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 I consider the origin o

  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 transfer of the surplus to the metropolitan centres of