Jamaica’s Christmas Rebellion

On Christmas Day 1831, 60,000 enslaved Africans in Jamaica rose up against their masters – the largest uprising ever in the British West Indies, and a milestone on the road to abolition a few years later.

The destruction of the Roehampton Estate in January 1832, pictured by Adolphe Duperly. 

(Wikimedia Commons)

By Perry Blankson
25.12.2021

In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumours had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom.

As it became known, the Christmas Rebellion (or Baptist War, named so after the faith of many of its key conspirators) was the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the history of the British West Indies, and directly influenced the abolition of slavery in 1833 and full emancipation in 1838.

To understand the dynamics at play during the uprising, it’s vital to understand the social structure of nineteenth-century colonial Jamaica. Jamaica, like much of the West Indies, was what was known as a plantocracy. In this arrangement, a minority of white European settlers, human traffickers, and plantation owners dominated the majority of enslaved Africans on the island.

Conscious of their minority (Africans outnumbered whites twelve to one), planters deployed ferocious violence to ‘discipline’ their slaves at home, and used their substantial wealth and influence to lobby against abolitionists in Parliament and the press. But despite their efforts, the sun was setting on slavery in the British Empire, and hopes of emancipation around the corner emboldened the enslaved population to take matters into their own hands.

Samuel ‘Daddy’ Sharpe, a Black Baptist deacon, organised enslaved Africans to participate in a peaceful general strike on 25 December 1831, demanding wages and increased freedoms. While non-violence was intended, Sharpe was under no illusions that the infamously violent planter class would respond in kind.

Enlisted to be his military commanders were fellow literate enslaved Africans spanning several different estates, illustrating the effectiveness of the vast communication network known colloquially as the slave ‘grapevine’. Also crucial was the limited degree of freedom given to Sharpe: as a Deacon, he had the ability to move around the island and secretly organise after prayer meetings.

The initially peaceful demonstration soon became a violent uprising, and out of a population of 600,000, an estimated 60,000 took up arms to resist their oppression. Any pretense of a peaceful demonstration was lost when Kensington Estate was set ablaze by enslaved rebels, with the Rebellion taking place in earnest soon after.
The Plantocracy

Aside from providing an insight into mass resistance against slavery, the Christmas Rebellion also provides a valuable case study into the complexities of governing a plantocracy and the contradictions of slave resistance. Seeking assistance to put down the rebellion, the colonial authorities enlisted the help of the Acompong and Windward Maroons—both disparate, militant guerilla organisations of escaped former slaves.

The Maroons had gained a degree of independence following their own Maroon Wars in the eighteenth century. As a result of treaties signed with the colonial authorities following the First Maroon War of 1728-139, signatory Maroon factions were granted small parcels of land which soon became known as Maroon towns.

The caveat to this treaty was that these Maroon towns would be assigned a white superintendent, and that Maroon fighters would be required to assist colonial authorities in putting down future uprisings by their enslaved brethren and catching runaway slaves. This arrangement was resisted by many Maroon factions, but they would later find themselves fighting opposite their fellow oppressed Africans.

The uprising led to the deaths of fourteen planters and two hundred enslaved Africans, with property damage worth an estimated £124 million today. African rebels burned hundreds of buildings across the island, including Roehampton Estate, the blazing scene of which was later recreated by French lithographer Adolphe Duperly (pictured). But it was the aftermath of the uprising which saw some of the most sadistic violence take place.

The Aftermath

The white Jamaican plantocracy responded to the Rebellion in the only language it knew: unspeakable brutality. The reprisals of the Jamaican planter class in response to such an affront to their authority was merciless and indiscriminate. Immediately after the Rebellion, approximately 340 Africans were executed using a cruel and gruesome variety of methods. The majority were hanged, and their heads displayed in plantations across the island to serve as a warning against future uprisings.

Beyond the pale for Parliament, though, was the tarring and feathering of a white missionary suspected of fanning the flames of rebellion. It’s difficult to find a clearer example of the racialised priorities of the British Empire than this—rather than the brutal murder of thousands of Black Africans (perceived as nothing more than chattel), it was the punishment of a white missionary by white planters that drew significant protest. The missionary’s filthy neckerchief was paraded around Britain to the horror of those who saw it, bolstering the cause of white abolitionists.

Today, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to call Sharpe an advocate of a form of liberation theology. Sat in jail following his failed uprising, Sharpe proclaimed that he learned from the Bible that ‘whites had no more right to hold Black people in slavery than Black people had to make white people slaves… I would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery.’ Sharpe was executed on those gallows on 23 May 1832. He’s remembered as a National Hero of Jamaica, with his likeness printed on the $50 Jamaican banknote.
An Ongoing Struggle

The popular narrative would have us believe that the British Empire chose to fully emancipate the thousands of African slaves in Jamaica in 1838 out of moral duty. But the truth is quite the opposite. Despite its failure, the sheer scale of the Christmas Rebellion, coupled with the constant resistance of enslaved Africans, demonstrated that the centuries-old practice of slavery had become untenable.

The Christmas Rebellion directly precipitated the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which on its surface abolished slavery, but also stipulated that formerly enslaved Africans would have to undergo a period of ‘apprenticeship’ under their old masters before they could be freed. It was not until 1838 that full emancipation was granted by Britain.

In addition, slave owners, the Jamaican planter class among them, were awarded a handsome £20 million in compensation—a sum comprising forty percent of the Treasury’s national budget at the time, and worth more than £17 billion today. This monumental debt was only paid off in 2015, meaning that the tax revenue generated by living British citizens, potentially among them the descendants of enslaved Africans, has been used to contribute to recompense for human traffickers. The former enslaved Africans, subject to untold brutality for generations, got nothing.

This year, the Jamaican government was unsuccessful in its petition for £7 billion in reparations from the British government. The latter dismissed Jamaica’s claims due to questions of practicality. Who would pay for it? And to whom?

No such questions were asked when the British government compensated slaveowners for the loss of their ‘property’. As we remember the Christmas Rebellion and the bravery of those Africans who struggled against near insurmountable odds, we must also remember that the long fight for justice remains incomplete.
About the Author

Perry Blankson is an MA Student at the University of Leeds and member of the Young Historians Project. He is also part of the Editorial Working Group for the History Matters Journal.

The Global North’s Vaccine Charity Is a Sham

ByBeauty Dhlamini

26.12.2021

The Global North is responding to vaccine inequality by dumping near-expired doses on African countries without infrastructure to disseminate them. Those doses don't end up in arms – they end up in the bin.


Some African countries are capable of manufacturing their own vaccines, if only the Global North would waive intellectual property rights. (daboost / Getty Images)

The emergence and rapid domination of the Omicron variant is the sharp reminder that Covid-19 remains a global threat, and that vaccinating the whole world is the only way forward. Yet the Global North continues to accept reality of vaccine apartheid, while the rest of the world, particularly Africa, pays the price.

Vaccines have been and remain in short supply in Africa after countries in the Global North hoarded all initial orders from pharmaceutical companies and refused to waiver vaccine patents. As a result, African countries have struggled to secure enough vaccines to roll out mass immunisation campaigns. Many are reliant on donations from global vaccine scheme COVAX, co-led by the WHO and partners, including the Gavi vaccine alliance.

Despite deliveries of vaccines to Africa increasing in recent months, there have been claims that weak healthcare systems and limited infrastructure are holding back rollouts once they arrive. Another, related issue has emerged, too: vaccine wastage.

