Facile Devji on Gandhi's enemies

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Why Prisoner's dilemma is mischievous shite- part 1

Law Enforcement can offer two sorts of incentives to get evidence against criminals. One sort is a monetary or reputational reward. The other is to use Criminal Informants who essentially buy the right to run their illegal operations in return for offering up a certain number of villains for legal punishment.

Clearly, the former course is to be preferred. The latter can be gamed by Organized Crime.
This is not to say that there is no grounds for clemency for criminals who confess to all their dealings, provide testimony against their associates, and genuinely turn over a new leaf. Indeed, as happened with Vidocq, there may be case for appointing a reformed criminal head of the Detective Force. However, what matters is whether the criminal has had a genuine change of heart and is seeking atonement.

Using 'immunity' to buy evidence is self defeating. It turns crime into a currency whose supply will be regulated by a Godfather so as to maximize 'seignorage'.  The Courts and Prisons, funded by the tax payer, become the Federal Reserve Bank and Fort Knox of Organized Crime.

All this was well known from countless detective novels and noir B Movies by the time the always hilariously stupid RAND corporation interested in this issue,

What folllows is Albert W. Tucker's canonical account of Prisoner's dilemma. Could anything be more utterly silly and radically mischievous? Judge for yourself-

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned.

If they are members of a gang- as opposed to just opportunistic allies- then there is at least one additional party who has an interest in both of them preserving omerta. Even if it is just a two member gang, the 'fence' or 'Godfather', has an interest in their keeping shtum. Suppose no third party is involved- perhaps this pair are rapists or serial killers- still, if there is a 'gang' element to their behaviour then they have different 'threat points' and 'Shapley values'. Gangs have hierarchies which is why they can feature entry and exit. If both criminal are equal in all respects then there may be a partnership, but there is no 'gang'.

Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge.

The prosecutor should convict both on the lesser charge and then see which of them will crack first once in prison. Letting one go free is silly. Clearly, the more ruthless of the two will offer up the weaker one- who may have been coerced into the crime- as a sacrifice.

Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent.

This is crazy shit. Why not just give one of them a blow job for confessing he helped the Judge kill the D.A?  What Jury is going to believe testimony given purely for the purpose of escaping a jail sentence? An innocent man, who can't afford a lawyer, should take the deal and let some stranger take the fall.

The offer is:
If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison 

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison (and vice versa) 

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will serve only one year in prison (on the lesser charge).

Why not jail A & B on the lesser charge and then tell them both that the other has implicated them in the more serious crime?  If that doesn't work, tell them their wife is being romanced by a rival or that their elderly Mum wants to see them before she dies or something of that sort?

However, all this is academic. If these guys belong to a criminal gang then they both understand that the bigger 'earner' for the Godfather must come out while the low man on the totem pole must take the long stretch so as to make his bones and show himself worthy of promotion within the gang.

Let us now turn to what a rational person would do if caught in this dilemma. The answer is to confess but do so in a manner which suggests one has a mental illness. This is because judicial games have a coordination and a discoordination aspect. The safer course is to cooperate in the coordination game- i.e. do what is expected- while hedging on a discoordination game- i.e. find a different game to transfer to.

In practice, it is regret-minimizing to keep the option of entry and exit with respect to the games available to one. Among criminals, there is a 'loyalty' game, a 'betrayal' game, and 'I'm a crazy lunatic' game. Marek Kaminiski- who spent some time in a Polish prison- has described this in his book 'Games Prisoners Play'.  Of course, if he'd been really smart he'd have never got sent to prison in the first place. He should have assumed a 'Good soldier Schweik' type imbecility- i.e. talked Zizek like crap so as to survive both Communism and Neo-Liberalism and thus flourish in the world of Trump and Kaczynski.

Game theory is irrational; its dilemmas wholly absurd and its paradoxes mere stupidity.

Aparna Kapadia on Mahatma Gandhi

An essay by Aparna Kapadia, a History Professor of some type, published in scroll.in, raises an important question. Is it possible for a person of Indian origin to write a single line about Mahatma Gandhi which is neither false nor fatuous?

Consider her opening line-

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, about 900 men of the Mahiya pastoralist-warrior community came together, sitting-in for months on public grounds in Junagadh in Kathiawad without much to eat or drink.

No such thing happened. Anyway, Mahiyas weren't 'warriors' coz they didn't have guns. Indians may have been as stupid as shit but they weren't so stupid as to think that 'warriors' could get by without guns. Why? Coz guys with guns would shoot them if they tried to pretend they were warriors able to throw a scare into people. The Mahiyas discovered this the hard way during their brief 'rebellion' against the Nawab of Junagadh in 1882.

The Mahiyas had served the kings of Junagadh for generations, and in return for their military services to the state, they had been granted tax-free lands.

How had they 'served'? Even if their service could be described as 'military', once they ceased to perform it, they weren't entitled to any tax rebate.

Now, their royal patrons, with whom they shared deep historical ties had decided to impose an unfair tax burden on their pastures, the source of their livelihood.

What 'deep historical ties' could they possibly have? The Babi dynasty had only arrived from Afghanistan in the seventeenth century. The Mahiyas were indigenous. They had played no particular part in the Babi rivalry with the Marathas. No doubt, during disturbed times, their propensity for violence meant they could grab a couple of dozen villages for themselves. But, the times were no longer disturbed. Their 'threat point' had vanished. In 1882, they rebelled against a new tax and were massacred on Kannada Hill. After that, they quietened down. Still, the Muslim convert 'Babrias' may have claimed some special relationship with the Nawab. But that was based on confessional identity rather than some historic link. In any case, what is salient here is that the triumph of the British had unloosed any other bond there might have been much earlier in the century.

All this can be verified in two minutes of a Google search. Yet Kapadia paints a picture of a warrior clan, betrayed by its laird, forced to pay taxes to reside in what was its own sovereign territory.

But the Mahiyas’ sense of loyalty was strong

Their loyalty was a pretense. Back then, everybody claimed to be terribly, terribly, loyal to the dynasty, or the usurper, or any random dacoit who happened to turn up.

and instead of taking on arms to protest the injustice,

in which case they would have been massacred and consigned to 'criminal tribe' status

they resorted to another method of resistance – risaamanu, the temporary severing of relations between friends or family members, or as in this case, between patrons and clients.

How was this a method of resistance? It was stupidity simply. I suppose its purpose was to foster in-group solidarity through collective suffering. No doubt, the women were doing the work while the men-folk competed with each other in seeing who could carry on with this imbecility longest for the purpose of thymotic signalling.

