In a conversation with Shruti Rajgopalan, the cretin Dinyar Patel says
There’s a particular moment in 1911 when Naoroji is very old, he talks about how the king and queen are coming to India for the durbar of 1911, and he says the best way to welcome the king and queen is to demand swaraj, which struck me as being this very odd moment. What is he talking about?
All the settler colonies had already become self-garrisoning and self-governing. Westminster was sick and tired of having to pass laws about 'peshkash' and 'taqavvi' for India. The King Emperor would have had no objection to sending one of his unemployable Uncles to preside as Governor General in Delhi.
Dinyar is too stupid to understand this.
Ultimately, I think one way that we can understand this— Well, I guess two ways — First, when we’re seated in the perspective of the late 19th century, any form of complete independence for India seems like a completely remote possibility.
Nonsense! Why should it not be self-garrisoning and self-governing? What mattered was that trade with UK should grown as should India's ability to contribute to Imperial defense. The last thing the British tax-payer wanted was a second Boer War in a territory with little gold or diamonds and where the climate was too horrible to permit any large scale White settlement.
People thought the British Empire would be around for hundreds of years.
The Commonwealth probably will be.
It was another Roman Empire that could last for millennia, so any idea of a complete separation from the British Empire was almost unthinkable.
India would still need the Royal Navy. Indeed, its Navy Chief remained British till about 1958.
It was so difficult to understand how that could be done.
No. Just do what the Canadians and Australians and even the South Africans had done.
The second idea is understanding what British rule meant to these particular individuals.
No. British direct rule meant that the Viceroy was answerable to the Secretary of State for India who was answerable to the British parliament. Ending British rule meant getting what the South Africans had got. The problem was that the Indians hated each other more than they hated the Brits.
So ultimately, towards the end of his life, what Naoroji thought about when he thought of British rule and the British Empire in general was some sort of loose connection with Great Britain, be it through economic relations, some loose cultural relations.
No. They thought of it as Dominion status. India would be expected to contribute to Imperial Defense.
It’s very similar to what later becomes this idea of a commonwealth.
It's Dominion status you fucking cretin. Retaining the King Emperor as head of state meant greater security for minorities or less populous regions. Even so, some States ma\y have preferred to remain out of the Federation. Newfoundland only joined Canada in 1949.
RAJAGOPALAN: What we think of as nationalism post-1930 and especially post-partition, it is more geographical.
It is religious. First Buddhist Burma went its own way. Ten years later the Muslim majority regions did so too. Nehru presided over massive ethnic cleansing.
So, it becomes a territorial kind of nationalism.
No. It was religious. Many Indian Muslims had to cross the border to get to live in their own 'pure' nation.
Now, if we think about nationalism post-2014 with the rise of the BJP and the influence of the BJP in Parliament and also some of the policies that have come about—like the National Register of Citizens
it was the Bench which mandated this for Assam. It also opened detention centers off its own bat. This happened under Manmohan.
and things like that—now it is not just territorial. It is also ethnic. It is also religious.
This stupid woman hasn't heard of a little place called Pakistan.
We use the word nationalism to describe all these different themes. So how do you think about that? Did you wonder about the choice of the word nationalism at all? Naoroji is really better described as a good governor than as a nationalist.
No. He was a nationalist just as Parnell was a nationalist. Naoroji was unusual in that he moved to the Left. But, being a Parsi, he was irrelevant.
PATEL: India really has developed a double meaning for nationalism.
No. India was partitioned just as Ireland was partitioned. Religion matters. Governance can always be improved without any change in regime. Look at post-war Hong Kong which thrived under British Governors.
We talk about nationalism in terms of the independence struggle or at least the struggle against colonialism.
There was no fucking settler colonialism in India. There was an economic struggle between indigenous industrialists- who financed Naoroji- and British Managing Agencies, not to mention the Lancashire lobby. But the Brits could make concessions on this.
Then again, this later phenomenon of religiously defined nationalism.
Which is what prevailed after the Great War or, in the case of Yugoslavia, after Communism collapsed.
Again, they have very little in common aside from the name. Surely, of course, there was a religious stream and there was a religious element in nationalism earlier on, but what we have right now, of course, is almost diametrically opposed to many of the ideas and concepts that— Leave alone Naoroji’s generation, people in Gandhi’s generation, Nehru’s generation were talking about.
