Detecting Starvation in Participatory Democracies

Amartya Sen has famously claimed that famines do not occur in democracies[i], but it is not immediately clear why this should be so. After all, inequality, deprivation, economic exploitation and denial of access to basic human needs are endemic in democracies around the world, even the United States. Do the processes of legislative accountability, a free press, free movement within the country, the rule of law, social security provisions and the political freedoms associated with a democracy guarantee that we will never see a repeat of likes of the Bengal Famine of 1943? In this paper I propose a bottom-up process that detects which citizens are unable to obtain basic human needs, through the participation of the people in the local political structures. The process design addresses the issues involved in the definition of deprivation, provides rapid identification of deprived citizens, and aggregation and reporting upwards into district/county, state and federal administration to ensure that immediate local responses are back-filled with resources that sustain them for the long run. Thus it can deal not only with nutritional deprivation, but also other human needs. The model will use India as an example.
Most countries, whether democratic or not, have disaster response mechanisms that kick-in when there are major events such as flood, earthquake, hurricane or terrorism. Pre-warning periods are generally short, ranging from days in the cases of weather related events, to none at all for earthquakes. There is usually no debate about the fact that the event has occurred, or that help is needed; only the extent of the damage and the ways in which to help the affected populace need to be determined and acted upon. Generally, in regions prone to these events, or where there is a likelihood of their occurrence, plans are already in place for rapid execution. International assistance is usually prompt, as in the Tsunami of 2004, even though some governments may refuse aid, as did Myanmar recently. The quality of the immediate response and the follow-up action are usually subject to intense media scrutiny as these are the events that form the basic raw material for the twenty-four hour news channels.

Starvation, epidemics and other more subtle deprivations of basic human needs are very different from the sudden intense disaster. There are usually chronic conditions such as lack of economic or natural resources, political or military conflicts, or the aftermath of exploitation that set the stage for an acute phase. As these have usually been in place for some years, they are no longer in the news, and no one is held specifically accountable for their removal. Berg claims that in the large parts of the developing world “malnutrition is everybody’s business but nobody’s responsibility” (Banik 2007:5).

These usually start in poorer or remote localities that are not covered by the media, leading to a delay in detection. Whether or not they are occurring is open to political debate since they are usually an intensification of a deprivation that is chronic; they are usually slow to build up over weeks and months; the causes are not easily understood and the steps needed to be taken to help those affected are not only controversial, but some could actually hurt the affected people in the long run.

The first step is setting up a system of measures and thresholds that provide a detection mechanism. In the examples that follow, I will use administrative terms, types of work performed and commodities from India, explaining them in terms of equivalent US terms in the footnotes. Setting up a monitoring system on a national or even district level would be impossible as agreement on the measures and their thresholds could not be reached. However this can be accomplished at the local level: in the village (Gram) or urban neighbourhood (ward or area in terms of the Panchayati Raj legislation). While guidelines could be provided on suggested measures and thresholds, the ultimate decision needs to be local. It also needs to be revalidated periodically.

A Deprivation Detection Model

This model detects conditions of deprivation at the local level by setting up lists of commodities produced and consumed with the corresponding quantities and prices, and recording daily family income for different types of work or economic strata. An exchange entitlement mapping uses allocation percentages and the production and consumption prices to identify the groups that don’t earn enough to purchase the minimum quantity of commodities needed to maintain a healthy nourished life. This is to be constructed and maintained at the local level, by the Gram Panchayat or Ward Committee. The examples of commodities, types of work performed and income allocations are given for illustrative purposes; it is expected that the exact details would be formulated by each local body, based on their circumstances.

Sen has detailed the difficulties in detecting and aggregating measures of poverty and deprivation within and across countries and communities: the “head-count measure… has at least two drawbacks… it takes no account of the extent of the (income) shortfall (from the poverty line, and) it is insensitive to the distribution of income among the poor” (Sen 1981:10). He goes onto criticize the biological approach to the definition of poverty in terms of nutritional requirements as their translation into commodity requirements depends on the food habits of a diverse population. The simplistic views of Karl Marx that “in a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known” (Sen 1981:18 quoting Marx in Das Kapital), do not map to a complex reality. As Megill has pointed out, Marx’s rejection of the market was partly due to his positivist belief that the people’s commodity needs could be computed and planned for; he rejected the multiplicity of goods that even the simplest human society needs and produces. Therefore large-scale aggregate measures that detect and report poverty are not practical: we need a localized approach.

In order to realistically model basic human needs Sen suggests that a hybrid vector of commodity requirements be used, e.g. “amounts of calories, proteins, housing, schools, hospital beds” (Sen 1981:25). In order to make this amenable to easy measurement, local knowledge has to be used to translate every element into a commodity vector that lists the commodities essential for a family to remain nourished and healthy. Note that these commodities are to be measured in terms of direct consumption in their natural units, and not in terms of the cash needed to acquire them. In addition, the current prices per unit need to be recorded on a regular basis. Table 1 is an example of a Consumption Commodity Vector, with prices in Indian Rupees and sample quantities for a family of four. In addition, a Production Commodity Vector similar to the Consumption Commodity Vector needs to be created that shows the commodities produced and their prices in the local area.

Consumption Commodity Vector



For the consumption commodities that are not self-produced, an Exchange Entitlement Mapping has to be performed for every significant socio-economic segment in the local population, focusing primarily on those at-risk. This involves estimates of their daily income, and their likely allocation of that income to the types of commodities. This must include allowance for non-essential purchases since this is not a model for a concentration camp. Local knowledge of market and labour conditions, behaviour patterns and economic stratification is needed to carry out this breakdown, but should be feasible at the village level. Table 2 is an example of the Income Vector, with examples of the daily income earned by a standard family in different lines of work.

Income Vector

The quality weightage adjusts for the fact that persons in the higher stratification need to preserve a higher standard of life even if it is a façade. Srivastava points out that during famines in the late nineteenth century, the higher castes and classes had a false sense of respectability, and could not participate in relief works or go to the poor houses (Srivastava 1968:335-336), and therefore suffered more during famines and periods of shortage.

Income Allocation

Table 3 is an example of the allocation of the expenses to the major areas of spending by the different types of workers. It takes into account that persons belonging to different economic strata have different expenditure priorities.

These four tables are then used to create a dashboard where we compute the margin between the income allocated for a type of need and the current cost on a daily basis. If the margin is less than Rs. 5, the cell is in yellow; it is shown in red when negative. In the example below, the Kisan is unable to afford food and shelter at the current income level of Rs. 75 per day and the local authorities should either invoke National Rural Employment Guarantee Yojana, a social security scheme of the central government that guarantees 100 working days in a year for every rural laborer and pays Rs. 100 per day or provide subsidized food and shelter. Note also that the higher strata are equally affected by the food prices and need support of some sort, or are forced to re-allocate their expenditure.

Dashboard

This dashboard could be easily implemented using a spreadsheet for local purposes, but using a web-based application with distributed daily data collection from various local functionaries and online display of the results is a better approach. By putting this on the Panchayat website, it becomes easily accessible to the public. Subsidiary information about data entry times and sources as well as drill-down into the calculations would be added functionality.
Elected village committees (Gram Panchayats) reporting into district level organizations (Zilla Parishads) are already involved in decentralized planning using software tools and portals developed by the National Informatics Center. Implementation of the proposed solution could easily be achieved on this platform (Planning Commission website).

Reporting Up the Chain

As Sen points out, “there is very little alternative to accepting the element of arbitrariness in the description of poverty, and making that element as clear as possible” (Sen 1981:22). By setting the measures and thresholds in a participatory process at a local level, it is the people most affected by this arbitrariness who make the decisions. The aggregation across the district or higher level administrative constructs needs to use the local metrics as their basis, not the measures themselves. Instead of averaging the commodity vector over a larger geographical unit, it is the number of reds and yellows in the metrics that should be aggregated. This way the disadvantaged tribal community that is facing starvation and is showing a red in its nutrition metric is not drowned out by the nearby district headquarters which has enough food to eat. Superimposing the dashboard on zoom-able maps with red/yellow/green dots to show the aggregates would be the best format.

At the state and national levels, these aggregated local level metrics need to be compared with other measurements of the economy, sample surveys, administrative reports etc and divergences between the reporting sources investigated. These can lead to fine-tuning of the traditional aggregated measurements as well as guidelines for use at the local level. This is needed to avoid moral hazards in the mis-application of central aid, as it is in the interest of the local political structures to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem being faced so as to show their constituents how much they are doing for them. Level-setting exercises that compare the basic data and the thresholds with independent sources and gaining consensus from all the agencies involved will reduce this risk.

In addition, steps need to be taken to ensure that there is no deprivation of political rivals by leaving them out of the monitoring, or the relief measures. As Banik has pointed out repeatedly, starvation and its relief is highly politicized; any process that is designed must counteract the basic tendency to ensure that political capital results from any relief undertaken. This can also be guaranteed by openness in the computation and display of the monitors, especially by making them available for review on the web by the public without logins or restrictions.

