Stuart Hall, who died in 2014, was 13 years older than Bob Marley and lived 36 years longer in total. His impact on contemporary culture was negligible. The 'Reithian model'- i.e. Aunty Beeb setting 'standards' for the proles- was already dying as independent radio and tv stations gained market-share. Ronald Coase, it will be remembered, was anti-Reithian. Competition in the media led to an 'internalizing of externalities' within a cohesive 'firm' where univocity prevailed without much negotiation or strategic entry or exit.
No doubt, this was all the fault of Racism or Communism or Sociology or other such shite. Yet, the fact remains, culture is orthogonal to theories about it. Hall, who, like Naipaul, was a student of Tolkien, showed by his trajectory that what descends from Matthew Arnold's Homonoiac Hellenism and Hebraism of good taste is but an impotent Philistinism. Samson's mantic dreadlocks, shorn or unshorn, topple pillars in Gaza. The Thames, from being waters of Babylon, were turned by Rasta Wailers into a common and overflowing Jordan.
Arundhati Roy, delivering this year's' Memorial lecture of a forgotten man, well illustrates the manner in which Hall was always already an irrelevant anachronism. Perhaps Roy lays it on too thick. But Roy lives in India. She is entitled to live in a cartoonish version of history specially curated for feeble minded wogs.
She says-
The main title of this lecture, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, is the title of a little book I wrote along with the actor John Cusack. It was about a trip that he and I made to Russia in December, 2013 to meet Edward Snowden in Moscow. Our other companion was Daniel Ellsberg – for those of you who are too young to remember, he was the Snowden of his time; the whistleblower who made public the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war.
Ellsberg was on the right side on the Vietnam question. Snowden is a guest of Putin- who has invaded Ukraine. Roy can't see any difference between the two. Moral imbecility works that way. It worries about what can and can't be said. It does not worry about saying the most obtuse and mischievous thing possible under the circumstances. Still, when Roy does it, the thing is unintentionally hilarious.
Snowden, who warned us years ago that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state, continues to live in exile in Moscow. And we have tumbled enthusiastically into the surveillance state he warned about, with our little phone-companions that have become as intimate and as indispensable as any vital organ in our bodies, spying on us, recording and transmitting our most personal information so that we can be tracked, controlled, standardised and domesticated. Not just by the state, but by each other too.
Roy is very intimate with her smartphone. No doubt, it is set to vibrate. Meanwhile its not just the State which is watching you poop. Everybody is at it. That's why Snowden is so important yaar.
Imagine if your liver, or your gall bladder didn’t have your best interests at heart, your doctor would tell you that you are terminally ill. That’s the sort of bind we find ourselves in. We can’t do without it, but it’s doing us in.
Doctor may please surgically remove smartphone from whichever orifice Roy has currently shoved it up.
The first section of my talk will be about things that can and cannot be said.
No. It will be the sort of shite anybody could say if they wanted to show they were the Rip Van Winkle of Wokeness.
The second, about the dismantling of the world as we knew it.
Roy never knew the world. She quite rightly felt that if it wasn't talking about her, she would not talk about it.
This has been a bad year for those who have said and done Things That Cannot Be Said. Or Done.
Like Putin and Lavrov claiming Zelenskyy is Hitler coz he is Jewish?
In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed while she was in the custody of Iran’s moral police for the sin of not wearing her headscarf in the way that is officially mandated. In the protests that followed and are ongoing, several people have been killed.
Why did this happen? The answer has to do with the Taliban and ISIS having raised the bar for Islamists. The Iranian regime ordered a crackdown by the morality police so as not to be outflanked. They need pious Hazaras to go fight for them in Syria. They may be scandalized, on their way to battle, by the glimpse of a young woman's hair peeking out from under her head-scarf.
Meanwhile, in India, in the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim schoolgirls who wanted to assert their identity as Muslim women in their classrooms by wearing hijabs
inside a Girl's school! Islam requires girls to uncover their face and hair in female only spaces. Otherwise the purpose of the hijab is defeated.
were physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men.
after being put up to this piece of stupidity by ultra right-wing Muslim men belonging to the PFI which has since been banned.
This in a place where Hindus and Muslims have lived together for centuries but have recently become dangerously polarised.
By Islamist terror recruiters.
Both instances – strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries – may appear to be antagonistic, but they aren’t really.
India does not have a hijab ban. The Supreme Court has reserved its judgment on whether hijab is an essential practice for Muslim women.
Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isn’t about the hijab. It’s about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women.
Nor is saying this really about the hijab or about women. This is the age-old preoccupation with being as paranoid as shit. Why did Mummy not let me play with my feces? True freedom entails nothing else! Mummy was totes a repressive agent of Neo-Liberalism with anti-fecal characteristics. Everything is about coercion, right?
In August, Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked in upstate New York by an Islamist zealot for his book, The Satanic Verses; a book that was first published in 1988. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution and the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued an edict calling for Rushdie’s death. All these years later, just when it had begun to seem that the anger and passions his book aroused had abated and Rushdie gradually came out of hiding, came the attack.
Is Arundhati going to stick out her neck for Rushdie? The PFI may chop it off. Still, since Modi has banned that outfit, maybe it is safe to do so.
