Guha arguing with Gandhi

In my book on Gandhi & Ambedkar, I was willing to 'repair' the views both expressed in the light of subsequent developments in the disciplines they were familiar with. In Ambedkar's case, this can be productive but nobody wants a sensible Ambedkar. They want a paranoid cretin & by God, they are welcome to him. Gandhi's importance was a tactician. He built esprit de corps within Congress & reconciled the 'naram' & 'garam' dal. It is not his fault he couldn't tackle the land question- i.e. the only thing which mattered. But that would take hard work at the local level involving cadastral surveys & the creation of an efficient Land Registration system. This could have been done by elected governments any time after 1937 but the incentive to do so was lacking. 

Ram Guha's 'Argments with Gandhi' does not attempt to 'repair' the views of either Gandhi or anyone he disagreed with. It accepts myths as facts and creates new myths on that basis.

His first chapter gives a flavour of the whole-

Articulating Non-Violence 

The British had established the rule of Law, justiciable property and civil rights, and created a peaceful country where non-violent methods- i.e. buying and selling or going to court to settle disputes- had prevailed over 'matysanyaya' (the big fish eating the little fish).

Gandhi was a barrister. He had been taught to articulate non-violence using a protocol bound legal vocabulary. As a vegetarian- like A.O Hume, the founder of the INC- he naturally associated non killing or eating animals with non-violence. This was where he differed from most British (or, indeed, Indian) people. One other point. Gandhi was influenced by both Tolstoy and the British Quakers. The Cadbury & Rowntree families bought newspapers at the behest of the Liberal party. They tended to be critical of the Boer War in which Gandhi participated as the head of an Indian ambulance corps. 

Guha quotes Gandhi as saying 'The acid test of non-violence is that one thinks, speaks and acts non-violently, even when there is the gravest provocation to be violent.'

Clearly this is false. A weak person may be very obsequious even while he is being beaten & buggered. The acid test of non-violence is solving problems peacefully even if you have overwhelming physical superiority. 

One may say that there is a spiritual benefit in avoiding sexy or violent thoughts. But a hired assassin may do so. He isn't non-violent at all. 

To understand an argument, you need to be smart enough to evaluate statements in a rational manner. If you can't do so, you have no business writing a book about arguments. Why? You have no way to separate what is doxastic from what is merely tactical or strategic. 

 In contemporary times, 11 September, or 9/11 for short, is a date remembered for the terrorist attack in 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York. Itself an act of cruel violence, the attack provoked the US government into invading lands far distant, leading to a cycle of death and destruction that has yet to fully run its course. In the long sweep of history, however, it is another 9/11 that may yet prove to be more significant.

No. The war on terror & its aftermath is the single most important event of this century. But for it, Russia wouldn't have made its move on Ukraine. China wouldn't have risen so rapidly in economic might that it is now accepted as an equal by the US. 

On that day in 1906, some three thousand men and women assembled in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa.

They were Indian. Indians don't matter in South Africa.  

They had come to protest a new racial law imposed by the government of the Transvaal, of which province Johannesburg was the capital. The Transvaal government had passed an ordinance seeking to end Asian immigration and place sharp restrictions on Asians already in the colony. Asians were to produce fingerprints, carry an identity card at all times and be confined to living in designated locations so that they would not, so to say, ‘contaminate’ the ruling whites.

The Boers were angry with the Indians who had sided with the British. They would use the issue of 'Asiatic immigration' so as to gain support from the new Liberal government in England. Would they also be able to intimidate the Mine owners by threatening their labour supply? Thanks to Smuts, the Boers lost the war but won the peace. 

Gandhi did go to jail for a few weeks for refusing to carry a Pass. Then he changed his mind. He got out of jail and went around saying that the Pass was a good thing. All Indians should voluntarily carry one. The Boers were wrong to say that Indians were too stupid to see that Passes are freakin' fabulous. But Indians are smarter than Africans. You may have to force Africans to carry a pass, but it is insulting to Indians to say they can't see the great advantage of doing so. 

Naturally, some Indians thought he had been bribed. Some Pathans beat the shit out of Gandhi. He then realised that it is safer to stay in jail if some stupid shit you pulled backfires.  

The resistance to the ordinance was led by the thirty-six-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi. A lawyer-turned-activist, Gandhi was a figure of considerable authority in the immigrant community. At the time, he had been in South Africa for a little over a decade. This protest meeting on 11 September 1906 was held in a building named the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg. It passed a series of resolutions, drafted by Gandhi, of which the most significant was the fourth, that stated: ‘This mass meeting of British Indians here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief.’1

In other words, Gandhi- like the Tory MP Bhownagree- was an Imperialist. He wanted the Milner 'kindergarden' rather than the rule of the native Boers (forget about Africans!). Sadly, multi-ethnic Empires were obsolete. Nationalism would triumph everywhere.  

The threat to court arrest was, for Indians in South Africa, a considerable departure from past practice. In the previous decade they had asked patiently, and extremely politely, in writing for greater rights or fairer treatment from the white rulers.

The problem was that the Brits, who had put Transvaal back under British control in 1902, were negotiating with Smuts & Botha to give self-rule back to it. This came to pass in December of 1906. Gandhi was arrested in Transvaal in January 1908 even though Royal Assent to the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act was only given in May 1908. Gandhi had compromised with Smuts & released after 20 days. With hindsight, this was a ghastly mistake. 

Since his arrival in the colony in 1893, as a young lawyer in his early twenties, Gandhi had dispatched a series of respectfully worded petitions, requesting that educated Indians be allowed to vote;

Transvaal had passed a Pass law for Indians and Africans since 1885. In 1891, citizenship & grant of crown land to Indian labourers in Natal was withdrawn. Prior to 1894, some Indians had the vote in Natal. This was cancelled despite Gndhi's petition. Some Cape Province Indians retained the vote even after joining the South African Union but this was chipped away over subsequent decades.  

Gandhi may have hoped that there would be British direct rule after the Boer War but the British hd no stomach for another expensive war. If the Boers wanted to be beastly to darkies- let them get on with it. 

that Indian traders be allowed to sell goods and open stores wherever they pleased; that Indians of all classes be allowed to travel freely between the coastal colony of Natal, controlled by the British, and the inland province of Transvaal, which was controlled by Afrikaners of largely Dutch origin. The meeting of 11 September rejected the cautious incrementalism of petition writers.

It failed utterly and completely. 

But it also rejected the violent methods then fashionable among revolutionaries.

Hilarious! The Boers were doughty fighters. If the Indians had rebelled, they would have been slaughtered within a couple of days.  

In Europe, anarchists and socialists hoped to bring about political change by assassinating kings,

Indian revolutionaries were doing the same thing.  

generals and Prime Ministers. These methods were being emulated in India, where young radicals sought likewise to kill colonial administrators in a bid to frighten the British into leaving the country.

Indians thought the assassination attempts on two Viceroys (Minto & Hardinge) did pave the way for reforms.  

When the Transvaal government refused to yield, Gandhi and his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes—or burnt them—defied nighttime curfews and hawked goods without a licence. Between 1907 and 1914, several thousand Indians were put in jail by the South African authorities. Gandhi himself served several terms in prison. The methods of protest mandated by that first 9/11 were given a particular name by Gandhi. He called them satyagraha, or truth force.

The truth was that they failed completely and utterly. Why did Smuts concede the 1914 Indian Relief Act? The answer is three-fold

1) Poorer Indians couldn't pay the £3 tax. If they were deported, the British Government would have to pay for their resettlement. Smuts had already got rid of the Chinese. Getting rid of Indians (who were British subjects) would harm the economy

2) refusal to recognize non-Christian marriages was simply malicious. Wealthy Indians (like the Tatas) were pouring money into Gandhi's agitation. 

3) the danger was that the Indians would ally with the Coloureds & White Trade Unionists. Sooner or later the African majority would take leadership of this. 

Some believe that Smuts had foreseen the German threat from 1913 onward.  But the Maritz rebellion was easily crushed. The real danger was that the Germans would arm Africans who knew the land even better than the Boers. In other words, the Whites in South Africa needed the British Navy which meant they couldn't be too horrible to His Brittanic Majesty's Indian subjects.  

After he returned to his homeland from South Africa

from London 

in 1915, he applied them with even greater effect to mobilize public opinion in favour of political freedom from colonial rule.

He tried to raise troops for the King Emperor.  

In India, Gandhi led four countrywide campaigns of civil disobedience against the British Raj: in 1919, 1920–22, 1930–32 and 1942 respectively.

They failed. Still, he and his people were only jailed for sedition. They weren't hanged or transported to the Andamans for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.  

 Where did Gandhi’s technique of non-violent resistance come from?

In 1902, the Tories passed an Education bill which resulted in 'Dissenters' having to pay for Anglican schools through their rates (property taxes). They created a 'Passive Resistance Committee'.The idea was to fill up the jail with people who refused to pay their rates. Interestingly, an 'Anti-Martydom League' was formed to pay the outstanding taxes of such people! Still, the Liberals gained greatly from this campaign. 

I may mention the Sufragettes who used hunger strikes to great effect around this time. However, they were prepared to actually die when they fasted to death. The solution was to shove a tube doen their throat and forcibly feed them.  

Some commentators have seen the heavy, if not determining, influence of Henry David Thoreau’s tract of 1848, Civil Disobedience.

Gandhi read Thoreau in 1907. However, he may have heard of him through his friend, the vegetarian, Henry Salt.

Gandhi was a disciple of Gokhale & opposed the revolutionaries championed by Bal, Pal & Lal. His friendship with Pranjivan Mehta- whose brother-in-law was the great Jain avadhanam Raichandbhai- probably reinforced his attachment to traditional Vaishnav Bania beliefs. 

I may mention, prior to the establishment of Pax Brittanica, Gandhi's ancestors couldn't be Dewans (i.e. occupy the top job) in a Princely State because they lacked martial ability. Thus, his people had risen because non-violence is only viable where there is the Rule of Law backed up with military supremacy. Indeed, one might say universal relgions of an irenic stripe spread most in multi-ethnic empires with well developed commercial networks. 

Gandhi told an Indian friend that ‘the statement that I had derived my idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong’. Gandhi continued: The resistance to authority in South Africa was well advanced before I got the essay of Thoreau on Civil Disobedience. But the movement was then known as passive resistance.

which was credited with helping the Liberls win in 1905.