'Risaamanu'- or boycott- only works if the tie that is being suspended was useful to the other party. In this case, it wasn't. Consider what happened when the good people of Chirala-Pirala decided that it was obnoxious to pay municipal taxes. Having consulted Gandhi, they decided to perform 'desh-tyag'- i.e. left their homes to go stay in the jungle where they became very ill. They then had to return home and pay the tax. This was deeply unfair because, as their leader- a guy with an M.A from Edinburgh pointed out- they didn't need drains and dispensaries and schools and police stations and other such godless innovations. Even if the satanic Sarkar forced them to put up with such things, they'd be damned if they would pay for them through municipal cesses and participation in local government. Sadly, the mosquitoes in the Jungle kept biting these wonderful freedom fighters and so their 'desh tyaag' was to no avail.

Despite hardships, the Mahiyas did not budge, did not attack the villages nearby for food, and most importantly, did not take to violence against the rulers who had subjected them to new taxes.

Because if they had done so there would have been a much bigger massacre than the one in 1882. Furthermore, they would be classed as a criminal tribe and thus have to support themselves by petty theft and prostitution.

The Junagadh king remained unmoved, however, and ultimately, the Mahiyas were defeated at the points of guns, even as they stuck to their commitment of not using violence against their former patrons.

Why does Kapadia tell us this story? Some stupid guys with bows and arrows think gathering en masse will intimidate the powers that be. Then a few chaps with guns show up and they disperse quietly. Their only commitment was to not getting massacred again. They had no means 'to inflict violence on their former patrons' and get away with it. Why? Coz the Brits were everywhere. There was nowhere they could run away to.

Why is Kapadia pretending that this story is about Non-Violence as opposed to the overwhelming superiority of Western weapons and military tactics? `

Kathiawad, the peninsular portion of present-day Gujarat, is also where Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was from. He was born in the sea-side town of Porbandar, a prominent princely state, and grew up in Rajkot, less than 200 km away from his birth-place.

Porbandar was a 13 gun state- scarcely prominent at all save in comparison to Rajkot, which was 9 gun. Still the British political agent resided there, because of its central location, so it was considered more secure. Gandhi completed high school in Ahmedabad, not in Kathiawad. It should be noted that Porbandar was relegated from first class to third class status, because of mismanagement, while Gandhi's dad was Divan.

Until he left for London to train as a lawyer at the age of 18 in 1888, Gandhi had mainly lived in this part of western India and had received his primary and secondary education there.

Gandhi had only lived in western India till he left for London.

Later, Gandhi would go on to work for the firm of a fellow Kathiawadi in South Africa, where he established himself as a political activist of repute.

This is misleading. Gandhi did not establish himself as a political activist while working for Dada Abdulla. He completed that case and was preparing to return home when a political change in Durban caused the Indian community to ask him to stay and take up political work, in which case they would guarantee his income. Gandhi thought this political work could be completed in a short time and did in fact make a trip back home a little later with the intention of settling permanently in India. Once again, political changes within South Africa called him back- this time with valuable support from the Indian National Congress and the Tatas. In other words, Gandhi was no stranger to India but rather drew strength, for the South African struggle, from his extensive Indian contacts and supporters.

And after decades of being away, when he returned to India in 1915, surrounded by much anticipation and fanfare,he would choose to evoke this heritage by donning the traditional Kathiawadi dress – plain cotton cloak, turban, and dhoti – in contrast to the suits preferred by the other Indian leaders at a reception held in his honour at a fashionable Bombay venue.

Arguably, this was traditional peasant costume rather than an elaborate regional variation of it. Gandhi was not trying to emphasize his regional peculiarity but rather appealing to something universal- viz. the desire to appear a yokel rather than a shyster so as to better swindle the yokels.

Traditionally, the people of Kathiawad had not just used dharnas, or sit-ins but had also developed many other ways to gain political leverage. From today’s vantage point, some of these, like risaamanu and fasting seem to share common elements with Gandhi’s ideas. In contrast,others like self-punishment, self-immolation, as well as well as forms of guerilla warfare are distinctively “un-Gandhian”.

Kapadia seems to be insisting on Kathiawad's difference from the rest of India. Yet no such difference obtained. Ambedkar has pointed out that the same tactics she refers to were used by high caste people in Maharashtra- generally to the detriment of the Dalits. There were also bardic communities, like the Charans, whose specialty was committing suicide so as to inflict a curse upon the wrong doer- but such mischegos can be found elsewhere in India. Hunger strikes and self-immolation, like guerilla tactics, too abounded in an area much of which had been recently under the Marathas.

How much was Gandhi directly influenced by this tradition in framing his political methodology? Historian Howard Spodek answers that as the son of a high official in the Porbandar and Rajkot states, at the very least Gandhi would have been familiar with these ways of negotiating power and settling disputes.

He would have been familiar with their singular inefficacy- that's why his family spent a lot of money sending him to London. British politics was a story about violent protest being quickly and brutally crushed whereas 'bourgeois' radicalism could bring about quite substantial reform precisely because the working class was increasingly conservative and thus there was no contagion risk. Indian Nationalists could not follow the Irish path because land reform- which is what the masses really wanted- would have hurt their own families most of whom were dependent, in one way or another, on rents extracted from an emaciated peasantry.

At the same time, Middle class India faced an existential threat- viz. a Youth revolt whose radicalism could turn insurrectionary at the slightest prompting. The Brits could shoot your kids, but to appease the masses, they would also do land reform. So, not only do you lose your sons, you also lose your financial security. The question for middle aged leaders was how to appeal to the young without alienating the British and putting a target on their own back. In this context, Gandhi could scarcely have been oblivious of the hunger-strikes of the Suffragettes and the tactics used by the Swadeshi movement. The British establishment had decided that they could live with such manifestations of rebelliousness in essentially silly creatures whom it was wiser to pamper than to persecute.

Gandhi needed to adopt similar self-harming strategies so as to put clear blue water between himself and the radicals who were prepared to carry out assassinations. In any case, he had been obliged to embrace fasting as a means of purging oneself of sin while in South Africa coz his son had been getting amorous, under his roof, with the married daughter of his biggest supporter. A lesser man would have topped himself.

This specific version of the Mahiya protest against the Junagadh kingdom is a partially fictionalised account of real incidents, told by Jhaverchand Meghani (1896-1947), the well-known, writer and folklorist from Kathiawad, who Gandhi once referred to as rashtriya shayar, or national poet.

 So, it was a pack of lies.

What is known though is that the mode of protest the Mahiyas chose was certainly traditional to Kathiawad which was home to hundreds of small kingdoms which had been around for centuries; even at Independence over 200 of the 550 Princely States of India were located in this region of present-day Gujarat.

It was not a traditional form of protest for the simple reason that it did not work at all. On the other hand, actual tribal levies, or other types of militia soldiers, do from time to time signal their displeasure at an outcome by firstly showing solidarity and secondly discontinuing some normal practice. The 'Curragh Mutiny'- during which British officers signaled their willingness to resign rather than have to bear arms against the Ulster Unionists- is an example.  This is purely a bargaining game, not some 'embedded' tradition. Gujeratis aren't stupid. They are perfectly rational.

