A Grand Strategy for India

A recent book review in The Hindu of “India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases” presented such a muddle of views on the topic that I did some research and made the frightening discovery that our leading lights in the field don’t know what they are talking about.

India's best and brightest seem to think that “Grand Strategy” is some form of intellectual soup into which they can toss anything they fancy.

Some of the scholars even seem unable to distinguish the strategic from the tactical: one is the pursuit of lasting interests and long term goals, the other of the short-term and the immediate.

 A Grand Strategy takes stock of history, makes an assessment of national experience, encapsulates all vital interests, and looks to the future. It reflects national character, defines the nature of the State, and is accepted as a common frame by all shades of political opinion in the country.

 Indian civilization is the result of a Grand Strategy established by the Saptarishis and pursued over millennia by the country’s intellectual elite.

It began with the Saptarishis assembling the sacred lore of all the tribes in the Vedas, which thus became a unifying object of common veneration. Intense discussion of the hidden meanings of the Vedas yielded the worldview of the Upanishads.

The consensus that emerged was that an immortal and changeless essence underlies the endless mutations of the Universe, holding it in order with the force of Truth (Satyam/Ritam/Dharmam).

As that essence exists in living things, our ancient Grand Strategists postulated that death is but a door to another life; they envisaged the individual soul, of the same substance as the Universal Soul (Paramatma), passing in a series of lives to the end of Creation. In that scheme of things tribal differences shrank into insignificance and allowed different groups to settle into interdependent castes.

 The Ramayana, authored by the low caste Valmiki and setting forth the ideal of a just King, Ramrajya, marked the next step in India’s ancient Grand Strategy. It promoted the evolution of caste federations into unitary kingdoms.

 The schema of the rishis foresaw society passing through cycles of corruption and virtue, and many millennia later, when the ideal of Ramrajya was trampled down in struggles for imperial power, the Mahabharata laid down the rules for the survival of the virtuous in a time of predominant evil.

Modern history covers the final phase of that age of predominant evil, with Mahatma Gandhi marking the turning of the tide with his opposition of racism in South Africa and colonial rule in India. With those he initiated the modern human rights revolution and the movement for national self-determination that transformed the world in the second half of the 20th Century.

 A Grand Strategy for India now must take up where Gandhi left off but our latter-day claimants to the role of rishis seem oblivious of the need for that continuity.

For instance, the Introduction to Grand Strategy for India: 2020 and Beyond, a book published in 2012 by the New Delhi based Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, makes no mention of Gandhi as it notes that India after independence had a role in world affairs disproportionate to its power. In fact, none of the 25 essayists in the book gives any indication of being aware of the traditional Grand Strategy that forged Indian civilization.

 The book reviewed in The Hindu does consider Gandhi, but wierdly. To quote the reviewer (Suranjan Das): “Siddharth Mallavarapu uncovers the Gandhian notion of grand strategy that proposes substitution of Western values with principles of truth, nonviolence and a decentralized polity that should convince other societies that India does not pose a threat.”

The broader background of Indian civilization is missing entirely from the IDSA book and makes a hunchbacked limping appearance in the other one (published by Rutledge). If the reviewer accurately reflects the views of the essayist (Swarna Rajagopalan), on the history of Indian Grand Strategy she relates our contemporary lack of a coherent world view to the “ancient Indian maxim that rulers were required to be driven by principles which were ‘context dependent’ and ‘not absolute in application’.”

Another essayist who looks to the past (Jayashree Vivekanandan) is equally whacky: she believes the Indian State’s “accommodative strategies” in meeting external and internal threats traces back to the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s policy as he expanded his domain.

The gaping omission in the IDSA book and the ludicrous theories in the other volume indicate a failure to make even the skimpiest historical connections, and it is scary that this disconnect extends to contemporary affairs.

 The IDSA book is, in fact, actively and massively misleading. In its Introduction, the editors (Krishnaappa Venkatshamy and Princy George) write that Europe’s role in our strategic thinking “has diminished in recent years … despite India’s strong relations with individual European countries such as Britain, France and Germany.”

The essayist on that matter (Dhruva Jaishankar), is described as urging “India’s strategic planners to recognise Europe’s potential as … a political partner with shared values, and leverage for building India’s relations with other countries, particularly China, Russia and the United States. Europe can also be a significant target for India’s multi-polar engagement strategy—one that does not bring with it the complications associated with India’s other bilateral relations, such as with the United States and China.”

 It is mind-boggling that anyone can think Indian relations with Europe are uncomplicated when we can look back on several nasty colonial encounters, more than a century of oppressive British rule, two European world wars, the cynical British manipulations that brought on Partition, decades of British-proxy Pakistan’s terrorist war on India and the European Union’s arrogant critiques of Indian policies on a whole range of issues!

