Scruton's stupidity

Sir Roger Scruton taught worthless shit. Thus, he became incapable of writing a single sentence which wasn't egregiously false, foolish or both false & foolish. 

His short book 'England & the need for Nations' begins thus 

Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties

 National loyalties can create Nation States. Some Nation States may become Democracies. But so may multi-ethnic Empires or Commonwealths. The Austrian half of Austro-Hungary had universal suffrage by 1907 even though it contained Czechs, Slovaks, Germans etc. The United Kingdom is a Democracy. Yet the Scots & the Welsh see themselves as separate Nations. Why did Scruton not know this?  

—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition,

they could be loyal to the same Emperor or President.  

by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole.

There may be separatist elements within the electorate. Some MPs may refuse to take their seats in the Legislature if an oath of loyalty is required of them. 

Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root.

It has failed to take root in plenty of places where the 'experience of nationality' was as strong as fuck. Is the converse also true? Yes. Look at India. It is way less nationalistic than China but, perhaps for that very reason, way more democratic.  

For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

Fuck off! Fascits & Nazis may have very fierce 'national loyalty' but they may also want to get rid of every vestige of not just representative government but also the rule of law.  

Yet everywhere the idea of the nation is under attack

No. The idea of the nation is defended. What is being promoted is 'pooling of sovereignty'. If this means the nation is more likely to survive and thrive, then we would say that the idea of the nation is being safeguarded. True, a crazy shithead may say that all treaty based law is very evil and those fucking furriners are in bed with the secret elite (Homosexual, Jewish, Freemasons many of whom are directly descended from shape shifting lizards from Planet X) which runs everything. Also, did you know the Post Office is actually just a cover for a paedophile ring? Our kids are being sodomized by furriners so as to undermine their sense of patriotic belonging.  

—either despised as an atavistic form of social unity, or even condemned as a cause of war and conflict, to be broken down and replaced by more enlightened and more universal forms of jurisdiction.

It is possible that some Pofessor as stupid and useless as Scruton said something of the sort. But that is because teaching shite turns your brain to shit.  

But what, exactly, is supposed to replace the nation and the nation state?

Prior to 2007, when it was plausible that European per capita income would converge to that of the US, some believed there could be a Federal European union with substantial transfers & full fiscal & monetary integration.

And how will the new form of political order enhance or conserve our democratic heritage?

Well enough. The EU forced the UK to set up a proper Supreme Court. Nobody currently seems keen to go back to the old system.  

Few people seem prepared to give an answer, and the answers that are offered are quickly hidden in verbiage, typified by the EU’s adoption of the ecclesiastical doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’, in order to remove powers from member states under the pretence of granting them.

Post-Brexit Britain is still going down this road.  

Recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind of transnational political order

e.g. NATO 

have ended up either as totalitarian dictatorships like the former Soviet Union,

Russia was autocratic under the Tzars & became more so under the Commies.  

or as unaccountable bureaucracies, like the European Union today.

The suggestio falsi here is that the EU is like the USSR. Why not simply say 'millions of British patriots have been killed in Brussell's Gulags.' 

Although many of the nation states of the modern world are the surviving fragments of empires, few people wish to propose the restoration of imperial rule as the way forward for mankind.

Maybe Scruton wrote this before ISIS became a thing. Plenty of people would like a Global Caliphate where Kaffirs get short shrift.  

Why then and for what purpose should we renounce the form of sovereignty that is familiar to us, and on which so much of our political heritage depends?

Maybe, if there had been more pooled sovereignty, Europe would have rebounded froom the Crash as rapidly as the US. The US has had 45 percent growth in real per capita Income since 2008. The UK has had 7 percent. France has had 10 percent. Germany has had 13 percent. China has had 185 percent. This means the EU can be bullied by both Trump & Xi. As for the UK, even Pakistan can shit on us.  

We in Europe stand at a turning point in our history.

No. Europe trundled a little further down the road of irrelevance.  

Our parliaments and legal systems still have territorial sovereignty.

But, the EU will soon nationalize our rectums and rent them out to shape-shifting lizards from Uranus.  

They still correspond to historical patterns of settlement that have enabled the French,

Alsatians? Corsicans? 

the Germans,

they lost a lot of territory 

the Spaniards,

Catalans? 

the British 

44 percent of Scots want Independence.  

and the Italians

Northern idealogues

 to say ‘we’ and to know whom they mean by it.

