Useless University Departments were considered a good place to dump darkies so they could pursue 'Grievance Studies'. This was deeply racist. The fact is Western democracy can learn much from the ancient monarchy of Wakanda.
As a case in point, Priya Satia has an article in Foreign Policy Magazine titled 'Democracy Isn’t Just About Voting- Precolonial kingdoms challenge our beliefs about people power and monarchies.'
The fact is, dynastic Kings can enter the dimension of the ancestral sprits so as to commune with elemental forces and thus gain a type of democratic legitimacy, not to mention kick-ass super-powers denied to run of the mill Presidents of Republics- even if named Obama- who, sadly, don't have any such capabilities. Still, Biden could at least have gender reassignment surgery to show he is serious about holding the Patriarchy accountable to Queer theory's discursive practices.
For Americans who rebelled against Britain’s King George III in 1775, monarchy was another name for tyranny
No. Their rallying cry was 'no taxation without representation'. In other words, only their own Parliament could impose a tax on them. George III- who, having been born in England, had more influence than his Hanoverian predecessors- was blamed for this.
—by definition, incompatible with democracy.
No. A constitutional monarchy could be a democracy. The King might reign, not rule.
This view of Britain softened over the next centuries, as many Americans drew inspiration from the British empire’s “civilizing mission” in regions suffering under “oriental” and other despotisms.
America preferred to wipe out indigenous people and transport them as slaves. Nobody gave a toss about 'civilizing missions'. Only money mattered. Some Americans did make fortunes in India- Elihu Yale and 'the King of the Hazaras' who later fought in the Civil War. Americans complained about the British Navigation Acts keeping them out of lucrative markets. These were economic grievances. It wasn't the case that all White peeps admired some small subset of White peeps who were civilizing, or failing to civilize, Priya's ancestors.
During the Cold War especially, they saw Britain as a vital partner in a contest against Soviet tyranny,
but the Americans supported independence movements in British colonies. Eisenhower put the kybosh on Eden's Suez adventure. Nixon was greatly impressed with Tom Mboya. Britain needed the US much more than the other way around. De Gaulle, having got out of Algeria, stood up to the US. In particular, the French took exception to 'exorbitant privilege'. But that was an economic grievance.
tolerating its monarchy as a quaint vestige in a country otherwise committed to liberal democracy.
This is stupid shit. The Americans encouraged Franco to restore the Spanish monarchy. It simply isn't true that the Americans had some great prejudice against Kings. They didn't like the Tzar, but that was a different matter.
The bond sustained the U.S.-U.K. partnership in the subsequent war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq in the name of spreading democracy.
Blair was totes Dubya's bitch in that war because...urm...Iraq has lots of oil. Gulf War I had made a profit. The hope was that Gulf War II would be even more lucrative. But Gordon Brown cooled things with America. Instead, Sarkozy jumped in with both feet. Incidentally, America's biggest ally in the Arab world was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Prior to 9/11, the most influential diplomat in Washington was Prince Bandar.
But if Britain’s royals were perceived as benign ornaments, the death of Queen Elizabeth II last year launched a new global conversation about their role.
Nonsense! There was the Harry & Meghan fan club on the one hand and the Kate & William roadshow on the other. Every one has their favorite Windsor just as they have their favorite Kardashian.
In former colonies, such as Jamaica, where the British monarch remains the head of state, republican sentiment has gained strength.
But, nobody cares. The thing doesn't make any difference to anybody.
Historians have highlighted the monarchy’s role in slavery and imperialism and the origins of its hereditary wealth and jewels.
Shitty, Grievance Studies, Historians may have done so. But BLM is as dead as the fucking dodo. You don't see Kamala Harris whining about being black. A more pure blooded Tambram, Vivek Ramaswamy, is making a bid for the Presidency on the basis of 'anti-woke' ideology. Don Lemon lost his job when he tried to play the Race card against Vivek. Since the latter was visibly darker, the thing failed.
And revelations about the monarchy’s racist treatment of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, have fortified the old equation of monarchy with despotism.
Thinks nobody at all. Prince Harry clearly has beef with big brother. But that beef is financial. We now understand that Prince Andrew- the King's younger brother- only gets about 250,000 quid a year. The Prince of Wales revenues are probably a hundred times that.
In a New York Times column about a Netflix documentary on the Sussexes, American writer Roxane Gay affirmed: “Monarchies are almost never benevolent, even if they have no political power. They are often upheld with one form of violence or another.”
The opinion of an LGBTQ academic of Haitian heritage are scarcely mainstream.
For Americans, monarchy is either ornamental or autocratic, never democratic.
Nothing wrong with seeing a constitutional monarch as ornamental.
Yet Americans are also concerned about the reality of democracy in their own republic.
No. They are concerned about money. Priya is only writing this shite because that's how she earns money.
They ask: Does the power to elect one’s rulers guarantee democracy?
Yes.
And can democratic republics holding regular elections become deeply coercive even as they fly the flag of liberty?
Yes. Democracies can fly any fucking flag they like. Jacksonian democracy was cool with slavery and genocide of indigenous people.
