A WIDE CANVAS
HUMANITY GOES MAD
Violent leaders and mass killings
We know that people get mad. But can whole societies turn insane? And the whole humanity? This may sound illogical, for does such a proposition exclude the person who makes it? How can a mad person recognise that others are mad?
Let us leave such profound questions to philosophers and psychologists. Let us consider just a few facts recorded in recent twentieth century history- a century advanced in hard science, and other social sciences. Let us take just one facet of it.
- Nazis under Hitler killed 6 million Jews and 11 million others between 1937 and 1945.
Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp at Auschwitz-II, 1944.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Stalin and his commie cadres killed 23 million Russians of different ethnicities. This is apart from the 20 million killed in the world war.
Starved peasants lying on the street in Kharkhiv-1933
Public domain. via wikimedia Commons.
Mass graves of people killed in the Ukraine 1937-38 opened up subsequently to exhume the body for identification .
Public domain via Wikimedia commons.
-Mao Zedong killed an estimated 49 to 78 million people in China during the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution years. China under Mao occupied Tibet too, which was acquiesced in by Nehru.
- Japan killed between 3 and 10 million Asians between 1937 and 1945, in what is known as the 'War Crimes'.
Chinese killed by the Japanese in 1938 filled in a ditch.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Two World Wars
This is apart from the millions killed in the two World Wars, which took place essentially among Christian nations, sharing the same civilisation, and enjoying similar standards!
First World War: Killed: 10 million military + 7 million civilians.
Wounded: 20 million.
Second World War: Military personnel Killed: 60 million direct+ 20 million indirect
Civilians: 50-55 million killed.
How do we call this phenomenon which connected such disparate people in different parts of the world during the same period in such acts of uncontrolled violent frenzy?? Does it not appear that humanity was seized by some madness? How do we account for the fact that the people of Germany, quite educated and civilised, allowed the Holocaust to happen? Was the whole thing merely a human act? What were the Christian leaders doing then? Well, what did God himself do, permitting all this violence? No wonder, many people lost faith in God and religion.
Wars after the World War
If we take time to pause and think, violence has not stopped with the end of the world wars. We have had other wars as in Korea, Vietnam, in the Middle East. Then we had dictators like Pol Pot killing their own people, all civilians. It may surprise many to know that there has not been a single year since 1945 which has been free from war ! Wars, insurgencies, civil wars,etc have been occurring in some part of the world or the other, almost non-stop!
Just look at some of them:
1.Yakubu Gowon. Christian-Communist. He killed I million civilians and 1,00,000 soldiers in Nigeria, in a civil war with a different faction. This was known as war with the Republic of Biafra. (A product of Sandhurst, he settled in the UK after his overthrow in 1976, obtained a Phd from some university, became a Church leader and is today considered an elder statesman!)
2. Mengistu Haile Mariam. Communist. Ethiopia. In the 'Red Terror' between 1974 and 1991, he got between 4,00,000 and 1.5 million Ethiopians killed.
3. Kim II Sung, Communist, North Korea.
He caused 1.6 million deaths.
4.Pol Pot. Communist, Cambodia.
His death tally is between 1.7 to 2.5 million, all Cambodians.
5. Ismail Enver Pasha, Turkey.
Between 1915 and 1922, he killed 2.5 million people, mostly Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians.
6. Leopold II of Belgium. In establishing his colony in the Congo ( to which the US extended its support) he killed between 2 and 15 million people there.
Full details are available at various sites on the Web. On the basis of absolute numbers alone, Mao Zedong emerges as the king of the cut-throats, by a large margin.
And now, the Muslims seem to have taken over the relay race. I do not know whether anyone has kept account of the killings, which various groups have indulged in so far, and it is still continuing on a daily basis. It is mostly among the Muslims themselves.
While we have a useless UN watching, most western countries, which are supposed to be 'liberal democracies' are extremely cautious and muted in their their opposition and criticism. On the US campuses, such groups have even their apologists. Those who ask what the Germans were doing when the Nazis rose, should ask what the West is doing now in the light of the current violence. And the lights have not yet gone out!
Does not all of this appear to be madness?
Poverty in the world
Then there is another kind of madness reigning in the world.