Conclusion

This paper describes an approach to the prevention of starvation and improvement in nutrition based on local participatory democracy and the use of information and communication technology (ICT). If applied to India as an example, it would require the setup and maintenance of commodity consumption and production and income vectors, daily data entry of sample data points for prices and incomes, and regular monitoring of the reports on local, district and state levels. The Panchayati Raj model that has been created in the country has already created the basic infrastructure needed for this exercise.

The political will and the administrative ability to perform this activity have already been demonstrated in Purulia, West Bengal. In order to effectively fight starvation in at-risk populations, Banik mentions at least three processes that mirror the proposals in this paper, albeit without the formalized approach and use if ICT. First, the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] party workers monitor food and water availability, as well as distressed families and arrange for them to be registered to receive relief. Second, the elected panchayat representatives monitor their communities and reach out through the Zilla Parishad to the district administration to ensure that relief is provided to those who need it. Third, three-member block level committees that include representatives from the Gram Panchayat, the administration and a social worker, monitor the transport and distribution of subsidized food from the Public Distribution System. Banik credits the innovations in Purulia to alert Panchayat representatives who “appeared more capable of identifying potentially vulnerable individuals and households… since they feared loss of political support if they ignored the plight of people close to destitution”. However, over-politicization of aid can be counter-productive as “Panchayat representatives regularly added and deleted households from BPL (Below the Poverty Line) depending on political affiliation” (Banik 2007:170). The setup phase when the vectors and thresholds are created on a local basis help reduce this arbitrariness compared to an aggregated poverty line threshold for income.

Why do democracies do better when fighting famine? I would argue that firstly they allow the information about the critical conditions in affected localities flow from the bottom-up, from the people actually affected, through administrative reporting to decision-makers. There are also other channels such as the press, intelligentsia and political workers, both from the ruling and opposition parties, and institutions such a parliament that bring the situation to public notice. Secondly, once they are out in the open, in a democracy the ruling party needs to at least show that they are taking action, or be out of office. Finally, there are the courts at the state and federal level that can investigate and intervene. None of these institutions can do the same in a closed dictatorial government.

References

Banik, Dan.(2007) Starvation and India’s Democracy. (Oxon: Routledge).
Megill, Allan. (2002) Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Govt. of India. (2007) The State of the Panchayats: A Mid-term Review and Appraisal. (New Delhi).
Planning Commission, Govt. of India. Manual for Integrated District Planning. http://panchayat.gov.in/data/1234765558648~Manual%20for%20Integrated%20District%20Planning%20-%20Planning%20Commission.pdf. Accessed May 24, 2009.
Sen, Amartya. (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Fulfilment. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Srivastava, Hari Shanker. (1968) The History of Indian Famines and Development of Famine Policy [1858-1918]. (Agra: Sri Ram Mehra & Co.).
[i] Banik quotes Sen in ‘Food Battles: Conflicts in the Access to Food’, Food and Nutrition, 10:81-89

From Freud to Eternity: Psychoanalysis and the “Oceanic Feeling”

Romain Rolland’s reaction to the carnage of World War I, and his perception of the hypocrisy of the established church, inspired him to search for a universal religion that would unite all mankind. His mystical experiences in late childhood had prompted him to study mysticism both in the East and the West, and led to his belief that the “oceanic feeling” common to many mystics was the source of a true religious feeling. In 1927 he wrote to Sigmund Freud asking him to analyze it. Freud, while admitting that the phenomenon posed a difficult problem, labeled it a universal regressive tendency towards the pre-Oedipal stage when the baby felt at one with its environment while being breast-fed. His atheism and his reliance on the traditions of western culture, philosophy and history did not allow him a different explanation. The fact that his estranged disciple, Carl Jung considered mysticism important may also have played a role in Freud’s response. Unfortunately this characterization led to generations of Freudians denigrating the role of spiritual or mystical feelings in their patients and considering them to be a part of the patient’s psycho-pathology. In order to rehabilitate these important parts of our mental life, new schools of psychoanalytic thought have recently developed, overturning this part of Freud’s legacy and successfully treating patients to whom mysticism, spirituality and meditation form an integral part of their life experiences.

Introduction

Rolland was born into a Catholic family, but by the time he went to secondary school he had established a personal credo based on a Nature God, influenced by Spinoza. He also had several experiences that he later recognized as being mystical, leading to his conception of an “ocean of being”, and the term “oceanic feeling”. Rolland wrote to his mother, after a mystical experience in the Swiss Alps, that “it is there where I felt most of myself … mixed into the infinite soul of Divine Nature …(it is that Divinity) who I am, who in spite of yourself you are, and in whose bosom we will all be united”[i]. He studied the mysticism of the East and the West, and his own intuitive ideas resonated with the concept of individual souls united in a universal Being, as expressed in Vedanta. Rolland later quoted Vivekananda: “He is present in every being! Thus we are all manifold forms of Him. There is no other God to seek for! He alone is worshipping God, who serves all beings!”[ii].

Mysticism has a wide range of meanings, so we will try to restrict it to what Rolland would have meant. Zaehner said that mysticism is an experience of unity in the mind “with someone or something other than oneself”. Rolland studied William James who was more specific: “In mystic states we both become one with the absolute and we become aware of our oneness” and gain “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect” [iii]. Religion is rarely mentioned, except in Christian mysticism where the experience is through “the felt presence of God”. James’s description is similar to the Hindu concept of samadhi, which is an alternate state of consciousness achieved through meditation when your individual soul, the atma, connects to the universal soul, the paramatma, or Being. Rolland noted that James, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, has “a collection of mystic witness coming from his Western contemporaries…All unknowing as they were, they realized states identical with the characteristic samadhi of India”[iv]. Mystical experiences can be triggered in different ways: by visual experiences such as looking at mountains or historical ruins, by using drugs or practicing Yoga. The Sanskrit root of yoga means unity, signifying physical and mental practices that bring the individual into unity with the universal Being.

According to Parsons, the period from 1880 to 1930 was the earliest period of the interaction between religion and psychological studies: “Freud, William James and Carl Jung are the psychologists most readily associated with this period … several noted scholars of their generation – Delacroix… Marechal … Flournoy … Morel … Bucke… Hocking … Leuba…- placed the psychological study of mysticism at the forefront of their research”[v]. It is in this context that the Rolland-Freud correspondence on the “oceanic feeling” takes place.
In response to Freud’s book analyzing religion, The Future of an Illusion, Rolland wrote in December 1927 asking him to do “an analysis of spontaneous religious sentiment or, more exactly, of religious feeling…the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the ‘eternal’ (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and like oceanic as it were)”. He thought that Freud would classify it under Zwangsneurosen[vi], but he often “had occasion to observe its rich and beneficent power” on “great souls of the West” and “great minds of Asia”, and that he was about to write a book on two of them “who revealed an aptitude for thought and action which proved strongly regenerating for their country and for the world”. He also said that he was familiar with this sensation, and “found in it a source of vital renewal… without this constant state… affecting in any way my critical faculties”[vii].

The two great minds that Rolland referred to are Ramakrishna Parahamsa and Swami Vivekananda. Ramakrishna, an unlettered village priest from Bengal, became well-known in the latter half of the nineteenth century for his simple teachings of the Vedanta and ecstatic visions of the Mother Kali. Moving to the temples on the banks of the Ganges at Dakshineswar, a suburb of Calcutta, he taught Hindu philosophy through parables. A seventeen year-old Narendranath Dutta came to visit him, had a mystical experience in his presence and stayed on, eventually becoming his chief disciple. After the death of the master, and several years of a walking pilgrimage in India, Swami Vivekananda, as Narendranath became known, founded the Ramakrishna Mission which now has many branches all over the world.

Rolland’s deeper understanding of the “oceanic feeling” came from his knowledge of Hindu spiritual practices such as yoga, and the teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. He seems to be the friend who has told Freud that “through the practices of Yoga, …and by peculiar methods of breathing, one can in fact evoke new sensations and co-anesthesia’s in oneself, which he regards as regressions to primordial states of mind that have long ago been overlaid”[viii]. As Rolland wrote in his letter to Freud, he is constantly in this connected state, yet able to maintain his critical faculties, presumably through these practices. Rolland distinguished between the mystical experience that occurs rarely, and that too due to a trigger, and the mystical state in which one always feels connected. The former he associated with his youth when he had “transient experiences of unity”. The latter is “a mature mysticism that was the result of an existential process”[ix].

It is this mature mysticism that Gupta recounted many times about Ramakrishna: “Suddenly the Master went into samadhi and sat thus for a long time. His body was transfixed, his eyes wide and unwinking, his breathing hardly perceptible. After a long time he drew a deep breath, indicating his return to the world of sense”[x]. Gupta also quoted Ramakrishna: “reasoning and discrimination vanish after the attainment of God and communion with Him in samadhi. …‘I’ and ‘you’…become silent when he is truly aware of Unity”. This may appear to contradict Rolland’s claim of always feeling connected yet in charge of his critical faculties, but can be understood when we contrast his experience with those triggered by the use of drugs. In those cases the experiences are unpredictable and the critical faculties may be impaired by the drugs.