None of the other writers in the book achieves quite that level of idiocy, but some come close, among them Manu Bhagavan who is noted in the Introduction as suggesting that the reform of the United Nations could lie in a return to Jawaharlal Nehru’s plan for “a global government to which all the world’s States would cede some of their sovereignty.”

 Many essays, especially those on Left Wing extremism and terrorism, civil-military affairs, and relations with neighboring countries, are not about strategy at all but tactics. Even the late lamented K. Subramanyan makes that confusion in noting that India in the first phase of independence had a Grand Strategy in Nonalignment and centrally planned development!

 These are not abstruse academic criticisms. If the best thinkers in the country on a whole range of critically important issues cannot tell the difference between strategy and tactics, it is small wonder that India is in such a discombobulated mess.

So, what should an Indian Grand Strategy involve?

 The groundwork has been laid in the Indian constitution; it is left to bring the directive principles to life and envisage a new role for India in world affairs. There must be four essential elements to that effort.

The first is to clear the cobwebs from our minds about industrialization. It is not progress. It is a deadly combination of false values, destructive policies and wasteful practices that is killing the planet’s life systems. Those eager to have India follow China as “workshop to the world” need to consider the pollution it will bring to land, air and water, and the consequent spiking of all degenerative diseases, especially cancer.

 Secondly, we need to be clear about the nature of international relations today. The world order has been intensely criminalized over the last seven decades because imperial European Powers have not given up their exploitative and oppressive policies but have merely taken to pretending that they no longer exist. Britain, primarily, has been responsible for building a global money laundering system and promoting every form of organized crime, including drug trafficking, terrorism and the illicit trade in arms.

 Thirdly, we have to be prepared for a wave of change over the next generation that will transform the world more radically than it was by the industrial revolution. The Internet, Worldwide Web and mobile telephone connectivity are only the thin end of the wedge: other new technologies will require us to reimagine manufacturing and trade. The age of carbon-based energy is over, and with it, the era of giant tankers, transcontinental pipelines and manufacturing for mass markets. The future belongs to off-grid renewable energy. With the capacity of small scale manufacturers to reach niche markets cost-effectively, the artisan can take on the factory and win; as 3 D printing matures a village craftsman can produce the same quality of product as the largest corporation.

Fourthly, the power structures of the industrial era are beginning to crumble. The old power elites cannot control the new information technologies without killing the creative power of their own societies and falling behind their democratic peers. Nor can they continue controlling the world through conflict if there is an effective effort to inform a global audience of their machinations. An Indian Grand Strategy must involve such an information effort, not through government propaganda but by seeking to promote a world order based on community-based networks. The goal must be peaceful transition to a prosperous world order protective of individual freedom and creativity.

The overall goal of ancient Indian Grand Strategy was unity in diversity.

Modern India must look not only for such a global dispensation but to the deeper unity captured by the term “global brain.”

System scientists say that the evolution of a supra consciousness is inevitable once global connectivity passes a certain as yet undetermined threshold of activity; it must be the overall aim of an Indian Grand Strategy to have it governed by our broadest ideals of Nara Narayana.

From Monkey Trial to Genocide by Germs

In February 1925 the American state of Tennessee adopted legislation making it unlawful “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals.” The American Civil Liberties Union responded with advertisements in Tennessee papers, offering to support anyone who would challenge the law in court, and a group of businessmen in Dayton, thinking of all the attention and visitors the case would draw to their drowsy town, put up a 24-year old science teacher and football coach, John Scopes.

 

The Scopes “monkey trial” was pure theater. 

 

The prosecution team was led by three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, whose eloquent campaigning against Darwin had led 15 states to initiate action to ban the teaching of the theory of evolution. Clarence Darrow, one of the most famous lawyers of his day, headed the Defence. 

 

The general expectation of fireworks was met in full measure. At one point, reported  H.L. Mencken in The New Yorker, “Mr. Bryan sprang to his feet, his face purple, and shook his fist in the lowering, gnarled face of Mr. Darrow” and shouted that he was trying to “protect the word of God from the greatest atheist and agnostic in the United States." Mr. Darrow, for his part, said he was trying "to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States." 

 

In a move the presiding judge allowed reluctantly, Darrow called Bryan himself to the witness chair, but after he made the pious old politician look ridiculous, the cross-examination was struck from the record. The 12-man jury, 11 of them devout Christians, found Scopes guilty. In the court of public opinion, however, Darwin triumphed. Only two of the 15 States (Tennessee being one) actually banned the teaching of evolution, and Scopes himself got off on appeal. (Although widely breached, the Tennessee law stayed on the books for another 43 years before the Supreme Court struck it down.) 

