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reasonsforhope · 2 months ago

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Masterpost: Reasons I firmly believe we will beat climate change

Posts are in reverse chronological order (by post date, not article date), mostly taken from my "climate change" tag, which I went through all the way back to the literal beginning of my blog. Will update periodically.

Especially big deal articles/posts are in bold.

Big picture:

Mature trees offer hope in world of rising emissions (x)

Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (x)

Good news: Tiny urban green spaces can cool cities and save lives (x)

Conservation and economic development go hand in hand, more often than expected (x)

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world (x)

Sun Machines: Solar, an energy that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge (x)

Wealthy nations finally deliver promised climate aid, as calls for more equitable funding for poor countries grow (x)

For Earth Day 2024, experts are spreading optimism – not doom. Here's why. (x)

Opinion: I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. (x)

The World’s Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think (x)

‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief (x)

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (x)

Young Forests Capture Carbon Quicker than Previously Thought (x)

Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how. (x)

Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows (x)

The global treaty to save the ozone layer has also slowed Arctic ice melt (x)

The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past (x)

Scientists Find Methane is Actually Offsetting 30% of its Own Heating Effect on Planet (x)

Are debt-for-climate swaps finally taking off? (x)

High seas treaty: historic deal to protect international waters finally reached at UN (x)

How Could Positive ‘Tipping Points’ Accelerate Climate Action? (x)

Specific examples:

Environmental Campaigners Celebrate As Labour Ends Tory Ban On New Onshore Wind Projects (x)

Private firms are driving a revolution in solar power in Africa (x)

How the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu drastically cut plastic pollution (x)

Rewilding sites have seen 400% increase in jobs since 2008, research finds [Scotland] (x)

The American Climate Corps take flight, with most jobs based in the West (x)

Waste Heat Generated from Electronics to Warm Finnish City in Winter Thanks to Groundbreaking Thermal Energy Project (x)

Climate protection is now a human right — and lawsuits will follow [European Union] (x)

A new EU ecocide law ‘marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals’ (x)

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII [United States] (x)

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren. [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study (x)

Chart: Wind and solar are closing in on fossil fuels in the EU (x)

UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show (x)

Countries That Generate 100% Renewable Energy Electricity (x)

Indigenous advocacy leads to largest dam removal project in US history [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

India’s clean energy transition is rapidly underway, benefiting the entire world (x)

China is set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early, new report finds (x)

‘Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis (x)

Largest-ever data set collection shows how coral reefs can survive climate change (x)

The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What Does It DO? [United States] (x)

Good Climate News: Headline Roundup April 1st through April 15th, 2023 (x)

How agroforestry can restore degraded lands and provide income in the Amazon (x) [Brazil]

Loss of Climate-Crucial Mangrove Forests Has Slowed to Near-Negligable Amount Worldwide, Report Hails (x)

Agroecology schools help communities restore degraded land in Guatemala (x)

Climate adaptation:

Solar-powered generators pull clean drinking water 'from thin air,' aiding communities in need: 'It transforms lives' (x)

‘Sponge’ Cities Combat Urban Flooding by Letting Nature Do the Work [China] (x)

Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala (x)

A green roof or rooftop solar? You can combine them in a biosolar roof — boosting both biodiversity and power output (x)

Global death tolls from natural disasters have actually plummeted over the last century (x)

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be (x)

This city turns sewage into drinking water in 24 hours. The concept is catching on [Namibia] (x)

Plants teach their offspring how to adapt to climate change, scientists find (x)

Resurrecting Climate-Resilient Rice in India (x)

Other Masterposts:

Going carbon negative and how we're going to fix global heating (x)

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metamatar · 4 months ago

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more excerpts from the excellent jamhoor article about the histories of caste class and power embedded in kamala's nom

In a 2003 interview with the San Francisco Weekly, Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’s mother, announced proudly— In Indian society we go by birth. We are Brahmins, that is the top caste. Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money. For Brahmins, the bloodline is the most important. My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years. [...]

TamBrahm supremacy undefeated

Gopalan was a life-long civil servant, first in the Imperial Secretariat Service of British India, and then the Central Secretariat Service post-Independence. In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris calls Gopalan “an original Indian Freedom Fighter”. However, some of her close family members highlight how any public opposition to British rule would have meant the loss of Gopalan’s job and livelihood.

if this is true it would be hilarious.

#there's congressis on my paternal grandmother's side who got cushy bureaucrat positions post independence i should hit them up for the goss

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fatehbaz · 1 year ago

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About the lethal world-altering power of "legal fictions of property" and creation of laws in British imperial attempts to control the monsoon-flooded rivers and deltas of Bengal, described in Debjani Bhattacharyya's work (Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta, 2019). Other scholars have also come to similar conclusions about British treatment of Bengal. It's kind of a nice microcosm not just of British rule in South Asia, but also of imperial attempts to control ecology, communities, and imaginations across the planet.

In deltas, shorelines, seasonally-flooded rivers and riparian wetlands, mangrove forests, etc., there may not be clear distinctions between "land" and "water". The boundaries might change every year, every season, sometimes every day, depending on tide, floods, etc. So, if empires like Britain or the United States are to control such a place, there are two different challenges here. One challenge is, maybe more obviously, material, physical. The other is ontological, imaginative, etc., or what not.

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The material or physical challenge is:

How does the empire tax or administer properties if the property changes seasonally depending on rivers, floods, precipitation, etc.? How does the empire "manage" local social/financial conditions if there isn't clear recognition of a stable title, landlord, authority figure? Where is the solid property boundary that can facilitate ownership transfer, zoning, revenue collection, etc.? How does the empire force people into industrial or plantation labor if the empire can't use the threat of home-loss or job-loss to coerce local people? How does the empire install development projects or extractive industries, like roads, bridges, monoculture/plantation fields, etc., if the land and water are always in motion, fluid, changing?

The ontological challenge is:

Part of the empire's power comes from its ability to conquer the imagination, to capture the future, to insist that there is no other way, there are no other options. Empire is inevitable. And the empire insists that borders are "real", definite, strict. But how can you believe the empire's claims about strict boundaries, about the inevitability of their future, when you can clearly see an alternative, when you are living in an ecosystem where land and water are in a kind of dance, influencing each other, fluid, impermanent?

And the empire doesn't appreciate physical, material challenges. But the empire especially doesn't want any ontological challenges. If you can identify other ways of being, alternative lives, other futures, you undermine the empire's claim to inevitability and inspire others to live otherwise. In a way, a river or a delta or an estuary, they are a provocation; as if they were alive, agents themselves, these environments are a direct challenge to empire's claims.

