It occurs to me that at some point after the Great War a new type of English English writer- one incapable of reading- came into existence. Consider the following extract from the collected essays of a typical example.
Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.
This would certainly be true of people who stop reading the moment they get into long trousers. For the rest of us, books only gain influence over us when we return to them after a gap of a decade or two and discover that they yet show more than their authors could have possibly known.
In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already: as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.
Graham Greene wrote this. No doubt his various mistresses were flattered that he thought they looked like him- more particularly in the throes of passion. Still, it is little wonder that a narcissist gets little out of the Bible save some forlorn echo of childhood play or prayer.
Perhaps, converting to Catholicism- for Anglicans- is an excuse not to read the one thing which alone can change how everything is to be read.
I suppose, one could say 'Greene was a Manichaean. One day, when he was 14 years old, he chanced upon the novels of Marjorie Bowen and found his own vocation.'
One had lived for fourteen years in a wild jungle country without a map,
An Edwardian schoolboy was spoiled for choice when it came to boy detectives and boy explorers but quickly graduated to stories about cricket or rugby. Such literature stressed what McClelland would later call 'need for achievement'. Orwell, I suppose, would have called it proto-Fascist. Kipling's Kim, after all, was an Imperial cartographer/spy much concerned with maps. But R.L Stevenson's Jim Hawkins had a Treasure Map. That's fucking Capitalism, that is! No wonder Greene was such a joyless shithead.
but now the paths had been traced and naturally one had to follow them. But I think it was Miss Bowen’s apparent zest that made me want to write.
Bowen had great talent but her early life was difficult. Her zest probably had a lot to do with earning money for her wee bairns.
One could not read her without believing that to write was to live and to enjoy, and before one had discovered one’s mistake it was too late — the first book one does enjoy. Anyway she had given me my pattern — religion might later explain it to me in other terms, but the pattern was already there — perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done.
I suppose the English intelligentsia had accepted that achievement no longer mattered. Social Justice was the grim grail questing which they must grow prematurely grey.
Man is never satisfied, and often I have wished that my hand had not moved further than King Solomon's Mines , and that the future I had taken down from the nursery shelf had been a district office in Sierra Leone and twelve tours of malarial duty and a finishing dose of blackwater fever when the danger of retirement approached.
No, you fucking dufus! You were supposed to study something useful at Collidge- like the bacteriologist, Lord Walston, whose wife you were poking- so as to cure malaria or blackwater fever or whatever. Sierra Leone had plenty of smart young people who could have been trained up quickly to create a better administration to benefit the native people- who would become more productive- thus also benefiting the British people who were buying from and selling to them. The pendulum of trade and exchange is set in motion by the invisible hand of the Katechon. But, Greene's generation thought they had to be focused exclusively on the Social Justice's Eschaton or Day of Wrath. Against that eventuality, Greene provided his class with an alibi. They had been molested as children by an absent God and thus had been set up to fail. True, a successful novelist may appear to have failed to fail- but that is mere appearance.
What is the good of wishing ? The books are always there, the moment of crisis waits, and now our children in their turn are taking down the future and opening the pages.
So long as they stuck to hard Sci-Fi, and had a penis, they were safe enough.
In his poem 'Germinal’ A.E. wrote: In ancient shadows and twilights Where childhood had strayed , The world's great sorrows were horn And its heroes were made . In the lost boyhood of Judas Christ was betrayed .
But that too was a beginning- the Genesis of a New New Testament. That's why the poem is called 'Germinal'. Greene has reversed the meaning.
Still, it is true that there was a good reason Sir Harcourt Butler, sometime in the 1880's, said 'We're all Socialists now'. The fact is some types of achievement- though leading to great wealth- were fundamentally evil or otherwise repugnant. But to right such wrongs too would be an achievement.
Greene writing of Henry James conjures up
'the black and merciless things that are behind great possessions’
there were plenty of blacks in Britain's great imperial possessions
as an expression of the ruling fantasy which drove him to write: a sense of evil religious in its intensity.
Henry James's America had torn itself apart in a Civil War which, ostensibly, was about black possessions being shown scant mercy. But that evil could be exorcised by high achievers.
Art itself’, Conrad wrote, ‘may be defined as a single- minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’,
So, Art should carry its own justification in its every line. But, Conrad said, its achievements are different from those of Science or Philosophy because, since it can't be authoritative and does not command reverence, its votaries must look within themselves and find some more subtle or intimate way in which to communicate the truths they thus uncover.
and no definition in his own prefaces better describes the object Henry James so passionately pursued, if the word visible does not exclude the private vision.
It does. The heroine of 'Golden Bowl' cleverly gets rid of her rival, till her husband can 'see nothing but her'.
If there are times when we feel, in The Sacred Fount , even in the exquisite Golden Bowl , that the judge is taking too much into consideration, that he could have passed his sentence on less evidence, we have always to admit, as the long record of human corruption unrolls, that he has never allowed us to lose sight of the main case ; and because his mind is bent on rendering even evil ‘the highest kind of justice , the symmetry of his thought lends the whole body of his work the importance of a system.
Henry James was concerned with 'economia' not the narrow 'akreibia' of the Law Court. But that economy- more particularly to mathematicians- is mysterious, if not ontologically dysphoric. Ultimately, it is founded on Faith, which is Credit, which is Belief of the sort that Artists can but hold in suspense.
No writer has left a series of novels more of one moral piece. The differences between James’s first works and his last are only differences of art as Conrad defined it. In his early work,
written at a time when High Society was more censorious
perhaps, he rendered a little less than the highest kind of justice ; the progress from The American to The Golden Bowl is a progress from a rather crude and inexperienced symbolization of truth to truth itself: a progress from evil represented rather obviously in terms of murder to evil in propria persona , walking down Bond Street, charming, cultured, sensitive — evil to be distinguished from good chiefly in the complete egotism of its outlook.
No. James was American, not stupid. He understood that the difference between an outlaw and a Senator was that though the latter had killed more men and robbed more banks, he was rich. As did his Pragmatist brother, Henry understood 'cash value'. But he also knew there were some varieties of experience which were beyond price. Were they also beyond words? Sadly, for him, yes.
Why does Greene pretend that people who marry for money, and then poison their spouse, are anarchists or nihilists or have sinned against the Holy Spirit? The answer is that he doesn't want to admit that James wasn't so different from Thackeray or Balzac. Novelists are supposed to turn tea-table gossip into something dramatic- no matter how pathetic or contemptible the protagonists. James and Conrad were part of an older tradition which looked for 'economia', not 'akreibia'. The sought to understand not merely to judge. They were concerned with the Katechon- i.e. what holds the Apocalypse at bay. But, truth be told, the Edwardian World deserved nothing less. For James, perhaps there was the fear of inherited mental illness- a fear psychosis which, had he turned to religion, might have put him in company with Kierkegaard & Tolstoy. Did Greene suffer anything similar? Perhaps. Or, it may be, he simply drank too much and popped pills which even English Doctors back then were too ready to prescribe. Still, what is undeniable is his talent. My mistake was to think he wrote simply enough for a Babu like me to imitate. In my collection 'Deus Absconditus', you will find a terribly grim Catholic novella set in a famine struck East African country. It is fucking hilarious.
Achille Mbembe comes from Cameroon which was a German colony- and thus which had forced labour- for about thirty years before becoming a League of Nations mandated territory. Some Nigerians, including Mbembe people, migrated to British administered Cameroon about a hundred years ago. However, it was the French who made bigger investments in education and infrastructure. The curse of forced labor was lifted. Cameroon has been politically stable- there have only been two Presidents since 1960. It may not be paradise, but it is a pretty decent place for most of its people.
Achille would have been about three or four years old when it became independent. Having been educated in France, he has some very queer ideas about the nature of the State- postcolonial or otherwise.
In his essay 'Necropolis' he writes-
This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.
This is a stupid assumption. A sovereign state may not permit the death penalty. Equally, no King or Emperor or President can prolong the life of a terminally ill patient.
Currently, one could say Hamas is practicing 'Necropolitics'. They are using murderous terror- as well as the Israeli reaction to it- to make money and gain influence. But, what the Palestinians continue to lose is more than lives. It is land. But control of land- which is what sovereignty is about- has to do with commerce not the cult of killing or being killed. Achille is pointing in the wrong direction. His theory was that death ruled Gaza at a time when Israel occupied it. He was wrong. Death only piled up skulls for its throne there almost twenty years after Israel, very foolishly, withdrew from it such that extortion replaced economics and bullets replaced the ballot. Hamas first terrorized over its own people before seeking to export that terror. Its great achievement is to get Sunni Arabis slaughtered for the greater glory of Shia Iran.
Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty,
Fuck off! A serial killer or a mindless thug is not a 'sovereign'. Hamas's leaders, if any such survive in Gaza, don't have sovereignty though they are still killing or allowing some of their victims to live so terror be prolonged.
The essay distances itself from traditional accounts of sovereignty found in the discipline of political science and the subdiscipline of international relations.
It also distances itself from sanity.
For the most part, these accounts locate sovereignty within the boundaries of the nation-state, within institutions empowered by the state, or within supranational institutions and networks.
This is because sovereignty is a 'term of art' in law and diplomacy. It isn't some shit that bubbled out of the brain of a lunatic like Foucault.
My own approach builds on Michel Foucault’s critique of the notion of sovereignty and its relation to war and biopower in Il faut défendre la société.
Chesterton had previously come up with the notion that the State might institute a National Health Service with the fell purpose of declaring insane and locking up all the good, decent, Christian, Jew-baiting nutjobs. Foucault raises a more fundamental question. Why isn't the President of the Republic scooping out the eyes of virgins and copulating with their empty eye sockets while the Pope, dressed in a gimp suit, looks on laughing maniacally? The answer must be something to do with either neoliberalism or biopolitics. It can't be the case that normal people don't want to torture and kill all and sundry.
To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.
No. To exercise sovereignty is to have a legal immunity for one's actions. If I kidnap and enslave you, I can kill you though I may not be able to keep you alive. But I have no legal immunity for what I do. Suppose I were the King. Even then, if my army is defeated and I am brought to trial, the Court may decide that I had voided my immunity or else it had lapsed for some other reason.
If you don't understand the meaning of a word, you are likely to misuse it and end up babbling nonsense. Suppose I don't know what the word 'Pilates' means. I might say 'To exercise Pilates is to sodomize the contango of the catachrestic constipation of Gayatri Spivak Chakraborty'. People would then think I must be Arjun Appadurai and run away because of the fearsome reputation of his farts.
