SACW - 26 July 2017 | Bangladesh: Offensive portrait? / Pakistan: Sufi shrines / India: Border spat with China ? Crackdown on domestic workers in Noida; Portrayals of Jinnah: A Critique / Burma: climate of fear for journalists / Philippines at War / Brazil: Lula’s conviction / Good Communist Homes

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 26 July 2017 - No. 2944 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: What makes a portrait offensive? | Abak Hussain
2. The Ummah At War With Itself | Pervez Hoodbhoy
3. How Pakistan is trying to rewrite the history of its Sufi shrines to wipe traces of Indian links | Haroon Khalid
4. Some Portrayals of Jinnah: A Critique |  Anil Nauriya
5. SAHR Announces release of "Nation State Boundaries and Human Rights of People in South Asia"
6. India: The right wing's use of rumour and fake news precedes social media and the current political resurgence | Akshaya Mukul
7. Yashpal: A Life in Science - A documentary film
8. India: Vice-Chancellor's 'Tank' Talk - Statement by Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Union
9. India: Violence of Class in Noida - crackdown after protest by domestic workers - Selected Reports and Editorials

10. Recent on Communalism Watch:
India: RSS's education man DN Batra wants Tagore, Urdu, English, Arabic words removed from school texts
India: BJP spreads its wings - Translating Hindutva into national creed
India - Jammu Kashmir: RSS pushes minority status for Hindus living in Jammu and Kashmir
Into the world of the Kanwariyas Reportage by Snigdha Poonam (Hindustan Times)
Lest they be called anti-national | Smita Gupta
India: Appeasement of Minorities is a Myth | Ram Puniyani
French comic book by William de Tamaris uses India’s war on beef to illustrate the dangers of Hindutva
India: Diversity is a dead-end without individual freedom | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
India: Terrorism in the name of Cow / Gau Atankwad - a video report on India Today
India: Vishwa Hindu Parishad to equip cow vigilantes and to appoint appoint "dharma yoddhas" [religious warriors] 

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. South Africa: Gupta Leaks / Turkey: Democratic resistance forming
12. This is India’s China war, Round Two | Neville Maxwell
13. India: A Madman at the Censor Board 
14. India: Baba Ramdev Launches ‘Security’ Business: Should We Be Worried? | Binu Mathew
15. Britain didn’t fight the second world war — the British empire did | William Dalrymple
16. Burma’s True News Information Unit | Sean Gleeson
17. Paint the united colours of India | Happymon Jacob
18. India: Army tank in JNU - It is not the VC’s job to inculcate nationalism in students (Editorial, HT)
19. Philippines: Suing for peace, Duterte gets all-out war | Richard Javad Heydarian
20. Brazil:  About Lula’s conviction – Statement MES-PSOL
21. Good Communist Homes | Sheila Fitzpatrick

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1. BANGLADESH: WHAT MAKES A PORTRAIT OFFENSIVE? | Abak Hussain
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A picture, drawn with the utmost love and respect by a child, is not some kind of anti-state or subversive activity. It does not, in any conceivable way, cause anyone any kind of harm.
http://www.sacw.net/article13397.html

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2. THE UMMAH AT WAR WITH ITSELF | Pervez Hoodbhoy
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The ummah is at war with itself. What other way is there to describe the brutal bloodletting by Muslims of Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, and, of course, Pakistan.
http://www.sacw.net/article13395.html

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3. HOW PAKISTAN IS TRYING TO REWRITE THE HISTORY OF ITS SUFI SHRINES TO WIPE TRACES OF INDIAN LINKS | Haroon Khalid
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. . . one of the biggest dilemmas of the Pakistani State's interpretation of religion and national identity. Given the immense emphasis on distinguishing themselves from Hindus, it has been hard to reconcile the ancestral heritage of a majority of the population. Therefore, history is often reinterpreted and several castes claim Arab, Persian or Afghan ancestry insteading of acknowledging their Indian roots. This was also the attitude adopted by the State when it took charge of the syncretic Sufi shrines.
http://www.sacw.net/article13400.html

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4. SOME PORTRAYALS OF JINNAH: A CRITIQUE |  Anil Nauriya
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The rise of Hindutva, particularly since the eighties, is paralleled by strenuous contemporaneous attempts by writers like Ayesha Jalal and H.M. Seervai to present a sanitized version of the politics of M.A. Jinnah. Such accounts have had an appreciable circulation. Some of the conceptual questions arising on the above basis and having implications for the notion of ‘minority' and ‘minority politics' are dealt with in this paper.
http://www.sacw.net/article13396.html

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5. SAHR ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF "NATION STATE BOUNDARIES AND HUMAN RIGHTS OF PEOPLE IN SOUTH ASIA"
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South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) is pleased to release the publication “Nation State Boundaries and Human Rights of People in South Asia” based on its study of cross border issues by Shomona Khanna, a researcher and a lawyer from India. The publication provides a comprehensive analysis of the issues entailing the land and maritime boarders in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region and approaches the issues from a human rights perspective detailing the impact cross border issues have on the lives and livelihood of people.
http://www.sacw.net/article13392.html

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6. INDIA: THE RIGHT WING'S USE OF RUMOUR AND FAKE NEWS PRECEDES SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CURRENT POLITICAL RESURGENCE | Akshaya Mukul
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Rudyard Kipling's six honest serving-men would have been a disillusioned lot now, hunting not for news but busy correcting fake news, lamenting how the sacred 5Ws and one H that ran through the veins of all news have been sacrificed at the altar of hate politics. Now, news is created without them. Its practitioners are not the professional journalists but a fast-growing tribe of politicians and peddlers of hate, mostly among the right-wing establishment who, with a fake Twitter handle, use altered news, pictures and videos to alter the truth.
http://www.sacw.net/article13387.html

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7. YASHPAL: A LIFE IN SCIENCE - A DOCUMENTARY FILM
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A documentary film about India's scientist, Prof.Yashpal (1927-2017), produced at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia, New Delhi. Directed by Yousuf Saeed, 2004
http://www.sacw.net/article13402.html
  
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8. INDIA: VICE-CHANCELLOR'S 'TANK' TALK - STATEMENT BY JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY TEACHERS UNION
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The JNUTA is amused by the JNU VC's earnest desire that a tank be rolled onto JNU campus. It is surprising that Prof. Jagadesh Kumar can only be inspired to patriotism upon beholding instruments of war. This seems to be only a personal affliction, since the rest of the JNU community does not need these visual aids to feel love and concern for this land, its environment and all its peoples, whether in the armed services or elsewhere.
http://www.sacw.net/article13401.html

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9. INDIA: VIOLENCE OF CLASS IN NOIDA - CRACKDOWN AFTER PROTEST BY DOMESTIC WORKERS - SELECTED REPORTS AND EDITORIALS
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Five days after a protest by domestic workers at the Mahagun Moderne residential society in Sector 78 in Noida [near New Delhi]; the Noida Authority on Monday [17 July 2017] demolished a settlement of workers shanties referred to as the 'bangladeshi colony' in the area where most of the workers lived. The residents welfare association of the upper class noida colony issued a notice saying ‘keep Bangladeshis out'. India's infamous minister of culture (well known for his murky role in honouring the Akhlaque murder accused in Dadri near Delhi) came out in support of the Noida family accused of assaulting a domestic worker and soon after the Noida local authorities went ahead razed to the ground the workers settlement. Influential people who live in gated colonies call the shots and use and abuse power to show the poor their place in a hugely unequal India
http://www.sacw.net/article13390.html

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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
India: RSS's education man DN Batra wants Tagore, Urdu, English, Arabic words removed from school texts
India: BJP spreads its wings - Translating Hindutva into national creed
India - Jammu Kashmir: RSS pushes minority status for Hindus living in Jammu and Kashmir
Into the world of the Kanwariyas Reportage by Snigdha Poonam (Hindustan Times)
Lest they be called anti-national | Smita Gupta
India: Appeasement of Minorities is a Myth | RAM PUNIYANI
French comic book by William de Tamaris uses India’s war on beef to illustrate the dangers of Hindutva
India: Diversity is a dead-end without individual freedom | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
India: Terrorism in the name of Cow / Gau Atankwad - a video report on India Today
India: Vishwa Hindu Parishad to equip cow vigilantes and to appoint appoint "dharma yoddhas" [religious warriors] 

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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11. SOUTH AFRICA: GUPTA LEAKS / TURKEY: DEMOCRATIC RESISTANCE FORMING
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 State capture - the Gupta link?
President Jacob Zuma and his government have been accused of allowing certain business interests to capture the state. 
https://www.enca.com/coverage/gupta-high-flyers

Transnet And The Gupta Leaks: 7 Major Companies Implicated In Scandals
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/07/17/transnet-and-the-gupta-leaks-7-major-companies-implicated-in-sc_a_23033812/

Les Gupta, la famille indienne qui fait trembler l’Afrique du Sud
http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2017/07/24/les-gupta-la-famille-indienne-qui-fait-trembler-l-afrique-du-sud_5164229_3212.html

o o o

Turkey: Democratic resistance forming

Le Monde - France. Democratic resistance to the Turkish government is growing, exiled journalist Can Dündar observes in Le Monde: “The social democrats who until now sought to move closer to the centrist parties for strategic reasons have now taken to the streets. The other leftist movements have been quick to join them. One can speak of a democratic front that has formed spontaneously on the streets of Istanbul. The demonstration's slogan 'justice' appeals to a need that is strong enough to gather everyone under its banner. It's a rally cry with a fundamental significance, because it shows that society refuses to be oppressed despite all the pressure. The fate of Turkey and Erdoğan will be sealed by a street-based protest movement.”
http://www.eurotopics.net/kurz/39d

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12. THIS IS INDIA’S CHINA WAR, ROUND TWO | Neville Maxwell
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(The South China Morning Post - 15 Jul 2017 / UPDATED ON 16 Jul 2017)

With India and China interacting over more than 3,000km of undefined frontier, friction is constant and that one day it would break back into border war has seemed inevitable. Two great Indian delusions have created this situation.