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A summary of this imperial conundrum, from Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl:

'[T]his tropical coastal ecology is a site of continual refiguration: neither sea nor land, neither river nor sea, bearing neither salty nor fresh water […]. The Sundarbans covers an area of 10,000 square kilometers of intertidal zones between parts of southwestern Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India. The largest mangrove forest in the world […]. As a landscape, the Sundarbans is marked by unfixity, since its intertidal nature places it between appearance and disappearance – with islands being submerged overnight. […] [T]heir porous quality does not allow for clear border-making. [...] [W]e are met with the trembling instability of borders. [...] [H]ere the coastline becomes indiscernible as a single entity. The legal vexations of such amphibious and obtuse terrain become pronounced in sea-rights cases, wherein border-making becomes the necessity of tenure.' ["Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality." e-flux Journal Issue #45. May 2013.]

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So, those "legal vexations", "wherein border-making becomes the necessity of tenure [ownership]"? That's what Bhattacharyya discusses, how laws become "technologies of property" in Bengal.

Basically, Bhattacharyya describes "the legal processes through which the mobility of the landscape was accommodated into the architecture of ownership" (p. 77); "drying a tidal landscape was as much an infrastructural project as it was an ontological endeavor in producing a dry culture with colonial law as its handmaiden" (p. 83)' "the materiality of the paper" functioned as "a legitimizing object of modern property" (p. 100); the British/US/imperial imagination of rivers were "characterized by a cartographic-mindedness that captures and fixes the spatial mobility. The colonial journey is one of reterritorialization that involves mapping, measuring and fixing" (p. 122).

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In the tags of my post, I mentioned that the "legal engineering to conquer rivers in Bengal" is also the focus of two other scholars who examine the relationships with water, the creation of private property, and the power of colonial law-making in Bengal:

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Rohan Ignatious D'Souza.

D'Souza authored Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (1803-1946), which provides nice coverage from the East India Company, through the Mutiny and nineteenth-century expansion of finance and plantations, into modernist development of the twentieth century.

And I think Lahiri-Dutt sums up this whole situation nicely:

'Traveling through Bengal in the eighteenth century, […] [travelers] saw a highly sophisticated water-based economy – the blessing of rivers […]. Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at stabilizing lands and waters, at creating permanent boundaries between them, [...] in a land of shifting river courses, inundated irrigation, and river-based life. Such a separation of land and water was made possible not just by physical constructions but first and foremost by engineering a legal framework. […] BADA, which stands for the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Act, a law passed by the colonial British rulers in 1825 […]. Nature here represents a borderless world, or at best one in which borders are not fixed lines on the ground demarcating a territory, but are negotiated spaces or zones. Such “[...] spaces” comprise “not [only] lines of separation but zones of interaction…transformation, transgression, and possibility” […]. Current boundaries of land and water are as much products of history as nature and the colonial rule of Bengal played a key role in changing the ideas and valuations of both. […] [R]ivers do not always flow along a certain route […]. The laws that the colonial British brought to Bengal, however, were founded upon the thinking of land as being fixed in place. […] To entrench the system, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 created zamindars (or landlords) “in perpetuity” – meaning for good. The system was aimed at reducing the complexities of revenue collection due to erratically shifting lands and unpredictable harvests in a monsoon-dependent area […]. From a riverine community, within a hundred years, Bengal was transformed into a land-based community.' ["Commodified Land, Dangerous Water: Colonial Perceptions of Riverine Bengal." RCC Perspectives, no. 3. 2014.]

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Part of why I appreciate Bhattacharyya's take on it is that she focuses on what was lost, not just in terms of physical landscape, material accessibility, etc., but also what was lost culturally, emotionally. Stories, traditions, ways of being. This is why Bhattacharyya describes this process of British rule in Bengal "a history of forgetting". She says: "And because we forget, it is harder for us to imagine alternatives".

Basically, British legal maneuvers to strictly define borders between land and water in Bengal, achieved several things: Yes, faced with frequent seasonal/annual changes of where shorelines and islands, etc., were located, part of the benefit of this legal defining and clarification of solid land was allowing the empire to map and administer stable segments of property for purposes of taxes, records, and development projects (roads, bridges, canals, etc.). This "permanence" of property then allowed for the opening of the door to financialization, so that investors in London or Calcutta could participate in financial speculation on the real estate market.

Another benefit was the installation of "private" property and strengthening the power of landlords, enforcing a social hierarchy, detaching poorer people from land access, resulting in conditions of indebtedness. Of course, the precarity of debt and lack of access to land then essentially forced poorer people into wage labour, factory work, plantations.

After all, Britain needed laborers to staff its expanding and notorious Assamese tea plantations. And the empire did this repeatedly elsewhere, too: Alienated people by using legal frameworks to force them into debt or homelessness, and then using those alienated people to work in terrible industrial conditions, often far away from their homes. Just as earlier nineteenth-century metropolitan London staffed its factories with indebted and impoverished people from elsewhere in England, Britain staffed its Assameses tea plantations with poor people from central India, and Britain staffed its plantations and infrastructure projects in Malaya with "coolies" and convicts from Bombay.

Outside of these material consequences, there is also the insidious lasting devastation of alienation itself. Emotionally. Loss of stories, songs, traditions, relationships, etc. The river, the delta, the ecosystem that you know and love, is not accessible to you. And so the empire's definitions and traditions are made resolute, the only possible future. There is no alternative.

But the river says otherwise.

#abolition #indigenous #multispecies #borders #temporal #wetlands #mangroves #tidalectics #archipelagic thinking #geographic imaginaries #plantations #intimacies of four continents #delta shoal islands swamps etc #carceral geography #debt and debt colonies #ecologies

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beguines · 3 months ago

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The Indian state has already begun to evict indigenous communities from their homes. In late 2020, tribal communities received notice that labeled their homes as illegally occupying forest land. Their homes were demolished. This bears an eerie resemblance to Israel's targeting of Bedouin communities of Naqab, where Israel gave the lands of these communities to Jewish settlers and the military. The logic of Bedouin dispossession was premised on the fact that as nomads, they had no right to the land.

In Kashmir, these communities were living on lands that the Indian state wanted to use for the development of tourist infrastructure. Part of the plan is to transfer agricultural land to Indian state and private corporations. Kashmir has already lost 78,700 hectares of agricultural land to non-agricultural purposes between 2015–19. This decline in agricultural land—which a majority of Kashmiris still rely upon as the foundation of their economy—will disempower farmers, result in a loss of essential crops, make Kashmir less agriculturally self-sufficient, and create grounds for economic collapse in the near future. It is of course, only when Kashmiris are economically devastated that India's job in securing their land will be made even easier.