One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control.
Which 'domain' of my life has Sir Keir Starmer taken control? None at all though no doubt I might end up paying a little more or a little less in tax.
But under what practical conditions is the right to kill,
anyone may kill in self-defense
to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?
In a sovereign country under the rule of law, this is a justiciable matter.
Who is the subject of this right?
A right is a collection of Hohfeldian immunities, obligations and entitlements. However, rights are meaningless unless there are justiciable remedies which, long term, are incentive compatible. Foucault understood fuck all. Mbembe was the victim of intense epistemic self-abuse. He should try de-colon-ising his mind so it is less full of shit.
What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer?
A maniac tries to stab you. You smash his head in. The court says you acted in self-defense. You are innocent of murder because your motive was not enmity but the desire to preserve your own life.
Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective?
That notion is wholly irrelevant. There is a large body of law regarding what is or isn't legal in the conduct of offensive or defensive military operations. However, that law may be ignored because of exigent circumstances or lack of jurisdiction.
War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill.
There is no right to kill. There may be an obligation to kill. Thus, suppose I am a soldier ordered to go to the front line and kill the invaders. I can't go to court and say 'I have a right to kill but am too weak and cowardly to do so. Kindly provide a legal remedy such that someone else goes to the front line and does my killing for me.' On the other hand, I might face a court-martial for not having fulfilled my obligation as a soldier.
Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)?
Barring assassination, no place whatsoever is given to the above. It isn't the case that Rishi Sunak attacked Keir Starmer with an axe.
How are they inscribed in the order of power?
Nothing is 'inscribed' in some imaginary shite.
Politics, the Work of Death, and the “Becoming Subject” In order to answer these questions, this essay draws on the concept of biopower and explores its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and the state of exception.
Sovereignty isn't imperium. A sovereign body- e.g. the Crown in Parliament- may delegate authority to a specific person for a specific purpose. That delegated authority is 'imperium'. In practice this means that though 'the Sovereign can do no wrong'- i.e. has unqualified immunity- the person exercising 'imperium' can be impeached and sent to jail. This is a justiciable matter. Currently, SCOTUS seems to be saying the POTUS has unqualified immunity while holding office. This certainly wasn't the conventional view.
Such an analysis raises a number of empirical and philosophical questions
No. Legal concepts raise legal or political questions. Matters of law are sharply distinguished from matters of fact. Philosophers should understand this. Kant imported this distinction and it is part and parcel of the phenomenological tradition in which Fuckwit was supposed to being working. Incidentally, he didn't actually know any history.
I would like to examine briefly. As is well known, the concept of the state of exception has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/extermination camps.
It is like the 'doctrine of necessity' or 'exigent circumstances'. However, it is unrelated to sovereignty. Had the Third Reich not been extinguished, its servants could have claimed qualified immunity.
The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of the absolute power of the negative.
What fucking 'absolute power' did Hitler have when he shot himself? Gassing on about Auschwitz is fine if you are Jewish. It isn't if- like Mbembe- you are anti-Zionist.
Says Hannah Arendt: “There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps.
The Brits and the Americans had set up concentration camps in South Africa and the Philippines. It must be said, Stalin and Mao's camps were more efficient.
Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death.”
Fuck off! If we can imagine a nuclear holocaust, the Nazi death camps aren't anything special. My guess is that they were only created so cowardly and lazy people had an excuse not to go fight the Rooskis. Pretending Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals represented an existential threat was a great way of avoiding the bullets of the Red Army. But it was a waste of resources. Still, it must be said, it wasn't the stupidest thing the Nazis did.
Because its inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, “the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized.”
British soldiers in Jap POW camps didn't exactly have a picnic. Africans and Indians find the Holocaust very funny. If you want to kill lots of people, do it cheaply with agricultural implements. Don't bother with gas-chambers. This was the great lesson of India's Partition- not to mention the Rwandan genocide.
In the political-juridical structure of the camp, he adds, the state of exception ceases to be a temporal suspension of the state of law.
The Camps were legal. What was illegal was non-government employees killing Jews for private gain.
According to Agamben, it acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the normal state of law.
Agamben was wrong. No system of law has ever defined 'bare life'. However, there may be laws in particular countries which place the Government under an obligation to provide certain minimal entitlements. The problem here is that there can be entitlement collapse. In that case, there is no legal remedy.
The aim of this essay is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of the Jews or to hold it up by way of example.
The Jews weren't exterminated. Plenty lived to take a fitting revenge on their tormentors. Millions of Germans had to flee from what had become Polish or Czech or Romanian territory. About a quarter of a million died.
I start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—
I suppose one could say the Glorious Revolution did inaugurate a new concept of sovereignty as did the American and then the French and then the Russian Revolutions. But then, even in ancient times, new concepts of sovereignty appeared and disappeared.
and therefore of the biopolitical.
Some ancient societies had strict rules of quarantine and other coercive methods to control the spread of diseases.
Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged normative theories of democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty.
Democracy is bad. It is preventing the President from teaming up with the Pope to tear out the eyes and copulate with the empty eye-sockets of innocent virgins. As for 'Reason', don't make me laugh! How is it 'reasonable' to say the Government should spend tax dollars on stuff useful to society? The fact is, Governments are 'sovereign' and thus should spend all their time chopping pieces off sweet little children. Kant should have explained this. I suppose the Jews got to him. Seriously, the Jews are the pits. Did you know they have a 'Commandment' which says 'thou shall not kill'? How fucked is that?
From this perspective, the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women.
No. A demos which is unable to defend itself will soon lose sovereignty. Thus, 'general norms' must be such as permit self-defense. True, some pretend that Democracy has some magical power. But they also don't want to mess with totalitarian Super-powers with plenty of nukes.
These men and women are posited as full
of shit
subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.
and self-abuse. Also, they should eat their own shit so as to spite Big Food.
Politics, therefore, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition.
Some specific brand of politics may define itself as such. The Sultan's sycophant may gas on about how he consults with even the meanest of his subjects. Sometimes, this is actually the case.
This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war.
No. A democratic country may, through no fault of its own, be at war.
In other words, it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the subject—or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the process, to become a fully moral agent.
This is the gravamen of Macaulay's essay on Milton. Since when has an early Victorian been 'late modern'?
Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere.
No. For people like Habermas, Truth is a regulative concept. It isn't an intrinsic property
The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom,
No. Nobody is so stupid as to think that a guy in prison can't reason.
a key element for individual autonomy.
There are some people who, following 'Clifford's Principle', think it is wrong to do things which you can't justify. But this is silly. Being free means having an immunity from providing justifications for many of your actions.
The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning.
No. That is the romance of freedom. But freedom does not endow anyone with unqualified immunity. Also, as the Stoics pointed out long ago, a galley-slave may be freer in his mind than the Emperor.
Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation
It could be, but then it becomes meaningless. The fact is the Emperor, whom the Stoic thinks is unfree, can fuck his own mother or elevate his horse to the Senate with complete impunity- unless the Praetorian Guard turns against him.
The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in society’s capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations.
No. India was not sovereign but much of Indian society was displaying a 'capacity for self-creation'. On the other hand, it is true that only a sovereign people can fart. For pissing, they need to establish the truth of their self-constitution as a micturating subject. It is only in the self-transcendence of biopolitics as the immanentization of zoepolitics that shitheads can say something sillier than Fuckall.
Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject,
shit is the subject of this nutter's search for truth
we can look to other foundational categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death.
But piss and shit are even less abstract and more tactile.
Significant for such a project is Hegel’s discussion of the relation between death and the “becoming subject.”
Some people study STEM subjects and thus reduce mortality and increase longevity. That is a useful type of work. Moreover, it can be done even in Societies whose norms are widely different. It is often forgotten that some Hegelians did useful medical and other scientific research. Indeed, Lawvere showed there might be a category theoretical way of representing Hegel's dialectic. Nutters like Foucault and Deleuze remained ignorant of such developments.
Hegel’s account of death centers on a bipartite concept of negativity.
rather than a tripartite concept of eating your own shit.
First, the human negates nature
because that aint a waste of time at all.
(a negation exteriorized in the human’s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs);
e.g. if you pluck an apple from a tree and then eat that apple what you are actually doing is negating nature. Had you shoved that apple up your bum you would be affirming it.
and second, he or she transforms the negated element through work and struggle.
and shitting.
In transforming nature, the human being creates a world;
Nope. He just changes it a bit.
but in the process, he or she also is exposed to his or her own negativity.
Unless, obviously, you don't eat the apple but shove it up your bum.
Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary.
No. Hegel wasn't that stupid. He just meant that people understand that getting a job may expose them to various hazards which might cause them to die prematurely. They learn to deal with it.
It is the result of risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the “animal” that constitutes the human subject’s natural being is defeated.
Yet, plenty of horses and elephants and camels had gotten used to being used in military operations.
In other words, the human being truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity).
Plenty of horses were braver than plenty of humans.
It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history.
A baby may have no awareness of death. Yet it's life may be cut short by the 'incessant movement of history'.
Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death.
Unless you are becoming a cat. Meow! That will confuse the shit out of the grim reaper.
To uphold the work of death is precisely how Hegel defines the life of the Spirit.
In other words, becoming spiritual means you stop shitting yourself, or pretending you are a cat, just because you could get hit by a bus today. Still, to be on the safe side, maybe it would be smart to skip Skool. Mummy, I have a tummy ache!
Georges Bataille
crazy, evil, nutter
also offers critical insights into how death structures the idea of sovereignty, the political, and the subject. Bataille displaces Hegel’s conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty, and the subject in at least three ways.
He founded a secret society dedicated to human sacrifice. Apparently, all the members wanted to be the victim, none the executioner. They should have been content shoving apples up their rectums like normal people.
First, he interprets death and sovereignty as the paroxysm of exchange and superabundance—or, to use his own terminology: excess.
The Sun King should copulate with the empty eye socket of his still screaming victim while the Pope, in a gimp suit, stands by laughing maniacally. It is sad that a nice lad from Cameroon had to study and regurgitate that shite.
Biopower and the Relation of Enmity
...What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency?
India had a State of Emergency. But unlawful killing remained unlawful. What was suspended was habeas corpus. On the other hand, there are regimes where, as a matter of routine, political opponents, or those who might become opponents, are subject to extra-judicial execution.
In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die.
How do you force a person to live? Why is it that no Nation has abolished death- at least for the Chief Executive and her family?
Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field
There has never been any such power. Nobody can abolish death or gravity or farting.
—which it takes control of and vests itself in.