The lesser of these was the outright falsehood spun in the shock of immediate and utter Indian defeat in 1962’s Round One border war with China, when, after the hesitant launch of an Indian offensive to drive the Chinese out of India-claimed territory on the Chinese side of the McMahon Line, the pre-emptive Chinese counter-attack had in little more than a month crushed the Indian Army. It enabled the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to vacate all the territory it had occupied with nothing more than the minatory – and humiliating – warning to India, “don’t challenge us again”.

This standoff is China telling India to accept changing realities

The absurd myth of an “unprovoked Chinese aggression” which had taken India by surprise was promulgated to resurrect the broken image of “Pandit” Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister personally and pre-eminently responsible for the national disaster. Although long ago exposed and belied internationally, in India the myth has fermented in high military as well as political circles a longing for revenge.

Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into 1962 border war [https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1461099/neville-maxwells-revelation-reveals-india-was-hiding-nothing-over-its-1962]

The underlying and greater delusion is that India’s geographical limits are set by millennial historical forces. The process of boundary formation established and required by the international community (negotiation to achieve agreement on border alignment and cooperation to demarcate the agreed alignment on the ground) thus becomes otiose for the Indian republic. India, having “discovered” the alignment of its borders through historical research, need only display them on its official maps and those would become defined international boundaries “not open to discussion with anybody”, as Nehru put it in a notorious order in 1954.

Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1461102/neville-maxwell-interview-full-transcript]

He applied his own ruling literally and categorically, rejecting Beijing’s repeated calls for negotiation; and every one of his scores of successors in the Indian leadership has clung, or felt nailed to, that obdurate and provocative stance, in effect claiming the sole right unilaterally to define China’s as well as India’s borders. Every generation of literate Indians is inculcated with that false sense of national oppression by the cartographic image showing broad areas of Indian territory “occupied” by China, with reminders that Beijing’s maps reveal an intention to seize even more.

[The Dalai Lama has been the subject of many spats between China and India. Photo: Reuters] The Dalai Lama has been the subject of many spats between China and India. Photo: Reuters

The Sino-Indian interface along the undefined and contested frontier is consequently and constantly a source of international friction, waiting only for incidental sparks to set off martial conflagration.
China, India border dispute bubbles over once more, but no one is quite sure why

Border war was narrowly averted in 1987 when a belligerent Indian Army commander, General Krishnaswamy Sundarj, having been foiled in his plan to render Pakistan a “broken-back state”, turned his attention to the China border. He massively reinforced positions there and in deliberate provocation pushed numerous posts across the established McMahon line of actual control. China reacted with matching troop concentrations and air force inductions, and warned India to desist from its aggressions, which, in the late summer of 1987, it did, probably under US pressure.

[Former Indian prime minister Narasimha Rao negotiated the only border agreement between India and China. Photo: AP] Former Indian prime minister Narasimha Rao negotiated the only border agreement between India and China. Photo: AP

The heat went out of the confrontation but the Indian Army was left in a grossly unbalanced situation, with great troop concentrations beyond normal supply reach. That predicament induced a new Indian government, under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, to negotiate in 1993 India’s one and only border agreement with the PRC: jointly to observe the line of actual control (LAC) and to reduce force levels to a practical minimum. Later, developments fell far short of what the treaty required.

The current confrontation in the Sikkim sector might appear to have similar origins in military rather than political assertions, with India’s army chief, General Bipin Rawat, beating his chest with boasts that India can fight and win on “two and a half” fronts simultaneously.
Border dispute an obstacle to building trust between China and India

But the context points to deeper factors. India has recently been goading China in what can only have been a purposeful series of actions. Rather than let the LAC mature with the passing years, India has been needling Beijing by taking such doll figures as the Dalai Lama and loud-mouthed American diplomats into the disputed border region India proclaims to be its state of Arunachal Pradesh, and megaphoning the false claim that the McMahon alignment represents a legal boundary rather than a historical but contested claim. The McMahon Line in fact rests on a British diplomatic forgery, long exposed. This may be another indication that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that India’s interest will be served better in an aggressive American alliance rather than in a neighbourly relationship with China.

[Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained a strategy of aligning his nation with the US and Japan. Photo: Reuters] Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained a strategy of aligning his nation with the US and Japan. Photo: Reuters

The sudden convergence of Indian and Chinese troop concentrations around the current military confrontation in Doklam illustrates again the truth of Curzon’s observation in his Oxford lecture that borders can be “the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issue of war or peace”. There is a spicy historical irony here because this confrontation is precisely sited in the single, tiny Sino-Indian border sector that was long ago treaty-defined and demarcated.
What’s at stake for China as unsure Modi meets unpredictable Trump?

In 1890, rational self-interest brought the mighty British Raj to sit down in conference, as if on equal terms, with the ruler of the Lilliputian Himalayan state of Sikkim, agree on the alignment of the state’s border and jointly mark that out on the ground. Time, weather and probably local human mischief will have obliterated the border markers but the careful verbal description in the Treaty prevails to prove that the local Indian commander, with or without higher orders, has blatantly moved forces into what is now Chinese territory. Beijing, sorely chafed already by India’s recent repeated provocations, appears to have decided that this is too much, and has itself adopted the absolutist Nehruvian position of “no discussion without withdrawal”.

[Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Photo: AFP] Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Photo: AFP

The Indian attempt to depict this confrontation as tripartite should be disregarded. Bhutan is not an independent actor, is rather an Indian glove-puppet. A brigade group of the Indian Army, permanently stationed in Bhutan and now reinforced, is an ever-present reminder to Bhutan’s ruling group of what happened to Sikkim when its ruler aspired to independence – speedy annexation.

Thus this still petty armed confrontation has a real and potentially enormous explosive potential – Round Two of Sino-Indian war. The way out, and ahead, lies where it always has been, in the opening of comprehensive, unconditional Sino-Indian boundary negotiation. What bars the way is the requirement of Indian policy reversal, which in the current bellicose mood and twisted popular sense of injury in India would require heroic bravery of leadership.
India’s China policy off target, says Modi’s Mandarin-speaking ‘guided missile’

There is an example of just such an action, which seeded what now appears to be the key geopolitical factor of the age, the Sino-Russian alliance: Gorbachev’s reversal of the Soviets’ no-negotiation stance in the border dispute with China, blooded in the Zhenbao Island battles of 1969. From the long-extended negotiations to compromise severely clashing territorial claims emerged a mutual confidence and trust that, annealed by common exposure to American hostility, set into an alliance just short of formal declaration. Should a leader ever emerge in India with the courage and vision Gorbachev showed, such too could be a Sino-Indian future.
Related articles

Neville Maxwell, who covered the 1962 China-India border war as the South Asia correspondent for The Times, is the author of India’s China War. In March 2014, Maxwell leaked the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, an Indian government report from 1963 examining India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian War that is yet to be declassified.

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13. INDIA: A MADMAN AT THE CENSOR BOARD 
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(The Times of India - July 22, 2017)

Take away Nihalani’s scissors: CBFC should limit itself to certification and relinquish its blundering attempts at censorship

Pavan K Varma in TOI Edit Page | Edit Page, India | TOI

Amartya Sen must have written ‘The Argumentative Indian’ before he came across Pahlaj Nihalani, the chairperson of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). For, while Sen believes – or believed until now – that India is a country where arguments flourish because people have the right to hold different opinions, Nihalani appears to consider such a right quite unnecessary, even subversive.

There could be three possible reasons why the esteemed guardian of what our cinema can show or not show thought it right to beep out the words ‘Gujarat’, ‘Hindu India’, ‘cow’ and ‘Hindutva view of India’ from economist Suman Ghosh’s documentary on the Nobel laureate, which was to be launched on July 14, but is now awaiting CBFC clearance. Firstly, this could be a reflection of his personal beliefs of what can – and cannot – be spoken of in cinema. Secondly, he may believe that those who appointed him would like his censor’s scissors to snip in such a way. And, thirdly, he could be acting under instructions, spoken or indicated, that this is what his job should be.

Illustration: Ajit Ninan

Each of these three possibilities raise further questions of great relevance to the foundational tenets of our democracy. Do a person’s individual beliefs empower him to impose them on others? Is what is permissible, or not permissible, to be decided solely on personal bias, or even worse, on a person’s political affiliations? Once a person assumes an office where he is expected to work with impartiality and fairness, can he with impunity take decisions only in accordance with a political agenda?