As it turns out, Americans’ narrow focus on voting has blinded them to other, more robust, forms of democratic expression practiced even in some monarchies in the past.
No such things existed. This silly lady is lying her head off.
Behind myths about foreign despotisms are lost kingdoms
Atlantis?
where monarchs were often actively accountable to the ruled.
Coz Atlanteans can talk to fish who, let me tell you, tend to be into accountability and actuarial science big time.
Britons, like Americans, like to believe they invented and settled on ideal democratic practices centuries ago,
No. We only got universal adult suffrage a century ago. Indeed, Sri Lanka, in 1931, had a more egalitarian franchise than Britain. Still, we weren't as shitty as France which only gave women the vote after 1945.
merely expanding them to include groups such as women and nonwhite people who had originally been left out.
Britain never excluded 'non-white people'. Indeed, they were welcome to become Members of Parliament.
Theirs was a monarchy that evolved to heed the will of the people. But in reality, the practices they settled on have routinely sidelined the people’s will.
A good thing. The people's will tends to be shitty.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 turned Britain into a constitutional monarchy in which supreme legislative power resided with Parliament.
No. William was a military leader. It wasn't till the Hanoverians came in that one can speak of the Crown in Parliament as being dominated by the latter. But 'Farmer George' was reasserting his authority till he went mad and started talking to trees. Even the Regent had his supporters but he fucked up so massively that the power of the Crown declined. Still, it wasn't till Victoria came to the throne that the monarch ceased to choose the Prime Minister. This was because Victoria didn't have a dick and, anyway, the Great Reform Bill had been passed.
Parliament had curbed kingly authority, but not in the name of democracy:
this stupid woman doesn't get that democracy just meant the supremacy of the Commons. The ancient Greeks hadn't given votes to metics, slaves, etc.
It also usurped the common rights of ordinary Britons, as the aristocrats who controlled Parliament used it to pass thousands of “enclosure acts” transforming common lands into their private property.
Which is why England didn't turn into a Malthusian shithole like Ireland. There is such a thing as a 'Tragedy of the Commons'.
The right to vote for parliamentary representation was itself based on property ownership.
Not in some constituencies prior to 1832.
Over the next century, popular movements emerged against this monopoly of state power—the oligarchic entanglement of the landed elite and imperial state that the radical reformer William Cobbett dubbed “the THING.”
Cobbett failed. The principle that parliamentary representation should align with economic power is what triumphed in 1832 in England and France. America, it is true, took a Jacksonian path- i.e. killed injuns and lynched niggers.
Those who had lost common rights and lacked the right to vote had recourse to extraparliamentary modes of expressing their political will: petitions and pamphleteering enabled by radical printers, but also marches and mass meetings—in a word, crowd politics.
Which failed. General Napier- conqueror of Sindh- showed the 'Physical Force' Chartists his canons. He could blow them to kingdom come. Physical Force was precisely what they Chartists didn't have. Radicals like Cobden & Bright succeeded in getting rid of the Corn Laws because Free Trade, at that time, was advantageous to a Britain that was rapidly industrializing. Economics trumped Agitprop.
In such activities they drew on utopian forms of popular Christianity and radical libertarian language about the rights of freeborn Englishmen.
They crashed and burned. Once the workers were enfranchised, they tended to vote Tory or Unionist. It took the great convulsion of the First World War to open a path to power for Labor- which turned out to be more fiscally responsible than Aristos like Churchill. Methodism, not Marxism, triumphed in 1945 but precisely for that reason, Labor was able to see that Markets weren't evil. By the Fifties, Britain had a 'Butskellite' consensus.
Many of them advocated for an expanded franchise, hoping that it would afford ordinary people political leverage in a rapidly changing society.
Yet, the dominant personality of the Thirties was Stanley Baldwin who pretended that what he really wanted to do was be a pig farmer. He claimed that his one great political achievement was to reverse the ratio of Etonians to Harrowvians in the Cabinet. No wonder, Orwell- an Etonian- lost his shit.
Finally, with the Reform Act of 1832, the bar for property ownership shifted to allow some middle-class Britons to vote. Limited as this reform was, it was the first evolution of the franchise and suggested that others might follow—that, gradually, Britain might become a democratic constitutional monarchy.
The Reform Act was about giving increasing representation to industrial constituencies. But this meant Poor Law Reform such that 'eligibility' became more stringent. Essentially, the Work House became more fucking horrible than ever. This was why Oliver Twist was always clamoring for more gruel.
The hugely popular working-class Chartist movement that erupted in the 1830s
failed completely
patiently petitioned Parliament for the vote against an ominous backdrop of riots and strikes in an era of European revolution. Women’s suffrage movements emerged, too.
Working class men didn't want women to vote. Sad.
The racial distinction of these subjects of the Crown from the millions of other riotous subjects around the empire abetted their success.
They failed completely. There were no 'riotous subjects' elsewhere. Britain was able to make settler colonies self-garrisoning and self-governing by about the end of the Civil War.
