How Britain Controls the Global Narrative

Why does the British government build a splendid new home for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) when it is imposing painful cuts in all other areas of public expenditure?

Why does the BBC need a “World News Room” with more reporters worldwide than CNN and far more than India, China and Africa combined?

Why continue to have full-fledged services in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Swahili?

The answer is the same to all the questions: it is critically important for British power to impose its narrative on world affairs, and the BBC, a widely effective instrument of propaganda since the heyday of Empire, plays a key role.

Why bother when the Empire is dead and gone?

That’s the beauty of controlling the narrative: the Empire is neither dead nor gone; in fact, it is more powerful today than ever.

As the formal structures of colonial rule came down in the second half of the 20th Century, Britain created a string of “tax havens” around the world, globalizing a system long dominated by its own Jersey Islands and Switzerland. There are some 70 tax havens now, most of them in small island territories like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Mauritius, and they operate with the City (financial center) of London as a global hub to launder and invest the world’s black money. Partial estimates put its assets at about $30 trillion, double the size of the American economy, and the annual flow of laundered money at $2 trillion, about the same as Indian GDP.

This system handles the proceeds of criminal activity ranging from tax evasion and official corruption to the trafficking of prostitutes and drugs. According to the latest report from the Washington-based NGO Global Financial Integrity, it drained an estimated $6 trillion from poor countries over the last decade, more than ten times what they received as “development aid.”

The system also victimizes affluent countries, including the United States and Germany; their super-rich use it to evade billions in personal and corporate taxes.

Unlike developing countries, the affluent ones have been trying to deal with the problem by pressuring and penalizing major international banks that are part of the system, albeit with little success. US authorities last year imposed a fine of nearly $2 billion on HSBC, Britain’s (and Europe’s) largest bank without causing a blip in the company’s share price: investors have known about its most lucrative line of business since drug traffickers founded it in the 19th Century. 

It is a measure of Britain’s control of the global narrative that mainstream media report all this sotto voce and explain none of it. Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent talk of a referendum that will open the door to British withdrawal from the EU is in response to intensifying pressure from Germany to rein in London’s role in money laundering, but it would take a Sherlock Holmes to detect that in the reportage.

The announcement on 7 February that the Bank of England, in an unprecedented departure from iron-cast tradition, will appoint a Canadian as Governor, has also gone without any media excursions and alarums. Obviously, it reflects tremendous pressure from Washington, and even though television cameras have recorded Cameron’s state of clipped cold rage, no reporter has bothered to say why.

How can Britain dominate the global narrative when there are so many other independent media organizations?

Two factors allow it.

One is that the super-rich in all countries are heavily invested in the global black market, and they either own mass media at the national level or control them indirectly.

The other is that much of the “elite” media in developing countries, including India, serve British interests. The links that make them British proxies are widely known. The staff of BBC’s Arabic Service resigned en masse to establish Al Jazeera, and the Sheik who financed the move is a firm British ally; he now runs the most influential media organization in the Arab world. The most influential of Arabic print media operate from London.

In India, as I have noted in previous blogs, the British handpicked the families that run The Times of India and India Today media groups; their patriarchs were financial operators who thrived under colonial rule. NDTV and even The Hindu despite its strong nationalist credentials, also have a pronounced pro-British slant that points to ties deeper than natural affinity. The content of many other English-language publications, especially Outlook and OPEN among the glossies, justifies suspicion their basic journalistic integrity lies suborned.

The mass media are only one aspect of Britain’s control of the global narrative. Another powerful tool has been the United Nations, of which it makes more intelligent and nuanced use than any other member State. In fact, others are usually oblivious to what London is doing.

For example, developing countries did not react last year when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed the British Prime Minister to a 3-member panel that will advise on what should replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that have been the benchmark for the 2000 to 2015 period.

