Verdict on Wang Wei

Flowers need neither love nor lies

Feed they but butterflies

But the Silkworm is

Pure Vanity- his.

Amartya Sen's entitled inedia.

Amartya Sen published the following paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in March 1977.

Starvation and exchange entitlements:

Starvation is not a matter of entitlement. It is a matter of food availability. If there is enough to go around, no one starves. If there isn't, either there is rationing or some excess mortality.  

a general approach and its application to the great Bengal famine

In 1974, there had been a second big famine in Bangladesh. It was obvious that transition to democracy meant increased corruption. In particular, food procured for the public distribution system was diverted to the black market so that some politicians and crony capitalists (e.g. the Ispahanis in the 1940s) made a lot of money.  

... Several authors have recently argued that there is evidence of increasing starvation for the world as a whole, and there has been quite an outburst of alarm about the 'food crisis of the world'

Real food prices tended to rise during the Seventies but fell thereafer.  

René Dumont has gone so far as to say that 'the biggest famine in history has just begun'. 

He was wrong.  About everything. 

It is with this context in mind that I shall examine the history of the Bengal famine
of 1943—possibly the biggest famine in the last hundred years.

The man-made Chinese famine of the early Sixties was the biggest in world history.  

I believe the analysis presented here relates to a key issue in development theory today, viz. the political economy of starvation.

The key issue was corruption. Darkies are as corrupt as fuck. The polite way to say this is 'weak institutions'.  

While a variety of causes have been considered in understanding the so-called 'world
wide famine', the most common approach has been that of 'too many mouths and
too little food'. 

Only if people were too polite to say 'darkies are greedy bastards. They will beg us for food to feed their starving people but then sell the stuff on the black market. Look at Bengal. They had a big famine on the two occassions when they transitioned to Elected Governments. Military generals did better than Bengali Muslim demagogues.'  

In this paper ... I would like to examine whether food availability per capita is a good way of viewing the problem

It isn't if neither the numerator nor the denominator are known. In a poor country, nobody knows either the total number of people nor the total amount of food available. True, some numbers could be made up but everybody would know they didn't mean shit. 

I shall argue tha framework within which the problems of famine seriously deficient.

Not having enough food is a serious problem. A deficient framework for studying the probelm of feeling a bit peckish is not a serious problem. It is stupid shit. People will spend good money to alleviate suffering. But money spent on measuring the measuring of suffering is money wasted. 

The traditional—and in some ways the most obvious—approach to famines is in terms
of variation of food availability:

both food supply and demand are inelastic butt the former, not the latter, is subjected to exogenous shocks- e.g. drought, disruption of trade routes by war, plant disease etc.  

This approach of 'food availability decline' I shall call for brevity (not premature
disrespect) the FAD view.

FAD works best when much of the food eaten by a family happens to be grown by
it without being acquired through exchange. 

No. Subsistence farmers eat the 'normal' crop (e.g. wheat or rice) while feeding the 'inferior' crop (e.g. oats or barley) are fed to livestock. In a bad year, humans eat the inferior crop. There is no food availability decline. Rather there is a change in relative prices causing an income as well as a substitution effect- i.e. people spend more in good years and retrench in bad years. One could say that Britain, under Wartime rationing, did not see much decline in food availability though 'superior' goods (e.g. butter, eggs, beef) were rationed. 

In an exchange economy, however, the terms of exchange constitute a factor of some importance of its own,

only if a large percentage of income goes on food. But, in that case, the State is likely to be weak (because there isn't enough food to feed bureaucrats) and thus nothing can be done about famine or epidemics or marauding bands of homicidal sodomites.  

and a family's ability to buy food depends on the rates at which its labour and commodity possessions can be exchanged into food.

i.e., its income and wealth. But credit too is important as is access to charitable, philanthropic or social insurance schemes. 

While food availability will clearly be an important influence on these terms of exchange,

It is the only influence 

other forces are also involved,

No. 

and famines can thus arise from causes other than food availability decline.

This has never happened.  

In an exchange economy, whether a family will starve or not will depend on what it has to sell,

Amartya Sen was living in the UK which has long been an 'exchange economy'. There had been no famine since 1620. The 'Poor Law' was a type of 'risk pooling' which also raised total factor productivity.  

whether it can sell them, and at what prices, and also on the price of food.

No. If you are spending a large portion of your income on food, then and only then are you at risk of starvation. If you spend less that ten percent of disposable income on food, you are at zero risk save if there is a massive exogenous shock- e.g. earthquake, tsunami, military invasion etc.  

An economy in a state of comparative tranquillity may develop a famine if there is a sudden shake-up of the system of rewards for exchange of labour, commodities and other possessions, even without a 'sudden, sharp reduction in the food supply'.

No. There has to be a sudden sharp reduction in the food supply. This could happen if land is collectivized and so peasants no longer have an incentive to work hard.  

An exchange economy implies 'entitlements' related to one's endowments;

No. The fact that you can sell or buy at a particular market price is not, generally speaking, an 'entitlement'. True, this may be undermined by legislation- e.g. you may not be permitted to sell to or buy from only people of a particular race- but there is no 'entitlement'. This is why you can't sell or otherwise alienate the underlying Hohfeldian incident. 

Consider the following scenario. I go into a cake shop and ask to buy a chocolate cake. The shop keeper says 'I am sorry. We have run out of chocolate cake.'  I reply 'I have the money to purchase the chocolate cake. Thus I am entitled to a chocolate cake. You must give me a chocolate cake or else I will prosecute you.' The shopkeeper tells you to fuck off. He bars you from entering his shop. You go to the police, who tell you to fuck off. At great expense, you bring a law suit against the cake shop owner. You explain to the judge that Prof. Sen says you have an entitlement to chocolate cake'. The Judge says the law recognises no such thing. Nor does Economics. An 'exchange economy' can be 'fix-price' rather than 'flex-price'. 

it gives people the ability to change a unit of commodity x into a certain amount of commodity  y.

Markets or market-makers confer this ability- up to a point.  

These are, of course, not 'rights' in the normative sense (contrast Nozick's 'entitlement theory' of justice).

Rights are wholly normative. Suppose I go into a cakeshop and order a chocolate cake. A bystander says 'what gives you the right to come in here demanding cake you fat freak?' My reply is that I have the money to pay for it. If I am refused service because of some 'protected' trait I have- e.g. being black- then I may have an action in law.  

They represent actual possibilities.

It is actually possible that I will commit murder. But I don't have the right to kill anyone.  

With an initial endowment x of commodities (including labour),

sadly, what this is can't be known. There are many types of labour I can perform of which I am unaware. 

the exchange entitlements offered by a particular set of market configurations

For a set to exist, all its elements must be known. Nobody can know what the set of market configurations is. Thus there is no such set.  

(in addition to direct production possibilities) can be seen as the set S(x) of all commodity bundles that can be acquired starting from x.

Sen is assuming no one can borrow or get charity or is covered by any type of social insurance scheme. This is highly unrealistic. Suppose you actually live in such a place. Then, you would seek 'hedges' such that you can get out of the place quickly when things turn to shit. Consider the Dutch "Hunger Marches" (Hongertochten) in 1944. Smarter, richer, people got out quicker and survived. 

(Formally, therefore, the set of exchange entitlements can be seen as a mapping S(.) from a given person's endowment vectors to availability sets of commodity vectors.)

Nobody knows their own endowment vector or what commodity vectors are available. One may say 'relative to a particular state of ignorance' such and such vectors and sets are plausible. But they are not unique. Moreover, the moment anybody's knowledge-base changes, the 'naive' set changes. That is why it is epistemic and thus can't be well-defined- i.e. can't be a set. 

If S(x) for the relevant x does not include any combination of goods that would give this person (or the family) enough food, starvation will occur.

No. An orphaned infant won't starve. He or she will be adopted or otherwise incorporated into a family or group. Human oikeiosis is highly plastic.  

The exchange entitlements

are unknowable because they 

depend not merely on the relevant exchange rates, but also on market imperfections and
other institutional barriers,

which will only become known after the fact 

as well as on the actual ability to sell or buy the com modities in question (e.g. a frustrated sale of labour resulting in unemployment is not to be ruled out).

Which is why nobody knows what exchange entitlements actually are. Arbitrageurs (market makers) may specialize in getting better information about this but they may make the wrong call.  

To analyse the Bengal famine within the limits of the information available, I shall

ask my daddy or Uncle B.R Sen who was in charge of food in '43? They would tell you that Suhrawardy, as Minister of Supply, gave 20 million Rupees to the Ispahanis to procure food for the public distribution system. A lot of this was sold on the black market. The Ispahanis then financed the Muslim League election campaign which is one reason Suhrawardy became Premier of Bengal in 1946.  

have to concentrate mainly on exchange rates (even they pose data problems), supple
menting them in a frankly ad hoc way with whatever other relevant information we
have, e.g. on unemployment. (There were, of course, no unemployment benefits.)

Because the country was as poor as shit. Since it was an agricultural country, this meant that agricultural productivity was very low. That's why the great mass of its people were visibly malnourished. What Bengal needed to do was to follow B.R Sen's (or Sen's own father's )  recommendations to raise agricultural yields. Bangladesh produced only about 11 million tons of food in 1974- which is why there was a big famine. In subsequent decades, output quadrupled while populatiion only doubled because of declinging fertility. A Malthusian disaster was averted. 

Famines can be the result of fluctuations of exchange entitlements

Sen means that poor people can starve to death if food prices go up. But the reason they go up is an exogenous supply shock- e.g. a flood or drought or America refusing to send food aid.  

altering the rules of the game on which the survival of different occupation groups depends.

The rule remains the same- viz. if you have enough cash you can enough food unless the country is Communist or occupied by an enemy army.  

For example, the 1974 floods in Bangladesh, which destroyed some of the crop, immediate agricultural labour hard, by drastically reducing the demand for labour and al the exchange possibilities open to labourers, through the development of wide unemployment.

In other words, the fact that there was less food meant that guys couldn't get work in return for food. But the real problem was corruption which led to 'compassion fatigue'. Also, Bangladesh's decision to sell jute to Cuba pissed off Uncle Sam.  

This, in fact, ushered in the famine

the floods- i.e. exogenous supply shock- did the ushering in. Bangladesh was Socialist. The Government didn't feed the people because it was corrupt and incompetent. Democracy creates famine in Muslim majority Bengal. Oddly, Military dictators did a better job.

Bengal, in 1943, wasn't a market economy. It was a war economy with price controls & extensive State control of resources. Even wealth White people found their Air Conditioners were requisitioned by the Army. Sen does not understand this.

Concluding remarks This paper has been concerned partly with economic history and partly with economic analysis of problems of relevance today.

To whom? Socialist countries. Not market economies.  

The tradition of analysing starvation and famines in terms of over-all food availability, which can be criticised in a general way (see section 1 and also Sen, 1976B), turns out to be particularly unhelpful in under standing the Bengal famine of 1943.

It was very helpful. People understood the need to get food into Bengal and distributing it to poor people through 'langars' (communal kitchens) and 'food for work' programs. Giving tax-payer money to Ispahani did no good. It just enriched the ruling party. 

Indeed, contrary to the conclusion of the official report on the Bengal famine and the often-asserted description of it as arising from a decline of over-all food supply in Bengal, 'food availability decline' seems to fail altogether in explaining the famine (see section 3).

Sen admits that reduced food availability caused prices to rise. This meant that a lot of people starved. The solution was to bring in and distribute a lot of food till output recovered.  

I have tried to focus instead on what I have called 'exchange entitlements', which include the opportunities the market offers to a person to exchange other commodities into food.