The possibility that Nihalani acts on instructions of his political masters is even more worrisome, for it involves the subversion of institutions. Ultimately, democracy is not only about periodic elections; it is equally about the robustness of institutions that ensure democratic practice. To be fair, the subversion of institutions is not the monopoly of the BJP dispensation. It began earlier, and has only reinforced itself over the years. But, whether it happened before, or is happening now, the fact that it is happening is wrong, and cannot be condoned.

Personal bias or institutional partisanship is particularly dangerous in the creative field. In this case it is about cinema, but freedom of expression is equally vital in literature, theatre, academia and the arts. True, nobody – not even artists – can claim absolute freedom of expression – and our Constitution, while guaranteeing this freedom also admits reasonable restrictions. But in a vibrant democracy such restrictions must be the rare exception. Moreover, a civilisation like ours, whose foundations are dialogic in nature, cannot be forced to become monochromatic only to suit one particular point of view.

There could also be another way to understand Nihalani’s actions. Perhaps he is actually a secret admirer of Amartya Sen, and has deliberately created an entirely unnecessary controversy to ensure that more people see this documentary and hear what Sen has to say. This is the inevitable and invariable consequence of ill-advised censorship, be it a book or a film. We have seen this in the case of the films Udta Punjab and Lipstick under my Burkha. In this sense, it could be possible that the censor board chief believes in the Freudian dictum that an obstacle is required to heighten the libido, and that prohibition only increases desire.

Moreover, there is the genuine question of whether the ‘few corrections’ in Ghosh’s film that the CBFC has made are, in today’s cyber age, actually implementable. For instance, Ghosh put up a 101 second trailer of his hour long documentary on YouTube that went viral within minutes. That has only whetted the appetite of a much larger audience to see the full documentary, and there is no way to prevent it from finding an accessible platform for viewership in cyber space irrespective of the length of CBFC’s scissors.

The truth is that the time has come to revisit the report submitted by noted film maker Shyam Benegal in 2016, which recommended that CBFC should limit itself to certification and relinquish its blundering attempts at censorship. It has been over a year since this report was submitted, but the government has yet to take a view.

The time has also come to review the entire Cinematograph Act that dates back to 1952. India has moved on; societal values have changed; technology has undergone a revolution. Censors of the old school live in a world whose foundations have collapsed.

There is a larger issue too: why is Nihalani, and BJP that appointed him, so brittle about any dissenting view? The way Amartya Sen, an internationally respected scholar, has been treated by the current government – such as when he was removed from the chancellorship of the Nalanda University so abruptly – merely because he does not agree with BJP about everything, is certainly in bad taste. Perhaps Nihalani, and BJP which makes no secret of its desire to resurrect the memories of ancient India, should read some of the basic Hindu texts to understand how much dissent and debate was an intrinsic part of that period. Then, perhaps, they will take the scissors away from Nihalani’s censorious hands before he further embarrasses both himself and the government.

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14. INDIA: BABA RAMDEV LAUNCHES ‘SECURITY’ BUSINESS: SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?
by Binu Mathew
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(countercurrents.org - July 15, 2017)

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev has launched a private security firm “Parakram Suraksha Private Ltd’. The aim of the company ensuring security and developing military instinct. According to Acharya Balakrishna, CEO of Ramdev’s Patanjali, “Security is a very important issue either for a man or a woman. Our aim is to prepare individuals for self and country’s security and for this we have formed Parakram. This will help develop military instinct in each and every citizen of the country so as to awaken the spirit and determination for individual and national security. Ramdev has hired retired Army and police personnel to train young interested recruits and plan to make a mark in security”.

In a democratic country there is nothing wrong with starting a legitimate business. A security firm is a perfectly legitimate business. Baba Ramdev is not just a Yoga guru with millions of followers including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the president of the ruling party, BJP’s Amit Shah but also a shrewd businessman.  He has been seen performing his yoga tricks on several government functions including the Yoga Day.

Baba Ramdev’s “Patanjali Ayurved Ltd” which started its operations in 2008-09 was a marginal player until Narendra Modi came to power. Since then his business has boomed. In 2016-17 it doubled its revenue from Rs 5000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore and has become the fastest growing FMCG company in India.  There are many who see the political patronage of the current political dispensation as the reason behind the phenomenal rise of the Patanjali empire.

So why should one be cynical about a well established businessman starting another lucrative business?

In April 2016, during a conference for harmony of the Rashtrya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Rohtak (Haryana). The media quoted Baba Ramdev as saying that he would have “beheaded” those who refuse to chant “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” were it not for the law of the land. Baba Ramdev said, “We respect this country’s law and Constitution, otherwise if anybody disrespects Bharat Mata, we have the capability of beheading not one but thousands and lakhs.”. This statement was directed at the Muslim community. This should send a chill down the spine of every peace loving citizen of the world.

When a person who has publicly stated that he is ready to behead hundreds of thousands of Muslims just for not ‘chanting’ patriotic slogans starts a private security company with an aim to “develop military instinct in each and every citizen of the country so as to awaken the spirit and determination for individual and national security” we should be worried.

Private security is a fast growing business in India. It’s the sought after business for the unskilled laborers and the former farmers who migrate to the cities and towns. They are in their millions in India. They can be spotted every nook and corner of India. If Baba Ramdev is going to instill ‘military instinct’  in them we should be worried.  At a time when every ‘other’ in India is termed an ‘anti-national’ by the Sangh Parivar, Baba Ramdev instilling the spirit of ‘national security’ in his ‘private army’ is worrying.  What is the purpose of hiring “retired Army and police personnel to train young interested recruits’’ if not for raising a para-military private army?

There is also a parallel in America. The Blackwater security company founded by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince contracts most of the non-field operations of the American military. Blackwater was later renamed as a Xe Services and now simply Academi. It has contracts with American military worth billions of dollars. Will this be the first step towards privatisation of the Indian army?

Given the business acumen of Baba Ramdev and the patronage he gets from the ruling dispensation and the Sangh Parivar, it would not be surprising, if he puts most of the currently operating security agencies out of business.  Would you like to see nationalistic, ‘patriotic’, militarily trained Parakram Surakshak’s guarding your businesses and housing complexes? I would be worried.

To conclude, let me put a speculative question. How would these trained Parakram Surakshak’s behave in a communal riot, which is not infrequent in India?

Binu Mathew is the Editor of countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor[at]countercurrents.org

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15. BRITAIN DIDN’T FIGHT THE SECOND WORLD WAR — THE BRITISH EMPIRE DID
by William Dalrymple
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(The Spectator - 25 July 2015

Yasmin Khan’s superlative The Raj at War finally does justice to the crucial contribution of the Indian army to Hitler’s defeat, says 

The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War Yasmin Khan
The Bodley Head, pp.416, £25

In 1929, when Edwin Lutyens handed over the newly completed building site of New Delhi to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, many believed he had created a capital for a British empire in India that would last if not 1,000, then at least 100 years. It was, as Lord Stamfordham wrote, ‘a symbol of the might and permanence of the British empire’ that had been commissioned specifically so that ‘the Indian will see for the first time the power of western civilisation’.

The plan of New Delhi was deliberately intended to express the limitless power of the Viceroy. In the words of Sir Herbert Baker: ‘Hurrah for despotism!’ Every detail of New Delhi was meant to echo this thought — from the stone bells on the capitals, which could never ring to announce the end of British rule, to the sheer imperial monumentality of the scheme, which even Lutyens’s greatest champion, Robert Byron, described as ‘an offence against democracy’.

Yet just 18 years later, in 1947, Lord Mountbatten lowered the Union Jack and moved out of Viceroy’s House, and the first president of democratic, independent India, Dr Rajendra Prasad, moved in. At the same time, imperial India was partitioned, creating two independent nation-states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. After 300 years in India, the British divided and quit.

Lutyens and his contemporaries were hardly alone in failing to see that they stood at the very end of both British colonial rule and of a united India. In 1929, independence had seemed very far away, and the idea of a breakaway Muslim state of Pakistan had barely even been mooted. How did such radical changes take place so quickly? As Yasmin Khan brilliantly demonstrates in her path-breaking study, The Raj at War, what changed everything was the second world war.

The British always liked to believe they stood alone in 1940, a plucky little island defying the massed ranks of fascists and Nazis. What we tend to forget, as Khan reminds us, is that ‘Britain did not fight the second world war, the British empire did.’ Nearly 20 years ago, Antony Beevor reminded us that for most of the war the majority of German troops were facing not westwards over the channel, towards Britain and the US, but eastwards towards Stalin’s Russia. Now Khan performs a similar service when she points out that no less than five million citizens of the British empire joined the military services between 1939 and 1945, and that almost two million of these, ‘the largest volunteer army in history’, were from South Asia. At many of Britain’s greatest victories and at several of the war’s most crucial turning points — El Alamein, Monte Cassino, Kohima — a great proportion of ‘British’ troops were not British at all, but Indian.