Disputes between different kingdoms often required means to garner political leverage, making Kathiawad a hotbed of political ferment and resistance.

It was a hotbed of internecine silliness of an aristocratic sort but no resistance whatsoever. Compared to the Hurs of Sindh, or the Faqir of Ipi, Gujarat was peaceful and its people were rising rapidly in education and civic sense.

In Kathiawad, Gandhi had also grown up in an eclectic socio-religious milieu.He mentions his encounters with Vaishanavism, Jainism, and Islam in his autobiography but he would have also known followers of Zoroastrianism and other Hindu devotional sects.

So would anyone from almost everywhere else in India. In the bigger cities, one would also find Iraqi Jews and Armenian Christians and Chinese dentists and so forth.

Kathiawad was a region where different religions had co-existed for centuries thanks to its links with the Indian Ocean trading world.

The same was true of Kerala and the Konkan coast and Calcutta and so forth. Why keep harping on things which Kathiawad has in common with other littoral parts of India?

While it was a predominantly Hindu region in the nineteenth century, for ages, the Hindu and Muslim communities in Kathiawad had lived side by in relative amity.

As they had done in Sindh and East Bengal. Gee, I wonder why that didn't work out? Could it be because Islam was the majority there?

On occasion, as in other parts of India, the two faiths also mingled. For instance, Gandhi’s mother, to whom he was deeply attached, belonged to the small Pranami sect. Krishna-worship was central to the Pranamis but the sect’s eighteenth-century founder also drew from Islamic practices and beliefs. While the Pranami faith spread to a few other parts of the subcontinent, it is in Kathiawad that this syncretic religious order had originated.

So what? Dayanand Saraswati was from Gujarat. His Arya Samaj, like the Brahmo Samaj, has an Islamic rejection of 'idols'. But, by the time Gandhi was in school, this current of thought was flourishing throughout India. Gandhi's mummy's fasting may have been important. Her being a 'Pranami' wasn't important. Daddy's being a member of the Pushtimarga was very important. This was because the syphilitic hereditary head of that sect was fucking his disciple's wives. The Maharaj libel case exposed this scandal a few years before Gandhi was born. That's why he was furious with his Daddy for re-marrying three times. 

It is not a stretch to imagine then that at 18, when Gandhi made his way to London, he was not a young man from a remote village who had set out across the sea to a large international city, but instead, someone who had already encountered and lived a complex cosmopolitanism.

It is a stretch to imagine this because, by Gandhi's own account, he was a callow youth unused to big city ways. Later, he found it difficult to settle down in Bombay- precisely because it was 'bustling' and 'cosmopolitan'. Even Ahmedabad was too big. He was happiest in Wardha which was wholly rural.

Indeed, Rajkot was no bustling metropolis like Bombay, but his specific setting had perhaps fitted him with the tools needed to embark on a new journey of experiments in England.

It was not his 'specific setting' but his family connections which gave him the tools he needed. Those tools were (1) sufficient hard currency and (2) basic English literacy and numeracy. Neither had any specific connection with Kathiawad. The Rupee was freely convertible and Government inspected schools taught to an acceptable standard because the Brits were running things.

 Kapadia is pretending that any street urchin in Rajkot could have jumped on a steamer and gone to London and returned, three years later, as a Barrister.

To be clear, it was later in London, South Africa, and eventually back in India, that Gandhi developed satyagraha as a unique mix of elements, specific to his early twentieth century context and experiences.

This is as clear as mud. I know of nothing that happened while Gandhi was here in London which had any relation at all to satyagraha. In South Africa, he got money and political backing from Indian politicians and businessmen which enabled him to pursue what was essentially a Trade Union type action. Smuts could get rid of the Chinese, who weren't British subjects, but if he pressed the Indian 'coolie' too hard the fellow would have to be sent back to India at British expense.

Indians in South Africa were a vulnerable minority. It would be very foolish to use the same tactics there as in India where non-Indians were a much smaller, even more vulnerable, minority.

In addition to indigenous influences, his ideas were shaped by the works of many international thinkers including the Russian Leo Tolstoy, the Englishman John Ruskin, and the American Henry David Thoreau.

Meanwhile, Dadabhai Naoroji was rubbing shoulders with Rosa Luxemburg and Plekhanov! Born 40 years before Gandhi, Naoroji was 40 years ahead of him all the time!

But Naoroji was a Bombay man, through and through, and had been an M.P in London. These were truly international topoi.  Gokhale and the moderates needed someone who could represent the small towns and pocket Princedoms whose vision could at best be National. Tolstoy was intensely national- Russia as the Christ bearing nation etc- and more than a little insane- as was Ruskin but both represented great Imperial countries and were great men in their own right. India's place would be more humble and its new Rishis needed to reflect this humility. Thoreau, who mingled' pure Walden water... with the sacred water of the Ganges' was a better fit. Clearly, Indians would have little role in the wider world, save as cogs in machines whose purpose they could little understand and approve, yet, Indians needed a class of seers amongst themselves whose conscience had to be free enough to undertake needful reform- more especially regarding the Hindu religion.
Thoreau wrote- 'The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.'

This passage encapsulates the dilemma of the Indian patriot. In so far as one contributed to global security or prosperity, one did it mechanically, at the command of others; in so far as one managed or decided matters with one's own brain- those matters were essentially contingent, not essential, and thus a matter of expediency not principle. Yet some sort of Thoreauian mishegoss was necessary for a notion of Nationality to survive- and such a notion was necessary if Reform were to be a Moral, not a Mercenary, project because otherwise none would bell the cat and risk being seen, however transitorily, as an Ibsenite 'Enemy of the People'. 

My point is that there is no 'international' program here. The Christian or the Khilafatite, or the votary of Spencer or of Marx, might have such a program but such programs were wholly disconnected with the problem of the small town Reformer battling Casteism and Misogyny and Child Marriage and so forth.

Gandhi, being outside India, came somewhat late to the game. This was fortunate because his own crossing of the black water would have counted against him in places like Bihar just a few short years previously when the young Rajendra Prasad was battling to reverse the out-casteing of a Kayastha barrister who had just returned from London.

Gandhi, in South Africa, like Shyamji Krisha Varma in London, did have links with non-India oriented movements. But Gandhi, as he tells us in his 'Experiments', insisted that the Indians keep their struggle separate from other struggles (even though they were working closing with the Chinese) whereas the Indian Revolutionaries in the UK (and in America, a little later) took the opposite route. Thus, according to his own testimony, Gandhi was a national, not international, figure.

By contrast, consider the trajectory of M.N Roy- a Jugantar revolutionary in Bengal who goes to the US in furtherance of a plot to get arms from the Kaiser. In Mexico, he helps found the Mexican Communist Party. In Moscow he rubs shoulders with Lenin and Trotsky. The Comintern sends him to China to foment a peasant revolution there. He fails and understanding that Stalin would give him short shrift, returns to India where he resumes his political career. Roy was truly international. Gandhi was solely concerned with India and the Indian diaspora.