But the market wasn't allowed to function because the whole of India was a 'war-economy'.  

For those who do not grow food themselves (e.g. artisans or barbers),

or Sen's daddy & mummy  

or those who do grow food but do not possess the food they grow (e.g. cash-wage agri cultural labourers), the vagaries of the market can have a decisive influence on their ability (and that of their families) to survive.

Sen describes how civil servants as well  a lot of workers in war-related industries were covered under various procurement schemes. In a war-economy, food is given to those who advance the war effort. It may be denied to those who are too weak or unskilled to be helpful. 

There seem to have been sharp movements in exchange entitlements

a ration is not an 'exchange entitlement'. You can't sell your ration book on the open market.  

with respect to food in Bengal during 1942 and 1943, both in terms of the saleability of the commodity to be exchanged (especially rural labour)

demand for 'normal goods' fall when income falls. During a war, the real income of almost everybody falls because resources are diverted to the military. 

as well as the exchange rates vis-à-vis rice (the principal food),

Sen is saying 'the black market price went up'.  

indicating a growing cause for starvation for several occupation groups.

because less food was available 

The observed occupational pattern of destitution is consistent with the expected pattern of destitution based on observed shifts in exchange entitlements.

because less food was available 

Some preliminary attempts at going one step behind, viz. into the causation of exchange entitlement shifts, have also been presented (see section 6).

Sen admits less food was available 

The failure of the government to anticipate the famine,

It anticipated it but didn't give a toss. Bengalis are like that you know. They wouldn't even bury their own dead preferring to leave that job to White soldiers.  

and even to recognize it when it revealed itself, seems to have been the result largely of erroneous theories of famine causation,

Everyone knows the true theory- viz not enough food. Everyone also knows that Bengali Muslim politicians will steal all the money allocated to famine relief. At any rate, that is what happened in 1943 and 1974.  

rather than mistakes about facts dealing with food availability.

The official statistics were made up. Ian Stephenson, editor of the Statesman, says so in his book 'Monsoon mornings'. Sen had met Stephenson.  

Later the facts were squared with theory by 'revising' the facts, by introducing mythical variations in the unobserved item called 'the carry-over from previous years'.

There were no facts. The official figures were made up. Poor countries can't afford to count their population or figure out how much food there is.  

The approach of exchange entitlements applied to famines and starvation

is stupid & useless. Sen was pissed off that his Uncle, B.R. Sen, a former head of F.A.O, was getting publicity for helping end global hunger by focussing on the supply side. Why should there not be a UN organization for looking at the Demand side? The Green Revolution was about increasing availability of food. Why not have a Sen-tentious Revolution which focussed on telling people to eat some food otherwise they might starve to death? Indeed, Sen did warn that UK was at risk of a major famine under Mrs. Thatcher! After all, she was a 'milk-snatcher'- right?  

directs us towards general interdependences that hold in a market economy,

In 1943, Bengal was a War Economy. In 1974, it was a Socialist economy.  In England, since Tudor times, food for the poorest was supplied outside the market. Sen wasn't just stupid, he was wholly ignorant.  

away from the focus only on the supply of food, as in the alternative FAD approach.

Smart people- like Sen's dad- a soil scientist- can increase the supply of food. There is no need to tell people to eat some food. Thus the demand side looks after itself.  

As B.R. Sen had made clear, the world had the excess food supply & means of transportation to ensure there need be no more big famines. Obviously, a Communist country or other sort of Dictatorship might have one for its own reasons. After all, one can always blame 'class enemies' or 'saboteurs' for famine. 

 I would like to suggest that the exchange entitlements approach has become more relevant to famines and starvation in recent years because of the growth of the importance of exchange in developing economies.

i.e. markets were expanding as transport improved  

There seems to exist an intermediate phase of development in which the dependence on the market increases sharply (given the breakdown of the traditional peasant economy)

Sen forgets that the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 wiped out 3 times as many people

and in which guaranteed entitle ments in the form of social security benefits have yet to emerge:

sadly, such 'entitlements' can collapse if there is a severe enough supply shock. That's why you need smart soil scientists and agronomists to ensure there is a healthy margin to maintain buffer stocks.  

An important develop ment in this phase of transition is the emergence of labour-power as a commodity,

this emerged at least ten thousand years ago.  

with neither the protection of the family system of peasant agriculture,

It didn't protect 10 million Bengalis in 1770 

nor the insurance of unemployment compensation

which didn't protect Dutch people under Nazi occupation 

—nor, of course, the guarantee of the right to work at a living wage.

  Which Soviet citizens & Chinese citizens had, in theory, at precisely the time when tens of millions of them starved to death. 

Molina's middle knowledge & free market ideology

 Luis de Molina, a prominent member of the School of Salamanca which some see as originating laissez faire ideology, also proposed that God has 'middle knowledge' - scientia media- i.e. the power of knowing future contingent events. One might say, 'an expert chess player or arbitrageur may be able to predict how others will react to a series of events. Moreover, if others have equally 'rational expectations', then those outcomes will be inevitable. Thus, we see one grandmaster resigning to another once he sees his defeat is inevitable. It is 'common knowledge' that there would be no point in  moving the pieces till the foreordained conclusion is reached.'

 Similarly, we may find that 'cobwebs' arising from 'adaptive expectations' disappear as all agents expect the outcome predicted by the right economic theory. We may say, following Samuelson, that 'ergodicity' prevails over 'hysteresis'. 

We may also believe that there is something like 'natural law' or 'spontaneous order' or a 'reflective equilibrium' must exist such that there is a Social Contract which all rational people will commit themselves to even absent the passing of any type of consideration.

 Molinism is also a way of reconciling free-will & God's omnipotence (or, indeed, His being the only efficient cause). What ties Molina's theology & economics together is faith that there is a 'mysterious economy' or 'invisible hand' which solves coordination problems and prevents 'combinatory explosion' of the underlying configuration space.

Sadly, by the end of the Sixties, there were purely mathematical reasons to do with complexity, computability, concurrency & categoricity such that any type of 'compatibilism' or chaos free co-evolution appeared vanishingly unlikely. Put another way, 'naturality' seemed ever further to seek. Even if there is an objective function, the thing being optimized is arbitrary to some degree. Moreover, uncorrelated asymmetries would drive Eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'.

 One such asymmetry is thinking your God or ideology or culture is superior to all others. This puts paid to the Thomist dream of getting rid of an angry, arbitrary, God or, if that was always impossible, at least, asserting that the Katechon might be nice even if the Eschaton is going to be fucking horrible.

 Molinist 'middle knowledge' has been described as-  'God's pre-volitional knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom—hypothetical scenarios exploring what free agents would do in any given set of circumstances'. This is another way of saying every Brouwer choice-sequence is actually 'lawful' though the reverse may appear to be the case for a finite intelligence. 

Suppose 'middle knowledge' was 'volitional'. Then we might say God is a 'creative subject' in the Brouwerian sense. But then Troelstka's paradox would arise. One way around it would be to reject Markov's principle on the grounds that God, or his Knowledge, is neither possible nor impossible.

 But the thing would still come across as weak sauce. Equally, non-volitional knowledge sounds fatalistic. If the being is strong and has a will, then the thing is virtually empty or trivial. 

But the same can be said of free market ideology or natural law or Enlightened Humanism or the project of everybody being so filled with empathy as to incessantly offer gratuitious rape-counselling to all sentient beings. 

Religion has no obligation to feel at home in the world. Nor, indeed, do some positional goods and services in the commodity space. Ontological dysphoria isn't a scandal- a stumbling block- to either Faith or Enterprise or Thrift or whatever. The best Molinist would be Mayavaad. 

Spivak on Naxalbari

 Spivak, like other ex-pat buddhijivis, learned about Naxalbari from American academics like Marcus Franda. To be fair, Spivak was teaching European literature. She had no knowledge of Bengali politics. She still does not. Last year, she wrote a gushing letter to Mamta- who had beaten the Communists into utter political oblivion some 15 years previously- without realising that her thuggish regime was on the point of collapse.

In 2017, she wrote as follows in Frontier magazine which was founded by Samar Sen and which was initially sympathetic to the Naxalites (and thus against the mainstream CPM). I should mention, Congress would have been happy to encourage this second split within the Communist party. 

A Few Words About Naxalbari
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

It is hard to think that fifty years have passed since the first confrontation in Naxalbari.

The CPM had become part of the ruling coalition in 1967. The leading Communist ideologue, Hare Krishna Koner had become the Minister for Land Revenue. This meant that he could take 'surplus land' and redistribute it to party loyalits. Hilariously, the Naxal leader, Charu Mazumdar, lost 13 acres  in this way. This impoverished his widow.  

I was both too far and too close.

She was far away. The reason Naxalbari happened was because both China and Pakistan wanted to choke off India's 'chicken neck'- i.e. the narrow strip of land connecting the bulk of the country to the 'seven sisters' in the North East. Since Bengali intellectuals hate Hindus and Hindu majority India, many- quite naturally- wanted to support the country's enemies.   

One of my cousins, with whom I had gone to school every day as a child, was deeply involved.

Why? The answer is that hardcore 'anti-Browderists' were angry that the CPM had fought and won elections. The Naxals believed that Communists should only rule after they have killed all 'class enemies' and have gotten rid of Parliaments and Courts of Law and so forth.  

And one of our batchmates let loose unbelievable mass brutality upon young men lining a street, asking householders to close their windows.

No. The batchmate was useless. Some lowly policemen and some hired goons killed kids who might plausibly be taken for Naxals. This was a good thing. Sadly, the mainstream CPM was doing a great job fucking over the economy. 

Rumours, before cable television (we had a small black and white),

TV broadcasting in Calcutta only began in 1975- by which time the Naxals had been crushed. The first colour broadcast was in 1982. The CPM was firmly in the saddle in West Bengal by then. This was because it continued to redistribute 'surplus' land & enhance the property rights of share-croppers and tenants. 

before the internet, before satellite telephone. I was tucked away at the University of Iowa, a young Assistant Professor quite set in with the anti-Vietnam War struggle earlier, and with the diasporic support of the Bangladesh upheaval later,

there was no such 'diasporic support'. Incidentally, the Bangladeshi equivalent of the Naxals supported Pakistan over the Mukhi Bahini. Why? Pakistan was allied with China. Sheikh Mujib, like Indira, was considered Moscow's puppet.  

but about Naxalbari was caught in helpless hearsay.

She relied on Marcus Franda's book which came out in 1971. Sadly, it was shit. The truth is, firstly there was no on-going 'Federalising' process in India at the time. Secondly, Hare Krishna Konar had discovered that colonial law gave the Revenue Ministry considerable discretionary powers in redistributing land to 'loyalists'. This is what transformed Bengali politics. 

Hadn't enough money to go home until 1972, only then to realise the depth and breadth of the wounded polity.

Siddhartha Shankar Ray became CM towards the end of March. By July, Naxalism had been crushed. Stupid foreign academics who thought India was a 'soft state' were revealed to be ignorant cunts.  

But, and I say this with some embarrassment, an old cynical woman now, some of us had romanticised the fact that the first shot was an arrow.

It was fired by a tribal woman whose people had emigrated to the region about a century and half previously. She killed a police officer belonging to the erstwhile Bhutia ruling class. Would the Centre support the Naxals as a way to split the CPM? No. Naxalbari was next to the 'Siliguri gap'. Thus National Security concerns trumped petty provincial politics.  

My best understanding of the entire movement still comes from Sumanta Banerjee's In the Woke of Naxalbari.

