Is Rudrangshu Mukherjee a Hindu fanatic?

Chancellor of Ashoka University, Rudrangshu writes-  

There was a time in the 17th and 18th centuries when conquerors from the West went out to convert pagans and acquire territories with the Bible in one hand and a sword or a gun in the other.

The Arabs conquered Sindh with Quran in one hand and sword in the other. Later, Turkic Muslims completed the conquest of much of India. If the British Empire was immoral, so was the Islamic conquest of India. 

Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is an example of a commander of the British Empire going out into the world as a herald of a vanished empire with his knowledge of the Bible as his armour and his keyboard/pen as his weapon.

In which case, Muslim and Christian intellectuals in India are equally immoral- unless they are atheists.  

Biggar has the letters CBE following his name, he has a PhD in Christian theology from the University of Chicago and is the Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford.

He is a British patriot whose views are in harmony with those of the vast majority of Britishers- even if, like me, they iz bleck.  The fact is the British government tended to improve conditions in areas monopolized by private trading companies. On the other hand, colonial governments were brutal to indigenous people. Australians were 'blackbirding' long after Westminster abolished the slave trade. The US, after becoming independence, went the extra mile when it came to genocide and grabbing territory. 

The subtitle of this book is misleading because there is no reckoning here. It is a defence of the British Empire.

Because it was better than what went before and, moreover, did away with itself in a timely and constructive manner. 

For Biggar, the British Empire, to use the words of W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman in that classic, 1066 and All That, was “a good thing”.

Indeed. That is why most ex-colonies, even if non-White- have kept British institutions- e.g Law Courts and Parliaments and so forth. By contrast, no non-Muslims want Sharia or Khilafat. This is not to say we wouldn't very happily live in a well run Emirate. 

Portions of Biggar’s remarkable balance sheet of the empire deserve to be quoted if only to strain the reader’s credulity.

What is incredible is that this guy doesn't get that anything he says against the Brits applies to a much greater extent to Muslims in the sub-continent.  

The British Empire, according to the gospel of Biggar “was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent.

This is true. There was clearly a 'closest possible world', where there was no color-bar or rent extraction or excessive violence.  

It showed itself capable of correcting its sins and errors, and learning from them. And, over time, it became increasingly motivated by Christian humanitarianism and intent upon preparing colonized peoples for liberal self-government”. These virtues of empire – a “cause for admiration and pride” for those who, like Biggar, “identify with Britain” – more than make up for the “sins” of empire.

Immigrants from the New Commonwealth like this story. The alternative is to admit that their parents or grandparents moved to a horribly racist country simply out of greed.  

What were those sins, according to the gospel writer of the British empire?

Rudrangshu seems to have great hatred for Christians. He uses the word 'gospel' here so as to demean Biggar. Yet, most Hindus respect Christianity. It is a matter of pride to be called a Christian just as it is a matter of pride to claim to be Hindu.  

Let me quote Biggar again. The “evils” of empire included “brutal slavery;

which pre-existed British arrival on the scene 

the epidemic spread of devastating disease;

whose cause was not understood at that time. Both Gandhi and his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta opposed vaccination because they didn't believe in the germ theory of disease.  

economic and social disruption;

which would have happened anyway 

the unjust displacement of natives by settlers;

which has no relevance to India. Also, it would have happened anyway under some other European power.  

failures of colonial government to prevent settler abuse and famine;

again not relevant to India. The fact is the Brits put an end to famine by the beginning of the twentieth century. Once power passed to Indians- more especially in Bengal- famines reappeared.  

elements of racial alienation and racist contempt;

again this hardly affected Indians the vast majority of whom did not know that the Emperor lived in a distant island. 

policies of needlessly wholesale cultural suppression;

Bengalis were forced to wear top hats and frock coats. Brigadier Dyer made Punjabis wear mini-skirts.  

miscarriages of justice; instances of unjustifiable military aggression and the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force; and the failure to admit native talent to the higher echelons of colonial government on terms of equality quickly enough to forestall the build-up of nationalist resentment”.

Okay, okay. Biggar doesn't have a big brain. Still, the guy is a devout Christian and is not currently known to have molested choirboys. That's a great achievement in itself.  

As any reader will notice, the two sections quoted run completely contrary to each other.

Nonsense! They are complementary. Everything Biggar mentions is something which the Brits tried to remedy.  

If the first quotation is valid, the second cannot be valid let alone the former compensating or making up for the other.

No. A sequence of acts can have two different properties simultaneously

1) minimize local opportunity cost

2)  deviate from the global golden path in the configuration space. 

That's the reason structural reforms are made from time to time. 

Moreover, a close reading of the text reveals that almost each of the “evils” enumerated by Biggar are actually justified by him in the relevant parts of the book.

This is because any action of sufficient consequence can have cascading 'evil' effects which require structural changes to address. In Christian theology, there is a mysterious economy which maintains the 'katechon' such that the end of days is averted. But that mysterious economy involves diakonia of a metanoiac type. There is a ministry to others, particularly the poor, which however requires a complete change in how we think and the nature of our institutions. 

The other thing to note that is that economic exploitation of the colonies by Britain does not merit a mention in Biggar’s list of “sins”.

Because it was imaginary. The plain fact is Britain's 'invisible exports'- e.g. 'Pax Brittanica' were worth much more than the revenue they extracted from India. That's why India got poorer and weaker and more insecure after the Brits ran away. That's why there are now far more Indian origin people in Britain than there were Brits in India. Also, the PM is named Rishi Sunak. Who saw that coming?  

He offers no explanation of how, to take an example, India – often described by the British rulers, as the brightest jewel in the British crown – became by 1900 one of the poorest countries in the world.

It was so shitty a tiny number of British merchant adventurers conquered the whole country and projected force to China and the Middle East.  

Economic exploitation does not feature in Biggar’s list because he does not believe there was any economic exploitation of the colonies and certainly not of India.

The man aint stupid. It is fucking obvious that if you go to a country and set up tea plantations or indigo plantations and then market that tea or indigo or whatever all over the world, then you have added value. There was some loot available in India but India was better off without it. Otherwise you'd just have a bunch of Rajahs and Nawabs raiding each others' toshkhanas. 

There are a couple ingenuous sleights-of-hand that Biggar uses which deserve to be exposed. After making his own list of the “evils” of empire, Biggar comments, “In the history of the British Empire, there was nothing morally equivalent to Nazi concentration or death camps,

the concentration camps to which the Boers were sent had very high mortality. But Whites killing Whites was totes cool with us dusky folk.  

or to the Soviet Gulag.” Biggar has obviously not heard of the Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands which the British constructed as their equivalent of a concentration camp. 

But Nehru & Co weren't sent there. Savarkar was. Rudrangshu is a closet 'bakth'.  

Ignorance aside, Biggar compares the British Empire to the two most oppressive regimes of the 20th century and on that basis justifies the cruelties and oppressions embedded in the British empire. What could be morally more reprehensible?

Gandhi, Jinnah & Nehru- those fuckers made no preparation for the population exchange which was bound to follow Partition. Bose- also a Congress President- went the extra mile by allying with Hitler and Tojo.  

Further, Biggar, as a part of his justificatory framework, makes the argument that what are considered (even by him) the more contemptible features of the British Empire were all replicated in the “history of any long-standing state”.

They were repeated on a much more horrible scale in successor states. Consider the Pak Army's genocide in Bangladesh. 

Ergo the British Empire should not be singled out for condemnation.

We should look at how the Brits avoided fucking up in ways in which we subsequently fucked up. The answer has to do with having a small government, backing private enterprise, and locking up nutters till they cool down.  

Also, the Brits thought a University degree was only worthwhile if you were a brainless aristocrat or a future clergyman. Everybody else needed to get a fucking job and do something useful. 

Let us move from these general considerations to some specific points that Biggar tries to make. As an advocate holding a brief for the British Empire, Biggar, to make it convenient for his readers, enumerates the eight questions he wants to address:

Only one question mattered. Did the Empire make Britain safer and more prosperous? The answer, by about 1922, was 'fuck, no.'  