Freud took over eighteen months to answer the question raised about the “oceanic feeling”. Writing in the first chapter of Civilization and its Discontents, he first stated that the question caused him “no small difficulty”, partly due to his inability to discover this feeling in himself. He described it as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”, but one that “sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology”. Reasoning from his theory of the development of the ego, he said it was due to the persistence of a primary ego-feeling “which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” and persisted “side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity” [xi]. Firmly embedded in the materialism inherent in the Enlightenment, Freud looked for an answer in sensations of the external world. Not only did he misinterpret the “oceanic feeling” as a feeling based on material sensations, he put it down as an immature regression to babyhood. This position is to constrain the Freudians’ understanding of mysticism and even “recent portrayals of Indian mysticism … in terms of regression, manic denial, depersonalization and derealization”[xii].

Rolland was not amused. In his Life of Vivekananda, he complained that psychologists, for example Pierre Janet, placed “awareness of the present, of present action, the enjoyment of the present” above “disinterested action and thought”; and at the bottom “the whole world of imagination and fancy”. Going further, he claimed that “Freud asserts that reverie … is nothing but the debris of the first stage of evolution”. Finally he recommended that the Freudian doctors needed psychological treatment themselves: “This depreciation of the most indispensable operation of the active mind…is in danger of becoming a pathological aberration. Physician, heal thyself!”. It appears that the Protestant work ethic and emphasis on action permeated a science studied the mind and thought processes. Rolland recognized this when he says that “psycho-pathologists… are … servants of a proud and Puritanical faith” [xiii].

Rolland sent copies of his biographies of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda that contained these complaints, to Freud in January 1930. Freud addressed Rolland’s criticism of psychoanalysis in two ways. First, he deflected some of the blame on to “C. G. Jung, who is a bit of a mystic himself and hasn’t belonged to us for years”. Second, he explained that the terms that they use, such as “regression, narcissism, pleasure principle are of a purely descriptive nature” and are value-neutral; so “reflecting is a regressive process without losing any of its dignity or importance in being so”. He seemed to be claiming that psychoanalysts can overload ordinary words and use them as technical terms but it is not their fault if lay persons interpret them on a scale of values. He then attacked the role that mystics place on intuition “to solve the riddle of the universe” when it is “worthless for orientation in the alien external world”[xiv]. Again he stresses the worldly aspect of his psychoanalytic theories. Not surprisingly, this is the last substantive response from Freud to Rolland in a correspondence that started in 1923. Interestingly, in the letter Freud writes that he will now try to “penetrate into the Indian jungle” and admits he “really ought to have tackled it earlier, for the plants of this soil shouldn’t be alien to me; I have dug to certain depths for their roots. But it isn’t easy to pass beyond the limits of one’s nature”. A confirmation that Freud has not escaped the influence of the “Oriental Renaissance”, yet has not studied it deeply as yet.

Schwab has documented the extensive influence on German, French and British artists and intellectuals that occurred following the colonization of Bengal at the end of the eighteenth century. From 1792 a stream of works translated from Sanskrit were to be circulated and discussed in Europe, leading to what he has termed the “Oriental Renaissance”. Hugo, Vigny, Michelet, Lamartine, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and Tolstoy are just a few of those influenced by Indian works such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads. But Freud seemed to have escaped its influence completely, at least in his analysis of the “oceanic feeling”, while he did admit having some acquaintance with Indian thought in his correspondence with Rolland.

Discussion

Freud believed that it was the sensual experience of the person that helped develop his or her inner world. This included external sensations such as touching and seeing, as well as sensations internal to the body. To develop an Oedipus complex, one had to be aware of the mother, the father and the sensations one felt in their presence. This was a view that predominated in the West, especially after the Enlightenment: anything worth studying had to be observable through the senses. Rolland believed instead that there was something deeper inside man that came from within the soul. This is the reason that Rolland disagrees when psychologists place “awareness of the present”, i.e. sense processing, above “imagination and fancy”. The Eastern, or more specifically Hindu, concept that the soul is reborn in different physical bodies and remains connected to the universal Being at all times did not resonate with Freud, it was “beyond the limits of (his) nature”.

This difference in their understanding of causation in the development of man’s psychology was the real problem here. Just like Weber, opposing Marx, claimed that the ideas in Calvinism may have led to capitalism, the argument between Freud and Rolland was whether the mind was built from a clean slate by the sensations encountered, or it came pre-configured to some extent and deeply connected to all other souls including a universal soul, Being. Just like the origins of capitalism, the reality is more complex than either was willing to admit. In the case of Freud, he would be hard-pressed to explain the differences in human behavior when the sensual environment was the same, especially at a very young age. Rolland pursued a Unitarian religion that all mankind could subscribe to, but forgot that the “oceanic feeling” didn’t occur naturally and the mystic performed arduous mental and physical labor before achieving the meditative state. Ashokananda points out that man is divine in potential, but “one needed recourse to dogma, mystical techniques and a guru to awaken what was innate and gain realization”[xv]. Thus most adherents would have to rely on faith and dogma rather than personal experience and a new Catholicism would thus emerge. This is probably why the Hindu religion is so different from the philosophy it is based on.

Hindu philosophy has a more complex view of human development: reincarnation means that the starting point for the human mind is not a clean slate, and later development of the personality depends on both the environment (in some sense fate) as well as the actions carried out by the individual (karma). Thus, while there is a deep unifying connection with the universal Being, and each person is born primed to behave in certain ways, the sensations of life also have a part to play. When it is time for the cycle to repeat itself in the next incarnation, only the balance sheet is transferred, so to speak, and the transactions forgotten.

Freud’s analysis of the “oceanic feeling” was taken very seriously by his colleagues and successors, who rejected all consideration of mysticism. Recently, some psychoanalysts are able to take a broader view of mysticism and the therapeutic benefits of meditation. Roland describes a patient in Mumbai who usually keeps her meditative and spiritual life a secret from her therapists since she has had negative experiences when she brought them up with classical Freudians; they consider meditation as regressive rather than therapeutic. After being in therapy with a progressive therapist the patient says: “meditation is better than psychoanalysis…but best of all is meditation and psychoanalysis”[xvi]. Vaidyanathan has collected several articles that favor a progressive view of Hinduism and mysticism in psychoanalysis.

Conclusion

Freud’s discussion of the “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and its Discontents and his correspondence with Rolland betray an unwillingness to consider that there is a psychoanalytic reality outside what he could comprehend using the traditions of western culture, philosophy and history. His psychoanalytic theory was universally applicable, there would be Oedipal myths in all societies, and the development of the individual’s psychological processes would be the same all over the world. As Parsons states, “While Freud sought to displace religion, psychoanalysis was still quite Western, carrying the values of his humanism, religious upbringing and scientific training”. Not that Freud was unaware of the teachings of the East: these had been translated and influenced European thought since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Freud and Rolland, just ten years apart in age, were both products of Western Europe’s malaise of the second half of the nineteenth century that would result in the wars and conflicts of the twentieth. The late nineteenth century was a time for overthrowing old ideas and concepts, like the final dispatch of monarchy in France in 1848. Using the scientific method as the primary tool, Marx was to question history and economics, Darwin biology, and Freud our understanding of the mind. Each thinker was revolutionary for his time and his origins, but all were firmly rooted in the scientific Enlightenment; for example, Freud went to great lengths to proclaim the scientific basis of his theories, despite widespread skepticism. Rolland, however, was an artist, working in music, literature and the theatre, yet he gained his fame as the conscience of Europe with his anti-war stance which was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. He questioned the nationalism in politics and religion that led to war, and promoted the unity of all mankind. Artists of the nineteenth century, like Rolland, were willing to look to the East and use the products of the “Oriental Renaissance” to find solutions to the problems that faced Man. Unfortunately, due to the dismissive treatment received by both mysticism and the “oceanic feeling” from Freud, the early psychoanalysts could not use this source for their insights. It is only recently that the field has matured away from Freud’s dismissive interpretation to include the fruits of mysticism.


Works Referenced

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Tr. and Ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961
Gupta, Mahendranath. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Tr. Swami Nikhilananda. Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1942.
Parsons, William Barclay. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Roland, Alan. Shakuntala in Vaidyanathan.
Rolland, Romain. The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1931.
Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Vaidyanathan, T.G. and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Ed. Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Prof. Paul Robinson: MLA 247: European Thought in the 20th Century
[i] Parsons, pg. 56
[ii] Rolland, pg. 166
[iii] Parsons, pg. 5 quotes R C Zaehner and William James. It is interesting to note that the metaphor recalls Freud’s reference to Schiller’s Diver.
[iv] Rolland, footnote pp 346-347.
[v] Parsons, pg. 8
[vi] Translates as ‘compulsive neuroses’
[vii] Parsons, pg. 173
[viii] Freud, pg. 21. This connection is made by Parsons based on an analysis of the Freud-Rolland correspondence.
[ix] Parsons, pg. 104
[x] Gupta, pg. 175
[xi] Freud, pp 11-15.
[xii] Parsons, pg. 10, 124
[xiii] Rolland, pg. 335, 343.
[xiv] Parsons, pp 176-77
[xv] Parsons, pg. 116
[xvi] Roland in Vaidyanathan, pg. 420

Harry Belafonte: The Secret Soldier

It is well known that Harry Belafonte was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, a member of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle, and close to the students who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); he was a prolific fund raiser, not just through his own concerts and appearances, but by roping in fellow artists from the USA and overseas . It is less well known that he was, through his “Rat Pack” contacts, friendly with the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert, and acted as a conduit between Dr King and the administration. What is not known at all, however, are his political views at the time. He wrote no articles, gave few speeches and kept his positions on the issues of the time to himself. Recently, he has been more outspoken, speaking out against the Bush administration, especially its handling of Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. He has even supported Hugo Chavez, the left-leaning President, while on a visit to Venezuela. As he turned 80 this year, and is expected to have mellowed with age , we can deduce that he held radical political views in the 1950’s and later, but was very careful to keep them secret. A close look at his history, his associates and his actions during the 1950’s and 60’s shows that not only was he a secret radical, but he had very good reasons to be circumspect about his ideological views during the McCarthy era.