Alongside the destruction of agricultural land, the Indian government has also been charged with "ecocide" in Kashmir, which, "masked under the development rhetoric . . . destroys the environment without care, extracting resources and expanding illegal infrastructure as a way of contesting the indigenous peoples' right of belonging and using the territory for their own gain." During the lockdown in late 2019, the valley saw unprecedented forest clearances. In June 2020, the Jammu & Kashmir Forest Department became a government-owned corporation, allowing it to sell public forest land to private entities, including to Indian corporations. The rush to secure and extract Kashmir's resources has typically come at an immense cost to the region's vulnerable ecology, prompting local activists' fears that a lack of accountability will almost certainly exacerbate the climate crisis in South Asia. Just as Israel has secured control over Palestinian resources, India's stranglehold of Kashmir's natural resources and interference with the environment will ultimately make Kashmiris dependent on the Indian state for their livelihoods.

All of these shifts in land use reflect the "Srinagar Master Plan 2035," which "proposes creating formal and informal housing colonies through town planning schemes as well as in Special Investment Corridors," primarily for the use of Indian settlers and outside investors. Indeed, the Indian government has signed a series of MOU's with outside investors to alter the nature of the state by building multiplexes, educational institutions, film production centers, tourist infrastructure, Hindu religious sites, and medical industries. Kashmiri investors are no competition for massive Indian and external corporations and have a fundamental disadvantage in investing in land banks that the government has apportioned toward these purposes. Back to back lockdowns have resulted in massive economic losses for Kashmir's industries, including tourism, handicrafts, horticulture, IT, and e-commerce. Furthermore, "as with other colonial powers, Indian officials are participating in international investment summits parroting Kashmir as a 'Land of Opportunity', setting off a scramble for Kashmir's resources, which will cause further environmental destruction." India has always kept a close eye on Kashmir's water resources and its capabilities to generate electricity, while intentionally depriving Kashmir of the electricity it produces.

As more economic and employment opportunities are opened up to Indian domiciles, Kashmiris will also be deprived of what little job security they had. In sum, "neoliberal policies come together with settler colonial ambitions under continued reference to private players, industrialization and development, with the 'steady flow of wealth outwards.'"

Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel

#azad essa #hostile homelands

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celticcrossanon · 7 months ago

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This is totally my opinion on Harry, Invictus and the Commonwealth. I think Harry’s greatest loss was the loss of their roles of President and VP of the Commonwealth Trust. If they lose Invictus a great deal of their “Plans” i.e. the Plans others have for using them. All of this is connected as I think Harry’s handlers have their ultimate goal of getting Harry back into a role with the Commonwealth which would allow a great deal of movement and economic and military activities within those countries populations, by his handlers, as Harry would be the face to put out any complaints by those who are fighting the multi national corporations and Tech companies that are trying to make inroads into those countries, to get access to their resources, like oil, their land for development. They have to have a face that is innocuous and who appears to be aligned with the Commonwealth countries. That face, the face of Invictus, gives them Carte Blanche to get into the country, to sell it as a Goodwill operation for Veterans etc. Without Invictus they lose that free pass to go right to the top of the countries hierarchy of ministers, presidents, meet a former prince routine of his and then integrate his own “connections” to the country with the blessing of the leaders as they trust Harry. You know the Harry that keeps talking about “Africa, my true home, the place I am most comfortable” blah, blah. The desire of Invictus to get rid of Harry has proven to be very difficult as there are powerful corporations who want him there and it has nothing to do with athletes. With Harry as the face, and the beard for what is going on, he distracts from the real activities and puts out that she is 43% Nigerian (I am your sister, your mother, your wife blah, blah!). Don’t be fooled. This is all a charade, a scam…not by Harry, he is too stupid. Follow the money…this is all a distraction from issues like all the violence over there, i.e., African Parks. However, there is no question in my mind that H&M would do anything for money…greed is the touchstone here…and we already know that Harry would sell out his family for money. Can you imagine what he would do to an entity like the Commonwealth, that he does not care about at all? Keep your eyes on these two, they are more dangerous than they look, because stupid people are very dangerous, because they will do anything for money.

Hi Nonny,

Thank you for sharing your opinion with us. :)

A few points that I want to comment on:

The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust is a local, UK based charity that is supposed to support young people aged 18-35 across the Commonwealth, focusing on social entrepreneurs who have founded organisations to address problems in their communities. So far it has funded projects in the following countries:

3 in the UK, 5 in Uganda, 3 in Kenya, 3 in Cameroon, 2 in Malawi, 2 in South Africa, 2 in Rwanda, 2 in Tanzania, 2 in Nigeria, 1 in Ghana, 1 in Barbados, 1 in Guyana, 1 in St Lucia, 1 in Trinidad and Tobago, 1 in the Maldives, 1 in India, and 1 in Pakistan.

That is 32 projects across 17 countries (out of 56 Commonwealth Nations). This is a small charity. It does not have an international reputation and I doubt that most people outside the UK would know about it.

Harry’s job as President was to be president of a UK based charity. It had nothing to do with the organisation of the Commonwealth if Nations.

With respect to the Commonwealth of Nations, any prominent position within the organisation is either filled by a Head of State or voted on by all Heads of State. If Harry wants one of those positions, for which he is woefully unqualified, he would have to do a deal with enough of the 56 Heads of State to be voted into the position. I can’t see that happening, myself, especially as many of them want the position to go to another country’s Head of State after King Charles.

In addition, the Head of the Commonwealth has no power in any nation that makes up the Commonwealth. They can not be the face of anything except the Commonwealth as an organisation because they have no power in any of the individual countries (except for what is granted to them as Head of State of one or more of those countries).

Invictus is another matter, as Harry does have role as its patron that could include going to different countries to raise awareness/funds etc. Using that role for other motives makes sense.

#submission

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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya in the key northern state of Uttar Pradesh in January in hopes it would earn him a massive victory in the national election that concluded in June. That didn’t happen—at least not to the extent that Modi, his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and their ideological fountainhead Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) expected.

In what has widely been described as a shock result, the BJP won merely 240 seats in the 543-seat parliament, after setting a target of 400 seats. Modi has formed a government but only with support from other parties.

Like any election result, the outcome had multiple causes that will take time to fully sort out. But one thing is already clear: Modi failed in his long-running bid to homogenize India’s Hindus across castes and cultures and consolidate their vote for his political benefit.

In 2014, Modi came to power on the back of religious nationalism and security issues, and he continued that trend in 2019. This year, in the absence of any urgent security threat from regional rival Pakistan and rising concerns over unemployment, inflation, and authoritarianism, Modi banked on the RSS’s homogenization strategy.

The Ram temple was built on a site long disputed with Muslims, where a 16th-century mosque stood until December 1992, when a group of Hindu nationalists razed it to the ground allegedly on the BJP’s provocation. Experts said the BJP had envisaged the temple would instill pride in Hindus, feed their Muslim animosity, and bring them under the Hindu umbrella to choose Modi.

Even though, by and large, the Hindu community seemed to have been pleased with the inauguration of the temple, that didn’t translate into votes for Modi across the Hindu hierarchy. Instead, the results exposed the weaknesses of the homogenization exercise.