Vaccine wastage is defined as any vialled vaccine that goes unused, and to some extent, it’s expected. Given the scale of the Covid-19 vaccination programmes, including booster campaigns, some vaccine wastage has been unavoidable for a variety of reasons, including the characteristics of the vaccine, logistical issues with cold chain supply, storage failure, vial size, and specific clinical contexts. But the volume is heavily dependent on vaccination rollout programmes, equipment, and immunisation workers’ practice.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) differentiates between two types of vaccine waste: closed vial wastage, and open vial wastage. Closed vial wastage occurs when there is physical damage to vials, when the vaccines expire before they are opened, or when vials are not kept at the necessary temperature during storage or transportation, rendering them unusable. Open vial wastage generally occurs because of spillage, physical damage, expiry, or because unused doses from multi-dose vials are thrown away.

The main vaccines approved and used in the UK, including Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford, and Moderna, come manufactured in multi-dose vials. They’re more cost-efficient and require fewer resources (i.e. the amount of glass vials). Once a multi-dose vial has been opened, it has a shelf life of about six hours. Wastage rates tend to increase as the number of doses per vial increases.

The extra vaccine in each vial is called overfill. While excess vaccine is perfectly safe to use, excess doses from multiple vials cannot be pooled into one vial and then used. Similarly, leftover AstraZeneca vaccine cannot be combined with leftover Pfizer vaccine, and vice versa.

In the early stages of the mass vaccination at the start of the year, there was a lack of ‘official’ guidance, and so after administering doses to the government’s priority groups, vaccine wastage was unavoidable—there was far more supply than there was demand. Once they had all been vaccinated, health professionals working at vaccination sites used their discretion and turned to other key workers including firefighters, taxi drivers, teachers, supermarket staff, and family and friends, often in exchange for their silence. However, even when this was done to avoid wasting vaccine doses, they faced criticism from politicians and senior NHS management—as if throwing away perfectly usable vaccine doses when millions of people were still at risk of catching Covid and passing it on was more ethical.

In January 2021, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said NHS England had forecast vaccine wastage to be around ten percent, but that the actual wastage rate was ‘well below that’. However, it was reported in November 2021 that the UK threw away more than 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine after the life-saving jabs were allowed to pass their expiry date. These doses were discarded after the decision was made in May to stop offering the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger age groups because of concerns over rare blood clotting.

Unsurprisingly, the government failed to donate the doses to eligible recipients in poorer countries struggling to access Covid vaccines—despite previous promises to redistribute supplies that were deemed surplus to requirements. It’s estimated that this amount is set to increase even further to around 800 million wasted doses by mid-2022.

In the United States, pharmacies and state governments have thrown away at least 15.1 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines since 1 March, according to government data obtained by NBC News—a far larger number than previously known and still probably an undercount. But the UK, the US, and other Global North countries where vaccine coverage is high are not the only countries experiencing these issues.

In July this year, the World Health Organisation reported that 450,000 donated doses across eight African countries had expired before they could be administered. This is a familiar story across the continent; over the course of this year Malawi has had to burn 20,000 doses, South Sudan discarded close to 60,000 doses, and the Democratic Republic of Congo had to return 1.3 million jabs to COVAX, all as a result of ill-thought-out donations.

Currently, the vaccines being donated to Africa fail to consider Africans themselves. The decisions taken by African leaders and health professionals to discard vaccines have not been made in silos, but due to the growing cases of donations with carelessly short shelf lives, as well as last-minute donations that have left countries with little time to prepare for their vaccine campaigns. What use are the vaccines for Africans if they are simply dumped on them for use, without accounting for the time needed to transport, clear, distribute, and deliver to the public?

Africa is not a dumping ground, and countries on the continent shouldn’t have to wait until our doses are about to expire to vaccinate their populations. Some African countries are capable of safely manufacturing their own vaccines, if only the Global North would waive intellectual property rights so doses can be produced patent-free for the communities that need them most.

There’s been a recent rise in media coverage of Covid vaccination wastage in African countries. This coverage often suggests that supply isn’t the main issue in vaccinating African citizens, instead constructing the idea that wastage is happening because people don’t really want the vaccine. What this coverage fails to do is make the case against wealthy Global North countries donating near-expired vaccines—and accepting the resulting and avoidable loss of life—and for the improvement of delivery logistics instead.

Of course, there are also internal factors that slow the vaccination of all Africans—for example, class divides. In Kenya, relative elites in the capital quickly got themselves vaccinated but stopped pushing for everyone else. But that doesn’t shift the responsibility rich countries shoulder to enable vaccine justice. Their short-sighted vaccine nationalism and the free pass handed to big pharmaceutical giants to profit as much as they like from these publicly funded vaccines is prolonging the pandemic, and costing lives.

With one billion doses of Covid vaccines expected to arrive in Africa in the coming months, concern has shifted to the shortage of equipment required to deliver them, like syringes, as well as insufficient planning in some countries that could create bottlenecks in the rollout. Reducing vaccine waste should be a key aim of all programmes, to ensure this precious liquid ends up in the arms of as many individuals as possible—and not in the bin.
About the Author

Beauty Dhlamini is a Global Health scholar with a focus on health inequalities. She works with community and grassroot organisations and co-hosts the podcast Mind the Health Gap.

The Radical Legacy of New York’s Winter Rent Strike

By Glyn Robbins

On 26 December 1907, 10,000 New York families led by teenager Pauline Newman began a historic rent strike – more than a century later, their struggle remains as relevant as ever.


An open market on New York City's Lower East Side, photographed in 1905. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

From 26 December 1907 to 9 January 1908, 10,000 tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York City’s Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by thirty-three percent. With their cry to ‘fight the landlord as they had the Czar’, the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for 2,000 households.

The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the city’s tenants today. But as the Covid crisis continues, New York City renters are again organising against rapacious landlordism.

The 1907-8 rent strike was led by a remarkable woman, Pauline Newman, who had arrived in the US from Lithuania in 1901, aged about nine (her birth certificate was lost along the way). She was one of two million Jews who arrived in the country between 1881 and 1924, escaping antisemitic pogroms. Still a child, she started work, first making hairbrushes and then in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Women discussing the rent strike, 1908.

Newman had been exposed to radical ideas in her homeland, where one trade unionist commented that ‘behind every volume of the Talmud was a volume of Marx’. Still young, she argued against gender segregation in the synagogue and demanded the schooling that was often denied girls. Her political education continued in America through the pages of the mass circulation Yiddish-language socialist newspaper the Daily Forward, and in discussion groups that included some of the left luminaries of the time.

Pauline Newman was the epitome of ‘intersectionality’ long before the term was coined. She became known as ‘the East Side Joan of Arc’, combining housing activism with trade unionism, socialism, the fight for women’s suffrage, and gender and sexual equality. As a gay woman who raised a child with her partner and assumed a non-traditional style of dress, she lived in a way that challenged patriarchal orthodoxy, and died in 1986 after a lifetime devoted to the struggle that saw her go from ‘the garment shop floor to positions of influence in the American labour movement’, according to Annelise Orleck’s 1991 book Common Sense and a Little Fire.

The legacy and contemporary relevance of Pauline Newman abounds. Inspired by the 1907 rent strike, in November 1909, she helped build the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and its ‘Uprising of 20,000’ against the exploitation of the textile industry. After two hours of indecision at a mass meeting at the Cooper Union, one of the workers, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, famously said, ‘I am tired of listening to speakers… I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now!’ Once again, the strikers’ demands were only partially met—but their women-led grassroots campaigning challenged both the employers and the male-dominated union hierarchy, leading to a wave of industrial action by textile workers across the US.

