it is alright to write about non-current politics here, right? i hope so.
thesis: gandhian non-violence satyagraha is nice and all, but only applicable when your tormenter is benevolent, and stronger than you. if your tormenter is benevolent and stronger than you, then they can do more for you than you can. therefore, some colonialism, such as the british control of india are good and should be encouraged.
satyagraha has worked a few times in human history. gandhi, mlk jr., and the velvet revolution of vaclav havel off the top of my head. but these enemies, the british, the americans, and the post-perestroika russians, were humane and/or media conscious (i'm not sure one could say the wwii era british were media conscious. did any brits really give a damn about india in the 1940s?).
my favorite gandhi quote is this letter he wrote to the jews of germany after kristallnacht:
"if i were a jew and were born in germany and earned my livelihood there, i would claim germany as my home even as the tallest gentile german may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me into the dungeon... if one jew or all the jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. and suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy can. the calculated violence of hitler may even result in a general massacre of the jews, but if the jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre i have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant."
Calling the British Empire's (or any other) colonialism "benevolent" has to be a joke. Or is it?
Satyagraha worked in India not because the British were too benevolent or too media conscious - it worked because of the intricate British policy of keeping as little as possible original British forces in the region (manpower has always been a problem in that respect for GB) and installing satraps (or raj) which were supposed to take care of local affairs with a certain amount of autonomy.
The British knew how to respond to violent uprisings - dispatch few elite troops alongside with a larger, domestic force (mostly Gurkha and Sikh units in India), move in fast and hard, and get the hell out again. That doesn't work against peaceful protesters who have gained a reasonable amount of support from the local populace, because that would be extremely provocative. Also it's harder to play peaceful portesters against each other and hope the problem will just solve itself.
The second reason for it to work, was that Britain had enormous problems on its hands elsewhere and couldn't muster the energy to concern themselves as throroughly with India as would have been necessary to break the Satyagraha movement (see Churchill's comments on Gandhi).
Civilian disobedience worked for MLK in the U.S., because it was a clever media effort and the U.S. weren't as good at policing then. I'm not so sure whether it would work equally well nowadays.
The velvet revolution worked because the Warszaw Bloc as a whole was already toppling and the SSSR was too weak / concerned with other problems to intervene by force, plus it would have been a pretty stupid idea, geopolitically speaking.
I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to agree with your thesis of a "benevolent" tormenter.
on a side note, I think gandhi was just utterly clueless on what happened in germany when he said that.
I hope that >>1 can clarify what they meas by a "benevolent tormenter," as the two words seem to contradict each other. (Also, don't forget why your shift key is there; capital letters do improve legibility.)
I would not go so far as to say that, as a guy I knew in college put it, "the British were the best thing that ever happened to India," but I would also note that if the British had never colonized India, and Mahatma Gandhi had gone to the friendly neighborhood Mogul warlord to demand democratic reforms, his head would have been on a pike outside the castle gates twenty minutes later.
as far as i understand, tormenter just means someone who greatly annoys you, while benevolent means something which helps you. many people are greatly annoyed by george bush but yet enjoy his tax cuts (or at the very least, has anyone rejected them?). it is self-contradictory perhaps, but such is life. there is a great russian oxymoron: "what men want is a virgin who is a whore".
also, i'm too lazy for the shift key. WOULD YOU PREFER CAPSLOCK? (just kidding).
bubu, i should have expected you to make a statement like (to paraphrase)
> calling any colonialism "benevolent" has to be a joke
colonialism brings technology and infrastructure. technologically speaking, pre-colonial india was as behind as pre-colonial africa now, tens of millions of indians make more than 40k usd each year. i just returned to the library a book by niall ferguson (my favorite living historian) called: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. it's very objective, and i recommend it for anyone interested in the subject (most interesting factoid: the founder of the boy scouts invented the concentration camp to hold the families of boer guerilla fighters). it has a really great chart showing how the standard of living for the average indian rose from the founding of the india company. it is really quite dramatic.
and honestly, what do you lose in colonialism? autonomy? if you and your occupier are both rational actors, and their goal is to harvest a renewable resource (tea, labor, food, salt), it is in their best interest to develop your nation in the same way you oughta to; both of you would want to make your nation as economically effective as possible and so either of you would. in a sense, imperial efforts are like venture capitalism.
p.s., as regards the gandhi/hitler quote, gandhi knew exactly what was going on i'd wager. i bet if he was a german jew he'd merrily hop on the train to auschwitz thinking that his noble sacrifice would instill humanity in his tormentors. and he would be wrong.
> sacrifice would instill humanity in his tormentors. and he would be wrong.
So true it's scary.
In WWII there were examples of doctors who dissected living aestheticized people in biological experiments. Later testimony indicates that after a while these doctors were no longer bothered by what they were doing; they'd finish up a day's work and go home.
People can become desensitized to anything. Combine that with authority figures and you have a recipe for disaster.
This is relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
And here's some amusing discussion and also comments on further developments: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.religion.kibology/msg/d923bc00aa29408e
>bubu, i should have expected you to make a statement like
what? (heh) was it too harsh?
>if you and your occupier are both rational actors, and their goal is to harvest a renewable resource (tea, labor, food, salt), it is in their best interest to develop your nation in the same way you oughta to; both of you would want to make your nation as economically effective as possible and so either of you would.