This is also true of people with tiny dicks even if we don't know who else is 'one of us'. 

The opportunity remains to recuperate the legislative powers and the executive procedures that formed the nation states of Europe.

The opportunity always exists to fuck up the economy by doing stupid shit.  Economists estimate that UK GDP per capita is approximately 6% to 8% lower than it would have been if the UK had remained in the EU.  Personal wealth across the UK (including housing, savings, and pensions) has dropped by roughly 23% in real terms since 2020, suffering one of the sharpest declines among advanced economies. Worse yet, White Europeans have been replaced by non-European darkies- Non-EU (primarily non-White) employment in the UK more than doubled by 2024, reaching about 225% of its 2016 level.

At the same time, the process has been set in motion that would

cause dogs to marry cats 

expropriate the remaining sovereignty of our parliaments and courts, that would annihilate the boundaries between our jurisdictions, that would dissolve the nationalities of Europe in a historically meaningless collectivity, united neither by language, nor by religion, nor by customs, nor by inherited sovereignty and law.

 also kittens would say 'bow wow' while puppy dogs would say 'miaow'. 

We have to choose whether to go forward to that new condition,

i.e. some fantastic nonsense this nutter pulled out of his arse 

or back to the tried and familiar sovereignty of the territorial nation state.

Which would mean a fall in real income & wealth of the type the UK experienced. It may also mean less sovereignty as the country becomes a 'rule taker' & becomes subject to economic and diplomatic blackmail.  

At the same time our political élites speak and behave as though there were no such choice to be made—just as the communists did at the time of the Russian Revolution

There were two of them in the same year. Communists said there were more choices- e.g. a separate peace & immediate expropriation without compensation of the landlord class.  

They refer to an inevitable process, to irreversible changes,

which is the case with all entropic processes. Scruton himself inevitably and irreversibly changed into a corpse.  

and while at times prepared to distinguish a ‘fast’ from a ‘slow’ track into the future, are clear in their minds that these two tracks lead to a single destination—the destination of transnational government, under a common system of law, in which national loyalty will be no more significant than support for a local football team.

Since about 1940, it has been obvious that Wilsonian Nation-States would have to be part of a Super-power alliance. Even India had to sign up with the Soviets. 

Economists don't think there will be full fiscal convergence. Instead you will have different 'Tiebout models' offering different external economies.  

In this pamphlet I set out the case for the nation state,

which is like setting out the case for cats. They already exist. The advantages of having them around are obvious. Why gild the lily?  

recognising that what I have to say is neither comprehensive nor conclusive,

nor sensible 

and that many other kinds of sovereignty could be envisaged that would answer to the needs of modern societies.

Some nation-states are Republics and thus have one type of sovereignty. Others are monarchies and have a different sort of sovereignty.  

My case is not that the nation state is the only answer to the problems of modern government, but that it is the only answer that has proved itself.

Why isn't there a Kurdish nation-state? The answer is that some 'nations' (i.e. a bunch of guys speaking the same language or who claim a common descent from dudes who spoke the same language) have kicked ass and established themselves on an economically viable swathe of territory. They have absorbed 'broken people' of indigenous tribes or ethnicities as well as immigrants from elsewhere. But one could say the same of various species of plants or animals.  

We may feel tempted to experiment with other forms of political order.

Scruton's pals were all like 'dude, lets kill King Charles & Sir Keir so as to try out a Lesbian gerontocracy'  

But experiments on this scale are dangerous,

they are impossible.  

since nobody knows how to predict or to reverse the results of them.

Sadly, that's how life works. You feel in your bones that turning 40 mightn't be a good thing. But you don't have a fucking choice, mate.  

The French, Russian and Nazi revolutions were bold experiments;

No. They were the result of the previous leadership doing stupid shit.  

but in each case they led to the collapse of legal order, to mass murder at home and to belligerence abroad.

The Glorious Revolution wasn't very glorious for Irish Catholics. The American Revolution was a fucking disaster for the indigenous people.  

The wise policy is to accept the arrangements, however imperfect, that have evolved through custom and inheritance,

The unwise policy is to tell King Charles to kiss your black ass.  

to improve them by small adjustments, but not to jeopardise them by large-scale alterations the consequences of which nobody can really envisage.

