Dumb questions invite dumb answers
Tuesday, December 23, 2008Aziz Akhmad
The Mumbai attacks had not even ended yet, when a TV reporter of a Pakistani channel, armed with a microphone and a camera -- and a dumb question -- hit the streets. He pushed the microphone in the face of a young man who appeared, from his demeanour and speech, not to have spent too much time in school, and asked this question: "India has threatened to attack Pakistan (which, in fact, was not true), what would you say?" Since dumb questions are likely to invite dumb answers, the reply the reporter got was: "One Muslim is equal to 10 Hindus. Let India attack, we will teach them a lesson." Visibly satisfied with the answer, the reporter repeated the question to a few other people in the same crowd. Since bravado and chauvinism can be infectious, other responses were equally spirited. Semi-literate and misinformed people, however, do not have monopoly over dumb answers. Seemingly educated and responsible persons are equally forthcoming. A former federal minister, when prodded by a talk-show host with a similar question, had this to say: "What is the bomb for, after all? It is meant to be used, and not just stored in a cupboard" He then went on to warn the enemy ominously in these words: "Neither grass will grow there, nor bells would ring in their temples!" Shouldn't we count it a blessing that this federal minister lost the last election on both the seats he contested, and is no more advising the government in any capacity. God is merciful, after all. The same federal minister was on another talk show (obviously the increased competition among TV channels did not necessarily translate into quality of talk show guests) discussing the imminence of India-Pakistan war. This time he had this insight to share with his host and the audience: "Ho, ji, hum ne koi chooriaan pehn rakhi hain?" (Are we wearing bangles?) In other words, are we women that we would be afraid of a war? This is a terribly sexist comment, to say the least, and tells you where the man is coming from.We know from our own history and the history of the world that women can be as courageous, if not more, in the face of a threat as men. Didn't Benazir, Margaret Thatcher, or Indira Gandhi "wear bangles"? While Benazir ran circles around two military dictators and literally looked death in the eye, Margaret Thatcher humbled the Argentinian military junta in the Falkland war (1982), and Indira Gandhi, in 1971, tamed a chest-thumping general who called himself "Tiger". Ironically, a PPP senator also repeated the "bangles" comment a few days later on a different talk show. It seems the PPP-wallas didn't want to be seen lagging behind in the on-going macho contest.Another talk show host, who always wears a sad and helpless look and, for some reasons, reminds me of a Kola Bear, was out to stir the nuclear nest on his show. After his doom and gloom introduction, he called his panellists, a retired four-star general and a retired diplomat, over the phone and asked them about the possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Both of them, sensibly, ruled out a war in the current circumstances and the general, to his credit, discouraged the host from even talking about a nuclear war. Disappointed with the answers, the "Kola Bear" climbed another tree, so to speak, in search of some juicy shoots. And he found them in the form another retired general, who is known for keeping his "horses ready" --- and galloping into nowhere. Listening to the general and the host for the next 15-20 minutes, one got the impression that the whole world was busy conspiring against Pakistan, and that the only way Pakistan could save itself from an imminent disaster was to keep its "horses ready". You must have noticed that many of the frequent guests on TV talk shows do not write. Writing requires, first, thinking, which is hard work, and then putting one's thoughts on paper or computer in a logical and coherent manner, which is still harder. Speaking, on the other hand, can be done without any of the hard work. Having been a student of communication, I recall three tips that communication gurus at business schools usually give to the talk show hosts and guests. Here they are, for whatever they are worth:1. DO NOT promote your own agenda, ideas or story. You are the INTERVIEWER, not the SUBJECT of the interview. 2. Remember, you are there to help everyone learn something --- information, insight, analysis --- and not to vent your anger. 3. A great guest on a panel has energy, is conversational, and says either very intelligent or very stupid things.Yes, saying stupid things also makes a guest entertaining on a show (remember the 'long arm of the law'?). While I am writing these lines on Saturday night, another TV host (he had disappeared for sometime) on a late night TV show has just concluded his mournful sermon and announced the presence of his guest on the other end of the phone (Iss waqt hamaray saath line par mawjood hain …. ), guess who? Again, the former federal minister! Mercifully, the light went off as it does these days at 11 o'clock at night in this part of Islamabad.
The writer is a consultant who divides his time between Islamabad and New York. Email: azizakhmad@gmail.com
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Nathuram Godse
Nathuram Godse was arrested moments after shooting Gandhi, and was taken to the nearby Tughlaq Road police station. A reporter who managed to see him briefly in a cell at the police station asked him whether he had anything to say? For the present I only want to say that I am not at all sorry for what I have done?, he replied? The rest I will explain in court? Preliminary investigations revealed that he was the Editor of a Marathi newspaper - Hindu Rashtra and a well-known member of the Hindu Mahasabha. Clean-cut, sober, intelligent, the thirty-seven-year-old bachelor hardly seemed a candidate for the role of assassin. From time to time he had written scathing editorials denouncing Gandhi and the Congress party, though acquaintances could not recall an occasion when he had spoken bitterly against the Mahatma. He had no personal hatred of Gandhi. Godse even stated in his trial, Before I fired the shots, I actually wished him well and bowed to him in reverence. On 8 November 1948, he was allowed his day in the sun when he rose to make his statement. Reading quietly from a typed manuscript, he sought to explain why he had killed Gandhi. His thesis covered ninety-pages, and he was on his feet for five hours.
Godse's statement should be quoted extensively, for it provides an insight into his personality."
Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus are of equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession.I used publicly to take part in organized anti-caste dinners which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Chamars and Bhangis participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other. I have read the speeches and writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books of ancient and modern history of India and some prominent countries like England, France, America and Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of socialism and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely what Veer (brave) Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other factor has done.
All this thinking and reading led me to believe that it was my first duty to serve Hindudom and Hindus both as a patriot and as a world citizen. To secure the freedom and to safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores (three hundred million) of Hindus would automatically constitute the freedom and well-being of all India, one fifth of the human race. This conviction led me naturally to devote myself to the Hindu Sanghatanist ideology and programme, which alone, I came to believe, could win and preserve the National Independence of Hindustan, my Motherland, and enable her to render true service to humanity as well. Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokmanya Tilak, Gandhi's influence in the Congress first increased and then became supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to these slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a dream if you imagine the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day. In fact, honour, duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust.I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force. (In the Ramayana) Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. (In the Mahabharata) Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness; and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed the total ignorance of the springs of human action. In more recent history, it was the heroic fight put up by Chhatrapati Shivaji that first checked and eventually destroyed the Muslim tyranny in India. It was absolutely essential for Shivaji to overpower and kill an aggressive Afzal Khan, failing which he would have lost his own life. In condemning history's towering warriors like Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru Govind Singh as misguided patriots, Gandhi has merely exposed as self-conceit.He was, paradoxical, as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence, while Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Guru will remain enshrined in the hearts of their countrymen forever for the freedom they brought to them. The accumulating provocation of thirty-two years, culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi had done very good work in South Africa to uphold the rights and well being of the Indian community there.But when he finally returned to India, he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on in his own way. Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the judge of everyone and everything; he was the master brain guiding the Civil Disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin it and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, but that could make no difference to the Mahatma's infallibility. 'A Satyagrahi can never fail' was his formula for his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is.
Thus the Mahatma became the judge and the jury in his own case. These childish insanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible. Many people thought that his policies were irrational but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with, as he liked. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility, Gandhi was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure, and disaster after disaster. Gandhi's pro-Muslim policy is blatantly illustrated in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language.In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. Everybody in India knows that there is no language in India called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect; It is spoken, not written. It is a tongue and a crossbreed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma's sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and the purity of the Hindi language were to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were at the expense of the Hindus.From August 1946 onwards the private armies of the Muslim League began a massacre of Hindus. The then Viceroy, Lord Wavell, though distressed at what was happening, would not use his powers under the Government of India Act of 1935 to prevent the rape, murder and arson. The Hindu blood began to flow from Bengal to Karachi with little retaliation by the Hindus. The Interim Government formed in September was sabotaged by its Muslim League members right from its inception, but the more they became disloyal and treasonable to the government of which they were a part, the greater was Gandhi's infatuation for them.Lord Wavell had to resign as he could not bring about a settlement and was succeeded by Lord Mountbaten. King Stork followed King Log. The Congress, which had boasted of its nationalism and secularism, secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the point of the bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected and one-third of the Indian Territory became foreign land to us from 15 August 1947. Lord Mountbaten came to be described in the Congress circles as the greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had.The official date for the handing over of power was fixed for June 30, 1948, but Mountbaten with his ruthless surgery gave us a gift of vivisected India ten months in advance. This is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and this is what the Congress party calls 'freedom' and 'peaceful transfer of power'. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called it 'freedom won by them with sacrifice' - whose sacrifice? When top leaders of Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country - which we considered a deity of worship - my mind was filled with direful anger.
One of the conditions imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast unto related to the mosques in Delhi occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and censure the Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed some conditions on the Muslims in Pakistan, there would have been found hardly any Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any conditions on the Muslims.He was fully aware from past experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi. Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he has failed in his paternal duty inasmuch he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. I stoutly maintain that Gandhi has failed in his duty. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. His inner-voice, his spiritual power, his doctrine of non-violence of which so much is made of, all crumbled against Jinnah's iron will and proved to be powerless.Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw that I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I thought that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate and would be powerful with the armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan. People may even call me or dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would be free to follow the course founded on the reason, which I consider necessary for sound nation-building. After having fully considered the question, I took the final decision in the matter, but I did not speak about it to anyone whatsoever. I took courage on both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds in Birla House. I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots. I bear no ill will towards anyone individually but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy, which was unfairly favorable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi.I have to say with great regret that Prime Minister Nehru quite forgets that his preaching and deeds are at times at variance with each other when he talks about India as a secular state in season and out of season, because it is significant to note that Nehru has played a leading role in the theocratic state of Pakistan, and his job was made easier by Gandhi's persistent policy of appeasement towards the Muslims. I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish that anyone should beg for mercy on my behalf. My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism leveled against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof someday in future."
