The Real First World War

Europe's "Great War" of 1914-1918 does not deserve to be called the "First World War." That title should go to the first real global conflict, Europe's genocidal invasion of other regions that began in the final decade of the 15th Century.

European historians have sought to downplay the ferocity, extent and significance of that earlier conflict by treating it as a diffuse historical process, but if we who were victims accept that view it disables our understanding of everything that has happened since then.

As few Indians are likely to know much about what actually happened, let me recount some salient points.  

A decade after Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492, its indigenous people were extinct. They had done nothing to deserve that fate; Columbus in a letter to his royal sponsors in Spain said they were “loving, uncovetous people,” with “good features and beautiful eyes,” who “neither carried weapons nor understood the use of such things.” Yet many were tortured to death in a vain attempt to get them to reveal nonexistent hoards of gold and others worked to death or driven to suicide.

Such gratuitous violence continued as Europeans extended their domains in the "New World."

 Many of the smaller tribes followed the Arawak of Hispaniola into extinction while the populations of larger groups fell by as much as 85 percent, victims not only of indiscriminate violence but of induced famines and new diseases to which they had no immunity. The spread of smallpox through blankets distributed free to Native Americans and the wanton slaughter of the great herds of bison on which the "Plains Indians" depended for food, clothing and shelter were the most outrageous cases of genocide. Estimates of the numbers killed range up to 100 million.

In South America the Conquistadores engaged in a zestful mass murder that has no equivalent to this day. Bartolomeo de las Casas (1484-1566), a Spaniard who went to the New World for fortune but was driven by the atrocities he witnessed to enter the Church, left a vivid description in Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de la Indias (Short Report on the Destruction of the Indies):

“One time the Indians came to meet us, and to receive us with victuals and delicate cheer, and with all entertainment, ten leagues from a great city, and being come at the place they presented us with a great quantity of fish and of bread, and other meat, together with all they could do for us to the uttermost.” The Conquistadores put them all to the sword “without any cause whatsoever,” more than “three thousand souls, which were set before us, men, women and children,” committing “great cruelties that never any man living either have or shall see the like.”

“The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among them. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, no pregnant women, nor those in child labor, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated, as though they were assaulting so many lambs herded in their sheepfold. They made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow: or they opened up his bowels. They tore babes from their mothers' breast by the feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks. Others they seized by the shoulders and threw into the rivers, laughing and joking … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords. They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honor and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and burned the Indians alive. They wrapped the bodies of others entirely in dry straw, binding them in it and setting fire to it; and so they burned them. They cut off the hands of all they wished to take alive. They generally killed the lords and nobles in the following way. They made wooden gridirons of stakes, bound them upon them, and made a slow fire beneath: thus the victims gave up the spirit by degrees, emitting cries of despair in their torture.”

Casas, writing as the Bishop of Chiapas, estimated that just in the Caribbean his compatriots had killed some 15 million Indians, leaving “destroyed and depopulated” the large islands of Cuba, San Juan [Puerto Rico], and Jamaica, and some 30 smaller islands.

In Australia and New Zealand, the killing was less zestful but it was more comprehensive, and there was no Casas to call attention to what happened. The Anglican Church and British authorities looked the other way as settlers in Australia hunted the Aborigines like animals, poisoned their food and water, raped their women and savaged their children, all in a deliberate campaign to reduce the indigenous population. The Aborigine numbered about 750,000 at the end of the 18th Century and about 30,000 a century later; both figures are estimates for they were not included in Australian censuses until 1971. Australian policies to “protect” and “assimilate” the Aborigines continued the oppression into the second half of the 20th Century. It inflicted prison terms on adults for “crimes” ranging from “cheeky behavior” to “not working” to “calling the Hygiene Officer a big-eyed bastard.” Government officials took Infants from their parents and placed them in White families or orphanages. That “adoption” policy openly aimed at eliminating the Aborigines as a cultural group, the legal definition of genocide. In the face of mounting international criticism the government discontinued the program grudgingly in 1970; it was not until 1997 that it noted the negative impact on the victims and their families.

In New Zealand, a country larger than Britain (103,738 sq mi to 94.526 sq miles), the first British settlers in the mid 1800s found a tribal population said to be around 100,000 – almost certainly an underestimate, for the newcomers were soon engaged in a series of “Maori wars” to expropriate tribal land. By 1896 the number of Maoris was down to 42,000.

 In Africa and Asia the death tolls were far higher.

The slave trade out of Africa began with the first Portuguese explorations down the African coast in the 14th century and continued into the 19th. By the time it ended, slavers had taken an estimated 25 to 35 million Africans across the Atlantic and killed an equal number during capture and conveyance.

Within Africa too, wherever Europeans settled, they displaced and often enslaved the local population. The “Congo Free State” established by Belgium’s King Leopold II reduced the native population from an estimated 20 million to 8 million. Under the pretext of "civilizing the natives," his regime established a reign of terror, mandating wild rubber collection quotas for each village and punishing unmet targets by lopping off the arms of workers. Supervisors were required to bring in baskets of limbs to show they were implementing policy rigorously.

 In Namibia, the Germans massacred the Herero. In Kenya, the British ran the Kikuyu off the best agricultural land in the country, pushing over a million people into lasting poverty. A movement to reclaim the land in the 1950s resulted in a second displacement as the colonial regime hunted down, tortured and killed over 100,000 “Mau Mau terrorists.”

In South Africa, the British slaughtered the Zulu to get at the diamonds and gold in their land and the Boers (descendents of Dutch settlers) imposed racial segregation on the whole country in 1948, as India’s independence heralded the end of the era of European world domination. The system stayed in place until 1994.