Beginnings

Harry Belafonte was born in 1927 to Caribbean immigrants in New York, but spent his formative years, ages eight through thirteen, in his mother’s native Jamaica, living in Kingston as well as in the countryside near the Blue Mountains. Growing up in a black-majority country gave him a sense of self that wasn’t possible in a racially segregated USA . In 1944, Belafonte dropped out of school to enlist in the Navy and started his political education at the hands of dock-workers and fellow-seamen. He read W. E. B. Du Bois ’s Color and Democracy, opening him to radical thoughts at a time when the Soviet Union was an ally against fascism. After leaving the Navy, Belafonte saw his destiny on the stage and performed at the American Negro Theatre. Paul Robeson was in the audience one night, and that sparked a long friendship that would change Belafonte’s life in many ways.

In 1948 the fifty-year old Robeson was at the pinnacle of his career, having “made a name for himself as an American football player, as a fine singer of Opera and slave spirituals, as a capable actor (notably in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones) and finally, as a bold speaker for the cause that he championed with a passion, the fight for social justice” . His outspoken radical views had set him on a collision course with the US government, just as the Cold War was setting in. Belafonte watched as his mentor was harassed by the FBI and even had his passport revoked in 1951 by the State Department. Unable to perform in the US after his performance at Peekskill in New York was disrupted by demonstrators, and not allowed to travel abroad for performances, Robeson was entangled in a legal fight to get his passport back while his career languished. The price he paid for his radical passion was very dear indeed; Belafonte saw this and never forgot. In 2000, Belafonte “was a featured speaker at a rally in Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, ‘streaked down’ Belafonte's face, ‘as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure’ in 1950s America” .

Quiet Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement

During the early 1950’s, Belafonte was quietly involved in protests; he walked a picket line in November 1950 when W.E.B. Du Bois was arrested . As he recently stated: ”I came back [from the Second World War], like millions of us did, with an expectation that those principles for which we fought would be fully revealed and embraced by the American government and the American people -- the war was about democracy, the war was about ending white supremacy, the war was about ending colonialism -- only to discover that the Allies, the British, the French, the Dutch and the Americans, all who were at the forefront of the democratic charge, having victoriously won that war, did not upon the celebration of victory do anything but go back to business as usual” .

Belafonte was also a friend of Stanley Levison, who “had served in effect as a financial pillar of the (US)CP [United States Communist Party] during the height of its persecution” , and was a close confidant of Dr King for many years until J. Edgar Hoover maneuvered the Kennedy brothers into getting Dr King to break off all contact with Levison . After the lynching of Emmet Till, a fourteen year-old Chicago youth visiting Mississippi in the summer of 1955, Levison and Bayard Rustin organized ‘In Friendship’, a concert featuring Belafonte along with Coretta Scott King, a trained singer as well as Dr. King’s wife, and Duke Ellington, to raise funds to support the movement against lynching.

Belafonte chose to live in New York, rejecting the shallow show business life in Los Angeles, preferring to follow his “benign idiosyncratic politics” to where his friends in the unions and radical politics were. But aware of the intense scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and potential surveillance by the FBI , Belafonte stayed in the background.
During the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which started in December 1955, Dr. King asked for a meeting with Belafonte at Adam Clayton Powell’s church in Harlem. “Belafonte was wary of preachers and established Negro leaders, partly because he thought they had never supported his idols W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson…King said that he had heard that Belafonte cared deeply about the race struggle, quite apart from his career in show business” . Almost the same age, they soon struck up a close friendship that lasted till Dr. King’s death in 1968. Belafonte not only raised money for the movement, but advised Dr. King on finances, and taxes, and arranged life insurance to benefit Dr. King’s family in case anything should happen to him.
By 1956, Belafonte was at the peak of his popularity as a singer, having sold 1.5 million copies of his album Calypso: the first artist in the world to have made a Platinum hit. He was nominated for the Spingarn Medal that year for opening the doors of several prestigious performing venues to black artists, such as Palmer House in Chicago and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In addition, he was cited for his painstaking care to make sure that he was not treated separately from his fellow blacks . He devoted increasing amounts of time to the movement by hosting strategy and planning sessions at his New York apartment and taking part in fund-raising concerts.

The Youth Movement & SNCC

Youth and young people were very important to Belafonte and he took part in the Prayer Pilgrimage at the Lincoln Memorial in May 1957, along with Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sidney Poitier, popular Afro-American artists. It was held to commemorate the third anniversary of the Brown decision, and protest against the opposition to integration in education in the southern states. He spoke at the event: :”All my life I have firmly believed that as an artist and a human being, I cannot isolate myself from the struggles of my people; that their victories are my victories and their defeats are my defeats” . In late 1959, Belafonte along with Jackie Robinson and Sidney Poitier helped sponsor Project Airlift that brought 81 students from Africa to study in the US . He joined his old friends in helping youth and students, working with Bayard Rustin in A. William Randolph’s Youth March for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959. In the last Youth March, Belafonte was mired in controversy as E. Frederic Morrow, the only black political appointee in the Eisenhower administration, blocked him from accompanying the four youth delegates to meet the President. Morrow writes: “It annoys me personally to see someone like Belafonte suddenly emerge as a knight in shining armor to lead Negro youth against the forces of discrimination and segregation. I just wonder where he has been all these years when his voice and his money and his prestige would have been very helpful in these areas” . It appears that Belafonte had managed to keep such a low profile that after several years of intensive support to the movement, his contribution has gone unnoticed by the White House and members of the black middle class. But Belafonte continued to focus on the youth movement.

After the spontaneous student sit-ins of February 1960, Belafonte provided an initial contribution so that SNCC could open an office and have a permanent staff in the summer of 1961. At a meeting held between14-16 July with SNCC in Washington DC, Belafonte discussed what it would take to have 100,000-200,000 students mobilized for voter registration activities. James Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, wrote to him in December 1963: “Since the summer of 1961 your commitment to our struggle has not faltered and you have on many occasions enthusiastically given your time, your money, and encouraged your friends to support us. We shall never forget this” .

When the SNCC leaders were almost all burnt-out and exhausted by mid-1964, especially after the failure to seat the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party instead of the segregated delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City , Belafonte arranged a tour of Africa for them. It was an eye-opening experience to visit countries where there were “Black people in charge. Black people doing for themselves”. It opened them to the pan-African ideas that would be brought to the fore by Stokely Carmichael in the future. John Lewis, Chairman of SNCC, also ran into Malcolm X at an unscheduled stop in Kenya, leading to some collaboration in 1965 just before the former Nation of Islam leader was murdered .

Early Strategic Vision

On several occasions, Belafonte was ready to participate in direct action. In May 1961 Belafonte wanted to ride in the first Freedom Ride being organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to test the implementation of anti-segregation laws governing interstate travel through the South. But Dr. King dissuaded him, and he was not on the bus when it is firebombed outside Anniston . Belafonte, however, continued to help plan activities such as voter registration, working with Gardner Taylor, a prominent Baptist preacher, and Dr. King .

Belafonte understood that the strategic power wielded by Dr King had to be carefully preserved and kept above politics and in-fighting. During the 1960 presidential election campaign, after John Kennedy called Coretta Scott King when Dr King was arrested, and Robert Kennedy quietly worked to free him, many around Dr King, including his father, felt that Dr King should come out in support of Kennedy. But Belafonte felt that Dr King “shouldn’t play the game like a politician, at a lesser level” and his advice was heeded. Even though Belafonte himself had the ear of the future President , he wanted Dr King to remain aloof from party politics.
During that time, Belafonte seems to have had a clear policy that he would not give any speeches. When Belafonte was asked to speak at Iowa State University in February 1960, Dr King explained that he had “heard him [Belafonte] say on occasions that he limits his activities to the artistic field” when responding to the request. This was the reaction to “speak on a topic regarding man’s religious expression through music, with some emphasis on the contribution made by negro spirituals and folk music” . Belafonte was very careful to stick to his art, even though much of the proceeds from this art went to the movement.