Which is why, if only Mitterand had commanded Fuckall to live, he wouldn't have 'died of ignorance'.
This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others.
There was no 'biological caesura' between Germans and Jews or Hutus and Tutsis or 'kulaks' and proletarians. Still, it must be said, where there is a pronounced difference in physical appearance, genocidal policies are more easily implemented.
This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable.
I believe this guy teaches in South Africa. Some think Asians and Europeans will soon have to flee that country. But so will many of its Black inhabitants. Look at Zimbabwe.
After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples.
Britain had a South Asian Prime Minister. America has had a half African President and may soon have a half West and half East Indian female POTUS.
Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt
who was very happy to emigrate to Jim Crow America
locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness
plenty of countries had the same experience but weren't shattered.
and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.
In which case, since all societies face death, all societies would have similar racial politics. Yet, this has never been the case.
Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.”
There were polities where the Sovereign could order executions without due process of law. But, as Lord Coke explained to James I, England wasn't such a polity. This didn't mean James was any less a sovereign. As for racism, it either just an impotent type of bigotry or else a form of wage, price and service provision discrimination. Economics explains this. Fuckall couldn't figure out shit.
In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state.
No. Britain was plenty racist but almost all the people who were executed were White British people. By the time a substantial colored population came into existence, the death penalty had been discarded.
It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.”
Which has declined even in polities where racism increased because of a substantial influx of immigrants.
Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive)
Since Hohfeld, the correct English translation would be 'immunity'. There is no right to kill, there is an immunity to kill in self-defense under certain circumstances. But this has nothing to do with sovereignty.
and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;
In which case, since modern states function in very different ways, 'mechanisms of biopower' are anything goes. One may as well speak of 'mechanisms of moonshine'.
indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity.
So can shoving apples up your bum- if that is what floats your boat.
According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill.
He was playing catch up with Stalin.
This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill.
But the Allies proved better at killing and so Hitler ate a bullet. Incidentally, some polities gave the parent an immunity to kill a disobedient son or daughter. Thus the thing has nothing to do with sovereignty.
By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the “final solution.”
Which wasn't so different from the slaughter of the Armenians. Incidentally, one of Hitler's mentors had protested about those massacres which he witnessed in Ottoman Turkey.
In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state.
No. It became the archetype of the conquered and deeply fucked state. But there have been plenty of those.
It has been argued
by cretins who teach worthless shite
that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state.
Actually, Hitler was trying to imitate Jim Crow America. What he didn't get was that Americans like and understand money. This curbs their inclination to do stupid shit- at least, it used to.
The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life,
is sensible if the guy is trying to kill you and grab all your cool shiny stuff
as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself.
Nope. It is very fucking ancient. There is a tribe in the Andamans which kills anybody who tries to land upon their beaches. This has kept the safe from the infections which have wiped out many other indigenous, historically isolated, peoples.
Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity,
because what would be cool is if we could live in days of yore.
whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.
No. What 'underpins' such critiques is stupidity. Smart peeps study STEM subjects and do useful stuff. Nutters teach nonsense.
According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death,
Fuck off! Nukes are way cooler. Still, I suppose bio-weapons are cheaper. The problem is- as COVID showed- is that our existing international organizations are shit at biopolitics. Under its current head, WHO is playing the race card to further vitiate its own effectiveness.
one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army).
Ancient Empires had bureaucracies, prisons, armies etc. Moreover, most 'modern Western' countries didn't do the stupid shit that Hitler did.
Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure.
Where? In the UK? Fuck off.
This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes
The UK had plenty such. Still, after Kristallnacht, the anti-Semitic joke virtually disappeared. My point is that extremely racist English people would still cleave to the law and notions of fair play.
and the nourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.
What is Achille getting at? Supercilious elite politicians expressing disdain for 'deplorables' in the Rust Belt? What he forgets is that 'savages' were slaughtered unless it was more profitable to enslave them. Better yet, you could have a cheap type of indirect rule.
In reality, the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources.
No. It springs only from shit inside the brains of shitheads who teach worthless shite.
Some are to be found in the political practices of the ancien régime.
They are only found there by shitheads.
From this perspective, the tension between the public’s passion for blood
Achille noticed that lots of French peeps turn up to cheer as Macron exercises droit de seigneur and then guillotines various members of the Le Pen family.
and notions of justice and revenge is critical.
There is no such tension. Everybody understands that justice isn't revenge. That's why the police won't arrest and sodomize the postman for getting my wife pregnant.
Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish how the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens went on for hours, much to the satisfaction of the crowd.
Why were such practices dispensed with? No all the blame attaches to the bourgeoisie. Increased socio-political unrest in the post-Napoleonic period led to a popular backlash.
Well known is the long procession of the condemned through the streets prior to execution, the parade of body parts—a ritual that became a standard feature of popular violence—and the final display of a severed head mounted on a pike.
An ancient practice. Industrialization meant people had less leisure to turn up for such spectacles.
In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the “democratization” of the means of disposing of the enemies of the state.
The 1792 election featured universal manhood suffrage. The guillotine, as first used in that year, was based on ancient Roman device which was revived in the thirteenth century. America could be said to be first out of the gate in terms of democratization. It stuck with the good old hangman's rope.
Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility
No. Nobles got to have their heads cut off with a sword. On the other hand, the Scottish Maiden was sometimes used on noblemen.
is extended to all citizens.
Oooh! We get to be killed in a real fancy manner! And they say there is no God.
In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at “civilizing” the ways of killing.
Why the scare quotes?
They also aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play.
That sensibility was old at the time of Christ's crucifixion.
More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty appear.
Like being tickled to death by bunny-girls.
But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution.
Because the French were stupider than the Brits whose Glorious Revolution was bloodless.
During the French Revolution, terror is construed as an almost necessary part of politics.
Till those sponsoring it were killed. It turned out France didn't need a King. It needed a fucking Emperor.
An absolute transparency is claimed to exist between the state and the people.
So long as the Emperor has no clothes.
As a political category, “the people” is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure.
It was always only the latter. There are still one or two 'Peoples' Republics' around.
As David Bates has shown,
he isn't known as Master Bates for nothing.
the theorists of terror believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the enemy.
Everybody can do so already. True, the French sometimes get confused and surrender to the invader. But that is because they eat too much smelly cheese.
They also believe it possible to distinguish between the “error” of the citizen and the “crime” of the counterrevolutionary in the political sphere.
Again this is easy enough to do. Guys you aren't killing made 'errors'. Guys you are killing are criminals. This scares the shit out of those in error.
Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body politic, and politics is read both as the mobile force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space where “error” would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of.
Very true. If you put on a fright mask and leap out at people saying 'Boo!' you will have disposed of the enemy. Zelensky could learn a thing or two from this nutter.
Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason.
Human reason understands that terror is easily dealt with by killing those who use it. What matters is money. Killing people can be an expensive business. Napoleon killed lots of people but England prevailed because it could pay other countries to fight the French.
It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation,
only because its Mummy's alcoholic sister got hitched to those narratives while on a bender at Las Vegas.
most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the “real” and the symbolic.
The Enlightenment's understanding was that Copernicus and Galileo and Newton were right. The Pope had shit for brains.
Marx, for example, conflates labor (the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the creation of lasting artifacts that add to the world of things).
No. Marx chose to concentrate on the production of goods, not services.
Labor is viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind.
Marx thought scarcity would disappear. He was wrong for a reason first explained by Malthus.
The historical self-creation of humankind is
shit people may have believed before they heard about Darwin
itself a life-and-death conflict,
No. It was life and life conflict. Nobody actually gets into a wrestling match with a fucking corpse.
that is, a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history:
Time. That's the path. The truth it leads to is that historians are as stupid as shit. Those are the good ones. The bad ones are crazy.
the overcoming of capitalism
by slavery in a Gulag
and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with both.
The contradiction is that Capitalism is supposed to be very evil and yet it pays good wages and makes cool, shiny, stuff.
According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the “real” will present itself as it actually is,
i.e. Marx would stop drinking so much and see that flying pink elephants don't actually exist
and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness will be transcended.
By stupidity.
But by making human emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production,
rather than the abolition of gravity
Marx blurs the all-important
i.e. totally bogus
divisions among the man-made realm of freedom,
which doesn't exist
the nature-determined realm of necessity,
which is merely a way of speaking about what exists
and the contingent in history.
which is everything.
The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the “real” make these processes—the fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind—almost necessarily violent processes.
Nope. The thing might appear in a clockwork fashion. But Marx himself thought Revolutions were super-cool.
As shown by Stephen Louw,
a South African who teaches in Sharjah
the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to “try to introduce communism by administrative diktat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully.”
by robbing and killing people. The trouble is they may kill you first. Still, it must be said, Slavery is cheaper than Capitalism. Why pay your workers if you can simply whip them or kill them?
Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor militarization, the collapse of the distinction between state and society, and revolutionary terror.
Just say slavery and genocide and be done with it.
It may be argued that they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality.
or being too stupid or unlucky to have run the fuck away
Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will presuppose
not being killed or, if you are useless, forced to teach stupid shit to cretins.
a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history.
The chief obstacle to achieving stupid shit is the fact that it is stupid shit.
In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death.
with boredom- if you are obliged to listen to shite of this sort. Apparently Kojeve told the French about the Master/Slave dialectic. He himself became a Eurocrat.
Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death.
Unless a narrative of getting rich prevails.
Terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known telos of history.
ISIS certainly believes so.
Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery,
ISIS reintroduced slavery.
which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation.
Slavery is prehistoric. Biopolitical experimentation includes such things as the domestication of animals and selective breeding of food crops.
In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system
which was based on the slave run estates in Portugal and Spain.
and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.
Nope. Slavery was the rule, not the exception for Africa and most of Asia. Portugal only abolished slavery in 1869 a little after it was suppressed in Cameroon.
This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow.
Africans enslaved Africans and sold them to the highest bidder. Did they indeed not recognize the humanity of the slave? My belief is that the thing was purely economic. But then so was European or Chinese or any other type of slavery.
Indeed, the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a “home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status.
Which is what happened to most women all over the world when they got married. Dicks are very evil. Ban them immediately.
This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether).
Why stop there? Why not say the immortal soul of the slave become the property of Beelzebub?
To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought.
Which is why babies aren't part of families or communities. The same is true of dumb people or those who are in a coma.
As Paul Gilroy
who was a joke figure to us darkies
says, “The extreme patterns of communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognize the anti-discursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts.