Gandhi was a firm believer in karma. This meant that a Hindu arguing with him could always say to him, 'this nutter wants to get reborn on Vaikuntha or some other paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures and everybody lives for ten billion years. Perhaps doing stupid shit in this life really will get you to such a boring paradise. At any rate, there may be some way in which this fool can be made useful.' 

In Hinduism we differentiate between 'matam' (dogma) and vigyan (praxis). Gandhi succeeded for a time because his 'vigyan' was a way of exchanging a bit of jail time for political power- or the chance of gaining it. Sadly, only spontaneous demonstrations can bring about political change. That's what happened in Egypt in 1922. Gandhi's satygraha failed in that year because it was planned. The rioters in Chauri Chaura had paid money to get enrolled as Congress members. This meant that the authorities would first want to arrest 'ring-leaders' & roll up their networks so as to strengthen their own hand before sitting down to negotiate. If an uprising was spontaneous, on the other hand, then you had to find popular leaders with whom to do a deal. 

Why was this not obvious to all concerned? The truth, I think, is it was always fucking obvious that the only thing which mattered was the land question. To solve it required doing some actual work not talking bollocks incessantly. 

Barristers are trained to argue. But they need to present actual facts and use valid methods of logical deduction. Sadly, Gandhi & Ambedkar & Jinnah & so forth were 'ultracrepidarian'. They didn't want to confine themselves to the work for which they had been trained. Instead, they turned into religious figure- Gandhi became a Mahatma, Ambedkar became a Boddhisattvas & Jinnah became the founder of a theocratic State.

We may say that Ambedkar supported British rule- as he was perfectly entitled to do- and only went crazy after Independence. Thus, he is a different league from the two Gujjus. 

I should explain, B.R Ambedkar was nominated by the British authorities to sit in the Bombay Legislative Council from 1927 to 1937. He represented the British policy of turning the Hindu majority into an artificial minority. The problem was that Dalits feared the Muslim more than they feared the Brahmins and Banias who dominated Congress. Thus, to win an election, Ambedkar had to do a deal with Congress's supremo- Mahatma Gandhi. The spadework had been done by Rajah & Moonje. Since Dalits were Nationalists, Congress didn't mind having more Dalit MPs provided they were elected by the general population. Ambedkar had to take what he was offered because he was a British nominee. If the Brits believed Churchill's claim that the Dalit hated the caste Hindu, then they could have no objection to Dalits getting more MPs. Indeed, the Tory toffs who passed the 1935 Act firmly believed that Congress wouldn't get a majority in any Province! 

Guha, shithead that he is, takes a different view. In his new book 'Arguments with Gandhi' he writes- 

When meeting Gandhi in jail in 1932, Ambedkar told him: ‘Let there be no repetition of the old method when the reformer claimed to know more of the requirements of his victims than the victims themselves.’

Gandhi had believed Ambedkar was a Brahmin whose foreign education and well-cut suits ensured that he knew nothing about the plight of 'Harijans'.  

Reading this warning now, almost a century later, one can see it as prescient.

Not if we studied a bit of Indian history to pass the competitive exams. We know that Ambedkar beleived that money raised for Harijans was being used to pay high caste lawyers not to practice law. 

Still, we may say Ambedkar's claim was like the slogan 'nothing about us, without us'. But this does not require separate electorates.  

There had to come a time when Dalits would be represented by one of their own,

that had already happened under the nomination system.  

rather than spoken for by a reformer from the upper-castes, however well-meaning he might be.

At the time, Ambedkar appeared intelligent. He had studied Sociology, Anthropology & Economics at Columbia & the LSE. He was a barrister with two PhDs. Sadly, he was a cretin. He converted to Buddhism- the religion which had spread untouchability to Japan.  

Ambedkar’s posthumous emergence as the great icon and exemplar of Dalits is thus entirely understandable.

No. If Jagjivan Ram had become PM in 1977, he would be the icon. Ambedkar's Republican party had factionalised and was clearly useless. One could say Kanshi Ram, Trade Unionising Dalit Government servants, helped spread the fame of Ambedkar to the cow-belt.  

But whether the attacks on Gandhi by Ambedkarites are entirely merited is another matter.

Gandhi was a shithead. Attack him by all means.  

For Gandhi’s own campaign against untouchability was conducted with great courage and resolve.

No. He was a late-comer to the party & remained something of a bigot all his life.  

Had he not been around, the issue may never have acquired the salience and importance that it did.

It was Churchill's 1931 speech which gave Ambedkar salience and importance. Since he was out of office, he could say what he liked. If Tories believed him, they would ask why Dalits were not getting what Muslims had been given. After all, it is that cunning Brahmin, Nehru, who is behind all this mischief.  

None of his important colleagues in the Congress Party — not Jawaharlal Nehru, not Vallabhbhai Patel, not Subhas Chandra Bose — understood how gravely the cause of Indian independence was undermined by the pervasive inequalities of caste.

It made no difference whatsoever. Elsewhere, on this blog,I  have explained Gandhi's 'game of tag' (his Mum told him, if you touch a Dalit, immediately touch a Muslim so the contagion passes to him).

Separate electorates for Muslims probably did make partition inevitable. But there could be no 'Dalitstan' because Dalits were nowhere in the majority. 

Nor did left-wing anti-imperialists such as Bhagat Singh and company.

It is obvious that a poor minority does not matter in the slightest. Virtue signalling merely helps pass the time. It doesn't get you power or wealth.  

Indeed, Indian Marxists completely ignored the caste question. This was because they looked at justice exclusively in economic terms, through the prism of their master category of ‘class’.

No. All parties and all who exercised authority or who sought power, kept in touch with (or threatened) community leaders. As the franchise expanded, every jat panchayat or caste association was courted by different political parties. When the first Communist administration was formed in Kerala, foreign journalists noted that caste, not class, had been used to win the election.  

Derived from Marx’s own focus on European history, this analytical framework had little (and often no) room for the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of caste discrimination in India.

All educated Indians chafed against caste-based legal restrictions. Thus Nehru, in his autobiography, bitterly complained that his sister had to pretend to convert to Brahmoism so as to marry a non-Brahmin. Indians wanted elected representatives to get rid of laws of this sort. Ambedkar could have played a role in this but, silly man that he was, chose to resign in a huff after the first Hindu Code was dropped.  

Among the major Indian nationalists of the day, only Gandhi recognised the hypocrisy inherent in demanding freedom from the British while allowing so many Indians to live and suffer in conditions of unfreedom.

The two were completely unconnected. America had slavery but still kicked out the Brits. Guha truly has shit for brains.  

Moreover, he saw it not just as a political problem, but a moral one.

It was neither. Untouchability arose from a primitive pathogen avoidance theory. As Western medicine grew more and more successful, people gave up these primitive ideas. Sadly, Gandhi (& his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta) didn't believe the germ theory of disease. 

Ignorance is no crime. We can admire a guy who lived long ago and thus who held some stupid ideas which, however, were not known to be utterly false, at that time.  

Untouchables had to be given equal rights so as to make a more persuasive case for India’s political independence.

No. If the Brits really cared about it, they would have tried to do it themselves. They genuinely didn't give a shit about Dalits but Churchill's speech meant that they had to try to see if Dalits, like Muslims, could be turned against the Caste Hindus. 

Incidentally, Gandhi's Rajkot satyagraha failed because the Dewan played the caste card- i.e. brought in Muslim, Rajput & Garasia nominees to tilt the balance in his favour. This is an early example of the KHAM strategy in Gujarat. 

At the same time, upper-castes Hindus had to atone for the ‘sin’ that untouchability represented.

This involved giving Gandhi money. That fucker always need more of that commodity.  

While his fellow Congressmen were, by and large, indifferent to Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign, a broad swathe of the general public was implacably opposed to it.

They didn't give a shit about it. The thing simply wasn't important. On the other hand the fight for Lebsian marriage was a defining feature of the French Revolution. Not till Madam Defarge was permited to marry her cat, Mitzi, in the Notre Dame cathedral could Marie Antoinette's head be cut off. 

Indeed, the unreasoning and extreme hostility to Gandhi from orthodox Hindus

he was himself a sanaatani Hindu as were most of his followers.  

helps explain why he adopted an incremental approach in challenging caste prejudice.

He was engaged in a game of tag, running between Muslim & Dalit when he had nothing better to do.  

Between 1915 and 1920, when he was first establishing himself in Indian politics, he attacked untouchability without calling into question the caste system itself.

He initially supported 'varna' and was a bit slow to adopt the neo-Hindu position that birth should not determine occupation or affect validity of marriage. 

As he grew more certain of his hold over the Indian people, and especially the Hindus among them, he began to encourage inter-mingling, inter-dining, and, eventually, inter-marriage itself.

No. The country had changed. A younger generation was taking over. They older generation liked Gandhi because he broke the 'kala-pani' taboo & married his son out of caste. The younger generation wanted all caste based law to be scrapped. However, what really mattered was the land question. Since nobody wanted to grasp that nettle, everybody ran around talking worthless bollocks. 

Notably, as Gandhi’s challenge to social orthodoxy became more direct, the opposition to him intensified.

He was a stupid shithead. Sadly, it was the stupid shit- stuff like khaddar- which gave him mass appeal. After all, religious rituals often involve doing mindless shite. What could be more mindless than spinning cotton? Maybe it really would get you into Heaven.  

There was an unrelenting barrage of hate mails received by Gandhi for daring to question what his right-wing critics claimed was the divinely ordained hierarchy of caste.

It is safer to direct your hate mail at a cowardly guy. What is illegal is sending him dick pics.  

Adding to the verbal abuse were threats of violence, with at least one assassination attempt provoked by his anti-untouchability campaign.

The Brits thought he had cooked up the bomb attack (1934) himself.  We don't know who was behind it.  

Ambedkar saw Gandhi as a timid and hesitant reformer.

He saw him as an hypocritical autocrat with little education or understanding of the modern world.  

Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary attacking the very basis of scripture and tradition.

No. The guy was a bania who didn't know Sanskrit. If he could pull the wool over the eyes of the Muslims- well and good. If not, shoot the fucker.  

This disjuncture in viewpoints brings to mind some comments of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass on his great white contemporary Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln had power. Douglass didn't.  

In a speech of 1876,

Which is when Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 by which the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes , was awarded the presidency under an agreement to remove remaining federal troops from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida

Douglass remarked that ‘viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.’

Douglass was pretending the Civil War was about being nice to darkies. It really wasn't. Still, Douglass had to play the hand he had been dealt. 

The two greatest opponents of untouchability in the first half of the twentieth century were Gandhi and Ambedkar.

