Sunday Posts

War is only bad for those who have to fight it, but it is good for everyone else. For governments, war is a good way to remain in power. Every President or Prime Minister wants to be a war leader, which allows them not to worry about hard promises such as economic development or jobs, and keeping power just by sending a few poor people to their death. If things go really wrong, one can just blame that on anti-national elements, suspend rule of law and put them in jail; and indeed, one can suspend elections altogether and stay in power as long as the war goes on. It's a pity we do not have the 'hundred year wars' anymore.  For businesses, there may be a nervousness about risks, but on the aggregate, war is good as it means new contracts, and good replacement demand. A bloated real estate economy can do with rebuilding some houses, and housing some displaced people, as long as the government is paying for it. For the media, it is news. How much better is it to report on real ...

One can, and often does, read history as a narrative of conflicts. The school-book history is designed as a sequence of wars and winners, its causes and aftermaths. Even when one wants to get away from the history of celebrities, which our stories of Kings, Queens and great men (and some women) usually are, our thematic narratives of Colonialism, Class Struggle, Revolutions and even Scientific Progress are usually built around conflicts - of powers, institutions and ideas - progressing and regressing in some sort of eternal motion.  One may claim that all history, therefore, is history of conflicts. However, it is equally possible to see that our ideas shape conflicts. I have three favourites - the Iron Curtain, the Clash of Civilisations and the Thucydides Trap - ideas that defined our past, the present and possibly the future conflicts. So, when Churchill was speaking at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, he conjured up the Iron Curtain , a dividing line from the 'Fre...

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the first decade of the new millennium, were possibly the last of the industrial wars that we have experienced over three centuries or thereabout. The side with the industrial might, not with most men, won. What counted is the firepower, and the training and equipment that the men carried, not how many men one had lined up. The format, perfected over the last hundred years or so, was to bomb the enemy out of the existence first, before sending out the infantry. In the last years of the doctrine, increasingly, the manned flights are being replaced by the unmanned ones and the race is on to replace infantry, at least in the more dangerous tasks, with robots of some sort. When this transformation is complete, the art of industrial warfare will reach its peak. But, I shall argue, that this peak will be reached long after the decline has already started. That is not unusual. The technological peak is often achieved often after the social necessity of the...

Madhusree Mukherjee has written an important book. Churchill's Secret War chronicles the story of the Great Bengal Famine, a famine almost deliberately engineered by the British War Administration, under the excuse of supply to British troops, but also with a deeper agenda of crushing the Indian Independence Movement beyond repair. The 1943 famine in Bengal killed three million people. The famine affected a generation and accentuated the city/village divide which persists even today. Economists, particularly Amartya Sen, has made efforts to prove that this devastating famine did not happen due to shortage of food. Ms Mukherjee argues that this had happened to a deliberate policy of the British War Administration of diverting food supplies from Bengal to Ceylon and then onto the British troops in Burma and elsewhere. Professor Sen has talked about the 'entitlement problem' and Ms Mukherjee also points to the practice of British Administration of buying grains at an in...

The world is divided on what President Obama said, and did not say, in his Nobel Lecture. An unlikely recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he felt hard pressed to present a justification for his various wars, but he should not have. The prize, in the world's eyes, was given to Obama The Symbol - of culmination of a long struggle of rights and dignity of the African-Americans - than Obama The Man. But, President Obama turned it into an endorsement of himself and his actions, and in doing so, he ended up justifying wars as a legitimate, and unavoidable, instrument of state policy. The point is, of course, that wars are not justified. In Obamaspeak , there were wars between armies, and then wars between nations, which has now turned into wars within nations. But, despite this evolutionary formula of war, there are some things which never changed. First, wars were between interests, which saw the world as a zero-sum equation, and parties which wanted to take all and leave none. Second,...

No non-violent movement would have been effective against Hitler's armies! Yeah, right, only if the British and the French did not think they were too clever and they are actually preparing Hitler to contain the soviets, there would be no Hitler's army. Nor will be Saddam Hussein's, few decades later, if the United States and Saudi Arabia did not want to use him as a prop against Iran. The point is there are always solutions other than war, if you accept equality of rights - of voicing an opinion, maintaining freedom and of earning the daily bread - for everyone. I am actually surprised President Obama said this. He was receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. In my mind, that prize is given to honour extraordinary individuals who followed the path of peace in the face of extreme difficulties. Like Martin Luther King, who Obama mentions. Gandhi, who he does not mention because he never got a Nobel, but in fact, mentions in context - in that extraordinary comment he made. Presiden...