 

The Scopes trial was widely assumed to have marked the end of the public controversy over Darwin versus God, but that was not so. In 2005 the matter was back in an American court, this time in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where a group of parents sued the Dover School Board for requiring science teachers to read a statement to 9th Grade biology students that evolution was “not a fact,” but a theory on par with “Intelligent Design.” 

 

Students were told of a “reference book,” Of Pandas and People that explained Intelligent Design.

 

 The parents asserted in their initial filing that intelligent design was “neither scientific nor a theory in the scientific sense;” that it was “an inherently religious argument or assertion” that was “consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” 

 

The Defence argued that its position was not religious. Appearing as an expert witness, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Professor Michael Behe, compared intelligent design to the widely accepted Big Bang theory in physics that explains the origin of the universe. Both were arrived at by using inductive reasoning based on scientifically observable clues; both raised questions about primary causes that had clear theological implications. 

 

The strategy did not work. 

 

In a scathing 139-page ruling, Judge John Jones of the US District Court in Harrisburg found for the plaintiffs, declaring that it was unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design in public school because it was not science but a “religious” viewpoint advanced by a “particular version of Christianity.” Excoriating the School Board for a decision of “breath-taking inanity” he ordered it to pay the substantial legal expenses incurred by the plaintiffs. 

 

The judgment was generally applauded by those who considered themselves liberal and progressive, an outcome both ill-considered and dangerous. 

 

Ill-considered, because it undermined the traditional liberal view that Darwin’s theory must be contained by a strong moral framework if it is not to be an argument for the most regressive social policies. Dangerous, because we are now in an age when small groups have unprecedented power to commit surreptitious genocide. 

 

The full title of Darwin’s 1859 book was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” 

 

The German philosopher Freidreich Nietzsche, who was 15 when Origin of Species came out, had by 1886, distilled Darwinism into an argument for the utterly amoral reign of power. 

 

In “Beyond Good and Evil” he argued that in every form of life there is “an incarnate will to power” that “will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant -— not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... ‘Exploitation’... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.” 

 

He was clear also on what that implied: “Suppose, finally, we succeed in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it ... then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force unequivocally as — will to power. The world viewed from inside ... would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.” 

 

That insane vision lit Hitler’s path to power and fired the gas chambers of Dachau and Buchenwald. Its miasmic influence continued in colonial attitudes that have shaped the openly criminal policies of post-colonial Europe in Africa and Asia. 

 

The "religious" perspective on life is essential to counter this brutal madness of power.

It brings to the fore the reality that human life is not a pitiless desert of power relationships. While competition for resources is indeed pervasive, so are cooperation and compassion. It is only to the extent that the latter have framed and contained the depredations of power that human civilization has advanced.

 

Beyond the politics of the matter, there is the quite weighty case for Intelligent Design that rests on plain common sense. The theory of evolution only explains some of the physical processes that have governed the emergence of life on Earth; it cannot and does not address its purpose, meaning and mystery. 

 

Science cannot touch those issues because they are not measurable. The most it can do is postulate the spiritual as a shadow of material interests and present it in terms of brain waves and blood chemistry. 

 

Those who say that instruction on moral and spiritual issues has no place in the teaching of science are surely out of touch with a modern world confronted with test-tube babies grown to be harvested for body parts, the cloning of the dead, and the potential to use genetically engineered diseases to cull the human species of the defenceless poor. Consider the following: 

 

• The laboratory creation of the HIV-AIDS virus in the Belgian Congo and its initial “escape” into the African population in the 1950s remains a story shrouded in unanswered questions and outright disinformation. (A 2005 Discovery Channel documentary provided an excellent overview; when last I looked it was available on-line.)
• The smallpox virus, the last remnants of which were supposed to have been eliminated in 1999, lives on in a number of military laboratories, and is the focus of opaque experimentation. Australian scientists have reportedly tried to grow a more aggressively contagious strain.
• Scientists have resurrected from the tissue fragments of long-dead victims, the potent Spanish Flu virus that killed some 25 million people in 1918. Ostensibly to help scientists prepare defences against a natural return of the virus, the genetic blueprint of this deadly pathogen was made available on the World Wide Web. 

It is not just the poor who have been victims of bacteriological attack; some of the most powerful people on earth have been targets.

 

After the 9/11 attacks, the United States Congress had to be shut down in the face of an anthrax attack; the strain used was later traced to a military laboratory and a South African scientist who had been part of apartheid era experiments in his own country.