No wonder it persisted! When the Brits didn't like a thing- e.g. Suttee or Slavery- they got rid of it.  Indian barristers were useless.  

Their differing social locations and political affiliations produced sharp disagreements between the two men.

Their agreement mattered. Their disagreements did not. Why? They had shit for brains. Politics is about solving collective action problems in a sensible manner. It isn't about converting to Buddhism or sleeping naked with young girls.  

In recent decades, as Dalits have grown more self-aware and better organised, they have

lost power. Channi was the last Dalit C.M. He didn't last long. It is difficult now to believe that Mayawati was once considered a future PM. 

The question now is whether reservations will be renewed in 2030.  

turned more, much more, to Ambedkar than to Gandhi, to the activist intellectual who was himself a Dalit rather than to the guilt-ridden upper-caste reformer.

The problem is that Ambedkarites are crazy hatemongers who alienate everybody. Smart Dalits can join the BJP and rise. Better yet, stay clear of politics and focus on building a business.  

This elevation of Ambedkar over Gandhi was inevitable, and appropriate.

It was silly. True, you could repair Ambedkar by turning him into a Law & Econ type maven. But nobody is interested in doing so. Thus one may as well dismiss him a hate-mongering narcissist with a Messiah (or Boddhisattva) complex.  

However, the politics of the present have also led to a wholesale repudiation of Gandhi on the part of those who seek to fight against the injustices of caste.

Nobody is fighting shit. Gandhi was a fool who died long ago. Same goes for Ambedkar. Forget them. All that matters is productivity. Talking bollocks helps nobody.  

A posthumous reconciliation

When, back in the 1990s, this demonisation of Gandhi by Dalit activists was gathering pace,

Back then, Mayawati looked like a contender.  

the social theorist

aka shithead 

D. R. Nagaraj wrote an essay with the telling title ‘Self-Purification versus Self-Respect’, capturing the different paths taken by the two reformers.

Gandhi is important if there is a Gandhi capable of taking the top job. Ambedkar is important if a Dalit party (e.g. BSP) can take the lead in forming a government.  

The self-purification of Gandhi sought to make upper castes abandon their arrogance and contempt for those whom the mere accident of birth had consigned to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Fuck off! All that matters is money. Ambedkar had plenty & thus was able to marry a Brahmin doctor. Raising productivity is how peeps get more money at which point they get plenty of respect from smart people who want to sell them stuff.  

The self-respect of Ambedkar was aimed at his fellow Dalits, urging them, as he famously put it, to ‘educate, agitate, and organise’ to claim rights of full and equal citizenship in the Indian Republic.

He claimed his full and equal right to support the British in India as their nominee. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

With the star of Ambedkar in the ascendance, Nagaraj reminded his readers that it was Gandhi who first made the eradication of untouchability ‘one of the central questions of Indian politics.’

Why didn't he ask the Viceroy to ban it? Interestingly, it was only in 1941 that Mahar recrutiment into the army was resumed.  

Now, ‘from the point of view of the present’, he argued, there was ‘a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis’ of the legacies of Ambedkar and Gandhi.

This is a compelling necessity only for people who enjoy eating their own shit.  

To build a more caring and just society, one

needs to stop teaching or writing worthless shite  

needed both to awaken afresh the upper-caste conscience

The upper castes have come to loathe reservations.  

and to consolidate the efforts for Dalit self-respect. Hence, insisted Nagaraj, ‘Gandhiji and Ambedkar can and should be made complementary to each other.’

Add in Godse, Mao, Hitler & Barbara Streisland and you might be on to something.  

Nagaraj understood that his call for a posthumous reconciliation between two figures whom both history and politics had made implacable adversaries

Ambedkar scratched Gandhi's face after the latter pulled his hair.  

might not meet with approval. As he presciently wrote, ‘surely such efforts will be met with stiff opposition from hardened ideologues and researchers, and they are bound to unearth fresh evidence to fuel the fire between the two’.

Ambedkar was educated and smart. Gandhi wasn't. But, since Dalits aren't interested in anything smart Ambedkar said, we have to condemn both as worthless shitheads.  

D. R. Nagaraj died a few years after writing these words. His call to bring these apparently opposed legacies in productive conversation has been continued by his friend, the Dalit novelist and activist Devanuru Mahadeva.

The question is whether Priyank Kharge can get the job his father was denied in Karnataka. On the other hand, he may prefer a seat in the Union Cabinet if a Congress led alliance wins the National Election.  

Speaking to the journalist Amrita Dutta on the eve of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, Mahadeva urged democrats not to view Ambedkar and Gandhi as rivals and adversaries. In the journey towards true equality, he said, they should rather be seen as colleagues and co-workers. Thus, as Mahadeva remarked, ‘Ambedkar had to awaken the sleeping Dalits and then make the journey. Gandhi had to make the immense effort of uplifting, correcting, changing those who were drowned in Hindu caste religion, in caste wells, to take a step forward. When you see all this, maybe Gandhi would not have traversed far without the presence of Ambedkar. Similarly, I feel that without the liberal tolerant atmosphere created by Gandhi in the wells of Hindu caste religion, then this cruel Savarna [upper caste] society may not have tolerated Ambedkar as much as it did then.’

Ambedkar could have joined 'the Lal, Bal, Pal' militant section of Congress. He preferred to rise under British patronage. Gandhi too had ingratiated himself with the Brits. By unilaterally surrendering in 1922, he did the Brits a favour. Sadly, the end of British rule meant that both would lose salience. Nehru, it must be said, had a international, rather than parochial, perspective. It was his vision for India which prevailed. 

Mahadeva continued: ‘If it is our understanding that it is the Savarnas who need to change if India has to liberate itself from caste,

the Japanese had gotten rid of caste. They also burnt down Temples & beat Buddhist monks and forced them to get married. Ambedkar knew this well enough, yet converted to that highly casteist religion. 

then Gandhi is necessary. In the fight for Dalit civil rights, Ambedkar is absolutely necessary. Hence, I say that both should be brought together.’ This is a sentiment which I whole-heartedly endorse.

Because you have yet another worthless book to sell. 

Why actually 'argued with Gandhi'?  

Sadashit Dumbo's new book.

Sadanand Dhume's new book 'Tinderbox: The Unpredictable Rise and Uncertain Future of Modern India' is not

A devastating critique of India’s failure to fulfil its founding promises.

This is because Hindus wanted to take power & tell Muslims to either fuck off or pipe small. That is exactly what happened in Hindu majority areas. It must be said, after Indira broke up the Congress party, there was a period when she promoted Muslims. Thus, Nehru appointed no non-Hindu Premiers in Congress Provinces in 1937. It wasn't till 1972/73 that Indira appointed one or two Muslim C.Ms. But that was because they were loyalists without much of a base of their own.

It must be said, Muslim gangsters were often just as good or better than Kaffir gangsters and thus criminalised politics was pluralistic. Sadly, voters get tired of being robbed and raped. Moreover, crazy jihads tend to provoke 'Hindu consolidation'.

I suppose one might say Sadashit Dumbo thinks India's oundational promise was that Nehru's Dynasty would rule. Sadly, assassination tempers autocracy & Rahul doesn't want to get blown to pieces. Thus, for the last 12 years, India has had good governance & has risen in the world. If Yogi wins a third term in UP next February, he can take over from Modi & rule the country till 2040.  

Since claiming independence from the British Empire in 1947, India has dramatically changed its nature and its place on the world stage.

No. It has changed gradually & in a predictable manner. If you want drama, look elsewhere.  

Today, it is common knowledge that the country glitters with formidable potential.

It will continue to grow economically. But will it join the Eurasian power-block? No. But it will disengage with an increasingly isolationist US. But that is true of most other countries.  

India is the largest democracy in the world

Democracy doesn't matter. If Rahul wasn't a moon-calf, we'd be perfectly happy with Dynasticism.  

and it has the third-most billionaires after the US and China.

But their family offices are in Dubai or Singapore. 

It is predicted it will have the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, the largest middle class by 2033 and the third biggest navy by 2035. I

The economy matters. Who is or isn't 'middle class' is subjective.  

ndia boasts a raft of savvy English-speaking academics

all non-STEM academics are shit 

and business-leaders,

are useful 

an army of talented software engineers and a youthful population buzzing with ideas and ambition.

unless they are 'cockroaches'.  

But can all that India has promised – to itself and the wider world – come to fruition?

It hasn't promised anything to anybody. However, under Nehru, it showed it could do tit for tat ethnic cleansing just as well as its neighbours. Dumbo probably thinks Nehru protected Delhi's Muslims. He didn't. When he took power the Muslim population plunged from 33 to 5 percent.  

In Tinderbox, acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist

aka useless shithead 

Sadanand Dhume

Sadashit Dumbo

takes a hard look at the country’s progress and potential, bringing together a view of politics, history, economic thinking and social attitudes.

i.e. anti-BJP bigotry. He thinks Congress could exist if it wasn't dynastic. He is wrong. It would splinter into regional parties (like the TMC) or get factionalised. One possibility is that Rahul nominates a technocrat if the Opposition get a majority. The problem is, he has a dog in the manger attitude. He will tear up the ordinances of his own puppet. The boy wants to be the Greta Thurnberg of Indian politics.  

Dhume points to why the economic progress of India is stuttering,

It isn't. But the global economic and diplomatic climate has turned inclement. Still, it has a large internal market & there are still plenty of low hanging fruit.  

with a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the desires of its technocrats and its politicians;

Nonsense! The politicians, no matter which party they belong to, need the Ambanis and Adanis.  

he shows how democracy is fraying,

The Hindu majority has asserted itself. Democracy means majority rule.  

Hindu nationalism cutting away at the nation’s fabled pluralism;

There was none once the Muslims voted overwhelming for Pakistan.  

and he accounts for the country’s continuing paradox of astonishing contradictions,

like those of the US. Some people are poor or addicted to drugs. Others are rich & as smart as fuck.  

what with its record-numbers of billionaires and mass poverty,

a social security safety net is under construction.  

its technological advances but overall lack of access to electricity and clean water.

Both have increased and will continue to do so.  

In short, it’s time to revisit the view that India’s growth and progress will continue at its prophesied pace.

No. Purely economic forces will continue to lift millions out of absolute poverty. Poltics doesn't greatly matter.  

And it’s time to overturn the widespread assumption that a familiar India will remain familiar.

Just as a familiar US or UK or Germany won't remain familiar. There will be more darkies. However, Indians are already darkies. They will just be less poor darkies.  