(Article Link - http://www.gandhibapu.com/templet.jsp?sno=71&E71=1)
Godse's statement should be quoted extensively, for it provides an insight into his personality."
Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus are of equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession.I used publicly to take part in organized anti-caste dinners which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Chamars and Bhangis participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other. I have read the speeches and writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books of ancient and modern history of India and some prominent countries like England, France, America and Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of socialism and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely what Veer (brave) Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other factor has done.
All this thinking and reading led me to believe that it was my first duty to serve Hindudom and Hindus both as a patriot and as a world citizen. To secure the freedom and to safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores (three hundred million) of Hindus would automatically constitute the freedom and well-being of all India, one fifth of the human race. This conviction led me naturally to devote myself to the Hindu Sanghatanist ideology and programme, which alone, I came to believe, could win and preserve the National Independence of Hindustan, my Motherland, and enable her to render true service to humanity as well. Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokmanya Tilak, Gandhi's influence in the Congress first increased and then became supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to these slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a dream if you imagine the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day. In fact, honour, duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust.I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force. (In the Ramayana) Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. (In the Mahabharata) Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness; and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed the total ignorance of the springs of human action. In more recent history, it was the heroic fight put up by Chhatrapati Shivaji that first checked and eventually destroyed the Muslim tyranny in India. It was absolutely essential for Shivaji to overpower and kill an aggressive Afzal Khan, failing which he would have lost his own life. In condemning history's towering warriors like Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru Govind Singh as misguided patriots, Gandhi has merely exposed as self-conceit.He was, paradoxical, as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence, while Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Guru will remain enshrined in the hearts of their countrymen forever for the freedom they brought to them. The accumulating provocation of thirty-two years, culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi had done very good work in South Africa to uphold the rights and well being of the Indian community there.But when he finally returned to India, he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on in his own way. Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the judge of everyone and everything; he was the master brain guiding the Civil Disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin it and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, but that could make no difference to the Mahatma's infallibility. 'A Satyagrahi can never fail' was his formula for his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is.
Thus the Mahatma became the judge and the jury in his own case. These childish insanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible. Many people thought that his policies were irrational but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with, as he liked. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility, Gandhi was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure, and disaster after disaster. Gandhi's pro-Muslim policy is blatantly illustrated in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language.In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. Everybody in India knows that there is no language in India called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect; It is spoken, not written. It is a tongue and a crossbreed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma's sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and the purity of the Hindi language were to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were at the expense of the Hindus.From August 1946 onwards the private armies of the Muslim League began a massacre of Hindus. The then Viceroy, Lord Wavell, though distressed at what was happening, would not use his powers under the Government of India Act of 1935 to prevent the rape, murder and arson. The Hindu blood began to flow from Bengal to Karachi with little retaliation by the Hindus. The Interim Government formed in September was sabotaged by its Muslim League members right from its inception, but the more they became disloyal and treasonable to the government of which they were a part, the greater was Gandhi's infatuation for them.Lord Wavell had to resign as he could not bring about a settlement and was succeeded by Lord Mountbaten. King Stork followed King Log. The Congress, which had boasted of its nationalism and secularism, secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the point of the bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected and one-third of the Indian Territory became foreign land to us from 15 August 1947. Lord Mountbaten came to be described in the Congress circles as the greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had.The official date for the handing over of power was fixed for June 30, 1948, but Mountbaten with his ruthless surgery gave us a gift of vivisected India ten months in advance. This is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and this is what the Congress party calls 'freedom' and 'peaceful transfer of power'. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called it 'freedom won by them with sacrifice' - whose sacrifice? When top leaders of Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country - which we considered a deity of worship - my mind was filled with direful anger.
One of the conditions imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast unto related to the mosques in Delhi occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and censure the Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed some conditions on the Muslims in Pakistan, there would have been found hardly any Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any conditions on the Muslims.He was fully aware from past experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi. Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he has failed in his paternal duty inasmuch he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. I stoutly maintain that Gandhi has failed in his duty. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. His inner-voice, his spiritual power, his doctrine of non-violence of which so much is made of, all crumbled against Jinnah's iron will and proved to be powerless.Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw that I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I thought that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate and would be powerful with the armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan. People may even call me or dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would be free to follow the course founded on the reason, which I consider necessary for sound nation-building. After having fully considered the question, I took the final decision in the matter, but I did not speak about it to anyone whatsoever. I took courage on both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds in Birla House. I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots. I bear no ill will towards anyone individually but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy, which was unfairly favorable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi.I have to say with great regret that Prime Minister Nehru quite forgets that his preaching and deeds are at times at variance with each other when he talks about India as a secular state in season and out of season, because it is significant to note that Nehru has played a leading role in the theocratic state of Pakistan, and his job was made easier by Gandhi's persistent policy of appeasement towards the Muslims. I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish that anyone should beg for mercy on my behalf. My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism leveled against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof someday in future."
(Article Link - http://www.gandhibapu.com/templet.jsp?sno=71&E71=1)
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
India-Its Spy-Masters and Spies
India-Its Spy-Masters and Spies
by: Maloy Krishna Dhar
Better forget about Nathan Hale, the American “patriot spy” who was hanged in UK in 1917, Mata Hari, hanged in France in 1917 and other famous names like Burgess, Blunt, and MacLean, Philby Guy Francis (Cambridge group) who basked in international limelight and have been transported to the folklore of espionage.In independent India Col. Bhattachariya, arrested by East Pakistan intelligence allegedly in the act of contacting his Pakistani agent in North West Bengal border had attained national attention, because of prevailing warlike situation between India and Pakistan in early sixties. Bhattachariya was a spymaster and not a spy. He was arrested in the handling process. Later postmortem process established that the MI officer had not scrupulously applied all the tradecraft precautions before trying to contact his trans-border agent.
During last decade and a half the electronic and print media have attained the stature of national ombudsmen. They have reached every nook and corner of national, regional and international activities. Their sweep covers mundane to marvelous happenings.
Sensationalisation of news and events beyond all proportions without any respect and regards for space, privacy and secrecy required by national intelligence agencies increase TRP of the channels. However, in the process, either by adding wailings of the relatives of the claimed spy, they generate mass hysteria and force the governments to move tactically, diplomatically and often foolishly to satisfy the voters.
However, while highlighting the plights of “Indian Spies” detained in Pakistan and utter neglect by the government of India, in case they are lucky enough to escape the gallows and black-death behind dark prison walls, the media focus emphasis on humanitarian aspects and inevitably suggest that some institutional, if not constitutional, safeguards should be devised for the patriotic spies.
I am afraid such hypes, though laudable as humanitarian concern, are based on certain misperceptions. Espionage is a part of Statecraft, extended diplomacy and elongated efforts for war and peace. War and Peace are integral parts of a nation’s philosophy of existence and survival. There cannot be any Ramrajya where there would not be any war and there would not be any need for espionage. Such chimera exists in the souls of saints and philosophers who are not trained to think in terms of cultural, ethnic and geopolitical nationhood. Absence of these very ingredients in ancient India had led to fragmented clan and dynastic nationalities. The Europe and many parts of Asia have gone through this process and the concept of ‘Nationhood’ is rather a gift of new human identity achieved during fifteenth and sixteenth century. In India the concept had started emerging after the British conquest of India, spread of modern education and the spark of Renaissance. The unintended attitude of treating Bharat as a Ramrajya by the Nehru government had pushed India into the throes of a humiliating military and diplomatic defeat in the hands of China. India is still unable to emerge out of that ghostly shadow of Ramrajya experiment.
Our examination of the trade of Espionage cannot be complete without falling back to the Arthashashtra of Kautilya.
Espionage is the assigned Trade of the spy agencies. They use Tradecrafts to hone their professional approaches to the task of creation of Human Intelligence Assets (HumInt). This is a complicated subject and would require a few volumes to explain the details.
This concept is as old as the organised human society is. Interested readers may like to glance through chapter eleven, section seven, eight, nine onwards of Kautilyan Arthasastra by M. B. Chande (Atlantic Publishers, New Delhi). Kautilya had compiled his treatise on various aspects of espionage as it suited the kings of his days. However, the eternal aspects of human fallibility have been explained by him, by exploiting which the trained intelligence generators create their agents. This is called Tradecraft, techniques of the trade of espionage.
The concept has remained unchanged: at the end of the day a curious housewife wants to what is cooked in her neighbour’s pot what and who sleeps with her rival neighbour under her sheets. Enlarge the inquisitive individual. This simple information is vital for “chaupal” gossip and important for social cohesiveness. Enlarge this orbit. A modern nation state cannot survive without having prior warning about its neighbour’s intentions. Whenever some stupid state scions like to indulge in the luxury of indulgent ignorance or philosophical utopianism we get surprised by broken China of Hindi-Chini Bahi Bahi and Kargil. Unfortunately, in India such slumbering philosophers are treated as national heroes and blundering officers are crowned with governor’s laurels.
It is not my intention to drag you through the minefields of intelligence generation tools. This is a vast subject and cannot be narrated in a column. My intention is to narrate certain developments involving national crisis reactions in the public and the media, which have exposed the raw sides of weakness and unpreparedness of our governing tools and vulnerability of our media and members of the public.