Yet India’s war was badly mishandled from the beginning. The Viceroy, the tactless and unimaginative Lord Linlithgow, declared war on behalf of India without even consulting India’s increasingly assertive nationalist politicians. As a result left-wing congressmen, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who might willingly have supported the global fight against fascism, found themselves pushed into opposing a war they would otherwise have endorsed. Instead, they fell in line when, in 1942, Gandhi launched his ‘Quit India’ campaign even as the Japanese advanced towards India from Burma. Nehru, who memorably described Linlithgow as ‘heavy of body and slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness’, spent the rest of the war in prison in Ahmendnagar, writing his Discovery of India. By the time he and the other Congress leaders were released in 1945, the world had changed irrevocably, and nowhere more so than India.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had been a relatively minor politician in 1939, had supported the war effort, and while his Congress rivals were locked up, he used the time to turn himself into the self-declared ‘sole spokesman’ for India’s Muslims. In 1940 he set out for the first time the goal of a separate Indian Muslim state called Pakistan. By 1945 Hindu-Muslim violence had spiralled out of even Jinnah’s ability to control it, and partition seemed the only alternative to outright civil war.

At the same time, war transformed the face of India. Indian factory owners and industrialists made huge fortunes providing military supplies, even as two million Bengali peasants died of starvation, partly as a result of war measures aimed at keeping the Japanese at bay. Khan writes:

    Cities such as Karachi and Bangalore boomed, the infrastructure of airlines, companies and road networks were laid by wartime projects, and consumer imports from tinned food to fridges came onto the market. The Americans became more economically and socially influential than before. Middle-class women found new freedoms in work and activism. Nehru’s planned economy and the welfare-orientated developmental state that he tried to craft after 1947 had its roots in the Raj’s transformation of the 1940s.

By 1945, Britain was exhausted and bankrupt, and lacked either the will or the resources to maintain its empire. Realising that we had lost any remaining vestiges of control, on the afternoon of 20 February 1947 the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, announced before Parliament that British rule would end ‘no later than June 1948’. As Khan notes:

    The war flattened out the pretensions of empire, making ceremonial and ritual excesses look archaic, challenging old compacts between king-emperor and the landed elites…. It heightened nationalism, both in Britain and India, so that older forms of transnational solidarity became dated and obsolete. The Raj was left in debt, morally redundant and staffed by exhausted administrators whose sense of purpose could not be sustained…. Ultimately, the war delivered decolonisation and the partition of 1947 — neither of which was inevitable or even foreseen in 1939.

The second world war is one of the most written-about episodes in all world history: every month sees a dozen new titles published. Yet, astonishingly, The Raj at War breaks new ground on almost every page. Based on years of intensive archive research in India and Britain, and written in beautifully polished and often moving prose, Khan’s book is the first detailed study both of the extent to which India — and two million Indian troops — changed the course of the war, and of how the war irrevocably changed India’s future. It succeeds brilliantly in illuminating both processes.

What is perhaps most remarkable is the way Khan has found of bringing into confluence two different kinds of historical writing. Her work has the detailed research, economic rigour and theoretical superstructure of heavyweight academic history; yet it also has the narrative momentum, prose style and humanistic and biographical insights of a more literary work.

With its wide-angled vision and breadth of interests, ranging from recruitment to land requisition to battles and brothels, The Raj at War acts as the perfect foil to another equally extraordinary book, coincidentally published in the same month. This is Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War by one of India’s most brilliant and talented young writers, Raghu Karnad (recently reviewed in these pages by David Crane). Farthest Field tells a similar story to Khan’s book, but through the lens of one family who lost three sons in different theatres of the war.

‘People have two deaths,’ writes Karnad; ‘the first at the end of their lives, when they go away, and the second at the end of the memory of their lives, when all who remember them are gone. Then a person quits the world completely.’ These two complementary books, superbly written acts of remembrance, recreate a world previously largely passed over by literature, and together they remind us how much we owe the forgotten Indians who died for our freedom during the second world war, even as we were only grudgingly moving towards granting them their own.

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16. BURMA’S TRUE NEWS INFORMATION UNIT
Sean Gleeson
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(London Review of Books,  13 July 2017)

Burma’s decades-old regime of pre-publication newspaper censorship was dismantled in 2012. Three years later, ahead of the election that brought Aung San Suu Kyi to power, ten journalists were in prison. According to an Amnesty International report, Burmese journalists were labouring under a new ‘climate of fear’. ‘We don’t have any safety,’ the reporter Lawi Weng told the Amnesty researchers. The authorities ‘can arrest us, they can take us to court anytime.’

Lawi, a former colleague of mine and one of Burma’s most talented reporters, was arrested late last month. He was travelling back from the northern village of Namhsan with two colleagues when their truck was stopped at a military roadblock. They were held incommunicado at an army camp for two days, transferred into police custody at Hsipaw and charged under the colonial-era Unlawful Associations Act for making contact with an insurgent group. They will stand trial on 21 July and face a two-year minimum sentence if convicted, which at this point is a formality.

In the fifteen months since Suu Kyi’s government took power, 17 journalists have been jailed or otherwise threatened with criminal charges, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. Most have been prosecuted under a telecommunications law, enacted in 2013, that criminalises defamation on social media. The editor of a national daily remains behind bars after publishing a satirical article on an army propaganda film, despite later publishing in full an apology drafted by the military’s True News Information Unit. Another reporter in Yangon, after pressing the police over allegations of military involvement in the assassination of Suu Kyi’s senior adviser Ko Ni in January, found himself the subject of a defamation suit by a member of a Buddhist nationalist group known for its ties to the previous government.

Lawi had been returning from an opium poppy bonfire, a piece of ceremonial pageantry performed by government officials across the country; Burma is the world’s second-largest exporter of heroin and the centre of the regional methamphetamine trade. But the event Lawi was covering had been organised by the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, one of more than 20 insurgent groups currently active after 70 years of civil conflicts. A relatively new organisation, the TNLA was formed after an attempt by the army to co-opt its predecessor as a proxy force a decade ago. The Ta’ang Women’s Organisation has documented the ravaging of communities such as Namhsan. Since a pro-government militia flooded the area with opium, it says, there are now villages where most of the adults are drug addicts. But the TNLA, too, draws a great deal of its revenue from taxing opium farmers, and its arms are supplied by other insurgent groups complicit in the drug trade.

Lawi and his colleagues are facing jail because the army would rather these conflicts and atrocities went unreported. Suu Kyi won’t save them; one of her confidantes publicly defended the arrests. But in truth the civilian government’s powers are severely limited. The constitution drafted by the former junta gives the armed forces a veto over any amendments to the document; federal reforms of the charter are the non-negotiable central plank of every insurgent group in the country. Accountable only to itself, the military retains control of the police, local government and every coercive mechanism of the state.

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17. PAINT THE UNITED COLOURS OF INDIA | Happymon Jacob
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(The Hindu - July 12, 2017)

The Sangh Parivar’s saffron agenda must not dictate the country’s foreign policy

By deciding not to gift copies of the Bhagavad Gita to Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visits abroad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to have ignored the self-congratulatory statement of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, that foreign dignitaries were now being given copies of Gita and Ramayana instead of Taj Mahal replicas (because they, according to Mr. Adityanath, do not reflect Indian culture). As a matter of fact, Mr. Modi’s gifts over the past three years have included an impressive selection, even as Hindu religious texts have become more prominent than ever in the Prime Minister’s gift bag.

Even though Mr. Modi’s gifts to foreign dignitaries have comprised more than Hindu religious books, the BJP-led government in New Delhi has exhibited strong tendencies of saffronising India’s foreign policy, one step at a time, and without much resistance. Remember the strong pitch made by none other than External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in 2014 to declare Bhagavad Gita as India’s ‘Rashtriya Granth’ (national book)? During Mr. Modi’s recent visit to Israel, some BJP leaders even referred to the underlying belief within the Sangh Parivar of the desirability of forging strong bonds between Hindutva and Zionism. The issue of ‘saffronising’ foreign policy is serious, and deserves to be examined in greater depth.
 
Religious symbolism

Mr. Modi’s official visits abroad have often been steeped in Hindu religious symbolism. Recall his first visit to Nepal in 2014 when he visited the Hindu temple, Pashupatinath. Clad in saffron attire, wearing a rudraksh garland and sandal paste smeared on his forehead, the religious symbolism of Mr. Modi’s visit to the temple was spectacular, if not prime ministerial. It is a different matter that the development of a potential Hindu religious plank in Indo-Nepal relations, a key piece in the Sangh Parivar’s long-cherished dream, was sabotaged by events thereafter, including India’s ‘unofficial’ economic blockade of Nepal in 2015.

When Mr. Modi visited Abu Dhabi in 2015, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government announced the allocation of land for the UAE capital’s first Hindu temple. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) tweeted on the occasion, “A long wait for the Indian community ends. On the occasion of PM’s visit, UAE Govt decides to allot land for building a temple in Abu Dhabi,” with Mr. Modi following up with another tweet: “I am very thankful to the UAE Govt for their decision to allot land in order to build a Temple in Abu Dhabi. This is a great step.” How so?