 

He was never tried. The whole affair has remained buried in dark theories of conspiracy that pull in the sudden, unexplained deaths of a number of other scientists who could have been prosecution witnesses. 

 

Similar theories have surrounded the emergence in recent decades of the various strains of the SARS virus in Asia and the Ebola virus in Africa. 

 

The Ebola virus, which causes a catastrophic internal collapse in its victims, dates back to the same period as the origin of the HIV-AIDS virus and was probably rooted in the same European fear of “losing Africa.” Its current outbreak in West Africa – the worst in history – follows an African effort to raise the issues of money laundering and drug trafficking in the context of the post-2015 development agenda. 

 

Meanwhile there has also been a sudden upsurge of contagious diseases in increasingly assertive Asia.

 

In addition to recurring “bird flu” and "swine flu," China has just been hit with bubonic plague. It has quarantined an entire district. 

 

India has had not only experienced sudden clusters of contagion in recent years (encephalitis in Bengal most recently), it has clearly been set up for something catastrophic. 

In 2010, the British medical journal The Lancet carried a supposedly peer reviewed article on an antibiotic-resistant "Superbug" the authors claimed to have found in Delhi.

The day after publication the primary Indian co-author told the Press that The Lancet version was a major distortion of what he had put his name to; he charged that his British counterpart had "edited" the findings without telling anyone. The Lancet then refused to carry a correction because of "lack of space." (A recent vaguely referenced Press report about another study claiming that India suffered a million unregistered unnatural deaths annually left me wondering if that was true or if someone was setting the scene for grim things to come.)    

 

Given the apocalypse by virus theme of much of Western creative culture in recent decades, it is not too far-fetched to speculate about the underlying socio-political reality. 

 

Could those who feel threatened by the rise of Africa and Asia be planning great depopulating plagues? 

 

 African and Asian governments must take that possibility seriously and respond by bringing the issue out of the shadows. 

 

They can do so with two initiatives: make a determined push to give enforcement powers to the now toothless Convention on Biological (Bacteriological) Weapons; and initiate a process to build a case for presentation to the International Criminal Court. The latter will involve mapping every laboratory involved in relevant research and compiling the names of all scientists involved. 

 

They can also begin looking at communicable disease as an existential threat, warranting a general social mobilization equivalent to the struggles for political independence. 

 

That is the least they can do, especially given the plentiful historical evidence that European elites will engage in genocide for profit or to preserve their power.

  

 

Katju Displays More Ignorance

Markandey Katju’s “clarification” of his outrageous comments about the Indian people and mass media has confirmed that his ignorance is multifaceted and extends to history.

 Consider just one paragraph in the long excerpt from an interview published by The Hindu on its OP-Ed page on 16 November.

 In it Katju says India is making “a very painful and agonizing” transition from a “feudal agricultural society to modern industrial society.” Europe during a similar transition from the 16th to the 19th Centuries experienced “turbulence, turmoil, wars, revolutions, chaos, social churning and intellectual ferment. It was only after going through this fire that modern society emerged in Europe. India is presently going through that fire.”

The unexamined, undigested quality of that assessment is breathtaking. How did this man ever ascend to the Supreme Court!

 First, Europe and India are in no way comparable. Our societies, histories and experience of modernity are all completely different.

Second, Europe’s “turbulence, turmoil” etc., had nothing to do with the advent of “modern society.” The agonies of Europe reflected the impact of a set of racist, violent, materialist philosophies. Insofar as Europe dragged India into its affairs we have been affected, but as a society, we have not endured anything comparable.

 Third, the “modern" values Katju esteems as the product of painful European transformation actually emerged from the American Revolution. The subsequent French Revolution also proclaimed the “rights of man,” but bloody tyranny submerged them quickly. The European “scramble for Africa” in the 19th Century brought back slavery, colonialism and genocide.

Fourth, it was not until Gandhi took up the cause of Indians in South Africa that the European darkness began to lift. Gandhi’s attack on racism in Africa and colonialism in India let loose the modern human rights revolution. The values Katju ascribes to industrial modernity are Indian and homegrown.

 Fifth, European societies did not embrace “modern" values voluntarily or enthusiastically. The onset of the Cold War in 1946 allowed Britain and France to shape-shift into "free-world" good guys, but their international policies continued to be dank with blood and corruption. Both societies have continued to glorify their colonial past, brushing under the rug a record of violence, oppression, exploitation and genocide.

There is much else in Katju’s “clarification” that reflects a fundamental ignorance of Indian and global realities. He should be dumped from the Press Council.

Understanding History: 1. Colonial Constructs

What passes for “history” today is an intellectual construct of the colonial era that originated in the effort by Europeans to explain their sudden global dominance.