Which is why Brexit was a mistake.  

The case for this approach was unanswerably set before us by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution

How come the American Revolution worked out great but not the French one? The answer is that the French are fucking horrible. Chances are, if the Government you have is shitty, it is likely that its successsor will be shitty.   

and subsequent history has repeatedly confirmed his view of things.

No. It confirmed the view that a successful General may be able to turn himself into an Emperor- just as Burke predicted. 

The truth is that the Brits saw that some reform, at home, was required. British support for the 'Holy Alliance' didn't last very long. The British Great Reform Bill was passed 22 months after the fall of the Bourbons in France. 

The lesson that we should draw, therefore, is that

people who teach Philosophy have shit for brains?  

since the nation state has proved to be a stable foundation of democratic government

as well as a stable foundation for Communism, Fascism, Theocracy, Imperialism  

and secular jurisdiction, we ought to improve it, to adjust it, even to dilute it, but not to throw it away.

Also, we should not throw away Gravity. We must learn to work with it otherwise we might float off into outer space along with our kittens which say 'bow wow' and our puppy dogs which say 'miaow'.  

Scruton published this shite in 2006. Should the UK have rethought joining the Euro and pushing for gradualist reforms within the EU? Was Scruton wrong to back Brexit? 

The initiators of the European experiment—both the self-declared prophets and the behind-the-doors conspirators

many of whom were shape-shifting lizards from Uranus.  

— shared a conviction that the nation state had caused the two world wars.

Macron says 'yes to patriotism, no to Nationalism'.  

A united states of Europe seemed to them to be the only recipe for lasting peace.

With hindisght, it was indeed essential to European collective defence because the US might decide that NATO wasn't worth the expense.  

This view is for two reasons entirely unpersuasive.

To a shithead- sure.  

First, it is purely negative:

No. It was purely positive. The question was whether Europe really could have large scale transfers from the richer to the poorer countries such that it could reflate after a Stock Market Crash and also finance a kick-ass European Army. The answer, sadly was- no. But, maybe Europe will get its act together belatedly in view of the clear and present danger posed by a vast Eurasian block under the leadership of a China which can do its own bilateral deal with the US.  

it rejects nation states for their belligerence, without giving any positive reason to believe that transnational states will be any better.

The problem was that if the EU expanded to its East, then it might come into conflict with Russia which in turn might be driven into the arms of China.  

Secondly, it identifies the normality of the nation state through its pathological versions.

Which was reasonable if your next door neighbour was Germany.  

As Chesterton has argued about patriotism generally, to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.

You can be for patriotism, like Macron, and against nationalism. Sadly, Le Pen may replace Macron quite soon.  

The nation state should not be understood in terms of the French nation at the Revolution or the German nation in its twentieth-century frenzy.

Can the UK be understood as a nation state or will Scotland go its own way?  

For those were nations gone mad,

The French were attacked. They fought back very successfully but then their Emperor decided he'd like his brothers and sisters to become Kings and Queens. As for the Germans, they genuinely believed that they needed to grab French gold & Eastern European land so as to avoid encirclement and eventual immeserization.  

in which the springs of civil peace had been poisoned

by the Emperor of Japan? What poisons the springs of peace is the possibility of a profitable war. What preserves it is Nuclear apocalypse which poisons the entire planet.  

and the social organism colonised by anger, resentment and fear.

also cats start marrying dogs.  

All Europe was threatened by the German nation, but only because the German nation was threatened by itself, having caught the nationalist fever.

No. Its General Staff believed they could enrich their country, and gain vast agricultural estates for themselves, by going to war sooner rather than later.  

Nationalism is part of the pathology of national loyalty, not its normal condition—a point to which I return below.

This is like Macron saying 'Patriotism is cool. Nationalism isn't.  

Who in Europe has felt comparably threatened by the Spanish,

Franco claimed Portugal 

Italian,

invaded Albania & Greece 

Norwegian,

Sami people 

Czech

Sudetens & Slovaks didn't like them 

or Polish

Poland took a bite out of Czechoslovakia.  

forms of national loyalty, and who would begrudge those people their right to a territory, a jurisdiction and a sovereignty of their own? The Poles, Czechs and Hungarians have elected to join the European Union:

for economic and geopolitical reasons 

not in order to throw away national sovereignty, but under the impression that this is the best way to regain it.