And his earliest experiments in non-violent resistance were carried out, not in India but in South Africa.

What would have happened if he had tried violent resistance? Smuts knew the answer to that even better than Gandhi.

The true story of Gandhi's first 'experiment' is as follows. He says all Indians should go to jail for defying the Pass Law and not come out under any pretext. He names and shames those who quit after a few months of porridge. Then he himself goes to jail and discovers within a few weeks that Smuts was right all along. Indians should carry a Pass. Once they understand it is a good thing, they will do it voluntarily. What was humiliating was Smuts presumption that they would only comply out of fear of punishment.

Anyway Gandhi came out of jail preaching this new Gospel. Some Indians violently resisted Gandhi by beating the shit out of him. They suspected he had been bribed. Thus, Gandhi learned a valuable lesson. It is better to be in prison, where your own people can't beat you, than to do a deal with Whitey so as to get out early.

The reason Gandhi wasn't a complete failure in South Africa is because Smuts could deport the Chinese but not the Indians because the latter were British subjects and would have to be resettled by the Imperial Government. Thus, it was the Brits who provided Gandhi his 'threat point'.

As his most recent biographer, Ramachandra Guha points out, “Gandhi was, and remains, a genuinely trans-national figure. He was trans-national in the range of his influences and in the reach of his thought.”

Gandhi was and is a genuinely failed trans-national figure just like Hitler or Stalin or Mao. There are small groups of nutjobs in every country who are inspired by such imbeciles. But then there are also votaries of David Icke or Lyndon LaRouche or other such paranoid thinkers.

Significantly, Gandhi also went far beyond the scale and scope of what anyone had ever attempted with non-violent protest.

The British reversal of the partition of Bengal occurred before Gandhi's return to India. Khilafat and the anti-Rowlatt agitation would have gone ahead if Gandhi had never existed. No doubt, Gandhi took leadership of this movement promising to deliver Swaraj within 18 months if a certain amount of money was collected, however, he called it off and thus ensured its failure. Thus, his contribution is equivocal. Arguably, he retarded, not catalyzed, progress and thus India got less than Egypt or Iraq or even Ceylon or Burma.

Unlike his Kathiawadi precursors, he took on not a local ruler but the entire British empire: his satyagraha, or truth force, succeeded in creating a political movement that eventually broke down colonial rule.

But Colonial rule broke down everywhere in any case no matter what the complexion of the local resistance to it.

Today, non-violent resistance has gained traction all over the world.

Opposition to silly or unjust laws may or may not be non-violent. Such opposition succeeds or fails not because of the tactics used but on the basis of a calculus of costs and benefits. Osama bin Laden succeeded in getting American troops out of Saudi Arabia- the stated aim of the 9/11 attack- but, just now, after the attack on Saudi refineries, it looks as though this victory was Pyrhhic. On the other hand, many reforms arise spontaneously without any 'resistance' whatsoever on the basis of a moral consensus based on better information. By contrast, much 'resistance' is counter-productive because it is stupid or paranoid. Gandhian 'resistance' generally falls under this category.

Yet in India, while Gandhi is officially celebrated as the “father of the Indian nation”, his ideas of peaceful protest are newly controversial.

His ideas were always recognized to be merely magical and involving a puerile type of play-acting. Still, one particular political party, and one particular political dynasty, had a mythology based on some magical power Gandhi is supposed to have possessed such that a hereditary apostolic succession had continuing sanctity. According to this view, the BJP killed Gandhi and thus must be ostracized in perpetuity allowing Congress to continue to steal and screw up everything in sight. However, there are plenty of such mythologies in every region of the country. In general, cousins belong to different political parties and vilify each other for betraying their common ancestor's legacy.

Often the common line of attack is that that Gandhi’s pacifism is either too weak a remedy for our times, too outdated, or simply an aberration that only an uncommon person, a “mahatma” (great soul), or saint like him, could sustain in the real world of politics and power.

This is also the line of defense against religious nutjobs who say 'God is all powerful. Instead of buying medicines or guns to fight disease or the invader, let's just pray.' The truth is God either does not exist or desperately wants to see the back of us. Yet, it may not be politic, to admit this.
My own way of dealing with Gandhians is to demand the fast to death on the 'free Deidre Rachid issue'. But they tend to give me a wide berth.

While his symbolic legacy remains unquestioned by almost every political creed, on the left and right, the central Gandhian notion – the right to protest peacefully – is disputed.

His 'symbolic legacy' is that of endless moralizing and utter impotence- a type of political action which challenges nothing. Still, sometimes it pays to pretend that Santa Claus is the one who brings your kiddies their presents. Similarly, it can be convenient to appear to be yielding to a Saintly nutter, rather than backing down.

The Kathiawadi traditions of resistance remind us that Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance was not quite the aberration it is imagined to be.

It wasn't 'an aberration'. It was a type of stupidity everybody everywhere is subject to. Sooner or later we all futilely protest something or other.

It had deep roots in India itself, including in his own home region. Wednesday marks the 150th anniversary of his birth. On this occasion, as Gandhi’s ideas face a new test in India, it is perhaps worth recalling these small and little-known histories: the Mahiyas of Kathiawad, and other non-violent protestors of the region, whether Gandhi knew them or not, were his ancestors in more ways than one.

It is not worth recalling things which never happened. Gandhi was a Modh Bania. He did not have any Mahiya ancestry. Unlike the Mahiyas, he did well out of his stupidity because he got Birlas and Bajajs and so forth to pay for his money pit Ashrams. This is the great lesson here. Get your funding right and then indulge in imbecility.  Don't put the cart before the horse.

Christopher Browning on Trump & Hitler

Last year, Prof.Christopher Browning, wrote in the NYRB

As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.

There are no similarities at all between the economically fragile fledgling democracies of Europe in the 1920s and the current situation in the wealthiest and strongest country on the planet.

God alone knows what 'troubling differences' this cretin can find between the halcyon days of Hitler and our present misery.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations.

Why? Because it wasn't more powerful, economically and militarily, than all the other countries of the world put together. It could, I suppose, have done some 'force projection' but it would have been a great waste of 'blood and treasure'. The plain fact is that America could not occupy Germany, along with its allies. Nor could it bring down the Bolsheviks in Russia. It couldn't even intervene against Turkey despite widespread anger in America about the Armenian genocide.

Why is this cretinous Professor pretending America could have altered the trajectory of the League of Nations? Could it have defended China from Japan? There was widespread, Christian, support for the charming Madam Chiang Kai Shek, but there was very little America could do and when it did that little the result was Pearl Harbor and Hitler's, very stupid, declaration of War against America.

America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans.

How unreasonable to want loans to be repaid! America should have sent specially trained officials to wipe the bums of those former allies and to tuck them into bed and to sing them nice lullabies. America's failure to do so represents a great historical crime.