After the initial news of the 75-year-old Rushdie having survived the attack and being in good cheer, there is no news at all. One can only hope that he is recovering and will return to the world of literature with all his powers intact. Heads of state in Europe and the US have come out robustly in Rushdie’s support, some saying, a little self-servingly, “His fight is our fight”.
The West spent a lot of money bombing the fuck out of Islamic territories. That's a fight they lost.
Meanwhile, Julian Assange, who published and exposed some of the more terrible war crimes committed by soldiers of those countries, wars in which hundreds of thousands died, is in terrible health and remains locked up in Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US, where he may face a death sentence or several life sentences.
Or else he may simply be left alone in a padded cell to play with his own feces.
So, we must pause before casting this horrifying attack on Rushdie in cliched terms such as a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ or ‘Democracy versus Darkness’. Because millions have been killed in invasions led by these so-called free-speech evangelists, and among those, millions have been writers, poets and artists, too.
Why just millions? Why not billions? Don't be so stingy, yaar.
As for the news from India, in June, Nupur Sharma, spokesperson of the BJP, India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, once a permanent, bullying presence on TV talk shows, made several intemperate comments against Prophet Mohammed in a provocative performance whose very purpose appeared to be to cause offence. There was an international uproar, and several death threats later, she has retreated from public life. But two Hindu men who supported her comments were brutally beheaded. In the days that followed, throngs of Muslim zealots have gathered to chant “tan se sar juda” (separate the head from the body) and call for the state to pass a blasphemy law. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that nothing would make the state happier.
The PFI has been banned. Their networks are being rolled up. Still, the Hindu- and, in Kerala, Communist- backlash is building up.
They’re not the only ones who conflate censorship and assassination. Earlier this month I was in Bangalore to speak on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of my friend Gauri Lankesh, the journalist who was shot down outside her home by Hindu fanatics.
No. Professional hit-men.
Hers was one in a series of assassinations that appear to be connected to the same shadowy group: Dr Narendra Dabholkar, the physician and well-known rationalist thinker, was shot in 2013; comrade Govind Pansare, a writer and member of the Communist Party of India, was shot in February 2015, and the Kannada scholar professor M.M. Kalburgi in August that same year.
This may have had something to do with Lingayat politics- a parochial affair.
Assassination is of course, not the only form of censorship we experience. In the year 2022, India ranks 150th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, below Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
But the World Press Freedom Index ranks below Putin's propaganda machine in terms of credibility.
We are policed not just by the government, but by mobs on the streets, by social media trolls and, ironically, by the media itself.
Also smartphone is surveilling us when it is not vibrating in some orifice.
On the hundreds of 24×7 TV news channels we often refer to as ‘Radio Rwanda’, our baying TV anchors rage against Muslims and “anti-nationals”, call for dissenters to be arrested, sacked, punished. They have ruined lives and reputations with absolute impunity and no accountability. Activists, poets, intellectuals, lawyers and students are being arrested almost every day. As for Kashmir – the Valley from which No News Can Come– it is a giant prison. Soon there could be more soldiers there than citizens.
Meanwhile, nobody bothers with Roy anymore. Sad.
Every communication by Kashmiris, private as well as public, even the very rhythm of their breathing, is supervised.
Why is Roy doing propaganda for Amit Shah?
In schools, under the guise of learning to love Gandhi, Muslim children are being taught to sing Hindu bhajans. When I think of Kashmir these days, for some reason I think of how, in some parts of the world, watermelons are being trained to grow in square moulds so that they are cube-shaped and easier to stack. In the Kashmir valley, it looks as though the Indian government is running that experiment on humans instead of melons. At gun-point.
China may be doing so. Indeed, they may dictate the future of political Islam.
Down in the Gangetic plains – the cow belt – of North India, mobs of sword-wielding Hindus led by godmen, who the media for some reason calls “seers”, call for the genocide of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women with complete impunity.
So, they are not being 'policed'. They can say what they want. Surely, it is better that some have freedom than that nobody does?
We have witnessed daylight lynchings, and the genocidal killing of more than a thousand Muslims (non-government figures put that number at closer to two thousand) in Gujarat in 2002 and in hundreds in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 2013. Not surprisingly, both massacres took place just before crucial elections.
Roy truly is the Rip Van Winkle of Wokeness. Why not mention the 1947 ethnic cleansing?
We have watched the man under whose chief ministership the Gujarat massacre took place, Narendra Modi, consolidate his position as Hindu Hriday Samrat (the Emperor of Hindu Hearts) and rise to assume the highest office in the country.
Roy played a part in this. She falsely accused Modi of being so stupid as to sabotage his own recent appointment as CM. The Supreme Court investigated and gave him a clean chit. Roy herself, if I recall correctly, described in orgasmic detail the rape and killing of a lady in Ahmedabad who was actually living peacefully in America at the time. This shows how Bush was complicit in Modi's atrocities- right?
He has never expressed regret or apologised for what happened.
Nor has Roy. She decapitated and sodomized trillions of innocent Muslims in Abu Ghraib so as to draw attention to the plight of Edward the Snowman who was melting in the Sun.
We have watched him continue to amass political capital from his dangerous, sneering anti-Muslim rhetoric. We have watched the highest court in the land absolve him of all responsibility, legal as well as moral. We have watched, nauseated, as leaders of the so-called Free World embrace him as a statesman and a democrat.