Sumanta was a journalist who quit the Statesman in 1973 & went over to the Naxals. But they had already been crushed. I think Bhabani Choudhury, who was helpful to Samar Sen, was an influence. Prof. Ruth Glass- an urban sociologist from London University- was close to Jyoti Basu and used to visit once a year. In other words, we are speaking of some useless journalists and academics who had jumped on a bandwagon which had ceased to have any meaningful existence. Still, any Naxal faction (there were dozens of them) which joined mainstream politics, could be used to split the CPM vote (on a caste basis) and thus could be useful to Congress. It was around this time that Mamta was beginning her rise, as a street-fighter- for the Youth Congress in Calcutta. At a later point, the CPM would accuse her of working with the Naxals in places like Singur (where some agricultural land had been given to ig industrialists) . 

Sumanta's book, which came out in 1980, though glorifying Charu Mazumdar, focussed on the land question and thus the Left Front government had no great objection to it. But neither did Congress which Indira had successfully taken to the Left. The collapse of the Janata Morcha & Indira's return to power meant that pretty much everybody was on the same page. Either 'landlords' could transform themselves into gangsters or they would be preyed on by gangsters. In either case, nobody gave a fuck about them.  

I have learnt some Chinese since then, enough to teach some Mao Zedong with the help of graduate students in Chinese.

She knows about as much Chinese as she does about European literature.  

It seems at this distance that, although Charu Mazumder's general inspiration from Mao was certainly enormously effective and moving,

it was useless. Hare Krishna Konar had met all the top Chinese leaders during his 1960 trip to Beijing. Incidentally, it was Ho Chi Minh who confirmed to him that the breach between the Chinese & the Soviets was permanent. But, since China was much poorer than Russia, this meant that whatever arms Mao could give you would be wholly ineffective compared to what the Soviets could supply Indira with. Pakistan's defeat in Bangladesh meant that the Siliguri gap was no longer vulnerable. Naxalism was welcome to retreat into remote forests so as to fuck over tribal people there.

it was the at least temporary conscientisation

a term from Paulo Frere's 'pedagogy of the oppressed'.  

of Left intellectuals that seemed most impressive to us. In 1968, when French university students joined hands with the working class,

The working class decided they preferred De Gaulle to a German Jew like Cohn-Bendit.  

the Naxalbari phenomenon seemed to us, from far away, a greater political achievement.

Because Spivak had shit for brains.  

It is no doubt a function of my base abroad that I cannot readily perceive continuity between the Naxalbari movement and what is called Maoism now in India.

The CPM was pro-China. The Naxals were supporters of the Cultural Revolution which was utterly disasterous. The CPM was able to rule West Bengal for thirty years on the basis of land-reform & clientism. Could they break their own 'iron rice-bowl' and emulate Deng? No. Their cadres were criminalized and corrupt.  

It could also be a function of the horror of violence

unleashed by the Left Front? 

among my co-workers from the landless SCST-s (this is the descriptive they commonly use) on the border of Birbhum and Jharkhand. It nay also be because I have personally encountered ex-Naxals in Purulia, completely given over to hands-on work for agricultural justice; I have inevitably thought of swords and ploughshares.

Swords don't matter. Guns do. The government can give pensions to those who shoot Naxals. Thus Naxalism was bound to disappear as tribal people gained political control of their own ancestral territory. 

Compare Mahashweta's 'Duoupati'- a Santhal woman whose job is to get beaten and raped by the police- with Prespident Draupati Murmu. Two Bengali Brahmin women- Mahua and Mamta- attacked her for visiting Dajeeling last year. Now it is Mahua & Mamta who fear jail while Murmu remains Head of State. Will a Santhali speaking State be carved out for her people? I suppose so. 

I am a literary critic and a translator. In 1981, I translated Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi". That story rather than the novel The Mother of 1084, set the seal on Naxalbari for me, as it will for generations to come.

Mahashweta- like Spivak, Mahua & Mamta- was a Bengali Brahmin woman. They may have looked down on Santhal women named 'Draupadi', but it is the Santhal woman who has prevailed. Centuries from now, school kids will chant the name of the 15th President of the Republic. Nobody will remember Mahashitter.  

Iyer's report on Experience

Contra Waugh, Charm isn't the weapon of the weak

Nor, pace Greene, Pity a Pan ruinous to let speak

Both were qualities England ever & yet lacks

Tho' now overrun by Lezzas & Blacks.

Telos' Tetelestai sub imperio Donaldi

Utile the self-domesticating Elitism Paideia yet posits

Futile the Monothelitism our current Caesar cossets 

In Telos' Tetelestai either all Energy ends

Or the Godhead's geodesic to self-sodomy bends

Envoi- 

Midons! Donald! Be thou Kierkegaard's Kirk or Troelstra's pair of ducks

Not lawless the choice sequence by which Donna, Daisy, fucks. 

Riposte- 

Aught intensional has an uncountable infinity of parts

Elohim's hindquarters aren't its own farts.

Sidhantha- 

I get it. Because Jews remain God's 'volitional' choice

Fucked is Molina or 'Hirschman' Voice.

Amie L. Thomasson on Ontology vs Aetiology

Contemporary academic philosophy consists of asking questions of the form 'Why do so many contemporary philosophers order salad at the cafetaria when, everybody agrees, nothing but one's own shit can be, or ought to be, eaten'? It is pointless to complain that nobody thinks coprophagy is a good thing. Why? Because this shows you aren't an academic- let alone a philosopher. 

As a case in point, Amie L. Thomasson, whom some consider one of our greatest living philosophers- which is like saying my neighbour's cat is the most proficient living alchemist- has a recent paper titled-

SHOULD ONTOLOGY BE EXPLANATORY?

The answer is no. 

 'What' questions are ontological. 'Why' questions are aetiological.  A particular discipline or discourse seeks to discover, invent or otherwise posit as existing, particular types of things. Those types are its ontology.  

Why a thing arises is a question about causation and is aetiological because the Greek word for 'cause' is aitia (αἰτíα).

Abstract. The central question of ontology has long been thought to be ‘What is there?’.
The central way of answering it has been to consider which entities we must posit as part
of a best total explanatory theory.

This begs the question- be it central or peripheral- as to whether thoughts exist. We may, for certain purposes, posit their existences just as we can posit other things- e.g. cuddliness- but nothing is explained by saying 'the cuddliness of the baby causes me to cuddle the baby' or ' thought cause us to think there are thoughts'.  

This paper argues against this ‘explanatory’ conception of metaphysics,

Nobody thinks of metaphysics (literally 'what is beyond natural science') as aetiological. Diseases have aetiologies and curing diseases by understanding their causes is useful and noble. Philosophy is jejune and useless.  

by showing that it relies on an unarticulated assumption that all the terms at issue in these metaphysical debates serve an explanatory function.

If so academic philosophy is even shittier than we imagine it to be.  

Making use of work in systemic functional linguistics

can't help unless philosophers suffer some sort of nuerological disorder when it comees to language processing. 

enables us to identify the many different functions played by terms of interest in metaphysics.

The functions of interest to metaphysics are metaphysical. But language- it now appears- isn't beyond physics at all.  

And that makes it clear that ‘contribution of explanatory power’ should be rejected as an across-the-board criterion in ontology.

Who accepted it? Name & shame the cunts!  

This work in functional linguistics also enables us to see why it is useful to have a language that entitles us to use redundant inferences

e.g. 'that utterly cunty cunt' 

to introduce terms for properties, numbers,

e.g. cunty cunt as opposed 'not that cunty cunt, I meant the other cunty cunt'

and the like, giving us new reason to accept ‘easy’ inferences that there are such things.

cunty cunts?  

As a result, we should give up thinking that ‘what is there?’ provides a deep and interesting question for a discipline called ‘ontology’ to answer,

Quantum onlology- sure. But that's high IQ stuff. What this lady is doing is finger painting with her own faeces.  

and give up thinking that the task for ontology is to determine which entities to ‘posit’ as part of a best total explanatory theory.

Since we don't know what that is- but are pretty sure the best one we have will soon be superseded- nobody has ever applied themselves to any such task. 

The central question of ontology, as Quine presented it, could be expressed in three
words: “What is there?”

Quine was wrong. To find out what there is, you need to get out of your armchair & go look. For a example, to find out what is in the cupboard, I have to open the cupboard door. OMG! It's a ga..ga..ga ghost! I shut the door quickly. But that doesn't mean a ghost exists in the cupboard. I have to apply various verification protocols. 

Ontology is what you must content yourself with because neither direct obversvation nor verification are possible. Equally, it may be purely dogmatic- what in Sanskrit is called 'matam' as opposed to 'vigyan'. 

But those who aim to answer this question

are either doing 'vigyan' (science) or else they are talking about how many angels can dance upon the point of a pin.  

generally do not take their goal as simply to generate a list or inventory,

Physicists would love to have an inventory of elementary particles or to find out whether hypothetical ones- e.g. gravitons- can be verifiably produced in the laboratory or detected in the cosmos.  

and tend to deny that answers are easy to come by. Instead, the project of ontology has been
thought of

by whom? Usless shitheads.  

as a matter of determining what entities we should or must ‘posit’ as part of
a best total explanatory theory.

which is that these cunty cunts are copraphogous cunty cunts.  

Amie's paper shows a complete absence of thought. This is a sample-

Here is the idea. In early language—both developmentally and evolutionarily

we know nothing about 'evolutionarily' early language. As for 'developmentally' early language- all we can say is that infants are different from mature people. If some fundamental change occurs in our fitness landscape, we have no idea how language will 'develop'. Overy my own lifetime it has become much more mathematical.  

(and across languages)—we begin with ‘congruent’ meanings: nouns for things, verbs
for processes. . . (Halliday 2009, 117).

but anything can be a gerund or a denominal verb or whatever. What is certain is that philosophy is now only taught and studied by those who are developmentally challenged. 

Lyly's Campaspe

Since to every rouged & rutting Phyllis

& our rude waking to what her bill is

Entelechy accords an Appelles

Tho' of suet her titties & sausage rings her bellies

Nathless, so hard has that whore ridden Aristotle

None can prove wine isn't its own bottle

Or Sherlock's smoke, Home's desiccating dottle

 Cupid's dick- Campaspe's demographic throttle.

Envoi- 

Turk! For its gate was greater,  Myndos fled through it

Brick up Mercy's- lest Kristos' dead rue it. 

Riposte- 

Tho' Homonoia's incarnate anointment

aint, for haemorrhoids, an ointment

Grieve who it will

It suffices to gate any City on a Hill. 

Siddhantha-

Euphuism sublates its own Erudition- rendering both so silly

Only an old darkie like me bothers with John Lyly. 

Why Hohfeld rules & Kelsen drools.

 

Henry Cohen summarises Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law thus- 

Kelsen was a legal positivist.

i.e. law is a command 

The "positivity" of law, in his words, lies in the fact that it is created and annulled by acts of human beings,

sovereigns or those acting for sovereigns 

thus being independent of morality and similar norm systems.

This does not follow. A command may be defeated by the higher claim of morality, religion or some other normative system. Moreover, one defeated command may lead to loss of sovereignty or the power to command. Thus commands aren't independent of anything which might lead to their defeat or disregard.  

This constitutes the difference between positive law and natural law,

Positive law may say it is natural and natural law might say that it is obvious that the Sovereign has commanded it or was just about to do so before deciding to invade Poland instead. Kelsen was a stupid man who couldn't tell the difference between shite which is only different by ipse dixit stipulation.   

which, like morality, is deduced from a presumably self-evident basic norm which is considered to be the expression of the "will of nature" or of "pure reason."' Kelsen labelled his theory of positive law "the pure theory of law."

rather than the 'shit theory of law'. I wonder why? 