Foucault on intellectuals

 Intellectuals, in 1977, had no political influence in any country in the world- unless right-wing economists count as such. Yet, in that year, Michel Foucault, in a series of interviews, propounded the following re. 'the political role of the intellectual'. 

For a long time the 'left' intellectual spoke and was acknowledged to have the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice.

This was never the case even in Communist countries. Some leftist writers or film makers or celebrities had some influence at different times and places. But this was also true of crazy right wing nutters or folksy centrist shitheads.  

He was heard, or purported to make himself heard, as the representative of the universal.

No. Some leftists claimed to speak for the poor but there were actual poor people who could speak for themselves.  

To be an intellectual meant to be, a little, the consciousness / conscience of everyone.

I suppose Sartre was wierdly popular. 50,000 turned out for his funeral in 1980. Nothing like it had happened since the death of Victor Hugo. But Sartre was an academic who became a writer rather than an intellectual.  

I think we encounter here an idea transposed from Marxism, from a faded Marxism indeed: just as the proletariat, through the necessity of its historical position, is the bearer of the universal (but its immediate, unreflected bearer, scarcely conscious of itself as such),

nobody believed that shite. Sartre & Foucault were retarded cunts who converted to an ideology based wholly upon an economic theory which they were incapable of understanding.  

so the intellectual, by his moral, theoretical and political chOice, aspires to be the bearer of this universality in its consciOUS, elaborated form.

I suppose you could say this of Milton Friedman who said inflation was always and everywhere a purely monetary phenomenon. There was a 'free market' universalism and the beginnings of a 'Human Rights' universalism but there was no Leftist universalism. Nobody thought a Communist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could be established in Western Democracies.  Even the notion of 'convergence' to a mixed economy was in question because the Public Sector in more and more countries was loss making. 

The intellectual is supposed to be the· clear, individual figure of a universality of which the proletariat is the obscure, collective form.

Mao was dead. The gang of 4 had been arrested the previous year. China was 77 percent agricultural. Meanwhile the industrial proletariat had begun to decline as a proportion of the working population after peaking in France at about 40 percent in the early Seventies. To be fair, it was not obvious that deindustrialization would succeed stagflation or that women and the service sector would rise and rise.  

For some time now, the intellectual has no longer been called upon to play this role.

Nobody ever gave a shit about intellectuals. Sartre, for some reason, was cool but what won in '68 was Gaullism. Cohn Bendit redirected his energies towards paedophilia.  

A new mode of 'connection between theory and practice' has been established.

That happened a couple of thousand years ago. Doctors listened to lectures on theory and then learnt on the job through practice.  

Intellectuals have become accustomed to working not in the character of the 'universal', the 'exemplary', the 'just-and-true for all', but in specific sectors, at precise points where they are situated either by their professional conditions of work or their conditions of life (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, familial and sexual relations).

Foucault was mentally ill. What worked on crazy people turned out NOT to be culture dependent. Oddly, Foucault's own psychiatrist- despite being French- wasn't shit. He had helped develop lithium salts as a treatment. Maoists forced him out of the profession but he then turned to literature and got elected to the French Academy.

Through this they have undoubtedly gained a much more concrete awareness of struggles. They have also there· by encountered problems which are specific, 'nonuniversal', often different from those of the proletariat and the masses. And yet, I believe that they have really come closer to the proletariat,

Foucault liked a bit of rough trade 

for two reasons: because it has been a matter of real, material, everyday struggles, and because they often came up, even though in a different form, against the same adversary as the proletariat, the peasants and the masses, namely the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, property speculators etc.

Also grown-ups. They don't want us kids to have any fun.  

This is what I would call the 'specific' intellectual as opposed to the 'universal' intellectual.

Foucault was a specific intellectual who was constantly harassed by the pigs coz he liked skateboarding while playing his guitar. Property speculators hired Ninja assassins to try to bump him off. Fortunately, his best pal was the Karate kid. 

'

Raghu Karnad on Gandhi

Raghu Karnad writes inthe LRB 

Mother Father


Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence
by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee.

The British introduced non-violent politics to India. Instead of Kings or Princes fighting wars to determine who controlled territory, elections were held. The party with a majority in the Legislature formed the administration. By 1937, all the British Indian states had elected Premiers. 

Gandhi could neither advance or retard this process which, by and large, was wholly determined by Tory grandees. However, once Atlee became PM in 1945, a pro-Congress Cabinet was in power in Westminster.  

Gandhi’s​ adversaries seem to have prevailed.

Jinnah was his adversary. He prevailed. The Justice Party was Gandhi's adversary. One may say that the Dravidian parties in TN are its lineal descendants. They have prevailed. Ambedkar too was an adversary. It might appear that he has prevailed but his followers have overplayed their hand. It may be that Reservations won't get renewed in 2030.  

The last generation of his disciples is dying off, and his pedestal can now be dismantled.

Congress, which still requires its embersto swear they are habitual spiners of cotton,  is in the doldrums because Rahul is useless. 

In the LRB in 2012, Perry Anderson could still describe a reverent consensus around the Mahatma,

because people thought Rahul would become PM & lead his party to victory in 2014 

which he then assailed with a catalogue of Gandhi’s missteps and obdurate follies. In 2014, Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction to Annihilation of Caste (1936) by B.R. Ambedkar, a leader of the untouchables, explaining his contempt for Gandhi, who in 1932 had begun a ‘fast unto death’ to end a plan that would have given untouchables separate electoral representation.

The Rajah-Moonje pact had already been done. The Brits were propping up Ambedkar. That is the only reason he had some bargaining power. 

Also in 2014, Hindu nationalists won the general election in India:

Hindu Nationalists won elections in Hindu majority states in 1937. Nehru, as Premier of India (shorn of Muslim majority Pakistan) presided over massive ethnic cleansing of Muslims.  

power was now held by admirers of Savarkar,

The BJP is descended from the Jan Sangh which was set up in opposition to Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha 

who had been tried as an accomplice to Gandhi’s assassination, and of Nathuram Godse, who had fired the gun.

Ambedkar spoke for many when he said that it was a lucky thing a great nuisance had been ended.  

The assassins’ point of view – that Gandhi was a misguided pacifist who had appeased Muslims and compromised Hindu interests – had become the establishment’s.

Gandhi had tried to fool Muslims and Dalits. It was in Congress's interests to pretend they believed they had a religious duty not to fuck either up.  

Gandhi’s vast correspondence was combed for its most egregious or dated remarks.

Sadly no sensible remarks could be found. 

It is true that he was too hostile to modern industry

He took money from mill-owners but pretended to be on the side of the weavers. Maybe he was simply stupid rather than hypocritical.  

and too cold towards militant labour; he was too cautious in 1922, when he called off the Non-Co-operation Movement against British rule,

He could have been transported to the Andamans on a charge of conspiracy to wage war against the King Emperor. That is why he cooperated witht he Prosecution and pleaded guilty to sedition. He expressed gratitude that a clause re. disloyalty to the King was removed because he considered himself a loyalist. He was given six years but released quite soon. However, he remained politically inert for the entire length of his sentence. In other words he was the opposite of Sa'ad Zaghloul which is why Egypt got Independene (as did Ireland & Afghanistan) while India got nothing. 

By 1926, the new Viceroy's big problem was not Indians trying to kill Whites, but Hindus & Muslims slaughtering each other. 

but too reckless in 1942, when he launched the Quit India campaign;

to be fair, he thought the Brits would lose. Few appreciated how quickly American military might could grow. 

he was effete but a bully, a pious Hindu crank, a Muslim-lover.

He did force his wife to cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad. To be fair, he had also enjoyed beating her. 

Then there’s the weird sexual stuff – his trials of chastity – intensely criticised by his followers during his stay in Noakhali, a district in Bengal, near the end of his life.

He thought he gained superpowers by sleeping naked with his great-niece.  

By the 2020s, it seemed to be harder to recite the events of his life than the faults and failures that attended them.

No. It's just that internet had made all sorts of archival material available almost instantaneously. Thus the events of his life were

1) burning passes in South Africa. Sadly, after a few weeks in jail, Gandhi decided that carrying a pass was a good thing. Indians should do it voluntarily. Government should not make it compulsory. This was an incredibly stupid theory. If not carrying a pass is bad, the Government should punish the action. Some Pathans beat the fuck out of Gandhi because they believed he had been bought off. Gandhi then understood that he needed to spend at least a year in prison otherwise his own people would fuck him up something fierce.

2) Gandhi betrayed his Chinese allies & did a disadvantageous deal with Smuts when the latter was at his weakest. Gokhale knew it was a bad deal & that Gandhi was a shit negotiator, still if Indians believed it was a 'win' for the Naram Dal, why not play along? 

3) Champaran. Hindus had been attacking Muslims across the length and breadth of Bihar with the result that cow slaughter ceased. Gandhi was sent to Champaran to distract attention from this and thus preserve the Congress-League alliance engineered by Jinnah. Later, Muslims would offer 'cow protection' for 'Khilafat'. 

4) Gandhi tried to raise troops for the Brits in Gujarat. His own people chased him away with vim and vigour.

5) Gandhi's two Himalayan blunders- viz. launching mass agitations but withdrawing them once violence broke out. In Egypt, spontaneous uprisings had forced General Allenby to back UDI. Gandhi's Satyagraha were meticulously organised to fail utterly and completely. 

As Nehru noted, after 1922, there was only one political question- viz. that of land ownership. That was the only thing which mattered. Having the British around was a good excuse for doing nothing about this even after the 1935 Act put the matter in the hands of the Provincial Legislature. 

‘And now, the more terrible and darker the picture you draw of Noakhali, the more is my mind steeled to stay,’ Manu Gandhi, not yet twenty years old, wrote to her great-uncle Mohandas – ‘Bapu’ – before joining him in December 1946

this was after Direct Action Day in Calcutta where the Hindus had prevailed.  

on Bengal’s eastern coast. He had warned her that, as well as physical danger and hardship, their mission in Noakhali would involve intense trials of the spirit.

He didn't add that it would be wholly useless.  

The local situation was ‘an altar for self-sacrifice’. Since October, it had been a preview of Partition: hamlets had been burned down, women and girls abducted; thousands were dead and tens of thousands had fled. There had been rioting in Bengal for years. In Noakhali, however, a district in what would soon be Pakistan (and is now in Bangladesh), the object was unprecedented: to push out the minority Hindu population and shut the door behind them.

This poor schmuck didn't get that ethnic cleansing was a two way street.  