Only in the same sense that we have watched Roy sodomize and impregnate the Pope. What is truly nauseating is the manner in which she sliced open the Pope's belly to extract a fetus which, I may tell you, was quietly reading Gramsci and underlining sentences and writing 'so true!' in the margin. She then raped and impregnated the fetus before tearing an even tinier fetus out of its belly. It too was reading Gramsci but in a more critical spirit.
Last month, India celebrated the 75th anniversary of independence from British Rule. From his elevated lectern in the Red Fort in Delhi, Modi thundered about his dream of empowering women in India. He spoke with passion, clenched his fist. He wore a turban flecked with the colours of the national flag.
Meanwhile, nobody was paying any attention to Roy. Sad.
Empowering women in a society built on the Hindu caste system where privileged-caste men have for centuries exercised what they believe to be their ordained right to the bodies of Dalit and Adivasi women, is not a matter of policy alone. It’s about a socialisation, and a belief system.
not to mention Roy's incessant rape and impregnation of the Pope.
There is a rising graph of crimes against women in India, putting it on the map of amongst the most unsafe places in the world for women. It surprises no one these days to see how often the criminals belong to or are related to members of the current ruling dispensation. In such cases, we have seen public rallies in favour of rapists. In the most recent case in which a 19-year-old girl was raped and murdered, a local leader blamed her father for “spreading raw milk before hungry cats.”
Meanwhile, Roy received no praise for raping Pope-ji. Sad.
Even as Modi was delivering his Independence Day speech, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state of Gujarat announced special amnesty
routine parole
for 11 men who were serving life-sentences for the 2002 gang rape of 19-year-old Bilkis Bano and the murder of 14 members of her family, including her mother, her sisters, her baby brothers, her aunts, her uncle, her cousins, her cousin’s one-day-old infant, and Saleha, Bilkis’s three-year-old daughter, whose head was smashed against a rock.
while Roy was raping and impregnating Pope-ji which, sadly, Media refused to comment on which is why Roy's stock has declined while Modi's has risen. Such an injustice, yaar!
This grisly crime, only one of several similar ones, was a part of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom I mentioned earlier. The panel that approved their release had several members from the BJP, one of them an elected legislator who went on record later to say that, since some of the convicts were Brahmins with ‘good sanskar’ (good upbringing), it was unlikely they were guilty at all.
Sadly, it is true that convictions by CBI Courts of the period are no longer regarded as safe.
In cases investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as this one was, it is legally mandated that any decision to give convicts amnesty
parole. This silly woman does not know the difference between the two words.
has to be approved by the Central government, which is of course the government of Narendra Modi. So, we must assume that that permission was given.
The problem is that Gujaratis assume that the CBI Court convicted innocent men on orders from Delhi.
When the convicts came out, they were greeted outside the prison walls as heroes – they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets and had their feet touched – by members of Hindu groups loosely affiliated to the BJP (the ‘looseness’ is to provide what is called plausible deniability) that make up the ‘Sangh Parivar’, the Joined Family. In a few months’ time, Gujarat goes to the polls.
In India, strange things happen just before our free and fair elections. It’s always the most dangerous time.
Not for Roy. She has been forgotten. The big question is whether Gujaratis will respond to the 'freebies' being offered by Kejriwal. I suppose the BJP will have to give in on the pensions issue and promise transfers, if not free electricity quotas. Indian elections are about deliverables and booth management. If Kejriwal cannibalizes the Congress vote, he still wins even if the BJP stays in power.
As the rapist-mass murderers return to take their place as respected members of society, Teesta Setalvad, the activist whose organisation, Citizens for Justice and Peace, has meticulously compiled a tower of documentary evidence that points to the complicity of the Gujarat government in general and Narendra Modi in particular with the 2002 massacre, was arrested, accused of forgery, tutoring witnesses and attempting to keep ‘the pot boiling’.
She was paid for a hatchet job and did it well. The real scandal is presented by senior police officers who lied and fabricated evidence to put innocent people in jail. Roy can't mention Sreekumar, the IPS officer in the dock with Setalvad. That's taboo for her side- when she had a side and wasn't an irrelevant blast from the past.
These are the conditions in which we live and work.
Roy lives and works in a fantasy land.
And say the things that cannot be said.
Corrupt police officers concocted a case against Modi which Roy insists was not concocted at all.
In speech, as in everything else, the law is applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. A Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity.
But everybody can say what Roy can- though they may be doing so for purposes of parody. She simply lays things on too thick.
In India as in other countries, the weaponisation of identity,
failed. Actual weapons can obliterate any identity.
in which identity is disaggregated and atomised into micro-categories, has turned the air itself into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine.
Air is very wicked. It should be more like Water.
Even these micro-identities have developed a power hierarchy. In his book Elite Capture, the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo describes how certain individuals then become elevated from among these groups, individuals usually located in powerful countries, in big cities, in big universities, those with social capital on the internet, and then are given platforms by foundations, by media, by corporations to speak for and decide on behalf of the rest of their communities.
I suppose this is what Taiwo hopes will happen to himself- he is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown- but the world has changed. China will call more and more of the shots. Davos Man will be disintermediated.
It’s an understandable response to historic pain and humiliation. But it’s not a revolutionary response. Micro-Elite Capture cannot be the only answer to Macro-Elite Capture. As some empirical research has shown, when we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, it is the Right that benefits disproportionately. A recent study by PEN America of banned school textbooks shows that the overwhelming majority of proscribed textbooks contain progressive texts on gender and race.
