmental and cultural destruction.

“Unfortunately for the astronomers involved in the TMT debate,” writes Swanner, “whether they identify as indigenous allies or neocolonialists ultimately matters less than whether they are perceived as practicing neocolonialist science” (emphasis in the original).

Astronomers have attempted a counter-narrative, linking the contemporary practice of astronomy to ancient Polynesian explorers and astronomers who navigated using the stars. A concrete outcome and centrepiece of this effort was a science education centre and planetarium that “links to early Polynesian navigation history and knowledge of the night skies, and today’s renaissance of Hawaiian culture and wayfinding with parallel growth of astronomy and scientific developments on Hawaii island.”

Swanner notes the unequal relationship – the centre “merely grafts Native Hawaiian culture onto the dominant culture of Western science … Astronomers do not look to traditional knowledge to carry out their observing runs, after all, but the observatories studding the summit physically deny access to sites of sacred importance.”

A view of Mauna Kea from the Mauna Loa Observatory. Photo: Nula666/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

For Casumbal-Salazar, this strategy of linking telescopes on the mountain to ancient Hawaiian culture reinterprets colonial conquest as inheritance while consigning indigeneity to history. This is not hard to spot from a glance at the TMT website, for example. The homepage displays the results of a “statewide scientific public opinion poll” which asked, among others, the following question: “Do you agree or disagree that there should be a way for science and Hawaiian culture to co-exist on Maunakea?” The way the question has been framed is revealing: science and Hawaiian culture are seen as distinct entities.

The conflict at Mauna Kea, as Swanner and Casumbal-Salazar learn from native Hawaiians, is not just over the construction of the TMT. The problem is that anything is being built on top of a sacred summit. Nevertheless, it is not incidental that the conflict involves science, particularly astronomy. Science did not merely happen to accompany colonialism: they are deeply linked in ways that are still being unraveled by historians who are tracing “the roots of contemporary science in the projects and practices of colonialism,” filling in the elisions from standard histories of science.

In their white paper, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an American-Barbadian cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire, and her co-authors give examples of how colonial conquests have historically enabled, facilitated or benefited astronomy. James Cook, the British explorer who was the first European to establish contact with Hawai’i, was tasked with leading an expedition to Tahiti to observe the 1769 transit of Venus (to help determine the Earth-Sun distance). But he had also been given sealed orders to search for Australia, indicating “that astronomy and colonisation have been entwined in the Pacific since first contact.”

Colonial conquests helped develop astronomy and cartography, not least through the establishment of overseas observatories. Other sciences “co-constituted” with colonialism include botany and medicine. And, as one author reviewing the existing scholarship put it: “One cannot imagine Charles Darwin’s work being possible without his access to plant and animal specimens derived from several European empires.” Science and medicine “functioned not merely as a ‘tool’ for a project already imagined, but as a means of conceptualising and bringing into being the colonial project itself.”

This history has consequences – not because the TMT is “a pawn in a long, losing game” for the Hawaiians (as one condescending New York Times article phrased it) nor is the issue confined to questions of representation of colonised peoples in astronomy (although only one Native Hawaiian holds a PhD in astronomy, with none in tenure-track positions at major institutions). For Casumbal-Salazar, it is about how “Western law, science and the state together control the ways humanity is imagined in the first place” and about “the techniques of governance by which Kanaka ‘Ōiwi [native Hawaiian] claims to land, sovereignty and independence remain in perpetual deferral.”

This settler colonialism, he argues, is the product of a sustained process with territorial ambitions. As Swanner notes, dismissing this neocolonialist image of science has only resulted in native communities continuing to “report feeling victimised while scientists’ efforts to expand their research programs suffer social, legal and economic setbacks.”

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In response, astronomy practice is changing. In her thesis, Swanner tracks how the opposition to mountaintop observatories and the rigours of preparing an environmental impact statement have forced astronomers to directly engage with the public and acknowledge their concerns.

Prescod-Weinstein and her coauthors go further, advancing a number of recommendations for a more ethical astronomy. For example, they call on the astronomy community to stop weaponising disagreements within native communities, which they have a history of doing. At Kitt Peak, for example, leaders of a native community signed a lease agreement in 1958 after they were invited to view the sky through one of the telescopes of the University of Arizona, even as others in the community remained unconvinced. Such tactics led the community to feel their interests weren’t fairly represented. They filed a lawsuit against the National Science Foundation fifty years later.