Pauline Newman, photographed c.1912. (Wikimedia Commons)

The tradition of working-class New Yorkers fighting for a better life extended beyond housing. ILGWU members were also heavily involved in a succession of protests and boycotts against excessive food prices, beginning with a boycott of a Kosher butchers in 1902. As the New York Times put it, ‘when East Siders don’t like something, they strike’. In 1914, the ILGWU founded the Union Health Center to provide medical care to its members; they also promoted education projects in the same period, including a successful Workers’ University.

By March 1911, Pauline Newman was working with the US Socialist Party alongside Eugene Debs, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers. The negligence of the factory’s bosses was yet another example of the corporate manslaughter that still puts working class lives at risk, from the sweatshops of Dhaka to Grenfell Tower. But the ILGWU kept up the struggle for better conditions, at work and at home. The union was part of a highly significant movement to build co-operative housing for New York City workers, several of which survive today: the Penn South development in central Manhattan, for example, was sponsored by the ILGWU, and continues to provide 2,820 truly affordable homes in the heart of one of the world’s most unaffordable cities.
A Radical Legacy

Rent strikes have been a recurring theme in New York City’s working-class history and a vital weapon in the ongoing fight for better housing conditions. As Ronald Lawson writes in the introduction to his history of the city’s tenant movement, ‘elites do not always have their way… ordinary people—working class and poor, women, immigrants, minorities—do help shape political agendas when they are organized and mobilized.’

This year has brought new evidence of this. With millions losing income and unable to pay rent during the pandemic, a huge increase in evictions and homelessness was threatened. But a vibrant, well-organised coalition of housing campaigners fought to ensure that the state of New York has been virtually eviction-free for eighteen months. This reversal of a cornerstone of capitalism is a remarkable achievement—one that has not yet been replicated in other places. It results from the same kind of assertive—and often women-led—mobilisation that Pauline Newman personified, including rent strikes. The early role of trade unions in building these movements was vital, too, and needs urgently to be revived

A CASA anti-eviction protest outside the Bronx housing court, 15 December 2021. (Glyn Robbins / CASA)

Another recurring theme of housing and social justice movements in New York’s history is the role of radical Jewish socialists. Much of the city’s truly affordable housing was inspired and built by them. Sadly, the ILGWU fell foul to the red scares and infighting that have so often afflicted the US labour movement, and it’s a horrible irony that, as we remember the 1907-8 rent strike, the leadership of the UK Labour Party is busy purging itself of people following in the tradition of Pauline Newman.

In New York City today, the call for unity to defend workers at work and at home continues. Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) in the Bronx is just one of numerous tenant organisations fighting against the renewed threat of mass evictions, as Covid enters its second year. Some CASA members are on rent strike, demanding their landlord carries out repairs, and the organisation is spearheading a campaign demanding that the anti-eviction protections are extended for as long as the pandemic is with us.

Private landlords have filed 240,000 cases against New York tenants with rent arrears, threatening a huge spike in homelessness next year, particularly among the city’s poor people of colour and immigrants. It’s a situation Pauline Newman would instantly recognise. But CASA and others like them are determined to fight in a way she’d recognise, too.
About the Author

Glyn Robbins is a housing worker, campaigner, writer and academic.

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The 1619 Project’s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses its cultural impact

December 26, 2021

 GZERO Staff

Today, we take a fresh look at US history—and the role Black people have played in it—with a woman who is reshaping that national conversation. When Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones published the “1619 Project” in 2019, not even she could have predicted its cultural impact. It’s hard to think of another piece of modern journalism that has garnered such praise while also sparking such intense outrage. Now, her new book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, expands upon her initial work. She joins Ian Bremmer for an in-depth look at how she’s trying to reshape US history, and the backlash it has caused.

Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Counter narrative: Black Americans, the 1619 Project, and Nikole Hannah-Jones

• Nikole Hannah-Jones pushes back against "disqualifying" 1619 ... ›
• Podcast: How we got here: Evaluating 1619 and US history with ... ›

Iranian Official: Over 300 Documents Presented to Iraq on Assassination of Gen. Soleimani


TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Judiciary Deputy Chief and Secretary-General of Iran's Human Rights Headquarters Kazzem Qaribabadi said Tehran has granted hundreds of documents to the Iraqi government on the assassination of anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, and declared that the two countries have struck an agreement to continue cooperation on the case.

"We submitted more than 300 documents on the martyrdom of General Soleimani," Qaribabadi said.

He pointed out that almost two years since the terrorist act on General Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and their companions in Iraq; the Islamic Republic of Iran’s major defined priority in the legal and judiciary field is surveying the criminal case in Iranian and Iraqi judiciary courts.

“It was agreed that a joint Iranian-Iraqi committee will be established comprising the judiciary delegations of the two countries to begin their surveys,” he added.

In a relevant development earlier this week, Iran and Iraq in a joint statement underlined their determination to identify, prosecute and punish the culprits behind the assassination of former IRGC Qods Force Commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani and Deputy Head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Iran and Iraq have issued a joint statement on an investigation into the “criminal and terrorist” assassination by the US of top anti-terror commanders of the two countries in Baghdad early last year, Iranian Judiciary Deputy Chief and Secretary-General of Iran's Human Rights Headquarters Kazzem Qaribabad said on Thursday.

He added that the statement was issued during the second session of a joint Iran-Iraq committee investigating the murder of General Soleimani and al-Muhandis.

Qaribabadi said that in the statement, Iran and Iraq stressed that the assassinations were a “violation of the rules of international law, including relevant international conventions on the fight against terrorism”.

“In addition, the two countries reaffirmed their serious and firm determination to identify, prosecute and punish all those involved in deciding, planning and implementing this criminal act,” he emphasized.

Qaribabadi noted that the two countries have exchanged documents and reports about the case.

“Documents and information related to the role and interference of the American defendants were presented by the Iranian delegation to the Iraqi side, and it was decided that complementary investigations would be carried out by the judiciaries of the two countries in this regard,” the senior Iranian human rights official said.

He added that Iran and Iraq also agreed to continue the exchange of documents and information in the investigation process.

“In the joint statement, the two sides also emphasized that they would use legal and judicial capacities at national and international levels to deliver justice and prevent the occurrence of such criminal acts,” Qaribabadi pointed out.

They also agreed to continue bilateral cooperation to gather information about all defendants and ways to hold them accountable.

The third round of the joint committee will be held in Baghdad within the next 45 days.

General Soleimani, al-Muhandis and ten of their deputies were martyred by an armed drone strike as their convoy left Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020. The attack was ordered by then US President Donald Trump.

To date, Iran’s chief civilian prosecutor has indicted 36 individuals in connection with the assassination, among them former president Trump, the head of US Central Command General Kenneth McKenzie Jr., and former US Secretaries of State and Defense Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper.

The file remains open to the further addition of individuals that Tehran determines to have played a role in the killing.

“Based on the statements of the prosecutor-general the list of 36 names is open, as is the role of nine others including German military personnel under investigation. The German military personnel are suspected of facilitating the assassination. Their number and exact role is not known and although I suspect, I am still not sure if they are the ones operating at Ramstein (Airbase),” a source was quoted by al-Mayadeen as saying in October, asking to remain unnamed.