But a recent study of PEN revealed it was shit. The problem with Roy and Mishra is that they were considered too stupid to be worth recruiting by the Communists in India. But this also meant they didn't get the minimum tariff of Marxist education.
I myself recall being sent, in 1982, to some apparatchik who suddenly asked me about Kantorovitch. I thought this had something to do with getting a book to review for a Journal and bluffed him that I was smart by mentioning volatility surfaces, the Ito integral, etc. As a matter of fact, there is now a full-blown Marxist Econophysics. I suppose it must have been germinating back then. Yet I was dismissed by the appartchik as a fool. Apparently the correct answer, for his clique, was that Kantorovich had actually derived a labor theory of value even under Socialism (which Marx said was impossible!). Dogma was more important than dialectical reason. The Commies could have taken up Lawvere's category theory based approach to Hegel's logic. They preferred to get stupider and lazier with each passing year.
To be fair, flibbertigibbets like Roy and Mishra would not have wanted to be recruited by the Communists because they'd have been subject to party discipline and have had to hand over a portion of their earnings. Pretending to be fellow travelers paid better than seeking real power- or indeed engaging with reality.
Still, it is very funny for Roy to speak of the correct 'revolutionary response'. Why not pretend to be Terence Tao while you are at it?
Sealing in communities, reducing and flattening their identities into silos can be perilous and precludes solidarity.
Roy's oeuvre consists of doing nothing else. But then stupidity precludes solidarity as does being an attention-seeking twat.
Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the caste system in India – divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable silos, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict.
Roy is a Christian from Kerala. She felt no pain when a Christian Professor's hand was hacked off. Nor did I. The truth is, there's a good reason we can't feel each others' pain. Firstly, there's too much of it and secondly there are Roy type self-publicists who claim to feel terrible pain while laughing all the way to the Bank.
It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative/surveillance machine in which society administers/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom (and these categories are minutely graded too) is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.
Hall must be turning in his grave at this paranoid nonsense. He was an intelligent man.
Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy – imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as “crones.” By his standards, I’d qualify as a crone for sure. But I’d still like people to read him. It goes without saying that by these standards, every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.
Roy thinks Doestoevsky would be concerned with her. Sweet.
Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock.
Roy isn't an intellectual. Hysteria is not a Research Program.
Solidarity can never be pristine.
It is a word for a bunch of losers who are trying to cheat each other but who have nothing of which they can be cheated.
It should be challenged, debated, argued about, corrected. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.
Whatever it is that Roy claims to be fighting against must be winning- at least in her own imagination- because it is surveilling her while vibrating in some hidden orifice.
And now I’d like to turn to the subheading of my talk – the dismantling of the world as we knew it. I’d like to speak a little about queens and their funerals.
When the Queen died, some British newspapers asked me to write a piece about her passing.
Roy would have been expected to point out that Queenji be White. Whitey be debil.
I was a little puzzled by the request. Perhaps because I’ve never lived in England, Queen Elizabeth II barely existed even on the peripheries of my imagination. So, I said sure, but it won’t be about the queen that you’re thinking about.
It will be the queen you aren't thinking about- the one who didn't exist.
The queen I was thinking about was my mother, who founded and ran a high school, who died earlier this month. For good or for bad, she was the most singular, most profound influence in my life. We were dangerous foes and desperately good friends. She was the obstacle race that I structured myself around from the time I was very young. And now that she’s gone, and left me not heart-broken, but heart-smashed, my rather odd shape and structure doesn’t seem to make sense to me anymore. I was tempted to make this lecture about the politics of two funerals. One on the world’s stage and the other in a small town in South India. But I will resist that temptation.
I suppose it will be yielded to when it comes in more remunerative form.
Perhaps, now’s time for me to say the first Thing that Should Not Be Said, at least not here in London, not now.
I couldn’t believe the pomp and pageantry and the days of endless television coverage of the rites and rituals of her funeral. I was transfixed by the obsequious, reverential paying of respects by those darker folks who hold high office in her former colonies, now known as the Commonwealth. There was nothing common about that wealth. It was extractive. And it flowed in one direction. We in the colonies paid for those costumes, those furs, those jewels, those gold sceptres.
India had plenty of Princes who well provided with all those things. The Nizam was richer than the Queen.
There’s much to say about colonies and colonialism and the Monarchs who reigned over that barbarous period in history. Who better than Stuart Hall to tell us that story?
Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean.
But how’s this – just as a piece of graffiti as the somber cavalry rides past? The historian Mike Davis estimates that in the last quarter of the 19th century, between 30 and 60 million people died of hunger in the mostly man-made famines in colonial India, China and Brazil. He calls it the Great Victorian Holocaust.
You should hear what it calls him. The fact is famines are bad for Government Revenue and Corporate Balance Sheets. That's why the late Victorians figured out how to prevent excess mortality caused by a food availability deficit.
Why do we love and admire those who humiliate us? That could be the most pertinent political, as well as personal, question of our times.
Our times, currently, feature Putin's troops not being loved and admired at all by the Ukrainians Putin tried to humiliate and subjugate.
I apologise if this sounds like an unnuanced commentary on colonialism.
