US Out Of World Domination, India Give Kashmir’s People A Choice
The major problem in South Asia currently is the unfair division of Kashmir. It has led to a resistance movement that has let to terrorist movements. Initially the subdivision of India into Muslim and Hindu nations was the problem. India should have been one secular nation with a variety of religions. The insistance upon a religion based division of territory led to a situation where people were caught on the wrong side of the line and there was religious violence.
Some of this goes back to the humiliation of the Moslems in World War One by the Allies when they defeated the Ottoman Empire and the Ataturk forces deposed the Caliph. Since then there has been no titular secular head of the Muslim world. The movement of Muslim nationalism in British occupied India was initially a movement to retain and then return the caliphate to a position to authority. That morphed into a separatist nationalist movement when Jinnah decided he could not work with the Congress Party and made a separate deal with the British in exchange for a state of his own. Gandhi was so opposed to this that he offered to let Jinnah be the first Minister of an independent India but he refused.
This is the viewpoint that I have gathered from reading biographies of Gandhi. But I am concerned with the origins of the Two State solution. It seems that it was first publicly articulated in 1930 in a speech by Allama Iqbal at the Presidential Address to the Muslim League. It was later picked up and propounded by Mohammed Ail Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League where he promoted the idea that Hindus and Muslims were different civilizations despite 1000 years of cohabitation including periods of Muslim rule in north India.
This is patently absurd and has been disproved by the fact that 1/3 of the Muslims in South Asia remained in Hindu India after the separation. Upon the break up of Pakistan in 1971 between Pakistan and Bangladesh, now only 1/3 of the Muslims in South Asia are in Pakistan and the remainders are in the nations of India and Bangladesh. Pakistan is the creation of Muslim intellectuals and the British Colonial Rulers. It was a deal that led to ongoing tension and violence. It was certainly not the sort of arrangement a Babur or other Muslim conqueror from the 15th century would abide by. He would have wanted as much of India as he could get regardless of what the religion of the people were.
The emergence of Pakistan as an independent state is a hold over from 19th century racialist nationalist thought. It is the same process that led to German nationalism and all the other fascist and neo fascist ideologies that base their concept of the nation on some misguided notion of racial identity that coalesce in some parts of the world such as Europe in language. I other parts of the world it coalesces around religion as it did in the division of Pakistan but ultimately it is some intellectuals fantasy of creating the perfect nation state that is then projected on the world. These racial states had to have a justification when the aristocratic rule of kings aligned with the church was overturned. They wanted some sort of mystical root cause and in the 19th century the myth of the volk or the people as a tribal entity that had emerged out of the mists of time forged by the blood of the ancestors, often breeding with wolves or some such animal surrogate for the divine in the mythologies of nationalism.
Every group-let had to have its myth. So these scholars in the 19th century scoured the history books and their records of folk tales to come up with these national fairy tales. We can see how it went to absurd lengths with the break of of Yugoslavia into as series of mini-state-lets. Montenegro and Macedonia with their own national identities are taking this tribalization to absurd lengths.
This is from a wikepedia article on Historiography and Nationalism.
“According to the medievalist historian Patrick J. Geary:
[The] modern [study of] history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe’s nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness.”
The simplest solution would be for India allow the vote of the people to be ratified and then give up on the parts of the province that want to be in Pakistan and keep the rest. What would happen to the Buddhist northeastern portion of the region is anybodies guess. I would assume they would form an independent mini state of their own a sort of Tibet in exile nation state. China would gobble that up in a minute.
But that does not solve the problem of hyper nationalism that has inundated the world with a false set of solutions for every problem, form a Republic, get a constitution and a flag and have your seat at the United Nations. Perhaps that is the answer, a total balkanization of the world but that simply leaves these small states prey to to the larger ones and ultimately unless there is some world police force with clout to maintain the independence of all these states they will be swallowed up by the larger ones. If we create a legal construct that gives priority to the independence of nations treating them as if they were private citizens in some large extended version of the Adam Smith notion of the capitalist market system of free agents, then the need for an international police force and legal entity become paramount and you work your way to a world government ass backwards. These multiple sovereign states all dependent on the world state body to protect them from the predator states such as the United States that insist on acting outside of the world body because it is to big, an exception to the rule. Or to put it more bluntly the United States set up the game to protect its interests. It can come and go as it pleases because the international body was created by the United States as a surrogate for its own power.
The fact that almost immediately after it was set up the other interest groups ie the Soviet Union and China had different ideas made the body set up as a tool for US policy into a debating society in which its founder was critiqued from all sides. It is as if God had created mankind and then mankind decided that they didn’t like the job god did.
Modern nationalism is reaching a conceptual dead end. The rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism is just as bankrupt as fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. We can even see fundamentalist Buddhism in Ceylon and Burma in action and a Chinese fundamentalism in Tibet and Turkestan. The rhetoric of nationalism, self determination and the right to access to the marketplace are all simply excuses for greed. The Chinese tried to lay their trip on the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese trounced them in 1979. After kicking out the American Imperialists they certainly didn’t want a return of the Chinese Imperialists although at least the Chinese had a history of ruling in Vietnam.
Capitalism, nationalism, fundamentalism and totalitarianism, all have reached a dead end and what we now need is a new world system of thought. Perhaps it is the modernist project itself that has run its course. Constant technological innovation as the driver of society has become something of a run away train. It is headed for a wreck.