In the mid-19th century, Britain crushed a series of colonial rebellions, sharpening the division between white and nonwhite subjects.
In Jamaica, an Australian who had been appointed Governor, did take some illegal measures. That's true enough. But, people like Kamala Harris's paternal ancestors had mixed feelings about Paul Bogle- the Baptist preacher who played the biggest part in the uprising in one particular parish.
Just two years after a Jamaican uprising was brutally suppressed in 1865, working-class British men who were seen to have proven their “respectability”—with permanent addresses, sobriety, and savings accounts—were given the vote.
There was zero connection between these two events. Disraeli, in 1859, had tried to push through a reform act believing this would help the Tories. Lord George Russell also tried in 1860. But Palmerston refused to countenance any such thing. Thus the thing was only possible after he died. The American Civil War- the first truly modern 'total war'- did change things. Essentially, it showed that the military power of a nation depends on its citizens' willingness to fight. Manhood suffrage was inevitable because in the event of total war, there had to be a levee en masse. The Prussians had grasped this. It was Bismark's decision to outflank the Liberals by allying with workers which was to drive progress to 'social democracy' despite spirited opposition put up by the likes of Herbert Spencer.
Meanwhile, Jamaica—where the minority white population had formerly ruled through a local assembly—reverted to direct British rule as a Crown colony, as security against the majority-Black population.
The plain fact is, Whites couldn't compete with Blacks on a level playing field. What can I say? African genes are simply superior. That's why Grievance Studies is needed to dumb down darkies.
Further expansion of Britain’s property-based franchise followed in 1884.
This did make an immediate difference in the highlands of Scotland which meant that the Irish Catholic middle class too had to take a more radical direction.
This narrative of expanding enfranchisement looks like a story of progressive democratization, at least for white men. But in important ways, it also reduced democratic participation in British politics.
Nonsense!
As historians such as James Vernon have shown, political energies became focused on voting and elections,
which they had been in the days of John Wilkes
guided by an establishment print culture.
which had existed in the days of Cromwell. Political energy decreased continually because people could rise up economically or, if they couldn't, could drown their sorrows in cheap gin. Also, emigration was a great safety valve.
Privatized and institutionalized politics based on organized parties and secret balloting at times overtook more radically democratic, extra-parliamentary forms of expression.
People stopped doing stupid shite because the 'opportunity cost' had increased. You could make money or emigrate and make even more money instead of listening to ranters and running amok. The other point is that the Brits were really good at shooting or transporting nutters. This is because the property owners were highly solvent and could finance such things. Still, compromise was often cheaper and better for the economy.
Political space shrunk;
People stopped listening to crazy ranters coz they had better things to do.
class solidarities fractured.
Though such 'class solidarity' tended to involve killing Catholics or smashing machines.
Women, once central to the informal politics of public spaces, were increasingly excluded from the associations of a more formally organized male social body.
Very true. They were forced to sleep outside in kennels. Queen Victoria was often whipped savagely by Gladstone.
Meanwhile, the monarchy acquired an important cultural function, becoming increasingly revered by and dear to Britons from the 1870s on.
Why? Darwin's theories had weakened the Church. That left the Crown as a secular symbol nobody cared enough about to actively hate.
Even at the time, the constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey
a Liberal Unionist alarmed by Gladstone's Irish policy. He only turned to Referendums as a device to prevent Irish Home Rule which he believed the English voter would roundly reject. The basic problem was that Dicey believed that the Lords had become pusillanimous and would not protect the Constitution.
perceived that the expanded franchise had reduced democracy by reposing power in the hands of a party machine.
He was concerned with the Constitution. Also, lets face it, he just didn't want Catholic Ireland to go its own way.
His proposed solution was to double down on voting by having people vote directly on certain issues via referendum (the mechanism through which Brexit has become a reality).
Only if the outcome was what he wanted. David Cameron made the same mistake.
After World War I, though service to the nation became the new basis of enfranchisement, allowing unpropertied men over age 21 and women over age 30 to vote, it became increasingly clear that the British state would smother democratic desires that ran counter to its interests.
Very true. The democratic desire to run amok was indeed smothered. But this was because voters didn't have democratic desires. They wanted more cool shiny stuff.
Having suffered profound loss, Britons were determined to assert democratic control over foreign policy to ensure their government did not embroil them in avoidable conflicts going forward.
No. The State was swinging 'Geddes axe' to cut the military budget and restore pre-war standards of living. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff gave a talk explaining that Britain didn't have the military resources to keep India, the MENA, or even Ireland. Indeed, the Army would be hard put to suppress a Bolshevik revolution. That's why during the General Strike a large number of the upper middle class enrolled as 'Special Constables' under the command of crazy Lesbians. Thankfully, both the Tories nor the Trade Unions wanted to see the backs of these demented dykes and so a compromise was made. But this did mean that Britain would have to take the path of appeasement.
But the state found means to evade them, drawing on practices developed during the war, including propaganda, censorship, and discreet aerial forms of warfare abroad.