(1) was the imperial endeavor driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate;

It was driven by patriotism. Jolly Jack Tar kept the islands safe from invasion. But Navies are expensive. So the Merchant Marine had to grab the Assiento and establish bases in India and China etc. Then came Tommy Atkins coz 'trade follows the flag'- at least when it comes to the export of 'invisibles'. But this meant deindustrialization because of the current account surplus. Britain should have turned 'Listian' and invested in the Air Force. Come to think of it, that was Baldwin's strategy except nobody noticed coz the guy was a boring as shit. 

(2) should we speak of colonialism and slavery in the same breath, as if they were the same thing;

No. Don't be silly.  

(3) was the British Empire essentially racist;

Yes. We aint fucking French. Black Brits can be just as Racist towards Europeans as anybody else- unless we are speaking of Priti Patel in which case we have to pipe small. 

(4) how far was it based on the conquest of land;

If land aint conquered there aint no fucking Colonialism.  

(5) did it involve genocide;

Sure. But that was done by the settlers.  

(6) was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation;

No. Sexual exploitation was the main driver. Viceroy used to surreptitiously enter the huts of starving Indians and perform fellatio and cunnilingus on them so as to deprive them of their vital bodily essence.  

(7) since colonial government was not democratic, did that make it illegitimate;

Yes. But illegitimacy is preferable to anarchy more particularly if Viceroy Sahib is sucking you off 

and
(8) was the empire essentially violent and was its violence pervasively racist and terroristic.

Viceroy only sucked off dusky folk. If they woke up he'd threaten to shove their dicks up his pooper thus terrorizing them. There are many videos on this subject on Pornhub. I suggest Biggar watch them and then go give Rudrangshu what for.  

I have deliberately italicised

Sonia is from Italy. Rudrangshu- RSS wallah that he is- is Italianizing Biggar because he too is White and Christian and thus totes immoral.  

some words that are used by Biggar when he is setting up his agenda.

Agenda sounds like 'gender'. Rudrangshu is hinting that Biggar is a cross dressing lesbian of some type. White peeps are all totally immoral in that way. They are doing sexing all the time. This is because they are having non-veg diet.  

As is obvious, these words and their implications are both ambiguous

sexually ambiguous. What did I tell you about non-veg diet? 

and subjective.

and involve very filthy type of sexual subjugation. This is why you should not eat meat.

What one person considers fundamental/essential/pervasive to a historical phenomenon may not necessarily chime with another person’s notions of the same terms.

Particularly if they are being sodomized. That is why you should not eat meat.  

There are no prizes for guessing Biggar’s answers to these questions.

Because being sexually molested is not a prize. Still, if some people continue to eat meat, the thing is inevitable.  

Biggar argues, quite predictably, that there was nothing like the colonial project.

Then what the fuck was Joseph Chamberlain banging on about?  

In his view, the British empire was not “a single, unitary enterprise with a coherent essence”. To make a caricature of the arguments made by critics of the British Empire, he adds, “No one woke up one sunny morning in London and said, ‘Let’s go and conquer the world’.”

Britain had been menaced by Spain which already had an 'Empire on which the sun never set.' Initially to defend themselves, but then coz making money is nice, they outdid the Spanish and Portuguese and Dutch and so forth.  

Which serious historian has ever made such a suggestion? Biggar asserts that “There was no essential motivation behind the British Empire.”

Biggar is a professor. Naturally, he writes nonsense. Still he is a Christian and a British patriot and is not known to have bummed numerous choirboys.  

The implication of this assertion is that the colonies were acquired and the British Empire established through a series of accidents.

The American colonies were set up as...urm...colonies with charters and so forth. British expansion in India was opportunistic. That's how commercial enterprises operate.  

This is worse than flogging a dead horse since the argument goes back to John Seeley, who wrote in the 19th century that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absentmindedness.

Americans like Gore Vidal felt the same way about the American 'Empire' that burgeoned in the Fifties and Sixties and which ended with GIs getting shot at in jungles which even the French had run away from.  

No motives, no plans, no strategies – a vast global empire emerged through a concatenation of circumstances.

Because history is nothing but such concatenations. It is all very well to have a plan for world domination but little things- like the Russian winter- can overturn them.  

There is an important point of historical method lurking in the assertions made by Seeley and his latter day epigoni.

No there isn't. Historical method can either be based on common-sense and the uncovering of facts or it can pretend that concepts have some 'logic' of their own- in which case they may also have their own wet dreams and episodes of auto-erotic strangulation.  

The logic of empire is located at a different analytical level

 it is located up Rudrangshu's arse. Biggar should look for it there. 

than in the motives and intentions of the many paladins of the British empire. It is one thing to delve into the manifold secrets of the minds of governors-general and politicians and then to discover that none of them actually wrote down that they wanted to conquer, dominate and exploit large parts of the world. But this cannot lead to the conclusion that the British Empire had no pattern, logic or compulsions.

It is obvious that what could or couldn't become a colony or be retained as such was stuff that guys at the Admiralty and War Office advised on. The Treasury too got involved if the expected profit or loss was 'material'. Calculating the latter was the job of the Colonial or India offices. 

The reason no 'pattern or logic' arose was because the fitness landscape kept changing. The Empire had a certain amount of 'anti-fragility' but only because it was 'co-evolved' not substantively rational. 

The latter are questions related to structure,

but structures behave differently under different types of exogenous shocks. One may say that their configuration space is 'ditopological'. They way in which a thing burgeons and opens up may be very different from the way it contracts or closes itself off. The British Empire certainly burgeoned on the basis of race- though, in India, this was broadly defined. First Armenians, then Iraqi Jews were assimilated or self-assimilated. However, when it contracted, the New Commonwealth was initially given equal rights of domicile in the 'mother country'. In the Sixties, it appeared there might be a backlash but, strangely enough, Thatcher ensured that colored folk- like Rishi's parents could assimilate on the same terms as pukka goras. Still, without Brexit, it is doubtful we'd have so many 'colored' people in the Cabinet. 

not to subjective motivations.

the subjective motivations of Viceroys and Governor Generals don't matter. Either they do what they are told or they are replaced or ignored.  

This point needs to be reiterated because there is a pronounced tendency among historians like Biggar

a theologian surely? 

and his ilk to deliberately ignore the structural logic of empire

i.e. Marxist shite about how like Imperialism is the highest, and therefore final, stage of Capitalism even though it is nothing of the sort

– a logic which binds together in a single interconnected process the development of capitalism and prosperity in Britain with the political control, the economic exploitation and the impoverishment of the colonies. It is this structural logic and interconnected process that some historians have called the colonial project.

Shit historians. Marxists shat on India's developmental potential.  Mamta has kicked in the heads of those cunts. 

The prejudice embedded in this book is obvious.

This man's stupidity is obvious. Biggar is not prejudiced. He is a patriot and a Christian. It simply is a fact that his country has turned out to be just as moral and righteous as a lot of believed it to be. This means we can go back to thinking that Westminster was, on the whole, a positive influence over territories British people controlled. After all, we don't have howling mobs in the streets protesting a brown man moving into Number 10 though, it must be said, this has lowered property values. On the other hand, I am on step closer to my fulfilling my dream of opening a dhaba on Downing Street.  

Again, that prejudice is an old and tedious one – the British set out to civilise the colonies, train them for self-government.

Colonies involve the transplantation of the civilization of one territory to a different territory. Phoenician colonies transplanted Phoenician civilization. Greek colonies transplanted Greek civilization. America, difficult as this may be to believe, is actually an offshoot of British civilization- not the good bits, obviously. 

Britain wanted its White colonies to become self governing so that they wouldn't need to be garrisoned and Westminster wouldn't have to keep passing bills about far away places. This was also the motivation for transferring power to responsible or representative bodies in India. The fact is British MPs were bored out of their gourds having to listen to debates about the ' succession to the Jaghire of Bungana Pally'.               

What is shocking, however, is the ignorance and the refusal to read what writers and scholars have written about British rule.

But those writers and scholars are as stupid as shit. Why read them? Why not just blow your brains out?  

I concern myself here with only India; I am sure scholars from other parts of the world will notice omissions from their fields of specialisation. Biggar writes without reference to R.C. Dutt,

An ICS officer, barrister, and- later on- a member of the Legislative Assembly. He served on the Royal Commission for Decentralization. Clearly, British rule couldn't have been very horrible, in his view, because he was very much part of that rule.  