Manu, who was one of those closest to Gandhi after the death of his wife, Kasturba, in 1944, was happy to reach Noakhali. ‘The journey was trying,’ her diary says, but ‘that day is written in letters of gold in the book of my life.’ Manu marched beside the 77-year-old Mahatma as he went from village to village. She cooked and cleaned, treated the cuts on his feet, attended his sermons, took dictation of his letters. It was a strange place to find the beacon of the national movement as India careened towards self-government.

No. Viceroy Wavell, an army man, warned that Indian politicians would have to work together to avoid a blood-bath. Gandhi said 'If India wants a blood-bath, it will have it.' Wavell had thought he would need to evacuate the White population. But, if Indians were too busy killing each other, the Whites would be perfectly safe.  

Noakhali was a swampy, mofussil district midway between Dhaka and Chittagong, where Gandhi did not speak the language. He wanted not only to halt the flight of the area’s Hindu residents but to summon them back, even to their deaths.

He assured them that. in his native Kathiawar,  Princes lived to rape. Why go to the trouble and expense of moving to a Hindu majority area if you could get raped and slaughtered in the comfort of your own homes.

Would Indian politicians have been able to arrange a peaceful transfer of people? Yes. There was a huge army presence. Sadly, Indian politicians simply didn't care about saving human lives. A Parsi war-reporter summoned to Punjab by British officers noted that, in Bombay, even a White High Court Judge who used a walking stick because he was lame in one leg, had to have a licence for that stick. In Punjab everybody was armed to the teeth in public. 

He was there, as Manu was, to offer the same sacrifice.

What was needed was an evacuation plan. What was not needed was a shithead saying 'stay here & get raped. Why have you slit your own throats you lazy cunts?' 

Anyway, the Muslims decided the Mahacrackpot was a nuisance. They chased him away. Still, for three or four months, the cunt was out of the hair of the Viceroy.  

By that example of ahimsa, he hoped to reverse the tide of violence that was carrying India towards Partition.

He failed. So did the Maharishi. Yogic levitation doesn't really spread 'peace rays' which prevent wars from happening.  

As late as 1946, the British position was still that ‘neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign state of Pakistan would provide an acceptable solution to the communal problem.’

Had Churchill been in power, the Brits would have wanted 'Pakistan & Princestan'- i.e. a Balkanised Hindu India.  

This was the conclusion of the cabinet mission dispatched by the prime minister, Clement Attlee, to Delhi and Shimla to thrash out the terms of independence. Carving through the middle of the Punjab and Bengal, it said, would be ‘contrary to the wishes and interests of a very large proportion of the inhabitants’, sharing as they did the ties of language, history and tradition. Still, it was clear that the increasing bloodshed and unravelling trust between India’s Muslims and Hindus required a constitutional remedy before any transfer of power.

There is no 'constitutional remedy' for Islamic militancy. Kaffirs should fuck off from Muslim majority areas. They may make room for themselves by expelling Muslims from areas where people of their own faith are the majority. At any rate, that is what happened in Punjab.  

The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was by now the sole representative of Indian Muslims.

Because Gandhi had been foolish enough to treat him as such. Still, it must be said, the 1946 election reflected a reality- Muslims had not enjoyed living under Congress Ministries. They wanted Pakistan & they got Pakistan. 

Gandhi was intent on a single national destiny;

Not really. Still, he could be useful. Mountbatten could say 'Gandhi is a one-man boundary force' which is like saying 'we don't have to save up money for Christmas pressies. Santa Claus will provide'.  

Jinnah was adamant there must be separation. The weary cabinet mission arrived at a baroque compromise to end the deadlock. It proposed a single federal entity: India’s provinces would be grouped along religious lines, with separate constitutions.

in other words, Muslims would get more than their fair share.  

Nehru, leader of the Congress, consented to the plan but then backtracked.

Which is why he remained in power & founded a dynasty. When the tough decision had to be made, he made it.  

Jinnah complained of sabotage. It was time, he said, for Muslims to ‘bid goodbye to constitutional methods’. He promised a general strike and a day of ‘direct action’ on 16 August. ‘If you want peace, we do not want war,’ he declared at a rally in Bombay. ‘If you want war, we accept your offer unhesitatingly.’

To be frank, non-Muslims would always be vulnerable in Muslim majority areas unless a powerful King or Dictator protected them. Sadly, if kaffirs become refugees, they may try to chuck out Muslims so as to make space for themselves. 

The competitive identities of Hindu and Muslim had hardened in Bengal earlier than in the rest of India.

This was irrelevant. Wherever there were Muslims, the end of a multi-Ethnic empire- or a Communist tyranny- led to a clash with kaffirs.  

In 1905, Lord Curzon split the province in two: his sole object, in the view of the Liberal MP Henry Cotton,

a member of the INC 

was ‘to shatter the unity and to disintegrate the feelings of solidarity which are established’ there.

by enabling East Bengali Muslims to rise. As Tagore pointed out, this would inevitably result in Hindu zamindars losing their estates in the East. 

The decision was so unpopular, and so helpful to agitators, that the partition was reversed in 1911. (George V made the announcement himself, at the Delhi Durbar, a huge gathering to mark his accession.)

Why? The answer is that it had resonances with the problem of Ulster. When Ireland was partitioned, it became inevitable that India too would be partitioned.  

More than a century later, there are still efforts to identify and disenfranchise Bengali-speaking migrants from Bangladesh.

Not if they are non-Muslim in which case there is a constitutional assumption that they have fled to avoid persecution. 

Every country- including Pakistan and Iran - deports illegal Muslim immigrants. 

The contention is that Bengali-speaking Muslims are ‘infiltrating’ India, demographically transforming and ‘Islam-ising’ eastern states.

Not anymore. The BJP has won Assam and now West Bengal precisely because they claim to be tough on this issue.  

India’s most inflamed arguments about national identity revolve around the figure of the ghuspetia, a Bengali Muslim ‘infiltrator’.

The argument is over. Can a political party rely on 'infiltrator' votes to stay in power? Not in Assam or West Bengal. There is Hindu consolidation. The big question now has to do with UP. Will Yogi win a third term in February? If so, he becomes Modi's natural successor. Maybe Akhilesh will ally with Owaisi- whose party did well in Bihar.  

In the days following the general strike on 16 August, hearing reports of the ‘direct action’ taking place in Bengal, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White flew to Calcutta. The Muslim League had taken power in the province after elections earlier that year. In Calcutta, a tea-shop owner called Nanda Lal gave her a vivid account of his street’s descent into havoc. It had begun with lorries arriving on Harrison Road and unloading a rabble who began to attack non-Muslim shops and houses. College students and rival party cadres were drawn into street fighting. Soon, Bourke-White wrote, ‘through the entire city the terror and arson spread, through the crowded bazaars, the teeming chawls and tenements.’ One night, Nanda Lal was approached by a neighbour, the owner of the Gulzar Shawl Repair Company, and asked to help rescue nine Hindu college girls (they were smuggled home through his courtyard). He was taken aback. ‘He had completely forgotten ... that Mussulmans could be benevolent human beings.’ On the third day, the army arrived and began to use machine guns. On the fifth day there was silence. To Bourke-White, who had been in Germany the year before, Calcutta’s streets ‘looked like Buchenwald’. Thousands were dead (the majority Muslims) and ‘vast areas were dark with ruin.’ But ‘Calcutta was only the beginning of a chain reaction of riot, counter-riot and reprisal’; the next link in the chain was Noakhali.

Suhrawardy had gambled & lost. Hindu gangsters had preserved Calcutta for India.  

A Hindu minority of about 20 per cent, many of them landowners, had prospered in Noakhali under the Raj. An organised local movement of peasants and sharecroppers was co-opted in the 1940s by the Muslim League, whose utopian promises about a new state easily outshone more pragmatic demands for tenancy reform and interest-free loans. In the same years, the Bengal coast was battered by cyclones, tidal waves and crop failures. In 1942, after the fall of Burma, the British implemented a ‘Policy of Denial’ in Noakhali,

Since this was a Defence matter, the provincial government was bypassed. The question is how White Civil Servants could get this done. The answer is they offered money. To the extent that the thing was done, it was done because Bengalis were paid to get it done. The Ispahanis, big financial backers of the Muslim League, were the primary purchasing agent buying up rice under the 'denial' policy. 

in an attempt to impede the anticipated arrival of the Japanese army in Assam and Bengal. Boats and vehicles were confiscated or scuttled and huge amounts of rice disposed of.

They were bought and paid for. Were they diverted to the black market so as to make a big profit for the League's backers? Yes.  

Bengali villages were more isolated than ever when famine set in the following year.

Their Bengali rulers were making a lot of money out of the famine which, to be fair, resulted from exogenous supply shocks.  

By 1945, in an attempt to feed their families, women in Noakhali were forced to ‘sell themselves ... in hordes’ to the troops moving down to Chittagong and the Burma front, according to a local communist leader.

Communists noticed that Viceroy was sucking off billions of starving Indians so as to cruelly deprive them of their precious bodily essence.  

The famine sharpened the peasantry’s anger at landowners,

unless they were Muslim 

and by August 1946 the mutation from class struggle to communal paranoia was complete.

There was no 'class struggle'. The Left was wiped out in the 1946 election. Religion mattered. Class did not.  

Pamphlets called for ‘a revenge of Calcutta’, and for Muslims in Noakhali to save themselves from a similar fate. One pamphlet, circulated by a subdivisional office of the Muslim League, warned of the ‘secret and evil plan’ of the ‘fascist, bourgeois caste-Hindu Congress in alliance with the bourgeois imperialist British’. It went on: ‘Not just in India, all Muslims all over the world are now living in imminent danger.’ On 10 October, Gulam Sarwar

who had been offered a Congress seat 

gave an incendiary speech in the district’s main bazaar. Sarwar, until recently a leader of the peasants’ party, had lost his seat in the election earlier that year to the League and gone over to its cause. His militia blocked the roads and docks, cut telegraph lines and stopped trains from entering the district, as the purge of Hindu households began.

Did Gandhi's arrival help anybody? No. He was useless. Still, the Viceroy could pretend he was using his super-powers to prevent bloodshed.  

‘The situation in Bengal is so desperate,’ Horace Alexander, a Quaker,

 a useless tosser.  

wrote to Gandhi in late October, ‘it can only be cured by a heroic remedy.’

It could be cured by the Army supervising an exchange of populations. But Indian politicians couldn't be arsed to supervise this.  

Gandhi was still occupied with the independence negotiations in Delhi. He was old and unwell, but he foresaw that Noakhali would serve as a final trial of his beliefs and the last chance to defeat the logic of Partition.