Nonsense! They just wanted to grow their economies and converge to the European average per capita real income level.  

They are wrong, I believe.

They were right.  

But they will be able to see this only later, when it is too late to change.

Twenty years have gone by. None of the new entrants wants to leave the Union. The Greeks threatened Grexit but only as a bargaining ploy.  

Left-liberal writers,

like ultra-conservatives  

in their reluctance to adopt the nation as a social aspiration or a political goal, sometimes distinguish nationalism from ‘patriotism’—an ancient virtue extolled by the Romans and by those like Machiavelli who first made the intellectual case for modern secular jurisdiction.

Prophet Muhammad said 'hubb al watan min al iman'. Love of the fatherland is part of religion. But Islamists, like Iqbal, also say that Nationalism is the shroud of Religion. The same thing could be said of Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox or Buddhist Emperors. 

Patriotism, they argue, is the loyalty of citizens, and the foundation of ‘republican’ government; nationalism is a shared hostility to the stranger, the intruder, the person who belongs ‘outside’.

One could equally say that patriotism is about xenophobia or loyalty to the clan, whereas nationalism is something broader and more inclusive. But why bother? If you aren't teaching worthless shit for a lving, you could say somethingg sensible instead. 

I feel some sympathy for that approach. Properly understood, however, the republican patriotism defended by Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Mill

not to mention Mummy & the Milkman 

is a form of national loyalty: not a pathological form like nationalism, but a natural love of country, countrymen and the culture that unites them.

Pathological love can lead you to inserting a District or a County up your arse. Kids, please don't try this at home. Let your love for your country remain decorous and wholly free of anal insertion.  

Patriots are attached to the people and the territory that are theirs by right;

Oikeiosis? Animals are territorial. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry dictating a 'bourgeois strategy'. 

and patriotism involves an attempt to transcribe that right into impartial government and a rule of law.

No. The two things are wholly unrelated.  

This underlying territorial right is implied in the very word—the patria being the ‘fatherland’, the place where you and I belong.

No. Slaves or serfs have a patria. That doesn't mean they have rights of any type. 

Territorial loyalty, I suggest, is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme

It may be a feature of forms of government based on cannibalism. It isn't a feature of any advanced economy though, no doubt, at some earlier period, territorial militias & 'Marcher Lords' may have had salience. 

Attempts to denounce the nation in the name of patriotism

can succeed if 'nationalism' causes you to be driven out of your natal territory. Conside the plight of the Muslim Leaguer from Uttar Pradesh. The two Nation theory meant that he had to emigrate to Pakistan.  

therefore contain no real argument against the kind of national sovereignty that I shall be advocating in this pamphlet.

Because it is of a pie-in-the-sky kind.  

I shall be defending what Mill called the ‘principle of cohesion among members of the same community or state’,

or any other situation where cohesion is displayed. But why defend it? Is it being sodomized by the principle of derision? What if it is totes gay & is enjoying the experience?

and which he distinguished from nationalism (or ‘nationality, in the vulgar sense of the term’), in the following luminous

not luminous. Boring and stupid.  

words: We need scarcely say that we do not mean nationality, in the vulgar sense of the term; a senseless antipathy to foreigners;

that's xenophobia- but it can apply to people who live on the other side of the river and who speak pretty much the same language you do.  

indifference to the general welfare of the human race,

as Blake says, only scoundrels talk of the 'general good' rather than focus on 'minute particulars'. 

or an unjust preference for the supposed interests of our own country;

nothing wrong in that at all. Mill had shit for brains.  

a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national,

I suppose this describes what Scruton was doing. England has a long tradition of boring shitheads writing nonsense. 

or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries. We mean a principle of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation. We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government, and are contained within the same natural or historical boundaries. We mean, that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigners with regard to another part; that they set a value on their connexion—feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together, that evil to any of their fellow-countrymen is evil to themselves, and do not desire selfishly to free themselves from their  share of any common inconvenience by severing the connexion.

Mill was aware that the Irish were a Nation and had always been very patriotic. But they had a decentralized system of 'Brehon law'. England was less national but more centralized and eventually prevailed. The question was whether the Irish should acquiesce in this arrangement. The Potato famine suggested that literally anything was better than British rule.  