It is a rant. That's what you are paid for. Just supply it already otherwise Tharoor will glom in on your shtick.
That is not my position. I don’t count myself among those Indian intellectuals who rage against colonialism but choose to remain silent about the wrongs in our own societies. The Hindu caste system, for example, is one of the most brutal systems of social hierarchy the world has ever known.
Roy tried to glom on to Ambedkar. But she is high caste and was told to fuck off by genuine Dalits. Sad.
Many would call it a form of colonialism that pre-dates British colonialism and is prevalent even today. Caste remains the engine that runs modern India. It is remarkable how many Indian writers and intellectuals manage to completely elide the question of caste. To unsee something that stares us in the face almost every moment of every single day, they have to assume the literary or academic version of a very elaborate, tortuous yoga asana.
But Roy isn't allowed to appropriate that Grievance. She is the wrong caste. Sujatha Gidla is genuinely Dalit and what's more her Uncle was a Dalit Panther poet pumped and dumped by the Naxals. She has credentials in this respect. She mentions, in 'Ants among Elephants', her friendship with a fellow Christian girl of Roy's mother's caste. What astonished her was that such Christians had always been accepted as of Brahmin status and had thought of themselves in those terms.
Roy herself, in her first novel, shows these high caste Christians torturing and killing Dalits while the Communists stood by watching approvingly. But Roy didn't build upon that sort of personal history or testimony. She went bonkers. At first she tried to jump on bandwagons which other Indian self-publicists had established intellectual property rights over. She was reminded of her weak academic credentials and told to fuck off. Then she began a flirtation with the Naxals and the separatists. But she was too deracinated. JNU recruits some people from the villages. The hope was that someone like Kanhaiya Kumar could be the demotic face of anti-nationalism. But Kumar is now with Congress. His pal, Umar Khalid is in jail. Muslims don't care. They think he is a Communist. Kumar only had a political career- albeit a brief one- because his fellow Bhumihars thought him a careerist, not a communist. His mistake was to bend the knee to the Yadavs in the hope of getting their votes. That was foolish.
All this is the subject of much of my writing, so for now I’d like to return to my bemusement about the Queen’s funeral. What was it really about? Someone please help me out here, because I don’t understand.
We loved the Queen. She had served the country and the commonwealth in an exemplary manner. In her death, grief brought us together at a time when, as never before, we need to stand together. That's it. That's the whole story.
It can’t have been about the passing of a 96-year-old monarch of a small island country, which is having trouble even holding on to the sum of its parts – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Was it only a harking back, a nostalgic invocation, a paean to the ghost of the Empire on which the Sun Never Set? Or was it something more than that? Was it about the past, or is it about the future?
It was about Love. It was about Grief. To people of Faith- and the Queen was the Defender of Faith- the Royal funeral was also about Death and Parting and the hope of Resurrection and re-union. It wasn't about gesture politics or virtue signaling. There was no histrionics and no hysterics. Everything was as decently done as if done by her who was the soul of that decency.
As the war in the Ukraine unfolds and the modern world as we know it comes apart at the seams, was all that pageantry actually a pantomime rally, a posturing, a parading of friends and allies, for a battle that is still to come?
No. Don't be silly. The same thing would have happened if there had been no Ukraine war. The Queen Mother died 20 years ago. Our sentiments were the same.
It reminded me of the opening chapter of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August about the lead up to World War I.
The Great War was a War of 5 Emperors, three of whom were related to each other. The Kaiser was jelly of cousin George. He thought Georgie should be deprived of India because he already had too many toys. He wrote that he'd be satisfied if the outcome of the War yielded Germany no new territory provided Georgie stopped being 'Kaiser-e-Hind'.
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled sashes flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens…and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of the Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying world of splendour never to be seen again”
Because Queen Victoria- apart from the hemophilia in her genes which affected the Spanish and Russian thrones- had left Europe with a poisonous legacy. She had used her daughter and her husband to try to push Prussia, and then Germany, down a more Liberal path. Her grandson, the future Kaiser, suspected that his mother's correspondence with her mother contained proof of some dark plot. He, the eldest grand-child, was being denied hegemony for some obscure reason. Uncle Teddy was alright- though he did consort with Grocers and Jews- but then the Kaiser had his own Court Jew. Still, Teddy was a man of the world. He wasn't scandalized by homosexual hi-jinks in the German General Staff. Cousin George, on the other hand, was a bore and a prude.
The dangerous brinkmanship being played out in the Ukraine
there is no brinksmanship. Putin says he may use tactical nuclear weapons. Biden says he won't use strategic nuclear weapons. Well, when I say 'Biden says', obviously I mean 'The State Dept. clarifies that what Biden says has no relation to what Biden actually means.' Still, this aint Cuba. Nukes are off the table, boots on the ground are off the table, Ukraine is welcome to defend itself as best it may but the Russians should remember that Washington was pessimistic of its prospects of so doing.
Instead of brinksmanship, what we have is economic estrangement and isolation. It remains to be seen whether a Eurasian power bloc prevails over an Oceanic alliance.
is being somewhat obscured by the noise of propaganda on both sides. But history’s clock could very well be racing towards sunset.
But sunset is racing away from history's cock. Oh. Roy said clock. Still, where there is a clock there may soon be a cock.