Sociologists talk funny. Yet the lad went to University College School which mostly turns out barristers and Merchant Wankers. Still, his Mum was from Guyana so he could pretend to be all Rasta or Rude Bwoy.
Achille gases on about the sufferings of the plantation slaves. What he doesn't mention is that his own ancestors had sold some such into bondage.
In what follows I am mindful of the fact that colonial forms of sovereignty were always fragmented. They were complex, “less concerned with legitimizing their own presence and more excessively violent than their European forms.”
Nope. They were less so. They didn't bother with burning witches or heretics or, at a later point, Gulags and Gas Chambers.
As importantly, “European states never aimed at governing the colonial territories with the same uniformity and intensity as was applied to their own populations.”
Very true. Macron is killing and sodomizing the eye sockets of millions of Parisians. Things are better in Martinique.
In The Racial State (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002), David Theo Goldberg
a White South African
argues that from the nineteenth century on, there are at least two historically competing traditions of racial rationalization: naturism (based on an inferiority claim) and historicism (based on the claim of the historical “immaturity”—and therefore “educability”—of the natives).
Some Boers claimed to have got to Jo'berg before the fucking Bantu. Anyway, God wanted the darkie to serve the drunken Dutchman.
In a private communication (23 August 2002), he argues that these two traditions played out differently
maybe in South Africa.
when it came to issues of sovereignty, states of exception, and forms of necropower.
very true. Historicist Boers would suck themselves off when dealing with issues of necropower. Naturists would get naked and try to snort the stuff.
In his view, necropower can take multiple forms:
Whereas narcopower is based on selling drugs and buying guns.
the terror of actual death; or a more “benevolent” form—the result of which is the destruction of a culture in order to “save the people” from themselves.
Destroying stuff costs money. Let a country turn Socialist and destroy itself.
Arendt develops the thesis that there is a link between national-socialism and traditional imperialism.
She was too stupid to understand that the German General staff was pursuing the same policy as the Emperor who was a traditional Imperialist. An Emperor is a dude with lots of Kings, Princes, Dukes, Counts etc. under him.
According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a potential for violence previously unknown.
Large parts of Germany and Arendt's ancestral Palestine had been colonies of the Romans. They weren't exactly long haired hippies.
What one witnesses in World War II is the extension to the “civilized” peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the “savages.”
No. The Europeans used superior tech which they had already extensively used on each other. On the other hand some of the more discerning savages were able to turn some Europeans into really tasty stew.
That the technologies which ended up producing Nazism
No technology did. Any bunch of nutters can be Nazi.
should have originated in the plantation or in the colony
Plantations or Colonies had to make a profit. Otherwise they were abandoned.
or that, on the contrary—Foucault’s thesis—Nazism and Stalinism did no more than amplify a series of mechanisms that already existed in Western European social and political formations (subjugation of the body,
Doctors are very evil. They say you should use a condom if you have butt-sex with loads of people. The only way to prove them wrong is have a lot of butt-sex and then politely but firmly refuse to die of AIDS.
health regulations,
Mummy refused to let me eat my own poo. She is worse than Hitler.
social Darwinism,
which is not compatible with Neo-Darwinism
eugenics,
championed by Swedish liberals like the Myrdals
medico-legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race)
pseudo-science
is, in the end, irrelevant.
Because nutters like Fuckall are irrelevant.
A fact remains, though:
This nutter does not know any facts.
in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus)
No. The colony was a place where the colonizer provided a Justice system- for a fee. However, as in British India, some Princes were sovereign and thus above the law (which is what legibus solutus means). In practice, however, they might be deposed and exiled if they kept knifing their Mummies.
and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end.”
Which war hasn't ended?
Indeed, such a view corresponds to Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, the power to decide on the state of exception.
Schmitt was wrong. The Sovereign does not have to decide this. His Prime Minister or Chancellor or Army Chief may do so in his name. Over the course of the Great War, the Kaiser was reduced to a cypher.
To properly assess the efficacy of the colony as a formation of terror, we need to
tell stupid lies
take a detour into the European imaginary itself as it relates to the critical issue of the domestication of war
an oxymoron. Why not speak of the 'cute kittens of terror' or the 'waggly puppy dog tail of despair'?
and the creation of a European juridical order (Jus publicum Europaeum).
That is a very recent development and may be rolled back.
At the basis of this order were two key principles.
Achille will now say the stupidest shit possible.
The first postulated the juridical equality of all states.
Nonsense! Only if there is a court with equal jurisdiction and power over two different parties can they be said to have juridical equality.
This equality was notably applied to the right to wage war (the taking of life).
There is no such right. However, there may be an immunity. If you wage war and win and no combination of other countries can fuck with you, then you have an immunity. Otherwise, a coalition of stronger powers can force you to give up conquered territory. Economic or diplomatic sanctions may have the same effect.
The right to war meant two things.
There's nothing stopping any nutter from declaring war on America or Chia or Drugs or whatever.
On the one hand, to kill or to conclude peace was recognized as one of the preeminent functions of any state.
Only in the sense that hairdressers recognize that one of the preeminent functions of postal workers has to do with trying to fight off crazy people who try to knife them or else consenting to get knifed and bleed to death.
It went hand in hand with the recognition of the fact that no state could make claims to rule outside of its borders.
There was and is no such recognition. Countries are welcome to lease territory or permit various types of extra-territoriality.
But conversely, the state could recognize no authority above it within its own borders.
The State could recognize anything at all- God, the teachings of the Buddha or Marx- as above itself.
On the other hand, the state, for its part, undertook to “civilize” the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of killing.
No. The State was pressurized to enact or enforce laws of various kinds regarding repugnant customs or cruel and unusual punishments.
The second principle related to the territorialization of the sovereign state, that is, to the determination of its frontiers within the context of a newly imposed global order.
Nobody has succeeded in 'imposing' a global order. Achille hasn't noticed. Anyway, some countries coexist without agreed borders. Achille is babbling ignorant nonsense
In this context, the Jus publicum rapidly assumed the form of a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself (where the Jus publicum was to hold sway).
Nonsense! Jus publicum was restricted to specific jurisdictions which could- as with the Holy Roman Empire- involve entities under the control of different powerful Monarchs. But nobody could stop Prussia taking Schleswig Holstein or Alsace Lorraine.
This distinction, as we will see, is crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation.
It is nonsense. This cunt is pretending Europeans were terribly nice to each other. Then they got colonies and started doing terrorist shit. This caused Nazism.
Suppose this nutter is right. In that case, Europe needs to deport every darky or Asiatic. Clearly, Europeans only become nasty when they come in contact with non-Europeans.
Under Jus publicum, a legitimate war is,
constitutional. Thus suppose some French or British dude started a war in some far off place without the permission of the French or British government, then that war would be illegitimate. The Jameson raid is an example.
to a large extent, a war conducted by one state against another or, more precisely, a war between “civilized” states.
Nonsense! There was a notion of a 'terra nullis' where anybody was welcome to grab territory and establish a government. The home country might agree to annex that territory. But, they might refuse.
The centrality of the state in the calculus of war
arises only if the State is in fact central to that war. It may be, but then again it may not.
derives from the fact that the state is the model of political unity,
it may be or, it may be a model of disunity.
a principle of rational organization,
the Government is 'rationally organized'? Are you kidding me?
the embodiment of the idea of the universal,
Nothing is the embodiment of any idea.
and a moral sign.
as opposed to an obscene gesture.
In the same context, colonies are similar to the frontiers.
When Macron goes to Martinique, he scalps Red Skins and kills buffalo.
They are inhabited by “savages.”
The 13 colonies were inhabited by very savage Red Indians who held a Tea Party in Boston. George III was crazy to want to continue to rule over those cannibals.
The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world.
How shitty was the Cameroon in which this dude was born?
Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens) who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal.”
In other words, Bleck peeps are mindless apes. They like to eat White peeps. Best steer clear of them.
Achille's big shtick is 'late modern colonial occupation'- which does not exist.
Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early-modern occupation,
because it does not exist.
particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical.
but this cunt spent the first half of his essay saying they did fucking exist 500 years ago in European colonies in the Canaries, the Caribbean etc.
The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.
Really? In that case there must be some other Jewish state which sent out colonists to Israel. Oh. Right. Achille is talking about the Jew-nited States not to mention the Kike-dom of Great Britain and the Rabbi-ublic of France.
Here, the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity.
Which colonial state did so? Not Britain. Viceroy Sahib didn't gas on about how the ancient Druids were very sweet and nice. Nor did the Dutch or the Portuguese or the French.
This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist;
Hamas thinks Palestine has no divine right to exist.
the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi impossible.
Israel came into existence at the same time as Pakistan. There was an exchange of population within the wider Middle East. Sadly, the Palestinians made themselves unpopular in some Arab countries. They can't have a state of their own because they are disunited and have made themselves less and less economically viable. Still, there will always be money available for Palestinian 'pay for slay'. The Israelis will compensate themselves with land.
.. To return to Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation, the late-modern colonial occupation in Gaza
that would end about four years after Achille wrote this.
and the West Bank presents three major characteristics in relation to the working of the specific terror formation I have called necropower.
Sadly, it is Palestinians, not Israelis, who have focused most on terrorism rather than doing useful stuff and making money that way.
First is the dynamics of territorial fragmentation, the sealing off and expansion of settlements.
Why do so many people want to seal themselves off from suicide bombers? Don't they understand that this is terrorism?
The objective of this process is twofold: to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state.
Israelis are smart. Why the fuck would they take a failed state as their model?
The occupied territories are therefore divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells.
The Israelis, very foolishly, gave up Gaza which is why they are now having to expend a lot of blood and treasure on it. I suppose this sorry story will end with an exchange of nukes and genetically engineered viruses.
According to Eyal Weizman,
a professor of 'spatial &visual culture'. I suppose he is an architect of some particularly stupid sort.
by departing from a planar division of a territory and embracing a principle of creation of three-dimensional boundaries across sovereign bulks, this dispersal and segmentation clearly redefines the relationship between sovereignty and space.
This is because of you claim sovereignty over not some portion of space but some period of time, people laugh at you. It is possible that I am the Rajah of Cooch Nahin who for some reason appears as a drunken hobo. It is not possible that I am the Pharoah of the Twenty Seventh Century.
For Weizman, these actions constitute “the politics of verticality.”
such naches his mother must be getting! Maybe the guy is a shorty. Tall people would come and fart in his face. Mummy told him the same thing used to happen to Golda Meyer.
The resultant form of sovereignty might be called “vertical sovereignty.” Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of the airspace from the ground.