Mr. Cameron has no experience that would fit him for that role, and as noted above, he is the defender of a system that drains wealth from poor countries. His appointment makes sense only as a preemptive move to ensure that the post-2015 development agenda will not broaden the focus of attention from purely domestic standards to the debilitating international environment over which Britain presides.

The United Nations has also proved useful in keeping inconvenient statistics out of public view. The information Global Financial Integrity reports is difficult to ignore but UN agencies manage to do it routinely and with no explanation.

A third method Britain has used to keep control of the global narrative is proxy conflict within developing countries.

In India we have had bitter experience of that tactic during the colonial era and after, but that is only one aspect of the picture. The larger canvas has been the manipulation of the entire Muslim world.

History books record clearly the steps by which Britain took control of the Islamic narrative but contemporary analysts studiously ignore what happened. The process involved four major steps.

One was the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. British support raised a caravan robber operating out of Kuwait to power in Riyadh and expanded his domain to the holy places of Islam, bringing them under the control of an extremist sect, the Wahhabi, that mainstream Muslims had considered “haraam.”

Step Two was support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a violent secret society founded in 1932 that took root first in the British controlled Canal Zone of Egypt, in a mosque built with British money. Since then, it has provided the leadership of every major “Islamic terror” organization in the world.

Step Three  was the creation of the "Palestine problem," a series of amazing treacheries that established an enduring conflict by pitting a desperate and traumatized Zionism against the rising but equally wounded sense of Arab nationalism.

And Step Four was the religious polarization and division of India to create Pakistan as a proxy. To control Pakistan itself, a serving British officer set up the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the spy agency that is the real center of power in that country.

Those four steps, supported by the romanticizing of Arabia's medieval past, pushed the narrative of Islam into a reactionary and violent mode that has made it difficult if not impossible for progressive forces to survive. The current course of events in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya and Mali exemplify that reality.

On a relevant personal note: a few weeks ago I was invited by Oxfam, the British charity, to a meeting to discuss the post-MDG agenda. The theme was inequality as it affected Muslims in India. When I informed the organizer of my intention to raise the issue of British mischief in dividing Indians along religious lines the invitation was revoked. The takeaway from that experience is the significant involvement of supposedly liberal British civil society in controlling the Muslim narrative.

Britain has been far less successful in gaining control of the Hindu narrative but that might change if fascist elements use religion to gain political ascendancy; my next post will deal with that danger.

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."]

“Cultural Terrorism” or Media Madness?

The news agency IANS carried an anonymous article on 31 January with the headline “Cultural terrorism: Idea of India threatened.”

“Shah Rukh Khan one day and Kamal Haasan the next" it began. "Is it mere coincidence or a sign of an increasingly knee-jerk, reactionary India that two of its most loved film icons are forced to go public to painstakingly reassert their secular identity and insist, in case the message is lost, that they are proud Indians?”

The next paragraph noted the predicaments of Ashis Nandy and Salman Rushdie and declared the query in the lead merely rhetorical.

In print and television, our “elite” English media commentators have been on a similar binge of shrill and confused hysteria, tarring with the same brush cases that have nothing in common.

Consider the facts:

Salman Rushdie is a Brown Sahib resident in Britain who for four decades has vilified his two putative homelands and ancestral faith. He is now engaged in promoting a low watt film version of Midnight's Children, the comprehensive dump on independent India that first brought him fame.

Television channels have been carrying endless replays of his indignation at the "cultural terrorism" that has kept him from attending the Calcutta Book Fair to which, he claimed, he had been invited.

Media have given little play to the statement by organizers of that event denying they ever invited him and that he is lying in claiming they paid for his plane ticket.

Quite clearly, Rushdie merely lost his nerve after learning that some Muslims were still outraged at his dump on the Prophet of Islam in Satanic Verses. His false claims repeated a pattern set last year when he was a no-show at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Ashis Nandy is a sociologist in his dotage who said something really stupid as a panelist at the Jaipur Literary Festival: that the lowest castes were responsible for most of the corruption in India.

