Pankaj Mishra's hysterical incontinence

Pankaj Mishra writes in the Guardian-

Anglo-American lamentations about the state of democracy have been especially loud ever since Boris Johnson joined Donald Trump in the leadership of the free world.

Perhaps, Mishra means the lamentations of immigrants, like himself, to Britain and the U.S have been especially loud since the native populations of those countries rebelled against their own marginalization and impoverishment by wave after wave of immigration as well as the deleterious effects of 'neo-liberal' globalization. In America, the election of a half Kenyan former 'Community Organizer' set off a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth. The 'Tea Party' bitterly contested the manner in which the globalized financial elite bailed itself out while betraying the working class in the 'rust belt'. Brexit's crusader was Farage, not BoJo who is probably soft of immigration. Anger against Trump- the only U.S President who had never previously received a Government pay check- arises out of fear of Democracy and its capacity to liberate the tax-paying sheep from the wolves who fatten upon their flesh.

For a very long time, Britain and the United States styled themselves as the custodians and promoters of democracy globally, fighting a great moral battle against its foreign enemies.

This is nonsense. President Wilson, very briefly, claimed that America was fighting for Democracy, but only for White people in Europe. A similar claim was made by FDR and Truman during the Second World war. During the Cold War, both the Communists and the Capitalists propped up Dictators while gassing on about the superiority of their brand of Democracy.

From the cold war through to the “war on terror”, the Caesarism that afflicted other nations was seen as peculiar to Asian and African peoples, or blamed on the despotic traditions of Russians or Chinese, on African tribalism, Islam, or the “Arab mind”.

This is still true. Mishra is strangely deluded if he thinks everybody does not consider foreigners to be evil bastards with perverse forms of Government and cruel or ridiculous laws and customs. His own value on the globalized market for stupid shite arises from his being a brown man who incessantly bleats about how his native country is an utter shithole ruled by evil cunts.

But this analysis – amplified in a thousand books and opinion columns that located the enemies of democracy among menacingly alien people and their inferior cultures – did not prepare its audience for the sight of blond bullies perched atop the world’s greatest democracies. The barbarians, it turns out, were never at the gate; they have been ruling us for some time.

Did Mishra's worthless shite really not prepare his audience for his big reveal- viz. the West was just as evil and shitty as the India he had left behind? If all he could see was Nazism in India, was it really a big surprise if he came to see nothing but Nazism in England and America and wherever he next emigrates to?

People who babble about barbarians at the gate will, quite naturally, find them under their beds and in their closets and within their padded cells.

All that Mishra is remarking is the stupidity and paranoia of his ilk of scribblers.

The belated shock of this realisation has made impotent despair the dominant tone of establishment commentary on the events of the past few years.

Mishra may be part of an Establishment- one for cretinous narcissists who get paid to shit on their own country on demand- but it isn't the Establishment because it can't establish anything save its own imbecility.

But this acute helplessness betrays something more significant. While democracy was being hollowed out in the west, mainstream politicians and columnists concealed its growing void by thumping their chests against its supposed foreign enemies – or cheerleading its supposed foreign friends.

So what? They were stupid shitheads paid to write shite which everybody else ignored. However, it was also the case that people in power- busy enriching themselves- also ignored disquiet at immigration and the loss of decent jobs. That's the whole story here. Ignoring reality led to politicians talking like Mishra. But that sort of hypocrisy is, like kissing babies, required of professional politicians. Still, they got their comeuppance at the polls not because of they shite they talked but because of the policies they pursued. No doubt, some of these idiots, tried to harangue Trump using that type of pi-jaw but Trump's tweets answered those fools according to their folly and thus they have been dis-intermediated.

Mishra writes feelingly of their distress and sense of disillusion at this salutary outcome.

Decades of this deceptive and deeply ideological discourse about democracy have left many of us struggling to understand how it was hollowed from within – at home and abroad. Consider the stunning fact that India, billed as the world’s largest democracy, has descended into a form of Hindu supremacism – and, in Kashmir, into racist imperialism of the kind it liberated itself from in 1947.

In 1947, directly ruled Muslim majority areas separated from non-Muslim majority areas to establish the state of Pakistan where Islam was supreme. This state did splinter after its army indulged in racist genocide to neutralize the outcome of that country's first proper democratic election.