In this age of science and technology, fully 20% of the world population is in officially defined poverty. That is one in every five persons living on earth.. Economic 'science' is supposed to be very advanced, with even a Nobel memorial prize to reward the economists. Yet, they are not even agreed on a proper definition of poverty, on proper ways to identify and measure it. How can we expect them to come up with solutions? They may be 'doctors of philosophy' but these doctors get paid to only define the problem and refine the theories, and possibly to contribute something to the problems themselves as advisers, and not for solving them.
War among the economists
But the fun does not end there. We have two broad groups of economists- the Conservatives- the Neoclassical, or simply the Right; and the liberal, leftists. Each group considers the other idiotic, if not lunatic. If you read their literature, the Right shows how the so called liberal policies- which focus on the expansion of the public sector, bureaucracy, and govt spending will not work, but lead to inflation, unemployment, corruption, unbalanced budgets , debt accumulation and national bankruptcy, and shrinking of our freedoms. If you read the literature of the liberal-left group, you will be convinced that the so called market economy is the foulest, vilest arrangement human selfishness has invented for human misery, deceit and degradation, and it should not be working. The result is that both groups agree that the economy is not in good shape! And in a country like the US and the UK, both groups get their chance to form the govt and run the economy, so that they both get rather equal opportunities to ruin it too. Any way, most of us experience the economic distress to varying degree, so we need no certificate from any economist! If one reads a serious economic journal like The Economist for ten weeks, one would know, without any doubt, that the economies of the world are all rotten, no matter whether the ruling establishment is right, left or anything else. Thus, the overall conclusion of the serious economic literature is that economics does not work!
Madness of Growth
Then both the left and the right share a madness with equal passion: Growth. This is probably the only thing on earth on which they are agreed, apart from money.( No leftist economist has so far voluntarily agreed to forgo or reduce his emoluments, and work for the honour of it. All work for the money,no less than the 'capitalists'. And the Indian left-oriented liberal economists only wait for a chance to go to that citadel of capitalism- the US-, in preference to the Indian universities! And the big- mouthed critics of capitalism and liberal icons like Noam Chomsky, the Clintons, Ralph Nader,Michael Moore , Edward Kennedy,etc are all big time investors and beneficiaries of capitalist crime, which is the stock market.See the book: "Do As I Say ( Not As I Do) by Peter Schweizer. Doubleday, 2005.
Mad fascination with GDP
Growth is measured by GDP. But what does the GDP measure? GDP measures the money value of domestic production- all production that passes through the market.
Now, look at this. When a factory works, when raw materials are used up, it results in pollution.When minerals are dug up, the area is despoiled. When a huge dam is constructed, people are displaced, the local ecology changes. When a car runs, it causes pollution. Where and how does all this pollution enter the GDP?
Take a recent case. In constructing a new 4-lane highway between two towns in Tamil Nadu- Krishnagiri and Tiruvannamalai, a distance of 130 km - they felled 19,000 fully grown, nearly 100 year old giant trees. (This is the official figure- we know how contractors work and count!) All the expenditure incurred in the construction of the highway has entered the GDP. But what about the felled trees? Did they add to the GDP? Where is it accounted and how? Most of the felled trees were full blown tamarind trees. Tamarind is a staple item of consumption in South Indian households, being an essential food ingredient. Who will count the continuing loss of this source? What about the permanent environmental loss caused by the felling of 19000 trees?
Or take another instance. When a state like Tamil Nadu or Gujarat facilitates setting up of automobile plants by foreign or Indian companies, and allots thousands of acres of fertile agricultural lands, economists talk of investment, employment, GDP etc. Who takes into to account the loss of a permanent non-renewable resource like agricultural land, the resulting loss of agricultural output, the loss of independent livelihood of thousands of farmers? Or, who bothers about the pollution caused by the plant's manufacturing processes? Where do they enter the GDP and how?