Ramstein Airbase in Germany is one of the largest American military installations in the world, functioning as a command center for NATO, the US air force’s European and African commands as well as a primary hub for drone operations throughout the Greater Middle East and North Africa.

“G4S that is in charge of Baghdad International Airport security also stands accused of involvement in Lt. General Haj Qassem Soleimani’s assassination,” the source added.

G4S is a British multinational private security company that is among the world’s largest private employers with a workforce of over 500,000 as of 2020.

Some 26 of the indicted individuals are known to be American and Israeli military and intelligence personnel, at least four of whom have died since January 3- 2020. On July 1 of this year, the Israeli press reported the death of Col. Sharon Asman of the elite Nahal Brigade, claiming he had collapsed during a training exercise.

Among the 36 indicted individuals were also seven local agents from regional Arab states, believed to include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, UAE, and Qatar. Most of these individuals have now been either apprehended or killed by the authorities of their own countries or by the Resistance Front, according to al-Mayadeen.

Assange’s Father: Treatment of Julian Mirrors US, Allies’ ‘Corruption, Criminality’

TEHRAN (FNA)- John Shipton, the father of Julian Assange, stated his son’s prolonged incarceration fits the patterns of “corruption, criminality of enormous depth” by the US and its allies the WikiLeaks’ co-founder exposed.

On the latest episode of RT’s On Contact, host Chris Hedges asked the 78-year-old father of the renowned publisher to share his thoughts on Julian’s long, drawn-out incarceration and whether he thought it was the US and allies’ plan to just let his son wither away behind bars, not intending to ever end the legal saga.

Shipton responded by saying that he thought it would be wrong to conflate the responsibility of the US and the UK, where the WikiLeaks’ co-founder has been kept in a maximum-security prison since April 2019 while awaiting a decision on his extradition to the US.

Assange’s father emphasized that authorities in London were just as guilty, and should not be seen as simply doing Washington’s bidding.

“It’s always been thought that the UK is a proxy for the intentions of the United States. That, in fact, is wrong. The actual torture is committed by the institutions of the crown prosecuting service, the foreign and colonial office, and the judiciary. It’s actually committed by those people … who then go home and have a glass of wine,” he stated.

Shipton pointed out that the kind of harsh treatment and protracted incarceration of Assange mirrors, albeit on a smaller scale, the overall patterns of “murders, corruption, criminality of enormous depth and conviction by the United States and its NATO allies”, which was exposed for the whole world to see by Assange and WikiLeaks.

The father of the jailed publisher went on to describe the ever-growing amounts of the “most vicious hatred, the most unscrupulous slander, calumny and lies that have surrounded Julian like a tornado in these 13 years".

Shipton told Hedges that it is the wide and unrelenting support for Julian from lawmakers and ordinary people alike, from all across the world, that keeps him going and gives him strength to continue to fight for his son’s freedom.

When asked to illustrate recent instances of humiliation at the hands of the British authorities that Assange has had to go through, his father recounted how in September, during a court hearing, Julian was placed in a “glass box”, which had only a tiny slot in it, through which Assange could communicate with his lawyers.

However, to do so, the WikiLeaks’ co-founder had to kneel each time, while the lawyers on the other side had to stand on their toes. When Assange and his defense team asked to let him sit next to his lawyers, the judge refused, with that “farce” continuing for three weeks. Understandably, Assange’s father found it too painful to go into detail about his son’s gradual physical and mental decline over the years.

Shipton concluded by saying that WikiLeaks’ revelations may have contributed to the ending of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, which were once deemed “endless”, describing this as the “gifts of Julian, of Chelsea and of WikiLeaks to the people of the United States and to people of the United Kingdom and Australia".

On December 10, the UK High Court of Justice ruled that Assange could be extradited to the US, overturning a previous decision by a lower court. The case was remitted back to Westminster magistrates court, while Assange’s team announced it would appeal the decision. Stella Moris, Assange’s fiancée, dismissed the ruling as a “grave miscarriage of justice".

What science tells us about kindness, healing and helping each other through trauma

DECEMBER 24, 2021
Illustration by Dorothy Leung

Trish Dribnacki-Pennock stood on her Calgary street in the sunny June, in front of the wet husks of her basement condo. Everything he had had piled up like garbage on the street – books, photographs, clothes, even his toilet. A few days earlier, she and her 18-year-old son had abandoned their home in Calgary’s floodwaters with the dog, but were unable to hold their grumpy cat. She returned to find the place covered with thigh-deep water. Her records and posters, held high on a shelf by her quick-witted son, were spared along with the cat, but the rest drowned or swam. On that summer afternoon in 2013, when the water was pouring mud, a group of friends were helping her remove whatever they could to stop the mold.

Someone held a melted Popsicle in her hand—a delivery from another friend dealing with her own flooding issues, a neighborhood away. “A popsicle?” That laughter, which was already a gift. He lifted his face into the hot sun, and squeezed the snow out of his white plastic. Helicopters hoisted up, and emergency vehicles raced across the road. She was covered in mud from her kitchen which could be sewage. He had gone home. And she was slapping a popsicle like a child. Surrounded by the devastation of his adult life, he experienced moments of silly, childish bliss.

Eight years later, she still remembers the importance of that friend’s simple kindness. “She saw me, she knew me and she understood what I wanted,” says Ms. Dribnacki-Pennock. “Isn’t that what we all need to see?”

In pandemics and floods and fires, there are grand gestures and courageous defenses that save lives, and then there is simple kindness that saves lives. They hug a stranger in Edmonton when you collapse in tears after an eight-hour drive from their burning city in the oil sands. The friend who skips dinner without asking is taken to an ambulance after your husband is infected with COVID-19. The Thursday night drinking buddy who goes to your swampy house in Merritt, BC to save your birds. That little girl who draws a picture to say she’s sorry you lost all your chickens in a flood in Sumas Prairie. Versions of these acts of kindness appear over and over again, with stories people tell when the world is turned upside down, when they remember the fires that devastated Fort McMurray, Alta. in 2016, BC floods still retreat. And this pandemic seems like it will never end. They are the meaty popsicles that keep us going. The moments that make us feel like we are not alone.

These simple actions are so powerful because of the message behind them, says Shane Sinclair, founder and director of the Compassion Research Lab at the University of Calgary. “The Popsicle is symbolic. It says, ‘You mean a lot, I saw and I felt for you, and I did something about it.'”

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What defines these moments of connection is that they are not random acts. They differ from donations made from afar, and are more concrete than sympathy. They require one human being to acknowledge the specific pain of another, and then act to alleviate that pain—the Latin meaning of compassion, according to Dr. Sinclair observes, is to “suffer”.

In research, the act of being present is related to social support, and based on the findings of countless studies, it is arguably the most important factor in why some people recover quickly after a traumatic event, and others do not. Even the belief that help is available, if needed, is linked to better outcomes in clinical care. And it’s not just about receiving care; Giving support, studies show, is healing, too.

What gives resilience, according to those studies, is the real edge, not innate patience or an optimistic personality: it’s connection. We learned this during the early months of the pandemic, when life shut down, and people found ways to reach out; When we understood intuitively, that a wave at Grandma’s window was hopeful, and a rally of gratitude to the doctors and nurses was soul-awakening. We are seeing this now, as communities are coming together after the floods in British Columbia. But we can already observe the wear and tear of another pandemic wave. It’s the same in science: People want to move on, and they sometimes get impatient with people who find it difficult to move on.