 Asia saw the highest death tolls of the colonial era, and as K.M. Panikkar noted in Asia and Western Dominance (1959), the violence began with Vasco da Gama. On his second voyage to India he came upon an unarmed Arab vessel and, “after making the ship empty of goods" he "prohibited anyone from taking out of it any Moor" and then ordered it to be set afire. A commentator in Portugal justified that as follows: “It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe, and therefore the Portuguese, as Lords of the Sea, are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.”

That “strange and comprehensive claim,” commented Panikkar, was “one which every European nation in its turn held firmly, almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. The principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking, and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples, was part of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia.”

 In India, the first of the "man-made famines" under British rule occurred in the decade after the 1757 fall of Nawab Siraj ud Dowlah in Bengal; it killed seven million people, a third of the population. The last famine the British created, also in Bengal, occurred in 1942-1943; it killed between 3 and 4 million. In all, the total of such deaths has been estimated at several hundred million; the Gandhian Dharampal calculated the total number of Indian deaths from all causes under British rule at 500 million. (Dharampal who died at Sevagram in Wardha in 2006, did not use his last name, Banwari; his groundbreaking work on pre-colonial and colonial India has been largely ignored by Indian historians because he had no academic background or standing.)

 China was never under colonial rule, but Britain fought two "Opium Wars" in the 19th Century to force it to import the drug. By the first decade of the 20th Century a quarter of its population was estimated to be using the drug.   

This litany of European depredations in the global South is not a mere scratching at old scars. It is, in fact, essential to understanding the "Great War" of 1914-1918. German disaffection at not having enough colonial "lebensraum" (elbow-room) was perhaps the most important factor that drove its competition with Britain into war. In that sense, it was a direct karmic consequence of the Real First World War. 
_

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.

  

 

Midnight's Children: the Film

Dipa Mehta and Salman Rushdie have told television interviewers that their dank depressing film Midnight's Children is a "love letter to India."

That's like a declaration of love for its victims from the Japanese banshee in The Grudge (who Mehta seems to have taken as a fashion model).

As with the novel, the film is a noisome dump on India.

Their primary difference is that the film, bound as it is to images, turns the turgid logorrhea of the novel's "magic realism" into revealing political scat.

For example, the film brings into high relief the bastardy of the main character, Saleem, Rushdie's alter ego: he is the son of a departing Englishman who cuckolds a poor wandering minstrel.

How much Rushdie's fiction has followed fact is a moot point, but considering that the novel gets its force from its rendering of history, this detail should probably be taken as more than embroidery, especially as it explains so much. 

In the film a nurse at the hospital where Saleem is born switches him for the son of the wealthy Muslim couple that bought the Englishman's house. She does so ostensibly to strike a blow for India's poor; a pecuniary incentive from the distant British parent is so much more believable.

That would also explain why Rushdie was sent off to England as a boy and never returned, his very British view of Indians as tragicomic freaks and misfits, and the totality of his blindness to the country's great post-colonial achievements.

The baby who replaces Saleem in the minstrel's home is named Shiva; he grows into a malignant scoundrel, joins the Indian Army and becomes the hero of the 1971 Bangladesh War. He also fathers a child from Parvati the powerful witch who is another midnight's child.

The film makes far clearer than the novel that Rushdie's storytelling is not about characters "handcuffed to history," but about stereotypes used to stamp a British political narrative on post-colonial South Asia.

Ayub Khan's military coup in Pakistan, Mrs. Gandhi's Emergency in India and the Bangladesh genocide mark turning points of the plot, underlining the stock theme of British colonial rule, that the natives are incompetent to run their own affairs.

As in the novel, the film gives not a hint that British puppet-masters pulled the strings for Partition and have made relentless use of Pakistan and "Islamic terrorists" as proxies against Indian democracy.

The British effort to control the narratives of others extends far beyond South Asia, and it is one of the most unremarked aspects of contemporary global affairs; my next post will explain. [Those who want a detailed exposition should check out "1001 Things Every Indian Should Know."]

The Money Trail From Darfur

The Sunday New York Times story by UN correspondent Warren Hoge was headlined "Intervention, Hailed as a Concept, is Shunned in Practice." The lead summed up its gist: "Three years after the United Nations adopted a groundbreaking resolution to help it intervene to stop genocide, even longtime supporters of the rule acknowledge that it has not helped the organization end the violence in Darfur."

The General Assembly in 2005 had endorsed the "responsibility" of governments to prevent genocide, but the United Nations had been "stymied" in its efforts to stop widespread killings in Darfur by "the failure of major member states to fulfill promises to support action and by the intransigence of the Sudanese government." As a result, only the 6,000-strong African Union component of a planned 26,000 joint AU-UN peacekeeping force had been able to deploy.

Hoge offered no explanation for the inaction of Western governments on Darfur, but seemed to suggest that a set of new non-governmental "advocacy and research centers" would address the issue. If they do, here's a simple bit of advice: don't waste time analyzing the moralities of why governments won't act. Just follow the money trail.

It's widely known that the Darfur money trail leads to China, which is the major importer of Sudanese oil. But it does not stop there. China needs the oil to keep its manufacturing industries whirring. Those industries produce 80 per cent of the toys imported by the United States and Europe. They produce the cheap clothes and electronics and other knickknacks that fill the shelves of Wall-mart and other major retailers on both sides of the Atlantic.

China does not produce all the goods it exports. It serves as a finishing shop for goods emerging from South East Asian Nations like Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar. In fact, China gets to keep only about 20 per cent of the proceeds from its exports; the rest goes to others in the production chain in South East Asia. Those nations do not get to keep much of the money either; just the pittance their workers earn. The lion's share of profits percolates back to the corporations and banks that have organized and control the production chains of our global economy. And of course, they wouldn't do it unless all of us buy the cheap goods they produce.

Send not to ask who tolls the bells of Darfur. We do.