Mishra turns the facts on their head. Islamo-fascism is a global problem. Hinduism is not. Kashmiri Hindus belong to the same race as Kashmiri Muslims. Yet Mishra speaks of 'racism'. Why? Does he believe Muslims belong to a different race from non-Muslims? He also speaks of 'Imperialism'. Yet India has not conquered any territory. It is defending territory it already has. Perhaps Mishra thinks India should let go of the Kashmir Valley. But, if so, it should have done it decades ago. There has been no material change in the political situation there.

Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is enforcing a seemingly endless curfew in the valley of Kashmir, imprisoning thousands of people without charge, cutting phone lines and the internet, and allegedly torturing suspected dissenters.

But the same was said thirty years ago when Mishra was beginning his career. Nothing has changed.

Modi has established – to massive Indian acclaim – the regime of brute power and mendacity that Mahatma Gandhi explicitly warned his compatriots against: “English rule without the Englishman”.

English is the language of the Judiciary and Bureaucracy. It would be perfectly proper to call Indian Democracy 'English rule without the Englishman' because India follows the Westminster Model and English is one of the languages used in the deliberations of its Central Parliament.

Mishra grew up in India. He should know this. Why pretend that Narendra Modi is actually a toff from Harrow or Eton who has suddenly parachuted from the Skies to recreate the British Raj in India?

All this while “the mother of parliaments” reels under English rule with a particularly reckless Englishman, and Israel – the “only democracy in the Middle East” – holds another election in which millions of Palestinians under its ethnocratic rule are denied a vote.

Mishra, it seems, objects to 'English rule' even in England! No doubt, he thinks England should be ruled by Belgian bureaucrats. Why does Mishra mention Israel? It gave citizenship and the vote to Palestinians who remained under Israeli rule. Neither Egypt nor Jordan did anything similar for those Palestinians who came under their rule.

The vulnerabilities of western democracy were evident long ago to the Asian and African subjects of the British empire.

If this was so, why did India adopt the Westminster model?

Gandhi, who saw democracy as literally the rule of the people, the demos, claimed that it was merely “nominal” in the west.

Gandhi considered it a great scandal that women in England could be seen walking on the streets to get to their place of employment. He believed this would inevitably lead them to become prostitutes. He linked this phenomenon to the Suffragette movement. He considered Parliament to be a harlot because it gave itself to a new master- i.e. a Prime Minister- every few years. No wonder English women- having taken the first step to become street-walkers by pursuing education and employment- were clamoring for the vote so as to participate in that form of harlotry.

It could have no reality so long as “the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists” and voters “take their cue from their newspapers which are often dishonest”.

British parliaments put an end to a situation where 'hungry millions' persisted. Mishra must know this. Voters may or may not take their cue from 'dishonest newspapers'. But so may despots. Indeed, dictators often become prey to their own propaganda machinery and thus lose all contact with reality. 

 Looking ahead to our own era, Gandhi predicted that even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian” since a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open”.

Gandhi was wrong about a lot of things. So what? He got to sleep naked with young girls and pretend to be a Mahatma. That was all he really wanted.

Why did Capitalist states not become 'frankly totalitarian'? The answer is that totalitarianism is inefficient and uses up costly resources. Moreover, the Commissars will fleece the industrialist and dispossess the farmer. The 'few capitalist owners' will take their skills and flee to countries under the Rule of Law where their energy and enterprise enables them to flourish.

Gandhi had strange views about violence. Lord Bhikku Parekh tells us that he ordered his wife to cook mutton curry for his pal Maulana Azad. His wife said that she believed in 'ahimsa' and considered it a sin to prepare meat dishes. Gandhi told her that Azad liked mutton curry and thus it would be an act of violence to deny him his favorite dish. Since Gandhi had previously established his ascendancy over his wife by beating her remorselessly, she did his bidding. We may well wonder whether Gandhi's successes- such as they were- did not represent the victories of a veiled type of violence. Dr. Ambedkar certainly thought so. He was blackmailed by Gandhi- who went on a hunger strike- into settling for reserved seats for Dalits such that the Caste population could choose 'Uncle Toms'. Ambedkar knew that if Gandhi died during his hunger strike, Dalits would be massacred in the villages.

Inaugurating India’s own experiment with an English-style parliament and electoral system, BR Ambedkar, one of the main authors of the Indian constitution, warned that while the principle of one-person-one-vote conferred political equality, it left untouched grotesque social and economic inequalities. “We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment,” he urged, “or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy.”