Wow! This guy doesn't get that it was Nehru who pulled the trigger on Partition, though it was Gandhi's unilateral surrender in 1922 which made this inevitable. Still, the Hindus wanted a strong center, and thus had to get rid of the Muslim majority reasons.
So in many ways, it is an accident of the same word being used.
Nope. A Nation may be defined in terms of religion or language or 'natural borders'. The fact that there are different forms of Nationalism is like the fact that there are different sorts of ice-cream. The word is not being misapplied, it is just that there are different things which fall under its rubric.
That’s not to say, at the same time, that there were certain typical nationalist ideas expressed in the ideas of people like Naoroji. You’re right. He talked a lot about the need for some form of good governance, but at the same time, he was very specific in saying that good governance is no substitute for self-government. It was better to have a bad self-government than to have a government that was supposedly good, but foreign.
Naoroji was paid to talk stupid shit. He knew very well that the alternative to British rule was a return to the days of the marauding Maratha and the plundering Pindari. Alternatively, some other power would conquer the country and instead of learning English, people like him would learn German or Russian.
Self-government is only possible if you can defend yourself against external and internal threats.
The British Raj prided itself on being supposedly this form of good government that was very cheap and light and flexible.
No. It prided itself on fucking over internal or external enemies. It was the gift of the Royal Navy. Once Britannia stopped ruling the waves, its Empire disappeared by itself.
Naoroji said no, this is completely wrong. First of all, it’s costing a huge amount,
but the alternative was people of his sort being robbed and raped and enslaved.
and it’s impoverishing the country.
A.O Hume had written a book on India's agricultural problem. He was fool enough to think that Indians gave a fuck about their own starving peasants.
Second of all, he said, no matter whether it’s good or not corrupt, it does not substitute for the fact that it is foreign at the end of the day.
But, at the end of the day, if you are shit at fighting, you have to pay someone else to protect you. Gandhi gave the game away when he said, in 1939, that the Brits must hand over the army to the Hindu INC before leaving. Otherwise the Muslims and the Punjabis would overrun the country.
So that was one main caveat, I think, all to this good governance argument.
Speakers of Gujarati were shit at fighting. Still, they could tell stupid lies with great valor.
The other argument was this idea that at this stage, at the late 19th century, what you’re talking about, this idea of India developing at the same time is really important to understanding how nationalism develops also. They’re trying to make a nation out of this group of people who for centuries have had some commonalities through culture, religion, language, etc., but of course, this is very different from what they want to create out of it.
Guys like A.O Hume & Wedderburn & Cotton may have been interested in 'development' and raisingg productivity and creating a virtuous circle of higher tax revenue leading to more public and club good provision leading to yet higher tax revenue. But Indians were only interested in enriching themselves. For Naoroji & Gandhi this meant demanding protection for the guys who gave them money even though this would fuck over the peasants. Gandhi had no objection to the Mody-Lees agreement. Nehru did, but he kept quiet about it.
So in this sense, vehicles like the Congress are important because people like Naoroji or Hume very specifically say, “Look, in the Congress, here is an opportunity for people to act—from different parts of the country, who might not necessarily understand one another—to actually get together and understand the commonalities that they have.”
They were all equally greedy and stupid. That was the commonality they had.
So in many senses, it is still a nation-building process that’s taking place in this very early era.
No. It was purely political. The 'Servants of India' were supposed to do nation-building. Whatever happened to them?
Ultimately, they do confront those prejudices that still haunt us. Communalism, caste-based prejudices, ideas of regional and linguistic differences. They’re tackling a lot of the same problems that still, unfortunately, are not dealt with properly in modern Indian society.
Also they failed to abolish death. This has caused billions to perish all over the world. Congress could have worked with the Government to improve governance but it was dominated by blathershites and vested interest groups.
RAJAGOPALAN: That’s really interesting that you point it out. In this sense, Naoroji is not the first or the only of his kind. You can, in one sense, even trace this back to, say, Ram Mohun Roy.
Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore spent their own money to lobby Westminster to permit unrestricted White migration to India. Why? Only Whitey could hold the rapacious Muslim at bay.
PATEL: Of course.