Take a recent case. In constructing a new 4-lane highway between two towns in Tamil Nadu- Krishnagiri and Tiruvannamalai, a distance of 130 km - they felled 19,000 fully grown, nearly 100 year old giant trees. (This is the official figure- we know how contractors work and count!) All the expenditure incurred in the construction of the highway has entered the GDP. But what about the felled trees? Did they add to the GDP? Where is it accounted and how? Most of the felled trees were full blown tamarind trees. Tamarind is a staple item of consumption in South Indian households, being an essential food ingredient. Who will count the continuing loss of this source? What about the permanent environmental loss caused by the felling of 19000 trees?
Or take another instance. When a state like Tamil Nadu or Gujarat facilitates setting up of automobile plants by foreign or Indian companies, and allots thousands of acres of fertile agricultural lands, economists talk of investment, employment, GDP etc. Who takes into to account the loss of a permanent non-renewable resource like agricultural land, the resulting loss of agricultural output, the loss of independent livelihood of thousands of farmers? Or, who bothers about the pollution caused by the plant's manufacturing processes? Where do they enter the GDP and how?
And despite the claims of the economists about the growth in GDP, most people report in most countries that they are not happy! In many countries, the average worker has to work more to maintain his income. In sectors like IT, the working hours have increased. As the Skidelskys have shown, to day the more qualified people have to work more, to be able to afford their standards! Considering all this, thinkers have been saying that GDP should not be considered the sole measure of total 'welfare'. In 2010, British PM David Cameron suggested that we must have a new "well being index" to supplement the GDP. In fact it is only the fanatics among the economists who still swear by the GDP.
Simon Kuznets, who first developed the comprehensive measures of national income accounting in 1934, warned that the numbers should not be taken as precise measurements, and indicators of absolute certainty, and said in 1962:
Distinction must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns,and between short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.
From: www.cu.uoc.edu/web/-mcooperacion/aulas/economics/Images/GDP3-jpg.
Copyright status not stated. Used here purely for educational, non-commercial purposes.
GDP is the problem!
Apart from any philosophical considerations, there are solid economic objections to GDP as a measure of economic performance. Some of them:
- it does not take into account the damage caused to the environment. It does not even take into account that most non-renewable resources are used up. This restricts the economic freedom and choice available to future generations.
- money value of any activity - even if it is unproductive or wasteful- which is reported to the market is included in GDP.
- GDP is not the measure of annual income.For instance, the per capita GDP reported is not the average income of individuals.
- GDP does not include the value of work done outside the market place ie in the informal sector.
- money value measured does not distinguish between wealth generating and capital-consumption activities.
(For detailed criticisms, see the Web. eg. rationalwiki.org/wiki/GDP)
Prof. E.J.Mishan (1917-2014) of the London School of Economics was one of the pioneering economists to point out the fallacies of the idea of continuous growth, saying 'continuous discontent' was 'the precondition of continuous growth'. He also warned the developing countries that blindly following industrialisation was a "thorny path" to "the wasteland of Subtopia." Such was the hold of the establishment economists, the running dogs of growth, that no publisher came forward to publish his book for two years. This work must now be regarded as the forerunner of all environment-conscious economics, and in a way of the Green movement, even. (on par with Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring.' )
Such is the state of this dismal science of economics that two of his early books, "The Costs of Economic Growth" and "Twenty One Popular Economic Fallacies" , which are the cornerstone of a reasoned critique of the orthodoxy of both left and right, which I read in inexpensive Pelican editions in the 60s is now available at an outrageous price ( of more than Rs.7000 and 9000 respectively!)[In spite of my desire to include a picture , I could not get one free of copyright hassles]
But the economists of all tribes have drummed up the GDP as not only the sole index of economic performance, but also as the standard of comparison between countries.
By Aeroid (Own Work) CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.
Do such comparisons make any sense?
And following them the politicians of all hues have embraced growth as the only ideal worth striving for. So belief in growth has now assumed the status of a new universal religion that has taken hold of the modern psyche everywhere.
This is another madness humanity shares now. It has led to race among nations, and commerce has now become a weapon of war among them.
Conventional wars kill people. Economic growth kills the very environment which makes life possible. In that sense, it promises to be the war that will end all wars! In the calculus invented by the economists, every single step that affects the environment adds to growth!
People are destroying the very planet which houses them and call it Growth and Development. Ghar jhalake Diwali manate rahe hain!
Does anything else on earth equal this madness?
