Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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On the Necessity of Bearing Witness

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On November 11, 2025

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Some stories are too difficult to tell in the hours, days or weeks after you experience them. Over time, however, they fester; begging to be told; becoming more insistent as the months and years pass. Some even begin to haunt a writer more and more, day by day until the tale must be told. Last night’s nightmare compels me to relate my tale now.

In late November of 2008 my bus from Vietnam to Siem Reap developed issues and required a stopover in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. It had been a sleeper bus so we were told we’d have a full day in the capital and the bus would leave the next day. Traveling plans like war plans rarely survive contact with the road. Growing ever more patient with detours, I inspected my guidebook, back when using Lonely Planet’s was a thing, and planned my day.

Let me be clear: I am no fan of war or atrocity porn, but I do understand its allure, although I am, thankfully, largely immune to it. On the other hand and possibly more importantly, I also recognize and empathize with the need to preserve places where truly reprehensible atrocities of human history occurred. They are to be preserved that future generations witness, feel, and have the opportunity to comprehend even the smallest portion of the enormity that took place underfoot. Maybe, just maybe, such lessons might be passed on to others who will never be able, or be allowed, to experience such hallowed ground.

Many practicing and secular Jews make pilgrimages to sites where the Shoah occurred. I’ve inquired why and each query has been answered universally. They describe a compulsion to bear witness, to honor the fallen, that they remain alive in living memory. Hard to argue with. Because the Armenian genocide occurred in a more dispersed manner Armenian pilgrims face much more significant hurdles. But, when possible Armenians likewise honor their ancestors. I cannot speak to what happened in Rwanda in 1994. I am aware of such places in Guatemala, heard in faint whispers where no gringos are welcome, nor visit, quite understandably.

How to explain how my choices that day were made? I may have only been 13 years-old but the 1984 movie ‘the Killing Fields’ left me with a powerful impression. An impression I recalled that November day and I felt oddly, inexplicably, duty-bound to see what I did not want to see. The killing fields were not my first stop that day however. That honor (poor word choice, I know) fell to the former interrogation and torture center of the Pol Pot Regime’s perceived enemies Tuol Sleng. Here I endured, what I can only describe as a feeling of almost unbearable witness to sickening crimes.

Two, and only two, examples need suffice.

First, in one room of the prison sat a metal frame bed where regime “enemies” were restrained. Once restrained, electrical leads were attached to the frame. Most expired for no reason at all. Sometimes the guards just left the room to have a smoke. At others they left to eat lunch. But most often the guards let them die because they knew no questions they might ask would be satisfactorily answered. They knew they were killing regular people, completely innocent.

The second example is this photo, a photo that haunts me to this day. The walls of Tuol Sleng are papered with them, all of them innocent and to this day they go unnamed. If you cannot feel the fear radiating from this photo you are devoid of the empathy gene.

In all I spent about two hours wandering through Tuol Sleng. I will never return.

But, my day was far from over. After walking out of Tuol Sleng I hailed a tuk-tuk and asked him to take me to the killing fields, which are about two kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. What I recall most vividly about this horrifying place was the care I had to take where I walked. (NOTE: click on the following links at your own risk.) The ground was uneven and I was told at the entrance to stay on the high ground, as the sunken spaces were mass graves. Christ, I shudder visualizing it even now. Then there were what I can only describe as large glass cases, best suited as terrariums for large pythons or boa constrictors. Each case was filled with one of the following: femurs of the dead, human ulnae and radii, and hip bones. Piling Pelion on top of Ossa, mason jars filled with human teeth sat atop each glass case. Finally, the Cambodians being Buddhists made a four story glass stupa—a Buddhist reliquary—filled with human skulls.

Towards the end of my increasingly heavy-hearted meanderings I noted crimson rays filling the sky. I hailed a cab to my hotel, shambled up to my room, slouched off my backpack and sank onto the bed, sighing deeply from emotional exhaustion. I didn’t know what I felt—except despair. I walked downstairs and asked where the nearest bar was. Now, I am not one to drink alone; but, I confess that I was incapable of dealing with what I was feeling at the time. So, I sat down, alone and in silence and got drunk. Not tipsy, but drunk. I barely recall making it back to my room, but I did. The last thing I recall thinking before I passed out was, “I’m going to be haunted by this for a long time.”