RAJAGOPALAN: He has a presence in England. He ever considered running for a seat in the British Parliament. He spoke about the misrule of the East India Company, though it was not yet under the crown, and he was even hailed as India’s unofficial MP in the British Parliament, right? Jeremy Bentham supports his run as an MP. So there are many, many themes.
This supposed 'Ambassador' of the soi disant 'Great Moghul' was saying 'Whitey, please come to India and get rich ruling over it.' This was because Whitey had made Roy and Tagore very fucking rich.
In that sense, there is a pretty direct line of people starting from both within Indian, which is people like Ram Mohun Roy and also outside of India like Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, who think the kind of misrule of East India Company is truly appalling and just needs to disappear.
The result was that John Company took over the Nizamat- i.e. the administration- rather than being content with the Diwani- i.e. right to collect revenue.
So I see your point about it not just being good governance. In one sense, the British Crown is an improvement over East India Company. It’s really about self-governance. It’s about agency. It’s about controlling one’s destiny.
Which you can only do if you can protect yourself. Indians didn't think they could. Guys like Gandhi and Rajaji would shit themselves when they thought about the Afghans across the Durand line even though Brigadier Dyer had kicked Amanullah arse with insulting ease.
Naoroji’s Run for British Parliament
I want to go back to one very big theme in the book, which is Naoroji’s run for Parliament. He contested three times. He was successful once. It really dominates a big part of the book. There are other themes, but first, I want to start with, why is it that Naoroji became this hero and India’s representative in the British Parliament, but at the same time you have someone like [Mancherjee] Bhownagree, who was another Indian who was elected just a little bit after Naoroji to the British Parliament. He had a much longer run. I believe it was 10 or 11 years, whereas Naoroji was just three years.
Bhownagree (bow & agree) helped Gandhi a lot with his South African struggle. He joined the Tories because he calculated it would be easier to get elected that way. By supporting immigration curbs on Ashkenazi Jews he pleased his working class voters. Incidentally, Saklatvala took the Communist route for similarly opportunistic reasons. By then, Indians had lost interest in Westminster.
He’s never mentioned. I never heard about him in history books while growing up in India. He doesn’t feature anywhere in the nationalist movement.
Neither does Saklatvala or Baron Sinha. So what?
Is it because he’s a conservative? Is it something about personalities? Is it the way they view representation of India and Indians in Parliament? What is this big difference between these two contemporaries who are in Parliament at the same time?
Bhownagree was less of a wind-bag.
PATEL: A lot of that has to do with bad blood between both Naoroji and Bhownagree and also Bhownagree and the Congress. I have good news on that front in the sense that there’s a scholar at the University of Louisville in Kentucky called John McLeod, and he is writing a book on Bhownagree.
Bhownagree actually supported Naoroji during his first parliamentary run but eventually finds Bhownagree too radical, if you will, and is encouraged by several conservative members of Parliament and conservative activists to run and be a rival to Naoroji.
No. Bhownagree understood that when a 'Radical' like Joseph Chamberlain resigned from Gladstone's Cabinet, British politics had changed. The working class voter didn't want to hear of the sorrows of Ireland or the miseries of India. It wasn't till the Bolshevik revolution, that the old fashioned Radical could gain a hearing from the masses. This is because few can dispute the fact that crowned heads look their best on a stake.
RAJAGOPALAN: I was reading B. K. Nehru’s short memoir of his time at the LSE [London School of Economics]. It’s in a book called My LSE, which is a collection of essays from the alums of the LSE. The socialists were interested in the Indian independence movement. Anyone who was interested in the Indian independence movement immediately became socialist, and that’s how he became socialist. So it was sort of like, ‘They were part of our cause, and they are the people we hung out with. Those are the professors whose lectures we attended, and then there is this natural coalition.’
Nehru was as stupid as shit. What he didn't get was that folks at the LSE were only for Communism because they hoped that posh cunts like Nehru would be slaughtered when the Revolution finally came to India. Poor darkies like me, were looked on with favor because it was assumed we would be wielding the pitchforks or scythes or whatever agricultural implements us coolies use.
I suppose, some readers may feel I'm being unkind to a nice American boy who doesn't understand India though he now teaches there. But, the following is an article of his from the Print which claims that Robert Kennedy- scourge of the Mafia- was like Dr. Ambedkar.
'The autocrats are winning,” author Anne Applebaum warned last November in an article in the Atlantic.