Hijacking of IC 814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar is a glaring example of intelligence and security failure of the governments of India and Nepal. This single incident had created several chain reactions-creation of new jihadi tanzeems called Jais-e-Mohammad, killing of Daniel Pearl, a grand kidnapping for ransom in Kolkata, transfer of part of the ransom money to Mohammad Atta by the ISI and utilization of that fund in the 9/11 attacks on Twin Towers and the Indian Parliament. The chain reaction continues even today, the USA behaving like a Nation State and India reacting as a lump of clay. The USA had brought in Homeland Security Act; India enacted and abolished POTA to prove that it is a better secular country and more democratic than the USA. Long live Bharat!
Besides these monumental cascading consequences I would like to draw attention of the readers to the video footages of demonstration by family members and workers of certain secular political parties, beating chest and wailing and forcing a government to free the hijacked passengers and the plain at great national humiliation and cost. The sounds of humiliation still echoes; political parties blaming each other in the name of communalism and secularism and faux pas committed and uncommitted.
Have you ever seen on electronic and print media the peoples of Israel and USA surrounding the Knesset and the White House to force the governments to take action to get their relatives released or declare wars on the perpetrators? Even at the height of national crisis the US media and people displayed dignified and solemn reactions-no chest-beating and no electronic wailing.
The same thing happened over the issue of death sentence awarded to one Manjit Singh by the Apex Court in Pakistan on charges of his alleged involvement in subversive and sabotage activities. His severity of the sentence was not because of his alleged involvement in espionage activities. Around the same time another person was repatriated from Pakistan after he completed jail sentence on charges of espionage inside Pakistan. The gentleman entered India raising hands and proclaiming before print and electronic media that he was an Indian spy and the government of India neglected to honour his welfare. His wails were beamed to attract national attention and to the alleged fact that India does not look after its spies.
I have no point to make on the issue if Manjit Singh had acted as an Indian saboteur inside Pakistan. I have no knowledge and no government would ever admit that it carries out espionage and acts of sabotage and subversion in another country. Whenever, such incidents happen in India we blame Pakistani and Bangladeshi intelligence agencies and their agent-organisations. Similarly they also blame our intelligence agencies.
The point to make is that no people in any nation in the West behaved in war and peace times during World Wars and Cold War conundrum. Their media did not wail and expose the nation’s raw hides with vengeance. An unwritten code is followed by the countries of the Dollar and Euro world as well as the countries behind the so-called Iron and Bamboo Curtains. In India we do not pretend to have any curtains at all. We dance nakedly at national discomfiture. We dance in electronic media, do some “Bahnagra” and Bharat Natyam in print media and leave the matters to “secular” and “communal” political parties to slug at each other with the holy objective of exposing our rotten national bones.
We must understand a few home truths:
• Every informer is not a SPY, but every Spy is an informer.
• No government would ever admit charges of carrying out espionage and sabotage activities.
• Spies are, if they are, a group of professionals, who are exposed to usual professional risk, like a soldier at the front and a policeman before a rioting mob. They are trained to get killed and maimed. They do not come back home amidst sounds of cymbals and horns. They return, if they return at all, quietly and live as quietly for which they are trained and paid.
• Espionage is not a salariat (in Urdu), meaning salaried job with encoded service rules. This trade is based on unwritten laws governing their tradecraft training, single or continued compensation package, security instructions, and no lost baggage claim principle.
• The entire trade is outside the purview of media glare and not based on any Act of the country.
• The media have unwritten sets of rules to honour national secrets and to ignore certain facts even if such hypes are likely to increase their TRP.
• The Public are expected to be more patriotic and heroic to the point suffering great personal loss, which nave been exhibited in cases of our soldiers and security personnel martyring themselves in action fields. Millions have perished in several wars, but nations have survived. Individuals and organised societies survive honourably only when the people gain strength to suffer silently. War losses are not matters for street-wailing. Intelligence warfare is another kind of war nations wage through extended diplomatic activities.
From the lowest category of spies or agents to the highest category there exist several intermediary layers. A mere trans-border smuggler used as a “single task” informer or a “deep penetration itinerary spy” is different from a well trained, embedded Long Term Resident Agent (LTRA) or a trained saboteur. Sabotage and subversion activities are unadmitted tools of silent or proxy-warfare. Most nations do and deny it. The ultimate test of success is the desired results and Deniability. No country would own up a lost, caught and punished spy. No country makes a hero out of a spy like Pakistan did to Abdul Kader Khan, the great nuclear bandit and pirate, aka a scientist.
Self-confessed informers like Mohanlal Bhashkar, Ruplal and Kashmir Singh (as claimed by them) are single task border smugglers and itinerants. They work on a specific task and after successful completion; failure or abortion the handling officer has no legal and moral responsibility towards their welfare. One-package-compensation is the law of the game. The person who agrees to do the job does so willingly out of a genuine or generated motivation. Creation of motivation is part of the tradecraft. Getting motivated is part either a part of patriotic feeling or simple greed for easy money.
Their brief is limited and the tasks are specific. Most of these trans-border human assets are not elaborately trained and briefed. As most of these border smugglers and illegal traders are left to device their own security aspects. They move like eels across international borders and straightaway sent to the frying pan when caught. Such assets are “feed and milk” type human agents. Some of them are known as “double agents.” A same talent may work for Indian and Pakistani agencies.
However, well trained, indoctrinated and Tradecraft oriented deep penetration Long Term Resident Agents are akin to classical agents of the type of Philby, Ethel and Julius Rosenburg etc. Such spies are very rare to come by. The agency takes full responsibility of locating, cultivating and if possible retrieving such highly priced agents. The lucky ones manage to trek back. Some are retrieved and most are lost, once detected by the agencies of the target countries. Some are forgotten and some are transported to folklore.
Spies are unsung soldiers and heroes of Statecraft. No country would admit spying in another country. They would deny existence of any agent, once they are caught in action and maintain deathly silence even if the media hype up such incidents. Normally the media has an unwritten understanding of the rules of the game and acts of successful or failed espionage activities do not form part of TRP increase marketing device. Every nation follows this golden rule, except, perhaps India, the infinite free country, where one is free to peep into the forbidden areas of statecraft.
Espionage is both real and unreal.
Every Trade and every Profession has inbuilt advantages and risks. A soldier is trained to die on the front. A policeman is taught to face brickbats and bullets and a spy is taught to gather intelligence and forget that he had any emotional, legal and moral bondage with his handler.
Some spies mix up smuggling, trans-border illegal trading with tidbit intelligence gathering. Some are prepared to face the gallows if caught in more serious violation of the laws of the country where they are stationed.
During Cold War the US, USSR, West and West Germany often “traded in” exchange of “Security Prisoners”- a euphemism for spies. India and Pakistan have not developed such bilateral convention of periodical exchange. No Pakistani spy or saboteur has so far been sentenced to death by any Indian court. Pakistan have awarded death sentence on some compromised Indian agents. This unwritten systemic protocol is rarely tinkered with at diplomatic level. However, India was forced on few occasions to intercede diplomatically without success.
Stealing national secrets is an offence under respective Official Secrets Acts and other Penal provisions. Once exposed and caught the spies are tried and punished. Governments decline to admit existence of such spies. This is the reason that leads to incarceration of Indian and Pakistani spies in jails for unspecified periods. Perhaps sufficient confidence building measures have not been established to reach that level of international protocol, which can facilitate periodical exchange of routine spies caught in actions of espionage.
There is no question of “bad” or “good” treatment to informers, often hyped as spies. The agencies are known to be reasonably responsive to the families of distressed informers. Often the compensation package is fat.
There is simply no institutionalised mechanism to attend to the human aspect of the Spy-trade. Response of the agencies depend on category of the concerned spy, importance of the mission, magnitude of results delivered and bondage of trust between the agent and his handling agency. Hyping up in expectation of a fat package of compensation does not always pay. Intelligence agencies are like proverbial leeches. They shrink back when sprayed with salts of media hype.
It is patriotic, heroic and great honour to be a high grade SPY, if one understands the rules of the game clearly. It is simply give and take, feed and milk and forget…forget…forget game; not to be immersed in emotional tears.
Intelligence is as remorseless a war as frontline wars are. The citizens are expected to honour this unwritten law of unwritten saga of statecraft.
(Article link : http://maloykrishnadhar.com/india-its-spy-masters-and-spies)
by: Maloy Krishna Dhar
Better forget about Nathan Hale, the American “patriot spy” who was hanged in UK in 1917, Mata Hari, hanged in France in 1917 and other famous names like Burgess, Blunt, and MacLean, Philby Guy Francis (Cambridge group) who basked in international limelight and have been transported to the folklore of espionage.In independent India Col. Bhattachariya, arrested by East Pakistan intelligence allegedly in the act of contacting his Pakistani agent in North West Bengal border had attained national attention, because of prevailing warlike situation between India and Pakistan in early sixties. Bhattachariya was a spymaster and not a spy. He was arrested in the handling process. Later postmortem process established that the MI officer had not scrupulously applied all the tradecraft precautions before trying to contact his trans-border agent.
During last decade and a half the electronic and print media have attained the stature of national ombudsmen. They have reached every nook and corner of national, regional and international activities. Their sweep covers mundane to marvelous happenings.
Sensationalisation of news and events beyond all proportions without any respect and regards for space, privacy and secrecy required by national intelligence agencies increase TRP of the channels. However, in the process, either by adding wailings of the relatives of the claimed spy, they generate mass hysteria and force the governments to move tactically, diplomatically and often foolishly to satisfy the voters.
However, while highlighting the plights of “Indian Spies” detained in Pakistan and utter neglect by the government of India, in case they are lucky enough to escape the gallows and black-death behind dark prison walls, the media focus emphasis on humanitarian aspects and inevitably suggest that some institutional, if not constitutional, safeguards should be devised for the patriotic spies.