The phrases that I would emphasise in that passage are these: ‘our own country’, ‘common interest’, ‘natural or historical boundaries’ and ‘[our] lot is cast together’.

Mill thought Ireland should stick with Britain albeit on the basis of thoroughgoing reform.  

Those phrases resonate with the historical loyalty that I shall be defending in this pamphlet.

Sadly, such loyalty has to give way with what can keep you alive. Sometimes it is better to be part of an Empire than to live in a shitty nation state.  

To put the matter briefly: the case against the nation state has not been properly made,

I just did. It may be that there has to bee a world government to properly deal with 'externalities'.  The opposite may be more likely. A world government is bound to do catastrophically stupid shit because there is no competitive pressure or possibility of 'Exit'. 

and the case for the transnational alternative has not been made at all.

sure it has. A World Governmnt would suppress negative externalities and 'nuisance goods'- like 'loose nukes'  

I believe therefore that we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world, and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it.

No such decisions were made at that timee. 

Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe’s Faust ring true for us: Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it.

What Goethe's generation hadn't inherited was a united German nation. They didn't want to earn or own a shitty situation which left them at the mercy of France.  

We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the

ability to walk up-right?  

sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law.

not to mention the ability to make fire 

Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders. 

Scruton forgets that what Goethe's generation earned was 23 years of war. 

Would he have written anything so foolish if he hadn't wasted his life studying & teaching nonsense? Sure. Stupid policies should be justified by stupid rhetoric.  Scruton made a bit of money out of his stupidity. That is more than most of us can say.

How did Hitler gain absolute power?

Though Adolph Hitler served in the German Army during the Great War and though he entered German politics under the auspices of the German Army's political wing, he remained an Austrian citizen till April 1925 when he renounced his citizenship so as to avoid deportation after completing his prison sentence for his participation in the Munich putsch. 

Hitler became a naturalized German citizen only on February 25, 1932. This was done by his being appointed to a minor civil service role in the state of Brunswick (where his party had won the  election). This automatically conferred citizenship on him and allowed him to run for president. One year later, Hiter became Chancellor and then, after the death of President Hindenburg, he became Fuhrer.

What explains this dizzying ascent?

The answer is that at every step of the way, Hitler was pushed forward by the Army whose maximal program involved grabbing reparations from France while gaining agricultural land and other resources from territory to its East. The sad thing is that the German population came to believe this was their only path to salvation. 

 Suppose Ludendorrf hadn't been utterly mad (he was just as anti-Catholic as he was anti-Jewish) and suppose he hadn't broken with Hindenburg, then he could have been Hindenburg's Chancellor. As things were General Schliecher got that position but he alienated Hindenburg by seeking to reduce aid to Junker landlords in the East. Moreover, General Blomberg hated him because Schleicher had sidelined him by sending him to East Prussia in 1929. 

In early June 1934, Hindeburg gave Hitler an ultimatum. Either he crushed the SA under Rohm (which was becoming a rival to the Army) or he himself would be stripped of the Chancellorship. The Army would rule directly. Bruning, a former Chancellor, was tipped off, and fled Germany on June 3 1934. One way or another, there was going to be a big blood-letting.

Hitler's 'night of the long knives' in late June was a great success. He didn't just personally arrest Rohm but ordered him killed. Rohm didn't see this coming. Hitler had brought him back to take over from Stenner, the previous rebel leader of the SA. But Stenner had been permitted to go into exile. More signinficantly, he had General Schleicher and his wife shot in their own home. Bredow, Schleicher's sidekick, too, was killed. This was the Führerprinzip in action. Here was the Caesar who would have no truck with either Democracy or party faction. Bloomberg was delighted and got the army to take an oath of obedience to Hitler on August 2- the day Hindenburg died. After that, Hitler assumed absolute power. He then proceeded to fulfil the Army's program better than they could do so themselves. He also got rid of Blomberg on the grounds that the fellow had married a prostitute. By the time some senior officers tried to move against Hitler, it was too late. The Allies were determined to occupy Germany & annihilate its army. A 'stab in the front' could not avert this outcome. The majority of Generals had no incentive to break their oath of loyalty to Hitler. 