In Cameroon, airspace is the same as ground space. That's why, if you run really fast, you will reach the moon.
The ground itself is divided between its crust and the subterrain.
In Cameroon, you can easily sprint down into the center of the earth.
Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains and bodies of water).
This is true of all types of human or animal occupation.
Thus, high ground offers strategic assets not found in the valleys (effectiveness of sight, self-protection, panoptic fortification that generates gazes to many different ends).
This proves that Capitalists who live in penthouses in skyscrapers are subjecting us to colonial occupation. Also, those bastards are preventing us running to the moon or sprinting to the center of the earth. Why are they being so mean?
Says Weizman: “Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power.”
So could penthouse apartments.
Under conditions of late-modern colonial occupation, surveillance is
by satellite or CCTV.
both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa.
Very true. Your knife can see for you. Why don't blind peeps understand this? Is it because their minds have been colonially occupied by late-modern capitalism.
Instead of the conclusive division between two nations across a boundary line, “the organization of the West Bank’s particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control,” according to Weizman.
This seems to be working well enough. Evacuating Gaza, on the other hand, was a bad idea which Netanyahu opposed.
Under these circumstances, colonial occupation is not only akin to control, surveillance, and separation, it is also tantamount to seclusion.
There are plenty of gated communities in the UK and the US. This proves they are colonially occupied.
... This new moment is one of global mobility. An important feature of the age of global mobility is that military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states, and the “regular army” is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions.
The State has a monopoly of certain types of legitimate offensive violence leading to death. But that is an immunity to kill not a right to kill.
The claim to ultimate or final authority in a particular political space is not easily made.
I can claim authority over Cameroon easily enough. The Cameroonians will laugh at me. That's cool with me provided they buy me a drink.
Instead, a patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights to rule
these are claims. A right has a remedy under a vinculum juris.
emerges, inextricably superimposed and tangled, in which different de facto juridical instances are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties, and enclaves abound.
Criminal gangs may indeed carve up slum neighborhoods in this manner.
“Remote as they are from their ‘targets,’ scurrying over those they hit too fast to witness the devastation they cause and the blood they spill, the pilots-turned-computer-operators hardly ever have a chance of looking their victims in the face and to survey the human misery they have sowed,” adds Bauman. “Military professionals of our time see no corpses and no wounds. They may sleep well; no pangs of conscience will keep them awake”
Hamas sleeps like a baby after raping and beheading kids. It is stupid to speak about Israeli Necropolitics when it is its enemies who have a cult of death and martyrdom.
Let’s take Africa as an example. Here, the political economy of statehood dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century.
It got a bit worse before getting a bit better unless the whole place turned to shit.
Many African states can no longer claim a monopoly on violence
more particularly if the Soviets flooded the place with Kalashnikovs.
and on the means of coercion within their territory. Nor can they claim a monopoly on territorial boundaries.
Anyone can claim anything they like.
Coercion itself has become a market commodity.
Mercenaries have always existed.
Military manpower is bought and sold on a market in which the identity of suppliers and purchasers means almost nothing.
On what market does Achille sell his shite?
Urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security arms, and state armies all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill.
Only the Dictator's army should kill people- right?
Neighboring states or rebel movements lease armies to poor states. Nonstate deployers of violence supply two critical coercive resources: labor and minerals. Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries, and privateers.
Okay. We get it. Africans are savages. Europe must deport all darkies. Israel can fend for itself because it has discovered a way to separate 'air-space' from 'ground space'. Jews are clever that way.
Alongside armies have therefore emerged what, following Deleuze and Guattari, we could refer to as war machines.
They emerged thousands of years ago.
War machines are made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances.
No. That's just a bunch of troops. A war machine needs direction, intelligence, and 'sinews'- i.e. resources.
Polymorphous and diffuse organizations, war machines are characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis.
In the opinion of a couple of shitheads. War is a serious business. Smart people study it.
Their relation to space is mobile.
Everybody's relation to space is mobile.
Sometimes, they enjoy complex links with state forms (from autonomy to incorporation).
Everybody can enjoy complex links with state forms- I myself frequently receive stuff in the mail.
The state may, of its own doing, transform itself into a war machine.
why not a Sex Machine like James Brown?
It may moreover appropriate to itself an existing war machine or help to create one.
No. States have armies unless, like Costa Rica, they abolish them after a Civil War. Still there will be some sort of National Guard or Paramilitary Police or Border Security force. Failed or failing States may only have warrior bands because the Army has collapsed.
The ways of killing do not themselves vary much. In the case of massacres in particular, lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons.
Unless we are cremated, this is what will happen to all of us. Nice biopolitics would ban death. Also farting.
Their morphology henceforth inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain,
Only if people are too lazy to bury the dead.
empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide—in which a number of skeletons were at least preserved in a visible state, if not exhumed—what is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand,
what is strange is fondling skeletons. Is it a French thing?
and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something.
They are dead. No doubt because they weren't stubborn enough to resist dying.
In these impassive bits of bone, there seems to be no ataraxia:
If those bones could speak they might object to those dude fondling them in a manner far from serene.
nothing but the illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred.
Those bones are rejecting your attempt to fuck them in the ass. This is because they don't got no ass. Death will do that to a skeleton.
In other cases, in which physical amputation replaces immediate death, cutting off limbs opens the way to the deployment of techniques of incision, ablation, and excision that also have bones as their target.
No. Only if your intention is to chop off a gangrened limb would 'bones be a target'. On the other hand, maybe this bonehead thinks the heart is a bone.
The traces of this demiurgic surgery persist for a long time,
The demiurge creates the universe. Surgery is about removing or transplanting stuff.
in the form of human shapes that are alive, to be sure, but whose bodily integrity has been replaced by pieces, fragments, folds, even immense wounds that are difficult to close.
Achille's head was chopped off and replaced by a cabbage.
Their function is to keep before the eyes of the victim
Achille's head is carried around so he can watch his new cabbage head is getting up to. Sometimes it falls off- which, to be candid, is hilarious.
—and of the people around him or her—the morbid spectacle of severing.
Achille's family too are forced to watch as more and more of his limbs are lopped off only to be replaced by vegetables of various descriptions. No wonder he babbles on about 'Necropolitics'. The poor fellow should be on a mortuary slab. It is very cruel of the South Africans to employ him as a Professor.
No. His proposal was for a Pakistan, a Hindustan and Pricestan. But the Princes were shit. The only question was whether Punjab and Bengal would be partitioned on terms more or less favorable to the Muslims. Had Churchill won the 1945 election and appointed Mountbatten as Viceroy, then Mountbatten's finger would have been on the Muslim side of the scales. The Hindus would have had less incentive to make a Federal structure workable. Thus, if anything, Independence would have come sooner under Churchill than Atlee. Furthermore, the Tories would have had less resolve to prolong the economic pain the British people were undergoing. Also, the quicker the Brits left, the greater the chance that essentially conservative Indian forces would replace them. If the Brits tarried, the Reds might end up taking over the entire shooting match.
A distinguished ex-diplomat, Kishan Rana takes a different view. He sees Churchill as manipulator or betrayer of India who may have played some devilish trick on Nehru & Co.
He writes in 'Open Magazine'-
WINSTON CHURCHILL, BRITAIN’S wartime Prime Minister from May 1940 to August 1945, had a huge impact on British India.
No. He carried on the policies of Zetland and Halifax and other senior Tories . Churchill was considered to be ignorant of, and a bit crazy on, the subject of India. The fall of Singapore- itself perhaps the inevitable outcome of Churchill's decision, as Chancellor, to cut income taxes rather than beef up the Navy- had doomed the Raj. Only American aid could enable it to throw out the Japs but the Yanks would insist that India become independent. This was because they were foolish enough to think the Indians would welcome f.d.i by Ford and GM and GE and so forth to replace inferior tie-ups with British Companies like ICI etc.
The plain fact is, Churchill like other British leaders, had a blind spot when it came to Japan. Indeed, a British Lord who was a known Japanese agent was given an official position at the Admiralty which he used to pass secrets to Japan even after war broke out. He was forced to retire, but wasn't prosecuted.
Strangely, his mismanagement of the ‘Jewel in the Crown’, and his motivation, are under-studied.
There was no mismanagement of India. Provincial autonomy had been granted. Congress resigned its ministries but the administration carried on well enough. India supplied men and materials to the Allies though, no doubt, if captured by the Japanese, some soldiers turned their coats.
That India connection began with Churchill’s three years as a cavalry subaltern, based in Bangalore from October 1896 to May 1899. He travelled widely, pursuing his passion for polo, also seeking military fame,
he was a soldier. He wanted to fight. Shame on him!
first to the Afghan frontier in 1897 (producing the first of 40-plus books), and the next year to the Sudan War, (with another book, in two volumes). Churchill also used that time for intensive self-education, via the books his mother sent from London. That was when he framed his political vision and public affairs strategy.
Not really. He simply followed his father's policy- viz. military retrenchment and free trade- while showing sympathy to the working class. Later, he came under the spell of Lloyd George.
Remember, Churchill had no university education, going directly from Harrow to the Sandhurst Military Academy.
It was rare for soldiers to go to University. If they did so it was because- like Sir John French- they enjoyed sports and socializing. Nobody in their right mind went to Oxbridge to learn useful stuff.
There is no gainsaying Churchill’s crucial role in defeating Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War II.
No. He played a crucial role in keeping up morale during the Blitz. But previous Tory administrations had emphasized the role of aircraft as England's last line of defense. The RAF came through- just. England had been saved by the skin of its teeth. Hitler defeated himself by attacking Stalin and then, quite gratuitously, declaring war on the US.
Churchill’s greatness is undeniable. But it is a disservice to verity and history to obfuscate the major dark spot in his life, his comprehensive misrule of British India
he had zero constitutional responsibility for India. Leo Amery, as Secretary of State, found him stupid and bigoted on the subject but he couldn't deny that Indian politics didn't greatly matter. After the fall of Singapore, Congress was bound to go to jail and thus play a waiting game. Churchill had good relations with the League which was backing the war effort. The Commies too got with the program once Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.
in those crucial five years, 1940 to 1945, preceding Partition and the Independence of India and Pakistan.
The Provinces had autonomy or, if Congress ministries had resigned, were under Governor's rule. But the Governor's reported to the Viceroy who reported to the Secretary of State for India. Churchill was too busy to get involved in Indian politics.
My book Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal? (2022), is the only one among over 2,000 oeuvres, offering a document-based, forensic, panoramic examination of those India-related actions.