Plain Speaking

Recently however, he has earned the ire of the establishment, especially the conservatives, by his outspoken criticism of the Iraq war that connects it to world terrorism in a way that the Administration could never imagine: ”Bush has led us into a dishonorable war that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people...What is the difference between that terrorist and other terrorists?" . In an interview with Wolf Blitzer soon after, not only does he refuse to retract what he says, but goes further: “President George Bush, I think Cheney, I think Rumsfeld, I think all of these people have lost any moral integrity… We are in this war immorally and illegally“. He seems to be carrying on the legacy of Dr King, who said in his last sermon at Ebenezer before he was assassinated: “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless unjust war [such] as Vietnam. And we are the criminals in that war! We have committed more war crimes almost than any other nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it“ . With parallels between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam on the minds of Americans more than ever, Belafonte is doing what Dr. King might have done, if he were still alive.

Casting Bush as a terrorist echoes the words used by Belafonte’s mentor Robeson, who in 1952 “charged that the US was committed to a policy of cultural and economic genocide against black Americans (with the tactic of lynching as the basic mode of keeping the rebellious in line)”. At the Arts Presenters Member Conference, Belafonte said “We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended” . Wolf Blitzer castigated Belafonte for using this Nazi analogy, and Blitzer even had a quote from Barack Obama to show that Belafonte is isolated in his opinions . But once again this is similar to Robeson who invoked the comparison with the Nazis in his writings: “I stood in Dachau in 1945 and saw the ashes and bones of departed victims. I might have seen the ashes of some of my brothers in Groveland, Florida just the other day—or in Martinsville a few months back” .

Belafonte recently visited Venezuela with Danny Glover, the famous actor, and Cornel West, Professor of Religion at Princeton. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hugo Chavez, he again called George Bush a terrorist and out of touch with millions of Americans: “No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we are here to tell you, not hundreds, not thousands but millions of the American people, millions, support your revolution”. Belafonte was especially irked that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when offers of help came from all over the world, including Venezuela, the Bush administration arrogantly declined all assistance, yet could not provide the help needed by the survivors of that disaster.

Moderation Leads to Success

Belafonte describes himself as an autodidact, but he has never forgotten the lessons given by his professors in the University of Life. He lives his life like “Professor” Robeson: “I am a radical. I am going to stay one until my people are free to walk the earth” . He drew his inspiration from the spirituals of the masses, but was neither a black-separatist nor anti-white, and was an internationalist in every way. Belafonte, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 1987, has traveled all over world, trying to bring freedom to children every where. He lives his life as his mentor did: “Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. …The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery” . Although he was discreet in the past, Belafonte now has no qualms about speaking out against oppression and supporting the forces of freedom.

His other “Professor”, Dr. King, has embedded a deeply pacifist viewpoint in him. Just as Dr. King, to the consternation of his hosts, asked India to unilaterally disarm during his visit to India in 1959, Belafonte says: “I don't think soldiers should be anywhere in the world. I mean, that is a moral and a basic philosophy. I think that the only way to end wars is to have no military” . He admits that it will take time to get there, but the process has to start sometime.
Both of these “professors” contributed to his working discreetly for the movement. Robeson by his example of what happened to those who publicly refused to toe the line, and Dr. King by his example of how moderation, a type of non-violence in itself, could lead to success. Instead of attacking head-on, as many urged him to, Dr. King was a master at deftly disengaging when it would pay off in the long run. On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, during the second Selma March in March 1965, Dr. King turned away, even as the state troopers parted, so that he did not risk violence, violate a Federal court order, and be responsible for a complete breakdown in the dialogue between the movement and the Administration. Belafonte learnt that it was important to preserve himself for the marathon that was the reality of the movement, rather than expend all the energy in a sprint that wouldn’t reach the finish line. By preserving his freedom to pursue his career, travel all over the world, and show the moderate side of the movement, he was also able to earn a great deal of money for the movement. Only now, when he has achieved all he needed to, and in a time when international media coverage provides far more protection than it did in the 50’s and 60’s, does he dare to bare his secret radical views. His philosophy is very aptly stated in his own words: “My social and political interests are part of my career. I cannot separate them. My songs reflect the human condition. The role of art isn't just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.”


Works Cited
Blitzer, Wolf, Harry Belafonte Lashes Out (Interview with Harry Belafonte), January 23, 2006. http://transcripts.cnn.com/transcripts/0601/23/sitroon.03.html
Branch, Taylor, Parting The Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Darby, Henry E. & Margaret N. Rowley, King on Vietnam and Beyond, Phylon, Vol. 47, No.1 (1st Qtr. 1986), pp. 43-50.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, New York: Random House, 1997.
Goodman, Amy, “We Have Got to Bring Corporate America to Its Knees” – Harry Belafonte on Racism, Poverty, John Kerry, War and Resistance (Interview of Harry Belafonte on the program Democracy Now!), June 15, 2004, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/15/1410245

King, Martin Luther Jr., Edited Clayborne Carson, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., New York: Warner Books, 1998.
King Papers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University:
Belafonte, Harry, Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier (African-American Students Foundation, Inc.), Letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., 11/13/1959. Location: MLKP, MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass. Box 19 Folder 5 (CSKV87-A10) [591113-003]
Jones, Robert L., Letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. 2/10/1960. Location: NAACPP, DLC, National Association for Advancement of Colored People Papers, 1909-1955, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Group III-G2 (CSKV90-A15) [600210-005]
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Letter to Robert L. Jones, 2/24/1960. Location: MLKP, MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass. Box 40, Folder 138 (CSKV87-A10) [600224-005]
Lerner, Gerda, Time for Freedom, 5/17/1957. Location: ICMAC, McDonald & Associates, Chicago, Ill. [570517-037]
Levison, Stanley D., Minutes of Board Meeting, 3/7/1960 Location: APRC, DLC A. Philip Randolph Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (CSKV90-A13) [600307-002]
McDonald, Dora E., Letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., 6/20/1961. Location: MLKP, MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass. Box 54 (CSKV87-A10) [610620-003]
Morrow, E. Frederic (United States, White House), Letter to Jim Hagerty, 4/10/1959. Location: EMFR, KabE, E. Frederic Morrow Records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kan. [590410-009]
Morrow, E. Frederic (United States, White House), Journal Entry, 4/18/1959. Location: EMFR, KabE, E. Frederic Morrow Records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kan. [590418-003]
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, List of proposed recipients of Spingarn Medal, 5/6/1957. Location: NAACPP, DLC, National Association for Advancement of Colored People Papers, 1909-1955, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Group III-G2 (CSKV90-A15) [570506-011]
Sims, Harold R. (United States National Student Association), American Student Speaks of Civil Rights Affirmation and Pledge of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 5/17/1957. Location: MLKJP, GAMK, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers (Series I-IV), Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia. [570517-018]
Wofford, Harris (United States, White House), Letter to John F. Kennedy, 5/29/1961. Location: RFKGC, MwalK, Robert Francis Kennedy Papers, Attorney General’s General Correspondence, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass., Box 68 Harris Wofford Folder. [610529-022]
Wofford, Harris (United States, White House), Memo to Kenneth P. O’Donnell, 6/12/1961. Location: WHMLK, MwalK, While House Names Folder, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. [610612-012]
Lewis, John with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.
Prashad, Vijay, Comrade Robeson: A Centennial Tribute to an American Communist, Social Scientist, Vol. 25, No. 7/8 (Jul-Aug 1997), pp 39-50.
Radosh, Ronald, Harry's Hatreds, New York Post, 10/24/2002
SNCC Papers, Media Section, Green Library, Stanford University.

How Kissinger “Lost” India

After Mao Tse Tung took control over China, and Chiang Kai Shek retreated to the island of Formosa late in the 1940’s, there was much finger-pointing within the United States administration to place the blame on specific individuals, especially within the State Department, for having “lost” China. The Cold War had just started, and this was seen as a huge victory for Communism. Early in the 1970’s, India was similarly “lost” from American influence by the actions of Henry Kissinger, then National Security Adviser to President Nixon. Kissinger’s actions during the civil war in Pakistan drove a non-aligned India into the Soviet sphere of influence; ironically this happened while he was working to re-open diplomatic relations with China. The “tilt” policy practiced by Kissinger and Nixon, not only alienated the world’s largest democracy and a natural ally of the United States, but in conjunction with other events, laid the seeds of the 9/11 disaster thirty years later.

On independence from Britain in 1947, colonial India was partitioned into two sovereign states: India and Pakistan. The Muslim-dominated western and eastern parts of the sub-continent respectively formed Islamic West and East Pakistan, separated by a thousand miles of a secular India, albeit with a Hindu majority . The princely states, over three hundred kingdoms that owed allegiance to the British Monarch, were theoretically free to join either nation. As small areas surrounded by the other state would not be viable, Muslim kingdoms within the central landmass, such as Hyderabad, acceded to India, as did Hindu kingdoms within Pakistan. The Hindu-ruled kingdom of Kashmir, with a majority Muslim population, was on the north western border of the peninsula and could viably be part of either state. On acceding to India, it was attacked by Pakistani irregulars in 1948 and a UN brokered cease-fire divided it at the Line of Control which is the operational border between India and Pakistan. Kashmir remains a bone of contention and wars were fought in 1965 and 1999 by Pakistan to get full control of the province. Pakistan has also sponsored and provided bases for terrorist groups within Indian-controlled Kashmir that demand “independence”.