The next morning after dreamless sleep, no ghosts woke me up. All that greeted me were overcast skies, a wicked hangover and my noon bus ticket to Seam Reap.

Two Quick Hits

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On November 4, 2025

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~by Sean Paul Kelley

First, Dick Cheney died today. He was 84 years old. It’s a personal policy of mine to avoid speaking ill of the dead on the same day they die. I’ll comment on the consequences of his time in office some time soon. You are certainly free to say whatever you want in the comments.

Second, when it comes to military power, Singapore is a nasty, mean little porcupine crossed with a skunk whose motto is FAFO and if I were a neighbor I wouldn’t want to find out. (What a damned fine run-on sentence, yeah?) It’s also something their new Victory Class MRCV (multi-role combat vessel) makes abundantly clear and reminds me of an experience I had while living there.

In the run-up to National Day, or Independence Day, I don’t remember what it’s officially called but the military was out in full force, rehearsing its marching routes for the celebrations.

I lived on Beach Rd. and was sitting out in front of my favorite duck restaurant when an absolutely terrifying thunderclap occurred. I damn near pissed my pants. I looked up at the clouds, as thunder is kind of rare in Singapore, and saw the shadow of a triangle pass a kilometer down Beach Rd. from where I sat.

“What the hell was that?” I asked the waiter.

“Just a jet practicing for the parade down our street,” he said all nonchalantly.

Then the f**king thing made another run down Beach Rd. no more than 300 feet overhead. The windows rattled everywhere.

My experience in that moment gave me just a small inkling of how terrifying it must be to face the business end of a US F-15. It’s a feeling that cannot be described.

One I am not interested in repeating, either.

 

 

Four Randon Econonic, Political, Geopolitical and Scientific Musings

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On September 15, 2025

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First economic: The US dollar is down 5% over the last six months against a basket of currencies. And over the past year, it’s lost 9.6%. The biggest winner against a dollar has been the euro which has gone up 13% however, which truly is a win for Europe because it makes their natural gas imports from the US less expensive. But their natural gas imports are still a poison chalice. Expect the dollar to continue its slide, perhaps precipitously at some point in the New Year.

There were large moves out of US equities in the spring confirming the adage “sell in May and go away.” What September will look like is anyone’s guess, especially as Israel is more than likely to start the second phase of its war against Iran? Or October—that worst of months for Wall Street? What happens if Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz and oil goes above 100 dollars a barrel? That would be great for oil producers, but it would be terrible for markets across the globe, even China, possibly leading to a worldwide recession, especially with Chinese growth being somewhere between 4% and 5% at present.

Regardless of what happens in September or October—both always being bad month’s economically for the US economy, America’s bond market and the value of the dollar will continue its downward trajectory because America’s lenders are now demanding gold for loans instead of treasuries. This smells to me like the beginning of the end of dollar hegemony.

It makes me wonder what kind of “store of value” the BRICS will adopt to support their currency? Will it be a basket of their currencies? Will it be backed by gold and petroleum? That would be truly hard-core, because it would mean we were in for a long era of tight money. Our entire lives, actually, the entire history has been based on easy money. And as you know money creation is only possible when using a fiat currency.

There are many ways to imagine what they’ll do. Maybe blockchain? Who really knows? But there are other commodities that do have a store value, silver among them, maybe even rare earths and others they could use. It certainly is an interesting time to live.

Second domestic political: Niall Ferguson in his interview by Charlie Rose posted a week ago on the Internet was asked about Trump‘s challenges of outright ignoring the constitution with the following question: are we the Roman Republic, is this or are we witnessing the collapse of the constitutional order like the Roman republic. Rose asks if Trump is Augustus. He clearly is not. I would say that Trump is more like Marius and the Kennedys were more like the brothers Gracchi. In fact, I made this argument on a graduate school paper that I got a very good grade on, but in which my professor seriously disagreed with my analogies. Regardless I would say that we are at the beginning of the end of our constitutional order, and that we are looking down the barrel of Caesarism. It’s on the way. Maybe two years, maybe four years but it’s coming. Will it be a general? Will it be a politician? Those are questions we simply can’t answer. But as Ian Welsh has consistently predicted America is heading for a collapse, be it constitutional or economic or both it’s gonna happen and there isn’t anything anyone of us can do about it. Besides, Ferguson, while whip-smart, is kind of a tool.