It appeared to them that they were innately superior in many ways, one being a unique sense of the past. Beginning with the German theorist Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), it became a fashion to assert that only Europeans had a sense of history. Herder saw societies in China, India and the Americas as experiencing change but not possessed of the capacity to perceive it as cumulative development; their past was thus not history in the European sense.

Europeans acknowledged Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 to 425 BC) as the “Father of History” for his chatty account of how Greece and Persia became enemies. (It began, he says, with the reciprocal kidnappings of nubile princesses.) A younger contemporary, Thucydides (460 to 400 BC), departed from tradition by not mentioning the Olympian gods as active participants in human affairs (the Peloponnesian War), and got credit for being the first to separate history from religion.

The “historiography” that Europeans developed from those roots involved a “science of history” dealing with the use of evidentiary sources, and a “philosophy of history” exploring its nature and aims. The European mainstream moved towards the belief that the “real past” was unknowable because knowledge of it was inescapably limited: at best, an individual historian could make an honest assessment of the evidence available, and leave overall truths about the past to emerge over time.

In the 1930s the widely influential Oxford Professor R. G. Collingwood put history at a yet farther remove from reality with the argument, in The Idea of History, that the dead past and the living present were separate in Nature, and were brought together only in the human imagination. At one point in his disquisition, he wrote, “The historian cannot have certain knowledge of what the past was in its actuality and completeness … The past in its actuality and completeness is nothing to him; and as it has finished happening, it is nothing in itself; so his ignorance of it is no loss.”

 A subset of thinkers, most prominently Karl Marx (1818-1883), conceived an even narrower frame for history, rooting it in the process by which a society generated wealth: those who controlled “the means of production” viewed the past in the perspective of their own “class interests.” Marx saw societies developing along a predictable line. The “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherer tribal society gave way with the coming of agriculture to the dominance of those who controlled the use of land (feudalism); when the wealth generated from land reached a certain tipping point “bourgeois capitalism” emerged, followed by the imperialism of those who used capital to control all other means of production. Violent revolution would then destroy capitalism (and the entire class of capitalists), usher in “socialism,” followed by the equitable heaven of advanced communism.

Thus, while mainstream European historians groped around in the past like blind men examining an elephant, each declaring his or her own perception, and every successive generation of scholars generated revisionist views reflecting their different personal and social perspectives, Marxists developed a firmly deterministic sense of the historical process. In reality, both Marxist and mainstream European historians tended to be obedient not to their declared principles but to the prevailing power structure of their societies; they differed mainly in hiding/declaring their role as ideological instruments.

While Europe was evolving its peculiar historiographies, its intellectual elite developed a smug sense of superiority towards India that reflected the prejudices of Christian missionaries and the gossip of traders. John Locke (1632-1704) was typical, dismissing India’s rich philosophical tradition (ironically, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding), with a passing reference to “the poor Indian philosopher” who believed the world was held up by an elephant, and when asked what supported the elephant, said it was a turtle which stood on something he knew not what.

The East India Company compounded European ignorance of India by publishing a six-volume History of British India by James Mill (1773-1836), a London journalist who wrote his opus without ever visiting the country or knowing any of its languages.

Mill trashed Indian history as a “monstrous and absurd” concoction of legends and myths. In fact, said he, Indian society “presented a very uniform appearance during the long interval from the visit of the Greeks [under Alexander] to that of the English.” Their “annals … from that era till the period of the Mohomedan conquests, are a blank.” Believing that the “meritorious researches of the modern Europeans,” were responsible for what we know about the Indian past, Mill declared:

“We cannot describe the lives of their kings, or the circumstances and results of a train of battles. But we can show how they lived together as members of the community, and of families; how they were arranged in society; what arts they practiced, what tenets they believed, what manners they displayed; under what species of government they existed; and what character, as human beings, they possessed.”

He endorsed the view that the “sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions incident to barbarians,” were “so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty, that they disgust us by the uniformity of their appearance, and it is rather fortunate for letters that they are buried in silence and oblivion.” In that respect, there was “perhaps but little to regret in the total absence of Hindu records.” Mill’s ignorant views came to be standard throughout Europe.

 Even observers with a high regard for India saw it as having no history. The German philosopher Hegel declared in his History of Philosophy how surprising it was that “a land so rich in intellectual products, and those of the profoundest order of thought, has no History.” India, he said, “has not only ancient books relating to religion, and splendid poetical productions, but also ancient codes; the existence of which latter kind of literature has been mentioned as a condition necessary to the origination of History – and yet History itself is not found.”