He explained the nature of its purity: [I]t seeks to preclude from the cognition of positive law all elements foreign thereto.

This can't be done. Cognition is bound up with the entire web of predication. You can't even separate law from econ or biology.  

The limits of this subject and its cognition must be clearly fixed in two directions:

No limits can be placed on any thing which is epistemic. German pedants were donkeys. 

the specific science of law, the discipline usually called jurisprudence, must be distinguished from the philosophy of justice, on the one hand, and from sociology, or cognition of social reality, on the other.

Distinguishing things doesn't mean they have discoverable 'limits'.  

The pure theory of law should be distinguished from the philosophy of justice.

Both are useless. Moreover, they may presuppose each other in various useless ways.  

While the pure theory of law is a science

only in the sense that the sexy theory of astrology is a science 

justice is an "irrational ideal" 

it may be arbitrary. It isn't irrational.  

and "a judgment of value, determined by emotional factors and therefore subjective in character."

Emotions are either Darwinian algorithms of the mind or we live in an occasionalist universe. There can be 'naturality' in that which is 'subjective' (i.e. has no observable metric) just as naturality may be lacking in an 'objective' configuration space- e.g. Arrow Debreu.  

" The pure theory of law must also be distinguished from sociological jurisprudence.

Only in the sense that we must distinguish my attempt to donate sperm to the moon from ordinary cases of public exposure & indecent behaviour during the course of a School excursion to the Zoo. 

Still, if you are too stupid to practice law & are stuck teaching it to people who are too stupid to practice law, then make such distinctions by all means. 

The pure theory of law studies norms-"propositions that state how men should behave" -

There are no such norms. There are merely certain actions which are forbidden- that too in specific circumstances (e.g having a wank on the Tube or taking a dump on the steps of No.10 Downing Street).  

whereas sociological jurisprudence studies what "is"-how people actually behave.

It is shit. Turds are incapable of studying anything except how to get smellier or squishier.  

Thus, Kelsen agreed with neither the natural law theorists,

who thought laws could have 'naturality' (i.e. be 'non-arbitrary') or canonicity such that all jurisdictions would converge to the same rule. Since this hasn't happened even between Scots & English law, we can safely say the thing is a pipe dream.  

who viewed law and morality as sharing the same basis,

Everything to do with human beings shares the same basis- e.g. wanking on the Tube & teaching this shite in a University.  

nor the legal realists, who believed that law consists solely of "the actual decisions of courts that litigants must live with."

This is clearly false. Many things which are clearly justiciable are nevertheless res non lege decisae

Law as a Coercive Order 

The coercive order is independent of law. I have the legal right to tell Mike Tyson he is totes gay & desperately wants to suck me off. Sadly, the coercive order which obtains has him punching off my fucking head if I try to exercise my right. 

Kelsen viewed law as a coercive order of human behavior. 

Did it stop the 'Night of the Long Knives'? No. Kelsen was clearly wrong. No wonder he couldn't get an Academic appointment when he first moved to the US. 

Laws "command a certain human behavior by attaching a coercive act to the opposite behavior."

No. Those with the means of coercion command. My infant son used to beat the fuck out of me till I surrendered the TV remote to him so he could watch Tellytubbies. The odd thing was, he got me to clean up after myself and even do some cooking and cleaning. He didn't like his Mum having to act like my unpaid servant. 

He disagreed, however, with the belief of John Austin, who

lived in a nice country where the 'Crown in Parliament' saw Justice as a service industry whose aim was utility- nothing more, save in egregious cases of repugnancy. 

 posited laws to be "a species of commands,"" since a command "is essentially a willing and its expression," 

or baby beating me or  biting my nose till I changed the channel to 'Tellytubbies'. But, at a later point, even the neighbour's cat could get me to watch 'Aristocats' for the umpteenth time instead of 'Fist of Fury'. I'm lying. It is 'Pyaasa' that I watch continually. 

and because it is doubtful whether some laws embody the true will of anyone."

There can be no doubt that, if everybody wants 'representative government', they go along with whatever legislative compromise proves 'incentive compatible'. 

 Many legislators enact laws without understanding them, let alone willing them.

They 'meta-will' them- i.e. will to will whatever results from some legislative process. But 'meta-will' is just 'will'. 

 Kelsen preferred to describe laws as norms or rules "stating that an individual ought to behave in a certain way, but not asserting that such behavior is the actual will of anyone."

In Civil Law, this may seem to be the case- e.g the conduct of a bonus paterfamilias with respect to culpa levis in abstracto. But, Hohfeld shows us the proper way to understand tort actions of this type. Essentially, you have an immunity if you show that your conduct was such as a person of the highest diligence would have exhibited in defending his own interest albeit it was a third party who was affected. 

Hohfeld was the only jurist of the previous century who wasn't pants. Add in Coase's theorem & Myerson type incentive compatibility & ...what? We are back where we started- which is a good way to be if the alternative is being stuck up our own assholes. 

முருகன் அழகு

When the Shraman pauses peregrination for Ind's four months of rain

& the Brahman praises Shiva for taking on Vishnu's Katechon strain

Then, because Nappinnai repaired Venkateshwara's tresses

Not even Shunyata's mundan, Bali, in Sutala, distresses.

Envoi- 

Prince! Krishna is the cowlick of whose skulls are bare

& why even the blackest black hole yet has hair

What Sheep say about parables

Though our shepherd's flesh furnishes, to gourmets, galavati kebab

& His blood burnishes, for the bibulous, Burgundian sharab

Nathless, it is to traffic in, but, the mohair of His beard

That, for England's Woolsack, we, yet, are reared

Envoi-

Prince! That Berenice's votive tresses, Belinda's ravished lock

Heaven's pasture now possesses, famished thy flock!

Wang Wei's Sarnath divyadhvani

Wingless the lonely mountain affords not a soul to sight

Just human voices homing through gloaming light

Slanting sun-beams, as green moss, are remade

& of Hou Yi's loss- Dreams' deer palisade. 

Did Karl Marx know the difference between dot Indians & feather Indians?

Yes. He had been to University. But he often got them confused because his IQ was low. 

The following is from Das Kapital

When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it.

Why compete with a machine? Suppose my wife had tried, even in the most luckluster manner, to compete with my Dyson, do you really think I'd have voided the warranty on it? 

Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses.

The benefit is gained by everyone. However, there can be transitional 'structural unemployment' for some. 

History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers,

Fuck off! The harrowing of the North was the worst thing in English history. 100,000 died.   In Yorkshire, 75 percent of the population perished.  

an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838.

the spinning jenny enabled the wages of handloom weavers to rise very substantially. Then weaving itself was mechanised.  

Many of them died of starvation,

why not enter the Work House instead?  

many with families vegetated for a long time on 2 1/2 d. a day. 

But cloth got cheaper for everybody.  

On the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India.

It made cloth a little cheaper- a good thing.  

The Governor General reported 1834-35: “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cottonweavers are bleaching the plains of India.”

Why the fuck would Lord Bentinck tell such a stupid lie? The answer is that he said no such thing. Karl Marx is thinking of the 'trail of tears' in the US. The path taken by the forcibly relocated Native Americans was marked by the bleached bones of those who succumbed to hunger, disease, exposure or exhaustion. 

If cloth gets cheaper, everybody benefits though some may suffer in the short run as they are forced to change their occupation. When technology improves, the quantum of muscular labour required tends to fall. This created the possibility that the industrial proletariat might, at some point in the future, shrink as a percentage of the population. This meant that the window for a Communist Revolution only existed while this percentage was still rising. Even in that case, there was the danger that an employer might share productivity gains with the workers. Without class conflict, Marx's theory of history collapses. 

Kyenes's 'means to prosperity'

In 1933, Keynes published a pamphlet titled 'the means to prosperity' which proposed that

1) the problem facing the world was one of not distribution but coordination. Yet when relative prices change, there are distributional effects if enough of income goes to or arises from a particular market (e.g. wages for workers, real interest rate for thos eliving off savings, oil for those who own oil wells etc.). Consumers who spend a big proportion of their income on a particular item- e.g. potatoes or rice for subsistence farmers)- sufffer a loss in 'real income' when the price of that staple rises. 

Changing the price vector is contentious. Moreover it may have perverse effects. Fix the price of bread too low and there is no bread in the market. The rich eat meat instead. The poor starve. 

What isn't contentious is improving coordination. People do that all the time. They don't need some stupid Professor to tell them how to do mutually beneficial deals.

2) No 'concurrency problem' arose- i.e. there was some 'natural' way of deciding in what order things should be done even if this had distributional consequences. Sadly, what is contentious is the order in which things are done. Everyone thinks they should get priority or else they expect some reward for delaying their gratification. 

3) Keynes was also saying that Structural unemployment associated with falling or stagnant productivity didn't really matter. Something could be done for workers in 'Sunset industries' without harming 'Sunrise industries' by taxing them too the hilt. 

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

If our poverty were due to famine or earthquake or war

some poverty around the world- e.g. in China where Civil Wars raged- was attributable to such things. Britain wasn't poor because it had won the war, avoided a prolonged General Strike, and could import as much food as it liked from its huge Empire.

—if we lacked material things and the resources to produce them, we could not expect to find the Means to Prosperity except in hard work, abstinence, and invention.

People did lack material things. The 'resources to produce them' were too expensive for them to be profitably produced. One reason for this was that rents needed to fall in real terms. But a lot of the capital stock needed to be sold for scrap. There had to be a shake out in many different industries.  

In fact, our predicament is notoriously of another kind. It comes from some failure in the immaterial devices of the mind,

people had different views about what was right and what was expedient. It is difficult to coordinate the actions of people who want different things and who hold radically different beliefs about how the world works.  

in the working of the motives which should lead to the decisions and acts of will, necessary to put in movement the resources and technical means we already have.

Suppose there were a 'revelation principle' such that everybody would truthfully reveal to a central planner exactly on what terms they would be willing to buy and sell commodities and consume and pay-for public goods, then there might be an incentive compatible 'mechanism' to optimally coordinate actions. Sadly, there is a problem of impredicativity- our preference depends on the preferences of others. More sadly, we don't know the truth about ourselves for a very good reason- viz. to baffle a predator or parasite our 'source code' is hidden even from ourselves. Moreover, there are concurrency, complexity, computability and categoricity problems which make the problem intractable. 

It is as though two motor-drivers, meeting in the middle of a highway, were unable to pass one another because neither knows the rule of the road.

Easily solved if one is willing to give way.  

Their own muscles are no use; a motor engineer cannot help them; a better road would not serve. Nothing is required and nothing will avail, except a little, a very little, clear thinking.

No. Clear thinking won't help. One has to give way to the other. A sacrifice has to be made.  

So, too, our problem is not a human problem of muscles and endurance.

Nor, for Old Etonians like Keynes & Strachey, was their problem sutpidity and ignorance. This is because if you are an Economist, talking bollocks is what gets you paid, son.  

It is not an engineering problem or an agricultural problem. It is not even a business problem, if we mean by business those calculations and dispositions and organising acts by which individual entrepreneurs can better themselves. Nor is it a banking problem, if we mean by banking those principles and methods of shrewd judgement by which lasting connections are fostered and unfortunate commitments avoided. On the contrary, it is, in the strictest sense, an economic problem, or, to express it better,[Pg 6] as suggesting a blend of economic theory with the art of statesmanship, a problem of Political Economy.

It was a coordination problem of a type familiar to oligopolists, bankers, etc. If everybody raises price or expands output at the same time, chances are they will all do okay. If one expands and the others don't, it may go bankrupt.  