Third is about some weaknessess the SCO currently must contend with if they are to become the anti-NATO military block. Here they are in no particular order of importance: One, the nations that make up the SCO are too diverse and often times their interests do not align with everyone in the SCO. For example, China and India have serious border issues. Pakistan and India have serious issues in Kashmir. Those are just two examples of several potential conflicts between members of a block, supposedly to oppose NATO. The issues between Pakistan and India make the intra-NATO issues between Greece and Turkey look like a family arguement on Thanksgiving.

Second, as the former director general of Russian international affairs Council said in a recent interview, “ the mandate of the SCO is too general.” The SCO can focus on security, development, or terrorism. Not all three.

Third, China is by far the most powerful member of the SCO and that creates a dangerous asymmetry in the organization. Much like the United States dominated NATO for so long and skewed it’s purpose after the Cold War for its own unfathomable means.

Fourth: This essay on the relative merits of “Superradiance,”.  Is well worth the three minutes it will take to read, plus it is comprehensible to the layman. The essay describes Superradiance as “a collective quantum optical effect in which a group of emitters, such as atoms or molecules, emit light in a highly coherent and amplified manner.  In the context of mammalian neural systems, superradiance occurs when a group of neurons collectively emit photons, resulting in a stronger and more coherent signal compared to individual neuron emissions. This coordinated emission of photons across vast networks of microtubules within neurons could potentially achieve the long-range coherence necessary for the emergence of consciousness.”

The essay stands as a correction of sorts to Sir Roger Penrose’s “Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR)” theory of human consciousness, which Wikipedia describes thusly: Orch Or “is a controversial theory postulating that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons (rather than being a product of neural connections).” In short, says Penrose, “Consciousness does not collapse the wave function; instead it is the collapse of the wave function that produces consciousness.”

One thing we do know is that consciouness is decidely not computational and most likely occurs in the quantum realm.

As you can tell, I dig this kind of stuff.

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The Solution to The USA’s Taiwan Dilemma

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On September 11, 2025

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“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

三国演义 ~by Luo Guangzhong

Earlier I promised to post my plan to prevent a war between the United States and China over Taiwan. I’ve traveled and met with Taiwanese diplomats. They are some of the most sophisticated operators I’ve ever encountered. Taiwan is a highly advanced technological country. Very wealthy, with a sophisticated full coverage heath care system and a vibrant democracy. Furthermore, based on the Shanghai Communique issued on February 27, 1972 by Nixon and Mao, both mainland China and the USA formally acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China”.

The Communique goes on to state the US side does not accept a violent solution to the unification of the two parties and the Chinese side retains the option to violence if Taiwan ever declares independence, paraphrasing here, folks. It’s been a long time since reading my Kissinger.

Conversely, I have traveled seven times to China. Here is an idea most Americans will probably never understand. China’s potential to utilize enormous amounts of soft power is profound. This is based on China’s circular view of history and that China has been invaded and ruled by foreign powers many times in its history. In each and every case China has overcome said invaders very differently than the way the Russians have. Or anyone else for that matter. Where the Russians trade space for time to husband their resources for a great counter attack and push the invader out of the country, China seduces the invader, with its ancient, deep, amazing and incredibly seductive culture. I cannot emphasize enough the depth, breadth, and tantalizing sophistication of its culture, be it material, artistic, political or spiritual. I do, after all, practice Chinese Chan Buddhism in my own life. Every time China has been invaded and completely taken over by a foreign power this strategy works. Even today we’re watching Chinese movies on Netflix. That is the use and export of soft power. And unlike America, that has only 250 years of history to draw upon its soft power, China has almost 4000 years of history to draw upon. The efficacy of Chinese soft power is not to be underestimated. It is indeed seductive.

Now the question moves to goals and intentions. And here an understanding of Chinese history can aid us in a better understanding of the present Chinese leader, Xi Jing Ping.