Unlike India which has evolved into a vibrant multi-party democracy with regular competitive elections, freedom of expression, smooth transfers of power and armed forces that remain under civilian control, Pakistan has seen a series of experiments in democracy, dictatorship and military rule. Its strategic location at the edge of the Middle East, just south of both Russia and China, had made it an important component of United States policy in that region during the Cold War. This led to disproportionate military aid, and the unbalanced growth of the military forces in the country compared to civil society. Even though there has been a great deal of multilateral lending to help develop industry and agriculture, it has been overshadowed by the amounts spent on the military . As Wilcox says, “Within Pakistan, American alliance assistance came to have three effects: to strengthen the armed services within the political system, to strengthen the central government against other centers of authority in society, and to strengthen Pakistan against India” .

Thus it is no mystery to understand why the armed forces took over from the civilian government in 1959, and General Ayub Khan became the President. In 1965, assuming that India was still vulnerable after its China war in 1962, and needing to bolster public opinion and confidence in his armed forces, Ayub Khan attacked India. Instead of the swift decisive victory that was expected, the Pakistan Army was forced into a stalemate that required Soviet mediation at Tashkent to broker a cease-fire, after the United States refused to mediate . This led to two changes that set the stage for the civil war to come. Firstly, India’s Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Sastri, died while negotiating at Tashkent, resulting in the selection of Indira Gandhi as the leader of the country. Secondly, in 1967 a set of younger officers, led by General Yahya Khan, removed Ayub and his disgraced colleagues from power.

Yahya Khan very soon established a legal framework to elect legislators who would then create a new constitution for the country and elections were held at the end of 1970 for national and provincial assemblies. At that time there were four contiguous provinces in the west with a total population of 55 million, and a single province in the East with a population of 75 million. In the twenty years since independence, significant fissures had emerged between the provinces, especially between East Pakistan and the provinces in the west. While the East earned most of Pakistan’s foreign exchange, it was the least developed, and had a per capita income 20% lower than that of the west. Most importantly, the people living in the East were culturally, temperamentally and physically different from the West Pakistanis . This led them to be more tolerant of Hindus, and many years after partition there were still many Hindus living in Bangladesh . Living in the low-lying but fertile river delta, the poor people of that region were often subject to natural disasters such as flooding and cyclones.

In East Pakistan the dominant political party was the Awami League led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Elections that were to be held in September 1970 were postponed due to a cyclone that caused much devastation and loss of life, and finally completed in December. Due to the step-motherly treatment by West Pakistan governments since independence and a popular perception that relief efforts were not satisfactory, the Awami League swept the polls in the East, capturing 167 seats out of the 169 available. As the East had the most seats, and the votes in the West was split between the Pakistan People’s Party led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and several other parties, Mujib’s party had the majority in a house of 302 seats and he should have been made Prime Minister. Bhutto’s party came a late second with 81 seats.
The election result was greeted with shock in West Pakistan and led to weeks of negotiation between the military dictatorship, Bhutto, Mujib and the leaders of the other parties. Mujib proposed a six-point program that would have led to a great deal of autonomy for the provinces, but this was not acceptable to the west. Early in March 1971, Mujib, frustrated with the delays in the transition of power, declared autonomy for East Pakistan, taking over the civilian administration, but stopping short of full independence and thus remaining within Pakistan. After negotiations failed in Dacca, on March 25 Yahya Khan declared an emergency in the East, expelled foreign journalists and let the Army, mainly made of West Pakistanis, loose on the civilian population. According to Hersh, “over the next weeks and months, the West Pakistani army expanded its march of horror, slaughtering Awami League supporters, students and intellectuals on a scale not seen since the Third Reich” . This genocide is estimated to have killed upto 3 million people and forced almost 10 million to leave their homes and take refuge in India. The West Pakistan army was opposed by the Mukti Bahini which was an amalgam of the more militant members of the Awami League with the Bengali regiments of the army, such as the East Pakistan Rifles. Mujib was arrested and put into solitary confinement in West Pakistan, and some senior members of the Awami League who escaped the killings set up a government-in-exile in Calcutta for the new country in the making: Bangladesh.
Against the international outcry against the Pakistan government’s actions and India’s appeal for help, was contrasted the silence of the Nixon administration. Even though Bangladesh was a cause celebre in the United States outside the official circles, both the State Department and the White House were very guarded in their public pronouncements against Pakistan. The US Consulate in Dacca had a clandestine radio transmitter and was able to send detailed reports about the genocide that were followed by a formal note of dissent from American policy signed by diplomats at the consulate, the State Department and AID . But Nixon and Kissinger had a secret agenda and didn’t want that to be disturbed by the events in Pakistan.

When Nixon won the presidential election in 1968, he was determined to be “hands-on” in his foreign policy, and chose Henry Kissinger as his National Security Adviser. Kissinger was an academic who had only played advisory roles in previous administrations, and had “no respect for career diplomats” ; as a result foreign policy was completely controlled from the White House, sidelining William Rogers, the Secretary of State, and the State Department. In order to secure a grand foreign policy victory and firmly establish Nixon’s legacy, Kissinger embarked on expanding the current United States-Soviet Union superpower relationship to include China and make it a triangular relationship. The inclusion of China would not only counter-balance the Soviet Union, but would help America in its negotiations to get out of the quagmire in Vietnam.

Kissinger “viewed the regional crises as inherently linked to triangular diplomacy” , and was not interested in the details of the history of the region or the motivations of the leaders there. He was convinced that anything that happened in the world was orchestrated by one of the three powers, and local factors did not merit consideration. In addition to ignoring experts and career diplomats, Kissinger felt that there was no need to monitor or accommodate public opinion , so what “mattered was how the Soviets, and in particular, the Chinese viewed American policy” . As Pakistan was Kissinger’s conduit to China, “Yahya Khan held the key to Nixon’s re-election” . In the initial phase of the conflict “Peking completely backed Pakistan, charged Indian interference, and noted that internal strife was part of the internal affairs of Pakistan” , and Kissinger may have been concerned that any American criticism or interference in the civil war would have put his grand plan at risk.

Instead of staying out of the conflict, Kissinger pretended to make an attempt to reconcile India and Pakistan, making a trip to both capitals in July 1971. When he vanished from public sight in Islamabad for some time, pleading an indisposition, it was speculated that he was in secret talks with Mujib. But it was revealed two weeks later that he had secretly flown to Beijing for talks with Zhou En Lai, and this duplicity “renewed Indian distrust of the American role in the East Pakistan crisis” and the “secret trip to China via Pakistan sent a message of support for Pakistan” . In addition, Kissinger had secretly been warning the Indian Ambassador in the United States about possible Chinese reaction to any Indian intervention , making it clear to India that it needed the Soviet Union in its corner.

On August 9, 1971, India and the Soviet Union signed a 20-year treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation, signaling closer ties between the two countries, the end of India’s non-alignment, and including “the news that Russia would provide India with more arms” . Since 1964, the Soviets had already been supplying sophisticated weaponry, including aircraft, as well as the opportunity to manufacture them in India . The clear message from Kissinger that the US would support China in any action against India, less than a decade after India’s China War, forced India to conclude this treaty that had been proposed by the Soviets many months before, but rebuffed at that time.

Late in November, Yahya Khan chose to force resolution of the conflict by attacking India in the West. After an initial setback, India struck back in the West, completely immobilizing the Pakistan Air Force and Navy and gaining some ground, but not attempting to go further. In the East, the Indian Army, working in collaboration with the Mukti Bahini in pre-planned moves, conducted a two week campaign to liberate the people and create the state of Bangladesh: they were welcomed everywhere as liberators. Even then Kissinger tried his best to reverse an un-winnable situation by branding India as the aggressor, putting pressure on the Soviets to arrange a quick cease fire and ordering the Seventh Fleet with the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal. Pakistan, after being rebuffed in its attempt to invoke secret US treaty obligations that required American involvement in the war, surrendered in the East on 14 December. India immediately halted military operations, and on 17 December recognized the new country and its leader Mujibur Rahman who had been released by Pakistan.
Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow’s Ambassador in Washington is quoted as having pointed out the irony to Kissinger of a situation “where [the Soviets] were lined up with what looked like [the Americans] had always thought was a pillar of democracy [i.e. India] while [the US] were lined up with the Chinese”
Kissinger focused on his grand plan to create a triangular super power relationship and open diplomatic relations with China, and decided that nothing should disturb its implementation. Keeping his eye on the goal to have Nixon re-elected in 1972, he deliberately ignored Pakistan’s bloody civil war and tried to thwart India’s actions to resolve the crisis. Using his position in Washington, he threatened India with dire consequences if it intervened, including the possibility of Chinese attack that the US would not interfere with . This forced India to move closer to the Soviets in self-defence. The world’s largest democracy and a natural ally of the United States and its people was forced into an alliance with a communist dictatorship.