I am afraid such hypes, though laudable as humanitarian concern, are based on certain misperceptions. Espionage is a part of Statecraft, extended diplomacy and elongated efforts for war and peace. War and Peace are integral parts of a nation’s philosophy of existence and survival. There cannot be any Ramrajya where there would not be any war and there would not be any need for espionage. Such chimera exists in the souls of saints and philosophers who are not trained to think in terms of cultural, ethnic and geopolitical nationhood. Absence of these very ingredients in ancient India had led to fragmented clan and dynastic nationalities. The Europe and many parts of Asia have gone through this process and the concept of ‘Nationhood’ is rather a gift of new human identity achieved during fifteenth and sixteenth century. In India the concept had started emerging after the British conquest of India, spread of modern education and the spark of Renaissance. The unintended attitude of treating Bharat as a Ramrajya by the Nehru government had pushed India into the throes of a humiliating military and diplomatic defeat in the hands of China. India is still unable to emerge out of that ghostly shadow of Ramrajya experiment.
Our examination of the trade of Espionage cannot be complete without falling back to the Arthashashtra of Kautilya.
Espionage is the assigned Trade of the spy agencies. They use Tradecrafts to hone their professional approaches to the task of creation of Human Intelligence Assets (HumInt). This is a complicated subject and would require a few volumes to explain the details.
This concept is as old as the organised human society is. Interested readers may like to glance through chapter eleven, section seven, eight, nine onwards of Kautilyan Arthasastra by M. B. Chande (Atlantic Publishers, New Delhi). Kautilya had compiled his treatise on various aspects of espionage as it suited the kings of his days. However, the eternal aspects of human fallibility have been explained by him, by exploiting which the trained intelligence generators create their agents. This is called Tradecraft, techniques of the trade of espionage.
The concept has remained unchanged: at the end of the day a curious housewife wants to what is cooked in her neighbour’s pot what and who sleeps with her rival neighbour under her sheets. Enlarge the inquisitive individual. This simple information is vital for “chaupal” gossip and important for social cohesiveness. Enlarge this orbit. A modern nation state cannot survive without having prior warning about its neighbour’s intentions. Whenever some stupid state scions like to indulge in the luxury of indulgent ignorance or philosophical utopianism we get surprised by broken China of Hindi-Chini Bahi Bahi and Kargil. Unfortunately, in India such slumbering philosophers are treated as national heroes and blundering officers are crowned with governor’s laurels.
It is not my intention to drag you through the minefields of intelligence generation tools. This is a vast subject and cannot be narrated in a column. My intention is to narrate certain developments involving national crisis reactions in the public and the media, which have exposed the raw sides of weakness and unpreparedness of our governing tools and vulnerability of our media and members of the public.
Hijacking of IC 814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar is a glaring example of intelligence and security failure of the governments of India and Nepal. This single incident had created several chain reactions-creation of new jihadi tanzeems called Jais-e-Mohammad, killing of Daniel Pearl, a grand kidnapping for ransom in Kolkata, transfer of part of the ransom money to Mohammad Atta by the ISI and utilization of that fund in the 9/11 attacks on Twin Towers and the Indian Parliament. The chain reaction continues even today, the USA behaving like a Nation State and India reacting as a lump of clay. The USA had brought in Homeland Security Act; India enacted and abolished POTA to prove that it is a better secular country and more democratic than the USA. Long live Bharat!
Besides these monumental cascading consequences I would like to draw attention of the readers to the video footages of demonstration by family members and workers of certain secular political parties, beating chest and wailing and forcing a government to free the hijacked passengers and the plain at great national humiliation and cost. The sounds of humiliation still echoes; political parties blaming each other in the name of communalism and secularism and faux pas committed and uncommitted.
Have you ever seen on electronic and print media the peoples of Israel and USA surrounding the Knesset and the White House to force the governments to take action to get their relatives released or declare wars on the perpetrators? Even at the height of national crisis the US media and people displayed dignified and solemn reactions-no chest-beating and no electronic wailing.
The same thing happened over the issue of death sentence awarded to one Manjit Singh by the Apex Court in Pakistan on charges of his alleged involvement in subversive and sabotage activities. His severity of the sentence was not because of his alleged involvement in espionage activities. Around the same time another person was repatriated from Pakistan after he completed jail sentence on charges of espionage inside Pakistan. The gentleman entered India raising hands and proclaiming before print and electronic media that he was an Indian spy and the government of India neglected to honour his welfare. His wails were beamed to attract national attention and to the alleged fact that India does not look after its spies.
I have no point to make on the issue if Manjit Singh had acted as an Indian saboteur inside Pakistan. I have no knowledge and no government would ever admit that it carries out espionage and acts of sabotage and subversion in another country. Whenever, such incidents happen in India we blame Pakistani and Bangladeshi intelligence agencies and their agent-organisations. Similarly they also blame our intelligence agencies.
The point to make is that no people in any nation in the West behaved in war and peace times during World Wars and Cold War conundrum. Their media did not wail and expose the nation’s raw hides with vengeance. An unwritten code is followed by the countries of the Dollar and Euro world as well as the countries behind the so-called Iron and Bamboo Curtains. In India we do not pretend to have any curtains at all. We dance nakedly at national discomfiture. We dance in electronic media, do some “Bahnagra” and Bharat Natyam in print media and leave the matters to “secular” and “communal” political parties to slug at each other with the holy objective of exposing our rotten national bones.
We must understand a few home truths:
• Every informer is not a SPY, but every Spy is an informer.
• No government would ever admit charges of carrying out espionage and sabotage activities.
• Spies are, if they are, a group of professionals, who are exposed to usual professional risk, like a soldier at the front and a policeman before a rioting mob. They are trained to get killed and maimed. They do not come back home amidst sounds of cymbals and horns. They return, if they return at all, quietly and live as quietly for which they are trained and paid.
• Espionage is not a salariat (in Urdu), meaning salaried job with encoded service rules. This trade is based on unwritten laws governing their tradecraft training, single or continued compensation package, security instructions, and no lost baggage claim principle.
• The entire trade is outside the purview of media glare and not based on any Act of the country.
• The media have unwritten sets of rules to honour national secrets and to ignore certain facts even if such hypes are likely to increase their TRP.
• The Public are expected to be more patriotic and heroic to the point suffering great personal loss, which nave been exhibited in cases of our soldiers and security personnel martyring themselves in action fields. Millions have perished in several wars, but nations have survived. Individuals and organised societies survive honourably only when the people gain strength to suffer silently. War losses are not matters for street-wailing. Intelligence warfare is another kind of war nations wage through extended diplomatic activities.
From the lowest category of spies or agents to the highest category there exist several intermediary layers. A mere trans-border smuggler used as a “single task” informer or a “deep penetration itinerary spy” is different from a well trained, embedded Long Term Resident Agent (LTRA) or a trained saboteur. Sabotage and subversion activities are unadmitted tools of silent or proxy-warfare. Most nations do and deny it. The ultimate test of success is the desired results and Deniability. No country would own up a lost, caught and punished spy. No country makes a hero out of a spy like Pakistan did to Abdul Kader Khan, the great nuclear bandit and pirate, aka a scientist.
Self-confessed informers like Mohanlal Bhashkar, Ruplal and Kashmir Singh (as claimed by them) are single task border smugglers and itinerants. They work on a specific task and after successful completion; failure or abortion the handling officer has no legal and moral responsibility towards their welfare. One-package-compensation is the law of the game. The person who agrees to do the job does so willingly out of a genuine or generated motivation. Creation of motivation is part of the tradecraft. Getting motivated is part either a part of patriotic feeling or simple greed for easy money.
Their brief is limited and the tasks are specific. Most of these trans-border human assets are not elaborately trained and briefed. As most of these border smugglers and illegal traders are left to device their own security aspects. They move like eels across international borders and straightaway sent to the frying pan when caught. Such assets are “feed and milk” type human agents. Some of them are known as “double agents.” A same talent may work for Indian and Pakistani agencies.
However, well trained, indoctrinated and Tradecraft oriented deep penetration Long Term Resident Agents are akin to classical agents of the type of Philby, Ethel and Julius Rosenburg etc. Such spies are very rare to come by. The agency takes full responsibility of locating, cultivating and if possible retrieving such highly priced agents. The lucky ones manage to trek back. Some are retrieved and most are lost, once detected by the agencies of the target countries. Some are forgotten and some are transported to folklore.
Spies are unsung soldiers and heroes of Statecraft. No country would admit spying in another country. They would deny existence of any agent, once they are caught in action and maintain deathly silence even if the media hype up such incidents. Normally the media has an unwritten understanding of the rules of the game and acts of successful or failed espionage activities do not form part of TRP increase marketing device. Every nation follows this golden rule, except, perhaps India, the infinite free country, where one is free to peep into the forbidden areas of statecraft.
Espionage is both real and unreal.
Every Trade and every Profession has inbuilt advantages and risks. A soldier is trained to die on the front. A policeman is taught to face brickbats and bullets and a spy is taught to gather intelligence and forget that he had any emotional, legal and moral bondage with his handler.
Some spies mix up smuggling, trans-border illegal trading with tidbit intelligence gathering. Some are prepared to face the gallows if caught in more serious violation of the laws of the country where they are stationed.
During Cold War the US, USSR, West and West Germany often “traded in” exchange of “Security Prisoners”- a euphemism for spies. India and Pakistan have not developed such bilateral convention of periodical exchange. No Pakistani spy or saboteur has so far been sentenced to death by any Indian court. Pakistan have awarded death sentence on some compromised Indian agents. This unwritten systemic protocol is rarely tinkered with at diplomatic level. However, India was forced on few occasions to intercede diplomatically without success.