I call attention to the nature of the problem, because it points us to the nature of the remedy.

If we all point our arses in a particular direction and fart simultaneously, we will be able to reverse the direction of rotation of the earth. As the first Superman film showed, this will cause time to go backward. In this way we can defeat Lex Luthor and save Lois Lane.  

It is appropriate to the case that the remedy should be found in something which can fairly be called a device.

For Keynes, money was a 'subtle device' for linking the present to the future.  

Yet there are many who are suspicious of devices,

gimmicks? 

and instinctively doubt their efficacy. There are still people who believe that the way out can only be found by hard work, endurance, frugality, improved business methods, more cautious banking, and, above all, the avoidance of devices.

These things would still be required. But one thing more was needful. A collective determination to talk the right, rather than the wrong sort, of bollocks. 

But the lorries of these people will never, I fear, get by.

Because lorry-drivers didn't go to Eton. Thus they don't understand that one or other must give way. Either, the thing is covered in the Highway Code or they toss a coin or have a pissing contest. 

They may stay up all night, engage more sober chauffeurs, install new engines, and widen the road; yet they will never get by, unless they stop to think and work out with the driver opposite a small device by which each moves simultaneously a little to his left.

What Keynes says about 'lorries' is also true of people. If you go to the City of London, you will find Bankers standing motionless on the street. This is because they don't understand that if they both move a little to their left, they will be able to pass each other by.  

It is the existing situation which we should find paradoxical.

If we were mad.  

There is nothing paradoxical in the suggestion that some immaterial adjustment—some change, so to speak, “on paper”—should be capable of working wonders.

It is magical thinking.  

The paradox is to be found in 250,000 building operatives out of work, when more houses are our greatest material need.

Why did Keynes want yet more houses? His material needs were easily met by waiters and tailors and rent-boys.  

It is the man who tells us that there is no means, consistent with sound finance and political wisdom, of getting the one to work at the other, whose judgement we should instinctively doubt.

More particularly if he shows us his dick. Otherwise, the fact is, we don't meet a lot of blokes who talk to us about 'sound finance'. We do meet guys who say they will lower our taxes or raise our benefits if we vote for them. The problem is that there's some stupid shit they feel it is very important for them to do before they get round to keeping their promises.  

The calculations which we ought to suspect are those of the statesman, who, being already burdened with the support of the unemployed, tells us that it would involve him in heavy liabilities, present and to come, which the country cannot afford, if he were to set the men to build the houses; and the sanity to be questioned is his, who thinks it more economical and better calculated to increase the national wealth to maintain unemployed shipbuilders, than to spend a fraction of what their maintenance is costing him, in setting them to build one of the greatest works of man.

Keynes didn't know that the cost of a ship or a house includes raw materials and expensive equipment. He probably thought builders shit out bricks.  

When, on the contrary, I show, a little elaborately, as in the ensuing chapter, that to create wealth

by getting builders to shit out bricks & then use those bricks to build houses which can float on air (to save on having to pay for building plots) 

will increase the national income and that a large proportion of any increase in the national income will accrue to an Exchequer, amongst whose largest outgoings is the payment of incomes to those who are unemployed and whose receipts are a proportion of the incomes of those who are occupied, I hope the reader will feel, whether or not he thinks himself competent to criticise the argument in detail,

Did you know that if you buy a Time share, not only will you get free holidays, you will also receive rent for all the weeks when you aren't on holiday? This basically means that you double your income! What's more, if you take a Time share on your Time share, you can quadruple your money! No wonder the Government wants to ban what they call 'fraudulent' Timeshare sales. Don't they understand that if everybody's Income quadruples, so will the Government's tax revenue! 

that the answer is just what he would expect,—that it agrees with the instinctive promptings of his commonsense.

You'd have to be an idiot to pass up this amazing opportunity! Also I have some magic beans you will want to exchange your cow for. 

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,

because of the disincentive effect? 

and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the Budget. For to take the opposite view to-day is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more;—and who, when at last his account is balanced

by the forced sale of his inventory 

with nought on both sides,

No. There is likely to be a loss. 

is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss.

The manufacturer knows his business well enough. If the current price doesn't cover your marginal cost you may as well see if demand is inelastic. If it isn't, you go bankrupt a bit more quickly- which may be a blessing in disguise.  

Economists pretend that there was a 'device' to fix the Depression which would have no distributional or other socially divisive or politically problematic consequences. But, it was obvious, there was no such magical remedy. 

It is a different matter that Accountancy practices in the Treasury & Reserve Bank needed to change just as they needed to change in the private sector. Better book-keeping is a 'means to prosperity'. Writing books can make you a bit of money but won't have any magical effect on the economy. 

Cemil Aydin on Pan-Islamism

 
An article by Prof. Cemil Aydin, published by Aeon asks- 

What is the Muslim world?

If the Government of a country says it is a Muslim country and that it belongs to a wider Muslim World, then the set of such countries is the Muslim World. 57 countries are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). 8 of those countries don't have a Muslim majority. All Muslim majority countries are members. 

One reason less developed countries may want to join the OIC is so as to push through social reform and to abolish superstitious practices in their own socieities. The traditionalists may say 'we have always done things this way', but the reformer replies- 'other Muslim countries are abandoning this practice. We should do so too otherwise we will get the reputation of being backward and lacking in religious instruction.'. 

Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda

Nonsense! NATO actually exists. So does the OIC. Both were created after Colonialism had gone into terminal decline. 

Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda

Since there is no colonialism, there is no colonial propaganda.  A thing which does not exist isn't dangerous at all. Islam is seen as a way of overcoming tribalism. 

ON 17 May 1919 in Paris, three Indian Muslim leaders

who were part of the Indian Delegation headed by Secretary of State Montague. 

met the United States’ president Woodrow Wilson

The British, French & Italian Premiers were also present 

to

represent the views of the Government of India. Wilson had been reluctant to give India a seat in the League but the size of the Indian army and its role in the MENA meant it could not be ignored. 

make a case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate in Istanbul,

I think, the Brits hoped that the Caliph would become their puppet in the manner of the Nizam (whose sons would later marry daughters of the Caliph) of Hyderabad.

The Indian Muslim delegates were aware of intense anger amongst young Muslims back home over the Italian conquest of Libya & Ottoman losses in the Balkans. 

and for the national self-determination of Anatolia as a homeland for Turkish Muslims.

It was true that the Muslim world supported the Ottoman Caliph and did not want the Greeks to gain Smyrna. But the reason these three Indian Muslims were able to meet Wilson was because they had been put on the Imperial delegation for the purpose of reflecting the views of the India office. I may mention this happened a month after the Jallianwallah Bagh atrocity and a little after the beginning of the third Afghan war. 

Montague began the discussion by saying 

Mr. President and Gentlemen, I think I can first express our heartfelt thanks for this opportunity of stating our case, because we feel deeply that you gentlemen, who are pursuing the peace of the world in this room, are likely to endanger for a long time to come the peace of the world in the East unless you realize the strength of Mohammedan feeling against the sort of peace that we hear rumored as a result of the war with Turkey. 

Montague is saying 'there is a Muslim world and a Muslim public opinion. If you ignore it, there will be war'. 

The Government of India feel this particularly strongly;

Because those who serve the GoI actually live cheek by jowl with the 'Muslim world' & 'the Hindu world'. What is particularly worrying is that these two worlds- along with that of the Bolshevik- are uniting against us. 

 but I would propose today, with your permission, that you should hear the case from my Indian colleagues. The case is always the more forceful when presented by the inhabitants of the country itself, than by one who is privileged to represent them. I am accompanied here this afternoon by my two colleagues on the Imperial British Indian Delegation who are both Hindus. Their object in coming here this afternoon is to demonstrate by the words which they will address to you subsequently the depth and reality with which Hindu Indians sympathize with the case of Mohammedan Indians.

The Indians advocated for the independence of what they called ‘the last remaining Muslim power in the world’.

Iran had declined greatly but it was still independent though Britain was determined to dominate the oil producing portion of it. 

Indian Muslim leaders speaking up on behalf of an Ottoman caliphate might appear to represent a global Muslim unity, but such a conclusion would be a mistake.

It is possible that the India Office hoped that Wilson would restrain George & Clemenceau. But it was also true that all three Muslims saw themselves as part of the wider Muslim ummah. They themselves had done well under the Raj but if power slipped away from the British governing class, they themselves might be consigned to the dustbin of history. 

In fact, the details, arguments and ideals of the meeting reveal how incoherent and misleading the prevalent presumption is of any distinction between ‘the Muslim world’ and ‘the West’.

The opposite is the case. Montague was saying 'beware the wrath of the Muslim world!' Would Lloyd George come to his senses if he was reminded that India could see a second Mutiny? Don't forget, the Afghans had launched a war two weeks previously. 

The Indian Muslims made their case for Turkish independence by appeals to Wilson’s 14 points for peace.

How very strange! When appealing to an important guy you don't mention stuff he has himself committed himself to. You tell him he sucks donkey ass instead.  

Wilson, it must be said, didn't think darkies could rule themselves and thus was sceptical of the demand that India be given a seat at the new League of Nations. 

Their success in getting the meeting with Wilson owed

everything to the fact that Montague included them in his delegation 

much to their sacrifice as soldiers in the British army fighting and defeating the German-Ottoman alliance.

There were 300,000 to 500,000 Indian troops in the MENA at that time.  

Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for British-ruled India,

led the delegation.  

arranged the meeting because he

thought Lloyd George & Clemenceau had gone crazy. Both were backing Venizelos, the heroic Greek Prime Minister, who hoped to gain even more territory for his country. He was defeated in the 1920 election because his people were exhausted after 8 years of war. The truth is, for all their courage, Greeks, even with allied help, could not hope to take and keep Smyrna from the Turks.

Montague & Chelmsford were worried that the Jallianwallah atrocity- in April- had alienated Sikhs and Hindus. Muslims were being influenced by 'Hijrat'. The Aghans took the opportunity to invade on May 3. It took three months to crush them. Sadly, Lloyd George was in a Messianic mood. He saw himself as prevailing where the Crusaders had failed. 

In May 1919,  Italian forces landed in Antalya and showed signs of moving troops toward Smyrna. Seizing the opportunity created by a temporary Italian walkout at the conference, Lloyd George fabricated reports of imminent threats to Christian minorities in the area.

Thus, in Mid-May, faced with Italian maneuvers, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson agreed to support a Greek occupation. The Allied Council authorized the Greeks to land in Smyrna with Allied naval and military backing, an operation that commenced on May 15, 1919. Lloyd George subsequently encouraged the Greek army to advance further east into Anatolia, with the intention of forcing the Ottoman government into accepting the punitive Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920.

Montague, who was Jewish, had no reason to believe that a Twentieth Century Crusade against Islam would be at all desirable. 

The following interchange between him and his PM is interesting

Montague- 'I don’t know whether you have heard of the very serious trouble that we have had in the Punjab in India, where certain Hindu seditionists, largely influenced I believe by outside influences, largely influenced, I believe, by Bolshevik influences, 

Ataturk would in fact ally with the Bolsheviks. Montague's intelligence network gave him an insight into a new chapter in the Great Game whereby Moscow had supplanted Berlin as the Mecca for anti-Imperialist Indians. 

were stirring up the people to resist the laws of the land. The Mosques were thrown open to them, and the non-Mussulman, the non-believer, the Hindu, was invited into the Mohammedan pulpit to preach opposition to the laws of the Indian Government, a thing which never happened before in the history of the world, I should imagine, and it would have been regarded by the old-fashioned Mohammedan as a desecration of their Mosques. 