A.K. Bagchi,

nobody reads that nutter 

Ranajit Guha,

who emigrated to England in 1959 and now lives in Vienna. This is not a guy who has a deep love for India- at least not as a place to live in.  

Partha Chatterjee,

another useless Bengali 

Eric Stokes,

who had served as an actual subaltern in India. He was deeply Christian. Why mention him here?  The fact is he was pro-Hindu. I suppose he must have been in Singapore at the time of Maria Hertogh riots- Muslims went crazy because a ten year old Dutch Catholic girl was returned to her parents despite having gone through a form of Islamic marriage. Maria didn't have a happy life in Holland but Stokes would not have known that. 

Why is Rudrangshu mentioning Stokes- who was influenced by Oakeshott- along with Leftist buddhijivi blathershites? 

Brijen Gupta,

who proved the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' was no myth 

Holden Furber,

who showed that Brijen was a bit shit as a historian 

Bernard Cohn,

American shithead. If the Brits made India casteist who the fuck did it to Nepal or Bali or Ja-fucking-pan?  

Elizabeth Whitcombe,

 who proved that you don't have to have a penis in order to be a pecker-head.

Asiya Siddiqui…

whose micro-histories are equally tedious. 

the list is endless.

it is useless.  

And all those named are major historians.

Fuck off! Major historians aren't attracted to a period about which little can be said other than it was as boring as shit.  

Biggar’s book fails the most elementary test of scholarship.

There is no test for scholarship in an utterly worthless field. Stupid people can get a PhD in this shit through either donkey-work or free floating paranoia. Either way, their punishment is to have to teach this shite to those stupider yet.  

To use Dorothy Parker’s memorable dismissal of a novel: “This is not a book that should be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown out with great force.”

But limp wristed Rudrangshu can't hurl shite. How fucking effeminate do you have to be to quote Dorothy Parker?  

The plain fact is, Biggar is a Christian and a Professor of Theology. He believes, correctly, that the Church should give Grievance Studies a miss. Us Bleck Britishers don't want it because coprophagy aint our native cuisine. We are cool with old fashioned Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or whatever. That's stuff about how you will go to hell if you get drunk and run me over with your Pope-mobile. Seriously, that's the sort of thing I worry about. That and some Archbishop getting his crozier stuck up my arse. It may be that I've been reading the wrong Theology text-books  

This is an immoral book.

Not for Britishers. It is right and proper to be proud of Britain's past achievements. Showing the Empire to have been moral shows that New Commonwealth immigration was equally moral. The alternative is to show Britain as a racist country which only let in dusky folk to do the shitty jobs. If this is true, why should the indigenous Brits not throw out colored people on the grounds that they aren't doing the shitty jobs. Some are running the fucking country. But, this affords no scandal- on Biggar's account- even if that Rishi bloke worships cows or elephants or something of that sort. Meanwhile, I hope to snap up a nice little property on Downing Street to open my own desi dhaba serving only vegetarian food. Mindi it kindly. 

But it might earn for Nigel Biggar, CBE, a knighthood: ersatz plumes for a false scholar.

What's wrong with that? Indeed the thing is almost routine. What is important is that Biggar turn his attention to getting the Pope to lay off the booze before getting behind the wheel of his Pope-mobile. As a Hindu, I deserve to be run over nothing less than a juggernaut. This, at any rate, is what British Hindus often tell me. Sad. 

Robert Tombs on Rajamouli's RRR

Robert Tombs, a Professor of History, has a deeply silly article in the Spectator which has provoked outrage in India. 

Yet, read in context, it represents nothing by the tremendous fear and revulsion felt by the Spectator- previously the voice of the lunatic fringe of the Tory party- at the prospect of a Hindu taking up residence at Number 10. What Tombs is saying is that Rishi will watch a particular Indian movie on Netflix and this will cause him to develop hatred for Britain with the result that he will hurt the country even more than BoJo's maniacal policies. 

Tombs writes- 

Netflix is promoting a new pseudo-historical blockbuster. RRR, which stands for Rise, Roar, Revolt, is an Indian film which has been playing to packed houses at home.

Netflix is not promoting it. It paid 40 million dollars for the Hindi rights for a popular Telugu movie- a smart move given that it is losing subscribers in many markets.  

Those expecting the usual Indian crowd-pleaser featuring magic, romance, stiff-upper-lip male heroism, and improbably gory violence will not be disappointed.

Nor will those expecting entertainment of a type cinemagoers enjoy the world over.  

RRR is set in the 1920s, when India was still in the British empire.

Bridgerton is an even more popular Netflix offering. It is set in during the Regency. The Queen and half the aristocracy is depicted as being of African or South Asian heritage. That's what really pisses off Spectator readers. They masturbate copiously while imaging all the dreadful things their ancestors did to darkies back in the good old days when Britain had an Empire and Yanks knew their place.  

The villains are British. No surprises there. But the portrayal of the two main British characters, ‘Governor Scott’ and his wife, is unusually nasty and at the same time amazingly silly.

This is nonsense. Nobody was nastier than Merrick in 'Jewel in the Crown'- which I confess I was unable to watch. The fact is, British people- since the time of Sheridan and Burke- have taken great pleasure, or derived profit by depicting the actions of other British people in India as terribly nasty. The essential silliness of the whole Enterprise too attracted the pen of satire. Still, it was Walt Disney's 'Pirates of the Caribbean' which went the extra mile and utterly demonized the East India Company. RRR is tame by comparison. Still, it does capitalize on local legends regarding two unpopular officials-   J. R. Higgins and T. G. Rutherford- who claimed credit for killing one of the two heroes depicted in RRR. 

Among other incidents, the Scotts kidnap an Indian child and try to murder the mother.

Because they are hiss boo VILLAINS.   

Hapless Indians are brutally tortured by assorted Brits.

But one of the Indian heroes is first on the side of the evil Scotts. Thus what the film is really about is a tribal community- the Gonds, a martial people from whom many Princely lineages have sprung, inhabiting pristine forests dotted with sacred 'teerths' of the Hindus- being oppressed by various outsiders till the hiss boo VILLAINS go too far after which even their mercenary instruments are converted to the path of justice by the heroic 'subaltern' leader. 

I may mention, this is a popular theme in India right now. The first 'tribal' to run for President has just won by a landslide. 

To portray British officials and soldiers roaming the country casually committing crimes is a sign of absolute ignorance or of deliberate dishonesty.

What of Bridgerton depicting half the British aristocracy as 'colored'? The truth is, the thing is good entertainment. It is neither ignorant nor dishonest. It's fun- that's all.  

The Indian civil service – the highest ranks of the administration – were regarded as an incorruptible elite, highly selected and dedicated to their jobs.

Were they though? The fact is plenty of them had to be sidelined because of corruption, dipsomania, or just being shit at their jobs. Indeed, there were Governors and even one Viceroy of whom this was said. Such things had to be hushed up. Incidentally, some officials who were transferred to Iraq or Palestine were known to have raped White girls rather than forming an orderly queue to fuck Mrs. Hawksbee in the best approved Simla manner. 

In any case, in the 1920s, many of them were Indians: in 1929, there were only 894 British officials in the ICS.

But, under dyarchy, their influence had diminished except in Punjab and one or two other areas. The problem was that Indian officials were either useless or disloyal or both.  

So viewers of RRR will have to imagine Indian colleagues and indeed Indian superiors sitting back and allowing rogue Brits to commit murder.

Just as viewers of 'Pirates' will imagine British monarchs and aristocrats sitting back and allowing the East India Company to enslave the seven seas using black magic.  

Netflix should be ashamed for promoting it

But the Spectator need not be ashamed for publishing this piffle. Come to think of it,  Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was editor of the Spectator. The fantasy world which that rag inhabits has contaminated British reality. 

If similar films were made slandering other nations, they would be regarded as crudely racist. Imagine a film showing twentieth-century Nigerian rulers as cannibals, or Hindu politicians burning widows alive.