At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult.

This is nonsense. Tariffs were the same in 1927 as in 1913. Because cost of transport had fallen, international trade had increased. What caused trade to fall was a liquidity crisis which in turn was rooted on rational expectations. This preceded the Smoot Hawley tariff rise which is why most economists no longer think protectionism had much effect on the Great Depression. The thing was liquidity driven which in turn meant that Expectations had changed. But, as subsequent events showed, it was entirely Rational for Expectations to change. The fact is, the Weimar Republic was just tinsel and cardboard designed to fool the West into financing German rearmament. Once Hindenburg was elected, the future was plain to see. Similarly, it was obvious that Mussolini wouldn't just rattle his sabre indefinitely. The time would come when he would draw it in earnest. Europe was headed down the toilet. America, too, could descend into either a 'class war' type stasis or else succumb to an internecine conflict of a type well known to its Historians.

The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok.

Nonsense! Hoover spent a lot of time getting industries to avoid 'repugnant' wage competition and 'beggar my neighbor' price competition. Sadly, this increased price and wage stickiness and prolonged the Depression. America was ahead in terms of 'Competition policy', not behind. Where it fell down was in having a reliable 'lender of last resort'. 

The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

How would lots of immigrants driving down wages and literacy levels have helped America? Granted, letting in Jews would have been a good idea- but not all immigrants are Ashkenazis.

Why is this historian pretending that FDR wasn't elected and that he didn't respond 'constructively' to the Great Depression? What was FDR supposed to do to check Fascism? Invade Germany? Conquer Italy? Even now, Americans can't go to Hungary and topple Orban, or go to China and topple Xi. When they do get rid of a Gaddaffi, they soon realize it was a stupid thing to do.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Nonsense! Trump hasn't withdrawn America from anything which wasn't going down the toilet in any case. Perhaps, this historian also thinks that Trump seems intent on raping him. He should certainly report this to the police.

His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system.

This is sheer idiocy. The pre-1914 system featured Monarchies which were closely- too closely- related by marriage. There was no 'unfettered self-assertion'. There was a complicated system of alliances which was supposed to ensure the 'Balance of Power'.

That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.

There was no 'international anarchy'. Serbia, it is true, acted in an unfettered manner. The Tzar should have sympathized with the Hapsburgs and let the Serbians take their punishment. Actually, the best outcome would have been if a Muslim, not an Orthodox Christian, had killed the Archduke. Sadly, the Muslim got cold feet at the last moment. There would have been no European war if Serbia had had 'plausible deniability'. Everybody would have blamed the Turks.

This is not to say there might not have been a European War for some different reason. However, there would have had to be a reason. In those days, Military Alliances couldn't be triggered by a unilateral action. There had to be a plausible 'casus belli'.

In threatening trade wars with allies and adversaries alike, Trump justifies increased tariffs on our allies on the specious pretext that countries like Canada are a threat to our national security.

The pretext is indeed specious, but pretty much par for the course when it comes to Trade diplomacy. In any case, Trump didn't say Canada was a threat- he said not being in control of something vital for defense was dangerous. That is a reasonable view. The military needs to plan for 'worst case' scenarios.

He combines his constant disparagement of our democratic allies with open admiration of authoritarians.

But, these 'democratic allies' respond in kind. Trump's genius is to have got in his dig at them first. Now they can't break up with America coz Trump will say he already pumped and dumped them.

His naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy and his faith in a handshake with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un recall the hapless Neville Chamberlain (a man in every other regard different from Trump).

Rubbish! Chamberlain gave up on Czechoslovakia because the Sudetens had a genuine grievance and, in any case, Poland took a bite out of it. The real problem- as De Gaulle recognized- was that France had no offensive military doctrine. In 1914, it was relying on the Russian steam-roller. God knows what it was thinking in 1939.

Fortunately the US is so embedded in the international order it created after 1945, and the Republican Party and its business supporters are sufficiently alarmed over the threat to free trade, that Trump has not yet completed his agenda of withdrawal, though he has made astounding progress in a very short time.

Trump doesn't 'have an agenda of withdrawal'. His schtick is that he can get Americans a bigger slice of the 'gains from trade' in line with optimal tariff theory. Back in '68, when he was at Wharton, this was the sort of econ that was taught.

A second aspect of the interwar period with all too many similarities to our current situation is the waning of the Weimar Republic. Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril.

This is crazy shit. Hindenburg was a senile Junker war horse who was still babbling about his duty to the Kaiser on his deathbed. Who the fuck thought he'd want to 'defend German democracy?' He hated the thing. He blamed the Social Democrats for the so-called 'stab in the back'. The only reason he couldn't bring in his old pal, Ludendorff, as Chancellor was because Ludendorff was batshit crazy. He was railing against the Catholics, in Munich, during the 1923 putsch. He refused to go to jail, which is why Hitler supplanted him.

Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule.

Hindenburg concentrated power in his own hands, not the Reichstag, because he was following the General Staff's maximal plan of conquest. What he didn't know was that the 'Austrian Corporal' would command the Army's loyalty while General Schleicher would be brought down by the jealousy of his comrades.

Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Hindenburg hated the Social Democrats. So did the Communist leader, Ernst Thalmann who founded the first 'Antifa' which did not target Nazis but went after 'social fascists'- i.e. the Social Democrats. The SDs signed their death warrant by supporting Hindenburg in the 1932 election. It was obvious to everybody that this very very old man hadn't long to live. Thus the SDs were essentially quitting the political realm. They were saying 'The Army knows best'.

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions.

Just a few short paragraphs ago, this cretin told us that the Weimar Republic gave Hindenburg lots of extra powers to 'defend democracy'. Now he tells us that what Hindenburg wanted was rearmament and the suppression of human rights.

The truth is Hitler was brought into politics by the Army which saw Nazi goons as a 'force multiplier'- i.e. a militia which could be turned into soldiers once the need to appear to respect the treaty of Versailles- and thus get foreign loans- ceased to operate.

Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

So, Hitler did what they wanted more speedily and effectively than they could themselves. In the process, they were disintermediated. Blomberg, who got the Army to swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, was sacked ostensibly for marrying an ex-hooker. Others were more unlucky.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.

No! It is Tammy Wynette! Everybody knows that if she hadn't sung 'Stand by your Man', Hilary would have Bobbitted Bill and gone on to storm the White House in 2000.

He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could.

So, the Tea Party had no effect. Bailing out Wall Street while letting Main Street go broke didn't have any repercussions.  Some elderly white dude from Kentucky managed to paralyze Obama's administration all by himself.  Who knew?

As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more.