Ambedkar said this after Stalin's Soviet Union had prevailed over Nazi Germany. In India, the younger generation of intellectuals was moving to the Left. Ambedkar had studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. What he was saying was echoed by leading Professors at both seats of learning.

Today’s elected demagogues, who were chosen by aggrieved voters precisely for their skills in blowing up political democracy, have belatedly alerted many more to this contradiction.

Trump has not 'blown up political democracy'. Nor has Boris Johnson. Neither have the capacity to do so because of constitutional checks and balances.

But the delay in heeding Ambedkar’s warning has been lethal – and it has left many of our best and brightest stultified by the antics of Trump and Johnson, simultaneously aghast at the sharpened critiques of a resurgent left, and profoundly unable to reckon with the annihilation of democracy by its supposed friends abroad.

Why the fuck should any American or Englishman listen to a guy from a shithole of a country? Ambedkar never pretended, unlike Gandhi, that he had any message for technologically advanced countries.

Mishra speaks of 'our best and brightest'. He probably thinks he himself is bright. Nobody else does. The 'sharpened critiques of a resurgent left' are nothing but what Obama calls 'circular firing squads'.

Modi has been among the biggest beneficiaries of this intellectual impairment. For decades, India itself greatly benefited from a cold war-era conception of “democracy”, which reduced it to a morally glamorous label for the way rulers are elected, rather than about the kinds of power they hold, or the ways they exercise it.

India gained no benefit from being considered a 'democracy'. Both the US and the UK 'tilted' to Pakistan. That country received more aid per capita while it was a Dictatorship. Nixon supported Ayub Khan, sending the Fifth Fleet into the Bay of Bengal and threatening to 'nuke Calcutta', despite the fact that US consular officials in Dacca stated that the Pakistani Army was carrying out a genocide. Incidentally, the reason this happened was because the Pak Army had conducted the first democratic General Election in the country. Since the Bengali majority would have got to form an Administration, the Army turned genocidal. 

As a non-communist country that held routine elections, India possessed a matchless international prestige despite consistently failing – worse than many Asian, African, and Latin American countries – in providing its citizens with even the basic components of a dignified existence.

Nobody gives a fuck about 'prestige'. A shithole is a shithole even if it has Democracy and Human Rights and so forth.

It did not matter to the fetishists of formal and procedural democracy that people in Kashmir and India’s north-eastern border states lived under de facto martial law, where security forces had unlimited licence to massacre and rape, or that a great majority of the Indian population found the promise of equality and dignity underpinned by rule of law and impartial institutions, to be a remote, almost fantastical, ideal.

Fetishists don't matter. They have no power. Whether they masturbate into ladies shoes or jerk off to talk of Democracy and Human Rights is wholly irrelevant. 

The halo of virtue around India shone brighter as its governments embraced free markets and communist-run China abruptly emerged as a challenger to the west. Modi profited from an exuberant consensus about India among Anglo-American elites: that democracy had acquired deep roots in Indian soil, fertilising it for the growth of free markets.

Anglo-American elites don't matter to India and vice versa. On the other hand, as India rises as a military and economic power, it will make alliances to safeguard its interests. But that's how diplomacy has always worked. There may have been a brief moment when some stupid hacks could gas on about a 'rules based international order', but that was long ago. Obama- 'the deporter in chief'- had Osama kidnapped, murdered, and dropped in the sea. He was a sensible man.

As chief minister of the state of Gujarat in 2002, Modi was suspected of a crucial role – ranging from malign inaction to watchful complicity – in an anti-Muslim pogrom of gruesome violence. The US and the European Union denied Modi a visa for several years.

They did this because the UPA Government- being unable to find concrete evidence against Modi- saved face by asking them to do so. India was a rising economic power. Once it became clear that Modi would win, everybody got terribly pally with him.

But his record was suddenly forgotten as Modi ascended, with the help of India’s richest businessmen, to power. “There is something thrilling about the rise of Narendra Modi,” Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, wrote in April 2014. Rupert Murdoch, of course, anointed Modi as India’s “best leader with best policies since independence”.