But there have been films showing Hindu politicians burning Muslims alive. There was a Visa ban on Modi. Come to think of it, Hollywood did depict a Hindu priest trying to tear the heart out of Indiana Jones. Thuggee featured in it. Suttee featured in David Nivens 'Round the World in 80 days'. Octopussy, on the other hand, was just weird. 

But we can’t imagine such films, because they would not be made.

They were made and will be made provided they are entertaining. True, Tombs may issue a fatwa and try to behead his local newsagent with a pair of gardening shears. But he holds dual French citizenship. Allowances must be made.  

Yet the British have long been fair game.

Britain's prosperity and place in the world has long been the target of the Spectator.  Come to think of it, Meredith Townsend, who owned and edited the Spectator, published a book back in 1901 which created 'common knowledge' that the 'loyal Indian' was a myth. People like the Nehrus read it and realized there was no point supporting or pretending to support the administration.  

Usually, we shrug this off. We have played such an important role in the world over the last few centuries

and are so much its laughing stock over the last few years 

that we have accumulated enemies as well as friends.

Putin is an enemy. This deluded fool is worried about a Telugu film. Incidentally, YSR's son has made English medium compulsory.  

In many nationalist myths, we are cast in the role of villains.

BoJo cast Brussels in the role of villain. Putin was delighted.  

It’s a way that quite a few countries make up heroic stories about themselves.

BoJo made up heroic stories about himself. Fuck knows what stories the Spectator is now making up. Nobody reads that rag.  

But that is no reason why we should accept these stories as true,

apparently, people stop this old fool in the street and ask him if there is any reason they should not believe Telugu films aren't historically accurate.  

or start apologising for things that did not happen.

I may be a mere immigrant but I am British enough to apologize to people who bump into me in the street by expressing my deep regret for fucking their mothers.  

That is not to say that there is nothing to regret.

I should have used a condom when fucking this dude's mother.  

Almost every conversation about the British Raj

among ignorant peeps 

sooner or later mentions the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, when a squad mainly of Gurkhas commanded by a British officer opened fire on an illegal demonstration.

That was fine. So was the crawling order. Where Dyer went too far was in forcibly enrolling all 93 members of the Amritsar Bar as Special Constables, forcing them to witness floggings, patrol the city, to salaam, and to perform work as coolies. Ever since the Kitchener/Curzon spat, it had become clear that the Army would remain independent of the Viceroy. The problem was that the British Indian Army had shat the bed during the First War. Its C-in-C, who had remained in Simla, had to be fired after which he took to drink and shot himself. Dyer, by contrast, had had quite a good War and followed up Jallianwallah with a victory against the Afghans. But he too wanted out. Soldiers had realized that however shitty life might be in Europe, it couldn't be as fucking horrible as life in India. The entire place seemed to have been intentionally designed to send a chap Doolally. Kipling might speak of India as a 'karmabhoomi'- a field for work- but nobody wanted to work any more. Entertainment offered Empires more Orient than any founded on Ind's coral strand of shit. David Niven could have soldiered in India after Sandhurst. He headed for Hollywood. The imagination could create wealth. The work of the Raj was merely to redistribute a little of a diminishing stock. 

Several hundred people were killed. Yet this was regarded at the time as a unique and shocking atrocity.

Which, sadly, British soldiers didn't want to stick around to inflict on a larger scale. This was the problem. Tommy Atkin, as much as Colonel Blimp, wanted to return to Blighty so as to enjoy the Music Hall and the Punch and Judy of suburban domesticity.  

Churchill condemned it in parliament. The officer responsible was sacked.

Nonsense! He was denied further employment like thousands of other officers. One may say that the C-in-C of Indian Army forced him to resign but the fact remains that he was a King's Commissioned Officer and could have been employed elsewhere in the Empire. But nobody wanted him and, in any case, 'Geddes axe' meant that even more senior officers than Dyer were being forced out. 

But priests of the Golden Temple in Amritsar (the holiest Sikh shrine) thought he had done the right thing, and made him an honorary Sikh.

What a foolish thing to say! The Udasin mahants were soon to be dispossessed by the Akalis. Olivier, as Secretary for India, condemned the Udasins in Parliament. The actual position was more complicated. Some Bedi jagirdars sided with the mahants as did some Sikh royal houses. This is one reason nobody understands Sikh politics. 

I have stood on the spot where the massacre took place, with feelings readers might easily imagine.

We may indeed imagine them. Hopefully, the old codger didn't have his dick out.  

Some young Indian men came up to me. I was expecting at least a reproachful comment.

Coz he had his dick out? 

But they just wanted to say hello and practise their English.

Coz he had his dick out.  

I mention this because hardly any British person who has been to India – and I have been half a dozen times to as many different regions – can have experienced hostility arising from the memory of British rule.

I have experienced much hostility, probably arising from the memory of British rule. when, in the Punjab, I claim to be Princess Di.  Well, when I say 'Punjab', I mean 'Glassy Junction' in Southall. 

Usually the opposite is true. I know Indians whose parents or grandparents held office under the Raj.

I know Britishers of the same description. They too greet me with hostility. This is because I say things like 'was your granddaddy an engine driver on the Agra line? There are a lot of people who look like you down that stretch of track'.  

Indeed, in the 1920s, when this film is set, India was mostly run by Indians, under fairly distant British supervision.

From 1924, there was dyarchy. However, only British officers could be trusted with political intelligence and putting down the Revolutionaries. Power was slipping from the ICS to the Police.  

The distinguished Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri (whose father was a nationalistic city official)

his dad was a small town lawyer- not an official of any type 

recalled that he had never met or even seen an Englishman during his childhood,

because he lived in a small town 

until a British inspector came to his school and presented him with a paintbox.

Sadly, the Indian Education Service stopped recruiting about this time. But, White School Inspectors  became a rarity during and after the War. 

So films like RRR do not reveal some hidden truth about the past, nor do they express genuine popular feeling.

Whereas 'Pirates' expresses hidden truths- right?  

They try to stir up synthetic emotions. Their main purpose, of course, is to entertain and make money. So should we just laugh, and even enjoy the melodrama? Perhaps.

Lie back and watch BoJo fuck up the country till the Spectator settles on somebody more worthless yet.  

But although absurdly unbelievable, we know that nowadays people will swallow almost anything bad about the British empire.

Because Professors of History, like this codger, don't want to cross swords with the 'Rhodes must fall' crowd. Leave that sort of thing to Kemi Badenoch.  

Doubtless many viewers in a range of countries will regard this as just as accurate as the most serious academic study. British adolescents will watch it too. Perhaps it will be discussed in schools as a piece of historical evidence.

Perhaps this will lead to widespread sodomy  

But the worst result will be in India.

Very true! The film celebrates a Tribal hero and just a few months later a Tribal woman becomes President of India! 

RRR panders to the reactionary and violent Hindu nationalism that is coming to dominate Indian culture and politics,

RRR is a Telugu film. I suppose you could say it represents NTR's Telugu Desam ideology which is similar to MGR's AIADMK ideology. This has nothing to do with 'Hindu nationalism' or the BJP.  But then the Spectator does not understand British or European politics. Fuck will its readers care about South Indian politics?  

fanned by the Modi government.

Telugu Desam was film star NTR's party inherited by Chandrababu whose enemy is the YSR dynasty which is Christian. Which party is the BJP's ally in the region? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. We may watch Pawan Kalyan's films and some may want him to become CM and maybe the BJP can enter Telugu politics under his banner but that's just Show business folks. Clearly, Congress incompetence has created a vacuum.

Those who suffer from this are not the British, but Indian minorities, above all Muslim but Christian too,

But YSR's son is CM of Andhra Pradesh! Owaisi, I suppose, will ally with Jagan Mohan. But, how that 'suffering'? As for Muslims, it is Britain they hate because Britain, not India, was part of the War on Terror which killed 1.3 million of their creed and enabled the enemies of the West to rise. Meanwhile, this cretin is getting worked about a Rajamouli movie! Fuck is wrong with him?  

and indeed any liberals who stand up against extremism, persecution and bigotry.

Very true. Liberals are being sodomized by Hindus who are refusing them the kind favor of a reach around.  

In reality, RRR does not record the nastiness of 1920s British rule, but it does reflect the growing nastiness of today’s India. Netflix should be ashamed for promoting it.