She was wrong. Donald Tusk is back in power in her adopted country of Poland. To be fair, Dinyar didn't know this when he penned this.
Since then, Vladimir Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine has exposed some of the first fatal cracks in the edifice of today’s illiberal global order.
No. It exposed cracks in the new global order NATO hoped to impose twenty years ago.
This is an order that has employed cynicism, the resentment of the powerless, and disinformation to centralise an enormous amount of economic and political power in supposedly indispensable strongmen.
Rubbish! Countries which were centralized autocracies remained so or reverted to that condition after a brief period of misrule- e.g. Yeltsin's Russia.
Might the modern autocrat’s playbook finally be failing?
No. It is a separate matter than an autocrat who does stupid shit may be killed. But, sooner or later, another autocrat takes over.
Putin’s folly presents us with an opportune moment to comb through history for liberal alternatives.
Very true. We should support Pussy Riot's bid to conquer Eurasia.
A remarkable example emerges from the United States of the 1960s: Robert F. Kennedy.
He'd have lost the Democratic nomination to Humphrey who had far more delegates. Most of the uncommited ones were Southern Whites and hated the Kennedys. LBJ too was against the boy wonder. What about 1972? He could have got the nomination, but he would have lost to Nixon who had perfected the 'Southern Strategy' while appealing to the 'Silent' (or, later on, the 'Moral') majority. By then, big government was out of favor as was 'bussing' and affirmative action.
If liberals are serious about exploiting emerging cracks in 21st century autocracy—in Putin’s Russia,
what fucking cracks? Putin kills his opponents. That's what autocrats are supposed to do. Assassination may temper autocracy, but another autocrat may be waiting in the wings
Narendra Modi’s India,
Modi isn't an autocrat. That is why there is no point killing him. So long as Rahul remains an MP, Modi will keep winning. The way you overthrow an elected leader is by finding a better candidate.
a United States still reeling from Donald Trump’s presidency,
it is now reeling from a Joe Biden presidency
and elsewhere—then we would do well to study the all-too-brief career of this American leader.
This is because the only way to overthrow autocracy is to find and get behind the younger, less smart, less handsome, brother of a President who got shot. This can't be Jed Bush, because Dubya didn't get shot.
Kennedy’s life was dedicated to egalitarian empowerment,
nope it was dedicated to his family's empowerment. Sadly, he pissed LBJ off and thus didn't get to be Veep. This meant that Humphrey would succeed LBJ if he decided not to run. This also meant that Robert would have to move to the right if he wanted to be POTUS in the Seventies or Eighties.
the very opposite of what keeps today’s autocrats in power.
Dinyar is not aware that the Chinese Communist Party was dedicated to egalitarian empowerment. Xi will fuck over a billionaire as happily as he will fuck over a Tibetan dissident. Putin, too started off as a Commie.
Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, is the subject of a new biography, Justice Rising, by American historian Patricia Sullivan (full disclosure: Sullivan and I were colleagues at the University of South Carolina).
This was before anti-vaxxer Robert. F. Kennedy decided to run for President. He now thinks the Capitol Hill rioters were wrongly prosecuted- maybe.
This is a book about democracy in crisis
because a book about democracy not being in crisis would be as boring as fuck
—about soaring hope and awful tragedy.
If Trump returns as POTUS many rising young academics will shit themselves
As US attorney general, Kennedy helped dismantle Jim Crow,
It was Eisenhower's White House which set the ball rolling. LBJ finished the job. Robert went into the Senate where, however, as newbie, his influence was limited.
the system in the American South that clipped the social, economic, and political freedoms of African Americans. He battled against exponents of hate and division.
He loved Nixon very much and would often try to climb into his lap and kiss him.
Kennedy did not live long enough to see out his transformative political project: He was felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1968,
he was killed by a Christian Palestinian.
while seeking the Democratic Party nomination to be president of the United States.
He wouldn't have got it. Eugene McCarthy had more of the popular vote while Humphrey had stitched up the closed causes.
Kennedy’s politics almost Ambedkarite
Kennedy could get elected. Ambedkar couldn't. I suppose what this cretin means is that Robert supported affirmative action for people different from himself. Ambedkar wanted it only for his own community. He stripped Muslim Dalits of such affirmative action as they had received under the British 1935 Act.