Montague is referring to the fact that Swami Shraddhanand, a revered Arya Samaj leader, addressed a massive congregation from the pulpit of the Jama Masjid in Delhi on April 4, 1919.  Seven years later, he was killed by a Muslim fanatic.

Now, this is due, not to one item, but to a whole series of items. 

Allenby's taking control of Jerusalem- the third holiest place in Islam- had itself been a shock as had the Balfour declaration. 

The talk about Constantinople began it; the rumors of the landing of Italian and Greek soldiers in Asia Minor, the suggestions that the Mosque of San Sofia should be rededicated as a Christian Church,—all these things have brought into these people’s minds the belief that despite what was said to them during the war, this war has turned out to be a war of non-Mohammedans against Mohammedans, a war of non-Moslem faiths against the Moslem faith; and the feeling which has been shown by my colleagues today merely makes me implore you to remember that that feeling, if it is not corrected by the terms of peace, may endanger the peace of the world throughout the East, and may add to the already dangerous elements in Russia.

Mr. Lloyd-George: Surely, Mr. Secretary of State, the Mohammedans of India must know that most of the fighting has been done amongst the Christians.

Rt. Hon. E. S. Montagu: The fighting has been done amongst the Christians, but the peace terms dictated to our Christian enemies will strike them as so much more moderate than the peace terms which lead to the complete disappearance of our only Mussulman state. And did you see that the Turkish newspapers have published a statement that they thought the terms of peace to Germany very fair?

Montague hoped his boss would see sense. The Allies didn't have the manpower to occupy Germany. Did they have the strength to occupy Anatolia? Look what happened at Gallipoli. Johhny Turk is a doughty fighter. What happens if our Indian soldiers mutiny? What about our own exhausted conspripts who just want to go home and have done with war? 

Montague never

believed that the British empire, as the biggest Muslim empire in the world, had a moral responsibility to

put on a Fez and give up bacon sarnies?  

listen to the Indian Muslim case for the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate.

 Montague, like some other British officials, thought that the Raj was vulnerable. If you simultaneously alienate Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, you may have to circle the wagons till you can evacuate the White population and abandon the sub-continent to anarchy.  

All three Muslim leaders asserting their spiritual ties to the Ottoman caliph

actually, it was Montague who brought up the matter. The Aga Khan then had to pretend that a Sunni Caliph really was the head of his own religion. 

– the Aga Khan, Abdullah Yusuf Ali

were Shias. They had no 'spiritual ties' to the Caliph other than those all Muslims have towards each other.  

and Sahibzada Aftab Ahmad Khan – were loyal subjects of the British Crown. Several Indian Hindu leaders

the Maharaja of Bikaner & Lord Sinha 

joined the meeting, making clear their solidarity with their fellow Indian Muslim brethren and their support for the Ottoman caliphate.

They echoed the line taken by the Government of India. Try to grab Turkey and you may end up losing India. But, if India goes, where are you going to get the troops to garrisson the MENA?  

This conversation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 does not reveal a clash between an Islamic world and a Western world.

Yes it does. Lloyd George, Clemenceau & Venizelos & the Italian King all dreamed of succeeding where the Crusaders failed. No doubt, there would be a puppet Caliph and a puppet Shah and a puppet Khedive and so forth. But behind such 'veiled Protectorates', would be Christian Europe re-establishing Crusader States. 

That's why first the Turks, then the KMT Chinese & then even the Saudi Arabians, established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. By then, the 'White' counter-revolution had been defeated. Bolshevik Russia was helping Ataturk & Sun Yat Sen who, in 1923, sent Chiang Kai Shek to Moscow to study the Red Army and gain Soviet military assistance. 

It reveals one complex and interdependent world.

No. It reveals that, in 1919, three European powers- UK, France & Italy- wanted to take over Muslim countries in a manner which explicitly invoked the spirit of the Crusades. Destroying atheistic Bolshevism, too, was a holy crusade. The India Office had other views but it had little influence. Military defeat and/or financial exhaustion caused the West to give up these schemes by the end of 1922. Egypt & Afghanistan gained Independence. Ataturk retained Asia Minor. Ibn Saud chased away the British backed Hashemite Sharif of Mecca.  

Yet, consider Bernard Lewis’s

a British Jew who studied under Massignon. He was at SOAS for many years and absorbed the ICS point of view.  

influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, ‘The Roots of the Muslim Rage’ (1990):

Muslims would get angrier and angrier 

‘In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam.’

This theory was foundational to the Pakistan movement and characterized one school of Muslim thought in India. However, the duty of hijrat (migration) from dar ul harb is no longer maintained. Thus Islamists are under no obligation to give up their American or European Nationalities. 

Lewis left little doubt that this alleged ‘duty’ of Muslims meant violent means: ‘The obligation of holy war … begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.’ In spirit and substance, the Indian Muslim leaders meeting with Wilson in 1919 contradicts every single claim by Lewis.

No. The fact that British stooges were British stooges doesn't change the fact that they acted as Muslims by making a demand on behalf of a Muslim potentate.  

The Muslims were loyal supporters of the multi-faith British empire,

they were its beneficiaries.  

cooperating with Hindus, and had fought against the Muslim soldiers of the Ottoman empire during the First World War.

No. They weren't soldiers. Yusuf Ali had been an ICS officer and had done valuable propaganda work during the Great War. However, what really mattered was getting paid. The Indians in the British Army were mercenaries.  

They did not see Westerners as any kind of enemy,

because they were getting paid by them 

and made their case for the Ottoman caliphate according to international norms about national self-determination and imperial peace.

How come they mentioned their common religion? Also, why weren't they getting their knickers in a twist about Buddhist Vietnam?  

Though he has been influential in US policy circles,

Academic circles- sure. Policy circles were about petro-dollars and arms contracts.  

Lewis did not come up with the idea of ‘a Muslim world’ distinct from a Western one.

But he did invent the notion that there was once a guy named Moses who parted the Red Sea- right? 

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Western journalists and radical Islamists popularised the idea.

Very true. Ayatollah Khomeini was a Lesbian Pope. Then Bernard Lewis & some other bloke who wrote for the NYT convinced him that the he was actually a slim Moose or Mooseslim or something of that sort.  

In their view, contemporary Pan-Islamism draws on ancient Muslim ideals in pursuit of restoring a pristine religious purity. According to this account, Pan-Islamism is a reactionary movement, in thrall to ancient traditions and classical Islamic law. The peculiarities of Islam, it is always argued, compel Muslims’ religious affiliation to transcend other political affiliations. This Pan-Islamism not only survives but thrives in the contemporary world, and is a civilisational artefact deeply at odds with modern times.

Whereas the truth is, Berard Lewis invented Moses which led to the wholly spurious distinction between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Lesbian Popes like Ayatollah Khomeini.  

Lewis might not have originated the idea of the Muslim world,

i.e. the 'Saracen' world against which the Crusades were waged. 

but he gave it an intellectual polish, and inspired Samuel Huntington’s even more popular work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).

Nope. Hundtington had been around for a long time. He reacted to Fukuyama (a Straussian student of Koyeve's) by stating the fucking obvious. After Marx, Muhammad would become the biggest challenger of Western hegemony. What nobody could predict at that time was that the thing was a sideshow. What would marginalize the West was the rise of China.  

‘The struggle between these rival systems [of the Islamic world and Christendom],’ wrote Lewis, ‘has now lasted for some 14 centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the 7th century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.’

Huntington died in 2008 at the height of the 'War on Terror' which the West lost. Now, Trump says, the question is whether Europe will be internally colonized by second or third generation Muslim immigrants.  

Such remains the dominant Western view of Pan-Islamism, expressed in the phrase common to punditry and journalism – ‘the Muslim world’.

Which just means 'Muslim majority plus Muslim ruled countries'.  

Yet, contrary to this dominant view of an eternal clash with the Christian West, Pan-Islamism is in fact relatively new, and not so exceptional.

No. The 'Christian West' only clashed with Islam, nothing else. There was no Crusade against Buddhism. Confucians never occupied Andalucia. The Battle of Vienna, in 1683, did not involve the defeat of marauding Hare Krishnas.  

Closely related to Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism,

neither of which mattered in the slightest 

it emerged in the 1880s as a response to the iniquities of European imperialism.

which were less horrible than those of the Turk or Albanian. 

Initially, the idea of global Muslim solidarity aimed to give Muslims more rights within European empires,

like being allowed to resume the slave trade?  

to respond to ideas of white/Christian supremacy,

by asserting Islamic superiority 

and to assert the equality of existing Muslim states in international law.

Why are Muslims not being allowed to slaughter and enslave Kaffirs? 

The idea of an ancient clash between the Muslim World and the Christian World is a dangerous and modern myth.

Fair point. Muslims want to kill kaffirs of all descriptions- right?  

It relies on fabricated misrepresentations of separate Islamic and Western geopolitical and civilisational unities.

Also, it pretends that men don't have vaginas.  

Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism

& the Vegetarian & Suffragette & Gay Lib movements 

offer a better context for understanding Pan-Islamism. All three emerged in the late 19th century, at the height of the age of empire, and as counters to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the white man’s civilising mission. 

&  racist propaganda which denies that a black man like me doesn't have a white vagina.  

Pan-Islamists in the age of empire

like the Ottoman Empire? 

did not have to convince fellow Muslims about the global unity of their co-religionists.

The Caliph didn't have to convince Kurds to kill Armenians.  

By racialising their Muslim subjects with references to their religious identity, colonisers

like the Ottoman Turks?

created the conceptual foundations of modern Muslim unity.

Yet Muslims are stupid enough to think that there was once a guy whose name was Muhammad who lived in Mecca over 14 centuries ago.  

At the time, the British, Dutch, French and Russian empires ruled the majority of the world’s Muslims.

Back then, Muslim populations grew more rapidly in places not ruled by Muslims. But it was Kaffirs ruled by Muslims who had it worst. 

Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, the first Pan-Islamists were intellectuals who wanted to counter the slights, humiliations and exploitation of Western colonial domination.

These were the guys who presided over the massacre of Armenians.  

They did not necessarily want to reject the imperial world or the reality of empires. In their sensibilities, the leading Pan-Islamist intellectuals Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Syed Ameer Ali strongly resembled the Pan-Africanist W E B Dubois or the Pan-Asianist Rabindranath Tagore.

They had nothing in common. Tagore was a poet & hereditary leader of a Hindu sect who stood to lose his Estates in the Muslim majorty East Bengal if the Brits fucked off. He had no love for, or trust in, a mainstream Muslim jurist-politicians like Ameer Ali or, the shady journalist/ secret agent, Afghani.

 Dubois was a cultured Sociologist with a romantic view of India. He didn't like Garvey type 'back to Africa' demagogues. He knew very well that his father's Haiti was a shithole. He had a low opinion of the Liberian elite who denied the vote to the indigenous people.

Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, Pan-Islamists emphasised that European empires discriminated against Africans, Asians and Muslims, both within empires and in international affairs.

This is like saying, Suffragettes emphasized that Jack the Ripper discriminated against working class women in the East End of London.  

All three challenged European racism and colonial domination, and promised a better and freer world for the majority of human beings on Earth

A world where elderly black men like me would have a white vagina of our very own.  

European colonial officers began to worry about a potential Muslim revolt when they saw how the modern technologies of printing, steamships and the telegraph were creating new links among diverse Muslim populations, helping them to assert a critique of racism and discrimination. Yet there were no Pan-Islamic revolts against colonialism from the 1870s to the 1910s.