Yet these waning times are when society needs a booster shot of communal kindness, because what used to be normal was not working for many. Modern, urban life has long been eroding social support. Years before the virus shut down the world, experts were raising the alarm about loneliness, a growing percentage of respondents to surveys who said they had no one to trust for their problems.

This is particularly concerning as the demand for mental health care is increasing, with Canadian psychiatrists, publicly funded psychologists and social workers dwindling in supply. But even if those most in need can easily access the best treatment, even if there are enough physicians to give them – which is not the case in Canada – therapy and medicine alone may not work. What science shows, and what life teaches, is that after these many months of forced isolation, followed by floods and fires, we need to maintain a community of compassion, which in times of crisis does not burn up. . Ms Dribnacki-Pennock, Calgary flood survivor and now health care worker on the frontline of the pandemic, knows it all too well: We cannot heal alone.
Illustration by Dorothy Leung

Last December, Therese Greenwood went shopping for Christmas cactus at Walmart in Fort McMurray, only to find them sold out. The cactus had become a new tradition after The Beast, as it turns out, in a 2016 fire that destroyed much of her home and town. The first winter after the fire, Christmas trees and decorations were in short supply. It felt like a priority for families with young children, Ms. Greenwood says, so she and her husband celebrated with a whimsical, almost leafless, cactus. The plant had become a symbol of harsh existence, and not one in a pandemic year, after a spring flood forced them to evacuate – yet again – from their home, in what felt like a new affliction. But Ms Greenwood had to speak to the woman at Walmart, who asked where she was living during the fire. “Abbasand,” said Ms Greenwood. “Beacon Hill,” replied the woman, placing the two of them in the neighborhood that were hardest hit. “I’ll put in a special order.” Within a week the cactus arrived.

Even after all these years, the people living through The Beast share a common language. “They just know how you’re feeling,” says Ms. Greenwood, who has written a book about fires, What do you take with you One of the non-material takeaways is the importance of community, having friends who listen actively, without being discovered, when you want to talk, and small actions that make a big impact. In January after the fire broke out, Ms. Greenwood was shopping in a pair of rubber boots – she hadn’t turned around to buy winter boots. She was visited by a friend, and a few days later, she received a gift card for new shoes. “It really helps you remember that people are nice and decent and kind,” she says.

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Vincent Agyapong, a psychiatrist working at Fort McMurray, was also evacuated along with his family in 2016. In the years since, he and a group of researchers have been tracking anxiety and depression rates among people affected by the fires. His work returned a consistent finding: the more social support a person feels, the greater his resilience. Those who said they received no social support were 13 times more likely to suffer a major depressive episode after a fire than those who reported receiving a high level of support. Compared to receiving financial aid for damage caused during the fire, social support for mental health was more protective in the long run, Dr. Agyapong says.

Dr. Agyapong’s job was to copy decades-old research. A 1982 paper about residents living near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant found that those reporting social support were more protected from stress after a disaster. The same finding shows up in studies of firefighters, soldiers, new mothers and babies, and in post-floods, fires, bombings and school shootings. People with post-traumatic stress syndrome who receive clinical care have better outcomes and are more likely to stick with treatment longer when they feel socially supported. Children who have had adverse childhood experiences are more resilient when they have at least one adult they can trust. Military veterans who believe they have higher levels of social support are less likely to have suicidal thoughts, according to a Yale University study published in November. Researchers at Ohio State University recently found that people who reported providing social support also had lower levels of inflammation, an important indicator of stress and long-term health.

So hugs make us feel good – did we need to study for that? The problem is, it’s not always easy to be around people struggling with trauma and mental-health issues, and they don’t always find the help they need. They push people away only when they need their support the most. Or people walk away on their own, or feel unskilled to help. Research suggests that while social support may be high during or right after a traumatic experience, it may drop, as people become tired or simply want to move on with their lives—a fatigue that has been described as an epidemic— A tired country can undoubtedly understand.

Edward Said’s Orientalism and Its Afterlives


Edward Said’s Orientalism instilled an anti-imperial sensibility into an entire generation of Western scholars. But even while it castigated the imperial project, its actual analysis didn’t give us the intellectual resources to overturn it.

A painting by Henry Martens portraying the battle of Ferozeshah in the First Anglo-Sikh War, which resulted in defeat and partial subjugation of the Sikh empire to the British. (Wikimedia Commons)

LONG READ

BYVIVEK CHIBBER

JACOBIN
12.24.2021
This article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. 

Few works have had a greater influence on the current left than Edward Said’s Orientalism. In the first instance, it has become the lodestone for critical scholarship around the colonial experience and imperialism. But more expansively, in its status as a founding text of postcolonial studies, its imprint can be discerned across the moral sciences — in race studies, history, cultural theory, and even political economy. Indeed, it is hard to think of many books that have had a greater influence on critical scholarship over the past half century. There are some respects in which Said’s placement of colonialism at the center of the modern era has had a salutary effect, not just on scholarship, but also on politics. Even as the Left went into retreat in the neoliberal era, even as working-class parties either shrank in influence or were absorbed into the mainstream, the centrality of anti-imperialism surprisingly remained close to the center of left discourse — an achievement in no small part attributable to Said’s great book. And even as class politics is reemerging after its long hiatus, it is impossible to imagine a future in which the Left in the core countries will ever repeat its sometimes baleful disregard for imperial aggression and for the aspirations of laboring classes in the Global South. In this recalibration of the Left’s moral compass, Said’s Orientalism continues to play an important role.


Precisely because of its classic status, and its continuing influence, Orientalism deserves a careful reexamination. Its importance as a moral anchor for the anti-imperialist Left has to be balanced against some of the other, less auspicious aspects of its legacy. In particular, alongside its excoriation of Western colonialism and its deep investigation of colonialism’s ideological carapace, the book undeniably took several steps backward in the analysis of colonial expansion. It was this very weakness that proved to be so attractive to the emerging field of postcolonial studies in the 1980s, and that enabled its proponents to don the mantle of anti-imperial critique even as they were engaging in the very essentialism and exoticization of the East that was emblematic of colonial ideology. It is no small irony that Said, a deeply committed humanist, secularist, and cosmopolitan, is now associated with an intellectual trend that traduces those very values. This apparent paradox, I will argue, is, in fact, not so mysterious. It reflects real weaknesses in Orientalism’s basic arguments — weaknesses that were exposed very early by critics from the South but that were brushed aside by the New Left in its flight from materialism. As the Left gathers its intellectual resources once again and takes up the challenge of confronting imperial power, an engagement with Orientalism has to be high on its agenda.

Orientalism as Cause and Effect

There are two arguments in Orientalism about the relation between Western imperialism and its accompanying discourse. The first, and the one that has emerged as a kind of folk conception of the phenomenon, describes Orientalism as a rationalization for colonial rule. Said dates this Orientalism to the eighteenth century, with the rise of what is now called the Second British Empire, and continuing into the Cold War, when the United States displaced Britain as the global hegemon. It was during these centuries that Orientalism flourished as a body of knowledge that not only described and systematized how the East was understood but did so in a fashion that justified its domination by the West. Hence, if nationalists demanded the right to self-governance by Asians, or criticized the racism of colonial regimes, defenders schooled in Orientalism could retort

that Orientals have never understood the meaning of self-government the way “we” do. When some Orientals oppose racial discrimination while others practice it, you say “they’re all Orientals at bottom” and class interest, political circumstances, economic factors are totally irrelevant. . . . History, politics, and economics do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is the Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland.