Justice Rising is much more than a biography. It details a fraught moment in American history,
No. America was booming. It could boom even more if it got rid of stupid laws discriminating against women and blacks. The latter point was also important for winning the Cold War.
one with certain parallels with our era of strongmen and far-Right populism.
Nonsense! The Kennedy's supported strongmen and far-Right politicians on many continents if they were anti-Communist. JFK's big mistake was killing a hard-ass Catholic leader in South Vietnam.
The 1960s in the United States were a time of intense polarisation, which make QAnon, ‘love jihad’, or Russian fantasies of Ukrainian neo-Nazism look like child’s play in comparison.
Rubbish! White Nationalism was in decline. The John Birch society never had more than 100,000 members. In the Twenties, the KKK had 2,000,000 members.
As African Americans pursued their civil rights, they were met with brutal opposition in the South, where state politicians and vigilante mobs unleashed campaigns of intimidation, mass incarceration, and deadly violence.
Less so than in the Twenties and Thirties.
Right-wing demagogues like George Wallace fomented division by exploiting historical resentments and concocting conspiracy theories of government overreach.
Woodrow Wilson was to the right of Wallace on the Race issue when he became President.
The results were some of the worst civil disturbances of the 20th century, where American cities were turned into actual war zones.
Whereas previously, the slaughter was so wholly one-sided that one could not speak of war.
Kennedy battled hate and exclusion with a radically expansive notion of justice.
would people of his own class pay for it through much higher taxes? Fuck no. They had smart accountants just like the Kennedy's. Thus the burden would fall on the middle class who would decide justice means getting to spend your own hard earned cash not giving it to Welfare Queens.
He sought, in Sullivan’s words, to “to bend American political culture in a new direction,” one which proactively championed equality.
No. He wasn't that stupid. Had he lived, he'd have moved to the Right because, unlike his younger brother, he didn't have a skeleton like Chappaquiddick rattling away in his closet.
At the age of 34, he was appointed as attorney general of the United States, the head of the Department of Justice.
By his brother who thought a little legal experience might come in useful if the boy decided to takk up the law for a living.
Here, he recognised that the law far too often criminalised those who were poor, socially marginalised, or uneducated.
All lawyers know this. They make money showing that when a rich dude does the same thing as a poor dude, only the latter has committed a crime.
“The poor man looks on the law as the enemy,” he noted. It was “always taking something away.” Instead, Kennedy attempted recasting the law as a tool for social justice, a helping hand to the downtrodden and disenfranchised.
No. Kennedy was a lawyer and, later, a Senator. He knew that only the Legislature can 'recast' the law. But legislators need money to win elections. They have to serve those who pay them. The Kennedy's got money from the UAW which is why they went after Hoffa and the Teamsters. Being from the North, they didn't care that the Dems might lose the South. Still, if Robert hadn't got shot and had moved to the right, he could have been a contender in 1976. Nobody can say he'd have been worse than Carter.
Under his watch, the Department of Justice made significant strides against voter suppression and school segregation while infiltrating far-Right groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
FBI infiltration of the KKK began under Eisenhower but it was LBJ who ordered Hoover to give them the same treatment as had been given to the Commies. The problem with Robert was that he made enemies and was too shrill. Thus he wasn't very effective.
Kennedy helped integrate Southern universities despite a white backlash so deadly that 25,000 federal troops had to be called into the Mississippi college town of Oxford in 1962.
Such actions had occurred under Eisenhower but it was LBJ who really brought home the bacon.
He instigated criminal justice reform inspired by compassion for the poor rather than a “lock them up” mentality.
The 'rehabilitation model of correction' began in the 1930s and peaked in the 1950's. Sadly, 'moral panics' started affecting sentencing policy.
There was something almost Ambedkarite about Kennedy’s politics.
John F Kennedy got modern affirmative action off the ground in 1961 though it was FDR, in 1941, who might be considered to have pioneered the idea. However, no American politician has ever talked about reserved seats in Parliament itself. But this is a British legacy to India. Unlike America, the Indians didn't fight the Brits and then create their own constitution ab ovo.
Like India’s greatest proponent of equality,
some White dude who introduced reserved seats for Scheduled Castes and Tribes in the 1935 Act. Ambedkar's genius was to strip Muslim Dalits from this entitlement.
he realised that the law could help overcome centuries of prejudice and discrimination—but that the law was not enough.