There were revolts and those who revolted invoked Islam if those they were fighting weren't Muslim. The Mahdist and second Afghan War certainly had Pan-Islamic features as did some Muslim rebellions in China.  

The alleged threat of Pan-Islamism made its first notable appearance in the West during the First World War, in part because

Muslims kept saying it was a major threat.  

the Ottoman and German empires promoted it in their war propaganda.

There were Kurdish rebellions against the Ottomans.  

Yet there was no Muslim revolt during the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers served British, French and Russian empires.

The Armenians didn't revolt. That didn't stop the Muslims massacring them. 

During the Second World War, Pan-Asianism was

a joke. The Japs were slaughtering the Chinese. Then it was the turn of the Vietnamese, the Malays, the Burmese etc.  

associated with the Japanese empire’s promises to liberate the coloured races of Asia from white hegemony. And in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, the historic decolonising of Africa raised the profile of Pan-Africanism among European concerns.

Nobody gave a fuck about that shite.  

By the 1960s, with the fading of the colonial world and its replacement by a world of independent nation-states, the political projects of Pan-Islamism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism had almost disappeared.

But Pan-Islamism was gaining ground. OPEC and the two oil-shocks were a game-changer. Also, Communism turned out to be totes shitty.  

They had, however, won many of the intellectual battles against racism, defeated colonial arguments of white supremacy, and helped to end European imperial rule.

Only in the sense that my farting caused the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

Disappointments about the failure of Africa, Asia and the Muslim world to become comparable in equality and freedom to the West also contributed to

emigration to places still ruled by White Christians?  

the declining status of the pan-nationalisms. By the 1980s, African and African-American intellectuals grew more pessimistic about

studying worthless shite at Uni.  

the key Pan-Africanist dream of gaining racial equality for black people in the modern world,

the author is White. Since he has shit for brains, he does not know darkies like me were and are equal to him. 

and making the whole of Africa prosperous and free.

Oh dear. This stupid cunt thinks there is some part of Africa still colonized by an European power.  

The Pan-African vision of uniting newly independent, weak African nations to create the necessary synergy of a federative global power and give them both liberty and prosperity has not materialised.

Nor has anything sensible from this Professor's mouth.  

Although there is still an international organisation – the African Union – it is ineffective, and far from achieving the goals of Pan-Africanism. The hopes of the Pan-Africanist generation, from Dubois to Frantz Fanon, for a future decolonised Africa remain a lost project for the next generation.

Dubois did give up his American citizenship and take up Ghanaian nationality. Fanon's Martinique had the sense to stick with France.  

On the other hand, with multiple great powers such as China, India and Japan, the decolonised Asia of today would have made the early 20th-century Pan-Asianists proud. Yet 20th-century Pan-Asianism took a complex course.

It was and is meaningless drivel.  

Japan’s exploitation of Pan-Asianism to rationalise its colonial occupation of China and Korea left many supporters feeling betrayed. Independent India’s foreign policy under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru showed a commitment to some Pan-Asian principles, which retained popular appeal at the Bandung Conference of 1955. This meeting of 29 Asian and African states, comprising more than half the world’s people, was the last major expression of Asian solidarity, and was later subsumed by Cold War rivalries and nation-statebuilding projects.

Bandung was about Nehru launching Chou En Lai. He had met Mao the previous year. Indonesia wasn't happy with the anti-Communist line proposed by the Ceylonese at the Colombo conference the previous year. Nehru fucked himself in the ass by boosting China, which invaded India in 1962, and making much of Sukarno, who sided with Pakistan in the 1965 war.  

Pan-Islamism has also proceeded in a series of fits and starts over the past century.

Then, a crazy Australian Christian set fire to the al-Aqsa mosque. This led to the creation of the OIC in 1969 or 1970.  

From Turkey and Egypt to Indonesia and Algeria, the idea of Muslim intellectualism and global Muslim solidarity empowered 20th-century nationalist leaders and movements. By the mid-1960s, the majority of the world’s Muslims had gained freedom from European colonial rule.

As had the majority of Christians previously tryannized over by Muslim Colonial rule 

The Turkish Parliament had abolished the Ottoman caliphate back in 1924, and by the 1950s that caliphate was almost forgotten.

Arabs had never thought a non-Arab could be Caliph.  

Nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century, however, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism seems to have vanished but Pan-Islamism and the ideal of Muslim world solidarity survives. Why?

Islam started off as Pan-Islamic.  

The answer lies in the final stages of the Cold War.

No. It lies in the fact that Military Dictators & Politburos were utterly shite.  

It was in the 1980s that a new Muslim internationalism emerged, as part of a rising political Islam. It was not a clash between the primordial civilisational traditions of Islam and the West, or a reassertion of authentic religious values. It wasn’t even a persistence of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism, but rather a new formation of the Cold War. A Saudi-US alliance began promoting the idea of Muslim solidarity in the 1970s as an alternative to the secular Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country allied with the Soviet Union.

But the Soviets only provided defensive military equipment. The Egyptians got rid of them because they wanted to go on the offensive.  

Any ideas of an ‘Islamic’ utopia would have floundered if not for the failures of many post-colonial nation-states and the subsequent public disillusionment of many Muslims.

The Saudis did a great job overseeing the Hajj pilgrimage. Islam, as a religion, has high income elasticity of demand. As people become more affluent they want more and better quality Islamic services.  One could say the same about American Evangelical Christianity or popular Hindu religion. 

The notion that Pan-Islamism represents authentic, ancient, repressed Muslim political values in revolt against global Westernisation and secularisation was

promoted by Muslims 

initially a paranoid obsession of Western colonial officers,

there was a time when British political agents were paranoid about Wahhabis. But that was because they were allied with the Khedive against the Wahhabis in the early nineteenth century.  

but recently it comes mainly from Islamists. Western pundits and journalists have erred in accepting at face value Islamist claims about Islam’s essential political values.

This guy, too, is a Muslim. We would err greatly if we accepted anything he said as true or, even, plausible.  

The kind of Islamism that’s identified with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran did not exist before the 1970s.

Very true. Abduh was actually a Jewish Lesbian. Khomeini was a Confucian scholar who lived in Taiwan.  

None of the Indian Muslims meeting Wilson, nor the late Ottoman-era caliphs, were interested in imposing Sharia in their society.

Indian Muslims had Sharia as their personal law unless- like the Ismailis & Bohras they were treated as Hindu for purposes of inheritance.  

None of them wanted to veil women.

None objected to the practice as far as the Hanafi majority was concerned.  

On the contrary, the first Pan-Islamist generation was highly modernist:

So was the first anti-Islamist generation.  

they were proponents of the liberation of women, racial equality and cosmopolitanism.

Yusuf Ali had a White, Christian, wife. The marriage didn't last.  

Indian Muslims, for example, were very proud that the Ottoman caliph had Greek and Armenian ministers and ambassadors.

They were even prouder that the Armenians were massacred. They laughed their heads off when the Greeks were expelled from Smyrna.  

They also wanted to see the British Crown appointing Hindu and Muslim ministers and high-level officials in their governments. None would have desired or predicted the separation of Turks and Greeks in Ottoman lands, Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and Muslims and Hindus in India.

Aga Khan supported the Pakistan demand. Yusuf Ali didn't but when he died it was the Pakistani High Comission which arranged for his burial.  

The fact that both Lewis and Osama bin Laden spoke of an eternal clash between a united Muslim world and a united West does not mean it is a reality.

But the War on Terror meant it was real.  

Even at the peak of the idea of global Muslim solidarity in the late 19th century, Muslim societies were divided across political, linguistic and cultural lines. Since the time of prophet Muhammad’s Companions in the seventh century, hundreds of diverse kingdoms, empires and sultanates, some in conflict with each other, ruled over Muslim populations mixed with others. Separating Muslims from their Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Jewish neighbours, and thinking of their societies in isolation, bears no relationship to the historical experience of human beings. There has never been, and could never be, a separate ‘Muslim world’.

Only in the sense that there never have been, nor could there be, any such thing as a Muslim or a world or 'separation' because all that is is one without possibility of distinction.  

All the new fascist Right-wing anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the US obsesses over Ottoman imperial expansion in eastern Europe. They see the Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 as the Islamic civilisation’s near-takeover of ‘the West’. But in the Battle of Vienna, Protestant Hungarians allied with the predominantly Muslim Ottoman empire against the Catholic Habsburgs. It was a complex conflict between empires and states, not a clash of civilisations.

Did you know, the Caliph was partly a Catholic Lesbian while the Hapsburg Emperor was partly Jewish and partly a flying horse?  

The Hindu nationalism of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi promotes the idea of an alien Mughal empire that invaded India and ruled over Hindus.

Whereas the Mughals were actually a type of Jewish flying horse indigenous to the Doab. Moreover, there were no Hindus in India at that time. The country was entirely populated by Lesbian Rabbis.  

But Hindu bureaucrats played a vital role in India’s Mughal empire,

Donald Trump is actually a Nigerian woman. This is proved by the fact that Nigerian women play a viatal role in the country she rules over.  

and Mughal emperors were simply empire-builders, not zealots of theocratic rule over different faith communities.

Aurangazeb actually ordered the destruction of a mosque so as to build a Hindu temple. Sadly, some stupid Nigerian Lesbian on his staff got hold of the wrong end of the stick.  

There are also Muslims today who look back at the Mughal empire in India as an instance of Muslim domination over Hindus.

But those Muslims are actually Shinto priests because of the vital role Japan plays in today's global economy.  

It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another.

It is notable that this cunt writes utter nonsense. Yet, it is David Icke whose books sell like hot cakes.  

They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa,

i.e. sub-Saharan Africa which has been a historical entity for at least 100,000 years 

the Muslim world,

1400 years 

Asia and the West.

Asia and Europe- a Greek distinction dating back at least 2500 years.  

Contemporary Pan-Islamism also idealises a mythical past.

Oh dear. This cunt just called the Prophet a mythical figure.  

According to Pan-Islamists, the ummah, or worldwide Muslim community, originated at a time when Muslims were not humiliated by racist white empires or aggressive Western powers.

As monotheists, the Prophet & his followers supported Rome against Persia.  

Pan-Islamists want to ‘make the ummah great again’. Yet the notion of a golden age of Muslim political unity and solidarity relies on amnesia about the imperial past.

No. It relies on the pious preservation of great literary works chronicling extraordinary achievements.  

Muslim societies were never politically united, and there were never homogeneous Muslim societies in Eurasia.

Only in the sense that Britain was never an Imperial power. Also, no Europeans ever settled in what is now the USA. Donald Trump is a pure-blooded Sioux warrior.  

None of the Muslim dynasty-ruled empires aimed to subjugate non-Muslims by pious believers.

The Pope is a nice Jewish lady.  

Like the Ottoman, Persian or Egyptian monarchs of the late 19th century, they were multi-ethnic empires, employing thousands of non-Muslim bureaucrats. Muslim populations simply never asked for global ummah solidarity before the late 19th-century moment of racialised European empires.

There were no such empires because non-European bureaucrats existed.  

The term ‘the Muslim world’ first appeared in the 1870s.

There were no 1870s because trillions of decades which were not the 1870s propped up that decade from before and after their occurrence. 

Initially, it was European missionaries or colonial officers who favoured it as a shorthand to refer to all those between the ‘yellow race’ of East Asia and the black race in Africa.

There were no European missionaries or colonial officers because Christ was non-European. Thus Christian Europe was essentially not European at all.  

They also used it to express their fear of a potential Muslim revolt, though Muslim subjects of empire were no more or less rebellious to their empires than Hindu or Buddhist subjects.

No rebellions ever occurred because no rebel was less or more rebellious than people who didn't rebel. 