Weimar didn't have parliamentary gridlock. It had utterly irresponsible cretinism. When the Rhinelanders went on strike against the French, Weimar politicians paid them not to work by printing money. This triggered hyperinflation and the pauperization of the middle class. Weimar's history of weak coalition Governments, whose sole utility was to beg for money from the Allies, demonstrated that Democracy was a cul de sac- a road to nowhere. Perhaps, this had to do with Proportional Representation. By contrast, the US has a strong Executive and a 'first past the post' system. There can be gridlock if the Chief Executive is pusillanimous and sweats the small stuff. With hindsight, no-drama Obama did not deliver what he had promised. The whole point about putting 'a nigger in the White House' was to scare K street straight. Obama should have gone ape-shit every now and then so as to get all them white dudes in business suits to stop fucking over Joe Public so incessantly. Trump, by contrast, is shaking things up. His core constituency is happy with him. Obama certainly had his own loyal support base. But it wasn't happy with the way his Administration performed.

Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

This is silly. It was the Democrats disastrous performance in the 2014 mid-terms, itself a product of the failed roll-out of Obamacare, as well as Obama's refusal to campaign and the Republican party's push to the centre, which led to this situation. Polarization is inevitable if the Chief Executive fucks up on bread and butter issues. It may be that Obama could have put a different spin on things by going ape-shit over the Republican shut down of the Federal Govt or by taking a more combative stance shifting blame to the 'fat cats'. I suppose, people admire Obama for taking the high road. But they couldn't endorse his Party's complacency because everybody knew its had its snout deeply buried in K street's trough.

One can predict that henceforth no significant judicial appointments will be made when the presidency and the Senate are not controlled by the same party. McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril.

Yup, that's what happens if you have a President who is constantly taking the high road while his Party has its snout deeply buried in the trough of vested interests. However, it is not the case that the Judiciary is 'disrespected'. Kavanaugh wasn't a scandalous choice. What was scandalous was the method used to try to bring him down. It cast the moral legitimacy of the 'Me too' movement into doubt. Now, it is Biden who is being painted as a serial sexual harasser by the Democrats' 'circular firing squad'.

Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump.

Like Winston Churchill's conservative allies- who rejoiced at the defeat of Hitler and Tojo- the Republicans can be pleased with themselves because Trump has fulfilled some, if not all, his campaign promises.

The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki,

Which did not occur. Why not simply say Putin gave him a golden shower?

the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

Quite true. But why? It is because the American people don't care about 'basic humanitarian principles'. They just don't want wage competition from immigrants.
Americans don't believe anybody adheres to 'campaign finance laws'- save maybe un-electable crackpots. They have now discovered that the Democrats don't really want to impeach the President. They want to bring down Biden under the pretence of going after Trump. Obama warned them about their 'circular firing squad' but they didn't listen. What they are now doing is tarnishing Obama's legacy by going after his side-kick, Joe Biden. This is like showing Tonto was a member of the KKK or that Robin has child porn on his laptop. The effect is to cast a cloud of suspicion on the Lone Ranger or Batman.

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations.

Very true! Under Trump, Communists are joining the Republican Party. Meanwhile, KKK Grand Wizards are standing as Democratic candidates. When will the madness end?

Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left.

 Hitler came to power because their goons were ex-soldiers who could beat the fuck out of the goons of the Left. Mussolini was appointed and later dismissed by a very stupid King. 

The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.

They didn't want democracy because they could see it was a shit-show. Why is this stupid man claiming that Communists wanted to 'cooperate effectively in defense of democracy'? Is he utterly mad? When Walter Ulbrich got power, did he defend democratic values? Of course he did. The Stasi used to go around kissing and cuddling dissidents and bringing them nice things to eat.

In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph.

I think 'red fascist' is a Trotskyite term. I think the Comintern line was against 'social fascists'- i.e. the SD.

By 1936 the democratic forces of France and Spain had learned the painful lesson of not uniting against the fascist threat, and even Stalin reversed his ill-fated policy and instructed the Communists to join democrats in Popular Front electoral alliances.

But this strategy failed and so Stalin did a deal with Hitler.

In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist. The victory of the Popular Front in 1936 temporarily saved French democracy but led to the defeat of a demoralized and divided France in 1940,

So, it didn't save France at all. It was counter-productive.

followed by the Vichy regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany while enthusiastically pursuing its own authoritarian counterrevolution.
Faced with the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the US election and collusion with members of his campaign, Trump and his supporters’ first line of defense has been twofold—there was “no collusion” and the claim of Russian meddling is a “hoax.” The second line of defense is again twofold: “collusion is not a crime” and the now-proven Russian meddling had no effect. I suspect that if the Mueller report finds that the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russians does indeed meet the legal definition of “criminal conspiracy” and that the enormous extent of Russian meddling makes the claim that it had no effect totally implausible, many Republicans will retreat, either implicitly or explicitly, to the third line of defense: “Better Putin than Hillary.” There seems to be nothing for which the demonization of Hillary Clinton does not serve as sufficient justification, and the notion that a Trump presidency indebted to Putin is far preferable to the nightmare of a Clinton victory will signal the final Republican reorientation to illiberalism at home and subservience to an authoritarian abroad.

France was occupied by Hitler's Nazis. Does this cretin think Putin will invade the USA? If not, why talk of 'better Putin than Hilary'? Putin has no chance of ruling America. Hitler did have the chance of conquering France.

Such similarities, both actual and foreseeable, must not obscure a significant difference between the interwar democratic decline and our current situation. In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis portrayed a Nazi-style takeover in the US, in which paramilitary forces of the newly elected populist president seize power by arresting many members of Congress and setting up a dictatorship replete with all-powerful local commissars, concentration camps, summary courts, and strict censorship, as well as the incarceration of all political opponents who do not succeed in fleeing over the Canadian border.

In his 'War of the Worlds' 1938 radio-broadcast, Orson Welles spoke of a Martian invasion. Some people believed him and panicked. No one believed Sinclair Lewis. FDR could have seen off Huey Long without any difficulty. Indeed, at the time, many people thought it was FDR who posed the greater threat to the constitution.

Invoking the Nazi example was understandable then, and several aspects of democratic decline in the interwar period seem eerily similar to current trends, as I have noted. But the Nazi dictatorship, war, and genocide following the collapse of Weimar democracy are not proving very useful for understanding the direction in which we are moving today. I would argue that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s.

First you say something idiotic and then you argue against it. Why? How stupid do you think your readers are?

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian.

They also prided themselves on being able to conquer their neighbors. Even Franco used to gas on about he would gobble up Portugal. At the time, people thought the way to get rich was by looting some other country.  Now

The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power.

When was this not known? It is obvious that Democracy can be subverted or has already been subverted.

Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.”

But, a term is all that it is.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power.

Putin governs Russia the way it has always been governed- save for spells of anarchy. Erdogan triumphed over the Army and has marginalized it as a political force. But he can lose power the way he gained it. So can Orban. so can Duterte. In any case, they won't live forever.

Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Till they stop being opposition leaders and form a Government. But this has always been true.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion.