There may be some who defend Kissinger by pointing out that the policy was Nixon’s, that the President had a personal animosity against Indian leaders, especially Indira Gandhi, and Kissinger was just following orders. However, Hersh quotes a 1979 interview with Indira Gandhi: “It was not so much Mr. Nixon talking as Mr. Kissinger, because Nixon would talk for a few minutes and would then say ‘Isn't that right, Henry?’, and from then on Henry would talk on for quite a while. I would talk with Henry rather than Nixon”
In addition, while Kissinger cited the likely Chinese reaction to any US pressure on Pakistan as a reason to do nothing, his understanding was flawed. In his October visit to China he was surprised by Zhou En Lai’s” glaring lack of interest in discussing the Indo-Pakistani conflict” . Yet in November Kissinger still told New Delhi that if there was an India-Pakistan conflict, China would intervene and the US would not help . Siddiqui states that Chinese support for repression wasn’t there, especially as Communists were targeted for extermination in East Pakistan. When Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bhutto went to China in November 1971, Zhou En Lai was quoted as having said “Chinese military aid was for meeting the threat of external aggression and not for the repression of the people”.

While Kissinger followed the usual practice of supporting repression by a client state, no matter what the circumstances, it was the Reagan administration that later demonstrated that transition from a dictator to democracy was possible, as was done in the cases of the Phillipines and South Korea . Thus the defence usually put forward that there was no alternative to supporting a repressive regime in order to avoid a complete breakdown in the country was not valid. It is surprising that even now, the Bush administration “quietly acquiesced as Musharraf amended Pakistan’s constitution in a way that extended his presidency for another five years and gave him the power to dissolve parliament.”

The “Tilt” created a military class in Pakistan that overbalanced the civilian administrators and politicians and continually needed a justification for more military aid. During the Cold War it was the Soviet Union and China that needed to be countered, a game that Pakistan played well with all three superpowers in the 1970’s. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan was a conduit for American aid to the Jihadis, mostly through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), using the funds and equipment to build-up experienced commanders like Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban were born in the madrasas of Pakistan, and took over Afghanistan completely after the Soviet defeat and withdrawal. During the 1980’s, the Jihadis used Kashmir as a training ground for terrorists while America looked the other way. The relationships forged between the American intelligence and military establishment and Pakistan during the tilt proved stronger than the increasing evidence that the Taliban and Bin Laden were just using India as a training ground for an attack on the West. Until right after 9/11, Pakistan regular army, special forces and intelligence units were working closely with the Taliban: forces that were trained and funded by the United States.

The relationship between the United States and India would not recover from Kissinger’s actions for three decades, until Bill Clinton visited India in 2000 , and re-started the dialogue. Since then, especially during the Bush administration, the strategic cooperation between India and the United States has been growing in many areas, including joint military exercises. Closer cooperation between the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest should be beneficial not just to their people, but to the rest of the world.

Works Cited
Hanhimaki, Jussi. The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983.
Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Siddiqui, Abdul Rahman. East Pakistan: the End Game. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004
Wilcox, Wayne. The Emergence of Bangladesh. Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1973.

Animesh Mukherjee
Gerald Dorfman
MLA 243: Problems in American Foreign Policy
Final Paper
June 4, 2007

Racism in Post-Revolutionary France:

The French Revolution of 1789 marked an inflection point in the attitudes towards race and slavery in France. For more than a century before the revolution, slavery was not legal in continental France, while an increasing number of African slaves became essential for agricultural production in the French West Indies. The revolution, with its slogan “Liberté. Equalité. Fraternité.”, should have automatically freed the slaves and made them citizens, along with the previously freed blacks and mulattos. On the contrary, during the century that followed, French attitudes towards race and the colonized hardened into brutal exploitation. The progressive experiments at constitution building at home had one feature in common: all enforced a separate set of exploitative laws and policies on the colonies. By contrast, the monarchy and even Napoleon, with his famous Code, considered all the people except slaves, as equal subjects, no matter where they lived. Physical slavery was finally abolished in 1848, but this did not stop the growing economic and mental slavery of the colonized people in the Caribbean, Africa and the Far East. Even today the citizens of the countries that were previously colonies are paying the price of the mental slavery to Europe that developed during the colonial period.

Before the Revolution, Legally, “There are no slaves in France”

During the seventeenth century, as France developed its colonies in the West Indies, particularly Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, it faced a shortage of laborers. Very few of the original inhabitants, the Caribs and the Arawaks, had survived the encounter with the Europeans, and farmers from France could not get acclimatized to the hot weather and were easily sickened by tropical diseases. To resolve this problem, slaves were brought from Africa to work on the farms. As their numbers grew, the legal basis of slavery in the colonies was decreed in the Code Noir (1685). This law applied only to the colonies in the Americas, and “in the early years of French colonial slavery, at least, the king, his ministers and the parlementaires all cooperated to uphold the tradition of France as a land free of slaves”[i]. As the colonies grew however, and more and more returnees or visitors to France brought their slaves with them, there was pressure from the slave-owners to change this viewpoint, whilst others attempted to control the growing black population at home.

The Edict of October 1716 set conditions whereby slave owners could bring their slaves to France without fear of their being set free, with restrictions on the purpose and maximum duration of the visit. Instead of the previous appeals to “customary practice” in order to free slaves who had been brought to French soil, this provided the first statutory basis for slaves to claim their freedom[ii]. As the Edict was not registered by the parlement of Paris, it was used to argue that slaves were free in France. In case the courts did recognize the edict, lawyers argued that violation of the conditions regarding registration of the slaves, or the purpose of the trip and its duration, merited freeing the slaves. The courts under the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris used this tactic to grant freedom to most of the slaves who applied for it.

In 1738, as increased numbers of slaves were being brought to France, the edict was reinforced but once again it was not registered by the parlement. However there were now two groups that wanted restrictions on the travel of slaves to the mainland. Firstly, colonial administrators did not favor the return of slaves who had been to France as they were thought to be troublemakers. Whether they returned as slaves or were freed, their experiences on the continent opened them to the possibilities of freedom, and the stories they told their fellow slaves only increased the general discontent. Secondly, some administrators on the mainland were disturbed over perceived threats to racial purity and exaggerated fears that whites were being outnumbered by blacks, even though they formed a tiny fraction of the population. This was the beginning of the use of race rather than status, “free” or “slave”, in the legal controls.
On August 8 1777 there was major change in legislation that was based on skin color alone, since “the government is intent to cleanse France of blacks”[iii]. This law prohibited the importation of blacks into France but did not disturb the status of those already there. It also attempted to stop the intermingling of blood, but a proposed article against interracial marriage was opposed by the church and didn’t survive the draft stage.

With the development of the liberation philosophy, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and de Pansey all wrote against slavery. Especially de Pansey, who castigated Christianity for creating and maintaining rather than removing slavery, and wanted to extend the freedom of the slaves in France to the colonies and linked anti-despotism to anti-slavery[iv]. However, while the theoreticians of the coming revolution were to use slavery as one of the examples to argue for freedom from the monarchy, the post-revolutionary regimes were too dependent on the production of the colonies, to completely free the slaves.

Racism Develops

As the number of freed slaves increased both in the colonies and France, race started to become an important characteristic: not just between whites and blacks, but even amongst the “blacks” from the other colonies such as India[v]. Laws based on race rather than status, started emerging, ushering in a trend of differentiating between humans based on race.

There was a progressive redefinition of the meaning of race that started in the seventeenth century. Initially associated with lineage and the concept of nobility, race transcended the inherited biological character to posit that diet, education and “placing the individual in a family with a long history of noble deeds”[vi] counted to develop a person’s race. In 1684, Bernier proposed to divide all of humankind into mostly four or five species or races of men: the Europeans (which included not just whites, but also people of the Mediterranean, Arabia, Persia, India, Siam and even Native Americans), African, Asians (China and Japan) and the Samoeds of Lapland. This equation of race and species ignoring skin color changed in the late eighteenth century: from that time race was synonymous with skin color.

For example, in the post-revolutionary battle for supremacy over the most important French colonial possession, Saint-Domingue, the many re-alignments between the grand blancs, (the white farm owning aristocracy), the petits blancs (bourgeois whites who were traders and artisans), the mixed race mulattos, and the slaves who had freed themselves, were based as much on race as they were on their republican or monarchial political views. The racism of the petits blancs was typical: ”This was the type for whom race prejudice was more important than even the possession of slaves, of which they had few. The distinction between a white man and a man of color was for them fundamental. It was their all. In defense of it they would bring down the whole of their world”[vii].

The question whether the differences between men were differences of race or of species was strongly debated in the nineteenth century. According to Blanckaert, one school of thought held that “species is defined not in the outward resemblance of forms, but on the continuing fecundity of the métis”, i.e. the mixtures between the purported species. If intermixtures survived and were themselves able to propagate, then they were part of the same species, and any outward difference was that of race. This was no value-neutral scientific debate: it formed the basis of arguments for and against miscegenation, as well as the treatment of the mulattos.
Apart from experiments on animals and plants, selected studies were made of mixed race families. Many concluded that “regeneration of the human species, or the return of all the colored races to the white type … was by means of perpetual cross breeding of the métis with the primordial, now European, white race”. Thus even those who supported miscegenation did it for a racist reason[viii]. This supremacist ideology was reinforced by Gobineau who in 1853 said that groups that remained the most pure enjoyed a relative superiority, although there were others like Paul Broca whose participation in the Republican clubs of 1848 led him to argue against this position.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the division of mankind on the basis of skin color and the supremacy of white skin triumphed. Not only did the whites believe in their natural superiority, but they used it to justify colonialism. In the colonies like the French West Indies, where there had been significant mixing of the races, social and economic advancement was seen in marrying someone lighter skinned: “marrying up” was transformed into “marrying white”. This was natural in a society where white colonists were at the top of the economic pyramid[ix], and led to the development of an inferiority complex about language, culture and customs that were not “white”.