Nobody in India has ever heard about 'Gideon Rachmann'. Few know who Murdoch is. Their opinions don't matter. Indians think Mishra is a cretin. So what? He lives in England and writes only in English. On the other hand, Indians are thrilled with Modi. He is our best leader since Independence. But he is not the only one. Amit Shan is now seen as the successor of Sardar Patel. The dynasty, by contrast, is 'dying nasty'. 

But Barack Obama also chose to hail Modi for reflecting “the dynamism and potential of India’s rise”. As Modi arrived in Silicon Valley in 2015 – just as his government was shutting down the internet in Kashmir – Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her Facebook profile in order to honour the Indian leader.
In the next few days, Modi will address thousands of affluent Indian-Americans in the company of Trump in Houston, Texas. While his government builds detention camps for hundreds of thousands Muslims it has abruptly rendered stateless, he will receive a commendation from Bill Gates for building toilets.

So what? American and European leaders are behaving rationally- India is a rising power and must be placated. Mishra is behaving irrationally. If he really hates Modi so much he should be writing in Hindi and roaming around his own natal place giving speeches against the BJP. What good can he possibly do writing nonsense of this sort in the Guardian?

The fawning by Western politicians, businessmen, and journalists over a man credibly accused of complicity in a mass murder is a much bigger scandal than Jeffrey Epstein’s donations to MIT. But it has gone almost wholly unremarked in mainstream circles partly because democratic and free-marketeering India was the great non-white hope of the ideological children of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who still dominate our discourse: India was a gilded oriental mirror in which they could cherish themselves.

Really? Do 'ideological children' of Reagan and Thatcher spend a lot of time thinking about India? Perhaps they also learn Hindi and put on funny head gear and dance the ras garbha. 

The truth of the matter is that there are analysts who look at India's government policies. This in turn affects India's credit rating. Since analysts think India is doing smart things to tackle its problems- e.g. deporting illegal migrants and killing terrorists and disrupting their overground networks- they are bullish on this aspect of Modi's Sarkar. On the other hand, when it comes to the economy, they are more skeptical.

This moral vanity explains how even sentinels of the supposedly reasonable centre, such as Obama and the Financial Times, came to condone demagoguery abroad – and, more importantly, how they failed to anticipate its eruption at home.

The Financial Times is concerned with Finance. India under Modi scores well on Internal and External security. However, the FT is critical of some economic policy decisions. Obama was himself a demagogue who, to the disappointment of his enemies, turned out to be a cautious statesman who 'sweated the small stuff'. It remains to be seen whether Biden can cash in on his prestige or whether the 'circular firing squad' of the Left- to which Mishra now wants to promote himself- will damage him sufficiently to give Trump a second term.

Even the most fleeting glance at history shows that the contradiction Ambedkar identified in India – which enabled Modi’s rise – has long bedevilled the emancipatory promise of democratic equality.

What enabled Modi's rise? The answer is simple. As C.M of Gujarat he put an end to the political instrumentalization of communal rioting which was economically damaging. He then went on to do a deal with the farmers by which they paid for good quality electricity. He also worked with farmers to gain land for industries on terms they were happy with. The result was that Gujarat experienced unprecedented agricultural and industrial growth while also curbing criminal activity. In Delhi there was a horrendous rape and the C.M, Shiela Dixit, confessed that her own daughter would not be safe on Delhi's streets after dark. Meanwhile, on TV we could see footage of girls in Ahmedabad moving freely, and with perfect safety, on the streets at eleven o'clock at night.

There is no 'contradiction' between encouraging economic development and upholding the rule of law. Democratic equality does not have any 'emancipatory promise'. Only fools would believe that a shithole where everybody gets to vote will, by some magic, cease to be a shithole. The Rule of Law matters but what matters even more is sensible economic policies- not stupid virtue signalling.

In 1909, Max Weber asked: “How are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism?”

Weber was stupid. Sociology is a shite subject. Freedom is possible long run if countries pursue sensible policies with respect to Defense and Law and Order. The German General staff did not pursue sensible policies. Thus Freedom ceased to be possible in Germany. Capitalism was irrelevant. 

The decades of atrocity that followed answered Weber’s question with a grisly spectacle. The fraught and extremely limited western experiment with democracy did better only after social-welfarism, widely adopted after 1945, emerged to defang capitalism, and meet halfway the formidable old challenge of inequality. But the rule of demos still seemed remote.