Hartosh Singh Bal, an Indian journalist and the executive editor of the Caravan, said there is “diversity in Hinduism” and the election results prove that it can’t be “papered over by directing attention and hatred outwards” toward Muslims. This election proves that “Hindus are not a monolith” and that “various segments of Hinduism have a successful chance of taking on the BJP,” he added in reference to tactical voting by lower castes in Uttar Pradesh against the BJP.

Karthick Ram Manoharan, a political scientist at the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, said that in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India with the second-biggest economy in the country, the BJP did not win a single seat out of a total of 39.

“Hindus are the absolute majority in Tamil Nadu, but they still mostly vote for the secular Dravidian parties,” Manoharan said in reference to local parties that have emerged out of social movements opposed to an upper-caste Hindu order that the BJP and RSS have been long accused of nurturing and propagating.

In March, just a month before voting began, I witnessed saffron-colored flags expressing support for Modi’s party jutting out from rooftops and windows in tightly packed homes in western Uttar Pradesh. Some people I spoke to said that BJP workers had decided to adorn the neighborhoods as they pleased, but underneath the flag-waving, a large-scale discontent was brewing over a lack of employment opportunities.

The upper-caste youth seemed confused, if not yet disenchanted, with Modi and in the absence of industry and strong local economies once again mourned the loss of government jobs to affirmative action. (The Indian Constitution reserves almost half of all state jobs for people from lower castes and others who confront a generational disadvantage and historical discrimination.)

Meanwhile, Dalits, who sit at the bottom of India’s Hindu hierarchy, in hamlets nearby who depend on the quota for their dignity and livelihood were quietly recalibrating their options. The mood was starkly different from 2014 and 2019 when I visited some of the Dalit-dominated parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh. Back then, Dalits I met were upbeat and decisively pro-Modi. They said they supported him since they believed that he might raise their stature in the Hindu hierarchy.

But 10 years later, they suspected the BJP was plotting to weaken the constitution, the only assurance of rights for marginalized communities in a country where upper-caste Hindus continue to hold social capital and economic power.

Recent comments by BJP leaders that if Modi won 400 seats, he would change the constitution spread anxiety among lower castes that the party intended to scrap the reservation system. The BJP repeatedly denied this, but the suspicion that it is first a party for upper-caste Hindus is deep-rooted among lower castes, and experts believe the comments were part of the BJP’s political strategy.

“They were testing the waters to see what would be the reaction,” said Sushil Kumar Pandey, an assistant professor of history at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow and the author of Caste and Politics in Democracy.

“The opposition picked it up and campaigned on it, telling people a change in the constitution could mean losing your livelihood, your jobs,” Pandey added. “That worked at a time [when] people were also scared of privatization” and in government-run sectors.

For Dalits, it was about more than jobs. The Indian Constitution is nearly worshipped by the community and celebrated en masse on the birth anniversary of the Indian intellectual who wrote it. B.R. Ambedkar was no fan of Ram and advocated against the caste discrimination inherent in Hinduism all his life, even converting to Buddhism when he felt there was no escaping caste-based prejudice. While he couldn’t annihilate the caste system, he ensured that the constitution offered lower castes a quota in government jobs to gradually uplift them.

In his honor, and as an ode to the progressive document, Dalits sing songs in praise of the constitution and hail it as the upholder of their dignity in a society where they continue to be belittled. Any change to the text was unacceptable. “Their cultural identity is linked to this book,” said Ravish Kumar, a journalist and the host of a popular YouTube news show.

In the south, too, there was a fear of culturally being subsumed by a Hindi-speaking upper-caste elite. Indian federal units, or states, were defined in the 1950s on the basis of language, and to this day south Indians identify themselves on the basis of the language they speak. The Ram temple had no resonance in the southern states, particularly in electorally significant Tamil Nadu, with the highest number of seats regionally. Tamils were wary that the RSS’s homogenization agenda would drown out their cultural ethos and impose a secondary status on the Tamil language.

Manoharan, the political scientist, said that in Tamil Nadu, it was “not so much religious but fear of cultural homogeneity” and “a language policy which will give importance to Hindi speakers over Tamil speakers and upper-caste Tamils over other backward castes.”

In a state where “88 percent people come from so-called lower castes” and “69 percent have jobs under affirmative action through a special act,” people were also extremely worried that the BJP may “water down” the employment quota promised in the constitution, Manoharan added.

The southern Indian states have a longer history of resistance to upper-caste domination, a higher literacy rate, better economies, and a tradition of secular politics. While the BJP maintained its tally of 29 seats from the last election, it is being seen as a poor result considering the inroads the RSS has made in the south.

For instance, in the southwestern state of Kerala, the RSS has more than 5,000 shakhas, or branches, second in number only to Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state—yet “despite the fact that the RSS has thousands of training grounds in Kerala, they are unable to get influence,” said K.M. Sajad Ibrahim, a professor of political science at University of Kerala. “That’s because while religion is important, communal harmony is more important to people here. BJP tries to create tensions, and that doesn’t work here.”

The BJP managed to gain one seat for the first time in Kerala, but that isn’t being attributed to its ideological success or expansion of homogenization project but to the winning candidate’s personal appeal. Suresh Gopi, the winning candidate, is a popular movie star.

In many states in the Hindi belt and even in the south, the BJP did well. The upper castes and urban voters are standing firmly behind Modi. Kumar, the journalist, said it would be foolhardy to dismiss Modi—and the bigger Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, forces backing him—just yet. He said Hindutva hasn’t lost and only faced a setback. “The BJP was trying to dominate caste politics with Hindutva,” he said, “but the election result shows that dominance has cracked.” However, he added, “it has only cracked—the ideology still has wide-scale acceptance.”

Everyone else Foreign Policy spoke to concurred but added that Hindus are far too diverse to be homogenized. Manoharan said the results exposed the weakness of the homogenization agenda and its faulty premise. “Hindutva’s aim for homogeneity is confounded precisely by a structural feature of the religion-culture it seeks to defend—caste,” he said.

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scotianostra · 2 months ago

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Scottish physician Patrick Manson was born in Oldmeldrum in Aberdeenshire on October 3rd 1844, he is regarded as founder of the field of Tropical Medicine.

Patrick Manson was a son of Alexander Manson and Elizabeth Livingstone Blaikie, his dad was the manager of the local Linen Bank, and Laird of Fingask. His mother was distant relative of the famed Christian missionary-explorer David Livingstone.

He developed a childhood passion in natural history, fishing, shooting, carpentry, mechanics and cricket. Among his Presbyterian-Christian family, he showed excellent memory for memorising church sermons at the age of 5 years. In 1857 his family moved to Aberdeen, where he started his formal education at Aberdeen’s Gymnasium School and continued at West End Academy.