The various points of view on the war also involve some pretty tortuous yoga asanas – some pretty drastic seeing and unseeing – depending on where you have decided to place yourself. Many on the Left cannot find it in themselves to call out Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. They believe that Ukrainian outrage against Russia has been entirely confected and cultivated by Western Imperialism. That the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s never happened. They deny that millions of Ukrainians – the historian Timothy Snyder estimates five million – died in the famine of the early 1930’s under Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation.
Roy is from Kerala where the Communists have been re-elected. Does the CPM hold the view quoted above? No. It responded sensibly enough in February but, like the rest of us, has corrected its perception by downgrading Russia (which isn't Communist) and rejecting the 'Zelensky is Azov is Nazi' claim. The truth is, there is little distance between CPM and BJP on this issue. Rahul, on the other hand, speaks of a US alliance. But he is on his farewell tour. So, nothing to see here, folks. Move along now.
They see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive war against an existential threat to itself by NATO. That’s not untrue. The fact that Russia does face a very serious threat is hard to deny. The hitch is that that the “defensive” war is being fought offensively on Ukrainian soil and against the Ukrainian people.
The CIA thought Putin would get a walk over. It turns out Democracy and Liberty and Human Rights is about ordinary folk grabbing guns and making Molotov Cocktails to kill and chase away evil invaders.
When the Cold War ended, demilitarisation and nuclear disarmament should have begun.
It did. There was a big reduction in nuclear arsenals.
Instead, NATO did the opposite.
Nope. Indeed, the US lost institutional memory re. a crucial step in H-bomb production. There was genuine disarmament on both sides. Sadly, Ukraine was foolish enough to surrender its nukes in return for worthless promises from US, Russia and even UK.
It amassed more weapons, fought more wars and used the territory of its allies and proxies for the aggressive and provocative forward deployment of troops and missiles.
This is garbage. Still, Roy might be seen as speaking for elderly commies in Kerala.
If Russia had done through proxies in Europe or the US what NATO is doing to it, there is little doubt that we would be seeing the moral arguments and western media coverage turned inside out.
Nobody gives a shit about moral arguments. Western media coverage showed Ukrainians kicking ass because they did in fact kick ass. Coding and decoding shit is wholly futile. Kicking ass or getting your ass kicked is what matters.
None of this makes Vladimir Putin a revolutionary anti-imperialist or a democrat of any kind. None of it alters the fact that he believes in an overtly fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Homosexual, Christian nationalist ideology (which ironically, he calls “de-Nazification”) propounded by his two favourite ideologues, Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov.
Putin believed his army would kick ass. He though Zelenskyy would run away. He was wrong. Does he have an ideology? Maybe. But it is wholly irrelevant.
His claim about Ukraine, Crimea and Belarus being inseparable territories that made up Ancient Rus, a theory based on the millennial myth of the Christian baptism of its leader Volodymyr/Valdemar in Crimea in AD 988, has been (correctly) met with hilarity.
It was initially met with alarm because people thought Putin's military machine was efficient. There is still no hilarity because of the terrible crimes that have been committed. But nobody thinks Putin gives a fuck for Ancient Rus. His pitch is that Lenin's Nationality policy was subverted by the Communists to push too many Russians into non-Russian Soviets so as to control them. In other words, 'de-communization' entails altering borders so that Russians marooned by Lenin on the wrong side of borders can rejoin the motherland.
There is some logic to this but only if Russians really want to live under Putin. They don't. The guy is fucked in the head.
But we must ask why then is there less amusement in the same quarters when it comes to talk of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its claims of being the ancient Promised Land for the Jewish people, which translates in modern legalese as “the Nation-State of the Jewish people.”
Israel kicks ass. If we try to fuck with it, it will fuck us up big time. You think Islamist terrorism was bad? You really want to wait around and find out what smart sabras can do to us if we take away their country?
Or in India, when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist militia and cultural guild of which Prime Minister Modi is a member, calls for an ‘Akhand Bharat’, a sort of fantasy that is futuristic and ancient all at once – a future ancient India that includes Pakistan and Bangladesh, which will be conquered and where all its people will be subjected to Hindu rule.
A strategic fantasy. It gives the Indian Army a threat-point. It is also a carrot for Indian Muslims to join the Army. They can dream of taking over Pak and Bangladesh. There's a scenario where crazy Islamists make one or both of those countries ungovernable. That's when local people in both countries might welcome Indian intervention. Obviously, they'll be happier if this is done under Muslim generals.
Ordinary people in Europe are gearing up to face the harsh winter that is nearly upon them, with very little or no heating, as Russia, in response to economic sanctions, threatens to shut off their gas supply.
That hurdle seems to have been largely overcome.
As Ukrainians fight on with relentless courage, and the chances of a negotiated settlement fade away, anxiety is building over the possibility of the war expanding and escalating. Putin has announced the ‘partial mobilisation’, whatever that means, of 300,000 military reservists. Perhaps for now the US is far away enough and safe enough, but all of Europe, Russia and much of Asia could become the theatre of a war unlike any the world has ever seen. A war in which there can’t be a winner.
Yes there can. Putin's troops are thrashed. They run away. That's it. That's the whole story.
Isn’t it time for everybody to step back? Isn’t it time to begin a real conversation about complete nuclear disarmament?
No. Ukraine would never have been invaded if it had kept is nukes. Hall was part of CND. We should remember he was a fool.