In other words, the normal grounds of political judgment did not apply to colonial settings because, in relying on them, colonial critics presumed that Eastern peoples were motivated by the same needs and goals as those of the West. But this, Orientalism advised, was a fallacy. Asians did not think in terms of self-determination, or class, or their economic interests. To object to colonialism on the grounds that it rode roughshod over these needs or, more ambitiously, to generate a system of rights based on the presumptive universality of those needs, was to ignore the distinctiveness of Eastern culture. It was based on a categorical mistake, and indeed, it could even be criticized as an insensitivity to their cultural specificity. In so conceptualizing the colonial subject as the quintessential Other, Orientalism absolved imperialism of any wrongdoing, and thereby stripped demands for self-determination of any moral authority. Said’s argument here is a fairly traditional, materialist explanation for how and why Orientalist ideology came to occupy such a prominent place in European culture in the modern period. Just as any system of domination creates an ideological discourse to justify and naturalize its superordinate position, so, too, colonialism created a legitimizing discourse of its own. The key here is that the causal arrow runs from imperial domination to the discourse it created — simply put, colonialism created Orientalism.Orientalism’s importance as a moral anchor for the anti-imperialist Left has to be balanced against other, less auspicious aspects of its legacy.

This is undoubtedly the argument for which Orientalism is best known. But it is also the component of Said’s argument that is the most conventional and familiar. Said was not, by any means, the first anti-imperialist to describe modern Orientalism as being tied to the colonial project. Or, to put it more broadly, he was not the first to show that much of the social scientific and cultural scholarship produced by colonial powers was, in fact, geared toward justifying their rule over Eastern nations. As Said himself noted, albeit somewhat belatedly, his book was preceded by scores of works that made the same argument, from scholars belonging to the postcolonial world. Many, if not most, belonged to the Marxist tradition in some degree of proximity. What set Said’s great book apart, then, was not the argument he made, but the erudition and literary quality he brought to it. For even while others had made claims that were identical to his, no one had made them with the same panache and, hence, to the same effect.

But Said also makes another argument, running through the entirety of his great work, that reverses this causal arrow and that takes the argument in an entirely novel direction. In this version, Orientalism was not a consequence of colonialism but one of its causes — “To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule,” Said avers, “is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” In other words, Orientalism was around far before the modern era, and by virtue of its depiction of the East, it created the cultural conditions for the West to embark on its colonial project. That depiction had, at its core, the urge to categorize, schematize, and exoticize the East, viewing it as mysterious and fixed, in contrast to the familiar and dynamic West. Hence, the West was ordained the center of moral and scientific progress, and the exotic and unchanging East was an object to be studied and apprehended, but always alien, always distant.

Said traces this tendency back to the classical world, continuing through the medieval period, and culminating in the great works of the Renaissance and after. This implies that Orientalism is not so much a product of circumstances specific to a historical conjuncture, but rather something embedded deeply in Western culture itself. To push this argument, Said makes a distinction between latent and manifest Orientalism. The latent components are its essential core, its basic moral and conceptual architecture, which have been in place since Homer, and which define it as a discourse. Its manifest elements are what give Orientalism its form in any particular era and hence are the components that undergo change in the course of history. Manifest Orientalism organizes the basic, underlying bits comprising latent Orientalism into a coherent doctrine, and its most coherent incarnation is, of course, the one synthesized in the modern era.

This distinction enables Said to accommodate the obvious fact that, as a discourse, Orientalism has not remained unchanged across space and time. He readily admits that Western conceptions of the East have undergone innumerable transformations in form and content over the centuries. Still, “whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism.” In other words, the changes have only been in the way Orientalism’s essential principles are expressed, their essence remaining more or less the same across the centuries. Said continues, “the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant [over time].”

It is not just that latent Orientalism imbricates itself into the pores of Western culture. It is also that, once embedded so securely, it goes beyond simple bias to becoming a practical orientation — an urge to bring reality in line with its conception of how the world ought to be. To Said, this practical stance has been a defining characteristic of the Orientalist mindset, from antiquity to the modern era, in spite of all the changes that it experienced across time. This has enormous consequences for the fate of East-West relations. Said poses the following question: Once the world is carved up analytically the way Orientalism enjoins us to, “can one . . . survive the consequences humanly? [Is there] any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into ‘us’ (Westerners) and ‘they’ (Orientals)”? The question is rhetorical, of course, because for Said, the answer is obviously in the negative. The hostility bred by latent Orientalism is passed on from one generation to another as a pillar of Western culture, always viewing the East as inferior. And, as it becomes internalized and fixed as a cultural orientation, the urge to improve the natives, to help them clamber up the civilizational hierarchy, becomes irresistible. It slowly generates a momentum toward a transition from gaining knowledge about the Orient to the more ambitious project of acquiring power over it. Said’s own description of this process is worth quoting:

Transmitted from one generation to another, it [latent Orientalism] was a part of the culture, as much a language about a part of reality as geometry or physics. Orientalism staked its existence, not upon its openness, its receptivity to the Orient, but rather on its internal, repetitious consistency about its constitutive will-to-power over the Orient.

Latent Orientalism came packaged as a “will to power” — this was the practical orientation it embodied. Hence the obsessive accumulation of facts, Said suggests, “made Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.”

Notice that this version of his argument just about completely inverts the first, materialist one — instead of a system of domination creating its justifying ideology, it is the latter that generates the former: an ideology now creates the power relations it justifies. One is not sure how far Said wishes to press this point — whether he takes Orientalism to be merely an enabling condition for colonialism’s rise, as against a stronger, more propulsive role. I will consider the merits of both interpretations later in this essay. But it seems clear that, on this second argument, Said views Orientalism as in some way responsible for the rise of European colonialism, not just as its consequence.

Now, this argument, unlike the first, does add considerable novelty to the critique of Orientalism. As Fred Halliday observed in a discussion of the book, critiques of Orientalist constructions had typically been materialist in their approach and grounded in political economy; Said’s originality derived in his formulation of an argument that gave a nod to this older approach, but then veered decisively away from it, offering what was an unmistakably culturalist alternative. Hence, “while much of the other work was framed in broadly Marxist terms and was a universalist critique, Said, eschewing materialist analysis, sought to apply literary critical methodology and to offer an analysis specific to something called ‘the Orient.’” It is to this innovation that we now turn.

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Two Early Critics

Said’s second argument attracted some attention in the early years after Orientalism appeared, most pointedly in Sadik Jalal al-Azm’s biting critique in Khamsin, and then in Aijaz Ahmad’s broadside in his book In Theory. As al-Azm correctly observed, Said’s second argument was not only in tension with, but also fatally undermined, his objective of criticizing Orientalist views of modern history. For to say, as Said did, that Orientalism had been the defining element in the Western constructions of the East, without attributing it to any social or institutional matrix, strongly suggested that Orientalism was in some way part of the enduring cognitive apparatus of the West. It led inexorably to the conclusion, al-Azm suggested, that “Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon . . . but is the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples, and their languages, in favour of Occidental self-affirmation.” But if this is what Said was saying, then did it not resurrect the very Orientalism he disavowed? A defining characteristic of this worldview, after all, was the idea of an ontological chasm separating East and West, which the fields, categories, and theories emanating from the West could not traverse. The Western mind, in other words, was not capable of apprehending the true nature of Eastern culture. Said’s implantation of Orientalist discourse as an unchanging component of Western culture seemed to reinforce this very idea — of the inscrutability of the Orient to Western eyes, from the Greeks to Henry Kissinger.