After the great Indian Rebellion of 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims rose up against the British, some British colonial officers blamed Muslims for this uprising. William Wilson Hunter, a British colonial officer, questioned whether Indian Muslims could be loyal to a Christian monarch in his influential book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871).

There was no such person as William Wilson Hunter. This is proved by the fact that there were millions of bureaucrats who were not named William or Wilson or Hunter and it is a complete and utter myth that anybody is more or less a William Wilson Hunter than people who aren't William Wilson Hunter at all.  

In reality, Muslims were not much different from Hindus in terms of their loyalty as well as their critique of the British empire. Elite Indian Muslims, such as the reformist Syed Ahmad Khan, wrote angry rebuttals to Hunter’s allegations.

A High Court Judge was killed in Bengal by a Wahabbi. This provoked Hunter to write his book which focussed on the followers of Sayyid Ahmad of Raebareli . Syed Ahmad Khan, a loyalist, responded by  paying tribute to Hunter as a sincere friend of the Indian Muslim but arguing that Hunter's was only speaking of the Bengali Muslim- more particularly the 'Faraizi'- rather than the Indian Muslim in general.

But they also accepted his terms of debate, in which Muslims were a distinct and separate category of Indians.

They wanted separate representation and (later on) separate electorates.  

To assert their dignity and equality, Muslim intellectuals emphasised the past glory of ‘the Muslim world’

Whereas the Chinese told everybody that their Mums were whores & their dads were pimps.  

The growth of European nationalisms also found a useful enemy in Muslims, specifically the Ottoman sultan. In the late 19th century, Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists all began to depict the Ottoman sultan as a despot.

Similarly, some Jews depicted Adolph Hitler as anti-Semitic.  

They appealed to British liberals to break the Ottoman-British alliance on behalf of a global Christian solidarity.

De Gaulle appealed to Churchill & Roosevelt to 'liberate' his country from 'Hitler' even  

Anti-Ottoman British liberals such as William Gladstone argued that Christian solidarity should be important for British decisions with regard to the Ottoman empire.

Why did that Christian object to Christians being slaughtered by the Muslims?  

It is in that context that the Ottoman sultan referred to his spiritual link with Indian Muslims,

the majority of Indian Muslims were Hanafi just like the Caliph. After Jallianwallah bagh, the Indian Office needed to split the Muslims from Sikhs & Hindus. Could this be done under the rubric of 'Khilafat'? The answer was that Muslis weren't stupid. They would get their pound of flesh one way or another.

to argue for a return to an Ottoman-British alliance thanks to this special connection between these two big Muslim empires.

The Khedive was nominally a Turkish vassal. Thus, it could be beneficial to the 'Veiled Protectorate' to have some cosmetic alliance of this kind. 

In his influential book The Future of Islam (1882), the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

who was stupid enough to become a British cat's paw enabling the establishment of the Veiled Protectorate 

argued that the Ottoman empire would eventually be expelled from Europe, and that Europe’s crusading spirit would turn Istanbul into a Christian city. Blunt also claimed that the British empire, lacking the hatred of Muslims of the Austrians, the Russians or the French, could become the protector of the world’s Muslim populations in Asia. In patronising and imperial ways, Blunt seemed to care about the future of Muslims. He was a supporter and friend of leading Muslim reformists such as Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and served as an intermediary between European intellectual circles and Muslim reformists.

The Syrian journalist, John Sabunji who edited an anti Ottoman journal may also be mentioned. Blunt saw that the British voter could not support Turkey against Christians in the Balkans. But could Turkey reinvigorate its Muslim territories? Was this even desirable from the British point of view?  

Around the same time that Blunt was writing, the influential French intellectual Ernest Renan formulated a very negative view of Islam, especially in regard to science and civilisation. Renan saw Islam as a Semitic religion that would impede the development of science and rationality. His ideas symbolised the racialisation of Muslims via their religion. Of course, Renan was making this argument in Paris, which ruled over large parts of Muslim North Africa and West Africa. His ideas helped to rationalise French colonial rule. Al-Afghani and many other Muslim intellectuals wrote rebuttals of Renan’s arguments, while being supported by Blunt. But Renan enjoyed more success in creating a distracting narrative of a separate Islamic civilisation versus a Western, Christian civilisation

Educated Muslims faced the same crisis of faith as educated Christians. The discoveries of Science seemed at odds with the statements of Scripture. Nevertheless, to rise up Muslims needed to come together so as to solve collective action problems. If the Catholic school teaches Science, why should the Madrasa not do so?  

European elites’ claims of a Western civilising mission, and the superiority of the Christian-Western civilisation, were important to the colonial projects.

No. Claims don't matter at all. Only money & gun-boats matter.  

European intellectuals took up vast projects of classifying humanity into hierarchies of race and religion. It was only in response to this chauvinistic assertion that Muslim intellectuals fashioned a counter-narrative of Islamic civilisation

What was that counter-narrative? Do Muslims claim to have discovered Relativity & Evolution & Quantum Computers?  

In an attempt to assert their dignity and equality, they emphasised the past glory, modernity and civility of ‘the Muslim world’.

Some did. Others didn't bother. The question was whether there could be a Pan-Islamism allied to the Kaiser. The answer was no. Arabs would want the Turks to fuck off.  

These Muslim opponents of European imperial ideology – of the white race’s civilisational superiority over Muslims and other coloured races – were the first Pan-Islamists.

Everyone thinks their own Mummy is the bestest Mummy & their own civilization is the bestest civilization. Muslim reformers of the late nineteenth century stressed the need for Scientific education  & the overcoming of barriers of clan and tribe so that collective action problems could be tackled more efficiently.  

During the early 20th century, Muslim reformers began to cultivate a historical narrative that emphasised a shared civilisation, with a golden age in Islamic science and art, and its subsequent decline.

It was true that there had indeed been such a golden age. The West acknowledged this long ago.  

This idea of a holistic Muslim history was a novel creation fashioned directly in response to the idea of a Western civilisation and the geopolitical arguments of Western/white racial unity. Like the early generation of Pan-African and Pan-Asian intellectuals, Muslim intellectuals responded to European chauvinism and Western orientalism with their own glorious history and civilisation.

Some African Americans responded by joining the Nation of Islam which holds that Yakub, a black Meccan scientist who lived 6,600 years ago,  created the white race. According to the story, following his discovery of the law of attraction and repulsion, he gathered followers and began the creation of the white race through a form of selective breeding referred to as "grafting" on the island of Patmos; Yakub died at the age of 150, but his followers continued the process after his death. According to the NOI, the white race was created with an evil nature, and were destined to rule over black people for a period of 6,000 years through the practice of "tricknology," which ended in 1914. 

I suppose the author thinks that Attaturm & Mosaddeq told similar stories.

Throughout the 20th century, the great Muslim leaders such as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nasser in Egypt, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddeq and Indonesia’s Sukarno were all secular nationalists, but all of them needed and used this notion of a glorious history of Muslim civilisation to talk back against ideologies of white supremacy.

Turkey had been a great power till quite recently. Iran, too, had been powerful in the eighteenth century. It was obvious that Indonesia had a rich culture and civilization of its own.  

Nationalism eventually triumphed, and during the 1950s and ’60s the idea of Islam as a force in world affairs also faded from Western journalism and scholarship.

Just as the idea of Christianity or European supremacy faded.  

Pan-Islamic ideologies did not resurface again until the 1970s and ’80s, and then with a new character and tone. They returned as an expression of discontent with the contemporary world.

Discontent with low oil prices. OPEC's two oil shocks meant there was much more money for the building of mosques all around the world. 

After all, gone were the heady days of mid-20th-century optimism about modernisation. The United Nations had failed to solve existential issues. Post-colonial nation-states had not brought liberty and prosperity to most of the world’s Muslims. Meanwhile, Europe, the US and the Soviet Union showed little concern for the suffering of Muslim peoples. Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan appeared, maintaining that the colonisation of Palestine and the tribulations of poverty required a new form of solidarity.

They wanted power because those with power were getting rich.  Also, it would be cool to stone adulterers to death. 

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 proved a historic moment. To condemn the status quo, Khomeini appealed to this new form of Pan-Islamism. Yet, his Iran and its regional rival Saudi Arabia both privileged the national interests of their states. So there has never been a viable federative vision of this new Pan-Islamic solidarity. Unlike Pan-Africanism, which idealised black-skinned populations living in solidarity within post-colonial Africa, Pan-Islamism rests on a sense of victimhood without a practical political project.

Pan-Africanism failed by the end of the Sixties when Ugand a started to deport Kenyans and vice versa.  

It is less about real plans to establish a Muslim polity than about how to end the oppression and discrimination shared by an imagined global community.

No. It is about stoning people to death while linking your pockets.  

The calls for global Muslim solidarity can never be understood by looking at religious texts or Muslim piety.

That is the only way they can be understood.  

It is developments in modern intellectual and geopolitical history that have generated and shaped Pan-Islamic views of history and the world. Perhaps their crucial feature is the idea of the West as a place with its own historical narrative and enduring political vision of global hegemony.

Everything is the fault of the West. If it didn't exist, everybody would have at least one penis and one vagina. They could then fuck themselves to death. Evil White Scientists created by Yakub have caused me to have only a penis & no vagina. This makes me so very angry that I've decided to become a jihadi suicide bomber. 

The Soviet Union, the US, the EU – all the global Western projects of the 20th century imagine a superior West and its hegemony. Early Pan-Islamic intellectuals developed Muslim narratives of a historical global order as a strategy to combat imperial discourses about their inferiority, which suffused colonial metropoles, orientalist writings and European social sciences. There simply could not be a Pan-Islamic narrative of the global order without its counterpart, the Western narrative of the world, which is equally tendentious as history.

Narratives don't matter. Pan-Islamism has increased because it is a way to gain money and power.  

Ideas of Western and Islamic worlds seem like enemies in the mirror. We should not let the colonisers of the late-19th century set the terms of today’s discussion on human rights and good governance.

Also we should all have at least one vagina as well as a penis.  

As long as we accept this tendentious opposition between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’,

which this cretin introduced 

we are still captives to colonisation and the failures of decolonisation.

Also we are captives to Yakub, a great Meccan scientist.  

In simply recognising and rejecting these terms of discussion, we can be free to move forward, to think about one another and the world in more realistic and humane ways.

Currently, the author thinks of other people in sadistic and unrealistic ways.  

Our challenge today is to find a new language of rights and norms that is not captive to the fallacies of Western civilisation or its African, Asian and Muslim alternatives.

Nor should it be captive to Yakub.  

Human beings, irrespective of their colour and religion, share a single planet and a connected history, without civilisational borders.

No. Civilizational borders do exist. This is why people speak different languages in different countries. 

Any forward path to overcome current injustices and problems must rely on

smart people not shitheads who teach nonsense 

our connections and shared values, rather than civilisational tribalism.

or cosmopolitan provincialism or wet dryness.  

Cemil Aydin is Turkish. Was it part of the 'West' or did it belong to 'the Muslim World'? It applied to join the EU in 1987 and gained candidate status in 1999. Twenty years ago, many people thought it would become a part of the EU. It wouldn't be considered 'Muslim' any more than France is considered 'Catholic'. Since then, the world has changed. Turkey is part of the Muslim world. It may help create a 'Sunni NATO'. It transacts business with the West and with the Russians and the Chinese and so forth but its Islamic identity is non-negotiable.

It is a different matter that Pan-Islamism- like Pan-Feminism or Internationalist Socialism- might not have very much practical relevance because stupid or poor people in one place have no power over ruling elites in distant countries.