Marx explained that lack of history in terms of what he called the “Asiatic mode of production.” Toiling away in the library of the British Museum, never having set foot anywhere in Asia, he pontificated on the “unchangeableness of Asiatic societies” brought on by the “simplicity” of the village economy. Except for the tithe paid to the larger structure of the state, villages consumed what they produced, and were not involved in the exchange of commodities; they remained “untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.” Indian society, Marx declared, “has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”

D. D. Kosambi (1907-1966), the avowedly Marxist Indian historian has pointed out how wrong that assessment was: “the greatest periods of Indian history, the Mauryan, the Satavahana Gupta, owed nothing to intruders” yet marked “the formation and spread of the basic village society or the development of new trade centres.” He also questioned Marx’s explanation that a lack of historical sense arose from the “Asiatic mode of production,” noting China’s “great annals, court and family records, inscriptions, coins,” and archeological excavations that provided a chronology “virtually undisputed from 841 BCE down.”

Most Marxist historians have not let such facts get in the way of the Master’s theory, and India became in their view the archetype of the “timeless East.”

To be continued

What the Stats Foretell

Okay children hold on tight, for the global economic rollercoaster will soon go off a cliff.

Here’s why.

There’s been a sharp slowdown in manufacturing in all the major economies, and it’s tied to slackening exports.

Most of the economies of the Eurozone are contracting. Germany is just a hairsbreadth away from joining the rest. The United States had zero jobs growth in August. Japan, reeling from the tsunami and nuclear disaster, is facing continued slow growth. The Canadian economy shrank 0.4 per cent in the last quarter.

Of the BRIC economies, Brazil and Russia are heavily dependent on commodity exports, which will plunge with the continued drop in manufacturing. The good news/bad news is that oil and gold prices will drop like stones.

China’s dependence on export-led growth will boomerang into an export-led depression. Signs of sharp contraction are already evident: car sales have slipped dramatically in the last few months and are projected to fall 45 per cent by 2013.

Analysts say the cause of this synchronous global slowdown is the end of the growth generated by the enormous economic stimulus packages after the 2008 crisis. As all countries are in debt up to their eyeballs, there’s no hope of anything like the last round of deficit financing. It remains to be seen if other major economies will follow the United States in its stimulus package disguised as a jobs programme.

Overall, we are looking at a scenario last seen when falling exports triggered the Great Depression of the 1930s. The sequence has a fatal internal logic: as export markets fall, corporations cut back on production, throwing millions of people out of work, thereby shrinking domestic demand and setting off further cuts in manufacturing and employment in a continuing vicious cycle.

Of course, if there is a default by any of Europe’s heavily indebted countries the crisis could develop far more rapidly. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned last week that the European financial system is on the verge of collapse. To avoid it, European countries will have to inject capital into their ever more shaky banks, but that seems unlikely.

What about India?

The funny thing is, while the exports of the rest of the world have been taking a nosedive, Indian exporters have been racking up staggering rates of growth ranging up to 84 per cent. There is widespread suspicion that this does not reflect real exports, only black money flooding back to take advantage of the only major economy that shows continued signs of vitality.

Can nothing be done to forestall the coming gut wrenching period?

A great deal, especially by community activists; but the corporate Powers-that-be will probably not allow things to get out of their control. Traditionally, they have maintained control by starting up conflicts to disrupt cooperative efforts at change. In Europe during the 1930s, that involved funding the rise of fascist parties under Hitler and Mussolini. It is sobering to remember that the world economy fully recovered from the Great Depression only because of the massive military expenditures of World War II.

Dealing With the Debt Crisis

As the financial skies darken and massive economic storms threaten the world, it is essential for people everywhere to understand that we are facing more than a double-dip recession.

We are seeing the end of the age that began with the trips of Columbus across the Atlantic (1492) and of Vasco da Gama across the Indian Ocean (1498).
The crumbling power structures of that era will cause great turmoil and the prospect of war is both real and close; but the situation is also ripe with opportunity. Strategic nonviolent action can mobilize people globally to avoid disaster and usher in a new era of democracy and peace. To see what nonviolent activists need to do we have to understand how the current situation developed.

The global expansion of European power that began 500 years ago laid the foundations of the current world economy. Before that, long distance trade consisted entirely of easily transported luxury goods like silks and spices, ivory and gemstones. With the enslavement of peoples in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and the development of large sea-going vessels, agricultural commodities (opium, sugar, tea and coffee), were for the first time traded over long distances. After the industrial revolution of the 17th and 18th Centuries, minerals and manufactured goods joined the mix. The volume of exchanges increased dramatically and, with a few exceptional periods such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, has continued to do so to this day.