While providing land to construct a temple for the Hindu community in the UAE (for Hindu migrant workers from countries such as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, etc.) is in itself a laudable act, what does the official visit of a secular republic’s Prime Minister have to do with the allocation of land for a Hindu temple in an Islamic country? These tweets, by the MEA and the Prime Minister, were not in keeping with the secular traditions of India’s foreign policy engagements. Wasn’t ensuring that the Indian migrant workers in UAE are not mistreated, as they regularly are, more important than portraying the “land for temple” as a major foreign policy achievement? Let’s not get carried away: it was neither foreign policy, nor an achievement. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s fixation with ‘Mandir’ cannot be projected as the Indian state’s legitimate foreign policy interest.
Refugee policy

The BJP’s proposed refugee policy also tells the story of a deep-seated saffron agenda. Its 2014 election manifesto was unequivocal in stating that “India shall remain a natural home for persecuted Hindus and they shall be welcome to seek refuge here”. Note that the statement is not one that promises to protect all persecuted minorities in the neighbourhood, as the country has done in the past, but a pointedly Hindutva sentiment. The party followed up on its promise when it came to power by proposing a controversial Bill to amend the country’s citizenship laws. The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, proposes that Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis and Christians entering India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan not be considered as “illegal immigrants” — no word on Muslims here! By not providing any justification whatsoever for discriminating against Muslims (if there can, in fact, be any), given that Hindus and Muslims comprise most refugees turning up at India’s borders, the motivation is clear. While on the one hand this appeases the communal vote banks in mainland India, the move also could potentially enhance BJP’s electoral fortunes in the north-eastern borderlands since the proposed law could alter the voter demographics in the region to BJP’s advantage. To get a more complete picture, read this together with the recently passed ‘Enemy Property (Amendment and Validation) Bill, 2016’ which could potentially dispossess many Muslim families of their inherited property.

India abroad

New Delhi has traditionally viewed the Indian diaspora to be a powerful force multiplier and has both used their services and catered to their needs. The Modi government has gone way beyond the legitimate exercise of engaging the diaspora to enthusiastically promoting overseas Hindutva/Sangh outfits for ideological ends, couched in sophisticated foreign policy showbiz, of course.

Clearly, the outright enlisting of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated organisations such as the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) for the government’s foreign policy pursuits and other official purposes can only be termed as attempts at saffronising our secular foreign policy. Recall how the HSS and the OFBJP-USA, along with the MEA and the Indian embassy in Washington, played a crucial role in organising Mr. Modi’s official visit to the U.S. in September 2014.

Several events in the Prime Minister’s official visits abroad today are organised by HSS/RSS/OFBJP activists in collaboration with the MEA and the Indian embassy. While these activists are indeed members of the Indian diaspora, they only represent one fragment of it, and a communal one. What is even more worrying is that many of these Hindutva organisations are increasingly partnering with Indian missions abroad to organise official functions of the Indian state. Consider this: during this year’s International Day of Yoga, the official partners of the Indian Embassy in Washington included the Association of United Hindu and Jain Temples, Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth, Hindu American Foundation, HSS, and several other Hindu organisations (http://bit.ly/2sLjxaA).

This brings back memories of the appointment of Bhishma Agnihotri, an office-bearer of the HSS, as India’s Ambassador-at-Large in the U.S. by the Vajpayee government. Mr. Agnihotri’s ad hoc appointment had led to run-ins between him and India’s official representation in Washington.

The proclivity of the Hindutva organisations, many of whose members are not Indian citizens, to grab the limelight of New Delhi’s official engagements abroad is resented by career diplomats who have often cautioned the MEA that such organisations should be kept away from official functions. Moreover, the BJP’s tendency to promote overseas Hindu organisations through the foreign policy engagements of the country will not only undermine the official and formal nature of the practice of diplomacy but will also divide the Indian diaspora along communal lines.

These organisations are also compensated by the government particularly during the ‘Pravasi Bharatiya Divas’ celebrations. The outsourcing of India’s foreign policy activities to overseas Hindu organisations should therefore be put an end to.

India’s foreign policy engagement, the BJP leadership needs to remember, is the sovereign function of the Indian state, not an instrument of the Sangh Parivar’s ideological agenda. Let us hope that Mr. Adityanath’s communal rhetoric about avoiding ‘unIndian’ gifts for foreign dignitaries does not alter the standard practice.

Happymon Jacob is Associate Professor, Disarmament Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

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18. INDIA: ARMY TANK IN JNU - IT IS NOT THE VC’S JOB TO INCULCATE NATIONALISM IN STUDENTS (EDITORIAL, HT)
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(Hindustan Times - July 24, 2017)

EDITORIAL

Educational institutions are not the grounds for what is obviously a politically motivated drive to inculcate nationalism. The vice chancellor has eroded the credibility of both his office and JNU

Jawaharlal Nehru University has been in the news in recent months for all the wrong reasons. The main one is the charge of sedition against many of its students for allegedly raising anti-national issues. Now the vice chancellor has undertaken an exercise that is bound to draw more unfavourable attention to the university. He has asked Union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and General VK Singh to help him procure a tank to be displayed in a prominent place on the campus to be a constant reminder of the sacrifices the Indian Army makes. He also celebrated Kargil Vijay Diwas on the campus in collaboration with Army veterans for the first time.

It is not the VC’s job to inculcate nationalism in students and certainly not through installing a tank in the university. Of far greater import and relevance is the fact that given the recent turmoil, many students have suffered due to the inability to complete their courses. Seats for research have been drastically cut. The VC does not seem overly concerned about this. Celebrating military victories is best left to those who have expertise in the field and to politicians and the public if it so wishes, not to academics.

Nationalism is something which must come from within and not through external militaristic displays. This action by the VC will only evoke protest, derailing studies further. This is of a piece with carrying giant tirangas as a symbol of nationalism. These attempts to foist nationalism through these symbols are meaningless.

Pride in one’s country stems from the values and ethics that students witness in public life. The use of military hardware to instil patriotism is reminiscent of the worst of Soviet-style dictatorships where the State exerted its might through these. This has no place in a democracy where it is possible to not be a hypernationalist and yet be a good citizen.

Educational institutions in any event are not the grounds for what is obviously a politically motivated drive to inculcate nationalism. The VC has eroded the credibility of both his office and the institution by doing this.

A nation’s worth is not measured solely in military terms nor is nationalism synonymous with symbols of war. A comprehensive and relevant education system could be a far greater value addition to nation-building and it is this that should be the VC’s remit.

The ministry for human resource development should take him to task and ask him to stick to his brief. The Army is more than competent to commemorate its achievements without such interventions from academics. It can only be hoped that this does not start a trend at competitive nationalism among universities, which would spell danger for higher education.

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19. PHILIPPINES: SUING FOR PEACE, DUTERTE GETS ALL-OUT WAR
by Richard Javad Heydarian
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(Asia Times - July 24, 2017)

Communist rebels have seized on the government's pre-occupation with Islamic State linked militants to make strategic gains and undercut a once hopeful peace process


“I am here to bully you and to kill you because there’s a war going on between us and you are killing my soldiers,” Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte recently lashed out at exiled Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison.

“Maybe I will kill you if I have the chance.”

The Filipino president’s fiery comments against his former college professor and mentor came in response to escalating tensions between the Philippine government and communist rebels.

There are indications the insurgent group, the CPP’s affiliated New People’s Army (NPA), has seized on the government’s pre-occupation with combating Islamic State-affiliate groups in the besieged city of Marawi to up the momentum of its attacks.

A series of armed encounters between the two sides, as well as the recent raising of a luxury tourist compound by NPA rebels, has put Duterte’s once hopeful peace initiative with the decades-old insurgency in a state of limbo.

The fifth rounds of talks, which were scheduled for May and are being held with Sison’s National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), a coalition of left-leaning organizations including the CPP and NPA, were called off. Duterte has since said that there won’t be any talks unless the fighting stops and a comprehensive ceasefire takes hold.

In recent weeks, communist rebels have declared a de facto war against Duterte’s martial law proclamation, which they view as an unjust pretext to clamp down on rebel groups.
Chief of the National Democratic Front of Philippines (NDFP) Jose Maria Sison answers journalists' questions during the opening ceremony of the formal peace talks between the Philippine government and the (NDFP) in Rome on 19 January 2017. The Philippines expressed hope of securing a permanent ceasefire deal with communist rebels waging one of Asia's longest insurgencies, as peace talks resumed in Italy. / AFP PHOTO / TIZIANA FABI
NDFP chief Jose Maria Sison at the opening ceremony of formal peace talks between the Philippine government and communist groups in Rome on January 19, 2017. Photo: AFP/Tiziana Fabi

Sison has lambasted Dutetre as a “lunatic who takes pride in extrajudicial killings,” and is “drunk with power and thinks he can just order revolutionaries to surrender.”

When Duterte won the presidency last year, he made it clear that aside from combating illegal drugs, his other priority would be to break the deadlock in peace negotiations with major rebel groups, particularly communists.

The self-described ‘socialist’ president is widely known for his long history of cordial relations with communist rebels, whom he partially tolerated and dealt with while serving as mayor of Mindanao’s Davao City.

As a confidence-building measure, Duterte released from prison major rebel leaders, including the Tiamzon couple, who have been the de facto chiefs of the communist movement in the Philippines in recent decades.

In an unprecedented move in Philippine history, Duterte also offered several cabinet positions to communist-leaning individuals, who are now in charge of social welfare, agrarian reform and labor departments.
Members of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) hold a demonstration calling for peace negotiations and social economic reforms in Manila on January 23, 2017.A new round of negotiations between the NDFP and Philippine government began in Rome on January 19, with the government's chief negotiator Silvestre Bello saying longstanding contentious issues could be "hurdled". The communists have been waging a "national democratic revolution" since 1968 to overthrow a capitalist system that has created one of Asia's biggest rich-poor divides and claimed 30,000 lives, according to the military. / AFP PHOTO / NOEL CELIS
National Democratic Front of the Philippines’ members hold a demonstration in Manila calling for peace negotiations and social economic reforms on January 23, 2017. Photo: AFP/ Noel Celis

To expedite the peace drive, Duterte also introduced a new modality into the process by agreeing to discuss and negotiate several areas of disagreement simultaneously. He appointed veteran peace negotiators Silvestre Bello III and Jesus Dureza to oversee the process.