Nothing is enough. What gets rid of prejudice and discrimination is productivity which turns into money. It is difficult to discriminate against a dude who is much richer and smarter than you.
Too many people, on account of their socioeconomic circumstances, experienced “an inability to assert real rights.”
No. They could assert them but they couldn't pay, or otherwise command influence, so as to get a remedy under a bond of law. This is bound to happen if the remedy is not 'incentive compatible'- i.e. the obligation's holder doesn't benefit by providing the remedy.
Only opportunity, Kennedy believed, could truly level the playing field:
provided people do smart things with their opportunities. If you get into Harvard and choose to study stupid shit, you have crapped on your opportunities. You will end up like Dinyar instead of Vivek Ramaswamy.
Access to quality education, good jobs, adequate health care, and livable housing.
costs money. Who will provide it. The Kennedy's could indulge in liberal rhetoric because, thanks to the War, the Government was still taking a big share of GDP. There wasn't much deficit financing and so the country could borrow or print money. That's how it financed Vietnam- which John F started. But this meant that Robert would have to move to the right if he didn't want to end up a blathershite in the Senate like his brother.
Government, Kennedy believed, had a responsibility to remedy historical injustices.
Till the money runs out or the voters rebel- sure. Still, it is good to know that the Kennedy's planned to hand back America to the First Nations before fucking off back to Ireland.
Where today’s autocrats manipulate the festering resentments of the poor or marginalised,
why bother? Shoot your opponents in the head. As for the poor and marginalized- fuck can they do? Ignore them if you can't make a profit by getting them into sweat-shops.
The only people who try to manipulate 'festering resentments' are nutters teaching shite to imbeciles- like Dinyar.
Kennedy sought solutions through community building.
No. He was a Senator, not a fucking community organizer.
He met impatience and anger with
shrieks of rage.
a deep commitment to improving citizens’ quality of life and augmenting democratic accountability.
No. As Professor Patti Obaweyo-Golem has shown, Robert F Kennedy has a broad commitment, not a deep one, to being nice. It is nice to be nice. Everybody should be nice. Also, we should abolish Death due to a disproportionate number of poor and marginalized people are dying every day. This is probably the reason cats are now sodomizing dogs. That's totes not nice.
Kennedy responded to a climate of cynicism and mistrust by empowering the youth.
No. Patti Obaweyo-Golem has shown what he was really responding to was a climate of cats sodomizing dogs in the clouds. Also he didn't empower youth so much as encourage them to be nice. Sadly, he neglected to abolish death.
At the Department of Justice, he appointed division heads who were, like him, under the age of 40, people who brought about a generational shift in the domain of law enforcement.
Then LBJ got rid of him. There would have been a 'generational shift' in any case. This is because successive administrations have failed to abolish death probably because they have been paid off by the undertaker's cartel.
On the ground, he reached out to young activists like the farm labour leaders Cesar Chavez
who was supported by UAW leader Walter Reuther who had helped the Kennedys.
and Dolores Huerta
an important Hispanic leader. It is rather patronizing to think people of this caliber needed the helping hand of a post White lad.
or the African American civil rights campaigner Marian Wright.
a lawyer better known for her work for Children.
Youth was a powerful antidote to entrenched conservatism. He engaged with raucous crowds of college students, taking part in back-and-forth debates and encouraging open discussion. In America’s most deprived inner cities, Kennedy gravitated towards children, enquiring about their diet or schooling.
Sadly, Dinyar wasn't born yet and thus could not have told Kennedy about his diet or schooling. Life can be terribly unfair.
Youthfulness gave Robert Kennedy some traits completely antithetical to the 21st century autocrat.
North Korea's autocrat is young.
He was humble.
So very humble that he ran for President. Had he been any humbler, he would have insisted on becoming the Galactic Emperor.
As attorney general and later as a US senator from New York, Sullivan tells us, Kennedy listened to others, rarely ever lectured, and encouraged the thrashing out of opposite views.
He would sit silently as people jizzed on him.
He acknowledged his mistakes. Whether it was his early support of Joe McCarthy,
his Daddy put him on that team
the paranoid senator who saw communist conspirators everywhere, or his responsibility for widening American military involvement in Vietnam, Kennedy admitted his errors and led course corrections.