The same questions about Said’s second argument were raised by Aijaz Ahmad in a landmark assessment of his broader oeuvre, published almost a decade after al-Azm’s review. Ahmad speculated that Said’s second rendering of the connection between Orientalism and colonialism was perhaps attributable to the influence of Michel Foucault, though for Ahmad, it was questionable whether Foucault would have supported the idea of a putative continuity in Western discourse from Homer to Richard Nixon. The critical problem for Ahmad, however, was not Said’s fidelity to Foucault, but the theoretical and political consequences of locating Orientalism in the deep recesses of Western culture rather than among the consequences of colonialism. Ahmad raised two issues in particular.Said views Orientalism as in some way responsible for the rise of European colonialism, not just as its consequence.

First, Said seemed to take the Orientalist mindset to be so pervasive in scope and so powerful in influence that the possibility of escaping its grip appeared exceedingly remote. Hence, even thinkers known to be fierce critics of British colonialism are blandly assimilated into the rogues’ gallery of European Orientalists. The most prominent figure in this regard is Karl Marx, who Said relegates to this ignominious status with only the flimsiest of explanations. Ahmad’s foregrounding of this issue was surely justified, given the leading role that Marx and his followers had played not only in criticizing the racism of colonial apologists, but also in anti-colonial movements — from Ireland to India, and from Tanzania to Said’s own homeland of Palestine. Ahmad pointed out, again correctly, that the very passages Said singled out as instances of cultural parochialism could easily be read in a very different vein, as describing not the superiority of Western culture but the brutality of colonial rule. In any case, regardless of one’s judgment about Marx, what was at issue here was whether Said could justifiably claim that Orientalism not only stretched back to classical Greece but exercised such power as to absorb even its critics.

Further, Ahmad pointed to a second, equally important implication of the analysis. Said’s argument, as well as his vocabulary, pushed strongly to displace the traditional interest-based explanations for colonialism, and toward one relying on civilizational clashes. Conventional accounts of colonial expansion had typically adverted to the role of interest groups, classes, and state managers as its animating force. For Marxists, it had been capitalists; for nationalists, it had been “British interests”; for liberals, it was overly ambitious political leaders. What all these explanations had in common was the central role that they accorded to material interests as the motivating factor in colonial rule. But if, in fact, Orientalism as a body of thought propels its believers toward the accumulation of territories, then it is not interests that drive the project, but a deeply rooted cultural disposition — a discourse, to put it in contemporary jargon. As Ahmad concludes:

This idea of constituting Identity through Difference points, again, not to the realm of political economy . . . wherein colonization may be seen as a process of capitalist accumulation but to a necessity which arises within discourse and has always been there at the origin of discourse, so that not only is the modern Orientalist presumably already there in Dante and Euripedes but modern imperialism itself appears to be an effect that arises, as if naturally, from the necessary practices of discourse.

Ahmad is registering his agreement with al-Azm’s judgment that Said has reversed the causal arrow that normally went from colonialism to Orientalism. Naturally, this means that the study of this phenomenon moves from the ambit of political economy to cultural history. But it is not just that colonial expansion appears to be an artifact of discourse. The dispositions it comprises are placed by him not in a particular region or historical era but in an undifferentiated entity called “the West,” stretching back two millennia. This is, of course, a classically Orientalist assertion on Said’s part, but its implications for the study of colonialism are profound. For colonialism now appears not as the consequence of developments particular to a certain era but as an expression of a deeper ontological divide between East and West, a symptom of the cultural orientation of Europe’s inhabitants. We have gone from the culprit being British capitalists to its being “the West” — from classes to cultures.

Said never addressed either al-Azm or Ahmad’s criticisms — a shame, because they remain among the most important and devastating engagements with his work to date. In a private exchange with al-Azm, he promised to reply at some length, and indeed to dismantle al-Azm’s entire examination point by point. (Said warned al-Azm, “I don’t think you’ve ever tangled with a polemicist of my sort. . . . I propose to teach you a lesson in how to argue and how to make points.”) But he never delivered on that promise, nor did he respond in print to Ahmad’s critique. (The latter was met with aggressively ad hominem arguments by Said’s followers.) In the rest of this essay, I purpose to build upon those early interventions to push further in the same direction. Ahmad and al-Azm were justified in their observation that Said’s argument had turned the corner from materialist critique of ideology to idealist argument. But while their accusation was correct, their justification of it was not fully developed — perhaps because they took the weakness of idealist Said’s argument for granted. In today’s context, however, it is important to further develop the line of argument they opened up, and to demonstrate why Said’s view is wrong by virtue of its idealism.

The crux of what I wish to argue is that Said’s second argument — that colonialism was a consequence of Orientalism, not its cause — was not only disturbing in its implications but also that it could not possibly be right, on Said’s own admission. In other words, what al-Azm and Ahmad failed to observe was that the second argument was contradicted by Said’s own evidence. Orientalism could not have generated modern colonialism, or even contributed to it in any significant way. Its roots, therefore, have to be sought in political economy, not in European culture — much as materialists had argued for decades.

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Culture and Colonialism

Said is correct in his observation that ethnocentric and essentializing depictions of the East were widespread among European observers from the earliest times. The question is what explanatory role such depictions are accorded in the rise of European colonialism. We have seen in the preceding section that Said clearly assigns considerable importance to them in this regard. Just what the causal chain is that connects them to it, and how important they are compared to other factors, is murky. But we can be confident that the role is important, since he never qualifies it, nor feels compelled to embed it in a wider discussion of how it combined with other forces that pushed Britain and France outward in the modern era. The problem with Said’s view is that, in his own description of the content of Orientalism, and in his empirical discussion of its relation to other cultures’ own discourses about the West, the argument for its importance as a factor in the advent of modern colonialism breaks down. And, by extension, the promotion of culture as a central explanatory factor in the latter process must also be demoted.

The central problem Said must contend with is that there was nothing unique in the West’s highly parochial understanding of the Orient. The same essentialized and ethnocentric conceptions were typical of Eastern understandings of the West. Hence, the texts we have from Arab, Persian, and Indian descriptions of European culture from precolonial times are no less parochial in their descriptions of Europe and its people, and no less prone to generalize across time and space. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any description of a culture that can escape the tendency to categorize, to generalize across cases, and to schematize in some way or form. The fact is that aspects of Western scholarship of the East that Said takes to be Orientalist are found in many instances of cross-cultural observation.

Said, of course, knows this and readily admits to it. Hence, he observes,

One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.

But this admission raises a fundamental problem for Said’s insistence that Orientalism was in some way responsible for modern imperialism. For if the urge to categorize, essentialize, and generalize about other cultures — which Said insists is what Orientalism does — is common to allcultures, then how can it explain the rise of modern colonialism, which is a project specific to particular nations? In other words, if this mindset was common to many cultures, then it cannot have been what generated colonialism, since the latter was particular to a few nations in (mostly) Western Europe.We have gone from the culprit being British capitalists to its being ‘the West’ — from classes to cultures.