The institution central to these developments since the 17th Century has been the joint-stock corporation, the first of which was the East India Company, chartered in 1600. Its centrality is easily explained: the corporation allowed investors to share risk and it limited individual liability.

As the number of investors and corporations grew, so did the support structure of stock markets, banks and brokerage houses. During the 20th Century, economies of scale led the most successful corporations to grow into multinational conglomerates. In the process, family owned companies came under professional managers who took strategic direction from bankers focused on the bottom line.

While that was happening, a parallel process saw corporations enter the political arena to protect their massive investments. Their influence soon grew into control, and in the richest countries they became the steel hand in the glove of government policy. Corporate power came to define social priorities and values.

In Europe, long-standing power struggles were infused with a sharp new energy, and war became a massively destructive -- and highly profitable -- corporate enterprise. That led to the military having a major say in State policy, especially in Germany, where an aristocratic officer class held sway.

Britain’s attempts to contain Germany’s rising power caused two world wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), and its efforts to retain an imperial role led to the “special relationship” with the United States that launched the “Cold War.” (In developing countries, where that confrontation was very hot, proxy conflicts killed some 100 million people, as against the 10 million in WW I and the 60 million in WW II.)

The Cold War saw the emergence of what President Dwight Eisenhower described in his farewell speech to the American people in 1960 as a powerful “military-industrial complex” dominating the constitutional government of the United States. It promoted militarization globally. The Cold War also saw widespread government sponsorship of terrorism and support of drug trafficking to pay for it.

The net result of this history is the world we have now, violent, corrupt and highly militarized, with bankers defining strategy in the above ground economy, laundering the proceeds of the criminal underground economy, and guiding government policy in the most powerful countries. The “debt crisis” now roiling the world stems directly from this situation, in which there is neither check nor balance on the overweening greed of bankers.

In the 1990s, with the willing support of a political class indistinguishable from the corporate elite, major banks began to package people’s debts as investment-grade securities. To maximize their profits they eased conditions on who could get loans and handed out billions of dollars to people who could not pay them back. When they began to default, banks were left holding staggering amounts of worthless paper. Their solution to the crisis was to have governments bail them out with taxpayer money.

Taxpayers in the wealthiest countries now face all kinds of austerities to deal with the huge imbalances in public finances. As governments cut back on everything except military expenditures, growing political uncertainty has slowed economic growth; with major nations falling into recession millions of people have been thrown out of work.

The threat of armed conflict in this situation springs from several sources. The first is the real possibility that as in the last Great Depression, the misery and anger of millions of people will empower fascist demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini. The country most threatened by such an outcome is China, where the Communist regime sits atop a mountain of bad debt that has powered a vast real estate bubble. With its export-led economic growth under serious threat, the regime could be faced with a volcano of popular political discontent, with entirely unpredictable outcomes.

India might be economically better off, but its incapacity to defend its borders, especially its coasts, will certainly invite adventurers in a time of general turmoil. If the Euro Zone ceases to exist, all its member States will be in a state of free fall and at risk of violent disruption, especially given the explosive problems posed by Islamic minorities in many of them. The recent “riots” in Britain (see previous post), indicate how cynical political leaders might exploit the situation.

In such a scenario public demonstrations and calls for changes in government priorities are of limited use. The die is cast, and it is likely that we will see global hyperinflation as the United States maneuvers out of its multi-trillion debt, and sharp deflation if China should collapse. The road ahead is uncharted, unstable and rocky.

 That is not to say that civil society activists can do nothing to deal with the current situation. If they organize at the community level and network globally, they can sidestep and defuse the entire crisis. In the process they can usher out the economic system rooted in the colonial era and replace its poisonous corporate globalization with a networked world at peace with itself.

[Anyone interested in specific proposals for bringing about such change should contact me at papamenon04@yahoo.com – and read Reviving Gandhi at www.undiplomatictimes.com.]

That Slow Train Wreck ...

The slow train-wreck of the world economy is progressing like one of those Peckinpah Westerns, each step slowed, bloodied, shown close up and then again from another angle, until the mind forgets what it is watching and is fascinated just by the blood and spilling guts.

When will the bodies start falling? I figure they're already falling. But as Buzz Light-Year put it, "falling with style."

Who will hit the ground first? My bet is it's going to happen in Europe. There's no way Greece is going to pay up. Or can pay up. Nor will Ireland. These were countries where the politicians "saved the banks" by taking on their debt. The people were not consulted. Marching to some Warsong of the Valkyries sound-track the politicians pledged their people's welfare for the banks and would you know it, they ended up holding the empty kitty!