This is silly. Brits were cool with TE Lawrence or Bomber Harris bombing the shit out of savage tribes. Indeed, Maulana Azad hints to us, Nehru's ending of aerial bombardment of North Waziristan was one reason why the Khan Brothers administration in NWFP collapsed. Incidentally, bombing Wahabbi raiders saved Iraq in 1919.
With such tactics, the British state sought to pursue its interests free from the check of Britons skeptical about the benefits of war and colonialism.
Quite false. The Secretary of State concerned was perfectly happy to give details of such operations- emphasizing their effectiveness (i.e. lots of wogs were killed) because it increased confidence in Financial Markets. Brigadier Dyer boasted of machine gunning Indians and was given a very handsome reward for it.
Many citizens realized their shrinking leverage over the state.
No. Citizens realized that if you went up to a bunch of navvies and started lecturing them on the vast number of fuzzy wuzzies being killed by some Brigadier, them guys would take up a collection for him and vote Tory at the next election. Priya doesn't get that the War on Terror was popular when Americans thought lots of rag-heads were being killed or sexually tortured. What they didn't like was Marines being killed by suicide bombers. But people only soured on that war of revenge when it turned out it meant higher taxes and higher oil prices. Killing furriners is cool only if it makes a profit. Otherwise, they must be encouraged to kill each other at their own expense.
In 1921, in support of questioning by radical members of Parliament, a Times editorial called the government’s expansionist policy in Iraq the greatest departure from parliamentary oversight “since the days of the Stuart Kings” in the 17th century.
So what? Journalists say the darnedest things. What worried people was that the Bolsheviks had established a Kurdish Soviet and the White's were losing to the Reds without Britain being able to do very much about it. Ataturk, in Anatolia, was kicking ass. The Commonwealth Premiers were pissed off. There would be no more Gallipolis. Lloyd George would fall by the end of the next year.
A month later, the paper endorsed Lord Islington’s letter warning that the old Crown vs. Parliament conflict had revived in the guise of a battle “between the nation and the Executive”—a view echoed by numerous supportive readers.
Lloyd George had overreached himself. Mesopotamia could turn into a money-pit. (It didn't, but French Syria did). The Greeks weren't strong enough to keep Smyrna. Worst of all, there was sympathy for the Bolsheviks amongst the working class. Nobody liked the Whites whom Britain was supporting. Geddes axe meant that foreign and colonial policy had to change. The bigger problem was that the world had changed and nobody really knew what Britain's role in that world would be. Indeed, one might say, this era only ended with either Macmillan's 'winds of change' speech or Wilson's 'East of Suez' policy.
Many Britons, like the denizens of nominally independent colonies such as Iraq and Egypt, became doubtful about government claims, ever suspicious of a hidden hand defying democratic writ.
In Iran, that paranoia continued to exist- indeed, it is something of a joke.
From the 1950s to 1980s, British critics concerned about the activities of the “secret state”—the “new Thing” disempowering ordinary Britons (as the historian and activist E. P. Thompson styled it)—looked to 18th-century traditions of democratic protest to assemble popular movements in support of nuclear disarmament and civil liberties.
Nobody in England gave a shit about these guys. Some Bengalis liked Thompson though they had resented his daddy. CND was an abject failure. Greenham Common, however, was cool. But the dykes remained even after the missiles disappeared.
Being a republic did not immunize the U.S. government against similarly engaging in covert activities to evade the check of public opinion while also bolstering antidemocratic regimes abroad.
The CIA was totes cool in the Fifties and Sixties. Then people realized it was stupid and useless. Just fucking kill Castro already. Also, fuck is MK-ULTRA? Men staring at goats? Admiral Turner's purge got rid of that sort of monkey-shines.
In 1953, for instance, Britain and the United States jointly undertook an operation to displace Iran’s popularly elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh,
who had managed to gain some sympathy in New York. Still, he was a fool. Prof. Zaehner, Spaulding Professor of Ethics, toppled him in a manner not just suave but witty. Kim Roosevelt distributed money. He genuinely loved Persian literature and civilization.
who was pushing back against Britain’s influence in the country and working to increase the power of Iran’s parliament vis-à-vis its monarchy. The United States then supported the Iranian monarchy’s transformation into a truly authoritarian government.
Iran either has authoritarian government or is a famine stricken anarchy. The Shah's big mistake was the 'White Revolution'- i.e. land reform. The silly man was too Lefty. He should have tried to emulate the Saudi monarchy.
These covert capacities have stymied U.S. presidents who promise to heed Americans’ antiwar desires and end the war on terror.
No. What stymies US presidents is vested financial interests including those of Media moguls and guys who make a lot of money when oil prices rise.
Drone operations in Asia and Africa increased under then-President Barack Obama, who was just “one man on top of a huge national security establishment,” in the words of antiwar lawyer Michael Ratner.
Obama also kidnapped and killed Osama. Voters liked that. Sadly the Benghazi attack seems to have harmed Hilary.
To shield his failure to end the war,
he extended it. He blames Cameron and Sarkozy for this.
Obama enveloped it in even greater secrecy.