At one point, Duterte even suggested that he might facilitate the return of Sison, the communist ideologue and the movement’s inspirational head, from the Netherlands, where he has been exiled for several decades.

“Once more I am grateful to President Duterte for his acts of goodwill to move forward the peace negotiations between his government and [communist rebels],” declared Sison in August last year, as the peace negotiations rapidly gained pace.

“President Duterte and I remain good friends…Our friendship has a strong basis in…desire to serve the national and democratic rights and best interests of the Filipino people.”

Two key factors underwrote the initial positive momentum of the peace process. On one hand, communist rebels, while strong in central peripheral regions of Mindanao and other poverty-stricken areas of the country, have lost much of their previous armed strength.
In this photo taken on December 26, 2014, members of the communists' armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA), walk past a hammer and sickle flag displayed in a village as they mark the 46th anniversary of its founding, on the southern island of Mindanao. The Philippine government and communist rebels said on December 26 that formal negotiations to end a lengthy insurgency could restart shortly, though the rebels' armed wing announced it was beefing up its guerilla campaign. AFP PHOTO / AFP PHOTO / STR
A New People’s Army (NPA) camp on the southern island of Mindanao in a 2014 file photo. Photo: AFP/Stringer

Throughout the 1980s, they had an estimated 25,000 armed regulars, but fractious infighting, internal purges and relatively effective counter-insurgency efforts by the Philippine military has reduced that number to around 4,000 rebels under arms in recent years.

Meanwhile, the government has also focused on bringing development to rural areas and ending the various insurgencies which have hemorrhaged the country’s military capabilities.

This is particularly crucial in light of rising external threats on the Philippines’ western and eastern flanks, namely in the South China Sea and Benham Rise maritime areas, as well as hopes of attracting investment to the neglected and under-developed peripheries.

By the end of 2016, as Duterte concluded his first six months in office, the two sides seemed on the verge of achieving the impossible. Peace negotiations with the communists heavily dominated the government’s agenda, relegating parallel efforts with Muslim rebel groups to a secondary priority.

Now, however, the table has turned, with Duterte shifting his focus to peace negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) amid the rise of Islamic State-affiliated groups in Mindanao and the virtual breakdown in negotiations with communist rebels.

Certain of the IS-aligned groups were previously linked to the MILF, which has publicly opposed the harsh tactics used by the militants in their siege of Marawi.
A Filipino soldier prepares to launch a mortar from their combat position as government troops continue their assault against insurgents from the Maute group in Marawi city, Philippines July 1, 2017. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
A Filipino soldier in combat position as government troops continue their assault against Islamic State-affiliated insurgents in Marawi city on July 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Jorge Silva

The president is expected to designate a revised version of the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) — the crucial legal framework for the creation of a Muslim-dominated sub-state unit in the southern Philippines — as a priority bill.

This would revive hopes of an enduring alliance with the government and moderate rebel groups against extremist elements in Duterte’s home island of Mindanao.

Negotiations with communist rebels have bogged down on three interrelated factors. First, intermittent clashes between rebel groups and the military have raised concerns over whether the communist leadership is fully in control of its rank and file as well as regional commanders.

Second, there is still stiff opposition within the defense establishment, particularly among leading officials in the military, to what they perceive as excessive concessions to the rebels, who have demanded the release of a growing number of their jailed comrades in recent months.
Old People's War for New People's Army: the truce is off and armed conflict may begin again in earnest. Photo: AFP
New People’s Army foot soldiers in a file photo. Photo: AFP

Third, the communist rebels oppose the government’s demand for a comprehensive ceasefire ahead of a final binding agreement, suspecting this could be used by the military as a pretext to infiltrate their areas of control.

They have also sternly opposed Duterte’s martial law declaration in Mindanao, which Congress agreed over the weekend to extend until the end of the year, for similar reasons.

Decades of bloody conflict have left deep wounds in the hearts and minds of both sides, particularly among the armed wing of the communist movement and the Philippine military. While both sides are expected to eventually return to the negotiating table, their is no clear end or much mutual agreement in sight. 

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20. BRAZIL:  ABOUT LULA’S CONVICTION – STATEMENT MES-PSOL
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http://portaldelaizquierda.com/2017/07/about-lulas-conviction-statement-mes-psol/

Sérgio Moro convicted Lula for corruption. The judgment on this decision cannot be just legal. It’s mostly political. Legally, the process did not end. Many lawyers and jurists argue that the case of the triplex has not enough evidence for conviction. At the same time they sustain that the case of the farm in Atibaia is enough for that. Anyway the process goes on and now the judgment will be the one of the second instance.

Politically, we understand that the legal process against Lula cannot serve to prevent his presidential candidacy from being impeded by a legal decision. Lula must have the right to apply himself as candidate. Ban this right when Aecio is senator, Temer is president of the Republic, Eunice is president of the Senate and Maia is the possible successor of Temer would be totally undemocratic.

We are among those who condemn Lula politically. We believe that your government has organized corruption schemes. They were schemes combined with the defense of the great capitalists’ interests. This is clearly observed by the relations between Lula and the PT summit with contractors, with banks and with big companies like JBS. Relations those are even programmatic. After all, the policy of the PT governments was to inject public money into these sectors, honoring the “national champions” of Brazilian capitalism – in a relationship in which Lula used all his political power to promote the business of these companies at home and abroad.

That is why we opposed to PT governments from the beginning. PSOL will have its own candidacy for the presidency of the Republic. We argue that the leadership of PT and the policy it represents must be defeated. In this perspective we struggle for the defeat of the entire political caste, in which PT’s summit has integrated. That is why the PT in the Senate did not defend the condemnation of Aecio. That is why Lula allied himself with Temer and still remains allied with Renan Calheiros.

But defeating them must come from the hands of the workers, who must bet on the construction of a new alternative.

If the bourgeois caste were in prison, if it was convicted , the picture would be different. But this is not yet the picture. And this will not only happen by the action of a sector of the Judiciary, which is correctly combating corruption schemes and putting in jail a part of this mafia.

This was the case of Cabral’s PMDB. These bourgeois leaders have already been totally condemned, not just by justice. They have already been condemned by the people, since their names do not even appear in opinion polls. Even Aecio Neves, who is a corrupt senator, has also been condemned and is even worse among public opinion than he in the courts.

This is not the case with Lula, who still has support from sectors of the people. We hope that these sectors will definitely break with Lullism. Break out to move towards a new alternative and not to join the bourgeois political parties that defend the rich and privileged minority. PMDB, PSDB etc. are linked to corruption and despite this situation they continue to run the country.
The task that all workers must devote is the struggle for the overthrow of Temer. Out Temer is the demand of the day. At the same time, our “Fora Temer” demands and fights for general elections immediately, for president and for the national congress, strengthening the struggle to sweep the political caste. Without new elections, in addition to maintaining the political caste, neoliberal reforms will be approved by this corrupt and pro-bosses congress.

MES-PSOL. 7-12-2017.

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21. GOOD COMMUNIST HOMES
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
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(London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 15 · 27 July 2017
pages 3-7 | 4370 words)

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine
    Princeton, 1096 pp, £29.95, August, ISBN 978 0 691 17694 9

Yuri Slezkine, a master stylist as well as a first-class historian, is the least predictable of scholars. Still, it comes as a surprise to find that the book he has now produced, after long gestation, is a Soviet War and Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War. The correspondences even so are notable. The two books are much the same length and offer the same practical difficulties of reading (the Penguin edition of War and Peace once fell apart in my hands when I tried to read it at the beach; The House of Government is so thick I had to put it on a flat surface to read it). The time span of the two books is much the same (fifteen years for Tolstoy, twenty or so for Slezkine), as is the intention to show how a society survived a cataclysmic event (the Napoleonic invasion for Tolstoy, the Bolshevik Revolution for Slezkine). Tolstoy had a philosophical point to make about history being the outcome, not of the decisions of a few great men, but of the chaotic actions of multitudes. Slezkine’s historical-philosophical point is that Bolshevism, and the Marxism from which it sprang, should be understood as millenarian religious movements.

To be sure, there are differences. Slezkine is fond of many of his (Old Bolshevik) characters, but when he writes about Bolshevism as an intellectual and political system there is a tinge of distaste, perhaps even contempt, that is alien to Tolstoy but reminiscent of another Russian epic predecessor on the boundary between history, literature and sarcastic polemic, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Then there is the difference, perhaps less important than it may at first seem, that Tolstoy’s work, despite its research base and the 160 historical figures among its characters, has made-up characters too and passes as fiction, whereas all Slezkine’s characters are real people who lived in the elite House of Government in Moscow in the 1930s. Slezkine doesn’t make up characters or dialogue, but then he scarcely needs to, given that the letters, diaries and memoirs his characters produced in such profusion show them to be self-inventors of a high order. The salient difference is perhaps not so much that Tolstoy’s characters are fictional as that, as a writer of fiction, Tolstoy can present them in the round, whereas Slezkine, as an intellectual historian, is restricted to their self-representations.