Aged 13 1859 he was apprenticed to Blaikie Brothers “Iron masters” however struck down by a form of tuberculosis he had to leave this job, the ironworks loss would be medicines gain, a year later he entered Aberdeen University where he completed medicine course in 1865 however aged only nineteen and was underage for graduation, so he visited hospitals, museums and medical schools in London. Finally of age he formally graduated in October 1865, and was appointed Medical Officer at Durham Lunatic Asylum.

The following year he gained his Master of Surgery and his Medical Doctorate.

Immediately after qualifying Manson travelled to Formosa (now Taiwan) to take up a post as a medical officer to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. In 1871 he transferred to Amoy, on the Chinese coast, and 13 years later he moved to Hong Kong, where he practiced from 1883 to 1889. Manson developed an early interest in tropical diseases, and in particular in the role of parasites in their transmission. His initial studies were on filaria, a small parasitic worm that causes elephantiasis: and he was able to show that mosquitoes had a key role in transmitting the worms and spreading the disease.

Manson’s discovery helped inform the work of Sir Ronald Ross, who was studying the transmission of malaria in India at the time. While in Hong Kong, Manson helped found the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, which later formed the nucleus of the University of Hong Kong. He was also the first person to import dairy cattle from Scotland to Hong Kong, starting a dairy industry there supplying hygienic milk affordable by pregnant women, children and patients.

Manson moved to London in 1889 and in 1897 was appointed to the post of Chief Medical Officer to the Colonial Office. Amongst his early initiatives was the foundation of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which opened in 1899. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1900, knighted in 1903 and in the following year awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Oxford. In 1907 he became the first president of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine, and retired from the colonial office in 191

Retiring in 1912 to fish in Ireland Manson returned to London at the beginning of the First World War. Despite crippling attacks of gout he continued to take a lively interest in medical education.

He died in London in 1922 at the age of 78 and is buried at Allenvale Cemetery in Aberdeen.

#scotland #scottish #history #physician #Surgeon

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astra-galaxie · 4 months ago

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🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🧸👽🦾💔 🔪😭😶 for the one and only lars douglas please :D

It's probably a good thing there’s only one Lars Douglas; I don't think the world could survive two!😉

That being said, here are his headcanons!

🏳️‍🌈 A sexuality headcanon

Lars is bisexual. He’s attracted to men and women equally, though when he was younger, sometimes he was attracted to one gender more than the other.

🏳️‍⚧️ A gender headcanon

Lars is genderqueer and uses he/him pronouns. Even though he identifies as a man, he’s not afraid to be feminine. He is always open to playing dress-up with his daughters and letting them put makeup on him or do his hair. Even before the triplets were born, Lars had many female friends he would hang out with even if the activities were not considered “masculine,” like spa days, clothes shopping, or getting manicures.

🧸 A headcanon about their childhood

Lars’s love of explosions started when he was young. As a child, he loved watching fireworks explode in the sky and light it up with dazzling colours and shapes. He used to ask so many questions about how fireworks worked, and when he was old enough, he was allowed to help set them off. While his parents didn’t keep fireworks in the house due to his father’s dislike of the sounds they made, Lars’s neighbours would shoot them for special occasions and let him help fire them. With his parents’ permission, of course!

👽 A headcanon about a weird quirk of there

Lars is always composing new songs. You can almost always find him humming, whistling, or singing his latest piece as he works to perfect it. He also always carries a little notebook to write down things when inspiration hits. Even if it can be annoying, Angela loves watching his face light up as an idea hits him before he begins furiously scribbling in his book.

🦾 A disability headcanon

He has hearing loss because of his music and lab explosions. It's not as bad as Oberon's, but often, Lars will not hear you, ask you to repeat something, or speak louder and slower.

💔 An angsty headcanon

Lars never got rid of his wedding ring. The thought of getting rid of it crossed his mind many times, and he considered countless ways to do it. But whenever he tried, he couldn’t go through with it. A part of his heart would always love Angela, and it was connected to that ring. Lars now keeps the ring in a special box tucked away for safekeeping, and sometimes, when he needs to, he’ll take the ring out and remember the good times he spent with his ex-wife.

🔪 A headcanon relating to fighting/violence

Lars has always been more of a lover than a fighter, but that doesn't mean he’s harmless. As a Bureau agent, he is still trained in self-defence and firearms, even though he’s only a lab expert. Because he travels with the team and does get out into the field, he went through training like the rest of his teammates just not as intense as the field agents.

😭 A headcanon about the worst thing that happened to them

When Lars caught the plague in India, he was convinced he was going to die. He was quarantined to protect others and was mostly alone except when Angela visited to check on him. While isolated from his team, Lars only had his phone to help distract him from his pain. But despite the pain, he found the strength to record videos for his family and friends. If he was going to die, he wanted to say goodbye and leave them something to remember him by, as horrible as he looked when he was infected. After being cured, Lars didn’t delete the videos but never told anyone about them either. If the time comes later on that they are needed, they will be safely stored away for his loved ones to access.

😶 A random headcanon

He used to dress up as a mall Santa Claus; it's where he got such a nice suit from! He started in college to earn some extra money, and while he was very young for the job, a little makeup and a good fake beard did the trick! The children loved him, and Lars had tons of fun listening to them ramble their Christmas lists to him and taking pictures.

And done! How’d I do? Did I make you laugh and cry?

Thanks for the request, Issy!

#criminal case #criminal case save the world #lars douglas #headcanons #ask

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justforbooks · 2 months ago

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Ratan Tata

Indian business tycoon who turned his family’s Tata Group into a global player, and invested heavily in British industry

Ratan Tata, who has died aged 86, was India’s most celebrated industrialist. He modernised the unwieldy business empire founded by his great grandfather in the 19th century and internationalised it. In the process he spread his interests into western countries, with mixed results.

For the UK, that included the £271m purchase of the Tetley Group in 2000, followed more controversially by the acquisition of the steel company Corus for £6.2bn in 2007. Then, in 2008, Tata, himself a car enthusiast, added the troubled Jaguar Land Rover motor business for a further £1.75bn.

He joined the family firm, Tata Steel, in 1962. Educated in the US, and newly qualified as an architect, the young Tata had, he said, no intention of returning to India. But family ties won out. When his ailing grandmother, Navajbai, who had raised him, asked him to return he did so. He was soon promoted, building his reputation with tough reorganisation, followed by more troubleshooting at the electronics and textile companies.

In 1981, he was made chairman of Tata Industries, and found himself confronting an assortment of separate businesses, with different ownership patterns over which there was little formal control. He made a blueprint for reorganisation, having spent time at the Harvard Business School, but it was rejected after opposition from semi-autonomous bosses.