What an American President should do is tweet details of all America's military and security and intelligence plans and personnel so that terrorists can kill Americans more easily. How can we call our country a democracy if we are not actively helping our enemies to kill our people? In a sense, a democracy which choses as its King an enemy agent is much more truly democratic and responsive to the will of the people. This is because the great mass of citizens hate their own country and want to see it go up in flames.
The involvement of agencies such as the CIA strove to keep it out of American sight
Sadly, if you have over a million low IQ grunts with access to top secrets, everything is going to end up on Wikileaks or even some online game chat group.
and out of American minds, rendering assent irrelevant.
Fuck assent. Just make us rich already. Fuck. That's an argument for voting for Vivek Ramaswamy.
The United States may be a democratic republic, but it is one in thrall to a state whose institutional inertia makes it deeply antidemocratic
in the opinion of a cretin who teaches stupid shite
—partly because of imperial priorities strikingly similar to those nurtured by Britain’s monarchical state.
Which has a nice Hindu Punjabi boy as its PM. King Charles puts on black-face to make him feel more at home.
OMG! I now get what Priya is really saying. The US should make Charley its King. Then Rishi will be ruling over Amrika! How changa would that be?
If modern constitutional monarchies and republics are liable to evade the check of democratic opinion, older monarchies at times proved more accountable to it.
I suppose Priya means older monarchies were more sensitive to the mood of the yokels and the menials because they lived cheek by jowl with them. What they wanted was to kill foreigners and take their cool shiny stuff.
Indeed, the crowd politics that are often a powerful vehicle of democratic expression depend on a dynamic of reciprocity between rulers and ruled that has been at the core of past monarchical polities.
Where? Tzarist Russia? Bourbon France? Germany under the Kaiser? No. Priya means the Manchu Emperor and the Ottoman Caliph.
In many monarchies of precolonial India, risk-sharing between ruler and ruled offered insurance against famine.
No. India like China had very big famines. The Brits reduced excess mortality and finally ended the thing altogether but the transition to Democracy meant they reappeared, at least in East Bengal. Still, it is true that famine is bad for landowners who should club together to keep their workforce together and thus prevent a fall in rents.
Revenue payments were a share of the harvest
which still means starvation if there is a negative supply shock.
rather than pegged at fixed rates; rulers maintained grain stores for times of need.
So do speculators. Arbitrage is a good thing. Preventing excess mortality is good for business.
As historians such as Ravi Ahuja and Prasannan Parthasarathi have shown, this paternalism arose not out of monarchical benevolence but in response to ordinary people’s demands, which acquired potency through the threat that they might otherwise seize grain by force or withdraw their labor from—and thus their consent in—the regime.
If the regime collapses you get an invasion. Things might get worse as the foreigners start enslaving you and grabbing your cool, shiny, stuff.
Political elites had an interest in performing charitable acts that shored up their status.
Merchants and landlords had this same interest but even more strongly. If the labor force contracts, rents and profits decline. However, real interest rates might rise.
Creative democratic visions fortified some polities. As historian Priya Atwal has shown, the Sikh kingdom in Punjab was the product of marital alliances between clans and thus depended on a sense of common destiny.
But there were and are 'martial alliances between clans' even without there being any kingdom or sense of common destiny. Sikh power was established by Sikh military prowess. Martial qualities not matrimonial alliances mattered back then. Plenty of priestly or mercantile families have complicated marriage alliances. But they don't rule shit.
Still, in some parts of Britain, marriages were arranged to put an end to feuds. Viceroy Dufferin's marriage in 1862 had this aspect. The Scottish aristocracy has long memories.
Sikh political thought further ensured that Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingly authority depended on partnership with the Sikh Khalsa Army, which was infused with an ethos of collective kingship.
What happened to that ethos? The plain fact is Ranjit's military genius was of no common order. But, he was also a superb manager of people. Still, it is a fact that the Sikhs were just great at cultivating the land and rising in commerce or the professions as they were good at fighting. The Brits were careful to nurture and cultivate the Sikh ethos though, sadly, the plan to resettle Sikhs in Canada met opposition from the Whites there.
Despite this dynamic and relatively functional political culture, the British saw the Indian subcontinent as mired in so-called oriental despotism,
Whereas the truth is most parts of India were ruled by LGBTQ anarcho-syndicalist Soviets. Also, most Indians were from Norway
a backward form of rule in need of eradication by Europeans bearing the wisdom of Western liberal democracy—albeit holding off on bestowing it until South Asians became supposedly fit for it.
The truth is India was not backward at all. It was on a par with the Kingdom of Wakanda. That is why the Indian could easily defeat European Armies and Navies. Sadly some mean Professor told the Indians that they were backward and Oriental. That is why India became a colony.
Meanwhile, British commitment to liberal political economy wreaked havoc on the reciprocal relations that had sustained Indian governance.
Indian governance was so great that any small bunch of European merchant adventurers could take over large swathes of the country yielding rich revenues. On the other hand it is true that the LGBTQ collective which ran Punjab had to give up reciprocal fisting when Queen Victoria signaled she was so not amused.