When someone outraged by that calumny initiated legal action under a law meant to maintain social order, Nandy backed away from his untenable proposition saying he was misunderstood and misquoted. What he actually meant was that the lower castes were caught in their corruptions more often. That too is arrant nonsense, but no one in the media dwelt on it.

Shah Rukh “it’s lonely at the top” Khan is an actor with an outsize ego who seems to believe his own media hype. He had a badly ghostwritten piece in a special “global issues” edition of Outlook magazine about his post 9/11 travails in America.

Airport authorities in the United States have detained him on several occasions for hours at a time, ostensibly because they mistook him for a terrorist.

A dimwit minister in Pakistan thought the article was about the star’s difficulties in India, and called on the Indian government to provide him greater protection. That led the actor to make a televised statement telling the Pakistani to mind his own business and declaring that he was quite safe and happy in India.

Kamal Hasaan is an actor/film maker whose movie Viswaroopam was banned in his home state of Tamil Nadu, supposedly because some Muslims were offended by its depiction of terrorists motivated by their religion.

As the film is innocuous and has a Muslim hero, it is likely that it offended Chief Minister Jayalalitha and not a fringe group of Muslims. She has reason to find offense in the film’s derogatory references to Brahmin women (of which she is a powerful example, particularly so at the head of a political party rooted in the anti-Brahmin movement let loose under British auspices).

In his initial hurt response at the ban, Hasaan told reporters that Tamil Nadu authorities wanted him out of the state, and perhaps he would have to flee the country to a more secular one.

In less emotional statements since then he has tried hard to downplay that response, dismissing one interviewer’s concerns about his artistic freedom by declaring, “my country comes first.”

Quite obviously, the four cases have nothing in common.

If the hysteria they have generated underlines a common theme, it is that “elite” Indian media have become so politically obtuse as to pose a clear and present danger to the country.

Intimations of Immortality

One of my classmates at Columbia Journalism School died recently after a long illness. He was the second to go in the space of a few weeks.

Although we are still in our sixties (“the new 40s”), our cohort is at a stage when it must begin to face the fact that death has become a personal rather than a philosophical interest.

Shored up as I am by the Indian expectation that the soul will go from one discarded body to another, this issue is somewhat easier for me than for most Westerners who, if they believe in the reality set out by their religions, face Judgment Day. If they do not believe, death can only be a final extinction, an equally imponderable end.

But how real is my expectation of many more lives to come (my spiritual status being far from the dispassionate stillness required for moksha)?

It’s very real, and not because I have blind faith in what the Bhagavad Gita says: Science has crept in all around the concept of an eternal soul and now makes it impossible to believe in anything else.

Two scientific advances in particular have validated the concept of the soul. One is the recognition of the matter-energy continuum set out in Einstein’s E=MC2. Matter and Energy are indestructible; they can only be converted into each other.

The discovery of the genetic code is the other major step Science took towards the soul. Its importance lies in the recognition that each of us is a piece of code: complex and only dimly understood as yet, but essentially, each individual is a piece of software that takes material form at the moment of conception.

Put the two concepts together, and we have an individualized code destructible in its material manifestation as DNA but not in its Energy persona. When the material body dies, our individual wave pattern survives, and as with the human voice carried by radio waves, it can vibrate another receptor: a new body at the moment of conception.

As with the radio wave, our individualized genetic pattern will only vibrate a receptor tuned to the right frequency. That’s where the concept of karma comes in. Every action, every thought we have affects our DNA, which contains information coded at the molecular level. At death, the code that floats free of the body is a permanent record of the sum total of our actions. It can only take a new material form consonant with that code.

So, those with good karma find bodies that resonate with virtue, others degenerate into lower forms of life.

QED.

Did China or India "Win" the Development Race?

Who has “won” the development race, China or India?

Steven Rattner, a Wall Streeter with a Washington revolving door background, declared in an opinion piece in the New York Times last Sunday (20 January) that it was China. 