Churchill was concerned with the conduct of the War- which was fucking abysmal in the South East Asian theatre . Thankfully, the Americans came to the rescue of the Brits.
The task was difficult, partly owing to suppression of documentary evidence.
The documentary evidence was shit because the Brits had taken their eye off the ball. This was because most people thought the Indians genuinely wanted Independence and thus would cobble together a Federal Government sooner rather than later. The fact is, strange as this may sound, Brits thought Gandhi genuinely wanted them to fuck off. He didn't because he thought the Muslims and the Punjabis would fuck the Hindus in the ass and steal all their cool, shiny, stuff. At least that is what he said in 1939.
Churchill was a notorious hoarder of papers, working assiduously to embellish his own life story.
Why didn't he write a big fat book showing he was a cowardly wanker whose wife beat him regularly?
He frequently said that history would vindicate him, because he would write that history.
Not that frequently. He wasn't a boring cunt.
From the late 1920s Churchill deployed a veritable ‘cottage industry’ of draft-writers, researchers, helpers, a form of collective production. Example: Churchill’s six-volume The Second World War (emerging sequentially, 1948 to 1954). It’s base: official documents that he commandeered after his August 1945 election defeat. They were edited and rewritten, almost always aimed at self-exculpation, gilding his own role — as shown by David Reynolds in In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2004).
If Churchill had known or cared much about India, he could have spun a yarn about how he cunningly got the Hindu Congress to snooker itself such that they sulked in jail while the Brits were able to borrow lots of money from India which it used to mobilize Indian manpower and materials for the War effort.
I WILL START WITH addressing Churchill’s gross mishandling of the End of Empire, squandering valuable time, mid-1942 to July 1945,
Churchill got about as much out of India as it was capable of yielding. The truth is, Congress was and is useless. The Americans may have thought Nehru was a smart dude who could help the war effort. But Nehru wasn't a smart dude. He was a blathershite. By 1962, this had become blindingly obvious.
failing to prepare for the Partition of British India,
Why prepare for it? If darkies want to kill each other let them do so after the War when it would inconvenience nobody who mattered.
doing nothing to reduce human suffering.
Britain was fighting for its life. Fuck it cared about useless darkies stealing each others' food? The fact is, India could have had a Federal Government under the 1935 Act if enough Indians had agreed to work together. But they preferred to quarrel and talk bollocks.
Elected to Parliament in 1900 aged 25, over the next three decades Churchill held varied high ministerial appointments, none directly dealing with India.
But Halifax and Zetland did. It was they who pushed through the 1935 Act. Churchill railed against it impotently. People thought he was ga ga.
But the mounting Indian demand for autonomy, from the 1910s onwards, drew Churchill’s attention, and hostility.
He joined the Indian Empire League which was set up in 1930 and the India Defense League in 1933. But, those old fogeys couldn't prevent the mainstream Tory party pushing through provincial autonomy under the 1935 Act. In other words, India was already a lost cause before the UK turned to Churchill.
Throughout, Churchill clung to a Victorian vision, that India was the Empire’s ‘Crown Jewel’, on which the sun must never set.
Rana is a cretin. The Sun sets on India. It doesn't on a Global Empire like that of Charles V.
Those were half-digested lessons
Why half-digested? Randolph wasn't a great thinker and died of syphilis soon enough. Churchill was more flexible on Ireland.
imbibed from his father, Lord Randolph, who died in 1895; he remained Churchill’s lifelong mentor. But Churchill failed to grasp his father’s humanity, which of itself was remarkable for those times.
Churchill didn't get syphilis because he was a little bit more discriminating regarding what specimens of humanity he grasped and stuck his dick into.
Remember, in the mid-1880s Randolph had asked that Britain should reach out, to understand the Indian people; he said, ‘the government knows less than nothing of the native mind’.
Randolph called Chandravarkar a 'Bengali babu'. He was a highly reactionary Sec. of State for India. Why is Rana pretending otherwise?
Randolph sought termination of ruthless exploitation, also asking in vain for a parliamentary commission to examine Britain’s rule over India.
Fuck off! He just said whatever all Opposition front benchers say during boring parliamentary debates. As Sec. of State, he pushed for the annexation of upper Burma.
CHURCHILL RELISHED, AND exploited, the division between the Indian National Congress (INC), led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League (ML) led by Jinnah,
Gandhi and Nehru created those divisions. They were exultant when Jinnah went into self-imposed exile in London between 1930- 1934.
and anything that sharpened the Hindu-Muslim divide.
Actually, Gandhi's demand that the Brits hand over the Army to the INC before leaving caused everybody- including Madrasi non-Brahmins, and Sikhs- to unite against Congress at the Round Table Conference of 1932. The Brits united India but their departure meant that it would split on Religious grounds. First Buddhist Burma went its own way. Then the Muslims got their own State.
Churchill called it the “bulwark” of British rule over India, hoping that this divide “would remain bitter and bloody”. That shaped his actions.
What actions? The dude was fighting a war. He had no time for India.
When did Churchill establish contact with Muhammad Ali Jinnah? No one knows for sure.
Churchill was under the impression that Princes- like the Aga Khan- were the people who mattered. During Jinnah's London sojourn, few predicted he would return to India as the head of the Muslim League.
Jinnah shifted to London after the first Round Table Conference at the end of 1930, staying there for over four years, establishing a prosperous legal practice. He told his sister that the locus of political activity had moved; his self-exile was also expedient in terms of internal ML dissensions. From 1929-35, Churchill was fully committed to obstructing the passage of the Government of India Act of 1935.
He failed miserably. After that, if he started gassing on about India, people rolled their eyes and suggested the old boy should go easy on the Cognac.
For Churchill those miniscule British concessions, partly
fully
opening provincial governance to Indian self-rule, heralded the end of Empire.
D'uh! What Rana doesn't understand is that if the Indians had reached an agreement they could have had their own Federal Government.
Diehard opposition became his one-point agenda, in that futile revolt against his own Tory (Conservative) party. Churchill gathered a ragtag collection of ultra-nationalists; most of his political allies, even friends, deserted him. That obsession left him high and dry, out of office, till World War II broke out in September 1939.
Churchill had opposed the Mody-Lees agreement (as had Nehru, though he didn't have the courage to say so). It was because Churchill was still attached to Free Trade and the Gold Standard and the fucking British Raj that people thought he was senile. Still, he was considered a fighting man and a bitter opponent of 'appeasement'. That's what got him the top job- though his own party didn't like him very much.
At that time Churchill sought out all manner of allies, including the Indian Princely States; he considered flying out to India to muster opposition to the Government of India Act, 1935. How could he have ignored Jinnah, given their political congruence?
Churchill made nice with G.D Birla. He had no problem sucking up to Rich or Royal Hindus. Jinnah, at that time, seemed a man with a brilliant future- behind him.
Both, as sharp politicians, had to ensure that the connections remained hidden.
There was no connection. Churchill was seen as a useless old fogey. Jinnah was disliked by the Brits- e.g. Lord Reading- because they saw he was determined to have Independence.
What was Churchill’s deeper motivation in favouring Jinnah and the ML?
Jinnah supported the War. That's it. There's your motivation.
After the outbreak of WWII, British strategic planners concluded in 1941 that a Muslim state carved out of British India would be their long-term ally in that oil rich, Islamic region (according to Narendra Singh Sarila
an equally stupid ex-diplomat
in The Shadow of the Great Game, 2005).
No. The Brits thought only a united Indian could hold the frontier against a Soviet backed Afghan regime. Don't forget the Brits had divided up Persia with the Soviets during the War. Incidentally, they used Hindu Gurkhas in Iraq against the pro-Axis regime. There was always the fear that Indian Muslim troops might not want to fire upon Arab or Persian Muslims. Don't forget, the Brits and the Americans toppled Mossadegh so the Brits could keep their hands on the oil of Khuzestan. On the other hand, the Americans did use Pakistan for its U2 surveillance flights. But that did not concern the Brits.
At the Churchill Archives (during two-month archival research in 2004, and on subsequent visits to Britain) I located correspondence dating to late 1946 between the private secretaries to Leader of the Opposition Churchill, and another leading member of the Conservative Party, ‘Rab’ Butler.
Who had no problem with getting shot of Britain's Indian headache.
Churchill sent him the ‘file’ containing his correspondence with Jinnah, which was returned a month later. But no such ‘file’, or substantive correspondence, exists in the papers that Churchill personally transferred to the Archives in the early 1960s.
Because the thing didn't matter in the slightest.
My search at the British National Archives brought up Jinnah’s letter to Churchill of January 2, 1941. That is the first known, surviving, substantive message from the one to the other. It has the flavour of a continuing dialogue; Jinnah extravagantly claimed that he enjoyed the support of 90 percent ‘Mussalmans’ of British India. That claim was fiction,
less so than Gandhi's claim that he himself was a 'Harijan' as well as a Muslim and thus represented all Indians.
though Jinnah had gained in support, after the 1938 provincial elections, when ML barely won 23 percent of the seats reserved for Muslims, failing to gain power in a single of the 14 provinces. By the early 1940s, support for the ML had grown, partly through the indirect message to British officials via PM Churchill’s patronage of Jinnah.
No. Once Congress resigned office, there was a power vacuum and lots of money to be made in various black markets. Muslim entrepreneurs saw that without Hindu competition they could get very very rich. Also, without the British umpire, Civil Servants could be as corrupt as fuck. However, it was the Army which would do best in 'the land of the Pure'. Still, so long as the Japs were at the gate, Churchill's patronage didn't greatly matter. The sly Mahatma's policy of sulking in Jail might win Congress the favor of the new Imperial masters of India.
We know from David Stafford’s Churchill and Secret Service (2007) that Churchill was among the very first leaders to actively deploy intelligence agencies.
The Brits in India had a better intelligence setup than the folks back home. Churchill's secret service was full of Commie agents.
But those British papers remain closed;
Lots of them were shit. My grandfather is accused of stealing granny's jewelry to give to prostitutes in a secret police file. The truth is, his father-in-law was a Police Inspector who knew him to be of good character- which is why he married his daughter to him. As for the prostitutes, Grandfather had indeed been part of a Jain philanthropist's scheme to rehabilitate them.
India’s pre-1947 Intelligence Bureau sent to London all its sensitive papers, and destroyed the remainder, before the August 1947 transfer of power.
Thus curbing a nuisance.
NATURALLY, SAFEGUARDING BRITAIN through World War II, steering the Allies to victory, was Churchill’s topmost priority.