What are Xi Jing Ping’s true goals? Simple, he seeks membership among the greatest of Chinese emperors. The greatest of Chinese emperors are judged by a single metric: did they unify all of China? As the opening sentence of the great Chinese novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I quoted at the beginning of this essay, unification is the way the Chinese see themselves when in a golden age.

This compulsion to unify all of China is the defining source of Xi’s ambitions. And that means Taiwan. Taiwan is the last remaining province of a fully unified China. China equal to that ruled by the Qin Shih Huang Di, the very first emperor to unify all of China, or the great conqueror Han Wu Di, or Li Shimin of the mighty T’ang or Zhu Yuanzhang of the wall building Ming. It is to this rank of Chinese men that Xi aspires.

What should America do? I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a war with China that most people are certain is inevitable. They call it the “Thucydides Trap.” But, if the study of history has taught me anything it is that nothing is inevitable, contingencies matter, and human agency means the most. We may live in a complex adaptive system, but nothing, nothing is inevitable. Therefore, America must find a way tone down its arrogance and find a way to peacefully unite Taiwan with China.

Here is how I would do it if I were president.

First, I would engage in a series of CBM’s (Confidence Building Measures in diplospeak) with Xi Jing Ping regarding our naval stance in the Straits of Taiwan. I would make it policy that no American naval ships traverse the Straits of Taiwan any longer. Then I would halt the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan.

Second, I would begin preparing the Taiwanese to consider peaceful unification with the mainland along the lines of the British handover of Hong Kong to China in the 90s. I would make it clear that we would not consider unification unless Taiwan was allowed to keep its democracy, and democratic traditions for a minimum of 80 years. I would do this to assuage the Taiwanese about a possible authoritarian takeover of the island in the case of unification. China did one nation, two systems successfully once before. They can do it again.

Third, I would secretly engage Xi Jing Ping with the following proposal: the United States of America would fully encourage and accept the unification of Taiwan with the mainland under the following conditions. Number one, Taiwan would have three representatives on the politburo, one of which would be a power ministry, either interior, defense, or foreign affairs. My fallback position, which is my true goal of course, would be the acceptance of two politburo members from Taiwan, but I would not relent on one serving as a power minister in one of the three ministries aforementioned.

I am relatively certain that Xi and the current politburo would agree to this proposal. It would serve to put Xi in the exhalted ranks of Chinese leaders in which he craves to be included. Mos timportantly, it would not harm a single vital national interest of the United States. The Chinese might have a salient in the first island chain, that being the island of Taiwan, but the United States would still have Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Not to mention the defenses in depth that the second island chain provides us in the Pacific ocean. Much less the great fortress of the third island chain of Midway, Wake and Hawaii. Defenses in depth matter much more than a salient in the first island chain.

Now, I recognize this goes against every national security intellectuals thinking. It is completely contrarian. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few years the more I believe that is the best way to avoid general warfare between two nuclear great powers from the Straits of Malacca to the South China Sea and into the deep blue waters of the Pacific.

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Losing Our Asian Allies – And Fast

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On June 25, 2025

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Ian in his last post mentioned that our Asian allies are slipping away from us. While we pretend to strategically re-orient the Japanese are engaging in massive rearmament begun by Abe and being continued by the current government. Japan has lost confidence in the American security umbrella because of the deceit we’ve displayed in foreign relations. The Koreans? I lived in Korea. They’re simply apoplectic. Some are even at the point where they are willing to consider a loose confederation with the north, an entente of sorts so the South has the protection of the North’s nuclear umbrella and the North gains goods and services from the South.

This is simply unheard of. When I talked to one of my former students who now works in the foreign ministry and he told me this I was gobsmacked.

Ian’s correct. For 400 years the balance of payments from the rest of the world went to the Littoral seapower states. For the last 50 years the balance of payments has been reversed.  All that gold is going back home. In one generation the United States has squandered all the goodwill and wealth it received during WWI and WWII. China in the last 50 years has lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of the world did during all of recorded history. Chew on that stat for a moment.

I will be visiting China and South Korea to do a 20 year retrospective tour and a 30 year retrospective tour on the former and the latter. I don’t know what to expect, but I remember China 20 years ago and being blown away.