From Adventurers to Economic Exploitation: Bourgeois Colonialism

In the years after Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and later the Netherlands, after overcoming Spanish domination, competed with one another to exploit the newly discovered lands in the Americas. While there was much debate for and against the pursuit of “God and Gold”, and much dissension between the powers, each pursued the expansion of their colonies[x]. The adventurers who had been looking for quick riches were supplanted by settlers who took over the land from the natives and set up farms. The European powers would eventually use the colonies as sources of raw materials and, in some cases, markets for their industrial products. Britain, starting its Industrial Revolution before the continent, was the leader in this.

The revolutionary changes in France after 1789 reinforced this expansion of the bourgeois interests. For example, even though slavery was abolished in 1794 by the Assembly, Napoleon later capitulated to the commercial interests and reinstated slavery in 1802. This prompted the final stage of the insurrection that led to the freedom of the colony of Saint-Domingue and establishment of Haiti. The restoration of 1815 brought back a monarchy that was influenced by the commercial interests; Louis Blanc characterized it aptly: ‘France was a nation of warriors doomed to impotence because it was governed by shopkeepers’[xi]. The 1830 revolution was once again hijacked by the bourgeoisie “the workers…had been badly disillusioned in 1830, having made a revolution then and let the bourgeoisie run off with the profits”[xii]. Only the 1848 revolution abolished slavery universally throughout France and its colonies. This attitude towards material success, even if it came at a moral cost, can be seen in the autobiography of Earnest Renan (1823-1892), which demonstrated a strong moral position, but didn’t condemn his distant relative, Monsieur Z who made his money in the slave trade[xiii]. Thus morals and principles were sacrificed to commercial interests, and exploitation justified by racism.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, France was following in the footsteps of the English and commercial interests were very active. For example the city of Lyons, whilst far from any port, concerned itself with colonization and “confronted serious problems both in securing a dependable supply of raw silk and reliable markets for the finished products”[xiv]. Changing their focus from just sending missionaries to the Far East, the city established a local geographic society and created business undertakings to exploit the colonies. This support for colonization began in 1830 with an address to the King that stressed the value of setting up enterprises in Algeria. While Lyons had previously been trading with China for its silk business, it set up enterprises in the new colonies in Indo-China so that it could import silk and export its products. This is just an example of how important the colonies had become for the bourgeois.
Import and export of commodities at terms extremely favorable to France was not enough, and the colonial government established monopolies for the exploitation of populace through its addictions. In Indo-China “the opium monopoly constituted one of the most perfect administrative organizations of the colony, it is indeed the only indirect tax which functions well and which causes the administration no variations”. Laffey goes on to say that the “opium monopoly has always been the most important of the direct taxes. Its only real defect lay in its immorality and that addiction is spreading to France”. Along with the liquor monopoly “it seems difficult to make the Annamite understand the benefit of civilization consists in selling him at a high cost a product of prime necessity” [xv]. Pagden quotes Benjamin Constant: “Commerce had not in any way altered the nature of humankind, since commerce and warfare are only two different means to achieve the same end, that of possessing that which is desired”.

Divergence of Laws and Policies between Home and Colony

The opium trade in Indo-China illustrated another aspect of colonization: having separate laws and policies at home and in the colonies, and denying the colonial subjects the constitutional rights granted at home. The French only developed this strategy in the post-Napoleonic period: during the monarchy, French colonies were considered a part of sovereign France, governed by the same laws and their inhabitants equal citizens, except for the slaves. For example, as Pagden points out, the 1664 charter of the Compagne des Indes decreed that all American Indians who converted to Christianity should be treated as French natives.

During the 1789 revolution, plantation and slave owners from Saint-Domingue claimed 18 seats in the Assembly, but Mirabeau turned fiercely on them: “You claim representation proportionate to the number of inhabitants. The free blacks are proprietors and tax-payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote. And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them, and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into considerations the number of our horses and our mules?”[xvi]. This illustrates that at that time the colonies were treated the same as any other part of France.
This principle of equality continued in the Code Napoleon and its application to the lands conquered in Europe: Napoleon’s goal was a greater France created by conquest with a single constitution and rule of law.

The British denied equal treatment to both the colonizers and the colonized. In North America the English settlers were denied the same status as the residents of Britain and did not have seats in Parliament, leading to the complaint of “no taxation without representation”. Edwin Burke observed that the “oriental despotism” practiced by Warren Hastings, the Governor General of Bengal, did not treat the colonized Indians as fellow subjects[xvii]. Later this exploitative model used by the British was applied by France in its nineteenth century colonies in Algeria, Africa and Indo-China leading to laws and official practices that would never be accepted back in France.

Civilization, Colonization and Culture

Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought about western civilization. Famously, he answered: “I think it would be a good idea!”[xviii]. He would have agreed with Césaire who said: “what fundamentally is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law”[xix]. In fact, Césaire vehemently argues that colonization is the opposite of civilization. The brutal behavior and policies adopted in the colonies would leak back to the home country in due course, destroying all that western civilization had built. He goes further and equates the treatment of the colonized with that visited upon Europe by Hitler. Césaire sees Hitler as a natural progression of colonization, in that he “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the blacks of Africa”[xx].

On the supposed modernization of the colonies by the colonizers he counters: “no one knows at what stage of material development the same countries would have been if Europe had not intervened”, giving the example of Japan which became a major power even though it was never colonized. It is not difficult to find at the present time numerous failed states, dictatorships and struggling economies amongst the ex-colonies of the European powers and wonder how much of this was caused by the aftermath of colonization.

The imposition of French language, religion and culture on the colonial subjects was mandatory, with French replacing the local language for official purposes. Even those who opposed slavery, such as the Abbé Gregoire, a delegate to the Assembly in 1789, did not respect the native or African cultures; his ideal was that all were assimilated into Catholicism. While skin color was not a source of difference to him, language, culture and religion were[xxi]. In the Antilles, the native patois language was discouraged, Paris was considered as the center of all culture and any higher education had to be garnered only by travelling to the French capital. In Vietnam, the written script was replaced by the Latin alphabet, making centuries of literature unavailable to future generations who would now be completely dependent on French literature. As Benjamin Constant pointed out: “earlier the conquerors expected the deputies of conquered nations to appear on their knees before them. Today it is man’s morale that they wish to prostrate”[xxii]. The colonized lost confidence not only in their culture but even in the color of their skin: the aspiration to be “white” is the legacy of colonialism. For example, Fanon describes the superior airs and behavior not only of the ones who had been to Paris and returned to Martinique, but even those who just booked their travel!

Thus we see that slavery was replaced by racism, glory-seeking kings and adventurers by the bourgeois seeking exploitative profits, and the rule of law by policies of subjugation. The revolution of 1789 indeed led to many changes in France and its interactions with other nations. The enlightened ideas of the eighteenth century that led to the revolution were supposed to liberate not just France, but the whole world. Instead they led to paradigms that enslaved the minds and destroyed the language, culture and religion of the colonized.

Works Cited

Blanckaert, Claude. “Of Monstrous Métis? Hybridity, Fear of Miscegenation, and Patriotism from Buffon to Broca.” Peabody Color 42-72.
Boulle, Pierre H. “Francois Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race.” Peabody Color 11-27
Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967
Hart, Jonathan. Contesting Empires. New York: Palmgrave Macmillan, 2005.
James, C L R. The Black Jacobins. New York: Random House, 1963.
Laffey, John. Imperialism and Ideology: An Historical Perspective. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000.
Pagden, Anthony. “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires” 28-46 in History & Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, Theorizing Empire. Ed. Philip Pomper, Volume 44 No 4, Dec 2005
Peabody, Sue. There are No Slaves in France: The political culture of race and slavery in the ancient regime. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
---. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Renan, Earnest. The Memoirs of Earnest Renan. Trans. J. Lewis May. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935.
Robertson, Priscilla. Revolutions of 1848: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein. “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference.” Peabody Color 28-

[i] Peabody No Slaves, pg 12
[ii] Peabody No Slaves, pg 17
[iii] Peabody No Slaves, pg 117
[iv] Peabody No Slaves, pg 105
[v] Peabody No Slaves, pg 68
[vi] Boulle, pg 12
[vii] James, pg 34
[viii] Blanckaert
[ix] Fanon, pg 43
[x] Hart, pg 12
[xi] Robertson, pg 16
[xii] Robertson, pg 32
[xiii] Renan, pg 79
[xiv] Laffey
[xv] Laffey, pg 37
[xvi] James, pg 60
[xvii] Pagden, pg 33
[xviii] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gandhi
[xix] Césaire, pg 10
[xx] Césaire, pg 14
[xxi] Sepinwall, pg 28
[xxii] Pagden quoting Constant in “The Spirit of Conquest”, pg 77