Congress's top most priority was to sulk safely in jail while other people did the fighting. The Mahatma's 'do or die' actually meant 'do nothing and thus avoid dying'.
And we have ample evidence of his strong leadership. But his remit included Empire affairs, including management of British India, especially the insistent self-rule demands of the INC and the ML.
The problem was that everybody thought Churchill was not entirely sane on the subject of India. Still, he managed to fight off American interference well enough. What helped was the Yankee obsession with China. But this also worked in Nehru's favor. Chiang Kai Shek thought Nehru would be a valuable ally- unlike the cretin Bose.
One of Churchill’s greatest WWII follies was his personal failure to initiate preparations for Partition.
No. That was a wholly Indian affair. If darkies want to stab each other, fuck has it to do with Whiteys?
Though unannounced, we have proof that Churchill had decided this by 1942. Evidence: Roosevelt’s message to Churchill of May 11, 1942 (analysed in my book).
Churchill said the Allies needed Indian troops. What was wrong with that? The fact is the Indians couldn't fight off the Japs on their own. They would have to do a deal and drop out of the war. They might become a puppet state like Thailand.
Obsessed with his India hatred,
This man is obsessed with his Churchill hatred.
he profoundly disliked that outcome.
Churchill didn't like the fact that the war was causing his country to lose a lot of blood and treasure.
But ostrich like denial of looming reality was not governance — he abdicated responsibility.
He had no responsibility. While the Brits were in power, minorities were safe enough. How is it the fault of Churchill if darkies killed each other after he was out of office and his successor decided to get the fuck out of India?
The Subcontinent paid that price.
It paid the price of being populated by Indians, not nice British people. Naturally, when the former started to run things, a lot of people died. Still, Churchill did send the Japs packing- a feat Gandhi and Nehru and Jinnah could not have achieved even if they had been united.
It is extraordinary that Indian diplomats still don't understand that without the Brits and the Americans, India would now be a province of the Japanese Empire. Nehru refused to pay the price necessary to secure India's territorial integrity as was discovered in 1962. You need to pay for Armies and Navies and smart people to direct them.
Our historians are divided over the wisdom of the August 1942 Gandhi-Nehru ‘Quit India’ call (after the failure of the March- April 1942 Cripps Mission).
Gandhi thought the Japs would win. He hadn't been to America and did not know how strong it was.
That played into British hands.
Churchill didn't have to bother much with Gandhi & Co because they did stupid shit. Still, they stayed safe in jail while Churchill and Roosevelt dealt with the big danger India faced at that time- viz. turning into a Japanese province.
On August 8, 1942, the entire working leadership of INC was jailed, from Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Maulana Azad, right down to middle ranking personalities, numbering over 70,000.
Jail was safe. The battlefield wasn't. Anyway, soon enough, Bose would arrive at Singapore having previously persuaded Indians to join Hitler's Waffen SS.
The leaders were isolated, bereft of mutual consultation for nearly three years.
Boo hoo! Meanwhile brave men were dying in battle.
And throughout, Jinnah was groomed as the putative Pakistan’s leader, privileged, protected, ‘sponsored’.
Rajaji opposed Quit India and resigned from Congress. He was protected to the same extent as Jinnah.
But no preparation was undertaken for Partition.
Curzon had partitioned Bengal but the Indian's protested and so the thing was reversed. If, at a later point, Hindus and Sikhs didn't want to live under Muslim rule and vice versa, how is this Churchill's fault?
Oh. Silly me. Churchill should have forcibly converted all Indians to the Anglican faith. That way there would have been no Partition. Either that or he should have ordered all Hindus and Sikhs to move out of Muslim majority areas.
That was at the heart of Churchill’s misgovernance.
No. What was at the heart of the misgovernance of India was the shittiness of Indians- Princes or politicians or pundits or Maha-fucking-atmas.
Roosevelt’s February 1943 plea for the release of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Azad was spurned. (FDR had addressed that request to Viceroy Linlithgow, through US representative in Delhi, William Phillips, not to Churchill).
Bose arrived in Singapore in July. Nehru had made some pugnacious remarks about fighting the Japs but his people were cowards. Congress was safer in jail where they could pretend they were 'fighting' rather than sulking while saving their own skins.
But Roosevelt had wearied of pushing Churchill on self-determination for India, failing in his repeated efforts of 1940-42, always brusquely rejected by Churchill.
Because America thought it needed British India so as to supply the Chinese 'over the hump'. The Thais, in alliance with the Japs, had cut off the Burmese route. Still, it must be said, British military performance was so shitty in 1943 that one can't blame Congress for preferring comfy jail cells.
IN THE PITHY language of the Chinese classics, Confucius advises: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”
The proper name for a country whose people are so shitty they can't feed or defend themselves is 'shithole'.
For too long, the catastrophic famine that decimated the people of East India during World War II has been mislabelled the “Bengal Famine”.
Because it actually occurred in Bournemouth.
That suited British India.
It suited the Muslim League administration in Calcutta. Lots of their people made a lot of money out of it.
The 1944-45 Commission of Inquiry (Woodhead Commission), excluded the starvation deaths and suffering in neighbouring provinces, Assam, Bihar, and Orissa, limiting the official death toll to 1.5 million. “The Great Famine of 1942-44” better captures that gross neglect of governance, the worst calamity in two centuries of British India rule.
Food had been a Provincial subject since 1937. Suppose India had created a Federal Government with responsibility for Defence, then I'd be writing this in Japanese.
The facts are straightforward. Japan’s 1942 attack in South-East Asia, coincided with low rice production in East India. The customary supplies from Burma were blocked when Burma was occupied by Japan. Fearing further land attack on India
there was a further land attack because the Japs needed Indian food and materials. Failing to get food, they starved. General Slim won by going around starving Jap troops.
and occupation, the British Indian Army destroyed private rice stocks across East India, including the food holdings of small farmers.
Nonsense! They destroyed boats but bought rice.
Merchants hoarded that staple,
Hindu Merchants- or so Suhrawardy claimed.
driving prices beyond the common man’s reach. The Administration’s disaster management collapsed.
Because Bengalis were running things just as they were in 1974.
Viceroy Linlithgow did not once visit East India, the traditional device to spur on-ground relief.
Because Linlithgow was an expert on agriculture.
British India officials endlessly begged London for extra ships for relief supplies.
Why not also demand that the Brits chuck the Japs out of Burma? India needed Burmese rice.
That had no chance; Churchill’s close aide, Lord Cherwell oversaw global shipping allocations;
No. But he did want Britain to have a larger food stock- which was perfectly sensible. As in the Great War, it was the home island which made the maximum sacrifice. I doubt whether the Brits would have bothered to defend India if America hadn't been obsessed with supplying China 'over the hump'.
his hatred for India was known.
It paled into insignificance compared to various Indians hatred for other Indians.
Those officials foolishly refused to offset food grain shipments against their regular ship allocations. Mounting starvation deaths went unheeded.
Because, in a total war, you only feed those who are contributing most to the war effort. True, the Bengalis were welcome to institute rationing so as to save lives. But, they were equally welcome to steal from the famine relief budget.
The fact that the transition to democracy led to big famines in Bengal in both 1943 and 1974 proves that Churchill kept stealing rice from poor Bengalis even after he was dead.
Leo Amery was the cabinet minister handling India affairs throughout Churchill’s first premiership. A Harrow-mate, senior in school to Churchill by a few years, his daily diary is a revealing resource, deserving close study by Indian historians.
Not really. Amery had different views from Churchill. Because provincial autonomy had gone through, the role of the Sec. of State for India was diminished. Amery was frustrated. Worse, his son had gone over to the Nazis. His was a bed of nails.
Other key players have written of the Churchill-Amery ‘frenemy’ relationship, and spectacular fights at Cabinet meetings. What do we learn from those accounts?
The Empire was fucked. Without America, the Japs would have taken a big chunk out of East India, if not the whole country. Bose's mistake was to underestimate America. Otherwise he'd have been the Rashtrapati of a Japanese puppet state.
One: the first time Churchill discussed a strategy for dealing with India was in 1945; he detested dealing with India.
After the fall of Singapore, India was lost- unless the Americans decided otherwise and the British Indian Army could take a break from sucking ass big time. But Roosevelt's pound of flesh was Indian independence. America wouldn't support the Dutch when they tried to retake Indonesia. France in Vietnam was a different kettle of fish because of the Communist threat.
Two: Amery’s first mention of the Great Famine was on December 24, 1942. Later: “… the Cabinet generally treated the matter as a bluff on India’s part…” (August 4, 1943).
Punjab mattered because Punjabis were good soldiers. Bengal didn't.
“Winston was prepared to admit that some things should be done but very strong on the point that Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war…it is just as important to get food to Greece…” (September 24, 1943).
The Greeks had kicked Mussolini's ass. They had tied up a lot of German troops. Bengal's Bose had gone over to the Axis. Fazl ul Haq was allied to his elder brother.
“My statement (in Parliament) that perhaps a million may have died from famine or its indirect consequences in Bengal made no stir…” (January 20, 1944).
Because Bengal had an elected Premier. Westminster wasn't responsible for what was happening there.
Three: Churchill corresponded directly with Viceroy Linlithgow, with Amery left out, evidently via the secret services.
So what? Amery wasn't in the War Cabinet. One worry for the Brits was reports that certain Princes were in contact with Axis powers. The other, obviously, had to do with Bose and other revolutionaries.
None of this is available. Four: on his final fast in early 1944, when Gandhi came close to dying, Churchill saw this as farce, claiming Gandhi dined better than he did.
Gandhi's fast was pure farce. Millions were 'doing and dying'. Others- including the Dutch- were starving to death. The Maha-crackpot was neither doing nor dying nor starving. He soon gave up his fast.
Five: for all their rancour, Amery makes no reference to Churchill’s dialog with Jinnah, safeguarding that secrecy.
Why would Jinnah keep any such dialog secret? Churchill was important back then. If the guy is talking to you, you make sure, one way or another, everybody knows.
Fearing land attack, the British Indian Army destroyed rice stocks across East India, including food holdings of farmers.
No. They bought food. Boat denial was a different matter. But what it signalled was that the Brits wouldn't defend Bengal. They would run away as they had run away from Burma. It was only after America leapt in with both feet and lots and lots of aeroplanes that General Slim was able to go on the offensive. Even then, he preferred to go around Japanese pockets rather than fight them. Starvation killed more Japs than allied bullets.
Churchill’s personal responsibility?
That fucking racist bastard prevented a large portion of India becoming a Japanese colony. Fuck you Churchill! Fuck you very much!