But fake news and propaganda too fail as the Communist regimes of East Europe discovered. Economic conditions, however, do shape public opinion.

Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists.

Also, Lizard People from Planet X replace all Heads of Government with shape-shifting members of their own species. David Icke has explained all this.

Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders.

When has this not been the case?

Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

But Clinton deported more people than Dubya and Obama is now called the 'deporter in chief' by some Democrats.

Trump has shown unabashed admiration for these authoritarian leaders and great affinity for the major tenets of illiberal democracy.

Yes, yes. He begs them to pee on his face. On the other hand, to his credit, he- like most normal people- doesn't think the 'major tenets of illiberal democracy' is  areal thing.

But others have paved the way in important respects. Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities.

Why didn't Obama correct this when he had the chance?

By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives.

The problem here is that Democrats gerrymander just as much as Republicans when they have control. No one can say the Weimar Republic had this problem because it had Proportional Representation.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

If it is to be feared, why not do something about it? What was Obama doing for 8 long years?

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further.

Did Hilary get no 'dark money'?

The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics.

Hilary had plenty of Corporations and wealthy individuals behind her. So would Biden if he gets the ticket.

We are approaching the point when Democrats might still win state elections in the major blue states but become increasingly irrelevant in elections for the presidency and Congress.

But, is what they are doing in blue states really so inspiring that red states feel they are losing out? If so, why can't people in red states change their votes?

Trump’s personal flaws and his tactic of appealing to a narrow base while energizing Democrats and alienating independents may lead to precisely that rare wave election needed to provide a congressional check on the administration as well as the capture of enough state governorships and legislatures to begin reversing current trends in gerrymandering and voter suppression.

If the Democrats didn't do it when they had the whip hand, why would they do it if they win big now?

The elections of 2018 and 2020 will be vital in testing how far the electoral system has deteriorated.
Another area in which Trump has been the beneficiary of long-term trends predating his presidency is the decline of organized labor.

This has happened all over the world. Does this mean Democracy is in danger everywhere?

To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow.

He had to abolish trade unions so as to fulfil his plans for Germany. A war economy sees the worker as a soldier. It shoots mutineers or deserters. But it does look after their welfare so as to maintain productivity. This element of Hitler's policy was successful. Its legacy continues in the Hartz reforms.

Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway. The increasingly uneven playing field caused by the rise in corporate influence and decline in union power, along with the legions of well-funded lobbyists, is another sign of the illiberal trend.

This 'illiberal trend' was associated with the revival of classical liberal thought. Indeed, it is dubbed 'neo-liberalism'.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

Did Trump do anything similar? No.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity.

To privatize something means to shift it from the Public to the Private Sector. Fox News launched in 1996.

Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

So, a free press isn't the 'guard rail' of anything. That's the lesson here.

The very first legislation decreed by Hitler under the Enabling Act of 1933 (which suspended the legislative powers of the Reichstag) authorized the government to dismiss civil servants for suspected political unreliability and “non-Aryan” ancestry.

One of Woodrow Wilson's first actions was to introduce segregation into the Federal Government. He got rid of many African Americans in Federal Employment.

Inequality before the law and legal discrimination were core features of the Nazi regime from the beginning.

They were core features of American democracy from its very beginning. Hitler was imitating America in many respects.

It likewise intruded into people’s private choices about sexuality and reproduction. Persecution of male homosexuality was drastically intensified, resulting in the deaths of some 10,000 gay men and the incarceration and even castration of many thousands more.

Britain was far more homophobic than Germany. Turing was chemically castrated in 1954.

Some 300,000–400,000 Germans deemed carriers of hereditary defects were forcibly sterilized; some 150,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans considered “unworthy of life” were murdered.

The US went in for sterilization first. Sweden stuck with the practice into the Nineteen Seventies. The Nazis desisted from killing the handicapped because of a popular revolt. Sadly, it must be said, the killing of Jews was popular in some other countries- with the honorable exception of Bulgaria and, to a lesser extent, Italy. It was, and is, a big part of Hitler's appeal.

Germans capable of bearing racially valued children were denied access to contraception and abortion and rewarded for having large families; pregnant female foreign workers were often forced to have abortions to prevent the birth of undesired children and loss of workdays.

Germans capable of killing were denied opportunities to avoid killing by not enlisting in the Army. Trump is forcing women to have 'racially valued children'. He has forcibly conscripted all able bodied Americans into the Army.

Nothing remotely so horrific is on the illiberal agenda, but the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures.

Why will these things happen? The answer, I am afraid, is that its what people want. They also wanted Hitler and Mussolini till those guys lost wars. Nobody wanted Franco but he died peacefully in his bed. 

The domestic agenda of Trump’s illiberal democracy falls considerably short of totalitarian dictatorship as exemplified by Mussolini and Hitler.

It also falls short of the Spanish Inquisition. Why does nobody mention the Spanish Inquisition?

But that is small comfort for those who hope and believe that the arc of history inevitably bends toward greater emancipation, equality, and freedom.

It bent towards Obama sure enough. But will it bend towards Biden?

Likewise, it is small comfort that in foreign policy Trump does not emulate the Hitlerian goals of wars of conquest and genocide, because the prospects for peace and stability are nevertheless seriously threatened.

By what?

Escalating trade wars could easily tip the world economy into decline, and the Trump administration has set thresholds for peaceful settlements with Iran and North Korea that seem well beyond reach.

Obama wasted his political capital cosying up to Iran at a time when they were strengthening their grip on Iraq and stretching it out towards Syria and Yemen. The South Koreans are smart enough to deal with the North. They are now fighting the Japs so as to gain sympathy in Beijing.

It is possible that Trump is engaged in excessive rhetorical posturing as a bargaining chip and will retreat to more moderate positions in both cases. But it is also possible that adversarial momentum will build, room for concessions will disappear, and he will plunge the country into serious economic or military conflicts as a captive of his own rhetoric.

The whole point about Trump is that he isn't into 'rhetoric'. He is a businessman of a sketchy type.

Historically, such confrontations and escalations have often escaped the control of leaders far more talented than Trump.

Only because they think they ought to be bound by their word. Trump has never had that problem as many of his creditors know to their cost.

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics.

What about the specter of the Spanish Inquisition? Why does everybody forget the Spanish Inquisition?

A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

In other words, America will remain America for the foreseeable future. This guy or someone like him can write the same essay four years or ten years from now with only minor alterations.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable.

But this would still be true even if Trump had never been born.

Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events.

Why not? If this Professor is right, America must start building walls and deporting migrants like crazy because a collapse in the food supply is around the corner.  Indeed, our best bet would be to join a militia and start stockpiling canned food and automatic weapons.

Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

A story told by a gloomy cretin won't have a happy ending. Mental masturbation doesn't work that way. Still if thinking about Nazis gets you hard, you can always finish yourself off after class.