However, in 1991, the 81-year-old patriarch of the group, JRD Tata, chose him as his successor as the overall chairman. Asked why, he replied: “He has a modern mind.”

Tata soon demonstrated it with a tough programme of reshaping that, against continuing opposition, brought closures, job reductions, and the departure of the heads of the steel, hotel and chemical businesses.

He began to focus more on brands and less on heavy industry, and he benefited from the deregulation of Indian industry championed by Rajiv Gandhi. As part of it, he took the company more heavily into the motor industry. Tata lorries already dominated Indian highways, but now he moved into the car business in line with his own enthusiasms. While always seen as a man of modest habits, he had his own lovingly maintained collection of high-powered and classic cars, and delighted in driving them along Mumbai’s Marine Drive most Sundays.

Tata produced what was called “the first Indian car”, designed by and for Indians, in 1998. Ratan did some of the first drawings himself. The Tata Indica was a success. But when he went further a decade later, and the company conceived the Nano, a tiny saloon described as the world’s most affordable car at a price of about £2,000, the project failed. Such a cheap car was not enticing even to those “on two wheels” whom he hoped to attract.

In 1999 Tata had travelled to Detroit to discuss the sale of the motor business to Ford, only to be asked why his firm had gone into the passenger car business when it clearly knew nothing about it. Later he would turn the tables, buying underperforming Jaguar Land Rover from Ford and reviving it.

With sell-offs and cutbacks, Tata reorganised the group into 98 operating companies from more than 250, reducing the labour force by more than a third. He forged alliances with foreign companies and went into information technology.

He stepped down in 2012, observing the compulsory retirement rule he had himself introduced, but was still regarded as “chairman emeritus” and was brought back unhappily for a few months when his successor was sacked four years later.

His most shocking day came in 2008, when terrorists took over the Tatas’ Taj Mahal hotel on the front at Mumbai with great loss of life. The company has continued to support staff affected and the families of those who died.

Ratan was born in Mumbai, into the large Parsi Tata family, whose wealth came from a scattered collection of businesses including textiles, hotels, engineering, steel and tea. His father, Naval, had been adopted by the son of the founder, Jamsetji Tata. After Naval and his wife, Soonoo, separated when Ratan was seven, the child was brought up with his younger brother, Jimmy, by his grandmother in a grand Tata mansion in central Mumbai.

Aged 17 he was sent to the US to attend Riverdale Country school in New York City, from where he entered Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He studied engineering before switching to architecture, graduating in 1959. He worked as an architect for a while in Los Angeles before returning to India, and Tata Steel.

In his 20 years at the helm, Tata’s sales grew by 22% annually and its international revenues rose from a quarter to 58% of the total, while Tata Consultancy Services became Asia’s largest software company.

His British investments have been among his less successful. Corus was bought for an over-the-top £6bn just before the global financial crash devastated the industry. Tata claimed it as “the first big step that Indian industry has taken as a global player”. It was later described by a senior Tata executive as “worthless”. The firm is currently negotiating terms of new investment at Port Talbot, which would be accompanied by hundreds of redundancies, while huge plants on Teesside and Scunthorpe have already been closed or sold for a nominal sum.

Jaguar Land Rover was initially a happier story. Tata’s major investment, including in research and development, made the company for a while the largest foreign investor in British industry. But eight years of profits have been followed by losses since 2018.

Surveying the British scene in 2011, Tata told the Times: “Nobody seems to want to exert the effort to make the UK truly competitive. It’s a work ethic issue. In my experience in both Corus and JLR, nobody is willing to go the extra mile.”

He was a major figure in the international business community, close to US politicians as well as the Indian government, advising the former prime ministers Gordon Brown and David Cameron, and sitting on the boards of multinational institutions.

He was also known as a major philanthropist. Many of the Tata companies were owned through trusts he chaired, and huge sums were provided for medical research and university projects both in India and abroad, particularly in the US, where a number of campuses have buildings bearing his name.

A softly spoken man, renowned for his courtesy, he never married, although he described himself as having come close four times. He was known for living modestly, although his recreations included flying his private jet and driving his collection of expensive cars, as well as a speedboat. He was noted for his love of dogs. The Tata headquarters in Mumbai had kennels and made provision for street dogs, and he was a donor to canine charities. In 2014 he was made GBE.

He is survived by Jimmy, by his stepmother, Simone, a half brother, Noel, and two half sisters, Shireen and Deanna.

🔔 Ratan Tata, businessman, born 28 December 1937; died 9 October 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Ratan Tata #in memoriam

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eaglesnick · 3 months ago

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“A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future.”

The National Centre for Social Research Centre's Social Attitude survey, finding that there has been a sharp decline in British national pride in the last decade has driven the pundits and politicians on the right into displays of righteous indignation.

Peoples pride in being British has fallen from 83% in 1995 to 64% in 2023. Only 53% think democracy works well in this country, down from 60% in 1995, and only 49% would rather be a British citizen than any other country, a decline of 20% since 1995. What has particularly agitated those on the right is the finding that pride in British history has dropped from 86% in 2013, to 64% in 2023.

Nigel Forage, never one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, went on a “blistering rant" concerning the decline of national pride in British history, claiming he has been “railing against" an education establishment that is constantly "talking down Britain’s past”.

What’s happened claims Forage is there has been a “Marxist take-over, of people that hate the country, hate what it stands for, and they have done their job” Primary school teachers, secondary school teachers and university lectures all “rejoice” in putting Britain down.

Who would have thought it? That seemingly lovely Mrs Jones, who does so much for the infants in her care, a revolutionary Marxist. The dusty secondary school history teacher Mr Smith, also a Marxist, just waiting to advance the communist revolution on the streets of Britain. Unbelievable! And as for all of those university academics…just don’t get me started.

What a load of utter piffle Mr Farage. But he knows that. What he is doing is dog whistling as usual.

Taking the teaching of slavery as an example , Forage condemns the educational establishment for teaching that Britain was “the only country in the history of mankind that had ever conducted slavery.” What’s more says Forage, Britain "far from being the one nation, actually, that ended it,..lost a lot of money and a lot of lives driving it out."

Lets examine these claims.

First, no one has ever said that Britain was the only slave-trading nation. Portugal, France, Spain, Netherlands, USA and Denmark ALL profited from slaves.

Second, Forage was right in asserting that Britain was one of the first major European powers to officially abolish slavery. The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed inn 1833 but not all British owned slaves were covered by this act as it specifically excluded many slave colonies owned by the East India Company and British slaves on the islands of Ceylon and St Helena.

Third, British sailors did die fighting the slave trade but nowhere near as many as has been claimed on social media. Fullfact.org, state that the figure of between 17,000 and 20,00 Royal Navy sailors dying fighting illegal slave traders is untrue, the figure being much nearer 2000.

Forth, did driving out slavery cost a lot of money? Yes it did, but none of the money went to the slaves themselves, only to the slave owners as compensation for their losses.