Prescod-Weinstein and her colleagues also recommend that “astronomers reject the use of state power to get what they want”, “consider what is globally healing for the communities rooted in the land” and “engage in dialogue and negotiations in good faith, understanding that a deal may not be reachable, with a mandate to respect a ‘no deal’ outcome.” The paper by Native Hawaiian scientists also recommends the same things, and asks: “Do indigenous people have the power to decide what happens to their own homelands?”

At Mauna Kea, this means understanding that Native Hawaiians, from the beginning of the opposition to telescopes on the mountain, “were not fighting against something,” as Casumbal-Salazar notes, “so much as they were fighting for something: the protection of the mountain from further development… Perhaps we should be asking what constitutes progress. Who determines that? And what are the costs of its production?”

Nithyanand Rao is a freelance science writer.

Gail Omvedt on the Indian Feminist Movement and the Challenges It Faces

Movements pioneered by early feminists should be studied with new theoretical inputs to deal with the challenges to the abolition of gender exploitation.

This is the text of Gail Omvedt’s inaugural lecture on Feminist Discourse, organised by the Department of Sociology, Savitribai Phule Pune University.

Thanks to the organisers of this seminar for inviting me to give the inaugural lecture.

My late mother-in-law [Indumati Patankar], a freedom fighter and feminist activist till her physical capacities allowed her to be so, experienced and faced all the periods through which concepts and practices of feminism have gone through; from the freedom movement against colonialism to the contemporary period of imperialist globalisation.

Her memoirs inform me about surprisingly advanced understanding and practices of feminist consciousness during the period of the freedom movement. It is shown by concepts of staying and sleeping in one room by young men and women without any apprehension, intercaste and interreligious marriages, young women leaving their homes alone to join the freedom movement.

Today, one can not even think of many of these practices and bold concepts involved in those practices. In the early 80s, my mother-in-law used to encourage us for being bold in this relation. Though I was from the background of the feminist movement in the US, in India I needed such kind of encouragement in the given situation. Feminist activists in our rural movement like Nagmani Rao, Gauri Day also still remember the pleasant shock they had about Indutai’s old experiences and bold concepts.

Gail Omvedt (second from left) at the conference. Photo: Special arrangement

The second aspect was of conducting marriages in the Gandhian or Satya shodhak way. Gandhian marriages were based on simplicity, Swadeshi ideology and without dowry of any kind. The satya shodhak marriage ceremony based itself on anticaste ideology, women’s liberation and commitment for social justice. Even in this era of imperialist globalisation, these kind of marriages are less in number than that period. The dominant trend is of the marriages based on ritualistic Brahmanic procedures. As against the component of social justice, these marriages are extremely individualistic and with the show of pomp.

Of course, it is true that autonomous women’s organisations based on feminist ideology were not getting formed in those days, but concepts and practices based on feminism were very much there. It was the beginning of the development of feminist ideology all over the world.

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Mass organisations of women based on feminist ideology started getting formed in India around the mid-1970s. They were autonomous from their sister organisations in which men and women were together. This phenomenon was more in existence in rural areas than in the urban ones. Their agenda was basically composed of feminist issues or issues related to women’s liberation. There were many debates about this new phenomenon, but these organisations were not opposed by sister organisations. Mass of women getting organised like this was giving new energy to the overall toiling people’s movements in those days. It gave rise to the creative contribution by uneducated or less educated women in these movements.

Most of the creative, poetic, emotionally appealing and content-rich songs in simple language belong to this period between the mid-1970s and 80s. Mass national women’s conferences at Kolkata and Patana were organised during this period only. It is a great lacking in today’s period.

Different shades of feminism

In the process of this development, different shades of feminism started emerging within the broad spectrum of the overall feminist movement: Ambedkarite feminists, Marxist feminists, Marx-Phule-Ambedakarite feminists, socialist feminists. These shades are there also in today’s period. These shades are not only related to the various theories but also realities of women’s exploitation related to the caste, class, race, gender, community and religion-based exploitation. Though the central question is related to gender, it exists in real life intertwined with these other forms of exploitations. Without considering this reality, one cannot emerge with theoretical and practical answers for marching towards women’s liberation. There is not sufficient theoretical churning about this with the aim of a united movement. It could be said that there is no in-depth attempt to understand the contemporary character of caste, gender as well as class relations of producing newer and newer life.