God forbid, Russia resorts to using US logic for turning to nuclear weapons. In an article titled, ‘If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used’, published in December 1946, Karl K. Compton, the physicist and former president of MIT, said that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved hundreds of thousands – perhaps several millions – of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months.” His logic was that the Japanese, even though they had been defeated, would not have surrendered and, if not for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people, they would have fought to the last man standing.
Also they'd have killed a lot of people in South East Asian and other territories they still controlled.
“Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman?” Compton asks himself. “All war is inhuman,” was his reassuring reply (to himself.) It was published in The Atlantic. President Truman wrote in to endorse this argument.
Years later, General William Westmoreland carried that logic a little further during the Vietnam war: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” In other words, we Asians don’t value our lives and so we force the White world to bear the burden of genocide.
The Japanese certainly didn't value Chinese or Indonesian lives.
And then there’s Robert McNamara, of course, who had a successful career arc, first as the planner of the bombing of Tokyo in 1946, which killed more than 200,000 people in two separate raids, then as the president of Ford Motor Company, next as the US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, in which US soldiers were ordered to “Kill Anything That Moves,” as a result of which 3 million Vietnamese lost their lives.
McNamara’s last job was to take care of world poverty as President of the World Bank.
He did a fantastic job. He helped China to rise very rapidly. Then even the Indians got in on the act. Edwin Lim, who had worked for the World Bank in China before being transferred to India, thought India would rise faster. He was disappointed. Why? Roy type nutters get paid more and gain a bigger reputational benefit by preventing development in India than do our nation-building Manmohans and Monteks. That's where Ambanis and Adanis come in. Gujarat showed that you can mobilize the people against Medha Patkar type virtue signalers. The nuisance of PILs is being curbed by suits brought against Patkars for embezzlement. Lying and 'Lawfare' are double edged swords.
Towards the end of his life, in an Erroll Morris documentary called The Fog of War, he asks an anguished question: “How much evil must we do in order to do good?”
None. Identify the right Structural Causal Model (hint, it is the one which allows you to non-coercively improve outcomes immediately) and then start doing first order good. There will be mimetic effects and Aumann public signals promoting better correlated equilibria. Roy, of course, can't understand a word of this.
As you must have gathered, I’m a collector of these gems. Let’s not forget that President Obama had a Kill List.
Who would have thought Obama would end up worsening things in the MENA? Worst Pres ever from that point of view.
And that Madeline Albright, who President Joe Biden recently described as “a force for goodness, grace, and decency – and for freedom”, when she was asked about the estimated half-a-million Iraqi children dying because of US economic sanctions, famously said, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Female American diplomats are worse than males. April Glaspie, Albright, Samantha Power... Lets hope Kamala Harris concentrates on abortion.
Where are we headed? Even those of us who stand squarely with the Ukrainian people against the Russian invasion of their country cannot help but marvel at the difference in tone and tenor of the Western Media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine and the breathless admiration with which it covered the US and NATO’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
This is stupid. Iraq and Afghanistan harbored terrorists who liked killing Westerners. Ukraine has never done anything us. Roy writes from a point of view of 'moral inversion'. She thinks we should be nice to those who try to kill us and nasty to those who only want to kill our enemies.
This January, Tony Blair, the most passionate purveyor of the fake news about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion, and President George Bush Jr.’s most enthusiastic ally in the invasion, was ordered Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the senior most British order of chivalry.
The Queen got on well with Blair. The honor was hers to give and is quite customary to bestow it on a former Prime Minister. John Major got his in 2005. Now Blair has joined him. Next will be Gordon Brown. However, there can only be 24 at any one time
Watching the funeral of the Queen the other day I nearly choked on whatever it was I was drinking as I heard one of the Bishops or Archbishops say that, unlike those who merely cling to wealth and power, Queen Elizabeth II would be loved and remembered for her “life of service” to the public.
She served her subjects. That is the only divine right any Head of State can have.
Her son, the new King of England, will inherit her wealth and station. His royal lifestyle will not be supported by his own private wealth, which reportedly amounts to about a billion dollars. It will be paid for with public money, by the British people, millions of whom, the Guardian reports, have begun to skip a meal every day just to “keep the lights on.”
But the Guardian also thinks Roy is a good writer. The truth is, it is a bit bonkers- at least when it comes to India or darkies of any description.
We don't know whether the King will have a tranquil reign. In the past it was the tabloids which decided such matters. Going forward... who knows?
Perhaps it’s hard for the rest of us to understand the mystery of the British people’s love and enthrallment with their monarchy. Perhaps it has to do with a national sense of identity and pride which cannot and certainly ought not to be reduced to vulgar economics. But allow me to indulge in some vulgarity for a minute or two.
A recent analysis in the Financial Times concludes that income inequality in the US and the UK is so great that they could be classed as “poor societies with some very rich people”. They’re like us ‘Third Worlders’ now, Banana Republics whose wealthy have seceded into outer space and whose poor are falling into the sea.
But immigrants are amongst the poorest- till they stop being so and like Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng etc. start sealing up the country so all can rise in affluence. Meanwhile, Roy is asked to deliver a lecture in memory of an erudite Jamaican to show that this country can always import idiocy from ex-colonies- if Braverman grants a visa.