He failed completely. Similarly, the Maharishi's yogic levitation didn't cause the world to become peaceful.  

With a company of disciples – and a party of Sikh army veterans – he left for Calcutta. On 6 November, a boat was arranged to take him to Noakhali. The countryside was described in the gazetteer as ‘a vast rice plain ... where rich groves of areca nut and coconut palms rising out from the dense undergrowth of Mandar [coral] trees ... make every village look like a forest’ – but now it was strewn with looted property and grisly evidence of violence. In one place, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee writes, an anxious dog attracted Gandhi’s attention. It led the group to a spot in the bushes where they found the remains of its human family. On another occasion, a traumatised woman approached Gandhi at a prayer meeting to present him with her husband’s thigh bone. Women in Hindu neighbourhoods told of being abducted, raped and sent home at daylight, just to be taken away again at sundown.

Gandhi was as happy as a pig in shit. Nothing got his juices flowing so much as the spectable of utter abjectness.  

In 1930, when Gandhi embarked on his Salt March to Dandi

he was under the impression that poor people were paying ten percent, rather than less than one percent, of their income on Salt. Still, the real reason he took up the issue was because Motilal & CR Das had tried to make it an issue some five or six years previously. Could Gandhi succeed where they failed? No. It was Liaquat, a Muslim Leaguer, who abolished it. But, under Nehru, it was brought back. Why? The price of salt actually went up. India still has a Salt Service.  

(an act of civil disobedience aimed at ending the colonial monopoly on the production and sale of salt),

Princely states could break it by making salt from seawater- as Gandhi did- but it was uneconomic to do so.  

a similar procession set out to collect salt on the beach at Noakhali. At that time, nobody had yet heard the word ‘Pakistan’. It was the high-water mark of satyagraha, or ‘truth force’, the term Gandhi coined for his practice of non-violent resistance.

It was useless. Still, the fact is, nobody was prepared, as yet, to tackle the real problem- viz. the land question.  

It was the high point, more generally, of Gandhi’s charismatic sway over the national movement and of Hindu-Muslim amity within it.

No. Hindu-Muslim amity had vanished at least six years ago. In June 1930, big communal riots broke out in Vellore. However, it was the big Kanpur communal riot in 1931 (occassioned by the Congress hartal re. Bhagat Singh's execution) which was the final nail in the coffin.

But Noakhali was now a symbol of the undoing of all three. V.S. Naipaul, reviewing Gandhi’s autobiography in 1976, invented a poignant image: ‘Sad last pilgrimage: embittered people scatter broken glass on the roads he is to walk. Seventeen years before, on the Salt March, at the other end of India, the poor had sometimes strewn his path with cool green leaves.’

But, a dozen years previously, Gujaratis had chased Gandhi away when he tried to recruit soldiers for the King.  

In fact, huge crowds turned out at every stop to hail Gandhi. His party met relief workers and refugees, who were crowded into school buildings, warehouses and any structure promising safety. Muslim Leaguers visited him to pledge peace. They blamed the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha for spreading panic through rumour and exaggeration, and asked sarcastically if Gandhi would go to Bihar, where the counter-riot against Muslims was underway. ‘I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity,’ Gandhi wrote. ‘I am unable to discover the truth.’ In Noakhali, even ‘truth and ahimsa ... seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’

Sadly, they had always failed to have attributes nutters ascribe to them.  

To Gandhi, Bhattacharjee writes, satyagraha was a ‘science in the making’,

it was a magical belief in the potency of stored semen. Did you know that if you have sex, you lose the ability to have sex and thus become no better than an eunuch? Thus, to maintain virility, you must never have sex.  

subject to experiment and revision. Having failed to validate it at the level of the nation or district, he attempted the smallest scale of praxis: go to a village, stay there. On 20 November he instructed his followers, including the women, to disperse into the countryside. There they would offer themselves up in an exemplary performance of non-violence, becoming martyrs if need be.

Oddly, Bertrand Russell had offered similar advise to the Brits.  "If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister. Such behaviour would completely baffle them'. He did not add that Winston Churchill should part the butt cheeks of the King Emperor just in case Herr Hitler wanted to sodomize his Brittanic majesty. Oddly, Wittgenstein did not criticize Russell for this omission. 

He went to Srirampur, a village from which all but one of the Hindu families had fled. Here, Gandhi hoped, he could be like a gardener, tending to his patch in order to learn ‘the exact conditions under which the plant will thrive’. With him went only an interpreter, the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, and a stenographer, R.P. Parasuram.

It was important that stupid Gandhians understand that Gandhian methods had failed completely. 

On his first evening there, the Hindu’s correspondent found him ‘in his new abode ... sitting calmly in a half-burned house amid ruins’. Of course, Gandhi in 1946 was never alone; visitors were numerous, journalists hovered. He held interfaith prayer sessions and sat with both Hindu and Muslim households. He kept up his daily quota of spinning cloth, sometimes getting back at 11 p.m. to sit at the charkha for an hour before he slept. He woke every day at three. He stayed in Srirampur for 43 nights, which, as his biographer Ramachandra Guha notes, was the longest he spent anywhere apart from his ashrams – or in prison – in more than thirty years of public life.

The good news was that he wasn't in Delhi making mischief. Nehru realised that the only way to deal with Gandhian nutters was to send them off to the villages where they could pretend to have achieved great things- e.g. bhoodan (which culminated in the whole state of Bihar being given away without any land actually changing hands.  

Still, he knew he was failing. ‘In spite of all my efforts exodus continues and very few persons have returned,’ he confessed on 3 December. ‘Why does the spell not work?’ he wrote to a friend. ‘May it not be because I have temporised in the question of brahmacharya?’ Manu’s arrival, on 19 December, gave him hope – and brought a strange turn to the Noakhali experiment, one that still confounds his believers and delights his critics. Forty years earlier, in South Africa, he had taken a vow of sexual abstinence. Now he felt it urgent to test his discipline, and his disciple. He asked Manu (who had taken similar vows) to share his bed at night, possibly unclothed. Among his party and his colleagues elsewhere there was muffled uproar. Parasuram – ‘the whole thing is considered wrong by the world’ – left in protest.

He started this practice after his wife died in 1944.  

Gandhi, making little effort at secrecy, engaged in earnest correspondence on the question. Vallabhbhai Patel growled about the political risk, the danger of their opponents finding out. Vinoba Bhave observed that, to a true brahmachari, lying with a woman would be no different from lying with a man. Nehru pressed Gandhi to return to Delhi, where his advice and authority were needed. India was on the brink of freedom but no closer to agreement on what that would mean. In his replies, Gandhi was as gently obstinate about continuing his nightly experiment as he was about staying in Noakhali. Manu, to judge by her diary, was distressed only by the intrusive fuss. But her diary wasn’t private: her great-uncle discussed every entry with her. She describes his attentions as tender, maternal care. On 21 December, when he first asked whether she was willing to share a bed with him, she replied: ‘Why did you even ask? I have made you my mother and a child sleeping by her mother’s side sleeps naturally.’ Gandhi, typically forthright, replied: ‘I am like a mother to you. But I am a man, and you are a woman. You are young.’ He likened their trial to a yagna, a ritual fire sacrifice.

So- the nutter was coo-coo for cocopops. My theory is that getting hit on the head in South Africa had left him with a screw loose.  

Manu’s mother had died when she was young, and she was raised by Gandhi and his wife at their ashram. After the Quit India uprising of 1942, Gandhi was imprisoned for the remainder of the war in the comfort of the Aga Khan’s mansion in Poona. Both Manu and Kasturba went there with him, and Manu remained after Kasturba died. In Noakhali, the maternal metaphor persisted, though in a euphoric register that hardly calls to mind a more usual mother-daughter relationship. When Gandhi warned Manu not to carry a heavy bucket of water, she wrote: ‘What male shows motherly care and love as he does? ... Oh, joy! I am actually having that experience! It is I who am that beloved child of Mother Bapu!’ As ‘Mother Bapu’ – literally ‘Mother Father’, as Guha points out – Gandhi embodied a chimeric ideal of authority and care, in opposition to the sexual violence, revenge and honour-killing that was taking place across India.

To be fair, there was an old belief that 'sperm retention' gave one super-powers. But sticking pins in wax dolls works just as well.  

Bhattacharjee’s book, which describes Gandhi’s final months, interpolates with a free hand snatches of literature and moral philosophy. He relates Gandhi’s ‘division of labour ... between the satyagrahi (by day) and the brahmachari (at night)’ to Foucault’s view of the chaste struggle of the Christian ascetic Cassian, ‘to stay awake night and day – at night for the day, and in the day thinking of the night to come’.

Foucault was a fool. Celibacy for priests had become mandatory in 304 AD (Council of Elvira). Cassian was born 60 yers later.  India had celibate monastic orders a thousand years previously. 

In Noakhali, Gandhi’s hope was for the pure, sublimated powers of the brahmachari to effect a worldly victory for ahimsa.

There were plenty of actual monks milling around the place. Why not ask one of them to use his 'siddhas' (supernatural powers)? The answer is that neither Congress nor the League wanted power to pass to the priests.  

‘The common element,’ Bhattacharjee writes, ‘was intensification: if violence provokes, meet it with a disarmed body. If sexuality distracts, expose yourself to a bare body. Truth is not metaphysics. It had to be confronted daily in the body.’

Bhattacharjee is totes batty.  Indians knew how to stop communal violence. This had to do with preventive detention or 'externment' of known touble-makers & one or two lathi charges or police firing. What was important was to give caravans a military export & do 'bundobust' for food & water along the route. 

Many have accused Gandhi of doing too much of that.

He was a useless tosser which is why he was useful to the useless tossers who wanted to move into the big bungalows of the British.  

Perry Anderson observed that Gandhi’s metaphysics treated the person and the world as fungible. He noted the dual connotations of swaraj, or ‘self-rule’, which was ‘far from simply political. It was mastery of the passions and of the senses in the ascent of the soul’ – something Gandhi demanded of his followers as much as of himself.

The truth is, Indians objected to the slogan 'no taxation without representation'. They wanted 'no taxation' & plenty of paid representation. Gandhi said 'you don't need schools or hospitals or sewers and other such Satanic Western shite. That also means you won't have to pay taxes.' My point is that Gandhianism is cheap. True, it is also utterly useless but cheap is cheap.  

Naipaul said of Gandhi’s younger years in England that ‘the inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete.’

Naipaul was wrong. It wasn't till he got hit on the head that he became a crackpot.. 