The USA is in deep strategic shit. For 200+ years our power has been based on our complete hegemony of this hemisphere. For 75 of the last 100 years our main strategic goal has been the prevention of one power or an alliance of powers attaining hegemonic power over the Eurasian landmass. In the last six years we’ve abandoned that VITAL national interest for what? We’ve driven Russia into the arms of China. India lost all confidence in us. Now East Asia has.

If a single power or coalition of powers dominate the Eurasian landmass our two oceans will not protect us.

It appears I might have been wrong about the Israeli-Iran pissing contest being the opening act of WWIII. Good. What it really feels like is the first Balkan War in 1912. The calculus is being made in Beijing. And Tokyo. And Seoul. And Taipei. We lack the ability to protect our allies conventionally. And no one wants nukes.

I don’t have any smart quip to conclude with except a Spanish expletive, “la puebla es jodida.”

You get the idea.

The Palestinian Option for Kashmir?

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On August 14, 2019

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Back in 1980, I visited Kashmir with my parents. This was before the troubles, and it remains perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.

Last week, India’s PM, Modi, abrogated clauses in the Indian constitution relating to Kashmir, which does not allow non-Kashmiris to buy property. As Margolis says:

Modi is clearly copying Israel’s Netanyahu by encouraging non-Muslims to buy up land and squeeze the local Muslim population. Welcome to the Mideast Conflict East. China is also doing similar ethnic inundation in its far western, largely Muslim, Xinjiang (Sinkiang) region.

Dai Lake, Kashmir

By their friends, you shall know them. I’ve never liked Modi, his demonitization was incredibly damaging to the Indian economy and hurt the poorest Indians. That he spends all his time buddying up to Israel’s Netanyahu tells you all you need to know about whether he’s more good than bad. (If it doesn’t, you need to self-reflect a bit.)

But Indians did vote for Modi in droves. It’s another episode of people, who are scared and have shitty lives, voting for the tough guy, thinking he’ll be tough for them, rather than for his core supporters. In Modi’s case, hard-right Hindus.

It’s worth remembering that the UN called for a referendum in Kashmir and that India never held it, because they know that, given a choice, Kashmiris would rather be part of Pakistan.

So, ethnic cleansing time! This is the world we live in, more and more, a place where the weak do as they must and the powerful do as they will (ever has it been thus, but sometimes it is less thus). For now, India’s the powerful one. Soon enough, it won’t be–because this BS is a distraction from actual existential threats to India, mainly around water. I can’t think of any major nation which is going to get hit harder than India.

Meanwhile, of course, both the Pakistani and Indian militaries are on hair-trigger alert, and both have nuclear weapons. Because India has a much larger army, if war does break out, Pakistan either goes to nukes or loses.

Brilliant.

 

 

Globe on Fire

The Insanity of India and the Future of Humanity

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On December 9, 2016

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You’ve probably all heard that Indian Prime Minister Modi ordered two of the most common high denomination bills (500 and 1,000 rupee) out of circulation and that they would no longer be legal tender after only a few days.

India’s economy is, well, not modern. Most people do not have or use credit cards. Only 53 percent have a bank account, and cash is still preferred for transactions. 43 percent of those who have a bank hadn’t used their bank account in the last year.

India also has a vast corruption problem and huge black and grey markets. The corruption makes it very difficult to fix problems, whether they be removing pollution from the Ganges, building enough toilets so people stop shitting in the streets, or anything else.

The black money (money never taxed or declared) market is supposed to comprise about 23 to 26 percent of the Indian economy. I don’t know if that’s a low estimate (I doubt it’s high).

Black money and corruption go hand-in-hand, for obvious reasons: You can’t declare the bribes you receive or gave, at least not with some way of laundering them first.

So cleaning up black money should help clean up corruption.

But many Indians live in the black money economy. It’s just that simple. Someone gives them money, they spend it, no one is declaring it.

De-monetization isn’t just about a couple of bills, it’s about pushing people towards electronic money, which can be easily tracked. There have even been suggestions of forcing beggars to use electronic money.

I regard this push to de-monetization as fundamentally insane in an economy like India’s, and it screams rentism. Yeah, black money can’t be taxed, but it also isn’t “bank-fee’d” away. When everything is electronic through banks (this isn’t bitcoin), then transaction fees and so on eat away at it. Every hand it goes through can make a little stick, and only very strict law can make it not happen.