Hilter gained absolute power because he delivered what the Army wanted and because the German people, misled by stupid economists, believed that only the Army could save them from starvation. Sadly, because the Army was as stupid as shit, the outcome was the utter annihilation of the German Army. The Commies were delighted because they got to rule East Germany. The West chafed under Allied occupation- Adenauer wanted to get nukes!- but then the economy grew at a miraculous rate. The Germans finally understood that List & Karl Ballod & Keynes etc. were wrong. They wouldn't starve if they failed to acquire land to their East. Rather thay would become more and more prosperous selling manufactured goods and importing as much food and raw materials as they wanted. They could have a 'hard' currency without having to get French gold (which is what had enabled them to go on to the Gold Standard in 1871). 

Suppose a General like Schleicher had succeeded Hindenburg. Would the subsequent trajectory of events been more favourable for the country? 

I doubt it. The fact is German generals quarelled with each other. Their chain of command was weaker than Britain or America's. Some say this was because of its Auftragstaktik (mission command) leadership philosophy which prioritized decentralized decision-making. Thus the Army needed a Kaiser like commander or else its esprit de corps might be fatally compromised. Equally, the Kapp putsch had shown that 'Civil Society' was loyal to the Head of State. Only if the Kaiser, or President, delegated absolute power to the High Command would the orders of military officers be obeyed. In other words, militarism wasn't innate in the German population. Ceasareanism was. Sadly, Hugo Preuss & Max Weber gave Weimar a constitution which allowed for a Caesarean President. Hindenburg was too senile to do very much with his power after divisions within the SD fold caused the Legislature to accept rule by Presidential decree. Hitler was younger- he became Fuhrer at the age of 45- and he was fortunate in that the worst of the Depression was over. The Communist movement too was fragmenting or otherwise losing momentum. People could believe that a lurch to the lunatic fringe of the Right would be reversed once traditional sources of authority- the Church, the liberal professions, the more cultured of the industrialists and financiers- were able to reassert themselves. 

Could Hitler have risen to power if there had been no Great Depression? Yes. Look at Mussolini. The King himself appointed him (he also dismissed him after it had become clear that the Axis had lost the war) during the Roaring Twenties. Admittedly, Mussolini was an erudite aristocrat compared to Hitler but the assumption was that he was a placeholder for some General or aristocrat. 

What changed for Germany was the end of 'extend and pretend' which would have happened in any case even without the Stock Market crash. Once there was no net inflow on the capital account, the German Army no longer had an incentive to do secretly what they would soon do very openly. 

Verdict on Wang Wei

Flowers need neither love nor lies

Feed they but butterflies

But the Silkworm is

Pure Vanity- his.

Amartya Sen's entitled inedia.

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

Starvation and exchange entitlements:

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

a general approach and its application to the great Bengal famine

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

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

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

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

He was wrong.  About everything. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the only influence 

other forces are also involved,

No. 

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

This has never happened.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They represent actual possibilities.

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

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

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

the exchange entitlements offered by a particular set of market configurations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The exchange entitlements

are unknowable because they 

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

which will only become known after the fact 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famines can be the result of fluctuations of exchange entitlements

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

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

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

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

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

This, in fact, ushered in the famine

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

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

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

To whom? Socialist countries. Not market economies.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or Sen's daddy & mummy  

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

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

There seem to have been sharp movements in exchange entitlements

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

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

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

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

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

indicating a growing cause for starvation for several occupation groups.

because less food was available 

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

because less food was available 

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

Sen admits less food was available 

The failure of the government to anticipate the famine,

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

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

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

rather than mistakes about facts dealing with food availability.

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

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

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

The approach of exchange entitlements applied to famines and starvation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i.e. markets were expanding as transport improved  

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

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

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

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

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

this emerged at least ten thousand years ago.  

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

It didn't protect 10 million Bengalis in 1770 

nor the insurance of unemployment compensation

which didn't protect Dutch people under Nazi occupation 

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

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

Molina's middle knowledge & free market ideology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spivak on Naxalbari

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

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

A Few Words About Naxalbari
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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

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

I was both too far and too close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but about Naxalbari was caught in helpless hearsay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it was the at least temporary conscientisation

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

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

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

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

Because Spivak had shit for brains.  

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

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

It could also be a function of the horror of violence

unleashed by the Left Front? 

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

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

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

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

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

Iyer's report on Experience

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

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

Both were qualities England ever & yet lacks

Tho' now overrun by Lezzas & Blacks.