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Random Thoughts
Politics,
Economics & Religion
� Tripod Of Revolution and War
by
Gaurang Bhatt, MD
 Economics and politics are the two faces of the same coin whose flip
decides the course of history. The American war of independence was a
rebellion of the relatively wealthy who lacked political power and were
tired of the British monarch and parliament deciding the imposition of
tariffs and taxes and the terms of whom to trade with or not to. The
merchants, bankers and landed gentry saw the British restraints as an
impediment to their enrichment. The landless poor saw the British
treaties with the American Indians as a barrier to their hopes of
acquiring lands by superior force of arms from the American Indians whom
they considered as savages of an inferior race.
As Krishna tells Arjuna
in the Bhagwad Gita on revealing his Virata Swarupa (ultimate true
visage), �Now I am time, the destroyer of all things�.
While the
American whites were of British stock and not convicts like the
Australian settlers, they were the poor, unsuccessful, Puritans,
Quakers, Scotch Irish forced to migrate to America due to religious and
economic reasons and often looked down upon by the British soldiers,
landlords and government officials as relative yahoos.
George Washington felt slighted when he was denied an appropriate
commission in the regular army by the Governor of Virginia. Many of the
landed gentry of America tried to put on airs by living beyond their
means and were heavily indebted to London merchants and manufacturers
for their profligate lifestyles of keeping up with the high official
British Joneses living in America. This was the confirmation of their
own insecurity and inferiority complex. There was confirmation of the
lack of Washington�s military capabilities in his earlier foolish and
gallantry induced attempts to fight and win pitched battles. He was
fortunately dissuaded by his advisor generals with lesser military
experience but greater strategy and genius. He subsequently followed a
guerilla warfare strategy using civilians as a refuge and support and by
exploiting the logistical difficulties faced by British troops dependent
on reinforcements by sea requiring weeks to months. Unfortunately the
Indians fighting the British in India did not have enough brains to use
this strategy against the countless invaders that conquered India from
before the Christian era to the present. The Americans notorious for
lacking historical memory have forgotten their own history and lost the
war in Vietnam and are losing in Iraq And Afghanistan by those very same
tactics.
The American Civil War, contrary to the bogus history taught in American
schools was not primarily on account of slavery. The South was an
agrarian economy and the North based on manufacturing and finance. There
were ongoing problems between the south wanting free trade and no
tariffs on imported goods from Europe and the north wanting high tariffs
to protect and develop its infant manufacturing base. There was no
Federal Reserve and no income tax at that time and the Federal
government depended on import duties and tariffs for its budget. These
high tariff barriers were what made America a great economic power, just
as they allowed Japan, Korea and Taiwan to prosper later (Read Ha Joon
Chang�s �Bad Samaritans�). The agricultural south needed cheap or
free labor to prosper economically. Slavery provided that, There was
racial prejudice and discrimination but it was also there in the north.
During the civil war, many Irish inflamed at being drafted to fight,
went on a rampage in New York and killed a large number of black people
as a protest. On a similar basis the French Revolution was because of
poverty, severe deprivation and unjust laws imposed on the common poor
by the rich and powerful nobles and the king.
Tocqueville and other social scientists have observed that revolutions
often occur after the tyrants have eased some of the severest
restrictions of the oppressed. The early whiffs of freedom can be
intoxicating and lead to anticipation of more with a sense of
empowerment. The next deprivation or oppression precipitates an open
revolt. This is what happened in the Russian revolution. The serfs had
been freed some years ago. Poverty, food shortage and disasters of WW1
led to the Bolshevik revolution. Similarly the Iranian revolution
occurred after minor concessions by the Shah and a population angered by
poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and torture by the Shah, a
minority of corrupt supporters and officials. The same thing happened in
China. The nationalists were corrupt, venal, hierarchic, condescending,
unjust and indifferent to the peasant masses and were overthrown by the
communists. Now the communists have caught the same infection and are
desperately worried about the increasing numbers of migrant unemployed
workers angered by arbitrary land seizures and absent justice on the one
hand and the rising affluent bourgeoisie denied entry to the corridors
of power.