Tyler Roylance of the Heritage Foundation weighed in with an opposing viewpoint three days later on the HF website.

“When a New York Times columnist feels the need to tell his readers, ‘Don’t get me wrong—I am hardly advocating totalitarian government,’ something has probably gone badly awry in his analysis,” he noted in a rebuttal that cited all the by now familiar points in favor of democratic India.

What was missing from both articles was the smoke and mirrors quality of Chinese success. (“Smoke and Mirrors,” by the way, is a must-read book about China by Pallavi Aiyar.)

I have noted in earlier posts the real estate and banking mess in China, both hidden by  statistical fraud but evident in the continuing rise of housing prices even as unsold and unoccupied buildings accumulate into brand new ghost cities.

There is also the officially reported fact that 50 percent of Chinese GDP is investment, foreign and domestic. That is an entirely unsustainable phenomenon, without precedent in economic history: like Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories, China’s spectacular growth rates are the result of artificially pumped-up muscle.

When that rate of investment slows – as it must – it will bring down the whole house of cards. That is because the mandarins of the Communist Party have chosen the appearance of growth over healthy development. They have hidden weaknesses and problems to support the pretense of success.

Corporate debt, for instance, is 180 percent of GDP. (India’s is 49 percent.) Despite that huge debt overhang, there has not been a single default on a Chinese corporate bond issue. That is because even one might start an unstoppable run on the house. So, when a corporation cannot pay back its loans and is in danger of default, local governments step in with public money.

Tyler Durden of Zerohedge.com summed up the situation yesterday: “China is proceeding with bail out after bail out of any company that threatens to expose the reality that Chinese corporations are massively undercapitalized and that absent Chinese state support this particular 180 percent debt/GDP bubble would pop immediately and have dire consequences around the world.”

The corporate bubble will not burst in isolation. It will take the banks with it, and the real estate market. Bank loans, much of it unrealizable and “hidden” in blatantly dishonest ways, are estimated to be 300 percent of GDP. 

The expectation that the Chinese economy has made a “soft landing” because its manufacturing index has shown a slight rise in the last few weeks is whistling in the dark. What has been happening is that the government has been paying ruined merchants to stay open. A few weeks ago The New Yorker reported on a new mall filled with shops carrying the identical range of products, all on the dole; there was not a shopper in sight.

Warehouses at ports and even decommissioned office buildings are reportedly storing imported commodities for which domestic demand has dropped radically.The regime has elected to hid the slowdown in demand.

How long can Beijing continue this charade? No one knows; but it cannot be for very long. A timeline might be suggested by China's huge increase in food imports -- reportedly four times its annual amount.

That is in line with the certainty that a crash in China will bring down the entire world economy. The financial system the IMF presides over with such aplomb is as insolvent as China’s. The trillions of notional dollars Western Central Banks pumped into national economies to prop up demand after the 2008 fall of Lehman Brothers must meet up with reality at some level, and when that happens, the results could be dire indeed.

To answer the question at the beginning of this piece: India has won; but that might not mean much if we do not survive China’s failure.

Background to the Nuke Warning in Kashmir

The Indian government has told Kashmiris to prepare for a nuclear attack. The paragraphs below, from the concluding chapter of my book "1001 Things Every Indian Should Know," explain the background to that startling development.

The chapter sets out a number of specific recommendations for action, then adds the following:

"These measures should effectively roll up the international black market, reduce crime and corruption globally, and provide funding for the most urgent anti-poverty and environmental action. However, there is acute danger that before any of this can happen the British elite will plunge us into another major war with assassinations and false flag operations.

Another World Conflict?