Stealing national secrets is an offence under respective Official Secrets Acts and other Penal provisions. Once exposed and caught the spies are tried and punished. Governments decline to admit existence of such spies. This is the reason that leads to incarceration of Indian and Pakistani spies in jails for unspecified periods. Perhaps sufficient confidence building measures have not been established to reach that level of international protocol, which can facilitate periodical exchange of routine spies caught in actions of espionage.
There is no question of “bad” or “good” treatment to informers, often hyped as spies. The agencies are known to be reasonably responsive to the families of distressed informers. Often the compensation package is fat.
There is simply no institutionalised mechanism to attend to the human aspect of the Spy-trade. Response of the agencies depend on category of the concerned spy, importance of the mission, magnitude of results delivered and bondage of trust between the agent and his handling agency. Hyping up in expectation of a fat package of compensation does not always pay. Intelligence agencies are like proverbial leeches. They shrink back when sprayed with salts of media hype.
It is patriotic, heroic and great honour to be a high grade SPY, if one understands the rules of the game clearly. It is simply give and take, feed and milk and forget…forget…forget game; not to be immersed in emotional tears.
Intelligence is as remorseless a war as frontline wars are. The citizens are expected to honour this unwritten law of unwritten saga of statecraft.
(Article link : http://maloykrishnadhar.com/india-its-spy-masters-and-spies)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
A Crude Game: Paying For Our Own Destruction
A Crude Game: PayingFor Our Own Destruction
by John Hoefle
The use of petroleum as a weapon by the British Empire has been a key feature of the oil business since its beginning. The original oil fields, in Pennsylvania and Texas in the United States, and in Russia, were taken over by British-allied interests, whose initial interest in oil was as fuel for a new and more powerful navy, in preparation for World War I. As the world industrialized, oil became even more important, and the control of oil assumed even greater importance for the British.
The history of oil is one of deception and manipulation, of the creation of giant cartels and front groups to hide imperial machinations. From the beginning, the vast wealth of the oligarchy, channeled through the City of London, was used to buy up the oil fields and suppress competition. Royal Dutch Shell took control of the Russian oil fields; the Anglo-Persian oil company, today known as BP, took control of fields in the Middle East; and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil dominated the oil business in the United States. These companies, or their descendants, still control the world's oil markets. There is no such thing as a "free market" in oil, and there never has been.
There are, today, three layers of control over oil. The first is OPEC, the organization of major oil-producing countries, which was a creation by the British, the purpose of which is both to set a floor under the price, and to provide a convenient scapegoat. The second layer is the international oil cartel, the oil companies that control the refining, distribution, and sale of petroleum products around the world. The third layer is the spot market, which sets the so-called "market" price. The oil cartel controls the oil business itself, while the spot market is a creature of the financial markets. By controlling all three layers, the British Empire exerts effective control over the oil market, while hiding behind the skirts of OPEC and Big Oil.
Through the control of both the supply and price of oil, the British Empire has been able to exert tremendous power over the world. With the rise of the spot market, and the consequent petrodollar market, the British now exert more control over the dollar than does the U.S. government, and we are all suffering the consequences.
The Oil Cartel
To many, the phrase "oil cartel" brings to mind the Organization of Petroleum Countries, or OPEC. OPEC was founded in 1960 by five countries—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Venezuela—and later joined by nine others—Qatar, Indonesia, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Nigeria, Ecuador, Angola, and Gabon. Its headquarters was initially in Geneva, Switzerland, but moved to Vienna, Austria in 1965.
OPEC was a British creation, a way of keeping the oil-producing nations in line, and creating a uniform oil price for the benefit of the oil companies. It was based upon the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency created in 1891 to protect the operations of the British-linked Harriman railroad operations in Texas. With the discovery of oil in Texas in 1901, that state became a major producer of oil, and in 1919, the Railroad Commission was given authority to "regulate" oil. Texas Gov. Ross Sterling, one of the founders of Humble Oil & Refining, and a former chairman of that company, sent the Texas National Guard into the oilfields in 1931 to enforce production quotas on behalf of Big Oil, with the Railroad Commission given the power to set the quotas. Limiting production is a way of controlling the price, so OPEC was actually a global version of the oil cartel's price-fixing mechanism in Texas.
As many an oil producer has learned to his dismay, having oil in the ground means little if you lack the ability to transport that oil to a refinery. Many drillers and oil producers have gone bankrupt because they could not afford the infrastructure needed to make use of the oil they owned, and the oil cartel, with its deep pockets, was always ready to take advantage by buying them out at pennies on the dollar.
The same situation holds true for the OPEC nations, which have the oil but no way to distribute it. From the imperial perspective, the oil underneath these nations belongs to the Empire, and the nations are effectively treated as subsidiaries of the oil cartel. The elites in these nations are permitted to get fabulously wealthy, but they are not permitted to develop national industrial economies. Those nations which violate this policy, such as Iraq and Iran, are treated harshly.
The oil cartel is centered around three companies—Royal Dutch Shell, Anglo-Persian, and Standard Oil—and their descendants. After the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into 34 separate companies, the oil industry restructured, resulting in what became over time, the Seven Sisters—Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon, BP, Texaco, Socal (now Chevron), Mobil, and Gulf—with Exxon, Mobil and SoCal all descended from Standard Oil. In more recent times this power has been consolidated, with the mergers of Exxon and Mobil, and Chevron with Gulf and then Texaco. BP acquired both Amoco (another Standard spinoff) and Atlantic Richfield, making it a major power in the U.S., just like Shell. Today six "supermajors"—Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, and the French Total—dominate the world oil market.
Oil Hoaxes
Up until the 1970s, the oil market was relatively stable, with the big oil companies buying oil from the producing countries at fixed prices over long-term contracts. This stability was useful for the economy and beneficial for all parties concerned, but it was not to last. The British Empire was preparing an assault on the United States, in which oil would play a key role.
The Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973 led to an Arab boycott of Britain and the U.S.A., which, at least nominally, led to the suspension of Arab oil sales to those countries. As a flank on the boycott, a "spot market" was set up in Rotterdam whereby Arabian oil could be sold to buyers from the blacklisted companies—at a substantial markup in price, of course. This spot market was the beginning of today's highly destructive and manipulated oil market. The price of oil jumped from $3.50 a barrel before the war to $10 a barrel at the beginning of the following year.
The next big oil shock came in 1979, with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and the consequent disruption of oil flows. The price of oil shot even higher, from some $19 a gallon in mid-1979 to nearly $40 a gallon by March/April 1980.
Like the 1973/74 event, the 1979 oil crisis was a hoax, designed to expand the role of the spot market as a way of jacking up the price of oil. In the U.S., we were inundated with the idea that oil was in short supply, creating serious shortages of gasoline. The TV broadcasts showed videos of long lines at the gas pumps, but it soon became apparent to careful viewers that the locations were changing every week, that the oil companies were putting on a traveling roadshow. This author, then in Houston and working for Shell, remembers how there were no shortages in Houston until the roadshow came to town—it was our week to be on the news—and then the show moved on, and things returned to normal. At about the same time, a local reporter interviewed the chief of the Shell refinery, who said that his refinery had all the oil it could process, and had tankers waiting in line to unload. The shortage was manipulated, a complete hoax.
British Geopolitics
Such hoaxes could never be run by the oil companies alone, and they weren't. While these hoaxes had the effect of sharply raising oil prices, that was only part of the game. The real game was reshaping the world, starting with the United States. The combination of higher oil prices, with oil purchases denominated in dollars, and the spot-market pricing mechanism, caused huge pools of "petrodollars" to build up in Europe, giving the British Empire a huge war chest with which to launch an assault on the United States and the rest of the world. With President Nixon's effective destruction of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971, currencies were allowed to float, making them subject to manipulation, and the spot market provided the funds for imperial currency warfare. The petrodollars, and to a lesser extent, their cousins, the dope dollars, allowed the British Empire to control the global dollar-based system. With the spot market, oil had become the vehicle for the British Empire to assert its will over the planet.
Today, this oil-price mechanism is being used to steal money out of the pockets of the world's population, in order to fund the completion of the British Empire's plan to use the financial crisis to finally sink the nation-states, including the United States. The same is true for food prices, and with every trip to the grocery store or the gas station, we are being looted to feed this evil scheme.
Civilization itself is in a breakdown crisis, a death spiral which can only be broken by sovereign nations acting to put the global financial system into bankruptcy, LaRouche's program can stop this imperial assault dead in its tracks, and start the process of rebuilding the productivity of the economy, and the prosperity of the people. There will be no recovery without these steps, only a further descent into Hell.
Assault on the Nation-State
The precondition for this assault was the destruction of the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency rates established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, at a conference at the Mount Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The fixed-currency-rate system, a necessary part of FDR's plan to rebuild the world after World War II, and to free the planet from colonialism, was destroyed by President Richard Nixon in August 1971, when he took the dollar off the gold-reserve standard. Shortly thereafter, Britain—the intellectual author of the Nixon move—allowed its pound sterling to float, too. Without the fixed rates, currency rates were allowed to "float," which opened the door for the oligarchy, with its vast financial resources, to target and manipulate currencies.
The second phase of the assault consisted of the oil hoaxes of 1973-74 and 1979, through which the spot market in oil was built. The spot market was a mechanism through which oil could be bought and sold at whatever price the market would bear. It began with the boycott that Arab oil producers placed on nations dealing with Israel during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973; the primary targets were the U.S.A. and the Netherlands, and it was in Rotterdam that the spot market was born. Nominally, the spot market was formed as a way to provide oil to boycotted nations, but the boycott itself was an Anglo-Dutch operation designed to create the conditions under which the spot market could be sold to a credulous world.
