Will Durant: "...I had come upon the greatest crime in all history"

Previously mentioned on these pages was William Jennings Bryan's assessment of the British rule of India, written around 1905-06:

While he has boasted of bring peace to the living he has led millions to the peace of the grave;  while he has dwelt upon order established between warring troops he has impoverished the country by legalized pillage.   Pillage is a strong word, but no refinement of language can purge the present system of its iniquity.

About twenty-five years later, Will Durant,  the American writer, historian and philosopher, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, made his assessment of the British Raj, and wrote a book - The Case for India, published in 1930.   The foreword to his book is reproduced below.

Reliable sources tell me that per honorable men like Brutus, the reproduction of such sentiments today amounts to hate speech.  Well, I am glad to be spewing hate speech in the company of Bryan and Durant.   

 

I repeat myself - Britain should be shorn of its "Great", and the United Kingdom should dissolve and  vanish into the pages of history -- they do not deserve to continue any more than the German National Socialists.   At best they perpetrated the second greatest crime in history (Will Durant wrote his words before Hitler ascended to power).   If this is hate speech, then "Hate Speech Zindabad!".

Will Durant – The Case for India (1930)

A Note To The Reader

I went to India to help myself visualize a people whose cultural history I had been studying for The Story of Civilization. I did not expect to be attracted by the Hindus, or that Ishould be swept into a passionate interest in Indian politics. I merely hoped to add a little to my material, to look with my own eyes upon certain works of art, and then to return to my historical studies, forgetting this contemporary world.

But I saw such things in India as made me feel that study and writing were frivolous things in the presence of a people– one-fifth of the human race – suffering poverty and oppression bitterer than any to be found elsewhere on the earth. I was horrified. I had not thought it possible that any government could allow its subjects to sink to such misery.

I came away resolved to study living India as well as the India with the brilliant past; to learn more of this unique Revolution that fought with suffering accepted but never returned; to read the Gandhi of today as well as the Buddha of long ago.

And the more I read the more I was filled with astonishment and indignation at the apparently conscious and deliberate bleeding of India by England throughout a hundred and fifty years. I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history.

And so I ask the reader's permission to abandon for a while my researches into the past, so that I may stand up and say my word for India. I know how weak words are in the face of guns and blood; how irrelevant mere truth and decency appear beside the might of empires and gold. But if even one Hindu, fighting for freedom far off there on the other side of the globe, shall hear this call of mine and be a trifle comforted, then these months of work on this little book will seem sweet to me. For I know of nothing in the world that I would rather do today than to be of help to India.

WILL DURANT

October 1, 1930

Note: This book has been written without the knowledge or co-operation, in any form, of any Hindu, or of any person acting for India.

From the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

About:

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. 

Some selections below - not necessarily the best, just some of those that most tickled me. :)

From 2015:

Sherlock Holmes brusquely dismissed his companion’s theory that the victim had died from an allergic reaction to either seasoning or seafood, saying “Watson, although the problem is alimentary, it is neither the Thyme nor the Plaice.” — Owen Roberts, Edina, MN

From 2013:

It was a tricky situation, given the complex behavioral instincts of the Lowland Gorilla, and this accidental group encounter with a silver-backed dominant male was taxing Professor Wiesenheimer’s knowledge of interspecies primate interaction to the limit, yet confidently and without hesitation, he turned to his startled pupils and whispered, “Run like Hell.” — Mark Watson, Raleigh, NC

 From 2012:

Professor Lemieux had anticipated that his latest paper would be received with skepticism within the small, fractious circle of professional cosmologists, few of whom were prepared to accept his hypothesis that our universe had been created in a marijuana-induced industrial accident by insectoid aliens; nevertheless, he was stung when Hawking airily dismissed it as the Bug Bong Theory. — Alan Follett, Hercules, CA

 From 2004:

Galileo Galilei gazed expectantly through his newly invented telescope and then recoiled in sudden horror – his prized thoroughbred’s severed neck, threateningly discarded in a murky mass of interstellar dust (known to future generations as the Horsehead Nebula), left little doubt about where the Godfather and his Vatican musclemen stood on the recent geocentric/heliocentric debate. — Don Mowbray, San Antonio, TX

 

Rajiv Malhotra: Fighting the Sepoys of the Leftist-Evangelist mafia.

Rajiv Malhotra roars!

PS: Via Rajan, Koenraad Elst's analysis: "... the larger context that explains the different forces at work here."

Hummingbird moth

The wild bergamot brought in hummingbird moths, which I've never seen before in my garden.  Not a great shot, but proof positive. :)

Wild Bergamot Flower

A close-up of the wild bergamot flower.