He ignored disaster relief; not a single of his famous directives (‘Action This Day’), was issued.
Because India had Provincial Autonomy. In any case, its people were shit. Left to themselves, they would have become a Japanese colony.
The Viceroy downwards, the British India administration remained conspicuously maladroit; Churchill ignored that gross failure.
After the fall of Singapore, Churchill counted for little. The Brits would have to surrender or run the fuck away from Burma and points East on their own initiative.
Field Marshal Wavell, commanding the Indian Army,
he was so shit at that job that he was kicked upstairs. His big idea was to evacuate the White population from Hindu majority areas towards Karachi from where they could embark for South Africa or Blighty or whatever.
took charge as Viceroy in August 1943. He promptly went to Bengal to spur relief, the very first Viceregal journey to the disaster zone.
He knew he had to rebuild morale. Soldiers could feel good about themselves for doing a bit of relief work. However, American air-power was needed for the Allies to go on the offensive. The big problem in Burma was
1) re-supply. The Allies could get air-drops and thus wait out the starving Japs.
2) Malaria. Slim forced his men to take their anti-malarial tablets though they tasted horrible. Still, it was only after the Burmese turned against the Japs that Slim could make progress. It must be said, in this theater, as elsewhere, Mountbatten was useless.
Viceroy Wavell said: London treated India with “neglect…sometimes even hostility and contempt”.
Lots of people hated Churchill. It was only after he had a stroke that his Party canonized him.
Churchill’s refrain: the Greeks needed food grains more than the Bengalis, “who were half starved anyway”.
Greeks weren't stabbing each other or stealing money from famine relief. It was worthwhile saving them from Communism. India was welcome to go down the toilet which, under Nehru, it did pretty thoroughly.
Most Churchill biographers have skated lightly over these facts.
Because saying 'Indians were and are shit' isn't politically correct.
Churchill scholar Piers Brendon writes: “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Churchill’s reluctance to alleviate the Bengal Famine stemmed, at least in part, from a racist animus.”
It is harder to avoid the conclusion that Indians are shit. If they hadn't been shit they wouldn't have been ruled by Turks and Brits. Sadly, Churchill prevented their coming under the benevolent rule of the Japanese.
F ROM THE 1920s onwards, Churchill had but one formula to deal with India’s demand for self-governance: extern Gandhi, out of India.
Okay. He was a silly-billy. Externing hadn't worked with Zaghloul. The UK had to accept unilateral Egyptian independence in 1922 a short while after the Maha-crackpot surrendered unconditionally. What is unforgiveable about Churchill is that he prevented India surrendering unconditionally to Japan or Thailand or the Patagonians or any other country which showed an interest in enslaving that shithole.
Days after August 8, 1942, when 70,000+ INC leaders and middle rankers were arrested, Churchill’s Cabinet instructed Viceroy Linlithgow to shift Gandhi to Aden, and other top leaders to East Africa.
If that is the case, Churchill's writ did not run in India.
The Labour leaders in the Cabinet, supposedly friends of INC, did not dissent.
Why did 'Labour leaders' want to win the war? Why didn't they heed Gandhi's advise and surrender to Hitler? It is because they weren't genuine chaddi buddies of the INC. Also, my own research has revealed, many of them were White and didn't even like curry.
But the otherwise spineless Linlithgow balked; he and his 12-member Executive Council unanimously refused.
Because they knew Gandhi was shit. Still, he could be useful. If the Brits had to evacuate India, they could say Gandhi had given them permission to depart though, in 1939, he wrote that the Brits mustn't leave till they handed over the Army to the INC because, otherwise, the Muslims and the Punjabis (regardless of creed) would enslave the non-violent Hindoooo.
They understood how such actions would set India on fire.
No. They understood that having Gandhi close at hand could be useful- if Indians showed some sign of wanting to make themselves useful in the defence of their own country.
Commencing around 1926, Churchill constantly abused Gandhi, Hindus and India, with singularly nasty language, full of invective.
Muslims never abused Hindus. However, it was only the Japs who turned up on the border with their cocks out to ram up India's arsehole.
“Half-naked fakir” was his epithet for Gandhi that stuck.
'Seditious barrister' was true enough. But Gandhi was posing as a Hindu Mahatma, not a Muslim fakir.
Churchill could not grasp the political calculation and ‘image branding’ behind Gandhi’s choice of attire.
Yes he could. The guy was pretending to represent the poor. Actually, he was representing the rich. That's why Churchill was very friendly to G.D Birla.
Gandhi’s response? Attending the 1930 Second Round Table Meeting
which occurred in 1932
in London, Gandhi sought a meeting, to no avail.
His son, Randolph, met Gandhi. Later Churchill met Birla. But Churchill didn't count for much at that time. Gandhi had frustrated the two attempts by Labour governments to do something for India. The third time was the charm. This was because Atlee (who had been part of the Simon Commission) had taken Gandhi's measure. He would ignore the Maha-crackpot so as to abandon India to whatever fate it might chose for itself.
In 1935 and 1936, Gandhi sent two emissaries to meet Churchill, with olive branches, even thanking Churchill for his concerns for India’s poor. Churchill graciously received GD Birla, major industrialist, and Mira Behn, formerly Madeleine Slade, daughter of a British Admiral. But beyond nice, empty words, Churchill did not move an iota.
He had no power. The Tory mainstream passed and then implemented the 1935 Act. Congress sulked but ultimately formed Ministries.
That raw animosity in Churchill’s hatred for Hindus remains inexplicable.
Because it didn't exist. If he believed Dr. Ambedkar, he was showing faith in a particular type of Hindu- a highly educated Dalit Hindu- who said high caste Hindus treated his people worse than shit.
His direct 1896-99 experiences, dealing with Indians were confined to the typical servants of British subalterns, and local merchants at the periphery of cantonments, especially the Hindu moneylenders, to whom Churchill took frequent recourse.
Churchill served in a Muslim regiment and thus, like many Brits, developed an admiration for Islam and a preference for Muslim culture. The fact is, A.O Hume, who set up the INC, was a Vedantin who advocated cow protection. Sir Syed Ahmed and other Muslim notables had sought to create a parallel organization but Muslims were disunited. Many hated the Aligarh boys or remained obsessed with ancient sectarian animosities.
One should also mention the influence of the charismatic W.S Blunt, a great friend of his father, on the young Winston. I should explain, Blunt- who introduced Mohammad Abduh to Randolph and was a patron of al-Afghani- was so fucking stupid that he became a pawn in Cromer's hand such that a 'veiled protectorate' was established in Egypt. Churchy-baby- as T.E Lawrence called Winston any time he came upon his tits- looked forward to a time when nice Muslim Sultans or Nawabs or Caliphs or whatever would handsomely reward the Brits for agreeing that the only people worse than kaffirs were the fucking Yahudis.
The polo-playing princes and their retinue, with whom he consorted in his passion for that game, did not figure in his ‘Hindu’ typology.
Like his Daddy, Churchy-baby didn't like 'Babus'- Bengali or otherwise. Princes, however, were totes cool- provided they were as rich as fuck.
Strangely, it was Katherine Mayo’s venomous Mother India (1927) that gave him the vocabulary for Hindu hatred, weaponising latent hostility.
Fuck off! Lesbian Mayo was bought and paid for by the Publicity Division staffed by cunts like, the Kipling wannabe, Edmund Candler who wrote 'Sri Ram, Revolutionist'.
There is a surfeit of evidence for Churchill’s racist venom.
It's not racist to prefer Muslim to Hindu darkies or to feel more sympathy for Ambedkar's people than the fucking Nehru dynasty.
Did that anger partly owe to his obsessive, futile five-year campaign against the Government of India Act, 1935, which so badly damaged his own political career?
The fucker had fucked up big fucking time and was, in political terms, deader than the fucking dodo. He had been a shit Chancellor and the Gallipoli albatross remained affixed around his neck. Still, he wrote well and was in better health than Lloyd George
SHORTLY AFTER RELEASE from 33 months of prison, Gandhi wrote to Churchill, his only direct communication. After a self-deprecating reference to a “naked fakir” he said: “I approach you then as such and ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine and through them those of the world.”
Gandhi, like Bertrand Russell, some years earlier, had told the Brits to surrender to the Nazis. Neither of those senile cunts could be of any fucking use for the duration of the hostilities.
That was an extraordinary act, overcoming rancour, to cope with the looming turmoil of the Partition.
Triggered by Gandhi. Why the fuck did he negotiate with Jinnah as an equal?
Churlishly, Churchill did not respond, later claiming he never received the letter (though sent through the Viceroy’s Office in New Delhi).
OMG! Rana has found proof that Churchill was a politician! He sometimes lied about getting letters from nutters.
Where was Churchill’s statesmanship, or fair play?
It was there where Germany and Japan surrendered.
As Indians we should know our past.
We should understand that we have been shit for a thousand years. That's how come Turks and Brits ruled over us. But for Churchy-baby, we would now be writing in Japa-fucking-nese.
History is too important to be confined to simplified textbooks, learnt by rote at school, and then forgotten, save in stylised images.
History isn't important at all. Money is. Do stuff which makes you lots of it. Then immigrate to where Whitey will protect your wealth.
Nor should we treat history as a political football, as happens easily in our social media age, when we enjoy ubiquitous access to global audiences through smartphones, and quick soundbites. Without deeper Indian research, how shall we tell our story to the world at large?
What is that story? India was and is and will always be shit compared to England or Japan or other countries which, for some strange reason, don't want to be shit just so as to be able to blame dead White dudes for their continuing shittiness.
Churchill was correct that understanding the past deepens our capacity to anticipate the future,
Churchill didn't anticipate shit. The 'economic consequences' of Winston, contra Keynes, was the loss of Britain's South Asian Empire. Churchy & his posh chums let Japan go ass-to-mouth on the Royal Navy.
though he did not live up to that adage.
No. He was the descendant of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. He lived up to that heritage well enough. India and Pakistan remained within the Commonwealth- (Burma, parts of which his daddy annexed, didn't)- and the mountebank Mountbatten remained very close to Nehru till the latter died.
History helps us understand ourselves,
Us guys were fucked by Churchill. But it wasn't just Churchy who looted us. Who stole our sense of humour? It was P.G Woodhouse's elder fucking brother!
the world around us. It enriches our lives.
Emigrating to some White controlled, or otherwise Capitalist, patch of the 'world around us' can indeed enrich our lives- that's true enough. But so can shitting on elderly ex-IFS officers who write worthless tripe.