The oil hoax of 1973-74, combined with the sharp rise in oil prices it effected, dealt a serious shock to the U.S. economy; that shock was then used to push the idea that the United States was "over-consuming" energy and that we must cut back. The government implemented a host of conservation measures, including price controls, odd-day even-day gasoline purchase restrictions, and the 55-mph national speed limit, all part of a British-authored social engineering plan, targetting the industrial capacity of the U.S. economy, and brainwashing the population.
This process escalated with the oil hoax of 1979, triggered by (guess who!)the British-orchestrated plot in which the Shah of Iran was overthrown and replaced with the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. President Jimmy Carter appeared in his sweater to urge Americans to conserve, and installed a wood-burning stove in the White House. More importantly, he pushed deregulation, furthering the control over oil by the oil cartel.
Throughout both oil crises, we were repeatedly told that the nation must wean itself from its dependence upon foreign oil—but it was sophistry. The real solution to the "energy crisis" was nuclear power, but that was effectively suppressed by another hoax, the 1979 Three Mile Island non-event.
With the only real solution blocked, the nation became more dependent upon the oil cartel than ever. At the same time, thanks to the combined effects of "conservation" measures, high prices, and orchestrated shortages, the U.S. industrial base was shrinking, and being replaced by the post-industrial Information Age nonsense.
World Domination
The story so far is a disaster, one of the British Empire, with the knowing complicity of Anglophilic American oligarchic wannabes and other fools, selling out the nation and the world to rapacious oligarchs and their raw materials cartel. But, it gets worse.
The move to jack up oil prices and suppress the standard of living through "conservation" was only Phase One of a much more pernicious operation. The spot market raised lots of money, and that money quickly began to pile up in the banks of Europe, particularly, in the City of London. Some of this money belonged to the oil producers, or, rather, to the royal families in places like Saudi Arabia, but an increasing portion of it belonged to the speculators who played the spot market. Over time, the spot market expanded into the financial exchanges, which provided the trading facilities for even greater speculation and manipulation.
As this pile of "petrodollars" grew, the British used it to fund operations to transform the United States from within, including the takeover of the U.S. banking system and the cartelization—under the euphemism of mergers and acquisitions—of corporate America. Wall Street was transformed into a giant casino, where betting on financial instruments replaced investing, and the connection to reality was severed. At the same time, the petrodollars helped fund cultural warfare operations against the American people, to keep them blind to the damage being done, or even conning them into believing it was progress.
The effect of this assault is now becoming obvious. The financial bubble has popped, and the great financial engine that was supposed to replace industry as the economic engine of the future has been shown to be as substantial as the emperor's new clothes. We are now left with a bankrupt banking system sitting atop a rusted hulk of an economy, dependent upon the "world company" cartels for many of the necessities of life.
The BAE Factor
There is an even darker side to the British Empire's oil operations, as indicated by the scandal around BAE Systems, the British weapons firm. Under the secret Al-Yamamah oil-for-weapons agreement between the British and Saudi governments, BAE provided weapons to the Saudis which were paid for by oil, and included billions of dollars of bribes and illegal payoffs. Investigations into the BAE scheme indicate that hidden slush funds were used not only to pay kickbacks on arms deals, but that funds were also conduited into "black ops"—secret intelligence operations—to run coups and terrorist cells, of the sort typified by the inside job that was 9/11.
The rise of the military-industrial complex inside the United States since World War II—which President Dwight Eisenhower presciently warned us about in 1961—is another result of this shift away from traditional American values toward the imperial perspective. Empires are militaristic in nature, because they depend upon suppression and looting for their survival, and this mindset has taken hold in Washington, particularly under the neocon fascism of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, who seem to see terrorist threats anywhere there are large pools of oil. Their British controllers must laugh at how easy it is to manipulate such fools.
Shut It Down
For humanity to survive, the use of oil as a control measure must be stopped. There are several steps that could be taken, all of which involve governments standing up on their hind legs, and taking on the British Empire and the oligarchic slime-mold behind it.
The first step is to shut down the parasitical system by putting the international financial system through bankruptcy, thereby breaking the power of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system to manipulate and corrupt the world. As an included feature of this, the spot market would be closed, and the world could go back to long-term contracts for oil under a new Bretton Woods arrangement of fixed currency rates, to protect both producers and consumers from fluctuations, and to facilitate global development projects. This would get the financial system under control, a necessary prerequisite for solving the economic problems.
The next step would be a crash program for the development and implementation of nuclear technologies, with the goal of switching the economy to the consumption of hydrogen as a fuel, leaving petroleum to be used mainly for chemical feedstocks. The combination of nuclear fusion and hydrogen power would effectively end the ability of the oligarchy to use energy as a control mechanism, and would open the door to a new era of technological breakthroughs to increase the productive power of human labor and raise the standard of living throughout the globe.
All that is holding us back is our own fear, fear of letting go of a bubble which no longer exists, and fear of letting go of failed beliefs, and embracing a new future. As FDR said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Once we get past that, the future is bright.
(Article link : http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2008/3519crude_game.html)
by John Hoefle
The use of petroleum as a weapon by the British Empire has been a key feature of the oil business since its beginning. The original oil fields, in Pennsylvania and Texas in the United States, and in Russia, were taken over by British-allied interests, whose initial interest in oil was as fuel for a new and more powerful navy, in preparation for World War I. As the world industrialized, oil became even more important, and the control of oil assumed even greater importance for the British.
The history of oil is one of deception and manipulation, of the creation of giant cartels and front groups to hide imperial machinations. From the beginning, the vast wealth of the oligarchy, channeled through the City of London, was used to buy up the oil fields and suppress competition. Royal Dutch Shell took control of the Russian oil fields; the Anglo-Persian oil company, today known as BP, took control of fields in the Middle East; and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil dominated the oil business in the United States. These companies, or their descendants, still control the world's oil markets. There is no such thing as a "free market" in oil, and there never has been.
There are, today, three layers of control over oil. The first is OPEC, the organization of major oil-producing countries, which was a creation by the British, the purpose of which is both to set a floor under the price, and to provide a convenient scapegoat. The second layer is the international oil cartel, the oil companies that control the refining, distribution, and sale of petroleum products around the world. The third layer is the spot market, which sets the so-called "market" price. The oil cartel controls the oil business itself, while the spot market is a creature of the financial markets. By controlling all three layers, the British Empire exerts effective control over the oil market, while hiding behind the skirts of OPEC and Big Oil.
Through the control of both the supply and price of oil, the British Empire has been able to exert tremendous power over the world. With the rise of the spot market, and the consequent petrodollar market, the British now exert more control over the dollar than does the U.S. government, and we are all suffering the consequences.
The Oil Cartel
To many, the phrase "oil cartel" brings to mind the Organization of Petroleum Countries, or OPEC. OPEC was founded in 1960 by five countries—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Venezuela—and later joined by nine others—Qatar, Indonesia, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Nigeria, Ecuador, Angola, and Gabon. Its headquarters was initially in Geneva, Switzerland, but moved to Vienna, Austria in 1965.
OPEC was a British creation, a way of keeping the oil-producing nations in line, and creating a uniform oil price for the benefit of the oil companies. It was based upon the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency created in 1891 to protect the operations of the British-linked Harriman railroad operations in Texas. With the discovery of oil in Texas in 1901, that state became a major producer of oil, and in 1919, the Railroad Commission was given authority to "regulate" oil. Texas Gov. Ross Sterling, one of the founders of Humble Oil & Refining, and a former chairman of that company, sent the Texas National Guard into the oilfields in 1931 to enforce production quotas on behalf of Big Oil, with the Railroad Commission given the power to set the quotas. Limiting production is a way of controlling the price, so OPEC was actually a global version of the oil cartel's price-fixing mechanism in Texas.
As many an oil producer has learned to his dismay, having oil in the ground means little if you lack the ability to transport that oil to a refinery. Many drillers and oil producers have gone bankrupt because they could not afford the infrastructure needed to make use of the oil they owned, and the oil cartel, with its deep pockets, was always ready to take advantage by buying them out at pennies on the dollar.
The same situation holds true for the OPEC nations, which have the oil but no way to distribute it. From the imperial perspective, the oil underneath these nations belongs to the Empire, and the nations are effectively treated as subsidiaries of the oil cartel. The elites in these nations are permitted to get fabulously wealthy, but they are not permitted to develop national industrial economies. Those nations which violate this policy, such as Iraq and Iran, are treated harshly.
The oil cartel is centered around three companies—Royal Dutch Shell, Anglo-Persian, and Standard Oil—and their descendants. After the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into 34 separate companies, the oil industry restructured, resulting in what became over time, the Seven Sisters—Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon, BP, Texaco, Socal (now Chevron), Mobil, and Gulf—with Exxon, Mobil and SoCal all descended from Standard Oil. In more recent times this power has been consolidated, with the mergers of Exxon and Mobil, and Chevron with Gulf and then Texaco. BP acquired both Amoco (another Standard spinoff) and Atlantic Richfield, making it a major power in the U.S., just like Shell. Today six "supermajors"—Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, and the French Total—dominate the world oil market.
Oil Hoaxes
Up until the 1970s, the oil market was relatively stable, with the big oil companies buying oil from the producing countries at fixed prices over long-term contracts. This stability was useful for the economy and beneficial for all parties concerned, but it was not to last. The British Empire was preparing an assault on the United States, in which oil would play a key role.
The Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973 led to an Arab boycott of Britain and the U.S.A., which, at least nominally, led to the suspension of Arab oil sales to those countries. As a flank on the boycott, a "spot market" was set up in Rotterdam whereby Arabian oil could be sold to buyers from the blacklisted companies—at a substantial markup in price, of course. This spot market was the beginning of today's highly destructive and manipulated oil market. The price of oil jumped from $3.50 a barrel before the war to $10 a barrel at the beginning of the following year.