So now oridnary Europeans are facing "austerity measures" -- like doing without jobs (unemployment's over 20 per cent in important parts of Europe), public services and social security. Part of the reason they're doing it is to "Save the Euro." The Germans are fighting that battle, giving out their taxpayer's money to keep Europe with a single currency. What's the bet that the Germans will tire of that eventually and chuck it?

If Europe falls, of course, there is no saving China. Even the Brits with their multi-trillion global blackmarket funds won't be able to salvage the Kung Fu Hustle we'll have there. China, by the way, seems to be headed for a perfect storm of drought, corruption, economic mismanagement. political folly -- and a real estate bubble.

The real estate market in the country is still rising. An average home in April rose in value to 8,773 yuan ($1,351) per square meter from 8,738 ($1,345) in March. The figures are estimates, for the government scrapped its national property price index in January. The Party mandarins just couldn't take the stress of reporting it any more. Another revealing detail: according to a study released last month, 80 per cent of all home-grown millionaires in China are planning to emigrate or have already established residence abroad.

What's grimly funny about this situation is that Pakistan's political leadership has taken just this moment to voice loud faith in China's enduring support. Its Prime Minister on a visit to Beijing exclaimed that China and Pakistan were "one nation but two countries." He thought Pakistan's "Islamic socialism" was just like the free market communism of the comrades of the CCP. No doubt to celebrate the kinship, the Chinese gave Pakistan 50 fighter aircraft. Just clean gave it to them . However, it is to be delivered in a year or two. Takes time to work out the kinks in free market communism.

Meanwhile, Beijing has been vigorously denying various political messages from Islamabad about how close ties are between them. For one thing, it denied that China would consider an attack on Pakistan as on itself. Then it said there was no question of taking over Gwadar Port in Baluchistan and developing it as a naval outpost. (The port is the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an active insurrection, with no infrastructure on the landward side, so it's easy to see why.) Then the mandarins declared that the aid demanded by Pakistan as an outright grant could not be given, for such gifts were never made.

The outcome of all this is not funny at all. We should, like Kubla, hear from afar, ancestral voices propheseing war. And not that far off either.

Decoding Kosovo's "Independence"

The declaration of independence by the province of Kosovo in Serbia is like the proverbial Buddhist onion: every layer of reality (or illusion) peeled away reveals another, till finally, at the heart of it one discovers the powerful void, sunnata.

The outermost layer presents a picture of the Muslim Kosovars escaping predominantly Christian Serbia.

Peel that away and you find a remnant of the Cold War: Britain, France, Germany and Italy speedily recognized Kosovo because it weakened Serbia, a traditional Russian ally (both are Slavic).

The next layer down is the revenge of the Hapsburg empire (in the dissolution of which the Serbs had a significant role); Kosovo is the final act in the implosion of Yugoslavia, which was set off by German recognition of Croatian independence.

Deeper still is the animosity left over from the Christian schism that separated the Church of Rome from the Eastern Orthodox, and under that are layers of hostility dating back to the tribal confrontations of Teuton and Slav.

Peel away those final layers and at the heart of it all is the ineffable, all powerful nothingness of manipulative politics, Washington's masterful hand, introducing into its emerging rival, Europe, a country that will be sick and backward, violent and undemocratic, a perpetual worry and drain.

Anyone who feels that this is all so much waffle should read the lead article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (March-April 2008). It is on "The Clash of Peoples" by Jerry Z. Muller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. He argues that everywhere but in the United States "ethnonationalism" has been on the march, and will not be denied, especially in the developing world, where States are "recent creations and where borders often cut across ethnic boundaries." There is "likely to be further ethnic disaggregation and communal conflict," he prophesies, much in the vein of Samuel Huntington, who predicted the "Clash of Civilizations" and the "bloody borders of Islam" just as the end of the Cold War threatened to bring about a period of world peace.

And what does Professor Muller recommend be done about the distressing prospect he foresees?

He notes that "once ethnic antagonism has crossed a certain threshold of violence, maintaining the rival groups within a single polity" is increasingly difficult. Partitioning countries would be "the most humane lasting solution." The "challenge for the international community in such cases is to separate communities in the most humane manner possible: by aiding in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new homeland, and providing financial aid for resettlement and economic absorption." The "bill for all of this will be huge," Muller declares in conclusion, "but it will rarely be greater than the material costs of interjecting and maintaining a foreign military presence large enough to pacify the rival ethnic combatants or the moral cost of doing nothing."

Muller does not mention other reasons for creating small and bloodied rump States: they can be easily manipulated to do whatever the "international community" wants. In the case of East Timor, which was liberated from Indonesia, Australia quickly nailed down an agreement to drill for offshore oil (which Djakarta had long resisted). In Kosovo there is to be a major new American military base.