Soviet Union – Brown Pundits

Dammed it you dont: The hydraulic origins of the divergence between the Raj, India and Pakistan

Historians have put forth the the idea that complex political states originated as ‘hydraulic empires’, a need for ancient societies to manage vast water systems. Governments have evolved from their ancient origins to do a lot more beyond managing water. However, we shall see in this post that attitudes towards water can lead to important differences in the evolution of spatially and temporally adjacent political entities.

In terms of hydrology and geology, there are striking contrasts between the Indo-Gangetic plain and peninsular India. The Indo-Gangetic plain is drained by perennial rivers, fed by both Himalayan glaciers and monsoonal precipitation. Peninsular India, on the other hand, is drained only by monsoon-fed seasonal rivers. Geologically, the Indo-Gangetic plain is blessed with alluvial soil which is both fertile and holds groundwater. Peninsular India is composed of harder rocks, which leads to more runoff and less groundwater retention. Water has always been a much harder challenge in peninsular India than the Gangetic plain.

The British Raj and its successor state of India, had vastly different attitudes towards the hydro problems of peninsular India. However, the Raj’s successor state of Pakistan never had to deal with the water challenges of peninsular India. Pakistan remained agriculturally more productive per worker than India till 2017. India had to construct 5264 medium and large dams (compared to Pakistan’s 150) to overtake Pakistan on that count. A side effect was an advanced industrial and technical base.

We first discuss the dam policy of the British Raj, which is known for its investments in railways and canals. A striking rarity in the Raj’s impressive portfolio of grand infrastructure projects are mega dams. It is not that the British did not build significant water-works in India, but these were overwhelmingly barrages and canal irrigation projects. And the absence of large dams was not due to a lack of technical expertise, indeed, elsewhere in the empire, (notably Canada and Australia), British engineers pioneered the techniques that underlie the construction of modern, large scale dams.

So what explains the Raj’s dam reluctance in their richest canvas ? It is likely that the politics of British India underlies the inhibition towards dams. The centre of gravity of the British Indian empire was the Indo-Gangetic plain. It was the most populated region, the region which produced the most recruits for the British Indian army and the region they really needed to manage. And this region did not need dams. The large dams the British built were mainly in deep South India, the largest dam there was a project conceived by the king of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodeyar.

The modern day Republic of India found itself in a very different political situation. The elites of peninsular India were organized and had the numbers to match their Gangetic counterparts. Prime minister Nehru, although Gangetic, was deeply influenced by the economic philosophy of the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet Union was a master of building mega dams. A massive dam building project ensued, all across India. In the Gangetic plain, this meant increased agricultural yields, but in peninsular India, the dams were a game-changer. Vast tracts of land in Madhya Pradesh were brought under productive cultivation. Interior Maharastra developed a sugarcane belt. Gujarat has become a leader in cotton, tobacco and groundnuts.

Equally important, dams made large cities viable outside the Gangetic plain. Dams and their reservoirs are the only reason the nascent urban centres of peninsular India (Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Hyderabad) could become the dynamic mega-cities they are today. In contrast, Gangetic plain cities continue to get their water from the perennial rivers that they are set on (Delhi-Yamuna, Lucknow-Gomti, Patna-Ganges, Kolkata-Hooghly and so on).

It is conceivable that the extreme importance of large dams and water management structures pushed India’s post-independent elites to invest heavily into engineering education. The public and private enterprises in charge of dam construction, irrigation boards, and hydroelectric machinery provided employment for the labour produced by these elite institutes. These projects thus serviced the needs and aspirations of both urban elites and the vast rural voting masses.

On the other hand, Pakistan’s situation was quite different. With the exception of Islamabad, Pakistan’s cities get their water in the same way Gangetic Indian cities do, surface water and ground water. Developing state-of-the-art water management technology was never an imperative for the Pakistani elite.

Post Modernist attack against muslims, darkies, India, America and the world

India is ranked 136 (behind many tinpot dictatorships with no freedom of speech or freedom of press) by Reporters without Borders in the World Press Freedom Index. US is ranked 43 (behind many countries with little freedom of press.) This is a post modernist hatchet job. The real criteria of ranking is how post modernist a country is and whether it conforms to post modernist politically correct thought police.

One reason India ranks so bad is because India protects freedom of speech of muslims to some slight degree . . . which is unheard of in the modern world. By contrast, Nordic countries don’t protect the freedom of speech of muslims (through the guise of Orwellian rubrics such as hate speech), which is a major reason the Reporters without Borders ranks them so highly.

India is the only country in the world that has a TV programs on a national network (hosted by Tarek Fatah) where muslims openly discuss and critique the holy Koran. Including taboo topics such as the Korans burnt by Uthman, the version of the Koran that was created by Ali, and how Uthman and Aisha assembled the modern Koran. They also openly discuss the ordering of the Koran and the context of verses. Many episodes of this show had over 100 million viewers as muslims around the world eagerly watched. While many muslim Imams and muslims scholars are eager to discuss this in private, they say it is too dangerous to talk about in public. This is indescribably sad. 🙁

India is a land of amazing freedom of thought and questioning, including on all the most controversial philosophical, existential, religious and spiritual topics. The most ancient eastern texts are about inquiry, questions, answers, conversation. The East for thousands of years was a beacon of freedom of art and thought which was exported to Europe during the European Enlightenment. The only other country in the world with similar freedom of thought to India I can think of is the US. Some say Israel is another example. While Israel might be, I don’t know enough about Israel to validate if this is true.