It’s free money from the point of intermediaries; they have to do very little to get it once the system is set up.

It’s leeching. Nearly pure rentism.

I do not support universal e-cash for this reason. It is to easy to do rentism, and rentism (transaction taxes and fees) kills monetary velocity and kills economies. The move to transaction taxes (GST) is one of the things that took the oomph out of Western economies, and it was designed to do so, to reduce inflation by reducing spending.

Despite our era’s absolutely crazed fixation with inflation, there is NO evidence that inflation from about 10 percent a year on down does ANY harm to the economy in and of itself and there is plenty of evidence that moderate levels of inflation have a myriad of good effects on the economy.

Yes, people who earned their money in the past hate inflation. Too bad, past contributions should be discounted, and proper government policy can easily ensure that people are still taken care of and have enough. Crippling the economy so that people who earned their money years and years ago retain power long past their period of productive contribution is economic malpractice.

Give people who can’t/shouldn’t/don’t work a decent income through a pension/welfare plan or even a basic income system and get rid of all transaction taxes except for those where you deliberately want to slow down a particular type of economic activity, rather than all activity altogether. If it’s carbon you don’t want to see too much of, tax it. If oil inflation is the problem, figure out how to tax that, and so on.

Demonetization without very strict anti-rentism is a bad idea. India is a shitty country to try to demonetize due to its lack of technological infrastructure. It’s also not ideal, ironically, because of it is weak rule of law, vast corruption and huge inequality in both money and power.

India, in general, is far more of a clusterfuck than most understand, including many middle class Indians. Calories per capita are lower than they were 30  years ago, and most people are worse off than they were before neoliberal dogma took over.

Meanwhile, much Indian agriculture runs off of aquifers, and they are being depleted, leading to farmer suicides. Climate change is making the monsoons erratic, and it is causing problems with runoff from the Himalayas, which is to say, where northern India gets most of its water. Earlier this year, one of the source rivers for the Ganges was dry for weeks.

India is going to go pear-shaped. The question is when, but when it does, I expect hundreds of millions to die. The issue will be water, pure and simple, but India’s inability to deal with even basic problems like open defecation and pollution of the Ganges, means it literally cannot deal with longer term issues.

Reforms, which have, yes, created a robust middle class, have not improved the situation of most Indians. Yes, many stats say they have, but when I find out that calories/capita is down, I start thinking that GDP/capita is not measuring real welfare. It’s not like Indians were overfed 30 years ago.

I simply DO NOT believe many of the Panglossian statistics that people are using to say the world is the greatest ever. In many cases, I can’t prove it (and no, unless you have a 100k you want to give me, I’m not going to prove it), but I know, for example, that proverty stats in America are absolute bullshit: The poverty level has not kept up with increases in cost of living, especially in food, rent, and medicine. Not even close–and that’s using formal inflation statistics, which systematically understate price rises in various categories.

So, when the US stats are shit, and knowing what I know about how places like India and most sub-Saharan African countries run, and how incentives to show progress work for the people who measure this shit, I just do not believe a lot of the stats.

I think the world is in worse condition than many make out. I know India is. I’m now receiving information that China is as well (more on that at a later date, maybe).

So, shit is going to hit the fan, we are in worse shape than we think we are, we are strangling all growth rather than merely counterproductive growth, and we are lying to ourselves about the real shape of our countries and our world, and when we’re not lying about it, we’re ignoring it.

This is going to get ugly. Hundreds of millions in India. And the same in many other places.

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Stephen Moss tells us the powerful do as they will and the weak can suck it up

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On June 7, 2011

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So, here’s Stephen Moss interviewing Arundhati Roy:

    I want to talk more about Mary Roy – and eventually we do – but there’s one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? “I don’t condemn it any more,” she says. “If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

    Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? “I am a Maoist sympathiser,” she says. “I’m not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support.”

    Roy talks about the resistance as an “insurrection”; she makes India sound as if it’s ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don’t hear about these mini-wars? “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers,” she says, “that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.” I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don’t believe it’s corrupt…

    I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I admire her courage.