The next big oil shock came in 1979, with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and the consequent disruption of oil flows. The price of oil shot even higher, from some $19 a gallon in mid-1979 to nearly $40 a gallon by March/April 1980.
Like the 1973/74 event, the 1979 oil crisis was a hoax, designed to expand the role of the spot market as a way of jacking up the price of oil. In the U.S., we were inundated with the idea that oil was in short supply, creating serious shortages of gasoline. The TV broadcasts showed videos of long lines at the gas pumps, but it soon became apparent to careful viewers that the locations were changing every week, that the oil companies were putting on a traveling roadshow. This author, then in Houston and working for Shell, remembers how there were no shortages in Houston until the roadshow came to town—it was our week to be on the news—and then the show moved on, and things returned to normal. At about the same time, a local reporter interviewed the chief of the Shell refinery, who said that his refinery had all the oil it could process, and had tankers waiting in line to unload. The shortage was manipulated, a complete hoax.
British Geopolitics
Such hoaxes could never be run by the oil companies alone, and they weren't. While these hoaxes had the effect of sharply raising oil prices, that was only part of the game. The real game was reshaping the world, starting with the United States. The combination of higher oil prices, with oil purchases denominated in dollars, and the spot-market pricing mechanism, caused huge pools of "petrodollars" to build up in Europe, giving the British Empire a huge war chest with which to launch an assault on the United States and the rest of the world. With President Nixon's effective destruction of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971, currencies were allowed to float, making them subject to manipulation, and the spot market provided the funds for imperial currency warfare. The petrodollars, and to a lesser extent, their cousins, the dope dollars, allowed the British Empire to control the global dollar-based system. With the spot market, oil had become the vehicle for the British Empire to assert its will over the planet.
Today, this oil-price mechanism is being used to steal money out of the pockets of the world's population, in order to fund the completion of the British Empire's plan to use the financial crisis to finally sink the nation-states, including the United States. The same is true for food prices, and with every trip to the grocery store or the gas station, we are being looted to feed this evil scheme.
Civilization itself is in a breakdown crisis, a death spiral which can only be broken by sovereign nations acting to put the global financial system into bankruptcy, LaRouche's program can stop this imperial assault dead in its tracks, and start the process of rebuilding the productivity of the economy, and the prosperity of the people. There will be no recovery without these steps, only a further descent into Hell.
Assault on the Nation-State
The precondition for this assault was the destruction of the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency rates established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, at a conference at the Mount Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The fixed-currency-rate system, a necessary part of FDR's plan to rebuild the world after World War II, and to free the planet from colonialism, was destroyed by President Richard Nixon in August 1971, when he took the dollar off the gold-reserve standard. Shortly thereafter, Britain—the intellectual author of the Nixon move—allowed its pound sterling to float, too. Without the fixed rates, currency rates were allowed to "float," which opened the door for the oligarchy, with its vast financial resources, to target and manipulate currencies.
The second phase of the assault consisted of the oil hoaxes of 1973-74 and 1979, through which the spot market in oil was built. The spot market was a mechanism through which oil could be bought and sold at whatever price the market would bear. It began with the boycott that Arab oil producers placed on nations dealing with Israel during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973; the primary targets were the U.S.A. and the Netherlands, and it was in Rotterdam that the spot market was born. Nominally, the spot market was formed as a way to provide oil to boycotted nations, but the boycott itself was an Anglo-Dutch operation designed to create the conditions under which the spot market could be sold to a credulous world.
The oil hoax of 1973-74, combined with the sharp rise in oil prices it effected, dealt a serious shock to the U.S. economy; that shock was then used to push the idea that the United States was "over-consuming" energy and that we must cut back. The government implemented a host of conservation measures, including price controls, odd-day even-day gasoline purchase restrictions, and the 55-mph national speed limit, all part of a British-authored social engineering plan, targetting the industrial capacity of the U.S. economy, and brainwashing the population.
This process escalated with the oil hoax of 1979, triggered by (guess who!)the British-orchestrated plot in which the Shah of Iran was overthrown and replaced with the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. President Jimmy Carter appeared in his sweater to urge Americans to conserve, and installed a wood-burning stove in the White House. More importantly, he pushed deregulation, furthering the control over oil by the oil cartel.
Throughout both oil crises, we were repeatedly told that the nation must wean itself from its dependence upon foreign oil—but it was sophistry. The real solution to the "energy crisis" was nuclear power, but that was effectively suppressed by another hoax, the 1979 Three Mile Island non-event.
With the only real solution blocked, the nation became more dependent upon the oil cartel than ever. At the same time, thanks to the combined effects of "conservation" measures, high prices, and orchestrated shortages, the U.S. industrial base was shrinking, and being replaced by the post-industrial Information Age nonsense.
World Domination
The story so far is a disaster, one of the British Empire, with the knowing complicity of Anglophilic American oligarchic wannabes and other fools, selling out the nation and the world to rapacious oligarchs and their raw materials cartel. But, it gets worse.
The move to jack up oil prices and suppress the standard of living through "conservation" was only Phase One of a much more pernicious operation. The spot market raised lots of money, and that money quickly began to pile up in the banks of Europe, particularly, in the City of London. Some of this money belonged to the oil producers, or, rather, to the royal families in places like Saudi Arabia, but an increasing portion of it belonged to the speculators who played the spot market. Over time, the spot market expanded into the financial exchanges, which provided the trading facilities for even greater speculation and manipulation.
As this pile of "petrodollars" grew, the British used it to fund operations to transform the United States from within, including the takeover of the U.S. banking system and the cartelization—under the euphemism of mergers and acquisitions—of corporate America. Wall Street was transformed into a giant casino, where betting on financial instruments replaced investing, and the connection to reality was severed. At the same time, the petrodollars helped fund cultural warfare operations against the American people, to keep them blind to the damage being done, or even conning them into believing it was progress.
The effect of this assault is now becoming obvious. The financial bubble has popped, and the great financial engine that was supposed to replace industry as the economic engine of the future has been shown to be as substantial as the emperor's new clothes. We are now left with a bankrupt banking system sitting atop a rusted hulk of an economy, dependent upon the "world company" cartels for many of the necessities of life.
The BAE Factor
There is an even darker side to the British Empire's oil operations, as indicated by the scandal around BAE Systems, the British weapons firm. Under the secret Al-Yamamah oil-for-weapons agreement between the British and Saudi governments, BAE provided weapons to the Saudis which were paid for by oil, and included billions of dollars of bribes and illegal payoffs. Investigations into the BAE scheme indicate that hidden slush funds were used not only to pay kickbacks on arms deals, but that funds were also conduited into "black ops"—secret intelligence operations—to run coups and terrorist cells, of the sort typified by the inside job that was 9/11.
The rise of the military-industrial complex inside the United States since World War II—which President Dwight Eisenhower presciently warned us about in 1961—is another result of this shift away from traditional American values toward the imperial perspective. Empires are militaristic in nature, because they depend upon suppression and looting for their survival, and this mindset has taken hold in Washington, particularly under the neocon fascism of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, who seem to see terrorist threats anywhere there are large pools of oil. Their British controllers must laugh at how easy it is to manipulate such fools.
Shut It Down
For humanity to survive, the use of oil as a control measure must be stopped. There are several steps that could be taken, all of which involve governments standing up on their hind legs, and taking on the British Empire and the oligarchic slime-mold behind it.
The first step is to shut down the parasitical system by putting the international financial system through bankruptcy, thereby breaking the power of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system to manipulate and corrupt the world. As an included feature of this, the spot market would be closed, and the world could go back to long-term contracts for oil under a new Bretton Woods arrangement of fixed currency rates, to protect both producers and consumers from fluctuations, and to facilitate global development projects. This would get the financial system under control, a necessary prerequisite for solving the economic problems.
The next step would be a crash program for the development and implementation of nuclear technologies, with the goal of switching the economy to the consumption of hydrogen as a fuel, leaving petroleum to be used mainly for chemical feedstocks. The combination of nuclear fusion and hydrogen power would effectively end the ability of the oligarchy to use energy as a control mechanism, and would open the door to a new era of technological breakthroughs to increase the productive power of human labor and raise the standard of living throughout the globe.
All that is holding us back is our own fear, fear of letting go of a bubble which no longer exists, and fear of letting go of failed beliefs, and embracing a new future. As FDR said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Once we get past that, the future is bright.
(Article link : http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2008/3519crude_game.html)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Aurangzebs Of Today
AURANGZEBS OF TODAY
By B. Raman
In a statement made after the July, 2005, blasts in London organised by suicide terrorists of Pakistani origin, Mr. Tony Blair, the then British Prime Minister, spoke of the need to counter jihadi terrorism not only operationally through better intelligence, better physical security, better counter-terrorism operations etc, but also ideologically in order to draw the attention of the public to the pernicious ideas being spread by Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda jihadi organisations and counter them energetically.
2. Amongst such pernicious ideas are that there was no civilisation in the world before the advent of Islam, that the Muslims have a right to re-capture all lands which historically belonged to them, that the Muslims do not recognise national frontiers and ,therefore, have a right to wage a jihad anywhere in the world where Islam is in danger and that the Muslims have the religious right and obligation to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and use them to protect their religion, if necessary.
3. The Pakistani jihadi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), which are members of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF), project Aurangzeb as the greatest ruler in the history of the Indian sub-continent and describe their aim as the "liberation" of the Muslims of India and restoration of what they view as the golden era of Aurangzeb in the sub-continent.
4. This glorification of Aurangzeb was actually started by the Pakistan Government after the birth of Pakistan in 1947. The text-books got written and prescribed in schools by different Pakistan Governments depicted that there was no civilisation or culture in India before the Muslims came to the sub-continent and glorified Aurangzeb. In September 1996, Murtaza Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir Bhutto, was allegedly killed by the police of Karachi after he had returned from Islamabad, where he allegedly had a fierce quarrel with Benazir and her husband Mr. Asif Ali Zardari over his demand that he should be appointed as the Vice-Chairman of the Pakistan People's Party. In a piece on the rule of Benazir, the "Economist" of London compared her to Aurangzeb.