It would also be prudent to spread awareness that we can expect strong opposition from Britain and its allies and proxies. An extrapolation of the British record suggests that it will be violent, perhaps involving war. Previous chapters have noted in detail the breathtaking variety of treacheries that led to the acquisition and retention of the British Empire. They have also made clear how the British elite has, from early days, considered the blood of its own people and those of other nations a cheap currency to trade for power. Massive death tolls accompanied the forcible trade of slaves out of Africa and opium into China, the genocides that drove to near extinction the American Indian, the Australian Aborigine and the Maori of New Zealand, and the great man-made famines of India. Britain fought two ruinous wars with Germany in defense of its imperial interests, killing several million of its own people and forcing the loss of some 100 million lives on other nations. Chapter 6 looked at how Britain maneuvered the world into the Cold War and engineered the great communal killings in India that led to Partition. Other parts of the text have reviewed how Britain gave itself room for strategic maneuver in the Middle East and South Asia by deliberately creating the conflicts over Kashmir and Palestine. In post-colonial Africa it has played a merciless game that has claimed the lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people on earth.

Looking back on that record it would be silly to expect that a few billion-dollar fines on its banks and the prospect of the economic collapse of China, its most lucrative source of criminal loot, will force Britain to mend its ways. It is an almost certain bet that London will try to provoke international conflict, most likely in South Asia where its geopolitical interests are concentrated. At this writing, the sudden deterioration in the India-Pakistan situation in January 2013, the staggering hate speech of an Indian Muslim politician, and the warnings of Hafeez Syed that things will hot up again in Kashmir are firm indications that it is trying. If there is inadequate temperance on both sides the situation could escalate in tit for tat violence and get completely out of hand. As with the beheading and mutilation of two Indian soldiers that led to the current deepening of tensions, it might not be easy to fix responsibility if “terrorists” get some of Pakistan’snuclear weapons. Another emergency Britain could set off easily is global hyperinflation. That would destabilize its nemesis, the United States, and ease all pressure to abandon its empire of crime. The only thing it cannot count on in undertaking such actions is its usual shroud of secrecy and persiflage. Too many people now are aware of its role and watchful of its actions. Despite that, the situation is extremely dangerous."

Keep your fingers crossed!

1001 Things Every Indian Should Know

"1001 Things Every Indian Should Know"  is the title of the e-version of my book just published on Amazon's Kindle.

The book is priced at $3.99 (approx Rs.270) and can be read on any computer or tablet.  I believe there are several promotional days to come on which the book can be downloaded free. I will let you know when they are scheduled.

As a print version is in the works would be grateful for all feedback!

Here is the book description as it appears on the Amazon web site:

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1001 Things Every Indian Should Know is a book about India and its place in the world. Written by a veteran journalist with a lifetime of experience covering international affairs, it tells of the country's millennial history and how our understanding of it was distorted during the period of British colonial rule. It also provides an Indian view of Britain and tells how the largest of colonial empires segued into a new career as the center of a global black market that is now estimated to be twice the GDP of the United States.

Britain and India are polar opposites. One invented the industrial revolution and the modern corporate apparatus of the market economy; the other has a rich material culture but its traditional approach to reality is essentially spiritual. Despite the end of colonial rule the interaction of the profoundly different approaches to reality of the two nations has continued into the 21st Century and it will decide the fate of the world. The book tells of that interaction in terms of Mahatma Gandhi's life and legacy, and Britain's deeply negative response.

The globalization of industrial civilization has brought the world into a situation of deep interlocked crises that have grown steadily worse despite all efforts by governments for over four decades. The book explains why that is so and reprises the case that Gandhi first made in 1910: industrial civilization is too violent and corrupting to be redeemed; it must be replaced.

However, India sans Mahatma is now on an ill-considered course to integrate with the industrial world: The repercussions for Indian society and for the world will be dismal. The rising tide of violence and crime in India is the direct result of its so-called "development" in recent decades. For the world, an industrialized India will be disastrous in terms of ecological impact.

How do we deal with this situation? Governments have shown they cannot do so. The book recommends how ordinary Indians can correct their country's course through civil action. It sets out a plan for a nonviolent Gandhian revolution that can transform not just India but the world.


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