Could Moss be a bigger sack of sanctimonious shit?  Calling her Manichaean for allowing that people have the right to self defense, while not recognizing his own Manichean thinking that only the state should engage in violence, no matter what it does?  Thinking that his business is not corrupt, the business which repeated the lies which lead to the Iraq war, and that he knows better what’s going on in India than she does.  Thinking that what journalists think matters, as if such injunctions can be disobeyed when they are enforced by editors neither assigning such stories nor running such stories if submitted without being asked for.

There has been a major insurrection going on in India for a long time, it’s true that newspapers like the Guardian don’t cover it, but a cursory google search brings up plenty of information: entire provinces are in dispute, this is not in question.  Moss hasn’t even bothered to do any research before dismissing Roy.

The sanctimony of Moss, where ordinary people who might kill people fighting back should just take it and always engage in peaceful protest, while the nations of the world, including India, kill far far more people than those guerillas do, ever day, is staggering in its immensity.  The willful ignorance, the assertion of moral superiority, the smug judgment is all immense in its self-absorption.

It’s such a pity that the Glorious Revolution and Founders of the US, and so on, didn’t have people like Stephen Moss around to tell them that non-violence is always the way to go.

Non-violence works when you are dealing with people who give a fuck what you think.  When you’re a bunch of dirt-poor peasants whose only value is the land you’re living on, you have no leverage.  None.  There is nothing you can do that outweighs the money that is to be made by moving you out of the way, and if moving you means getting you dead, that works too.

This lesson, of the sharp limits of non-violence, is one the world’s effete leftists are going to have learn, and learn the hard way.  At the very least you have to be willing to make life unpleasant for your enemies, to get in their face, to shut down their hotels, their factories, their airports, their refineries, their businesses.  That is at the least.  Modern elites are selected for their ability to do make decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, taking into account only money, the possibility of harm to self or the immediate family, and the possibility of going to jail (minimal).  Everything else is irrelevant to their decision making calculus.  If the cost of moving you aside, to them, not to you, or to the environment, or society, or to the children, or to God, is less than the benefit of doing so, for them, they will do so. End of story.  Morals and ethics do not come into it.  Period.  The communications industry runs on minerals out of the Congo, which is a region ruled by mass systemic rape.

There used to be some in-groups.  That is to say, if you were American or European, you could expect to not be treated like a black African.  You could expect that the benefits of hegemony would be spread around.  And as Asian nations joined the club, their governments took care of them too.  If you didn’t have a government capable of or interested in looking out for you, well, too bad (see South America, post-war decline).

Those in-groups are fading.  In the Western world they are gone or going in major nations.  American elites do not think they need share anything with Americans.  The Brits are heading down this road.  The French still will share with whites, but dark immigrants can suck on it.  Harsh austerity is being pushed on Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and so on, and their own elites are have their hand on the pointy end of the stick, driving it into their citizens throats.  “Cough it up,” they scream, “we know you have more blood to give! More!  More!  MORE!”

This is the modern world, where in nation after nation the elites have become unmoored from any concern, not for general humanity, neither they nor the populations they rule have ever had that, but even for concern for their own populations.  The disease is not at the same stage everywhere, the Chinese still care for the Han, the Indians take care of non-aborigines, but the in-groups are shrinking, and what is shared with them, what they are seen as deserving, is being reduced, step by step.  I remember when I was in England, being told by a friendly ex-Pol that of course austerity was no big deal, and those multi-generation welfare bums had it coming, as if welfare had anything to do with the financial crisis, and if the amount of money which could be saved by screwing the poor would be enough to make a difference.

As Thucydides said, “the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”  I don’t think he approved of that maxim the way that Moss appears to.

Instead men like Stephen Moss are there to justify the abuse of the weak by the strong, to denigrate the right of people who are having everything taken from them to fight back, to spew their bullshit about how violence is only justified when it’s the state bombing someone, but never in fighting back against an unjust state.  The world has many Stephen Moss’s, the world will have many more, and the world has always had Stephen Moss’s, the moral apologists of corrupt systems, the men who wring their hands and tell the powerless they should stay powerless, that they should never fight their enemies with the same violence their enemies use against them.

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