A 2022 Oxfam study says India’s 98 richest people own the equivalent of the combined wealth of the poorest 552 million people. For this impertinence, Oxfam offices in India have been raided by the Income Tax department and perhaps will soon be shut down, like Amnesty International and every other organisation that is critical of the Modi regime.
Useless or mischievous foreigners can be told to fuck off. It may not always happen, but it can always happen. Sensible people try to be useful. Not me. But then in a well ordered world I'd be afforded Euthanasia of some pleasant sort. Just keep delivering me Pizzas while queuing up bingeable Netflix series on my Smart TV and I'll be dead in a week.
King Charles III, rich though he may be, is a pauper compared to Gautam Adani, the world’s third richest man, Gujarati corporate tycoon and friend to Narendra Modi. Adani’s fortune is estimated to be $137 billion – a sum that rapidly increased during the pandemic.
Adani is useful to India. India has made him rich. Roy may have been useful to India's enemies. She has much less money.
In 2014, when he was first elected Prime Minister of India, Modi made a point of flying from Ahmedabad, his home city in Gujarat, to Delhi in Adani’s private jet – his name and logo emblazoned across it. In the eight years of Modi’s rule, Adani’s fortune has grown from $8 billion in 2014 to what it is now. That’s an accumulation of $129 billion. I’m just saying. Please don’t read deep meaning into it. Adani’s money comes from coal mining and operating sea-ports and airports.
Stuff that is useful to India. The value of those ports and mines is what has increased. But the benefit from them has been widely distributed.
Most recently, he was involved in the hostile takeover of NDTV, the only mainstream national TV news channel that dares to delicately criticise the Modi regime. Most of the rest of the media is already bought and paid for.
One could say the same about Roy except she might well have supplied the same poisonous product for free. Still, it's good to say you paid top dollar for a courtesan when people are laughing at you for having exposed yourself to infection by dallying with a gormless slut.
The corporations that are blasting mountain ranges, clear-felling forests and bleaching corral reefs also fund ‘happiness conferences’, sporting events, film and literature festivals. They provide courageous writers platforms on which to condemn attacks on Free Speech and make declarations about their commitment to peace, justice and human rights. And say Things Cannot Be Said, Done.
So, kids what have we learnt today? The Caste System, Big Corporations, and the Queen- they are all very evil but were pretending to be good. Nobody else is courageous enough to say this except me. I'm a very special little flower.
Capitalism is in its Endgame. Sadly, as it goes down, it’s taking our planet with it.
But Roy studied Architecture, not Econ. She knows shit about Capitalism or what it will be inevitably replaced with. Nor does she know anything about Environmental Science. But she has views on the Queen and Big Corporations and the Caste system. So she can predict that Capitalism is going down and the Planet will go with it. But Caste System and Crown will remain for her to complain about. She has already provided for her own future. It is the rest of us who are suckers because we are relying on buying and selling our goods and services on global markets. But the globe is gonna go boom! All that will be left is Roy saying snarky things about the Caste system while Modi hunts in vain for some Adani or Ambani to enrich.
Between nuclear hawks and mining corporations, it’s a race to the bottom.
There is no connection between the two. Roy doesn't understand that 'race to the bottom' means 'wasteful or mutually destructive competition'. Nuclear hawks aren't competing, they are cooperating with mining corporations who provide the Uranium for H-bombs. What Roy meant was our destruction was assured whether it came to us from nuclear annihilation or environmental collapse.
Meanwhile, for light entertainment, let’s all fight about what gods to pray to, what flags to wave, what songs to sing. In case I’ve left you feeling dejected, let me read you an email I wrote in response to a member of the audience who criticised me (gently) for sounding overly optimistic when I spoke in memory of Gauri Lankesh:
Lankesh was for separating Lingayats from Veerashaivas. This may have been important for Karnataka politics but it is of zero significance to anyone else.
If we have no hope, let’s all sit down and give up. There are millions of excellent reasons for us to be pessimistic. That’s why I suggested we should divorce Hope from Reason.
There was never any such marriage.
Hope should be wild, irrational and unreasonable.
It should suck off homeless dudes in the hope that they may be Lenin or the King of Spain or Kermit the Frog from the Muppets.
In every line I write, every word I speak, what I’m really saying is, We are not Zero. You haven’t defeated us.
You are zero from the point of view of any anti-Indian force which isn't counter-productive. You won't be attacked and thus can't be defeated. You can be chided or ignored. That is all.
For millions in the world with their backs to the wall, these debates about hope and despair are a luxury.
Roy is being paid to provide a luxury good.
Even here, underneath the reek of wealth in the city of London, a visitor can sense a sort of tense, vibrating unease, like the rumble beneath your feet as a train approaches the platform.
Especially here. London genuinely is wealthy. India, for the most part, genuinely is as poor as shit.
None of this will matter in the event of a nuclear war. That will simply end us. It’s time for the two sides to step back. And for the rest of the world to step in. Armageddon doesn’t contain a clause for second chances.
Armageddon is the prequel to the Second Coming. Roy truly is as ignorant of Christianity as of Hinduism as of Economics and as of almost everything else. Still, to pair this creinous has-been with the memory of Stuart Hall is a splendid way to put that uppity intellectual in his place- which, to be clear, is the grave. Meanwhile people will still be listening to Bob Marley long after Hall and Roy are forgotten.
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