Despite the repugnant and morally corrupt practice of slave ownership that the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act represented, a mere four years after this law came into being another piece of slavery legislation was enacted: the Slave Compensation Act 1887.

This is something Forage and those other millionaires and billionaires on the right of British politics often neglect to tell us. Despite the repugnant and utterly immoral practice of slave ownership implicit in the Abolition of Slavery Act 1833, this new act ordered the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt to compensate slave owners in the British colonies to the tune of £20 million pound – around £17billion pounds today. This payout was a massive 40% of total government budget.

What else Forage neglects to say is that the last compensation payment for loss of slaves paid for by the British government was in 2015.

In short, we the British taxpayer, have been paying compensation to slave owners and their dependents for "loss of their property” for the past 182 years!

I only wish we did teach these things in our schools but we don’t. In fact, the Conservative government, in its Education Act of 1996 made the promoting of partisan views by teachers illegal.

So much for Marxist conspiracy theories!

#uk politics #nigel farage #marxist #slavery #british values #pride in history #compensation #people as property #teachers

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dietsandmore · 11 months ago

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dragoneyes618 · 5 months ago

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Considered the Father of the Indian Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948), aka Bapu (a Gujarati endearment for “father”), was a lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist whose use of nonviolent resistance led the successful campaign for Indian independence from British rule and inspired worldwide movements for civil rights and freedom.

Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability and, above all, achieving self-rule. He famously began to live in a self-sufficient residential community, to eat simple food, and undertake long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, he called for the British to quit India in 1942 and was imprisoned several times for many years in both South Africa and India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, leading to extensive religious violence throughout the country.

Gandhi visited Punjab and Bengal, the primary affected areas, attempting to alleviate misery and, in the months that followed, he famously undertook several hunger strikes to halt the religious violence, with his final fast beginning in Delhi at age 78 on January 12, 1948. He was murdered a few weeks later by a militant Hindu nationalist unhappy about Gandhi’s defense of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims.

Gandhi’s first job was with a Jewish law firm in Johannesburg and some of his closest friends and confidants, both in Johannesburg (1893 – 1914) and later in India, were Jews. He lauded the Jewish spirituality, high standards, and sense of community and, after visiting the synagogue in Johannesburg during Pesach, he expressed his culinary delight with “the Jews’ unleavened cakes” and wrote that “you can almost say that I was keeping Passover with my Jewish friends.”

He, in turn, was always held in high regard by the Jews. In 1931, he met with members of Bene Israel to discuss their participation in the nationalist movement, but he suggested that they join in support of the movement only after India won its independence from the British, urging them not to become involved in politics before then because they constitute such a small minority.

The Bene Israel, sometimes referred to as the “Native Jew” caste, are a community of Jews in India said to be the descendants of one of the Ten Lost Tribes that settled in India many centuries ago. Starting in the second half of the 18th century after learning about normative Sephardic Judaism, they migrated to cities throughout British India, primarily to Mumbai, where they opened their first synagogue in 1796 and became prominent within the British colonial government.

Exhibited here is the editorial on the front page of the February 1948 issue of Schema that was dedicated to mourning Gandhi’s loss. After waxing enthusiastic about the greatness – indeed, the near deity status – of the late Indian leader, the editorial addresses Gandhi’s contribution to the Jewish community:

What does the passing of this great saint and believer in the universality of true religion mean to our small community in India? Our debt to him is no less unquestionable. Apart from the general principles of morality on which he based his every thought and action and which afforded all communities including ourselves the protection of the rock-like foundations of the true freedom and self-expression, he gave concrete expression to his sympathy for our cause and our sufferings on numerous occasions and in no uncertain manner. We are proud and grateful to place on record that he had the greatest respect and admiration for the Jewish people and all they symbolized – for he did not himself stand for what they had stood through centuries of persecution and suffering – the eternal principles of justice and morality against the savage hand of tyranny, the belief that the spirit shall triumph over the sword.

Indeed, Gandhi sympathized with Jews and saw their plight as similar to that of many Indians:

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews… There the Indians occupied precisely the same place that the Jews occupy in Germany… A fundamental clause in the Transvaal constitution was that there should be no equality between the whites and colored races including Asiatics. There, too, the Indians were consigned to ghettos described as locations. The other disabilities were almost of the same type as those of the Jews in Germany. The Indians, a mere handful, resorted to satyagraha [nonviolent resistance] without any backing from the world outside or the Indian Government…

During a massive review of millions of its archival documents in 2019, the National Library of Israel unearthed a letter handwritten by Gandhi on September 1, 1939 – the very day that World War II broke out in Europe – in which he sends Rosh Hashanah greetings to Avraham E. Shohet, a local Jewish Indian official:

You have my good wishes for your new year. How I wish the new year may mean an era of peace for your afflicted people.

Shohet was head of the Bombay Zionist Association (BZA), president of the Bombay branch of Keren Hayesod, the Bombay city office’s Zionist organization, and editor of The Jewish Advocate, the official publication of the BZA and the Jewish National Fund in India.

But did Gandhi deserve the veneration and affection of the world’s Jews? The answer to that question is far from black and white.

It is doubtful that most Jews would consider Gandhi a great friend, or even a moral person, when they learn that, notwithstanding his characterization of Hitler as the ultimate in evil and as a man with whom negotiation is impossible, his solution to the Holocaust was that Jews should happily accept their fate and proudly submit themselves to mass extermination . . . which he readily admits would be the inevitable result of the Jews wielding “peaceful resistance” against the Nazis.

In a seminal letter he wrote from Segaon (a village in the Khargone district in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh where he established an ashram and settled) – which he published as The Jews in the November 26, 1938 issue of the Harijan newspaper – Gandhi argues that “the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history;” that “the tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone;” and that “he is doing it with religious zeal.” He writes that “If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified.”

However, because he does not believe in war under any circumstances, he concludes that “there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is being committed against the Jews:”

Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is. No person who has faith in a living G-d need feel helpless or forlorn. Tetragrammaton of the Jews is a G-d more personal than the G-d of the Christians, the Mussalmans or the Hindus, though as a matter of fact in essence, He is common to all and one without a second and beyond description. But as the Jews attribute personality to G-d and believe that He rules every action of theirs, they ought not to feel helpless. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Tetragrammaton had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the G-d fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

Gandhi even went so far as to send two conciliatory letters to Hitler, the first on July 23, 1939 and the second on December 24, 1940, in which he addressed the Fuhrer as a “friend” and wrote that he did not believe the German dictator was the “monster” that his opponents described. He raised the issue with Hitler of the Germans’ treatment of Poland and the Czechs – with nary a mention of the Jews – and he asked his closest friend, the Jewish Zionist Hermann Kallenbach (more on him later), to pray for Hitler.