Where they ruled, the British adopted a policy of non-interference in times of dearth.
Then they discovered this meant loss of revenue. They had to do the sensible thing. That's how enlightened self-interest works. Nehru, on the other hand, thought India should be fed by America which should also give lots of 'free money' coz Whitey said mean things
Laborers lost other means of empowerment
I suppose she means thugee, pindari and other forms of 'social banditry'
as colonial economic priorities transformed the environment. The power to withdraw labor,
i.e. to either starve or become a bandit
the very mobility of the poor, became a particular bogey to a colonial state
No. The Brits were cool with landowners bringing in cheap labor from tribal areas- e.g. the Chota Nagpur plateau. Their own plantations did so including those in the West Indies, Fiji etc. Empires, from the time of the Assyrians, have been about encouraging mobility. The Brits made investment in agricultural land safe and increasingly (because of population growth, for a Ricardian reason) profitable. This in turn made being a barrister very profitable. Sadly those barristocrats turned seditious and screwed over vast numbers of people who had grown complacent under Pax Britannica. Some of those worst affected ended up immigrating to Britain.
determined to discipline the society it was governing, sparking the invention of concentration camps to detain famine victims.
To feed them. They might think they'd be better off trying their own luck away from the camp, but they would be wrong.
The empire’s minions affirmed that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement”—as East India Company bureaucrat and philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1859 essay “On Liberty.”
He was a minion of a Commercial Company not of the Empire.
In many cases, these transformations occurred while Indian elites remained nominally in power.
But they also happened in England where English elites remained nominally in power. In fact everything happens when some elite or the other is nominally in charge.
But even kingdoms that withstood the encroaching British threat saw major change that ultimately sealed their fate. The influence of British patriarchal norms in the Sikh kingdom,
Punjab was ruled by LGBTQXYZ activists
for instance, triggered questioning of women’s involvement in Sikh rule (which the British contrasted to the more discreet, symbolic, matriarchal role of their own queen, Victoria), dooming the last Sikh queen Rani Jindan’s bid to defy British conquest in the 1840s.
If only the Sikhs hadn't questioned 'women's involvement in Sikh rule' they would surely have prevailed. Furthermore, if they had fully embraced a transgender identity, they would have conquered Delhi. Now, if only they had granted equal rights to animals and plants, they would rule over the Universe.
Some states, such as Tipu Sultan’s Mysore, became intensely autocratic in the course of transforming into fiscal-military states along European lines in order to resist the British.
Mysore didn't want a Muslim ruler. Equally, Muslims in Punjab and Peshawar didn't really want Sikhs to rule over them. As for 'fiscal-military' states, either you have some such thing or you get conquered. Sad.
The creation of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir as part of the unraveling of the Sikh empire exemplifies the way British colonialism undermined democratic checks
which didn't exist then and which don't exist now
on Indian monarchy. In 1808, Ranjit Singh, the maharaja of the Sikh empire, annexed Jammu to his kingdom. But he soon co-opted Jammu’s Dogra Rajput rulers into his own administrative structure, making Kishore Singh (followed soon after by Kishore’s son Gulab Singh) the raja of Jammu under Sikh rule—another instance of the Sikh kingdom’s reliance on partnership among powerful chieftains and its complex conception of sovereignty.
Dogras were good fighters. Under capable leadership they too would have had an expansionist kingdom just like the Gurkhas of Nepal
Gulab Singh was given taxation rights over lands in Punjab, too, and emerged a powerful figure in the Sikh court.
Because of lack of democratic checks. Also LGBTQ activists were not properly insisting on transparency and accountability. Same thing happened under Obama when Hilary emerged as a powerful figure.
Gulab Singh expanded the empire into Kashmir (then under Afghan rule); his nephew was the empire’s prime minister. Eventually, this Dogra dynasty nurtured ambitions to ascend the Sikh throne themselves, attempting a coup in 1843 and extracting much of the kingdom’s treasury to Jammu. Finally, they colluded with the British conquest of the Sikh kingdom;
The truth is that the Afghans and Muslim Punjabis would have taken control back from the Sikhs had the Brits not intervened. That's why Sikhs became loyalists.
and in 1846, the British rewarded them by selling them a new, separate kingdom of “Jammu and Kashmir.” It was the largest “princely state” (that is, territory that the British ruled indirectly through a local monarch) in the subcontinent.
It was a shithole. The avaricious Dogra may have been bad, but the Afghans had been worse.
Such commodification of sovereignty was integral to the functioning and expansion of British colonialism, as historian Steven Press has shown,
Fuck off! The Brits didn't commodify sovereignty and sell themselves to the highest bidder. It is a different matter that the East India Company- like its predecessors in the sub-continent could sell off Diwanis or whole Kingdoms. Indeed, the Durrani Afghans had initially put Kashmir under a Hindu who rebelled. After he was defeated Kashmir's worst days began. The Sikh invasion was initially welcomed but proved little better. If only J&K had come under direct British rule, it could have progressed greatly. The people are smart and industrious.
and radically altered the process of monarchical legitimation.