Even at the end of his life, the pattern held. But when Gandhi’s distress over the killings and abductions took him to Noakhali, and his febrile obsession with chastity returned, he did not falter in his march. Naipaul: ‘At this terrible moment his thoughts are of action, and he is magnificent.’

Naipaul had shit for brains. Gandhi was a manifest failure. Suppose he had succeeded in appealing to Bengali Muslims. Then, he would have regained 'obligatory passage point status'. Why didn't this happen? The answer is obvious. It was the land question. 

Gandhi left Srirampur on 2 January 1947, going ‘on foot, when possible and necessary, from village to village [to] induce the evacuees to return’.

Come back & get killed. Do it for me. I really really want to you die horribly.  

He walked barefoot and his party sang hymns as they marched; after sunrise, a crowd would swell around them. In due course, he would relent and go to Bihar,

where he took no action against Congress men who had been busy killing Muslims.  

then to Delhi –

where the Muslim population fell from 33 percent to 5 percent when Nehru became PM. Nehru put in a law to prevent refugees who had crossed the border in panic from returning to reclaim their property.  

opposing Partition to the last – before returning to Calcutta in August. He was there when the two states formalised independence, fasting in a half-ruined house to demand an end to the riots in the city.

There is no need to riot, it property owners are running away.  

They ended, and the peace held, in Noakhali too. Six months later Gandhi was killed, by an assassin who believed – as do others, legion in India today – that he emboldened Muslims, betrayed his homeland and consented carelessly to its partition.;

He was killed by a nutter who greatly helped Congress by ridding it of a nuisance. Interestingly, three people with the surname Gandhi have been killed with salutary effects. Autocracy gets tempered by assassination which is why Rahul is gun-shy. 

Becky Sawyer's arubekiyowa

That all Anatomy is a book whose page is torn by Becky Sawyer

So Judge Thatcher's Scripture need no nomikos lawyer

For, as when Monophysis was forced on Showa,

Karma, as Svadharma, is arubekiyōwa

Note- The Seven Characters: Myōe famously taught that humans should always keep seven phonetic sounds in their hearts: a-ru-be-ki-yo-u-wa.
Man'yōgana spelling: It was written using phonetic kanji as 阿留辺畿夜宇和 (arubekiyōwa).

Russell's introduction to the Tractatus

Russell, in his introduction to the Tractatus wrote-

Mr Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whether or not it prove to give the ultimate truth on the matters with which it deals, certainly deserves, by its breadth and scope and profundity, to be considered an important event in the philosophical world. Starting from the principles of Symbolism

there are no such principles.  Anything can symbolise anything for any purpose. 

and the relations which are necessary between words and things

there are no necessary relations whatsoever. 

in any language, it applies the result of this inquiry to various departments of traditional philosophy, showing in each case how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism

which don't exist 

and out of misuse of language.

The above is an example of the misuse of language. Just because you can give a name to a thing doesn't mean that 'principles' regarding it exist. Also, if a thing is a traditional solution to something else, then it must have had some utility for some set of people. Another set may say 'but this is useless for our purpose! Thus, what you guys are up to is 'misuse''. But, this is merely a case of one man's meat being another man's poison. 

The logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference are first dealt with.

Different people can have different logics for different purposes. If Logic logic 'exists in the world like zoology' maybe it has 'unicity'- i.e. a unique representation. But we can be sure it isn't whatever shite Russell & Witless were playing with.

Thence we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics, and finally the Mystical (das Mystiche).

This was written in 1922 by which time all Physical theories and principles were known to have been overturned or . Ethically, Russell- a pacifist who had been sent to jail during the Great War- & Witless, who volunteered & spent time in the front-line- were on opposite sides. But it was the Bolshevik Revolution which had really shaken up notions of right and wrong. 

 In order to understand Mr Wittgenstein's book, it is necessary to realize what is the problem with which he is concerned. In the part of his theory which deals with Symbolism he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language.

 i.e.- a hypothetical language where the structure of a sentence mirrors the exact logical structure of the fact or thought it expresses.  It has zero ambiguity, a strict one-to-one match between words and simple objects, and rules as precise as mathematics. 

Sadly, it would be fucking retarded, not perfect in any way. By contrast, a magically perfect language- in which saying 'Shazam!' gives you super powers- would be totes cool. 

There are various problems as regards language. First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology.

Neurology. The answer is different things happen to different people at different times. What gets reinforced is what is useful- i.e. has survival value.  

Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology.

No. It belongs to game theory. There are coordination & discoordination problems. Epistemology is merely a theory about knowledge. It isn't itself knowledge. Thus, if there were a perfect logical language, Epistemology would not be part of it. The wider problem of impredicativity would be explored by Godel, Church, Turing & Tarski. Russell & Witless never grasped this.  

Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood;

My farts convey the truth- which is that I have farted- without any problem at all.  

this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question.

Getting closer to the truth may involve learning some 'special science'. Sadly, what Witless was up to wasn't science. It was stupidity. 

Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?

Anyone can use anything to be a symbol of anything else. All that matters is whether the thing is useful.  

This last is a logical question,

It really isn't.  There can be a logic without the excluded middle- even if Russel thought it would be useless- and, it turns out, it can do pretty much anything any other logic can do. 

and is the one with which Mr Wittgenstein is concerned.

The poor chap had probably lost his marbles during the war. A brother of his killed himself when his troops stopped talking orders. Unlike England, which could reform itself, Hapsburg Austia was fucked.  

He is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism,

as I am concerned with the conditions for accurate farting. If I could just get the composition of intestinal gasses right, I could transform the universe into one made entirely out of cheese-cake.  

i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence means something quite definite.

i.e. it turns into a fart of some type.  

In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

It can be made as precise as we like in a protocol bound manner for some useful purpose. That is how the law works.  

Thus, logic has two problems to deal with in regard to Symbolism: (1) the conditions for sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols;

Anyone is welcome to set such conditions for themselves. Thus, when my ex-wife said to me 'you have a tiny dick. Also, you smell bad. I am fucking the milk-man', I said 'how adorable you are when you babble nonsense!'  

(2) the conditions for uniqueness of meaning or reference in symbols or combinations of symbols.

Which could be fulfilled if there is 'modal collapse'- i.e. there is only one possible world- in which case Godel's proof of God would be valid. But so would my proof that the Big Bang occurred because of a tachyonic fart I emitted in 1984 after drinking ten pints and eating a vindaloo.  

A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a defunite and unique meaning.

Such a language could consist entirely of farts. That's not a good thing. The lesson of the 'monkey's paw' is 'don't wish for stuff which will turn out to be a fucking night-mare- e.g. wishing that your cat comes back to life & it does but it is a zombie cat which want to feed on human brains. 

Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect languagenot that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.

This is clearly false. Meaning is about reception which is about signal extraction. It is hermeneutic, not logico-deductive.  

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts.

In which case, what Russell & Witless were doing was no business of concern to language- or, for that matter, farting.  

Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known.

Fuck off! There is such a thing as sarcasm.  

In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.

What is the structure of the fact that I just farted?  

This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein's theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact

there is no such thing. Facts may have something in common and sentences may have something in common but there is nothing that facts and sentences have to have in common. A particilar  'intension' (like 'facts' meaning alethic propositions) may be subsumed by a broader intension ('facts' and 'value judgments' are subsumed under the broader 'intension' of 'propositions' ) but that intension may be trivial. What is common between a sentence and a fact is what is also common between them and the plaintive memory of a fart. 

cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language. 

with equal truth, we may contend that language says nothing else save on those occassions when it so plaintive a memory of a fart that it fails to do so.  

It can, in his phraseology, only be shown,

it can be displayed with no words spoken. But if the thing is being shown there is some type of language involved- perhaps that of gesture or, more commonly, the lifting of the skirt and the act of pointing to the vulva. As Tagore said 'I am a beggar maid who lifts her skirt to cover her head'.  Sadly, having a great big beard is a disadvantage in that line of business. 

not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure.

 Even the worst grammar-Nazi accepts that a sentence can have no fucking structure and yet be meaningful.  

The first requisite of an ideal language would be that

it had magical powers over things. Harry Potter & his friends keep using Latin phrases to cast spells. That's totes cool. If you don't know Latin, then playing with your wand is just masturbation. It isn't magic at all.  

there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples.

We are welcome to do this for any useful purpose of our own. Pharmacists have different names for the many different types of pills they dispence. But this is true of most inventories held by different types of enterprise. 

The problem is that 'simples' are discovered not to be simple as time goes by and knowledge increases. The 'extension' corresponding to the 'intension changes. It may be that the 17 elementary particles known to the Standard Model are 'simples'. But we can't be sure there isn't something even more simple or elementary. Physics would not have been able to make progress if it had been confined to Witless's 'perfect' language'.  

A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols.

Bertrand is derived from the Old German 'glorious raven'.  Names can be simple or complicated.  

In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol.

Nothing known at the time  actually was simple. Even now, we can't be sure elementary particles are truly elementary. 

...Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless.

One man's meat is another's poison. I don't understand a word of Chinese. This does not mean what Chinese people say to each other in their own language is senseless. Philosophical propositions are stupid, paranoid & false. They aren't senseless even if that is the intention. 'Green ideas sleep furiously' means something to me even if it was meant to mean nothing at all. 

We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness.

'Why are you such a cunt?' is not senseless even if it isn't a question I can answer.  

Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

Language may have grammar and logic may be expressible in it, but no natural logic has a 'logic' anymore than it has a cousin who works as an Actuary in Vancouver. 

... He compares linguistic expression to projection in geometry.

What we say may, in some sense, express our state of mind to some other person who knows us well. Thus, though Professor Russell gave exactly the same lecture today as he did this time last year, his TA could detect the sorrow & bitterness he was experiencing because of the untimely death of his goldfish.  

A geometrical figure may be projected in many ways:

by people 

each of these ways corresponds to a different language,

nope. They are all embedded in the same language- viz. that of diagrammatic geometry.  

but the projective properties of the original figure remain unchanged whichever of these ways may be adopted.

It depends on whether the 'original figure' can itself do projective geometry. When I look in the mirror, that is what I am doing. I can change 'invariants'- e.g. remove  a ketchup stain on my tie- in the projection by making changes on myself. 

These projective properties

which exist only in the minds of mathematicians. High dimensional projective properties can give rise to positive geometries such that the physical properties of particles (like locality and unitarity) emerge naturally from purely geometric boundary properties.

correspond to that which in his theory the proposition and the fact must have in common,

which is nothing 

if the proposition is to assert the fact.