I'm sorry, but to me colonization isn't a mere economic issue - and neither is it to the colonized people.
Popular british (and every other nation's) tactics did not involve the peaceful, symbiotic, utopically splendid coexistence of conqueror and conquered.
You could argue by a long stretch, I suppose, that the Brits did some good when they forcefully abolished Sati - but then I'm not so sure whether it isn't the unbearable presumptuousness of the conqueror to do away with everything "uncivilized" he encounters. It also brings technology and infrastructure- at least where it matters for the colonial power. But at what prize?
The rest, however, I can't bring myself to see in the same warm colours as you apparently do - colonialism is always violent no matter where, no matter who has a go at it (Herero hello?), involves the exploitation of the colonized people (tea, anyone?), the imposition of the colonizer's values and the plundering of resources from the colony.
Events from as early as ancient Egyptian and Greece times through the course of human history cast quite the gloomy light on colonialism in my book.
>tens of millions of indians make more than 40k usd each year.
and Africa is a continent so in turmoil that it mostly serves as an unlimited supply for donation-evoking pictures of "biafra kids" and is best forgotten otherwise.
>niall ferguson
uh. I've read Empire (among other publications of his) and I find it quite...uuuh. His euphoric praise for British hegemony ("no negative comments please!") was flabbergasting. To be honest ("you should have expected me to make a statement like this"), his being a friend of lofty, highly speculative and overly strong theses doesn't really appeal to me. Wilhelminic Germany as the holy innocence of history? England to blame for World War One (both: "The Pity of War")? Oh please.
I'm personally more a friend of Philip C. C. Huang (wrote intelligently on Britain/China), Dipesh Chakrabarty (has an excellent short writ on European colonialism leading to a constant eulogizing of griha and grihalakshmi by the Hindu Bengali nationalists; "Provincializing Europe" is great) and Jurgen Osterhammel ("Historiology beyond The Nation-State") when it comes to an analysis of colonialism.
no, not harsh at all, but earlier we argued about whether democracy was binary or whether some people had more democracy than others, and it seemed like your type of thing.
i really think that all the violence done by human empires throughout history has been in the service of putting down uprisings. if the uprisings hadn't have happened, then the empires wouldn't have been violent... just like if germany would have surrendered earlier, dresden wouldn't have been bombed. there is very little totally irrational, totally immoral, totally indefensible violence.
and i think you overestimate the value of culture. i think that things like sati and the class system and racism and religious fundamentalism disappear when general wealth is obtained. all cultural adaptations have a reason, just like all evolutionary adaptations, and when the reasons for them disappear, they eventually do to. culture is extremely transient, and therefore valueless. it's just a novelty.
a really good example is the sexual mores of a culture. the wealthier the nation the more promiscuous. culture is mostly a lie, its just a behavioral response to economic conditions.
i also think it is disingenuous to say that ferguson's empire makes no negative comments on the british empire, but i think you must have been being sarcastic. :P
>no, not harsh at all, but[...]
right. I'd like to make one thing clear - I don't think clonialism is inherently Evil either. I just don't believe it's Good either. I think colonialism as a concept is rather neutral - what you make of it matters. What the Europeans made of it doesn't appeal to me - as hinted at earlier, modelling Africa into a "super place of we all die" doesn't even get a slight nod for effort from me.
>and i think you overestimate the value of culture.
>culture is mostly a lie, its just a behavioral response to economic conditions.
>culture is [...] valueless.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we have so little common grounds that we can simply not continue this, or any other, discussion on any subject at all. I'll just politely agree to disagree and leave it at that.
> we have so little common grounds
bah! too bad, i'd like to know what value you think you've received from your culture. on to another topic i suppose!
>also, i'm too lazy for the shift key.
Are you bullshitting me?
Then I'm too lazy to read your posts, much less take them seriously.
are you bullshitting me?
you really take posts with proper capitalization more seriously than posts without? someone once said something about books and their covers that you should remember. be more like bubu, damn me for substance, not style.
>>14: If I bought a book and began reading it only to see the author didn't bother to capitalize, I'd take it back to the bookstore for a refund rather than try to decipher it. (Having to read "Ulysses" in college was torture.) And if you are too "lazy" to do it, that speaks volumes about your substance.
Wish to have an intelligent discussion? Write with intelligence. Then we can talk.
>>9
It's not a stretch at all. The British abolished thuggee and suttee (just as they abolished the slave trade in all their African colonies), and dragged India kicking and screaming out of the Bronze Age. The British were the best thing that ever happened to India, and I only hope that the Indian government can keep it all from regressing back to it was before the British came.
we simply disagree on the definition of intelligence then, because i think that capitalization spellling and punctuation are simply aesthetic. language is about communication, not entertainment; if you get your message across you succeeded, if you didn't, you failed. besides, half the languages i know don't even have capitalization, and i can't imagine denigrating them for it. and the "lazy" comment was an attempt at humor. i just choose not to capitalize.
please, if it bothers you so tremendously, stop reading my posts. i'm the only one here who posts under the name of "anonymous" so it ought to be easy to weed them out.
>>15 has a good point by the way. i'm done talking about capitalization until they make an orthography board. ;)