Also Read: Building a Feminism That Centres the Voices of the Oppressed

With the beginning of the process of imperialist globalisation, somehow, the process of decline of mass women’s liberation movements started taking place. One has to seriously study this process because it will come up with the relationship between the decline and emergence of the imperialist globalisation. At the same time, it would reveal the weaknesses of these mass movements in coping with and successfully going ahead in the face of imperialist globalisation.

This period of imperialist globalisation comes with big ‘revolution’ in the information technology and new kind of automation in the industrial field. With this, the character of the industries having a big workforce under one roof has radically changed. Now more than 90% of the workforce is in the category of the unorganised labourers. The percentage of unemployed and semi-employed people has risen to new heights. This has given rise to a new kind of unrest which cannot easily develop in the positive movement, giving alternatives to the various aspects of the established socio-economic formation

A new approach

A new approach could only emerge with the alternatives in the fields of industry, agriculture, natural resources, ecological approaches. In this situation, the system is going ahead with false promises to the people and dictatorial ways of dealing with suffocated unrest without an alternative vision. Women’s liberation is facing a situation in which there are rampant atrocities and women are forced to return to the gender slavery of most regressive nature. There is a special boost given to male domination of the worst kind.

There are many spaces and opportunities which could be used by the feminist movement in the present era. Women’s movements could be organised around the rights of women on natural resources like water, wind, sun, forests and sound waves to have ecologically sustainable, renewable-based and decentralised production processes. There is enough scientific base available for doing this. A movement for equitable water rights for organic agriculture could be the best beginning for this. Experimenting for a new kind of commune homes initiated by women could be one of the socio-cultural contributions of the feminist movement.

The question of deserted women is one which has the potential to find theoretical and practical alternatives to the traditional family. It was taken up by the movement in Sangli-Satara district led by late Krantivirangana Indutai Patankar and the movement led by Nisha Shivurkar in Nagar district. These movements should be thoroughly studied and freshly taken ahead with new theoretical inputs dealing with the question of single women-headed families.

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The feminist movement is for the abolition of gender exploitation of all kinds and abolition of gender as a socio-economic, cultural reality which is the basis of the exploitation. A lot of theoretical contribution is necessary for understanding this and finding out the programme which becomes the basis of the movement. I hope that the young generation engages itself in this and will come forward to organise a mass feminist movement of advanced nature.

Gail Omvedt is a scholar, sociologist and human rights activist who has written on the anti-caste movement, Dalit politics and women’s struggles in India.

Shapurji Saklatvala, the First British MP to Uncompromisingly Refute Imperialism

An excerpt from Priyamvada Gopal’s book ‘Insurgent Empire’.

This is an excerpt from Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019), published with permission from Simon and Schuster India.

There are not two ways of ruling another nation. There is not a democratic and sympathetic way, and also an unsympathetic way.
Shapurji Saklatvala

On 17 June 1927, a heated debate was underway in the House of Commons on a controversial proposal to send to India a commission that would review the provisions of the India Act of 1919, with a view to possible further limited constitutional reforms. To be headed by the right-leaning Liberal Sir John Simon, a cautious proponent of gradual changes, the proposed consultative body would have no Indian representative. The Simon Commission’s blatantly racist composition – especially egregious given that it was a body set up to discuss the issue of political representation for Indians – was manifestly inflammatory, and the protests that rocked India a few months later surprised many political observers by their ‘sheer ferocity’. When the commissioners did arrive in India, they were greeted by a sea of black flags and placards reading ‘Go back, Simon’. In Britain itself, however, it would be left to the member for North Battersea to voice outright criticism of the commission, in an indignant and characteristically direct parliamentary peroration:

It is absolutely impossible for one country to hold another in subjection and pretend to offer them measures of reform giving them a partnership in the commonwealth. That is all humbug. I see that a new Commission is going to be appointed, and I would like to ask what is going to be the scope of that Commission and its terms of reference. Everybody knows, whether it is put in black and white or not, that the first thing that will be put in the terms of reference is how this country can keep a stranglehold over India.