He couldn't lead shit. Humphrey would have got the nomination even if he hadn't been shot. Nixon would have won in 1972. He'd have needed to move to the Right to beat Carter in '76.
Unlike certain leaders today, he did not double down on failing, flawed policies.
He couldn't because he was shot.
Kennedy possessed a form of progressivism that was global in scope, visiting South Africa to speak out against apartheid and traveling to some of the worst slums in South American cities.
Okay, I admit it. The guy was unelectable.
And he had a capacity to learn and change his mind.
So as to become less and less electable.
Sullivan recounts how Kennedy became a vocal champion of African American civil rights only through sustained engagement with, and tutorship from, activists in the front lines against Jim Crow. Many of them were younger than him.
But it was LBJ who delivered. The African American leaders had got the measure of the Kennedy boys. They must be told politely but firmly to stay in their lane.
“The young people,” he told John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “have educated me. You changed me. Now I understand.”
What African Americans would increasingly understand was that East Coast Liberals would fuck them up because they were more interested in virtue signaling than in actually helping fellow citizens rise up.
Kennedy could also be remarkably critical of the white elite, his own social class, holding them to account for the racial ferment of the 1960s.
Why not hold them to account for the fact that cats were sodomizing dogs? Also how come they hadn't abolished death?
He formulated scathing analyses of white hypocrisy, noting how Northern whites criticised the Jim Crow South while tolerating segregation and discrimination in their own institutions and communities.
Also they tolerated death instead of banning it immediately.
To strengthen freedom of speech, he sought out dissenting voices and gave them a platform.
By resigning his seat in the Senate in their favor- right?
It was not enough “to allow dissent,” Kennedy told students at the University of California, Berkeley. “We must demand it.”
Also, death must be abolished.
He had the unique capacity to speak truth to power while being in a position of power himself.
No. LBJ told him to fuck the fuck off. People in power might be prepared to hear the truth from their brother or sister provided that truth is 'you are wonderful! Everybody loves you'.'
By pursuing social justice, empowering the youth, and appealing to the conscience of American citizens, Kennedy built bridges between communities and constituencies.
They greatly helped the Republicans. But for JFK, Nixon could not have won in 1968. The odd thing was, on affirmative action he sounded a lot like Bobby.
He critically evaluated the United States’ postwar economic expansion and argued that materialism had distracted Americans from bigger questions of morality and equality.
Which is easy to say if your daddy was a bootlegger who made billions.
In one speech, highly unusual for an American politician to make, he attacked gross national product (GNP) as a metric of progress. GNP, he argued, did not take into account “the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.” It measured everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.” And it concealed far too many disparities in American society.
But it was useful because GNP correlated to defense capacity and 'fiscal headroom'. What makes life worthwhile is being alive. This means being able to defend yourself which requires resources.
Sullivan’s book, while focused on a particular chapter of American history, has clear relevance in broader global discussions about democracy and autocracy.
If Rahul visits poor people and says GNP is very naughty, Modi will be defeated.
It can make for sober reading in Modi’s India—a reminder of a now long-distant era when India was a progressive beacon to the world.
Fuck off! Nobody wanted to starve to death in between taking it up the ass from the Communist Chinese.
There are traces of India in many strands of Kennedy’s progressivism.
Ambedkar, who had studied in America, wanted to put a sunset clause on affirmative action. He failed. India isn't interested in progress. It is interested in penalizing success.
As a recent college graduate, for example, Kennedy traveled to India and met with Jawaharlal Nehru.
It was Israel which impressed him. This got him killed.
Nehru presciently warned him and his brother not to confuse anti-colonial nationalism in Vietnam with conspiratorial theories of Soviet world domination.
No. Nehru told his private secretary this. He didn't tell JFK. If the domino theory was false, India wouldn't get 'free money' from the US.
While crafting a civil rights agenda for his brother’s administration, Kennedy relied on two individuals with strong ideological and political links with India.
The Kennedy administration was cautious and piecemeal in its approach to Civil Rights because of its reliance on White Southern legislators. At a later point, a White blue-collar, Black and Hispanic combination seemed possible and, as East Coast liberals, this could give the Kennedy clan a broad, country-wide voting base. But what originally got JFK the White House was 'New Frontier' technocratic anti-Communism and claims re. a 'missile gap' between the Soviets who had been the first to get into Space.