But the Spectator is not ashamed of publishing this shite from an 'emeritus Professor'. True, I found it entertaining. But underneath the BoJo type bluster and forehead of brass I detect something truly nasty. This is a man who stands around with his dick in his hand in the sacred space of Jallianwallah! True, it is a very small dick and so passing Punjabi youths were not aware of the indecency. Still, there is a type of desecration or blasphemy here which I have reported to 'Sikhs for Justice'. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.  

Kenan Malik crushing on Shashi Tharoor.

 Rehashing the old chestnut about how us darkies made Whitey rich, Kenan Malik writes in the NYR

 The historian Robin Blackburn notes that around 1770, total investments in the domestic British economy amounted to £4 million (about £500 million, or $700 million, in modern values). This investment “included the building of roads and canals, of wharves and harbors, of all new equipment needed by farmers and manufacturers, and of all the new ships sold to merchants in a period of one year.”

Britain was already the leading global maritime power. It had colonies. Thus, its domestic product was of much less relevance in determining its national Income. A lot of the 'profit' repatriated from its overseas operations was actually an export of invisibles. Furthermore capital investment abroad- e.g in a West Indian wharf or on the purchase of an Indian made ship- was actually domestic capital formation in that the sea made the area of operation contiguous and the cost of transport, in many cases, less than overland carriage from remoter regions of the British isles.

Around the same time, profits from the slave trade and slave labor came to £3.8 million. Not all profit was reinvested but, suggests Blackburn, “slave-generated profits were large enough to have covered a quarter to a third of Britain’s overall investment needs.” Without the slave plantations, it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to industrialize, or to forge an empire, as it did.

'Slave generated profits' included factor payments to expatriate British labour- viz. sailors and soldiers and arbitrageurs and administrators- repatriating earnings to provide for their families. The suggestio falsi here is that Britain extracted profits from abroad without expending labour or assuming risk in doing so. Kenan Malik is quoting Blackburn- who, to be fair, quotes contrary estimates by other scholars- to make it appear that British industrialisation was financed by a 'transfer'. It wasn't. It was financed by factor earnings. Much skill was required and risk undertaken for British ships to girdle the globe. This meant there were high rents on ability and profits on risk accruing to British domiciled sailors and soldiers and merchants and so forth. However, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the purchasing power and stock of savings thus created would benefit British manufacturers or that productivity enhancing investment would occur in the home market. The Econometric work of researchers like Blackburn is worthless and based on bizarre assumptions. More importantly, such research is based on a discredited model of economic growth.

All sorts of people were making money out of capturing and selling slaves all over the world. Few gained any permanent benefit. Why? What matters is how they invested their ill gotten gains. The slave trade- featuring White Christian victims- was far more important to the economy of the Barbary pirates than the assiento was to England. But North African pirate states gained no permanent advantage from it. Indeed, it led to their colonisation.

Consider Korea and Kerala. Both exported 'invisibles' to the Gulf- i.e. workers from both places went to work there- but Korea found ways to mobilise Korean savings into highly productive domestic investments whereas Kerala did not. Korea has gone from strength to strength. Kerala plateaued at a much lower standard of living.

The British Empire began to take shape during the early seventeenth century, with the English settlement of North America and Caribbean islands, and the creation of corporations, such as the East India Company, to administer colonies and overseas trade. The origins of colonialism lie, in other words, in a time when Britain was still a feudal kingdom, with a parliament but little democracy, and when manufacture was dominated by the handloom rather than the factory.

Britain was no longer feudal- the Tudors ended War of Roses type factionalism whereas the Mughals, despite initial appearances to the contrary, did no such thing. When James the First came down to London, he discovered that he couldn't even hang a thief without due process of Law. As Sir Edward Coke explained to the 'Wisest Fool in Christendom', England was a limited monarchy governed by the 'artificial reason' of the Law. This also meant that the gate of King's Equity would have to close. Democracy is irrelevant. All that matters is the supremacy of the Law and thus the relative autonomy of Civil Society.

If Britain could, over the next 250 years, transform itself from a backward, undemocratic state into a modern industrial power, why could not any of the nations it colonized have done so, too?

America was colonised by the Brits. Most people think it is a 'modern industrial power'. So is Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Hong Kong and Singapore may not be democracies but they are modern and industrial. Why? The Rule of Law is firmly established and productive investment, not political rent-seeking, has the hegemonic role.

India could have become a modern industrial power. It produced more cars than Japan in 1950. Till 1965, it was ahead of South Korea. But crazy Government regulations strangled industry in India. Labour militancy was fostered by the State. Productive investment was viewed as Capitalist exploitation. The result was that the Indian steel industry added negative value to crude iron at the same time that Indian technocrats, employed by Lakshmi Mittal, had risen to the top of the Global steel industry. Mittal, like Aditya Birla and many others, had to leave India to invest productively. This wasn't the fault of British colonialism. No. This was part and parcel of India's long tradition of despotic government on the one hand and subaltern volatility on the other.

Why assume that it was only colonization that allowed India or Ghana to develop?

This is not an assumption but an empirical fact. People could compare areas administered by the British- which did develop economically- to adjacent areas with similar endowments which stagnated in a revolting manner. Moreover, both India and Ghana reversed some of the gains made under Colonialism after independence.

One answer might be that the countries that Britain colonized were even more backward than Britain was at the time, and lacked the social and intellectual resources to transform themselves as Britain did.

'Social and intellectual resources' don't matter. What matters is the Rule of Law underpinning a hegemonic role for productive investment. India had greater social and intellectual resources than China in 1950 or again in 1980. But its leaders were not interested in productive investment. They preferred to play a blame game. Thus the shithead Tharoor, now a senior opposition politician, concentrates on blaming the Brits for the legacy of the dynasty he himself serves.

But the reality, at least in some of its colonies, was the opposite. Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.

Tharoor is the servant of the dynasty that has ruled India for much the greater part of its post independence history. He, quite naturally, wants to show that the British had chopped off the legs of the Indian economy before they left- which is why the country crawled economically while the dynasty preened itself and gave high sounding, moralising, speeches.

Two hundred years ago, India's share of  global trade in 'visibles' was high. But visibles don't matter as much as invisibles (unless economies of scope and scale continually increase) because only the latter yield market power and thus capture more of the dynamic benefits. That's why rising up the value chain means moving towards the invisible side of the spectrum.

Back in the eighteenth century, it was the ship that carried the cotton or the sugar or whatever which made the bigger share of the profit.
Similarly, the provision of Law and Order and Markets and so on is a service. The factor income it yields is an 'invisible'. The statistics given above are meaningless.
Did India, post independence, develop into a Shipping giant? Nope. Japan did. Korea did. But, to this day, Colombo handles more container traffic than all the Indian ports put together. This was not because indigenous entrepreneurs shied away from the maritime sector. The Indian Scindia Shipping company was set up in 1918. It languished under the license permit Raj. Ravi Tikkoo did not dream of setting up his tanker empire in India. Why? The Indian State strangled Indian industries. The British did no such thing. Why? They were only in India to make money. You can't make money by doing stupid shit. Politicians can fancy themselves great statesmen and liberators of their people by doing stupid shit. Merchants, sooner rather than later, go bankrupt if make a habit of promising one thing and doing another.

 It is a stupid lie to suggest that corrupt East India Company officials would destroy Indian workshops so as to benefit strangers in Manchester or Glasgow. They simply weren't that patriotic. What actually happened was that the Indian artisan, like the Indian agriculturist, was preyed upon by a vast class of intermediaries with the support, tacit or open, of the State. In many post-colonial countries- Ghana, Burma etc- Great Liberators fucked over the people by reducing the reward for the primary producer so as to coddle a small urban elite and provide 'bread and circuses' for a lumpen urban class. That is why some countries did worse after the Brits left. It was a choice made by urban elites. Nothing constrained them to do stupid shit. It just made them feel soooo good to do it.

Suppose the Brits, in a fit of pique, had destroyed every factory or railway track or foundry before leaving India in 1947. Provided India had sensible leadership, this would have been a blessing in disguise. State of the Art technology could have been adopted and export led growth pursued.