Priyamvada Gopal
Insurgent Empire
Simon and Schuster India (2019)

A fellow MP had had quite enough. Launching into an ad hominem attack on his prolix colleague’s personal history, George Pilcher, member for Penryn and Falmouth, noted that, while the honourable member for Battersea had ‘made some very cruel and unjustifiable charges against the European population in Bombay’ in relation to poverty, low wages and slums, he himself belonged to the wealthy community ‘most responsible’ for Mumbai’s industrial development. It was ‘high time’, Pilcher sneered, for parliament to ‘know who the hon. Member for North Battersea is and what is his relationship with that great industrial community in Bombay’.

During another fractious debate on the Simon Commission that autumn, it was the turn of the Tory under-secretary of state for India to get personal about his Battersea colleague, who had once again attacked the mission. No one with ‘the remotest knowledge of India’, snarled Earl Winterton, ‘could possibly accept the hon. Gentleman as an exponent of Indian opinion. As far as I know, he has absolutely no authority of any sort. He is repudiated by every responsible organisation in India.

The focus of this sniping was Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, the lone Communist member of the House. Saklatvala was a Parsi from Bombay, who had first come to Britain in 1905 in his late twenties for medical treatment. After marrying an Englishwoman, Sally Marsh, he had settled down in London, where the couple would raise a large family. Saklatvala was indeed related to the great industrial dynasty inaugurated by Jamsetji Tata, and had worked for several years in the family concern. He was not quite culpable of being an ‘heir of the industrial system which he attacks’, however, having been a paid employee and a poor cousin rather than a direct descendant of the main branch of the business dynasty.

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Responding to Pilcher’s broadside, Saklatvala replied simply that he had no greater stake in defending his own natal community than he had in attacking Bombay’s elite European milieu:

“The Parsee capitalist class is just as abominable and as much to be avoided as the class to which the hon. Member and his friends belong in this country.”

Responding to Winterton’s charge that he was not taken seriously by any Indian organizations, he pointed out that he, who had been officially welcomed in nine Indian cities during a recent tour, could speak of matters Indian with far greater legitimacy than the ‘unrepresentative Indian Princes on the League of Nations’ placed there by the earl in his capacity as colonial secretary.

At this point, Saklatvala had been in the House for three years, elected first in 1922 as a Labour MP, and then again in 1923 as a Communist (after the Labour Party expelled Communist members). So he noted that while he spoke in this debate as ‘one of the conquered and enslaved subject races’, he was also ‘representing the interests of the British electors who sent me’.

It is this sense of carrying a dual but intertwined representational responsibility – and his persistence in identifying common ground between the two sides – which makes Shapurji Saklatvala a figure of transnational significance in thinking about the relationship between colonial insurgencies and British anticolonialism in the interwar period.

Deemed ‘one of the most violent anti-British agitators in England’ by state espionage agencies, Saklatvala sought actively to forge a language of opposition to empire that would at once undo the pretences and prevarications of gradualist reformism and make clear that resistance to empire was in the interests of both the Indian and British working classes. Where Hardie, MacDonald and others who visited India during the Swadeshi years came back to make the case for reforms that might defuse the ‘unrest’, Saklatvala was arguably the first MP to make a sustained case in parliament against reformism and ‘liberal’ approaches to colonial governance in themselves.

His biographer, Marc Wadsworth, argues that Saklatvala was also responsible for putting empire and anti-imperialism firmly into the view of liberals and progressives at a time ‘when the British left was by no means committed to anti-imperialism’; he invited campaigners from the colonies to speak at meetings and wrote on the topic in such organs as the Labour Leader. At meetings of the Independent Labour Party, which he joined in 1909, ‘Saklatvala raised the issue of Indian independence and chided the ILP on the need to be more internationalist’.

The subject of three biographies – one by his daughter, Sehri – Saklatvala, Britain’s third Indian MP after fellow Parsis Naoroji and Mancherjee Bhownagree, is usually mentioned only in passing in studies of early twentieth-century relationships between English dissenters and Indians, which have tended to focus on more reformist figures such as Annie Besant, C.F. Andrews and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), who appear less Manichean in their approach to colonial questions.

Annie Beasant (Public domain image), Mirabhen (Photo: Encyclopaedia Britannica) and C.F. Andrews (Photo: Howard Coster/National Portrait Gallery, London CC BY NC ND 3.0)

Yet Saklatvala – who described the likes of Besant as ‘white men and women’ who ‘pass as India’s friends and pretend to be almost Indianised’ – himself emerges in some ways as the consummate hybrid, deeply rooted in British political and social life while equally committed to the Indian anticolonial struggle. To the later dismay of the British Communist Party, he was also committed to retaining something of his Parsi cultural and religious heritage.