Butterfly bush

A moth perches on a butterfly bush flower.  With the wild bergamot nearby, anything visiting the butterfly bush is a rarity.

Trumpet vine flower

The trumpet vine flower is supposed to attract hummingbirds, and I've had one in the backyard for years now, from an earlier half-hearted attempt to be hummingbird-friendly.  This year it is flowering quite profusely, relative to previous years (though still not very impressive).

Cardinal flower

I have a new stand of cardinal flower in the backyard.  It is for hummingbirds, or apparently, the few species of butterflies with sufficiently long proboscis.

More Zinnias

White Zinnia

Shaking the dust off camera equipment.

Wild Bergamot

The bees, wasps, moths, butterflies all go wild over wild bergamot, I've never seen anything like it.

Bonya Ahmed: Fighting machetes with pens

Wiki:

Avijit Roy (Bengali: অভিজিৎ রায়; 12 September 1972 – 26 February 2015) was a Bangladeshi American online activist, writer, blogger known for pioneering Bengali freethinkers’ weblog-forum, Mukto-Mona. Roy was a prominent advocate of free expression in Bangladesh, coordinating international protests against government censorship and imprisonment of bloggers. He founded Mukto-Mona, an Internet community for freethinkers, rationalists, skeptics, atheists, and humanists of mainly Bengali and other South Asian descent. He was hacked to death by machete-wielding assailants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on 26 February 2015; Islamic militant organization Ansarullah Bangla Team claimed responsibility for the attack.

Avijit Roy's wife, Bangladeshi American Rafida Bonya Ahmed gave a talk to the British Humanist Association, "Fighting Machetes with Pens". Here is the 2015 Voltaire Lecture by Rafida Bonya Ahmed hosted by the British Humanist Association. It is a must-listen.  If you can't watch, then a full transcript is available on the British Humanist organization's website.

Tarek Fatah: Why Balochistan needs the attention of the USA

Tarek Fatah: Why Balochistan needs the attention of the USA
Speech at a discussion on The Hill in Washington DC on the conflict on Balochistan hosted by congressman Chris Smith on July 22, 2015.

More on the Bengal famine of 1770

The East India Company took over the taxation of Bengal in 1765.  There ensued the great famine of 1770.  10 million people -- one-third of the population -- is estimated to have perished.

Here is what Wiki says about the contributing factors:

• the widespread forced cultivation of opium (forced upon local farmers by the British East India Company as part of its strategy to export it to China) in place of local food crops

• as lands came under company control, the land tax was typically raised fivefold what it had been – from 10% to up to 50% of the value of the agricultural produce

• ordering the farmers to plant indigo instead of rice, as well as forbidding the "hoarding" of rice. {In Madhusree Mukherjee's talk she says that the custom at that time was for farmers to stock two years worth of their food consumption of grain.}

How were the British any different from Stalin or Mao, under whom enormous numbers of people starved to death?  Stalin's famine in the Ukraine killed 7 million people.  That was a quarter of the population.  Mao's great famine killed somewhere between 30 million and 45 million in China.

Ah, but Stalin forcibly collectivized the Ukrainian farms, you say.  But the East India Company extracted the Bengali farmers' entire surplus by raising taxes fivefold.   Is there a difference?  I can't really see one.

And let us remember, the era of Victorian holocausts was yet to come.  I mean, you could possibly argue that once is an accident.  But almost two hundred years of repeated such "accidents"? 

The kindest thing that can happen to the world is that Scotland breaks away from the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom thereafter fades away into history just as the Soviet Union did.

After listening to Madhusree Mukherjee's talk, I tweeted to her (with no reply) about how could she know what she knows without becoming a revolutionary?

PS: as large portions of Bengal returned to the jungle and as labor productivity in Bengal plummeted, the British Parliament, to help alleviate the East India Company's troubles, raised the taxes on tea in America....

India: more news of renewable energy investments

Solar and wind energy are crucial components of the electrification of India without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.   There is some encouraging news of possible investments.

Japan's foreign aid arm, the Japan International Cooperation Agency plans to fund solar parks in India.  CRISIL, an analytics and ratings company, majority owned by Standard & Poor's, estimates that conditions are favorable for the Indian wind energy sector to add 4 GW of capacity each year over the next five years.