The House of Government begins with the disclaimer, a typical Slezkine inversion of a cliché, that ‘this is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental.’ Leaving aside the question of whether this is accurate, given his characters’ devotion to literature and their tendency to see life through its lens, it is a deceptively simple statement of disciplinary allegiance and genre that is quickly undercut in the introduction that follows. There are three strains in his work, Slezkine writes. One is ‘analytical’: that is, his argument that Bolshevism is a millenarian religion. Another is literary: at each stage of his story, in tandem with his historical account, he runs a summary of the literary works that ‘sought to interpret and mythologise’ events. But the most important strain, listed first, is the epic. Slezkine’s introduction makes only the modest claim that the book ‘is a family saga involving numerous named and unnamed residents of the House of Government … readers are urged to think of them as characters in an epic.’ But the publisher’s blurb more straightforwardly – and, I think, accurately – characterises the book as an ‘epic story … in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’.
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As befits an epic, Slezkine’s mode of narration is expansive. The first third of the book, before the House of Government even makes its appearance, offers a history of the Russian revolutionary movement, with a side excursion into Marx; a sixty-page overview of religion in human history, with special reference to millenarianism; and historical and literary accounts of 1917, the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, including the factional struggles in the party following Lenin’s death, and the ‘great turn’ of the late 1920s (Stalinist industrialisation, collectivisation and famine). There are several lengthy digressions on such topics as constructivism and utopian architectural visions. Slezkine lets his characters speak for themselves, both in long quotations from diaries, letters and autobiographies, and in extensive paraphrases. He affords equivalent space to literary works, most frequently Mayakovsky’s and Babel’s writing for the early years and Platonov’s and Leonov’s for the later ones.

There are endnotes referencing secondary works, particularly those of intellectual historians who share Slezkine’s eschatological view of Bolshevism. The endnotes are no doubt to remind us that the book is, inter alia, a work of scholarly history, but I think they would have been better left out. This is partly for the parochial reason that, as a social historian in the field, I was somewhat irritated by his choices, and partly because, as a reader, I was less interested in the book as a work of scholarship (impressive though it is in its breadth of research and reference) than as a work of literature. References to secondary sources suggest that this is an ordinary academic work which, according to the conventions, ought to ‘position itself in the scholarship’. It isn’t, any more than The Gulag Archipelago was.

The overall framework of the book is structured according to the stages of a millenarian movement. ‘Early in the book,’ Slezkine explains,

    the Bolsheviks are identified as millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse. In subsequent chapters, consecutive episodes in the Bolshevik family saga are related to stages in the history of a failed prophecy, from an apparent fulfilment to the great disappointment to a series of postponements to the desperate offer of a last sacrifice. They managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an inherited habit, but they never figured out how to transform their certainty into a habit that their children or subordinates could inherit.

‘Anticipation’ is the title of the section on the revolutionaries in exile and underground in Russia before 1917, followed by ‘Fulfilment’ with the October Revolution, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘The Reign of the Saints’ for the struggles to survive and fulfil the prophecy (incorporating ‘The Great Disappointment’, as it becomes ever more clear that what the revolution had brought into being was not heaven on earth), and ‘The Last Judgment’, winding up the drama with the destruction in the Great Purges of many of the erstwhile revolutionaries.

Slezkine suggests in passing that the early 20th-century Russian intelligentsia – symbolists and Christian mystics as well as revolutionaries – was in the grip of a millenarian and apocalyptic mood. But the main genesis of Bolshevik millenarianism, in Slezkine’s account, was Marxism. Marx’s early preoccupations, Slezkine argues, were the emancipation (resurrection) of Germany and the reformation of the Jews; and ‘the entire edifice of Marxist theory … was built on these foundations.’ Marx, ‘like Jesus and unlike Mazzini or Mickiewicz, succeeded in translating a tribal prophecy into a language of universalism’. Not being an expert on the early Marx, I will leave it to others to take up the gauntlet on this one, but I winced when, much later in the book, Hitler is thrown into the mix as a fellow millenarian with ‘the same enemy – but whereas the Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe’.

Interpretations of Bolshevism as a religion, of which there have been many over the years, generally leave me cold, but Slezkine’s argument is more interesting. I have always tended to dismiss the Bolsheviks’ predictions of imminent total transformation on the grounds that nobody could be so silly as to believe such a thing, except fleetingly in the madness of the revolutionary moment, but Slezkine has persuaded me to take it seriously – up to a point. I still privately believe that, for all the Bolsheviks who thought like Platonov characters, there were others of a practical cast of mind who didn’t. Lenin I can more or less accept as a millenarian, at least until October, after which responsibility sobered him up. But not even Slezkine could convince me that Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, also an Old Bolshevik, was ever anything of the kind. While that may restrict the applicability of Slezkine’s thesis, it doesn’t refute it. Slezkine himself notes that the most passionate exponents of Bolshevik millenarianism tended to be male.

You may by now be wondering when I am going tell you what the House of Government was and who lived there. Take it as my homage to Slezkine, a past master at stringing out anticipation. His narrative for the first 407 pages is dotted with stories and quotations from Old Bolsheviks who, the reader must presume, are likely to show up later as residents of the House of Government. This is so, by and large (even if Nikolai Bukharin, who makes many appearances in the story, did not actually live in the House), but it is also part of Slezkine’s art to avoid locking himself in with strict definitions. The reader, he warns at the beginning, should think of the persons who appear in his narrative not just as characters in an epic but also as similar to people encountered in their own lives, who may or may not be familiar and may or may not turn out to be important. ‘No family or individual is indispensable to the story,’ however. ‘Only the House of Government is.’

*

The building, renamed ‘the House on the Embankment’ in Yuri Trifonov’s autobiographical novel of the 1970s, was a grey constructivist/neoclassical elephant designed by Boris Iofan and built on Swamp Square on the Moscow River diagonally across from the Kremlin. (Slezkine likes to translate his Russian names into English: Swamp Square is his rendition of Bolotnaya ploshchad; the House of Government’s cinema Udarnik becomes Shock Worker.) Luxurious and modern by the standards of the time, and intended primarily, as the name suggests, to house senior government (including party, military and security) officials, the House consisted of 507 apartments ranging in size from one to seven rooms (three to five rooms was the norm), with facilities including a kindergarten, a shop, a club and a theatre.

In an earlier iteration, Slezkine’s book was conceived as a biography of the building, and traces of this remain, usually in the form of deadpan lists of objects, one of his standard techniques for dealing with non-narrative archival material. Incoming residents had to sign an inventory of 54 items including ‘ceilings, walls, wallpapers, tiled floors (in the kitchen, bathroom and toilet), parquet floors (in the rest of the apartment), closets, windows, hinges, lampshades, doors (French and regular), locks (two kinds), doorknobs (three kinds), nickel-plated doorstops, an electric doorbell, enamel bathtub with overflow drain and nickel-plated plug, nickel-plated shower’ and so on. Sometimes the lists are of abstract nouns, such as the Housekeeping Department’s priorities of ‘centralisation, symmetry, transparency, cleanliness, accountability and surveillance’, or even verbs: Slezkine reminds us of the practical demands on a building whose residents, as human beings, ‘ate, drank, slept, procreated, grew hair, produced waste, got sick, and needed heating and lighting, among other things’.

Once the story gets under way, the human beings come into focus. Tenants began moving into the House of Government in 1931, and by the mid-1930s they numbered 2655. Of the 700 leaseholders (heads of household), a high proportion were Old Bolsheviks (people whose connection with the party predated the revolution), mainly intellectuals born in the 1880s and 1890s currently holding high office; among the intellectuals, ‘by far the largest group’ were Jews. The rest of the residents were wives (an even higher percentage of whom were Jewish), children, wards, in-laws, maids and an array of other relatives and non-relatives who made up the often unconventional households. An appendix lists the 66 ‘leaseholders’ who, along with some of their dependants, are most prominent in Slezkine’s story. They include the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who covered the Spanish Civil War and became a character in For Whom the Bell Tolls; the secret policeman Sergei Mironov, whose frivolous, clothes-loving wife wrote memoirs that serve as a foil to the high-mindedness of everyone else; the cultural official Alexander Arosev, a close friend of the head of the government, Vyacheslav Molotov; Aron Solts, the party’s morality expert; Valentin Trifonov, a Civil War military hero; Karl Radek, sometime oppositionist who for some years returned to favour with Stalin as an international specialist; and the trade minister Israel Veitser, married to the high-profile director of the Moscow Children’s Theatre, Natalia Sats. Elena Stasova – b. 1873, one of the oldest of Old Bolsheviks – is a rare woman among the overwhelmingly male leaseholders. Even Sats is listed only as a dependant of her husband. But most of the wives worked, if generally in less exalted jobs (usually in the cultural sphere) than their husbands.