Described later by George Padmore as the ‘most independent-minded Communist ever’, during his parliamentary career Saklatvala produced the first truly uncompromising refutation of imperialism in the House, one which put in place an unbridgeable antagonism between empire and democracy, refused to accept that reforms or ‘trusteeship’ were possible in the context of political subjugation, identified the centrality of capitalism to the imperial project, and stressed the revolutionary agency of the oppressed out of which common ground would emerge.

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In doing so, Comrade Sak’ crafted a unique political voice for himself, at once Indian and British, speaking out candidly and passionately on many causes, but most especially against imperialism, which, for him, was inextricable from capitalism. Known for ‘a striking and original manner of speaking’, he would tell his British audiences that ‘he could not help it that his accent was a little foreign but his heart was not foreign’.

One contemporary, the journalist Herbert Bryan, described Saklatvala as possessed not of ‘the mock eloquence of the demagogic wind-bag, but the deep sincerity of the man finding expression in flaming words’, also noting: ‘His command of English is infinitely superior to that of the average Englishman.’ The over 500 interventions he made in the House of Commons during a relatively short but packed parliamentary career certainly ranged over domestic issues such as housing conditions, unemployment, wages and trade unionism, but the majority were on India and imperial matters, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Member for India’.

While it is true that he ‘was only one of many personalities operating in the West from a variety of Indian political tendencies’, few were able so deftly to negotiate – and make a polemical virtue of – colonial subjecthood as a form of dual citizenship. The fact that Saklatvala was at once influential and reviled had much to do with his ability to navigate artfully – though never without integrity – between the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’ when addressing British politicians and lawmakers; the ‘you’ was a source of irritation to his political opponents.

British House of Commons. Photo: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Unsurprisingly, not a little racism came his way, with some on the ‘pink’ left allegedly wanting to get ‘this bloody nigger off our backs’. Saklatvala’s synchronic identification with both fellow Indian colonial subjects and ordinary British citizens appears to have been completely sincere; certainly there is nothing in either his private communications or his public pronouncements to suggest otherwise. Indeed, the insight that subjects of the British Empire and ordinary Britons had more in common with each other than with their respective ruling classes was one that he attempted to elaborate from his earliest years in British politics, and which he later parlayed into the language of communist internationalism.

Intervening in Commons debates and playing an active role in organizations ranging from the British Socialist Party and the Independent Labour Party to the Workers’ Welfare League of India and the League against Imperialism, Saklatvala made significant public contributions that tell us something about how British criticism of empire was shaped and reformulated, particularly after the October Revolution, by the growing presence and pedagogical impact of Asian and African campaigners and intellectuals in the imperial metropolis.

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Certainly, he was responsible for adamantly bringing resistance to the imperial project – particularly, though not only, in India – firmly into both parliamentary view and public hearing, which was no mean feat. Close readings of his speeches and writings indicate the extraordinary extent to which Saklatvala was preoccupied with the project of channelling a democratic ‘voice’, both for the subjects of colonialism and for ordinary Britons; he also wanted each of these constituencies to hear the other. Later in his political career, Saklatvala, with what fellow MP Philip Snowden described as ‘volcanic eloquence’, would also become a prominent spokesman in Britain for another juridical crisis of empire that became a cause célèbre in Britain – the infamous ‘Meerut Conspiracy Case’.

Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English and Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

Imposition, Exile and Memories: Korea’s Struggle Against Japanese Occupation

In the centenary year of Korea’s March First Independence Movement, an impressive array of artwork narrates personal histories.

New Delhi: History textbooks have – many a time – failed to capture the individual lives of commoners during tumultuous times. Histories of war and popular movements have always been enriched by individual stories of remembrance. Such historicity has always touched hearts.

A walk through the on-going exhibition at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) is a journey through these stories. “One Shiny Day”, an artistic commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the March First Independence Movement of Korea against the brutal 35-year Japanese occupation, captivates the eye. It speaks of the everyday struggle of common people during those times – narrated through remarkable individual accounts interposed by sketches, film, photographs, woodprint work, typography and new media.