We have a world market, a world government, a world health infrastructure, a world scientific establishment and a world history. Culturally we have not caught up with the reality. We have not devised a political model that is capable of controlling this word economy and social structure. We have the technology but not the emotional and mental development to decide to meet the challenge. This does not mean we need a monolithic structure, but we do need a flexible one that can respond to immediate needs and proactively plan for what we want. This is global. The climate crisis is global, the population crisis is global. the wealth distribution mechanism is global, the resource development and transformation is global. Diseases are global and so are the solutions. There is no more small independent nook on the planet where you can go and live a life of simple primitive leasure. There is no place to go. We are all linked. Soon the technology will exist to implant communications devices in each of us creating a bio-computer out of each and every one of us.
How do we want to live in such a world? Do we want masters and slaves? That is what we have now. Each and every wage earner is a modified version of a slave. The masters are those who are able to live off of the labor of the slaves. The independent parties, free nomads, tribal people, are becoming extinct. Even the small private farmer, the small business owner, they are closely regulated and integrated. No man or woman is an island in this world.
As a youth I wrestled with this. I truly did not want to become part of the machine. I stayed out of it as a member of the underground economy and as a starving artist/revolutionary until about age 30 when I had a child with my partner. I was also busted at about the same time and had to go to work to stay out of prison. So I got down to it and in a couple of years even got good at it becoming a successful salesman and broker. I was on my way to becoming a success story in the capitalist game. But it took a toll. My partner didn’t like my being a workaholic and she left. I had a break down and decided it wasn’t worth it. Since then I have simply been a worker like the vast majority of people in western society.
The Neoconservative attempt to make all of us capitalists vested in the system could only work if we were each of us willing to go up and down with the cycles of capitalism. It is a significantly male concept. Women with the need to feed a family and nurture children would have to face a pretty stark reality, of feast or famine if pure capitalism was the rule. A world of winners and losers on the play of the market. It is a world system a gambling addict would love but if you are a scholar or trying to feed a family, it is a return to the caves. Who wants to have to rely on the success of each days hunt to plan for the future?
So we need a new model. We live in an interconnected world where billions of lives are at stake. One out of every 6 is starving and a small 1 out of 10,000 is living the life any king of old would envy. We need to get a better system of redistribution going. We need a system that takes into account global warming, pollution. peoples need for shelter, food and clothing as well as the health care required to ameliorate the deleterious effects of living in a technological sedentary civilization. Diet, agriculture, energy, water, air, industrial production, services, communications and allocation all need to be reexamined. We need effective feedback loops to communicate the needs in one region to another, we need effective governmental structures to address the needs and to implement planning. We need adequate institutions of learning to study how to provide for all these needs. When we look at it there are certain things that are redundant and should be eliminated.
Advertising. Legal services. Militaries, and speculative economic manipulation, ie the stock market, all are totaly unnecessary and aberrations that take up way too much human energy.
We need to disarm, create a minimal international police force, a simplified understandable legal system and economy that anyone could understand. People with brains should be focused on creating better healthcare, solving pollution and production problems and streamlining the distribution process. If they are imaginative in that way then let them work in entertainment not advertising. Or education. Politics should be stripped of all the hoopla and democracy should be implemented with a safe guard system that takes into account the irrational side of humans. We have the science and technology. Rather than simply say ok folks anything goes, what we need is rational entertaining presentation of facts to people to make informed intelligent decisions with watchdogs to insure if there is a demagogue or deceiver out there trying to stir up one of those primitive tribal instincts that they can come in a diffuse the situation. A veto power is what I would give to Plato’s philosopher kings. Let the Demos rule but the philosophers be there to act as a fuse breaker to stop any vote or decision from taking people into a self destructive direction. Perhaps the computers could be programed not to take over the world but simply to stop working when people decide to do something sucicidal like start launching Nukes against one another or poisoning the environment for a short term profit.
Eventually one would hope we would evolve out of greed and stupidity, but until we do, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves. In the mean time should India give up Kashmir? If that defuses the fundamentalists then sure let the people have what they want. The initial decision to divide India into religious groups was foolish to start with, but right now what we have there is a mess and the best thing to do is to defuse the tension by removing the reasons for it. Ultimately education, jobs and a real access to power over ones own life is what the people there need. Lives of dignity so they can tell the fundamentalists to go take a hike. Until then people will listen to whomever promises the pot of gold at the end of the local rainbow or at least a way out of the current shit.
We need to evolve out of nationalism, not into new empires but a community of people. We need to evolve out of petty legalism and constitutional wrangling over interests that often represent not people but politicians and the money people the represent. We need something like Alexander’s solution to the Gordian Knot. He sliced right through it.
Look at poor Obama up there trying to disentangle himself from the mess Bush created. He made a good speech in Cairo but now he is entangled in the mess in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We created that monster by funding it with the Saudis in the eighties in our drive to defeat the Soviet Union. Now we are entangled in our own equivalent mess. If we say we are getting out then the local people will have to come up with a solution. If we tell the Indian’s we will not support their imposition in Kashmir and if the Russians and Chinese stay out, it will be over in a short period. We need to replace the USA hegemony with a real international body but to do that we have to create a mutual disarmament of all the major players. That is a tough cookie but if we lead the others will follow.
If we simply stop funding these terrorists, on a state level and on a local level and help people develop economically, we will be way ahead of the game. But that means a radical reorientation of the priorities of the US budgets. We spend more on the military that the whole world combined. We have to stop and change direction now.
Tags: India Let The Kashmir's People Decide, USA And Saudi Arabia Stop Funding Terrorists