[abhiv]

The standard, disingenuous "we stand for civilization" line that apologists of colonialism like to make. Not a single mention of the fact that England with all its stated commitment to freedom ruled India and dozens of countries around the world against their will for two hundred years, systematically stripping them of their wealth for the benefit of the mother country.

Notice how casually the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined -- is slipped in, well after NZ and Australia. And of course they all volunteered out of their love for the Queen -- unrelated to the fact that a coercive foreign power was ruling their country at the time.

Honestly, the world should be too evolved to be accepting thinly veiled racist garbage like this any more.

[javert]

> the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined

That's a bald-faced lie.

The British alone had over 3.5 million. [1]

8.5 million Soviet soldiers died in the war. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_during_the_Second_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_...

> Not a single mention of the fact that England with all its stated commitment to freedom ruled India and dozens of countries around the world against their will for two hundred years, systematically stripping them of their wealth for the benefit of the mother country.

Look at what a dishonest shitfest the political system is in India, and the whole culture of corruption.

It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.

Indians should be thankful for the British influence. As an American, I certainly am thankful for their influence on us.

[nl]

> the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined

That's a bald-faced lie.

THat comment could have been clearer, but it was clearly in response to the number of "Anglosphere" soldiers quoted in the article. For context the article says:

During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,000 from Canada, 2,400,000 from India.

In that context, Indian soliders did outnumber the other listed countries.

It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.

I'm old enough to remember the 1970's and 80's where India was like Africa[1]. I'm not drawing any conclusions from that except to say that colonial influence isn't as simple as you may believe.

[1] http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly...

[abhiv]

> Look at what a dishonest shitfest the political system is in India, and the whole culture of corruption.

> It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.

India was keeping pace with the rest of world, and leading in many ways, quite nicely for thousands of years before the 1600s. It happened to be under continuous foreign occupation at just the time the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, and British policies were explicitly designed to stifle the same changes happening in India. Most things that you see today are a consequence of that missed opportunity.

Without the British, it's more likely that India would have been like Japan today rather than Africa.

It's easy to be thankful for British influence when the US got rid of it so early in the industrialization game.

[javert]

> British policies were explicitly designed to stifle the same changes happening in India

How so? I'm genuinely curious.

I know the British brought a system of law and education and a massive train system to India, and I don't know much else about what they may have done. None of that seems like it would serve to stifle the Industrial Revolution.

It seems to me like promoting the Industrial Revolution to the maximal extent possible in India would have been the rational thing for the British to do. You don't produce wealth by holding other people down. And the three examples I gave above would support the idea that that's what they were aiming for---development. But maybe there's something I don't know.

[abhiv]

As nl mentioned below, I thought it was obvious that this was in response to the list of countries in the article -- NZ, Australia, South Africa and so on. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

[apsec112]

"In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not... In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention."

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

[asimov42]

Wow really? Apparently pointing out the obvious bias and rewriting of history is "racism." I mean I get that the victor gets to write the history, but this is the empire that put "No Dogs or Indians Allowed" in front of its bars, please done shove "civilization" down my throat so hard.

There seems to a be a large rise in popularity of such articles which cherry pick certain facts to paint a rosy picture of the colonial empire. I believe its the classic case of people wanting to read a history they wish was true rather than deal with the uncomfortable truth.

While I have no problems with people writing about the many positives of the raj, I believe that omitting to mention certain genocides and atrocities is akin to misinformation.

[pg]

Is there a specific sentence or passage in the essay that you feel is false and would like to refute? That would be more convincing than mere accusations of isms you feel the author is guilty of.

[primelens]

> Look at the size of the war memorials outside Europe. Consider the sheer number of volunteers. During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,000 from Canada, 2,400,000 from India. The vast majority had made an individual decision to enlist. What force pulled those young men, as it had pulled their fathers, half way around the world to fight for a country on which, in most cases, they had never set eyes? Was it simply an affinity of blood and speech?

Slipping India into that list is just bizarre and tantamount to distorting the truth (not the number, perhaps, but certainly the argument he bases on the number). These 2.4 million "volunteers" were not so much pulled by any affinity of blood and speech as grabbed by the scruff of their neck. Meanwhile countless millions more were struggling at home to overthrow the oppressive rule of the British.[1] The vast majority joined the relatively peaceful struggle for freedom led by Gandhi, but many took up arms against the colonizers and an Indian army even fought against the British and alongside the Japanese in WWII.[2]

So excuse me if I find that rosy picture about the loyal Indian bleeding for the "dear government" a little hard to digest. It would be a lot more believable if the dear government hadn't been massacring and looting the country for two centuries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army

[waps]

It's very easy to "fight" against an unpopular enemy that won't retaliate, like Gandhi did. The death toll of the Indian partition was breathtaking, and Gandhi ... fasted, while refusing to implement basic security measures while easily preventable massacres happened. He was also smart enough to choose his captors wisely, in other words, in the partition he avoided contact with muslims -himself- He had little qualms about sending millions to their death.