Madhusree Mukherjee: The Imperial Roots of Hunger

The demise of the United Kingdom is something that is to be devoutly hoped for; it was as genocidal as the Nazis. Only the fact that it won the World Wars and thus wrote our current history is the reason why it is "respectable". I predict that if India and China continue their ascent in the world and come to write the accepted version of world history, the United Kingdom will achieve its correct lowly place along with Nazi Germany, Genghis Khan's Mongols, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and so on.

The IMF and World Bank and the powers behind them will also be consigned to the same dung heap. The unthinking disciples of Adam Smith are, I hope, burning in hell.

Video has autoplay on, and so am putting it beneath the fold. [PS: Video seems to have gone kaput]

PS: sample exhibit - the East India Company took over the taxation of Bengal in 1765; in 1770 there was a famine in which 1/3rd of the population of Bengal perished - 10 million. Among the contributing factors was the forced cultivation of opium for the Chinese market.

The Piano - how they used to play it

Rachel Nuwer had this in the New York Times that I found fascinating.  Apparently modern piano playing technique is considerably different from that in Mozart's time; and apparently it makes a difference.

Rolf Inge Godoy, a professor of musicology at the University of Oslo..struck up a collaboration with Christina Kobb, a doctoral candidate at the Norwegian Academy of Music and head of theory at Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo. Ms. Kobb has developed an unusual expertise: She has learned how to play the piano according to techniques described nearly 200 years ago.

....she gradually replaced her modern way of playing with 19th-century technique, gleaned from around 20 treatises. Most were written in Vienna in the 1820s, while a few were published in France and England. Her primary source, however, was “A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Instructions on the Art of Playing the Piano Forte,” the seminal 465-page treatise published in 1827 by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, one of Mozart’s students.  {you can find the English translation of the German work online, it is a 300 MB PDF file}.
...
...
While modern players tend to hunch over the keys and hold their forearms nearly perpendicular to the keyboard, 19th-century style dictated that pianists sit bolt upright. The posture prevented players from bringing their weight to bear on the keyboard, instead forcing them to rely on smaller finger movements. The elbows were held firmly against the body, with forearms sloping down and hands askew.

As Ms. Kobb became more fluent in this approach, she found that certain movements — jumping quickly between disparate chords, for example — became swifter and more fluid. “The elbow against your body serves as a sort of GPS, so you always know where you are,” she said.

Chords and scales sound smoother and can be played faster, Ms. Kobb also found, and dramatic pauses between notes — often a matter of physical necessity rather than of style — are lessened. The old style also allows the performer to be more discriminatory and subtle in choosing which notes to stress, Ms. Kobb learned, producing a performance that is subdued by today’s standards.

Turns out there is at least one youtube:



 

On the British "gift" of railways to India

Reginald Reynolds in The White Sahibs in India (1937) writes:

The history of British railway policy in India is that of probably the largest item in the existing public debt of the country.  By 1931 the total capital expenditure by the State on railways stood at nearly £ 600,000,000. According to Sir John Strachey's Finance and Public Works of India the railways built by State enterprise between 1869 and 1881 involved a total outlay of £26,689,000.  The rest of the railways were, in the great majority of cases, built by Guaranteed Companies, most of them having since been purchased by the Government."

The nature of the contracts by which these Guaranteed Companies built Indian railways is probably unique in the history of financial operations.   The Company would be guaranteed an interest on its capital by the Indian Government at a rate which was itself excessive when compared with the prevailing market rates.  Free land would be granted by the Government, thus obviating the principal difficulty with which the railway speculator usually has to contend. If and when the railway showed a profit, that profit was the property of the Company; but when there was a loss the Company's dividends would be paid from the Indian taxes. 

Thus with a minimum of cost to themselves, a group of financiers could, without any of the normal risks of speculation, invest their capital with the certainty of a minimum dividend and the hope of a surplus.  The people of India, who were their sleeping partners in this astonishing arrangement, were compelled to balance the shareholder's losses and to produce, in addition, substantial dividends for them out of their taxes.

After pointing out that such a financial arrangement combines the disadvantages of private enterprise and public ownership with the benefits of neither, Reynolds continues:

An additional evil arose from the clause, inserted in these railway contracts, that the State might purchase the railway after a certain period of years.   Inevitably this caused an artificial inflation of stock prices as the purchase date drew near.   According to one authority the wastefulness of the system was officially perceived in the early years of the Crown Government, following the Mutiny.
Sir J.P. Grant, President of the Viceroy's Council, objected to the procedure as uneconomic, and the Finance Member of the Council (Mr. Laing) pointed out that the Companies looked exclusively to the Guarantee for their dividends.