Artwork of as many as 12 top South Korean artists are on display at this must-see exhibition, which began on August 14 and will continue till September 29, brought to the NGMA by the Daegu Art Museum. It has been channelised through the cultural exchange programme between India and South Korea.

The movement is a significant event of early 20th century Asian history and is considered to have been a catalyst to the creation of a free and modern South Korea. In the centenary year, the artists – through a variety of mediums – not only succeed in chronicling it but also a close comprehension of how individual lives must have been affected during those 35 years of Japanese colonial rule (from 1910) before on August 15, 1945, finally achieving freedom.

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The March 1 movement, locally referred to as the Samil movement, was the first public display of Korean resistance. The story goes that historian Choe Nam-seon drew up an independence charter which was read aloud by 33 activists around 2 pm on March 1, 1919, at a restaurant in Seoul. They signed on the document and submitted it to the governor. This was followed by a chain reaction of thousands of common people reading the charter out. The Japanese military unleashed a ruthless clampdown on such gatherings, throwing people into jails in thousands and killing many.

Artwork by father-son duo

The black and white drawings of Jo Donghwan and Jo Haejun, a father-son duo, encapsulate the charter’s declaration. Drawing from the memory of an educator, the Jos recalled how Japanese was imposed on the Koreans. “My teacher went to Gobu Elementary School for his entrance exam with his father at the age of 11. He came back home without passing the exam because he could [not] speak Japanese”, read a caption explaining a drawing.

Other sketches represent the colonial government’s discrimination against locals in employment, food supply; how colonialism triggered a disparity in the quality of education, leading to mass illiteracy in the rural areas – that Korean teachers in rural areas were forced out of jobs because they didn’t know Japanese. One such drawing said, “When I was in my 4th grade at the agricultural school in Jeongup in the autumn of 1944, I was mobilised as a labourer for 10 days for the project to construct Gunsan Airport.”

Another memory, from the Pacific War, shows how every student needed to pay homage to a Japanese Shinto Shrine to remind the Koreans that they are imperial subjects of Japan. “It was an era when those fleeing without paying homage at a Japanese Shinto shrine could be subject to an ideological crime, for which the entire family could be punished.”

Photo: Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty/The Wire

Through sketches, the artists also recalled how the Pacific War caused famine in Korea, leading people to eat short-awn foxtail with brown rice and even white sand dug deep from the ground. Eating sand often left people sick “with headache and stomach ache,” a drawing shows.

The drawings of the duo also go on to chronicle what happened after liberation. “There was a movement to teach the Korean alphabet for two years from 1946 to 1947 (to eradicate illiteracy). The movement even took place throughout the village at night.” The memories tell of an educator visiting every village to teach people how to draw the Korean flag and sing the national song.

This was followed by Communist rule and the division of the country, leading to the burning of documents and the North Korean flag.

Tumultuous history

Yet another section of the exhibition displays life-size photographs of faces, with captions telling their life stories. Clicked by Sohn Sungyhun, the portraits concentrate on Korean diaspora who were forced to stay away “due to political and historical tumults in Korea.”

One such story is of Arkadiy Ligay, born in Uzbekistan. “His father was a veterinarian and mother a homemaker. His parents told him that Stalin put Koreans on a train in 1939 and forced them to move to Kazakhstan. The land they arrived on was too barren to farm and when their leader Byeong Hwa Kim insisted that they ‘will survive if they move to Uzbekistan where it is warmer’, all Korean immigrants walked 45 days together to Uzbekistan and settled there.”

Then there is “The Trains” created by Kim BoMin. Against the street map of Seoul of 1910, the artist places framed snapshots of the modern buildings of Seoul. Just like a train connects distant places, her photos represent a bridge between Korea’s past and present, between Seoul and Pyongyang. Outside the map, she marks Mt. Geumgang situated in North Korea, and expresses her desire to visit it one day.

Among the impressive displays is “The Floating and Crashing”, a new media artwork by Bae Sungmi. Onto a spell of sea waves hitting the shore, she has dropped words like ‘desire’, truth’, ‘relation’ and ‘justice’ on to the moving visual. As you stare at the work, the words feel like waves crashing against rocks. Quivering, they stay afloat, thus driving home the point that there are certain unchanging sides to the world.

The exhibition ends at a ground-to-ceiling black and white photograph by Lee Woosung – of young people looking at one direction under a flag, holding a torch or a candle, signifying resistance, representing a collective force.