The UK and most of Europe lack freedom of thought (if it is politically incorrect) and as a matter of state policy do not protect the freedom of speech of European muslims. Europe is heavily controlled by post modernist thought police.

Canada has more freedom of press, speech, thought than Europe, but less than India or America:

Canadian Senator Grant Mitchel is clearly a very dangerous sectarian demagogue who supports Islamists against muslims. It is hard to exaggerate how Muslims around the world–especially Indian muslims or minority muslims or liberal/reform/secular/agnostic/atheist muslims–cringe in deep fear and horror at this clip. He tried this against Tarek Fatah–one of the most loved and respected muslims in India, Pakistan and Canada. Tarek Fatah is one of the world’s greatest living Koranic and Islamic scholars.

Before every mosque service, there is a prayer in Arabic for the military victory of the faithful (or “real”) muslims against the nonmuslims and the minority (fake) muslims. Yes, this means twelvers, sixers, fivers, Ahmedis, Kurds, Sufis. The prayer doesn’t come from the Koran. Many muslims are well aware of this problem and want to remove the prayer . . . but they are afraid of getting killed (and their mosque blowing up) if they remove the prayer. This is what Senator Mitchel is talking about.

Freedom of thought and freedom of dialogue are everything for muslims. Reporters without Borders is opposed to muslims having freedom of thought and dialogue. Without freedom of thought, there cannot be dialogue between good muslims and Islamists. Without freedom of thought the fourteen century Islamic civil war that has killed over a 100 million muslims cannot end.

The post modernists are slowly taking over many very powerful global organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (which until recently doubled as an anti muslim hate organization), Reporters without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International to harm muslims and harm the world as a whole. Perhaps the world will finally begin to awaken to the global post modernist threat. They are no longer only targeting muslims, darkies and India, but are now attacking America too.

In May, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston released a report saying the United States has the highest rates of youth poverty, infant mortality, incarceration, income inequality and obesity among all countries in the developed world, as well as 40 million people living in poverty. Alston accused President Trump and the Republican Congress of deepening poverty and inequality in the country, citing the Republican tax law passed last fall.

“The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege,” Alston wrote in the report.

Alston is a post modernist with little economics understanding engaged in a clearly inaccurate piece of propaganda, [which might be elaborated on in future articles] much the way the UN has engaged in dangerous propaganda attacks against many darkie countries all over the world for decades. Post modernism was created as an imperialist attempt to oppress European colonies. They colonize the mind in an attempt to divide and conquer, and reduce self confidence to create inferiority complex. They try to discredit, negate and replace all ancient cultures, civilizations, values and religions with post modernism. And they do enormous damage to poor people all over the world. Articles at Brown Pundits related to post modernism and nonmuslims harming muslims include:

Some of the people resisting the global post modernist wave are collectively referred to by some as the intellectual dark web:

Review: Stalin, waiting for Hitler..

Stephen Kotkin is a historian who has written several outstanding books on Russian history and is now in the process of distilling his lifetime work into a monumental three part biography of Stalin. Volume 1 dealt with Stalin’s early life and his progress from relatively peripheral disciple of Lenin in 1917 to Lenin’s handpicked general secretary of communist party in 1922, to undisputed (though not yet completely all-powerful) boss and ruler of the Soviet Union by 1928. By the end of that volume, Stalin was firmly ensconced in this position, having successfully seen off the challenge from Trotsky, who lost out partly because almost nobody around him liked him, but mostly because he was neither as hardworking, nor as competent, iron-willed or crafty as Stalin. It is true that Trotsky imagined himself as the real “Marxist intellectual” in this fight, but the autodidact Stalin was no intellectual slouch, and Trotsky’s low opinion of him in this arena is also a (small) part of why he lost this fight; he underestimated his opponent. Of course, both of them believed fully in the Marxist-Leninist picture of history and society, complete with the necessity of class war, the central role of the proletariat and the idiocy of the peasants, so it is easy to dismiss the intellectual output of both parties as equally delusional, but that is not how it looked in the 1920s, so we should leave such retrospective wisdom out of the discussion. In any case, by 1928, Stalin had kicked Trotsky out of the Soviet Union, and had defanged or sidelined all his other rivals within the Bolshevik leadership.

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Review: The House of Government

Yuri Slezkine is a Russian-American historian (he is also technically Portuguese-American, since he first emigrated from Russia to Portugal and then came to the US with a Portuguese passport) who has written a number of interesting books, and “The House of Government; a Saga of the Russian Revolution” is his latest and greatest offering. At over 1000 pages, it is not a lightweight book, literally or metaphorically. What he does is follow the lives of a large number of Bolshevik revolutionaries, from their origins as young rebels (they were almost all very young; very few were over 40 when they took over the largest country in the world) to the heady days of the Bolshevik revolution, to the civil war that followed, the first compromise (the NEP), the second and more serious attempt at “true communism” (the five year plan), the terrible violence and suffering of collectivization, the victory of communism under Stalin, the insane purge and auto-annihilation that followed that victory, the second world war, the desiccation and death of revolutionary ideology, and, perhaps most strikingly, the coming of age of the next generation without any sincere transfer of the purported official ideology, leading to the final, inevitable collapse of the entire experiment.

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