Suppose the Brits had been cruel savages who hadn't maintained Law Courts and, as time went by, Legislative Assemblies and so forth. In that case, Indians would have had to develop their own community based institutions to enforce contracts and provide public goods. One such public good would have been resistance to the Brits. Sooner or later, it would have succeeded. But, in that case, the dynasty would have had no salience. Cambridge educated shitheads could not have fucked up the economy and defence policy and so on. Moralising speeches- or Tharoor type mythology- would have been no substitute for proper mechanism design and pragmatic policies. The upshot would have been that India- at least parts of India inhabited by sensible people- would have been better off.

Malik has a different view. He thinks a country only develops decent institutions and non coercive mechanisms if it has unjustly enriched itself through slave trading and opium trading and so forth.

What of democracy and liberalism? The Enlightenment helped transform the intellectual and moral culture of Europe in the eighteenth century, and laid the ground for modern ideas of equality and liberty. “All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies,” as the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, “are implicit in it, and indeed come out of it.”

This is Eurocentric garbage. Academic availability cascades, as well as Tardean mimetics, militate for claims that every ideology or system of governance is compatible with- or, indeed, is a superior development of- the globally hegemonic ideology.
The Enlightenment did not transform Society. Changes in the mode of production caused the Enlightenment availability cascade which could lead equally to Prussian militarism, Tzarist autocracy, Nordic gradualism, French mania, Swiss sobriety, corrupt Turkish Tanzimat, Fascism, Communism, Social Democracy, anything at all except what actually prevailed in Britain and America- viz. the slow burgeoning of 'the artificial reason' of the Law and the mechanism design  pragmatics of Taxation based on Representation.
Condorcet represents 'Enlightenment'- he got his head chopped off. John Adams represents 'artificial reason' and fiduciary pragmatics. Adams kept his head and so the American Revolution had a very different trajectory for that of the French.

Why does Malik believe that Indians and Japanese and Africans and Arabs were horrible savages till Whitey came along? Was Islam just despotism? Hinduism just Casteist coercion? Confucianism just Mandarin oppression? Did no 'progressive social ideals' exist anywhere save Western Europe?

But if the European Enlightenment was crucial to the development of progressive social ideals, European colonialism as a practice denied those ideals to the majority of people. It maintained slavery, suppressed democracy, and was rooted in a racialized view of the world. It was not colonialism but anticolonial movements that truly developed Enlightenment ideals. From the Haitian revolution of 1791, the first successful slave revolt in history,

The Gokturks claimed to have been slaves working iron mines before they rebelled and created a great Empire.  

to the Quit India movement, to the liberation struggles of Southern Africa, the opponents of empire demanded that equality and liberty applied to them, too.

France and Britain and Holland had colonies- but those colonies (unless Ireland is counted as a colony) seldom had any impact on domestic politics. Spain and Portugal don't count as they weren't particularly Enlightened and were subject to their own internecine problems. Other European countries did not have colonies. Some- like the Nordic countries moved towards Feminism and Social Democracy faster than England. Ibsen inspired Shaw and Joyce- not the other way around. Germany, of course, has a checkered history. But Switzerland has not.

There have been many successful 'slave revolts' in history. The Haitian wasn't particularly successful- which is why the place isn't exactly prospering. How is it that Malik- a Muslim- does not know that the Gokturks were originally slaves as were the Mamelukes and the various 'slave dynasties' of the Delhi Sultanate? The Gokturk revolt was the most successful in history because their descendants ruled much of Asia and Europe and Africa.

No anti-colonial movement truly developed Enlightenment ideas. The American Revolution was precisely that- a Revolution, not a movement. Americans may say it 'developed Enlightenment ideas'. People my color- or Malik's- may respectfully disagree. Most of us couldn't emigrate there till 1965 because of racialist immigration laws. Indeed, prior to that year, many dusky people like ourselves couldn't vote in some States or even get service in a diner.

No doubt, Malik means non-white anti-colonial movements. But which of them 'developed Enlightenment ideas'? None. The best of the bunch was the Indian National Congress but, under Nehru, it restricted freedoms- including that of emigrating to the UK- previously available, till the Judiciary intervened.
Under Indira, of course, things got worse. Still, it must be said it was Shanti Bhushan who abolished the fundamental right to property under the Janata regime.
Philosophically, all this was perfectly compatible with Kantian Deduktionshrifften- but then, it is not the letter of the law, or even its harmonic construction which matters. What matters is the quotidian pragmatics which in turn only has an incentive compatible trajectory if productive investment takes the hegemonic- that is leadership- role

It was the Law which 'developed Enlightenment ideas'- but all systems of Law, if incentive compatible, tend to restrict arbitrary action and gravitate towards the non-coercive solution in a repeated game.

Leaving aside the lawyer led Indian National Congress and the highly elitist politics of Ceylon, the fact remains every other anti-colonial movement quickly turned into a dictatorship or else featured ethnic cleansing and secessionist movements. 

As the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, “All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought.” The problem was that “Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them.” So, it was left to the anticolonial struggles to “start a new history of Man.”

Fanon died before he could see the nature of the regime he had ignorantly supported. We can't blame him too much. He didn't know Arabic. Still, it is sheer bad faith to quote the poor fellow now- as if this deluded psychiatrist knew anything about Islam or African civilization or, come to that, any Economics worth the name.
There is only one 'solution' to the economic problems of humanity- it is Game theoretic mechanism design. I can find 'all the elements' of this solution in the Nalophkhyanam because it depicts the Just King having to learn Statistical Game Theory in order to overcome his akrasia. The Japanese 'peasant-savant' Ninomiya found a more restricted solution of this equitable sort in the conjunction of Confucianism, Shinto and Buddhism. This can be expressed in terms of a general equilibrium which isn't anything goes- i.e. it is free from 'under-consumption' type crises.

By contrast this solution is simply not present in European Enlightenment thought. Arguably, it is implicit in the 'artificial reason' of Common Law Jurisprudence but it is severely missing in Locke, Hume, Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill and so on.
That is why there is a racialist essentialism- the same one Malik is parroting- in their thought. But, those guys were ignorant. We have smartphones and wikipedia. Why is Malik writing this cringeworthy Eurocentric shite? Well, there's a globalised market for brown people writing cringeworthy racialist shite because...urm...only Whitey can kiss the boo boo of their injured self-image and make things better by saying 'Sorry we were so mean to you. Promise to give you lots of kisses and sweeties from now on.'

But, respond defenders of empire, the “new history” created by anticolonial struggles has been disastrous. There is no gainsaying that, in the decades following independence, many former colonies descended into chaos and worse. The reasons are manifold, and partly lie, as Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire shows, in the policies enacted by the colonial powers themselves before independence and in the economic and political conditions imposed by Western powers after. The horrors of the postcolonial world seem, however, to have created an amnesia about the horrors of colonialism. Gilley, for instance, commenting on the current disorder in the Democratic Republic of Congo, suggests that “Maybe the Belgians should come back.”

 This is a crock of shit. In every case where a former colony descended into chaos or worse, the reason was endogenous and unitary, not manifold or exogenous at all.
What was that endogenous and unitary reason? The answer is simple. Unfairly fucking over a section of people who are either productive or who can't mount a costly resistance. Why did leaders chose to fuck over such communities? They were myopic in their megalomania. It was never enough that their country prosper. They wanted their country to prosper only in a certain way- with everybody speaking one particular language or belonging to one particular religion or ethnicity or making all their transactions through only one approved mechanism. Since the project was incentive incompatible or incompossible with reality- naturally, chaos followed.

It is easy to blame foreigners for one's self-created problems. However, once people saw that a neighboring country which had followed a different path was doing well, they naturally questioned the paranoid assertions of their 'Great Liberators'.

Nobody is saying 'the Belgians should come back' so as to repeat the crimes of King Leopold's company. They are saying let us get in some sensible guys who know they will be put in jail if they start killing people and unjustly enriching themselves. But sensible people of this sort exist everywhere. What matters is the Rule of Law. It is naive to think this should be imposed from outside. Why? There will always be doubt whether, at the margin, the cost of enforcing the Law will be felt to be worthwhile by the foreign power. So, on the one hand, the Rule of Law is eroded, while, on the other, it is gamed- i.e. manipulated into enabling or assisting unjust enrichment. Thus it loses its legitimacy and collapses.
By contrast, an incentive compatible Rule of Law- i.e. one able to provide public goods like honest policemen and Judges and so on- is sustainable and a foundation for endogenous growth.