In 1884, a Select Committee of Parliament examined a number of witnesses who gave evidence on this subject.   Among these witnesses was General Sir Richard Strachey, who said with regard to the Guarantee system:

Not only has it been productive of wasted money, but it has also created a very valuable property at the expense of the taxpayers of India, which has passed into the hands of third parties without their having incurred, in any sort of way, any risk.

 As regards the disproportionate rate of interest paid under the Guarantee, both Sir Richard Strachey and Mr. Westland (afterwards Finance Minister of India) stated that if the Government had built the railways itself it could have borrowed at a cheaper rate. "The probability is", said Sir Richard, "in fact it is almost a certainty, that they could have borrowed the money on better terms than the Company."

At an earlier enquiry, a witness stated that "the contracts are a perfect disgrace to whoever drew them up."

"This", said William Thornton, speaking as an expert, "is the necessary result in which the way they are drawn up...the undertakers of the railway, the Company, are deprived on one of the great inducements to economy; they know that whatever blunders they make, those blunders will not prevent their getting full current interest on their expenditure."

 Similar evidence was offered by Lt.-Colonel Chesney, who for six years had been auditor of the railway accounts.

"Railways began in India in 1848, when the first staff of engineers were sent out...These gentlemen were sent out to make railways and there was a kind of understanding that they were not to be controlled very closely....Nothing was known of the money expended till the accounts were rendered...It was quite understood that whatever was spent must be eventually passed.

The Right Honourable William Massey, who had been Finance Minister of India under two Governors-General, stated the matter even more bluntly.   According to him, "enormous sums were lavished, and the contractors had no motive whatever for economy." 

"All the money came from the English capitalist, and so long as he was guaranteed 5 per cent on the revenues of India it was immaterial to him whether the funds that he lent were thrown into the Hooghly or converted into bricks and mortar."

Massey estimated the cost of the East Indian railway at  £30,000 per mile and said of it, "It seems to me that they are the most extravagant works that were ever undertaken."  Lord Lawrence himself, who as Governor-General had condemned the system, reinforced this expert evidence with the authority of his high office, and told the Parliamentary Committee:

"I think it is notorious in India amongst almost every class that I ever heard talk on the subject, that the railways have been extravagantly made; that they have cost a great deal more than they are worth or ought to have cost.

"With a guarantee of 5 percent, capitalists will agree to anything; they do not care really very much whether it succeeds or fails; 5 per cent is such a good rate of interest that they are content to get that, and not really look after what is done."

 The figures of expenditure prove convincingly the justice of such strictures.  The Congress Report gives a table showing the cost per mile of twenty-five different railways, compiled from figures supplied to the Select Committee of 1884.   This table shows that, as between the same types of railways (that is to say, railways of the same gauge and traversing the same type of country) those constructed by the State cost half the amount that was spent under the Guarantee system.

Even Sir Juland Danvers, who for several years had held the post of Government Director of Railways in India, and was not himself hostile to the Guarantee System, admitted that

"the cost of lines now constructed" (that is to say, by the State) "has been much less than the average cost of these railways, which form the original main system.  Instead of £18,000 and £20,000 per mile we now see lines constructed on the five feet six inches gauge for £4,000, £5,000 and £9,000."

Reginald Reynolds tells us:

The loss on the Indian railways is incalculable.  Payments of deficit in guaranteed interest alone account for about £40,000,000, and this figure does not take into account the value of free land given to the Guaranteed Companies or the loss incurred by wasteful methods of construction.

MJ Akbar at Manthan, Hyderabad

An excellent talk, I highly recommend.  The talk starts with India-Pakistan and continues to the ongoing World War IV (the Cold War was World War III).   The current battlefield of WW IV extends from India's western border all the way to Morocco.

RISA Lila - 3?

Prof. Narayanan Komerath explains.  Rajiv Malhotra has been accused of "plagiarism" -- in brief, because he quotes the passages that he debunks.

Rajeev Srinivasan succinctly describes the attackers. They come from a lobby where three interests converge: First are the fundamentalist Protestant conversionist/ ‘evangelists’ out to Save the Souls of people all over the world, particularly India, by destroying their native culture and religions. The second lobby is the extreme-left combination of Marxist anarchists relevance-challenged by the demise of global communism, and the extreme-Islamists funded from the Pakistani/Saudi Wahabi cartels to destroy democracy. These are people who stand around in San Francisco or New York on July 4 and August 15 holding posters proclaiming “Death To Terrorist India and America!” or “Brick by brick, wall by wall, US Imperialism will fall!” . The third are the supporters of the Indian National Congress party, who are now out of power and hate those who voted them out.