5. This created a lot of interest among analysts over the influence of the Aurangzeb model on the minds of Pakistani rulers----political and military--- who grew up after its independence and studied the text-books, which glorified him. It is now recognised by imany that one of the reasons for the spreading prairie fire of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan is the pernicious influence of the Aurangzeb model on the mind-set of the Pakistani youth. Many of them, who are spreading havoc across Pakistan, see themselves as the Aurangzebs of today. Aurangzeb as well as bin Laden are their role models.
6. The overwhelming majority of the Indian Muslim youth, who remain intensely patriotic, have not let themselves be influenced by this pernicious veneration of bin Laden and Aurangzeb and their ideas, but recent events such as the involvement of one or two Indian Muslims in the UK with Al Qaeda, the role of two Indian Muslim youth in the attempted terrorist strikes in London and Glasgow in June last and the recent arrests of some Muslim youth of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in Karnataka indicate that some of these pernious ideas might have started winning adherents in the India Muslim community too---- in India as well as in the diaspora in the Gulf and the West.
7. Before this spreads further, it is important to counter this phenomenon ideologically. This is what some respected Muslim clerics and scholars, who had met recently at Deoband, had done. One must welcome their initiative in condemning terrorism. That is also what some activists against terrorism under Mr. Francois Gautier, a well-known French journalist living in India for many years, have been doing. Whereas the appeal of the Deobandi congregation was addressed to the Muslim community specifically, the anti-terrorism campaign of Gautier and his small, but devoted band of associates is addressed to all people----whatever be their nationality, religion, ethnicity etc. It seeks to educate them not only on the evils of terrorism, but also on the mental origin of it.
8. To understand the mental origin of the jihadi terrorism emanating from Pakistan, it is important to identify not only their present-day mentors such as bin Laden, the Pakistani jihadi leaders and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but also their historical idols. Aurangzeb is one of their topmost historical idols. It is important to educate the people of India on the real nature of Aurangzeb, his policies and actions so that they do not get easily carried away by the way Aurangzeb's rule is depicted by the jihadi terrorists.
9. An exhibition organised by Gautier and his associates as part of this education process had a successful run in New Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. In Pune, over 100,000 people visited it. In none of these places, did the members of the local Muslim community view the exhibition as anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. Unfortunately, some members of the community in Chennai viewed it as anti-Muslim and demanded that the exhibition be discontinued. This has reportedly been done on the advice of the Police.
10. I had attended the inauguration of the exhibition on the opening day (March 3,2008) and spoke on the importance of understanding the pernicious ideas about Aurangzeb being spread by Pakistani jihadi organisations. I had seen all the exhibits before the inauguration and did not find any of them of a provocative nature. More than the paintings, what was so eloquent in the exhibition was the collection of scanned copies of the various orders issued by Aurangzeb during his rule. These documents were authentic and the scanned copies were made over a period of three years from a Mughul Archive in Rajasthan which, I was told, contain a wealth of documents relating to the Mughul period.
11. One of the contentions of those, who protested against the exhibition, was that raking up the past would create a communal divide in Tamil Nadu, which has been relatively free of it.One of the lessons of history has been that remaining silent on unpleasant periods in history leads to a repetition of such unpleasant experiences. That is why Western school children are taught about the evils of rulers like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin etc. That is why the Jewish people keep reminding themselves and the rest of the world about the holocaust. That was why some years ago Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French rightist leader, was severely criticised for denying the reality of the holocaust.
12. When we deny harsh truths of history, we are only playing into the hands of jihadi terrorists, who see themselves as the Aurangzebs of today.
13. The Annexure gives extracts from what foreign scholars, including scholars in Pakistan itself, have been saying on this subject of what a Pakistani scholar described as a creation of myths regarding the real nature of Muslim rule. When Pakistanis have themselves started realising the damage done to their society and country by this myth-making, leaders of our Muslim community should refrain from starting a similar myth-making exercise in India about the past
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
(Article link : http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers27/paper2611.html )
By B. Raman
In a statement made after the July, 2005, blasts in London organised by suicide terrorists of Pakistani origin, Mr. Tony Blair, the then British Prime Minister, spoke of the need to counter jihadi terrorism not only operationally through better intelligence, better physical security, better counter-terrorism operations etc, but also ideologically in order to draw the attention of the public to the pernicious ideas being spread by Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda jihadi organisations and counter them energetically.
2. Amongst such pernicious ideas are that there was no civilisation in the world before the advent of Islam, that the Muslims have a right to re-capture all lands which historically belonged to them, that the Muslims do not recognise national frontiers and ,therefore, have a right to wage a jihad anywhere in the world where Islam is in danger and that the Muslims have the religious right and obligation to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and use them to protect their religion, if necessary.
3. The Pakistani jihadi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), which are members of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF), project Aurangzeb as the greatest ruler in the history of the Indian sub-continent and describe their aim as the "liberation" of the Muslims of India and restoration of what they view as the golden era of Aurangzeb in the sub-continent.
4. This glorification of Aurangzeb was actually started by the Pakistan Government after the birth of Pakistan in 1947. The text-books got written and prescribed in schools by different Pakistan Governments depicted that there was no civilisation or culture in India before the Muslims came to the sub-continent and glorified Aurangzeb. In September 1996, Murtaza Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir Bhutto, was allegedly killed by the police of Karachi after he had returned from Islamabad, where he allegedly had a fierce quarrel with Benazir and her husband Mr. Asif Ali Zardari over his demand that he should be appointed as the Vice-Chairman of the Pakistan People's Party. In a piece on the rule of Benazir, the "Economist" of London compared her to Aurangzeb.
5. This created a lot of interest among analysts over the influence of the Aurangzeb model on the minds of Pakistani rulers----political and military--- who grew up after its independence and studied the text-books, which glorified him. It is now recognised by imany that one of the reasons for the spreading prairie fire of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan is the pernicious influence of the Aurangzeb model on the mind-set of the Pakistani youth. Many of them, who are spreading havoc across Pakistan, see themselves as the Aurangzebs of today. Aurangzeb as well as bin Laden are their role models.
6. The overwhelming majority of the Indian Muslim youth, who remain intensely patriotic, have not let themselves be influenced by this pernicious veneration of bin Laden and Aurangzeb and their ideas, but recent events such as the involvement of one or two Indian Muslims in the UK with Al Qaeda, the role of two Indian Muslim youth in the attempted terrorist strikes in London and Glasgow in June last and the recent arrests of some Muslim youth of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in Karnataka indicate that some of these pernious ideas might have started winning adherents in the India Muslim community too---- in India as well as in the diaspora in the Gulf and the West.
7. Before this spreads further, it is important to counter this phenomenon ideologically. This is what some respected Muslim clerics and scholars, who had met recently at Deoband, had done. One must welcome their initiative in condemning terrorism. That is also what some activists against terrorism under Mr. Francois Gautier, a well-known French journalist living in India for many years, have been doing. Whereas the appeal of the Deobandi congregation was addressed to the Muslim community specifically, the anti-terrorism campaign of Gautier and his small, but devoted band of associates is addressed to all people----whatever be their nationality, religion, ethnicity etc. It seeks to educate them not only on the evils of terrorism, but also on the mental origin of it.
8. To understand the mental origin of the jihadi terrorism emanating from Pakistan, it is important to identify not only their present-day mentors such as bin Laden, the Pakistani jihadi leaders and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but also their historical idols. Aurangzeb is one of their topmost historical idols. It is important to educate the people of India on the real nature of Aurangzeb, his policies and actions so that they do not get easily carried away by the way Aurangzeb's rule is depicted by the jihadi terrorists.
9. An exhibition organised by Gautier and his associates as part of this education process had a successful run in New Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. In Pune, over 100,000 people visited it. In none of these places, did the members of the local Muslim community view the exhibition as anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. Unfortunately, some members of the community in Chennai viewed it as anti-Muslim and demanded that the exhibition be discontinued. This has reportedly been done on the advice of the Police.
10. I had attended the inauguration of the exhibition on the opening day (March 3,2008) and spoke on the importance of understanding the pernicious ideas about Aurangzeb being spread by Pakistani jihadi organisations. I had seen all the exhibits before the inauguration and did not find any of them of a provocative nature. More than the paintings, what was so eloquent in the exhibition was the collection of scanned copies of the various orders issued by Aurangzeb during his rule. These documents were authentic and the scanned copies were made over a period of three years from a Mughul Archive in Rajasthan which, I was told, contain a wealth of documents relating to the Mughul period.
11. One of the contentions of those, who protested against the exhibition, was that raking up the past would create a communal divide in Tamil Nadu, which has been relatively free of it.One of the lessons of history has been that remaining silent on unpleasant periods in history leads to a repetition of such unpleasant experiences. That is why Western school children are taught about the evils of rulers like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin etc. That is why the Jewish people keep reminding themselves and the rest of the world about the holocaust. That was why some years ago Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French rightist leader, was severely criticised for denying the reality of the holocaust.
12. When we deny harsh truths of history, we are only playing into the hands of jihadi terrorists, who see themselves as the Aurangzebs of today.
13. The Annexure gives extracts from what foreign scholars, including scholars in Pakistan itself, have been saying on this subject of what a Pakistani scholar described as a creation of myths regarding the real nature of Muslim rule. When Pakistanis have themselves started realising the damage done to their society and country by this myth-making, leaders of our Muslim community should refrain from starting a similar myth-making exercise in India about the past
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)
(Article link : http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers27/paper2611.html )
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