Monarchs became legitimate by killing anybody who might want the crown- more especially if they were blood relatives.
The fateful Dogra-British deal is the root of Kashmir’s misery:
Because the Brits invented jihadi Islam- right?
As historian Mridu Rai has written, British backing enabled Dogra rulers to impose a highly personalized and decisively Hindu sovereignty over the majority Muslim population of Kashmir,
which is fond of killing Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. Some British backed Dogra prevented this for about a century. How deeply unfair! A proper LGBTQ anarcho-monarchy would have encouraged kaffirs to kill themselves after handing over their daughters for rape.
“erasing earlier traditions of layered authority shared simultaneously by various levels of Kashmiri society.”
No such thing existed under Afghan rule.
In 1947, the Dogra king acceded the state of Jammu and Kashmir to independent India,
because Muslims invaded just as they had done during the Second Round Table Conference.
without the assent—or any effort to secure the assent—of the Kashmiri population. His rule had never depended on local assent, but instead on British support.
Sadly, rule which depended on 'local assent' was always so much shittier that the place got invaded and the locals were enslaved.
All this is not to say that Indian monarchies and empires were utopic before British intervention, but that there were rich political cultures in place to hold monarchs accountable when they became extractive or oppressive.
Not in Punjab or J&K (or anywhere else). Either a monarch kicked ass or Afghans or Sikhs or Marathas or Pindaris invaded- unless of course the people had given up any type of productive work and taken to cannibalism.
This moral purchase explains why Indian monarchs proved such compelling and influential leaders in the massive rebellion against British rule in 1857.
No. Sikh Princes were enthusiastic allies of the Brits as were several other serene Highnesses. The Mughal Emperor was useless. Some Maharshtrian Brahmins- including the Rani of Jhansi- were effective but they were not monarchs. Even the Rani was only a regent.
Indeed, realizing these monarchs’ enduring claims on Indian loyalty, the British resolved to make better use of them after that rebellion. After 1858, areas that had been governed directly by the East India Company came under Crown rule. But further British expansion would take the form of indirect rule through local rulers, these so-called princely states comprising roughly 40 percent of British territory in the subcontinent. Rulers submitted to treaty relationships with the British in India, paying a subsidy
or receiving one if too poor
and ceding control of foreign policy in exchange for protection from internal risings and external threats. The states’ deepening indebtedness to the British effectively signed away considerable control over internal affairs, too.
A good thing. Still, as Mahatma Gandhi pointed out the main recreation of the Princes was raping and robbing their own subjects.
Though Indian monarchy survived, these colonial arrangements disempowered ordinary people.
In particular LGBTQ collectives lost their power to hold elected politicians to account. Under the Moghuls, lesbian auditors would frequently force the Grand Vizier to fist himself vigorously so as to demonstrate that he hadn't hidden any embezzled money up his prison purse.
Propped up by the British, monarchs no longer had to accede to their subjects’ demands,
Previously, the Nizam would perform Hindu ceremonies at the behest of the Hindu majority amongst his subjects.
and Indian monarchy acquired a new authoritarian style.
Previously, when they executed people or conducted massacres, they did so in a democratic and egalitarian style.
Meanwhile, British officials continued to propagate the idea that India’s princely rulers were corrupt, petty despots
which they were
to justify continual interventions in their realms
e.g. preventing a Prince killing his relatives or robbing and raping his subjects
—a stereotype that haunts historical understanding of them today.
because the truth has that unfortunate habit.
In Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, the British likewise partnered with chiefs, princes, and pashas against anti-colonial elements.
No. Princes- e.g. the Gaekwad- often allied with 'anti-colonial' elements. Sometimes this was because Princes were patriots. At other times, it was a strategic move so as to increase their own power.
The resolutions of the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, which sought an end to colonial rule, spelled it out: “The democratic nature of the indigenous institutions of the peoples … has been … replaced by autocratic systems of Government.”
This was a fantasy but not laugh out aloud funny at that time. However, it soon would be. Wealthy Ghanaians soon regretted bringing Nkurmah back to take over from the Brits.
It is difficult to generalize about these myriad precolonial states, as their histories are locally rooted. In South Asia, the Gandhian movement sought to recover the democratic precolonial culture of the panchayat, or village councils,
which Ambedkar opposed coz village panchayats were shitty
but we have yet to fully grasp or redeem other political customs and possibilities nurtured in states the British taught the world to think of as stagnant and dissolute backwaters.
Nobody was interested in anything the Brits taught once they fell behind Germany and America.
Yet doing so allows us to recognize, as economist and philosopher Amartya Sen did decades ago, that democratic practice is not limited to elections as invented by the West.
And yet India is sticking with the type of election invented by the West. Sen isn't prancing around in a dhoti. He wears tweed jackets and teaches at Harvard.
Indeed, a too-narrow preoccupation with elections has caused many societies, especially Western ones, to devalue forms of public deliberation and collective action essential to security against oppression.
Very true. Why does Rishi Sunak not attend meetings of the LGTQWYZ collective? How come he is not vigorously fisting himself in solidarity with disabled goats in Guatemala? How can gain security from oppression when Biden obstinately refuses to have gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday?
