Kannan Srinivasan in New York

Make a Desert & Call it Peace, or Cognitive Dissonance Declaring that “justice has been served,” Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that  the killing of Yahya Sinwar , the Hamas leader whom she called the “mastermind” of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, created an opportunity to end the war in Gaza ( https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/us/politics/harris-yahya-sinwar-hamas-israel-gaza.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ) Surely this is cognitive dissonance :  for how does America not see how the world sees it? How apt Tacitus’ expression describing the Roman subjugation of Britain,   “They make a desert, & call it peace!” As it is remembered, though it might be better translated as “they make a solitude, & call it peace”  (for that supposed speech by the Scottish chief Galgacus, that Tacitus’ biography of his father in law Gnaeus Julius Agricola who had governed Britain, recounts as beginning  “Whenever...

  Is this the Nobel Prize for property rights --- or for how  genocide  is the pre-condition for economic growth? Acemoglu Johnson & Robinson  https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369   seem to argue that in those countries where colonial settlement having  followed genocide  in replacing the native aborigine, public institutions were set up mirroring those back home, thereby ensuring life expectancy outcomes for their descendants comparable to their own countries of origin. These were markedly superior to the populations of other countries where by contrast, insalubrious conditions having made settlement unattractive for European settlers,  aborigine populations were allowed to survive.  Yet since democratic representation & welfare measures towards that end were  not considered necessary for subject peoples, the colonial powers employed such territories purely for the purpose of the extraction & the t...

Fascism might be better than the Left, suggests the New York Times:  " Some voters consider France Unbowed, which has members who have been accused of antisemitism, to be at least as dangerous as the far right.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/world/europe/france-election-new-popular-front-far-right.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Given the unsubstantiated claims of Melenchon's anti-Semitism which match those that removed Corbyn, one might wonder about the dogwhistle of "Soros & rootless people without culture" (the traditional anti-Semitic reference to the Jewish people):  https://youtu.be/o-3-lN3bA9w?si=G3zQLvJUm35X4s8a Why does this not trouble the Western leaders-- https://www.youtube.com/live/avIs4YrtM00?si=fWZQmC73J5rWCwYR https://www.governo.it/en/articolo/g7-summit-president-meloni-meets-president-biden-united-states/25999 https://youtu.be/AYz88B_N10U?si=WUCbohnhiy_xE0nW --- who embrace Italy’s Meloni today? Why  isn’t she...

  The Starmer government cannot do very much.  It wont tax, it can't borrow much; its election victory has been crafted on the recent fraud of misrepresenting Corbyn’ s sympathy for the Palestinians as anti-Semitism, & concealing the fact that the Labour defeat of 2019 was the outcome of Starmer’s demand not Corbyn’s for a fresh referendum on Brexit; which of course came on top of the fraud of Brexit. Brexit followed the false promises of trickle-down growth that have distracted Britain for over four decades since Mrs Thatcher first instituted austerity and an upward redistribution of wealth in order to financialise the UK economy, unlocking the opportunities afforded by the Eurodollar market & Britain’s role as money-launderer to the world. When Starmer can no longer blame Corbyn, Sunak & other Conservatives for the UK’s economy, he will have to acknowledge reality. Which is as follows: that the UK’s role as money-launderer to the world is critical to its balan...