Malik doesn't get this. Apparently the guy is a scientist. Why can't he apply scientific method to filter the foolish availability cascades which render his article worthless? Is it because, as a brown man in post Brexit Britain, he feels obliged to write puerile shite? Or does he have a crush on Shashi Tharoor? Sad! Tharoor only has eyes for Rahul Baba. As do I. Rahul will certainly marry me and bring me home to Soniaji as her bahoo. Then, because 'saas bhi kabhi bahu thi'- since mother in law too was once a daughter in law- Soniaji will buy me nice saris and pay for breast reduction surgery on my man-boobs and then I will defeat that evil Narendra Modi in General Election and become Prime Minister! Rahul Baba, having attended Harvard and Cambridge, will no doubt come to me and say 'Amartya Sen wants you to fuck up the Economy because Growth is very wicked. Kindly do the needful, darling'. I will immediately sing 'Jhoot bole tho kauva katte! Main maikhe chali jaoongi, thu dekhte rahiyo' and, to drive my threat home, immediately return to Britain where I will challenge Theresa May to a dance-off so as to reverse Brexit.
In this way, the British freedom struggle will be quashed and European Enlightenment will reign supreme.

McDougall vs Biggar

 James McDougall is a historian who has attacked Nigel Biggar's contention that the British should take pride in their Empire. McDougall writes-

When Rhodes, already censured by a parliamentary select committee, was proposed for an honorary degree at Oxford in 1899, there was vocal protest from 92 academics(none of whom were Corbynistas.)

 A quick Google search shows that Rhodes was awarded the Doctorate in 1892 three years before the infamous Jameson Raid for which he was quite properly censured. He only turned up to receive the honour in 1899 a few months before the Boers commenced hostilities. Two elected proctors, who had the power of veto, did consider exercising it but in the end the award ceremony went ahead without incident.

It makes little difference to ordinary people whether Rhodes was proposed for a degree in 1892 or 1899. The truth is, History does not matter to ordinary people- it is bunk. But History does matter to students of History. They must learn to get their facts right. Why? A History degree serves a 'screening' and 'signalling' purpose. If History graduates are careless about facts then they will be useless for employment in the Law or the Bureaucracy or, indeed, any respectable branch of Journalism. James McDougall is setting a bad example to his students by writing carelessly in an article where he argues that Historians are concerned with facts not questions of 'guilt' or 'pride'.

McDougall says

 Colonial empires provided the matrix of the modern world in the 19th century, and their effects still influence the shape of the world and the division of privilege across it today.

This is utterly false. The United States of America, as Marx recognised, was 'the matrix of the modern world in the nineteenth century'. Germany and Japan, too, rose rapidly. America wasn't interested in colonies- except for a brief period under Teddy Roosevelt. Germany came to bitterly repent its wasteful and mischievous colonial adventures. Japan learned a similarly harsh lesson. Colonial Empires aren't the 'matrix of modernity'. They militate for stagnation and military weakness. Why? Colonial armies face weak, technologically backward, foes. They lose the will and ability to fight their peers. At worst- as happened in Spain, under Franco- a colonial Army invades the home country or, like in Salazar's Portugal, imposes poverty upon its own people.

What about the notion that dead white men are to blame for all the problems of ex colonies because of the way they drew lines on the map?
Surely there is some truth to that?
The answer is- no, none at all. Either those lines on the map weren't contested- so, the line drawing had no effect- or else they corresponded to some genuine fault-line. Those dead white men had no magical power. This isn't to say that hysteresis effects don't exist. Good administration has persistent effects measurable hundreds of years later. But good administration is essentially collaborative. It has hysteresis effects only because there is increased Trust and this increased Trust permits superior correlated equilibria.

McDougall writes-

Britain, like France, the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, Russia, Germany and Italy, does need a public debate about the realities and legacies of its imperial past. We need a fuller public understanding of what Britain’s empire was, and how its aftereffects have influenced Britain’s multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society, its inequalities and injustices as well as its commonalities and opportunities.

Why does Italy need a 'public debate' about its stupid and expensive Colonial misadventures? The Somalis actually invited them back as the UN mandated power even though the British dangled the carrot of a bigger unified Somalia in front of them. Italy had no difficulty mending fences with Libya. Even Haile Sellaise maintained excellent relations with the wife and  son of the Duke of Acosta.

What about the Netherlands? It experienced a terrible famine in 1944. What good were its vast colonial possessions to it? The Dutch are smart people. They turned their back on that type of stupidity. What possible benefit would they derive from a 'public debate' on colonial policy do them now? It is wholly irrelevant even to the 'Indos'.

Japan isn't going to do any more apologising. Why should it? As for a 'public debate'- what good would it do?

Germany has no connection or other salience with respect to Tanganika or Namibia. It is foolish to think so. It wasn't a Colonial power- it was an aggressor which was punished for its aggression.

Britain and France do have large 'colonial' immigrant populations. Some of these immigrants are as stupid as shit and thus can't study anything useful. But they still want a diploma. As a Society, we must ensure that there are worthless subjects which they can study under worthless Professors. However any 'public debate' instigated by their worthless Professors is going to be a public nuisance.

It is important that young British people, or French people, grow up to feel pride in their country. To instill in them a sense of inherited injury or humiliation is not helpful to anyone. 

Nigel Biggar vs this random nigger- who is the bigger bigot?

Nigel Biggar is a Christian Theologian who thinks that the British Raj wasn't all bad. He could scarcely be called a Christian of any description- let alone a distinguished Anglican Theologian- if he saw no good at all in an institution providential in bringing millions of souls to Christ.

Biggar is White. I iz Bleck. He belongs to the Established Church. I am a howling heathen kept busy kowtowing to the elephant god and the monkey god and my neighbour's cat which might well be the vahana of Goddess Shashti. The only thing Biggar and me have in common is pride in British citizenship and love of England's sterling qualities and traditions. In my case, I suppose, my present enfranchisement was purchased by a racial and religious humiliation accepted by my ancestors. Biggar's, more honourably, was purchased by blood, sweat and tears. We both have good reason to condemn what was bad about the British Empire. Biggar probably lost family members to Pyrrhic battles that would not have been fought, or would have been fought very differently, but for the Fata Morgana constituted by the delusive chimeras of Imperial military doctrine & the mischievous chrematistics of Imperial Finance. But, precisely because we have both paid an eusebiac 'price of admission'- id est our sense of filial piety must reckon with the sorrows and sacrifices of our forebears- it follows that there is a univocal 'separating equilibrium' here based on an ancestral 'costly signal' we both ought never to forget. It would be dishonourable to suggest that Biggar's 'costly signal' was 'subaltern'- I'm certain his ancestors, of whatever class, thought it sweet and decorous to die for Britain whereas mine considered any service to the Raj only justifiable in so far as it benefited Indians or India- but it would, in an opposite manner, be vainglorious to suggest that some superior dispassion or transcendence of thymos animated my ancestors such that I can imagine my grossly ignorant and Falstaffian self, mutatis mutandis, univocal in Britishness with this slim, sober, savant.

There is a notion that Christianity is a 'narrative'. It isn't. It can't be. The deeds of the risen Christ, over a space of 40 days, were such that if they were all written down, Holy Writ were more voluminous than the World. Yet, as- of all people!- Oscar Wilde pointed out- there is one 'ipsissima verba' of the Judge of Judges which is also a 'hapax legomenon' such that the synoptic Gospels are a fractal Yoga Vashishta- not a narrative, but a knight's tour of all possible narratives, a Borgesian book of sand which can never fall open on the same page twice.  Christ is the Living Word because the Bible has infinite apoorvata.

In particular- the Lord's Passion is both subaltern- that of the patient, suffering, khorban or pharmakos- as well as a more Knightly vigil than that of all save who harrows Hell, overturns Law Minded Yama's primordial Kingship, so that the great crowd of our ancestral dead too, in our merely kairotic sortes Virgillianae, learns a King of Kings.