That's the theme of Gandhi's non-violence : it's only non-violence if you're looking from very far away focusing on the person. If you were someone affected by the political decisions Gandhi was involved in ... the political change he affected probably felt more like a holocaust. You could say, if you look at it from afar, that he didn't know this was going to happen, and he didn't order it. But he did order people into situations that he knew perfectly well were going to explode.

Here's one account of the immediate result of Gandhi's "non-violence":

  There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and
  mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes 
  the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of 
  babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of 
  victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and 
  corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly, 
  the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented. 
  Although some scholars question the use of the term 
  'genocide' with respect to the Partition massacres, much 
  of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies. 
  It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well 
  as prevent its future reproduction."[1]

Mahatma Gandhi was a skilled orchestrator of public violence, who was very careful about constructing his public image. He has about as much claim to being a non-violent person as Hitler has, who has as far as I know never hurt a fly personally (actually Hitler did military service as a soldier, so I guess that's probably not true). Mahatma Gandi saw himself as being "above" base violence, saw himself as upper class, so he wouldn't touch arms himself. Not because he doesn't believe in violence, but because he doesn't believe in people of his social caste doing anything that could be understood to be work. He started out his political career recruiting for the army, and he's done the same job ever since.

Like most of this kind of "heroes" his non-violence is not the result of a belief that violence is wrong (or he wouldn't have recruited for the army), but the result of the worst aspect of Indian society : the caste system. His non-violence is about him personally refusing to do anything related to violence, except of course, command them from a distance. He would only involve himself in strategy, ordering people around and deciding what is "decent" "good" and "moral", on a grand scale. Personally committing violence is just one of those things he won't do himself, he'll hire/order others to do that for him.

And like any other monster that just happened to do successfully what is popular now, he has a cult following. At least this particular popular monster had the decency and self control to never rape and torture people himself, unlike the ubiquitous Che Guevara.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

[abhiv]

Yes, there are several. I mentioned two in my post above, so it's unfair of you to say that all I did was make accusations of isms. Here they are, repeated:

1. The fact that the (very large) number of Indian soldiers in WW2 was slipped in without comment into a statement about how NZ, Australia and other Anglosphere countries were joined in some kind of glorious kinship. India was not, and is not, a part of this cosy club and should not have been in that list.

2. Attributing the participation of Indian soldiers in WW2 to some kind of personal decision, and not the fact the British ruled India at the time as an imperialist foreign power.

Here are a couple more statements that are false:

1. "What do we mean by Western civilization?...Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us."

This was patently false in the large parts of the world where Britain ruled illegally for two centuries. Taxes were routinely levied on citizens of the colonies without representative government. (I seem to remember this having something to do with the American Revolution, as a matter of fact.)

2. "Yet Peru—indeed, Latin America in general—never achieved the law-based civil society that North America takes for granted. Settled at around the same time, the two great landmasses of the New World serve almost as a controlled experiment. The north was settled by English-speakers, who took with them a belief in property rights, personal liberty, and representative government. The south was settled by Iberians who replicated vast estates and quasi-feudal society of their home provinces."

There were several other differences between North and South America, including the climate, the relative times at which they achieved independence, and (perhaps most importantly) the attitudes of the imperialists towards their subjects. In colonies where the ruled were racially different than the rulers (South America, Africa and Asia), their treatment and eventual outcomes were far worse than in places where the colonial power and the colonies were both racially the same (North America). The author is ignorant at best, and probably deliberately dishonest, in not mentioning this as part of his argument.

==============

The tone of the article is clear enough that point by point rebuttals like this are a waste of time, but since you asked...

[foobarbazqux]

A perspective doesn't have to be false for it to be myopic.

[eevilspock]

He writes,

Here is Havildar Hirram Singh writing to his family in India from the sodden trenches of northern France in the same year:

We must honor him who gives us our salt. Our dear government’s rule is very good and gracious.

If you know anything about Britain's salt monopoly, Gandhi and the Salt March 15 years after Singh's letter above, you'd see how messed up this article is.

[alexeisadeski3]

If you knew anything about the etymology of the word salary, you'd not have bothered writing that.

Here's a hint: Salary = salt given as payment for services rendered.

[asimov42]

You coudnt be more wrong. Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_salt_tax...

[eevilspock]

Interesting. Let's say you are right and Singh means "salary" (It's not clear). Here's something from Wikipedia about that:

By the time of the Hebrew Book of Ezra (550 to 450 BCE), salt from a person was synonymous with drawing sustenance, taking pay, or being in that person's service. At that time, salt production was strictly controlled by the monarchy or ruling elite. Depending on the translation of Ezra 4:14, the servants of King Artaxerxes I of Persia explain their loyalty variously as "because we are salted with the salt of the palace" or "because we have maintenance from the king" or "because we are responsible to the king".

Somehow my point stands.

[alexeisadeski3]

I'm glad that you've researched the history of salt as payment from monarchs to their soldiers.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to support your point. Pretty sure it supports mine.