The Nazis had adopted 'social-welfarism'. Indeed, Keynes- in the introduction to the German edition of his General Theory- said that the Nazi system was better adapted to Demand Management.

The Second World War saw an enormous expansion of the State's bureaucratic capacity which was re-purposed for Keynesian purposes. However, this experiment ended in 'stagflation'.

Interestingly, Herbert Hoover was an early 'social welfarist' who got industries to adopt minimum wage policies so as to get rid of 'repugnancy' markets in Labor. Sadly, Hoover did not understand price and wage stickiness being in thrall to what was then the consensus among mathematical economists. Mishra, being an ignorant fool, does not understand this. He thinks Capitalism is a beast which must be 'defanged'. He lives in the world of fairy tales.

The Cambridge political theorist John Dunn was complaining as early as 1979 that while democratic theory had become the “public cant of the modern world”, democratic reality had grown “pretty thin on the ground”. Since then, that reality has grown flimsier, corroded by a financialised mode of capitalism that has held Anglo-American politicians and journalists in its thrall since the 1980s.

Dunn had some marginal importance back in the Seventies because he denounced Marxist revolutions back when a lot of kids thought Che Guevara was cool. Since then, he has zero influence. There is a Chinese saying 'Science students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Poli Sci students. Poli Sci students look down on their teachers.' When was the last time any parent got naches for saying 'My son has a Doctorate in Political Theory'? What they say instead is- 'My son used to be my daughter. He has married a goat and lives on a commune. Personally, I blame his Professors at the Dept. of Political Science.'

What went unnoticed until recently was that the chasm between a political system that promises formal equality and a socio-economic system that generates intolerable inequality had grown much wider.

Wow! Mishra thinks that people in Communist countries did not notice that there was a chasm between the way the majority of the people lived and the luxury enjoyed by the nomenklatura. He also thinks that poor people in America or Europe did not notice that they had real shitty lives while all sorts of swindlers were making out like gangbusters. 

It eventually empowered the demagogues who now rule us.

Which demagogue rules us? Obama? No. He has gone. Trump is not a demagogue. His limited vocabulary is better suited to tweets at mid-night. What about BoJo? The man can't open his mouth without putting his foot in it. Bercow has him on the ropes. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court finds his prorogation of Parliament to have been illegal. He may yet go down as the worst and shortest lived Prime Minister in modern British history.

In other words, modern democracies have for decades been lurching towards moral and ideological bankruptcy – unprepared by their own publicists to cope with the political and environmental disasters that unregulated capitalism ceaselessly inflicts, even on such winners of history as Britain and the US.

Like Mishra, I live in England. What 'environmental disasters' has 'unregulated Capitalism' unleashed on me? None at all. I can't even add an extension to my house without filling out a thousand forms and paying for all sorts of surveys and architectural drawings and so forth.

What about Brexit? Surely that's a 'political disaster'? After all, the real exchange rate has fallen by about 15 percent. My wealth has decreased. On the other hand, a lot of young people in poorer parts of Britain can now more easily gain employment. Their life-chances have improved because they are no longer priced out of the global market. 

Having laboured to exclude a smelly past of ethnocide, slavery and racism – and the ongoing stink of corporate venality – from their perfumed notion of Anglo-American superiority, the promoters of democracy have no nose for its true enemies.

The promoters of democracy, like the promoters of Gravity, are wholly deluded if they think they are achieving anything. But the same is true of people who criticize these promoters. 

Ripe for superannuation but still entrenched on the heights of politics and journalism, they repetitively ventilate their rage and frustration, or whinge incessantly about “cancel culture” and the “radical left”, it is because that is all they can do.

So what? Fuck them. They don't matter. Mishra is himself a journalist of the 'views' not 'news' type. He may or may not be entrenched on the 'heights' of his profession. But, it is a silly profession. Why would British people listen to some Indian dude with a crap education from Goodhulia Gornmint Collidge? Does he run a hedge fund? Has he found the cure to Cancer? No. The fucker is an intellectual coolie employed under some sort of affirmative action program.

Their own mind-numbing simplicities about democracy, its enemies, friends, the free world, and all that sort of thing, have doomed them to experience the contemporary world as an endless series of shocks and debacles.

So, Mishra is railing against some cretins who are constantly getting spooked by stuff they read about in the papers. Why can't we just put them all into padded cells where their incessant incontinence won't pose a public nuisance?