Biggar has now been denounced as a bigot.

His thought crime is 'parrhesia'- a Christian duty, a British reflex of 'fair play'.

No one is saying his statements aren't alethic.

No evidence has been offered that he has some dismal agenda.

But he is guilty nonetheless.

Why?

The man thinks there is a difference between Good and Evil!

That's jus' ignnirint, innit?!

His enemies say-

Good and evil may be meaningful terms of analysis for theologians. They are useless to historians.

Geography is about maps. History is about chaps. Maps don't care about Good and Evil. Chaps do. A good historian of Imperialism needs to understand Geography- because that's the fitness landscape for Empires. A bad historian of Imperialism needn't bother because he can just gas on about how good historians have a duty to tell stupid lies so as to prevent Nazi Zombies from the centre of the Earth rising up and grabbing power disguised as Narendra Modi or Donald Trump or Angela Merkel.

I know Biggar has received a lot of support from Black and Asian British people. The trouble is some of these people may be homophobic. To be frank, I was a homophobe myself. Why? Au fond, homophobia is a misogyny. Women have to sleep with men so babies can be born. If men sleep with men they are no better than women. I think my attitude only began to change when I saw women priests leading Churches and Synagogues and (to a much smaller extent) working as Hindu priests in Scandinavia (a boy from a good family known to me, went to Sweden to have a Hindu marriage to a fellow Doctor. Only a woman priest had the courage to conduct the ceremony.)

Okay, I agree that I'm a bigot. But, Biggar isn't. We should listen to what he has to say if for no other reason than that he is British and proud of it. He is Christian- not some wishy washy irenicist  but a full blooded Theist- and, quite rightly, proud to be so. No doubt, that pride is riding for a fall.  His Church- like a prostitute to her pimp- is most beloved to her Lord when/ most open to all manners of all men. That's the problem with being proud to be British or Anglican or whatever. This 'fex urbis' Curry & Chips Cockney legitimises the 'lex orbis' of both Church & Crown in the eyes of their Creator.

God must fall.

But first we must deal with Love.

That tramp!- don't you see, we've gotta do it for her own good!

Beeyatch be hooked on Truth.

These dyspeptic post Xmas days are a good time for the cold turkey treatment.

Do it now.

Who knows what will happen as this new Millennium gains Majority?

Bruce Gilley and the case for his colon.

The Third World Quarterly has withdrawn Bruce Gilley's article 'The case for Colonialism' on the basis of  'credible threats' of 'personal violence'.

Was the article any good in the first place? Let us see- (my comments are in  bold)

For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. Nonsense! A little less than a hundred years ago, the British and the French and the Belgians were given League of Nations' Mandates- later the U.N would do the same thing- over territory controlled by defeated powers. Clearly, at the time, Western Colonialism was considered a good thing, not a bad thing at all. It is true that Colonialism wasn't a particularly paying proposition and ceased to be militarily & financial viable by the late Forties or Fifties. However, Colonialism didn't really have a bad name at all. India's annexation of Portuguese Goa was vigorously protested. Niradh Chaudhri was acclaimed by the Brits as a master of English prose because he said that Bengalis were a pile of shite and needed proper Aryans to rule over them. He hoped the Americans would step up to the plate. 

Later, V.S Naipaul got a Nobel for harping on the same theme. However, once Americans discovered that 'Nation building' was tough- which is why the Army refused to do it- and an excuse for colossal corruption- they too recoiled from it. Colonialism has a bad name today because the thing can't be done profitably & without a lot of body bags. Similarly, Professors of Political Science have a bad name today because everybody can see that the sort of shithead that would take the job under current conditions must be stupider and more ignorant than anyone able to work Google Assistant on her smartphone.

 It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Why? What's changed? 

Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. So what? The thing was supposed to make a profit or contribute positively to one's defence capacity. In order for that to be possible, obviously, it either had to wipe out or marginalise indigenous people or else it had to 'objectively benefit' them in some way and thus gain some sliver of 'subjective legitimacy'. Otherwise it wouldn't have existed. There would have been no 'Western Colonialism' just a war zone where Westerners kept wasting money and getting killed. 

The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Nonsense! Countries stable enough to maintain administrative continuity did better than countries too unstable to maintain any sort of continuity.  Why? Was it because of stuff to do with 'embracing' or 'smooching' or anything of that sort? Nope. What mattered was if effective Governance was achieved on an incentive compatible basis. Inheritance had nothing to do with it.

Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. This is sheer stupidity. Subject people are incapable of harming themselves no matter what ideology they espouse because, by definition, they have no power. That's what makes them a subject people.  Perhaps what this idiot Professor means is 'newly liberated people suffered because they did not understand that Colonial institutions were useful and thus they destroyed those institutions because they were motivated by a mischievous anti-colonial ideology.' However, this view is foolish. Why? Because 'newly liberated people' cared about bread and butter issues- not about ideology. Their leaders cared about increasing their own power and revenue. They may have pretended to care about ideology but it was all just pretence. Why? Because ideology is shite. Only very very stupid and ignorant people- the sort who might become Associate Professors of Poli Sci at Portland State Uni- think 'ideology' aint a joke word used only by gobshites and blemmya whose heads are lodged securely up their rectums.  

Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch. If a State is weak and fragile it can't enforce its authority even within its own borders. Thus it can't do any of these things Gilley suggests. Myanmar has a pretty impressive army. Yet, it struggles to 'recolonise some areas'. Aung San Suu Kyi would last for about 5 minutes if she tried to 'reclaim colonial modes of governance'- like putting the Army Chief on trial for genocide.  Even if she granted the Americans a naval base in Rakhine, she would still have to flee. China may be able to operate a naval base there, but it would have to turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing. No Western nation is going to set up a 'new Western Colony' in some 'weak and fragile state'. It wouldn't be profitable for one thing. It also probably wouldn't be legal because of things like the Alien Torts Act.

Gilley thinks Colonialism ended because of 'anti Colonialism' rather than because it was no longer viable.
 I suppose, in the case of Singapore and Cyprus and Aden, there is some truth to this. After all the Royal Navy might have wanted to retain these strategic colonies and the Americans could have supplied the cash to make it feasible. Sadly, anti-colonial demagogues; like Lee Kwan Yew, and that 'Castro of the Mediterranean', Archbishop Makarios; put paid to this dream. True, Britain retains its base in Cyprus- but only because the US insists they stay. The Greek Cypriots know that the Americans will recognise the Turkish breakaway Republic if they make trouble.

 governments and peoples in developing countries (need) to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts – as successful countries like Singapore, Belize and Botswana did

Gilley thinks Singapore replicates as far as possible 'the colonial governance' of its past. He must be mad. It is run on very different principles. That's why Mrs. Thatcher wanted to make Britain more like Singapore rather than the other way round. Unfortunately, she was too stupid to understand how the Singapore Financial Sector actually works. Lee Kwan Yew didn't try to explain it to her. British politicians are as thick as shit. Why waste your breath?
Cyprus, it is true, is better than Greece, because of the superiority of British institutions, but those institutions were still shit when compared to Singapore's which is why they are now in a hole.

What about Botswana? Is it replicating 'colonial governance'? Hardly. There was hardly any governance to replicate. It made things up as it went along. Belize has an even tinier population than either Singapore or Botswana. It can either continue in vassalage to some private company or other or else get gobbled up by Guatemala.

Gilley quotes Africans in failed states asking 'when are the Europeans coming back?' The answer is never. The thing isn't profitable and Europe is, in any case, too weak.

On the other hand, it is quite true that stupid shitheads write books about evil colonialists. But only shitheads read those books. The debate is a circle jerk for dickless wonders. It may be that these guys get paid a little for this fluff but it is very very little. Now that they are getting physically threatened, they will drop even the pretence of 'critical' argument and 'peer review' and other such bullshit.

Western Colonialism is as dead as the dodo. Western Poli Sci is as brain dead as that dodo's Uncle wot sexually molested it when it was but a chick. Now, more than ever, it is vital that we create a truly autonomous Academy where sexually molested dodos can speak truth to power and recover memories of having been Bruce Gilley's colon. There is a case for serious debate on only that last aspect of the extinct bird.