Chester Bowles, the former US ambassador to New Delhi who became a warm supporter of Nehru, orchestrated outreach to African American voters.
He was Kennedy's Secretary of State but was demoted probably because he opposed the Bay of Pigs shitshow. On the other hand, it is true that if you want to reach out to the soul brothers in the ghetto you need to bring in an elderly white dude who went to Choate and Yale.
Howard Wofford—who traveled to India to study Gandhian nonviolence and then helped Martin Luther King, Jr. visit India in 1959—pushed the Kennedy brothers to adopt a maximalist position on executive action for civil rights.
He lacked the heft to do much in that direction. LBJ sidelined him. What mattered was Congress and the Courts.
India loomed in the background through the duration of the Civil Rights Movement.
Darkies should follow Mahatma, not Marx. Just quietly queue up to get hit on your head from time to time.
Marian Wright, who helped guide Kennedy’s investigation of poverty in the Mississippi Delta region in 1967, had written her college thesis on Mahatma Gandhi.
Who got shot. There is a lesson here. Hang out with dudes who studied Gandhi- who was good at getting shot- and you yourself may get shot. In India, three prominent politicians surnamed Gandhi have been assassinated. In America, two Kennedy's have eaten a bullet. There's a pattern here is all I'm saying.
Wright eventually married Kennedy’s aide, Peter Edelman, who, in a sign of the times, dressed in a Nehru jacket for his wedding.
Nehru never wore any such thing but the Beatles did.
History proves that all authoritarianisms are finite—this is a lesson which Vladimir Putin and his fellow autocrats will learn one day.
Unless they kill anyone and everyone who tries to teach them lessons of any type. What history proves is that authority is not terminable if it puts down all internal or external threats with a heavy hand. Alternatively, like Sonia & Rahul, you can just concentrate on getting rich rather than ruling the country.
The key challenge, therefore, is how to minimise the damage they inflict while in power –
the key challenge faced by those in power is how to stay in power. This involves being better than your rivals or else killing them
upon rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens as well as the essential norms of governance.
that doesn't matter in the slightest. You just have to be less shit than the other guy- or else quicker on the draw.
To accomplish that, and to fully turn the tide against 21st century autocracy, the world is in urgent need of more leaders like Robert F. Kennedy.
& more shooters like Sirhan Sirhan- right?
In the past, India had leaders who shared many of the best qualities of this American politician.
viz. when shot dead they stayed dead.
One thinks of B.R. Ambedkar’s blistering analysis of prejudice in Indian society,
Ambedkar strongly disapproved of prejudice being shown to him. He was cool with it being done to other people. He was a sensible man. It was the Mahatma who pretended he cared greatly about 'Harijans' and Muslims.
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s globally minded progressivism,
did not involve sucking up to Stalin like her sister-in-law Suhasini. Nehru was miffed that she and her husband were having a gay old time in the Soviet Union while his own Ambassador to Moscow, who was also his sister, was getting the cold shoulder.
or, more recently, P.V. Narasimha Rao’s ability to learn and change his core convictions.
which was that Chandraswami had magic powers- right?
It is difficult to see signs of such figures amidst today’s political landscape of democratic erosion and muscular nationalism.
Rahul is a posh kid who pretends to care greatly about the very very poor. But he is useless. Bobby Kennedy may not have been wholly useless. But he would have had to move to the Right to be electable. To be clear, the Kennedy's were a political clan. They weren't Ministers of Religion or Social Activists or Community Activists. Their job was to get elected to high office. There were plenty of other small town idealists, like Eugene McCarthy (who regretted sponsoring the '65 immigration bill (Hart Celler Act), or George McGovern, who could carry the flag for progressive causes in the Senate. The Kennedys had money, were attractive, and smelled of power. The City on a Hill could now also be an the Camelot of style if not an intellectual Mecca. More importantly, Kennedy kicked Krushchev's sorry ass. This sort of muscular nationalism burnished the Kennedy legend.
But one can, like Robert F. Kennedy, hope for better days.
He got shot just as his brother was shot. Better days may have dawned but the Kennedys had nothing to do with it. LBJ was born into poverty. His 'Great Society' was not based on crumbs falling from Camelot's round-table. People would rise up and pay taxes which, in turn, would help others like them to do the same. Democracy is about virtuous circles not virtue signaling circle jerks featuring cretins like Dinyar.
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