The marginalization of the Sri Lanka Tamils by making Sinhalese, the
sole official language and denying them their fair share of political
and economic rights caused the LTTE insurgency. It is coming to an end
due to the military might of the rightist Sinhalese government and the
intransigence of Prabhakar and his LTTE, but victory without redress and
reconciliation are predictors of an unstable and fragile peace. The
idiocy of the Nepalese king and his total indifference to the plight of
the average poor Nepalese villager, cost him the throne and the rule of
the Maoists prevailing now. The foolish insistence of the French on
resuming their colonial rule over Vietnam with American support after
WW2 and later assumption of the war by America led to the defeat of both
in their foolish and selfish tyrannical efforts to thwart the
nationalist will of the oppressed peasants.
The Naxalite and Maoist movements in the eastern and southeastern states
of India and to some extent Kashmir are the results of mis-governance by
the Indian central governments from independence onwards. In the eastern
states the oppressed have thrown off their millstone of Hindu religion
with its promise of pie in the sky in the next birth or the specter of
more pain as a punishment, and are seeking their moment in the sunlight
in the only life they will ever have. In Iraq only idiots like Cheney
and Bush who imbibe their knowledge either by sitting on books or being
punished by being hit on their ossified brains by heavier ones, would
have failed to predict the Shia Sunni civil war. The so called wise
Jefferson was equally unable to predict the reign of terror of the
Jacobins in the French Revolution. See what havoc, retarded children
left behind like Bush and Cheney can cause when given the reins of
power. In Afghanistan, abused by America, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to
punish the USSR by the first and to lend a patina of legitimacy to their
illegitimate power by General Zia and the Saudi king, the continuous
tyranny, and infighting of unjust warlords led to the rise of the
Taliban with support from the Pakistani ISI (for its own nefarious
ulterior motives). The inept, ineffective, corrupt, unjust Karzai
government combined with indiscriminate aerial bombing of innocent
civilians is leading to the Taliban resurgence and another lost war in
Afghanistan by America, adding to the prior defeats in Korea, Vietnam,
Lebanon, Somalia and Iraq.
Contrary to popular belief the myth of American exceptionalism is a
blatant lie. Black Slavery, native American genocide, unjust wars of
choice, Chinese and Southern European exclusion acts (barring
immigration), internment of US citizens of Japanese origin, Monroe
Doctrine, torture in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Iraq, Cuba and
Afghanistan requires apology and war criminal trials, not empty boasts
or laurels. Continuing with Pakistan, the atrocities perpetrated in its
eastern wing, now Bangladesh, to militarily annul the legitimate victory
of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and prevent him from becoming the prime
minister of all of Pakistan by the principle of majority rule in a
democracy, led to the secession of Bangladesh with the help of India and
its armed forces. It also, by serendipity, bestowed on India the
accolade of having fought a just war, an almost unheard of event in
entire human history.
Most people are unaware that
the central government in Pakistan rules the Northwest Frontier
Province, Swat and the FATA just as the British did during the Raj. They
provide little or no services and in the case of FATA, appoint a
political agent, who punishes any transgression by an individual by
collectively punishing the family including children, by incarceration
and by bulldozing their houses and confiscating their land. Welcome to
the other Palestine on the periphery of Pakistan. There is no
functioning court or judicial system in much of Pakistan. The feudal
landlords pervert justice and the landless peasants are left to starve
despite backbreaking labor and their nubile women worried about becoming
victims of sex crimes. The provinces of Sind, Baluchistan and even
Punjab are suffering the same afflictions, but to a lesser degree. An
inability to provide four independent corroborating witnesses converts a
raped woman from a victim to a criminal adulterer, subject to death by
stoning. What a Biblical thought plagiarized by the Koran.
Thus do prolonged and excessive inequality of wealth in a given
population with skewed scales of justice to favor the lobbyists,
politicians, wealthy and powerful sow the seeds of revolution and war in
fertile minds irrigated by injustice, deprivation, oppression,
humiliation and torture.
April 26,
2009
Image of "Landing at
Jamestown, the founding of the colony of Jamestown, Virginia by Captain
Christopher Newport and 105 of his followers, 1607" under license with
Gettyimages.com
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