The guy making the proposition is doing the asserting. Indeed, 'this is a proposition' is an assertion. 

In certain elementary ways this is, of course, obvious.

It is obviously false because nothing we know is 'elementary'.  

It is impossible, for example, to make a statement about two men (assuming for the moment that the men may be treated as simples), without employing two names,

One could say 'fat Vivek' as opposed to 'morbidly obese flatulent Vivek' which is what happens when us Viveks get together at the local branch of the Vivek Iyer society.  

and if you are going to assert a relation between the two men it will be necessary that the sentence in which you make the assertion shall establish a relation between the two names.

Russell and Alfred North Whitehead' treated relations as fundamental, primitive notions. Norbert Wiener realized that if you could define an ordered pair using only standard, unordered sets, then any binary relation could simply be defined as a set of these ordered pairs. Kuratowski simplified Weiner's notation in 1921. Weiner was Russell's student but Russel wasn't impressed.  Russell continued to view relations as real, intensional properties existing in the world (e.g., "being to the left of"). He viewed Wiener’s definition as a clever mathematical trick rather than a true philosophical analysis of what a relation actually is. 

... Mr Wittgenstein begins his theory of Symbolism with the statement (2.1): We make to ourselves pictures of facts.

We may do. Some people are good at visualisation. Others aren't.  

A picture, he says, is a model of the reality, and to the objects in the reality correspond the elements of the picture: the picture itself is a fact.

A picture is a picture. That's a fact. We may say 'this photograph of x stabbing y establishes the fact that x killed y'. But we may be wrong. X wasn't stabbing Y. He was trying to perform a tracheotomy. Sady, Y choked to death. It was too late for X to save Y's life. This fact has been established by the medical examiner. 

The fact that things have a certain relation to each other is represented by the fact that in the picture its elements have a certain relation to one another.

This 'relation' is an 'ordered pair'. It isn't some self-subsistent feature of reality. Weiner's 1914 result showed relations were set-theoretic. In other words, only the extension mattered. This made for ontological economy. You didn't have all sorts of intensions filling up reality. This got rid of the third man problem (Bradley's regress).  The idealists were saying relations were logically impossible because if there is a relation then there must be another relation to relate it and another relation to relate the relating and so on ad infinitum. Russell & Whitehead didn't solve the problem but treated relations as primitives. But this would naturally give rise to a notion that strict limits on language should exist so that 'simples' stayed 'simples'. But this is like the Pythagoreans saying irrational numbers (literally 'surds') should not be spoken off!  

Frege's approach (concepts are unsaturated or not determinate) led Witless in this direction. 'The concept horse is not a concept' shows that it is a concept precisely because it is unsaturated. 

In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all.

That may have been true of the pictures in the Royal Academy in the year Russell was born. But, the first Impressionist exhibition was held a couple of years later. By the time Russell wrote this, there were Cubists & Fauvists & Surrealists & so forth.  

What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner rightly or falsely is its form of representation (2.161, 2.17).

That's what it can't have save in the trivial sense that a picture is really a picture & reality is really reality, not a fucking picture at all. 

We speak of a logical picture of a reality when we wish to imply only so much resemblance as is essential to its being a picture in any sense, that is to say, when we wish to imply no more than identity of logical form.

Russell's 'relation similarity' differs from our category theoetical isomorphism in that for the former there is a static colletion of elements whereas for the latter 'up to isomorphism' means two systems are different names for the same thing  

The logical picture of a fact, he says, is a Gedanke.

Is that a fact? What is the logical picture of the logical picture that is a fact? Is it the Gedanke which farts itself?  

Why did Russell give this shite the time of day? My theory is that Witless was the child G.E Moore & Russell had together. At one time, it seemed precocious- but there were signs all was not well with the little butt baby. Then it became a soldier & went round the twist in the trenches. Let's be nice to it, lest it blows its brains out. 

Russel could see that Witless's notion of a number as the exponent of an operation meant his Logic couldn't handle Peano Arithmetic. Russel says Witless's system could be extended to transfinite numbers but this requires have to have quantification over infinite domains to get Peano induction. Thus Witless was a fucking retard with respect to Long Division which everybody else had mastered by about the age of 7. 

More interesting than such questions of comparative detail is Mr Wittgenstein's attitude towards the mystical. His attitude upon this grows naturally out of his doctrine in pure logic, according to which the logical proposition is a picture (true or false) of the fact, and has in common with the fact a certain structure.

A fact differes from a deduction in that verification is not ratiocinative. We may be able to visualise certain facts but not others. Verification is a separate matter. 

It is this common structure which makes it capable of being a picture of the fact,

even if is actually a fart 

but the structure cannot itself be put into words,

only in the sense that only words can be put into words.  

since it is a structure of words, as well as of the facts to which they refer.

This structure exists only in the mind that posits it. But a mind could equally posit all things as farts.  

Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language,

because complex branching algorithms make Witless's tiny little brain hurt.  

and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. This inexpressible contains, according to Mr Wittgenstein, the whole of logic and philosophy.

Not to mention long division.  

The right method of teaching philosophy, he says, would be to confine oneself to propositions of the sciences, stated with all possible clearness and exactness, leaving philosophical assertions to the learner, and proving to him, whenever he made them, that they are meaningless.

Also, if a kid starts doing long division, teechur should beat the shit out of him.  Had Ludwig remained an elementary school teacher in rural Austria, sooner or later, the villagers would have kicked his head in. The fucker lied on oath so as to avoid going to jail for his brutal beatings of village kids. 

It is true that the fate of Socrates might befall a man who attempted this method of teaching, but we are not to be deterred by that fear, if it is the only right method

Witless was rich and well connected. Also he had no qualms about lying under oath. Still, if he had continued to teach kids, sooner or later their mothers would have smashed his head in. Cambridge had a duty to take this moronic sadist off the streets. The good thing about teaching muscular Cambridge blues is that. if you punch them with full force, they think you are trying to tickle them. Say what you like about the British Public School, it breeds thickos with proportionately thicker hides.  

. It is not this that causes some hesitation in accepting Mr Wittgenstein's position, in spite of the very powerful arguments which he brings to its support. What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the sceptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages, or by some other exit.

The saving grace of the aristocratic British thicko is that he had a sense of humour. Witless was like one of those Hindu Swamys who scolds you for being materialistic while demanding more and more money so as to be able to buy himself a fleet of Rolls Royce cars.  

The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region.

Rather than the expressible region of the Law which says 'don't beat kids you worthless retard!'  

Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions. His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said.

The reverse is the case. What can be shown can always be said by a sufficiently skilled language user. G.E Moore, the Classicist, would call this 'ekphrasis'. Back in those days, there was no Pornhub, so people had to do with descriptions which, however, couldn't always be shown because of the anatomical limitations of the human body & the fact that octopuses really aren't that kinky. 

Thus, what can be shown is a small proper sub-set of what can be said. Pretending otherwise is the mark of either a moron or a charlatan.  

It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort.

Not being allowed to do long division would impoverish our lives.  

There is one purely logical problem in regard to which these difficulties are peculiarly acute. I mean the problem of generality. In the theory of generality it is necessary to consider all propositions of the form fx where fx is a given propositional function. This belongs to the part of logic which can be expressed, according to Mr Wittgenstein's system.

Brouwer, Heytig, Weyl etc. were showing that constructive math- a logic without the excluded middle- could do what any other math could do. Godel-Gentzen (or Kolmogorov) negative translation is the key.  

But the totality of possible values of x which might seem to be involved in the totality of propositions of the form fx is not admitted by Mr Wittgenstein among the things that can be spoken of, for this is no other than the totality of things in the world, and thus involves the attempt to conceive the world as a whole; 'the feeling of the world as a bounded whole is the mystical'

Einstein was showing the universe is finite but unbounded. This wasn't mystical. It was mathematical.  

hence the totality of the values of x is mystical (6.45).

The word 'mysical' comes from the Greek 'mystikos'  meaning "secret" or "concealed". But secrets can be revealed. I suppose, one could punish those who reveal secrets- like how to do long division- but the Mums of kids you punish may beat you to death. 

This is expressly argued when Mr Wittgenstein denies that we can make propositions as to how many things there are in the world, as for example, that there are more than three.

Was Russell writing this with tongue in cheek?  

These difficulties suggest to my mind some such possibility as this: that every language has, as Mr Wittgenstein says, a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit.

Tarski proposed the notion of 'meta-language' in 1931.  

Mr Wittgenstein would of course reply that his whole theory is applicable unchanged to the totality of such languages. The only retort would be to deny that there is any such totality. The totalities concerning which Mr Wittgenstein holds that it is impossible to speak logically are nevertheless thought by him to exist, and are the subject-matter of his mysticism.

Why be mystical when it is more useful to be mathematical? God's economy (management of the world) may be mysterious, but our economics gains by being mathematical. Von Neumann's game theory turned out to be very useful. Witless's 'language-games' weren't useful at all. 

The later Witless thought there were 'hinge propositions' - i.e. foundational, ungrounded background beliefs that stand fast for us and make all empirical inquiry, doubting, and rational justification possible. 

Sadly, the fact that there is a door doesn't mean we have to believe it has hinges. It may be a sliding door or a big rock the cyclops rolls to block the entrance to his cave. 

The totality resulting from our hierarchy would be not merely logically inexpressible,

if logic has unicity. It doesn't.  

but a fiction, a mere delusion, and in this way the supposed sphere of the mystical would be abolished.

No mystery exists if you dogmatically assert 'the Butler did it'.  

Such an hypothesis is very difficult, and I can see objections to it which at the moment I do not know how to answer.

There were smart people who were building on Russell & Whitehead's work who would provide the answers in the Thirties. Witless wasn't one of them.  

Yet I do not see how any easier hypothesis can escape from Mr Wittgenstein's conclusions. Even if this very difficult hypothesis should prove tenable, it would leave untouched a very large part of Mr Wittgenstein's theory, though possibly not the part upon which he himself would wish to lay most stress. As one with a long experience of the dficulties of logic and of the deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on which it is wrong.

That point was that Logic doesn't have unicity. There are more logics than there are mathematicians though it is also true that, as Doestoevsky paraphrased Pascal, 'there are more monks than reason'.  

But to have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance.

Not if it can't handle long division.  

This merit, in my opinion, belongs to Mr Wittgenstein's book, and makes it one which no serious philosopher can afford to neglect.

We can't neglect Frank Ramsey who did a lot of the translating for the Tractatus. But we must shit on retards almost as stupid as ourselves.