In drawing attention to monarchies’ possible responsiveness to democratic will,
e.g. in the Kingdom of Wakanda.
my aim is not to encourage a turn to monarchy, but to
babble nonsense so as to qualify for further affirmative action. Basically, this broad is pretending her ancestors suffered worse things at the hands of Whitey than African American slaves or the autochthones of the Americas.
discourage a too-easy equation of a voting republic with democracy—an equation that Americans arrived at through the influence of British colonial thought.
No. America was an actual voting republic. After the Civil War, the Brits extended the franchise in a Jacksonian manner. British colonial thought didn't matter to any one.
The British idea of oriental despotism was
true. The question was whether the Sublime Porte could reform itself and go on the offensive. The answer was no. The 'sick man of Europe' would get sicker. What was surprising was that the Young Turks worsened things. Then came Ataturk who imposed the Roman script and who got rid of the Fez. Turkey was no longer Oriental. After the War it even became somewhat democratic.
a self-serving myth that stoked misunderstanding of precolonial monarchies and forgetting about cultures of common rights and collective action in Western societies.
The misunderstandings of stupid, powerless, people didn't matter in the slightest. When stupid, powerful, people misunderstood something, lots of blood and treasure was lost and finally those stupid people lost power or their memory was consigned to obloquy.
Gay is right that monarchies are upheld by violence,
but violence is upheld by economics. Killing people costs money.
but so too are the states of many republics—especially those harboring imperial agendas of eradicating “despotism” elsewhere.
But they stop harboring such agendas when it proves too costly in blood and treasure. In the end, only economics matters.
Questioning our assumptions about monarchy as the “other” of democracy
is silly. Plenty of monarchies are democratic. But they could as easily be Fascist or Socialist.
helps us reflect on what real democracy entails.
Priya is too stupid and ignorant to reflect on anything.
Democracy is not the endpoint of a process of political evolution from an original state of anarchy or tyranny; it is the continual collective struggle for liberation in every kind of polity.
Nope. It's just a name given to a particular type of political arrangement. The thing has no essence or magical power.
“Democracy is not a settled state, but a shifting expression of collective will,” one British journalist reflected in the Guardian after the massive 2019 march against Brexit.
An utterly meaningless observation. If a collective will exists then its expression will shift from time to time irrespective of the form of government.
This is the culture that drove and was nurtured among the Indian farmers who joined what was likely the largest protest in history in 2020-21.
Few Indian farmers participated. They wanted a rent-strike but that wasn't on the table.
It is a culture of empowered political agency, a sense of the sovereignty of every human being.
It is stupid shite. Ukraine shows that 'empowered political agency' only exists if people will pick up guns or brew up Molotov cocktails to reclaim sovereign territory from an invader.
This is what anti-colonialism was fundamentally about:
talking bollocks while the guys paying for the bollocks-talkers improved their economic position- unless the opposite happened coz they were as stupid as shit.
rediscovering personal sovereignty.
Personal sovereignty is not enough. We must decolonize our colons by granting independence to our intestines and assholes. Let them go where they will shitting on the heads of stupid Professors.
For thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, swaraj (self-rule) was about
sleeping naked with his grand-nieces so as to gain superpowers
unlearning capitalism and colonialism’s denial of mutual obligation to become, once again, an ethical being:
This involved taking plenty of money from Birla and Bajaj and Sarabhai and so forth
“It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves,” Gandhi wrote, echoing thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy. “It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands.”
So long as his dick wasn't in the palm of his hands, we didn't object too much.
Anti-colonialism’s objective was an “enlightened anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler.”
and grant independence to his own asshole so it could shit on his own head.
The goal of human life is
not to fucking die- at least not immediately
self-rule—each of us monarchs unto ourselves.
Why stop there? Why can't we be Popes unto ourselves? Also we can be our own rape counsellors if by chance we happen to sexually assault ourselves. The problem here is that we might become our own Professors and award ourselves PhDs in every subject under the Sun.
This is a cultural ideal that resonates even with Americans who, despite their allegiance to a republic, embrace stories about fairy-tale queens and princes as vehicles for working out ethical ideals.
Also, as a vehicle for porn. You should see what Prince Harry does to Prince William behind the pay-wall of the Buggers of Buckingham Palace website.
It is the radical libertarianism that animated the 18th-century English working classes
had actually existed there would have been no fucking England in the Nineteenth Century. The place would have been called La France d'outre-Manche
and the mutually committed members of the Khalsa Army.
why not mention the Khalistani Army? They are certainly fit to be committed.
As we continue to wrestle with the legacies of colonialism, it remains a democratic vision to which we might aspire, together.
Satya will take over 'Waris de Punjab' to restore the rule of LGTQWXYZ coalition in a revived Khalitan. The sad thing is she might do a better job of things than the clowns currently running things there.
Meanwhile, I aspire to watch the latest Marvel offering re. Wakanda on the Disney Channel. Western Democracy will never be the same again.
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