The extraordinarily detailed information on the households and the complexity of their domestic relations is one of the remarkable and unique aspects of this book. Nobody knew what a good communist home ought to be like, Slezkine remarks, but on the basis of House of Government data it looks strikingly non-nuclear. Partnerships shifted, not always rancorously, so that an ex-wife plus children might be living down the hall from the new wife plus children, with the husband dividing his time between the flats. Arosev shuttled between three apartments: he lived in the House of Government with two daughters by a first marriage, their governess and a maid; his new wife and their young child lived next door; and his first wife and another daughter lived in a different building. Sometimes, an old wife and a new one lived in the same apartment, as in the case of Bukharin’s third wife (Anna Larina) and his first, who was an invalid, together with his aged father and Anna and Bukharin’s small son; Bukharin himself continued to live in the small apartment in the Kremlin he had swapped with Stalin after Stalin’s wife’s death. Valentin Trifonov lived in an apartment with his wife and their two children, Yury and Tatania, along with his mother-in-law (an old revolutionary to whom he had once been married) and Undik, the young man she had adopted as an orphan during the Volga famine of 1921.
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Many families in the building included an adopted child – sometimes strays like Undik, sometimes children taken in after the arrest or death of their parents, who might be relatives or just friends. Registered tenants in Mikhail Koltsov’s apartment included his old wife, Elizaveta, and his new German partner, Maria Osten, along with a young German boy whom Mikhail and Maria had adopted. The two essential components in the everyday life of a House of Government apartment were a babushka (often of ‘bad’ social origin and/or a believing Christian or Jew) and a maid, running the household between them while the parents were out at work. The babushka was not necessarily an actual grandmother, but might be another elderly female relative. The maids came from the countryside: as Slezkine points out, high Soviet officials might, by virtue of their status, be insulated from the collectivisation struggle, but ‘almost every child raised in the House of Government was raised by one of its casualties.’

The Great Purges hit the House of Government with particular fury. The NKVD usually came for people at night, and many households experienced repeat visits, first for the husband and then, sometime later, weeks or months, for the wife. The apartments were sealed, and the remaining family moved elsewhere in the building, often sharing with another family in the same situation before finally being evicted. They came for Inna Gaister’s mother on her 12th birthday: ‘Mother kept walking through the rooms with me following behind her in my nightshirt. And Natasha [the nanny] followed after me with Valiushka [the youngest daughter] in her arms. We just kept walking like that in single file around the apartment.’ Arosev (and wife), Koltsov (and Maria Osten), Larina (and Bukharin), Trifonov (and wife), Radek, Mironov, Veitser and Sats were all arrested in the Great Purges; the men and some of the women were shot or died in the Gulag, but Gaister’s wife, Larina, and Sats survived, returning to Moscow in the 1950s. Platon Kerzhentsev, fired as head of the Committee on the Arts, wrote desperate denunciations as he awaited arrest – but the Black Maria passed him by and he died of heart failure a few years later. In similar circumstances, Solts had a breakdown, while another jurist, Yakov Brandenburgsky, appears to have feigned madness and sat out the terror in a psychiatric hospital.

‘Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away,’ 12-year-old Yuri Trifonov wrote in his diary for 3 April 1938. (Slezkine’s American translation of Mama as ‘Mommy’ is jarring, at least to my ears.) ‘They woke us up. Mommy was very brave. They took her away in the morning. Today I did not go to school.’ Yuri’s father had been arrested earlier. ‘Now it’s only Tania [his younger sister] and me with Grandma, Ania [a friend of his parents, living with them since her husband was arrested] and Undik.’ Some House of Government children were shunned by family and friends and had trouble at school; others found support at school from friends and teachers. Babushki and occasionally maids stepped in to care for the children after their parents’ arrests, but many ended up in orphanages in distant provinces.

The orphanage experience, as later recounted by the children, was not necessarily negative: nine-year-old Volodia Lande, sent to an orphanage in Penza in 1937 after the arrest of both his parents, received warmth and kindness from his teachers, quickly made friends, and eventually went to military college and became a naval officer. Surprisingly, the upheaval of 1937-38 seems not to have permanently thrown the House of Government children out of the circle of Soviet privilege. ‘Most of the children of government officials, including “family members of the traitors to the motherland”, graduated from prestigious colleges and (re)joined the postwar Soviet cultural and professional elite.’

The children of the House of Government are very important in Slezkine’s story. In the first place, he is deeply interested in their attitude (he treats it as a singular Weltanschauung rather than as a spectrum of positions) to their parents and the Soviet way of life. Their childhoods were blissfully happy (or remembered as such), as Soviet childhoods were meant to be. The children ‘admired their fathers, respected their seniors, loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building socialism as a means of self-improvement’. They loved school and loved their friends, as well as venerating the idea of friendship. Like their parents, they were passionate readers and admirers of the Russian classics, Pushkin usually coming at the top of the list, as well as the ‘Treasures of World Literature’: Dickens, Balzac, Cervantes etc, whose volumes were to be found on the shelves of their fathers’ studies. They were also attached to Jack London and Jules Verne; they were romantics who embraced the real-life sagas of polar explorers with the same fervour as the fictional adventures of Verne’s Children of Captain Grant.

You might think that the sudden arrest of their parents as ‘enemies of the people’ would have significantly changed these attitudes, but apparently not. Most of the children believed in their parents’ innocence, and perhaps that of their friends’ parents, while at the same time accepting the Soviet premise that enemies were everywhere and needed to be unmasked. When one House of Government child, Andrei Sverdlov, went to work for the NKVD and participated in the interrogation of some of his former playmates, most of his contemporaries ‘considered him a traitor but did not question the cause he was serving. They did not feel that they had to choose between their loyalty to the party and their loyalty to their friends, family and themselves.’

*

The Second World War marks the end of Slezkine’s saga. The House of Government, cast into turmoil by the Great Purges, was essentially emptied after bombing damage and with the approach of German troops in the autumn of 1941. Remaining residents were called up into the army or evacuated east. A significant proportion of the children died on active service. Those who survived tended to come back to Moscow but not to the House of Government, which was back in operation after the war with a largely new set of residents. Some of the mothers arrested during the Great Purges returned from the Gulag in the 1950s, but they were changed people, shadows of their former selves, and their adult children often found it difficult to relate to them.

The Great Terror ‘spelled the end of most Old Bolshevik families and homes; it did not bring about the end of faith,’ Slezkine says. But something did, since seventy odd pages later he writes that by the Brezhnev period the children still ‘venerated the memory’ of their dead fathers ‘but no longer shared their faith’. The cause of this loss of faith is not very clearly spelled out. It wasn’t the war, since as Slezkine tells us, ‘the coming of the war … justified all the previous sacrifices, both voluntary and involuntary, and offered the children of the original revolutionaries the opportunity to prove, through one more sacrifice, that their childhoods had been happy, that their fathers had been pure, that their country was their family, and that life was, indeed, beautiful, even in death.’ Nor, presumably, was it the Thaw of the mid-1950s, which ‘heartened and briefly rejuvenated’ the former House of Government children. Perhaps it was the long disillusioning years of Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’, in which some of the House of Government children became dissidents and some of the Jewish ones emigrated. Most of those remaining in the Soviet Union ‘welcomed Gorbachev’s Perestroika’, but it was too late: some time in the postwar decades, ‘utopia’ had ‘evaporated … without anyone quite noticing’. ‘By the time the Soviet state collapsed, no one seemed to take the original prophecy seriously any more.’

‘Why did Bolshevism die after one generation?’ Slezkine asks. Why was its fate ‘so different from that of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and countless other millenarian faiths? Most “churches” are vast rhetorical and institutional structures built on broken promises. Why was Bolshevism unable to live with its own failure?’ His answer is that the Bolsheviks, unlike other millenarian sects, failed to bring the family under its control. ‘One of the central features of Bolshevism as a life-structuring web of institutions was that Soviets were made in school and at work, not at home … The Bolshevik family was subjected to much less pastoral guidance and communal surveillance than most of its Christian counterparts.’

Perhaps so. (But what about Pavlik Morozov, the heroic child of Soviet myth who denounced his own father?) One could also question Slezkine’s premise. The émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in his book The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (1946) noted with approval a process of routinisation in the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, Trotsky had observed the same process, which he called ‘The Great Betrayal’. From this perspective, the Soviet (Stalinist) system that emerged in the mid-1930s looks very like one of those ‘vast rhetorical and institutional structures built on broken promises’ that follow the utopian moment in the millenarian success stories of Christianity and Mormonism.

Slezkine isn’t writing a success story, however. His saga is in the tragic mode, and tragedies, in his interpretation, are about failures and their inevitability. It wasn’t an inability to achieve ‘routinisation’ that constitutes Bolshevism’s real failure in his narrative, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Slezkine’s short discussion of this is interesting if perfunctory. Marxism didn’t take permanent root because its economic determinism was sterile. The House of Government children inherited their parents’ literary tastes but not their interest in Marxist theory, being ‘entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries’. It also failed because Russia was Russia. Bolshevism’s international orientation was unappealing, and the multinational structure of the Soviet state proved its undoing. ‘Stalin may have sounded like a Russian national prophet, but his Russian never sounded native … Because the House of Government had never become the Russian national home, late Soviet Communism became homeless – and, eventually, a ghost.’

Success and failure are a matter of opinion, and Slezkine’s interpretations should give Soviet historians plenty to argue about. But this may be beside the point. Bolshevik millenarianism and Soviet ideocracy must fail in Slezkine’s story, both for dramatic reasons and because of his intuitive conviction that they did. As for the issue of genre, the best summation probably comes from Tolstoy who, explaining that War and Peace was ‘not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle’, stated simply that it was ‘what the author wanted and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed’.


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