Even after World War II, Gandhi essentially remained silent on the Holocaust and, most inconceivably, he spoke out against the “wickedness” of the trials of Nazi war criminals. In a June 1947 interview with his biographer, Louis Fischer, he said:

Hitler killed five million Jews [the correct number, of course, is six million Jews, but what’s another million Jews more or less?]. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany… As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

Gandhi defenders argue that, in urging Jews to accept martyrdom during the Shoah, he was only being consistent with his core values of pacifism and peaceful resistance and that this was not fatalism but, rather, an assertion of will so strong that it would deny the Nazis a sense of ethical and moral superiority over their victims. This position has not only been characterized as passivity bordering on cowardice but, I would argue, a naivete that is stunning, dangerous, and disgusting. Moreover, as I discuss in more detail below, Gandhi’s views of the Jews, the Holocaust, and Eretz Yisrael exhibit a sharp and indisputable double standard that is the very antithesis of “consistency”

Perhaps the Jerusalem Post said it best: in an article titled Repudiating Gandhian Pacifism in the Face of Mass Murder in 2016, the Post summarized Gandhi’s philosophy regarding the Shoah as “when some evil regime or group wants to attack and kill you, the worst thing you can do is try to run and hide to save your life.” No matter how much Gandhi may have sympathized with the Jewish condition, he was oblivious to Jewish survival.

Thus, in a 1939 response to Gandhi’s 1938 article, Martin Buber, the renowned Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher who had made aliyah from Germany only a short time earlier, wrote what should have been obvious to any rational person, let alone to a national leader and internationally-respected philosopher like Gandhi:

The five years I myself spent under the present [Nazi] regime, I observed many instances of genuine satyagraha [nonviolent resistance] among the Jews, instances showing a strength of spirit in which there was no question of bartering their rights or of being bowed down, and where neither force nor cunning was used to escape the consequences of their behavior. Such actions, however, exerted apparently not the slightest influence on their opponents. All honor indeed to those who displayed such strength of soul! But I cannot recognize herein a watchword for the general behavior of German Jews that might seem suited to exert an influence on the oppressed or on the world. An effective stand in the form of non-violence may be taken against unfeeling human beings in the hope of gradually bringing them to their senses; but a diabolic universal steamroller cannot thus be withstood.

Moreover, Gandhi extended his opposition to Jewish self-defense against Nazi genocide by resolutely opposing their right to go to Eretz Yisrael, whether to establish a Jewish State there or even to simply save themselves from death at the hand of the Third Reich. He argued that the mere Jewish agitation for a national home would provide justification to the Nazis to expel them – as if Hitler needed any additional excuses – and that the Jews should engage only in non-violence against the Arabs and “offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them.” In March 1921, he issued a statement supporting the proposition that Muslims must retain control over Eretz Yisrael.

In his 1938 article, Gandhi – almost unbelievably – writes:

Several letters have been received by me asking me to declare my views about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. It is not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on this very difficult question… [After expressing sympathy for the Jewish plight:] But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. [But] why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colorable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of its October 7th butchery, this quote has been resurrected by Hamas, and its supporters around the world who argue that Gandhi, the great statesman and man of peace, was clear that “Palestine” belongs to the Arabs and that the Jews are, at best, interlopers.

In his article, Gandhi concludes:

And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it in the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same G-d rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in their favor in their religious aspiration. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-shares with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them… Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth.

Thus, argued Gandhi, the “real Jerusalem” was the spiritual one and, as such, Zionism was unnecessary and Jews could practice their faith in their native countries – including, as we have seen, Nazi Germany.

In Buber’s 1939 correspondence to Gandhi cited above, he noted that Arabs had themselves come to possess Eretz Yisrael “surely by conquest and, in fact, a conquest by settlement,” and he appealed to Gandhi to recognize the responsibility for violence and unrest that was shared by Palestinian Arabs, but Gandhi would not yield. Similarly, Moshe Shertok, as head of the Jewish Agency (later to become Prime Minster of Israel as Moshe Sharett), also asked Gandhi to raise his authoritative voice in favor of a Jewish autonomous government in Eretz Yisrael, but he refused.

Statue of Gandhi and Kallenbach outside Rusne synagogue in Lithuania (2015).

Moreover, A. E. Shohet, the leader of the Indian-Jewish community and Gandhi’s good Jewish friend, reached out to Hermann Kallenbach, a wealthy Jewish Zionist architect and carpenter to whom Gandhi referred as his “soulmate,” to intervene with Gandhi on behalf of Zionism. In May 1910, Kallenbach had funded the establishment of Tolstoy Farm, the South African prototype for Gandhi’s ashram, where the two had lived together; Ghandi once wrote to him “Your portrait (the only one) stands on the mantelpiece in my room . . . even if I wanted to dismiss you from my thoughts, I could not do it.”

How to explain Gandhi’s outrageous views on the Holocaust and Israel? It certainly wasn’t due to antisemitism, since he loved all people and peoples – including, as we have seen, Nazis and terrorists – and he often spoke out in support of Jews. Some authorities suggest that he adopted his views on Jews because he understood Judaism only through the lens of Christianity and that he reduced Judaism to a religion without considering its nationalistic character and, as such, he excluded Zionism from the Jewish identity. Moreover, his closest Jewish friends, including Kallenbach and Sonya Schlesin, were all universalists largely ignorant of rabbinical philosophy and law and post-Biblical rituals and customs; thus, for example, Gandhi condemned the Bible’s “eye for an eye” rule for its inhumanity and violence, wholly unaware of the oral law teaching that the Biblically proscribed punishment was never meant to be interpreted literally but, rather, that the tortfeasor must compensate his victim through the payment of financial damages.

Another proffered explanation for Gandhi’s anti-Zionism was that, although he was well-informed about the special Jewish relationship with Eretz Yisrael from Kallenbach, Schlesin, and others, his pro-Arab bias and battle against British colonialism and imperialism trumped all other considerations so, unlike every other people, religion, and nationality, he chose to disregard Jewish singularity. Moreover, his desire to placate Hindus and Muslims and keep them united in India surely colored his attitude towards Zionism. In a manifestly undeniable double standard, he held Jews to the highest possible spiritual standard while judging the “proud Arabs” by the “accepted canons of right and wrong.”

Double standards seem to be the rule, rather than the exception, when it came Gandhi’s attitude to the Jews. As another example – in what can only be characterized as a truly monstrous double standard – he acknowledged that nonviolence was not possible for the Polish people in 1939 and praised their violent resistance to Hitler, at the same time he was telling the Jews to go peacefully and joyfully to death by their Nazi executioners. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize five times, but never won; yet, he continues to be admired by many Jewish leaders, including David Ben Gurion, who hung a photograph of only one person in his bedroom: Mahatma Gandhi.

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