Gautam Bhatia on the Sedition Law

Gautam Bhatia writes in the Hindustan Times-

Earlier this month, during the course of a lecture, Supreme Court (SC) judge Justice Deepak Gupta, remarked that the time had come to reconsider the law of sedition. Highlighting a number of recent examples, he observed that the law of sedition “is more often abused and misused”, and that “freedom of expression being a constitutional right must get primacy over the laws of sedition”.

If this is the case, there is no need to get rid of the sedition law. It will be read down by the bench- i.e. in accordance with a principle of harmonious construction.

Justice Gupta’s observations are a significant intervention in the ongoing debate about the utility of the sedition law in the India of 2019.

Where is this debate occurring? If it isn't in Parliament then it isn't really a debate- it's just talk is all.

As Justice Gupta correctly noted in his lecture, sedition is — of course — of colonial origin.

No. Sedition, as a crime, is no more of 'colonial' origin than rape or murder was of 'colonial origin'. Indian Princes would chop off your head if they thought you were looking at them funny. The Brits did the same thing. Only after their rule was perfectly secure did they embrace milder judicial types of punishment as opposed to just blowing rebels out of the mouths of cannons. However, as Brigadier Dyer showed at Jallianwallah Bagh, they were quite happy to machine gun potential seditionists- or just anyone it was convenient to do so- to send a message. Thus, the law wasn't the problem. The problem was getting killed if you wagged your tail.

The British regime enacted it in order to suppress political and cultural dissent, and many of the most famous figures of the freedom struggle — including Gandhi — were sent to jail on charges of sedition.

The British regime suppressed dissent by killing people. However, it discovered that people it sent to the Andamans soon started whimpering to be let out and promising to behave. In some cases, like that of Aurobindo, the smart play was to let the guy loose and then spy on him so as to roll up the entire network. It didn't kill Gandhi and his chums because they were very useful to the Brits. They represented the 'Plan B' for when the cost of repression outweighed the benefits.

The very text of the sedition law reflects its colonial provenance.

Yes. It was written in English, not Urdu. This is because India had been colonized by English speaking people. The very text of the law on rape too reflects its colonial provenance. The same is true of laws passed in Independent India.

In prohibiting “disaffection”, “contempt” or “hatred” against the government, it effectively requires citizens to love their rulers — or, at least, to not make their dislike publicly known.

Bhatia is a lawyer. He knows this is not true. There is a wide difference between encouraging others to feel disaffection, contempt, or hatred and being forced to dissimulate such feelings one might oneself have. I am welcome to show hatred and contempt for Bhatia because I believe he tried to sexually molest me on the Northern Line at rush hour. However, if I publish material which would tend to cause other people to believe that Bhatia is the worst sort of pervert who gets into packed Tube compartments for the express purpose of interfering with elderly Tambram males, then I may be prosecuted for libel even though it is probably true that Bhatia gets his jollies in the manner I have described.

It was for this reason that there was a fierce debate about sedition in the Constituent Assembly. Attempts to include it as a specific restriction upon the freedom of speech were defeated, and Jawaharlal Nehru himself went on to promise that the government would soon get rid of it.

So, the sedition law was useful. The Constituent Assembly decided that it was reasonable to restrict free expression if it endangered relations with a foreign power. Why not if it endangered relations between the Government and its own people? The framers of the Constitution deliberately chose to make it autochthonous on the Irish pattern. They wanted to foreclose stupid arguments about 'colonial laws'. Thus the Constitution declares all Indian laws to be wholly indigenous.

However, the government didn’t, and in 1962, the SC upheld the constitutional validity of sedition. The court held that penalising sedition was a reasonable restriction upon the freedom of speech — however, only if the words of the provision themselves were given a narrow meaning. In other words, it wasn’t enough to just spread “disaffection” against the government, but to do so in a manner that incited violence or public disorder. In the five-and-a-half decades since that judgment, the SC has refined the test further, noting that the link between speech and public disorder must be like that of a “spark in a powder keg”, and that it must constitute incitement to “imminent” lawless action.

All this is quite reasonable. Bhatia may be a nitwit, but the Bench isn't. There is no need to amend laws which are being interpreted in a utile and harmonious manner by the Judiciary.

The problem, however, is that there remains a massive gap between the words of the sedition law — “disaffection”, “contempt”, and “hatred” — and the interpretation placed upon it by the Supreme Court — incitement to imminent lawless action. An ordinary person who simply looks at the text of the law is unlikely to divine that what it actually requires is incitement to public disorder.

Ordinary people don't look at 'the text of the law'.  Those who are intent on mischief may not know what law they are breaking but they do know they are doing something that can get them into trouble.

It is this gap that has allowed the law of sedition to be used as a political tool. As Justice Gupta also pointed out in his lecture, sedition is a cognisable offence, which means that the police can arrest an accused without the need for a judicial warrant. This allows for the deprivation of personal liberty with great ease; so while there are very few convictions for sedition, the provision’s broad wording facilitates — to use an old cliché — “the process being the punishment”.

So, there is an abuse of power- not a defect in the law.

Keeping this in mind, and the fact that we already have laws to penalise and punish people who call for and incite violence, Justice Gupta’s call to relook at, and review, the sedition law must be heeded.

Why? In view of the tactics used by outfits like ISIS, the opposite is the case. We need to punish the guys who recruit the suicide bombers.

The real bite of the sedition law is in its broad wording. Terms like “disaffection” and “contempt” can be stretched to mean just about anything, enabling, for instance, prosecuting 7,000 farmers for protesting against a nuclear power plant (as happened a few years ago).

I suppose Bhatia means the fisherfolk- or more generally their wives- who opposed the Kundakulam nuclear plant and raised slogans against Manmohan Singh and Jayalalitha. But, sedition was only one of a number of false charges levied against them. The Supreme Court had decide that the Nuclear plant was 'in the public interest'. Both the Center and the State Government were determined to teach this mainly Christian fishing community a lesson and showed their willingness to abuse due process to do so.

But it is this precise broad wording — with its colonial rationale of insulating the government from the citizen — that is contrary to the Constitution, and the precise reason why the SC has given it a narrow (and almost unrecognisable) meaning.

The Constitution says the sedition law is autochthonous, not colonial. The Bench has given narrow, wholly unrecognisable, meanings to all sorts of laws. One reason for this is because Parliament can't be bothered to draft new legislation to tackle problems the great mass of the people don't care about.

As events have shown, however, the gap between the law and its judicial interpretation has become so wide that there can be no interpretive bridge that will adequately protect liberty; this being the case, the Supreme Court will, hopefully, reconsider its 1962 decision, and strike down the law of sedition as being unconstitutional. This will be the greatest tribute to Gandhi.

The greatest tribute to Gandhi would be to embrace celibacy like he told us to. The Indian race would have died out long ago if only we'd listened to the Mahatma. However, it is important to bear in mind that Gandhiji was against all forms of sex including whatever it is Bhatia gets up to on the Northern Line at rush hour.