One way to save Said’s second argument would be to weaken the claim for its causal role. As I suggested in the preceding section, because of Said’s ambiguity regarding its status, there are a variety of ways that we could construe his claim. At the very least, we can distinguish between a strong version of it and a weak one:
Strong version: Latent Orientalism was sufficient to launch colonialism. On this account, the motivational push coming from cultural essentialism was all that was needed to launch a colonial project. No other preconditions were necessary.
Weak version: Latent Orientalism was necessary, but not sufficient to launch colonialism. In this account, the racism associated with latent Orientalism was an indispensable precondition for colonialism, but it needed other factors to also be present — perhaps political and economic ones. Nonetheless, the latter could not have been effective had the Orientalist mindset not been gestating.

The strong version proposes that once the Orientalist mindset was in place, it could, on its own, generate modern colonialism. In this view, no other contributing factor was needed to bring about the result. Hence, it would predict that any country that viewed other cultures through this prism would embark on colonial expansion. Clearly, this view is contradicted by the observation that the number of countries with an “Orientalist” mindset (as described above) far exceeded the number that embarked on colonial expansion — so the strong version of this argument cannot be sustained.

A second strategy to save Said’s second argument would be to resort to its weak version. The burden here would be to propose that even if latent Orientalism could not, by itself, generate colonialism, it was nonetheless an essential part of the combination of factors that did bring it about. Hence it was still necessary, even though it wasn’t sufficient, and even though it had to act in tandem with other factors. (It would be what John Mackie referred to as an INUS condition: a necessary but insufficient component of an unnecessary but sufficient causal complex.) Thus, it might be that economic interest or political ambitions were also critical in generating the British or French thrust into the Middle East. The search for oil, the desire to find new markets, the need to secure geopolitical advantage by capturing key ports — all these might have been critical motivating factors for the European powers. The weaker argument would be able to accommodate all these into an explanation for the rise of modern imperialism. It would not have to claim that racial prejudice alone was what drove the Europeans outward, but it could still insist that these other factors would not have been sufficient for the outcome on their own. Without the mindset created by the already existing latent Orientalism, the other factors might have remained inert, unable to muster the force needed to launch the project.

This would probably be the commonsensical defense of Said’s argument, and it is certainly the most effective. But while it has a surface appeal, this version also fails for two reasons. The first has to do with the internal structure of the argument. Nobody doubts that factors like economic or political motivation had to play a role in colonialism’s rise. In that sense, the place of the broader causal complex is secure. The question is, once the economic motivation is in place, will its proponents also require the psychological orientation generated by Orientalism to undertake the colonial project? It might seem that the answer is an obvious yes, because it could be claimed that a process as brutal and costly as colonialism could not be undertaken without some moral or ethical justification — not just for the wider public but for its practitioners. Moral agents could not engage in oppressive practices, they could not terrorize other human beings, unless they believed that the endeavor served a higher purpose. And this is what Orientalism provided them, with its claims to civilize and educate the natives. The ethnic and racial domination implied by modern colonialism would thus be perceived by its progenitors as a moral undertaking, not just as the naked pursuit of power and profit. This is the sense in which Orientalism might be suggested to be necessary, albeit insufficient, as a causal factor in the expansion of European rule.

But what this argument would overlook is that it is not the rationalizing function of Orientalism that is in question, but the need for it to be already present in European culture at the inception of the imperial project. Thus, materialist arguments could easily allow that an economically motivated project is greatly facilitated by a discourse that rationalizes the project on moral grounds. But they would deny the stronger proposition that, had the discourse not been in place, the project would have stalled or failed to be launched. This is so because, once the economic interest is in place, there is an endogenously generated pressure to create a justifying discourse for the project, even where such a discourse does not already exist. Dominant agents are not impeded by the fact they do not have, ready at hand, a rationalizing ideology. Where it does not exist, they cobble one together. This is, after all, the main function of intellectuals — to serve ruling groups by crafting an ideology that justifies their dominance on moral grounds. Thus, the absence of such a discourse at the project’s inception cannot be deemed an obstacle to its launch.

But this is exactly what is implied in Said’s claim that latent imperialism was in some way responsible for the modern colonial project. For even the weak version of his second argument to succeed, it has to establish that, had British and French elites not had the intellectual resources of Orientalism already available to them, this absence would have been an obstacle to their colonial project. Without this claim, the second argument collapses into a materialist one. If Said were to agree that, even if Orientalism had not been available as an academic discipline, even if latent Orientalism had been absent from the scene, its basic elements could have nonetheless been crafted ex nihilo in order to justify colonial rule — then he would be suggesting that latent Orientalism was not, in fact, a necessary part of the causal complex that brought about colonialism. If it is conceded that colonial elites were capable of generating their own rationalizing discourse, then latent Orientalism fails even as a necessary component of the forces behind colonialism. We are now back to the materialist argument that ruling classes create the ideology needed for their reproduction, and not the other way around.

Hence, Said’s second argument cannot be sustained, even in its weak form. Once it is admitted that essentializing descriptions of other cultures were common across East and West, and once we recognize that other motivations were enough to propel states outward, then it cannot be maintained that the mindset created by these descriptions was in any way responsible for the colonial project. What was, in fact, responsible was what Marxists and progressive nationalists had been suggesting for a century prior to the publication of Orientalism: the material interests and capacities of particular social formations in the West. It is to Said’s credit that he acknowledges the fact of cross-cultural parochialism, but it’s quite astonishing that he is unaware of how devastating the admission is to his argument. The admission injects a deep and unresolvable contradiction in one of his fundamental claims. Once this part of his book is rejected, as it should be, what remains standing is his first argument: that the basic function of Orientalism was to serve as the justification of colonial rule — as its consequence, not its cause.

SEPOY REBELLION INDIA 1857

Legacy

Said never addressed the ambiguity in his book regarding the relationship between Orientalist discourse and the colonial project — in chief, the copresence of two diametrically opposed enunciations of that relationship. But, in many ways, that very ambiguity played a role in the easy assimilation of Orientalism into the broader shifts underway around the time of its publication. The early 1980s were when critical intellectuals ceased to be enamored of Marx and Marxist theory, turning to the warm embrace of post-structuralism and, soon thereafter, postcolonial theory. In this context, Said’s incipient culturalism, his nod to the potentially primary role of ideas and discourse in the initiation of colonialism, folded seamlessly into the shifts that were occurring in the scholarly world. His explicit overtures to Foucault, and his adoption of some of the latter’s conceptual vocabulary, packaged the book in a fashion that made it easily digestible, even familiar. Substantively, the culturalism of his second argument — which elicited censure from Marxists like al-Azm and Ahmad — barely raised an eyebrow in the wider firmament, because this was the very direction in which critical theory was evolving. Indeed, the reaction from broader circles was directed not at Said but at Ahmad, whose important critique of Said was met with a campaign so vicious and personalized that it is jarring to revisit it even a quarter century later.

The second aspect of Said’s book that ensured its warm reception had to do with his treatment of Marx. Said did not just present his book as a scholarly work on colonial ideology, but as a representative of the anti-colonial tradition. It was packaged as a work of critical theory — deeply erudite, intensely scholarly, but never neutral. In this respect, it was intended to be part of the anti-colonial tradition associated with the global left in the twentieth century. But as Said well knew, that tradition had been led by, and associated with, Marxist and socialist theory since the late nineteenth century. Even mainstream nationalists drew on the theories and political ambitions of the Marxist left, from India and China to South Africa and Peru. The only political currents that were explicitly hostile to that tradition were those associated with conservative nationalists and religious groups. For a century prior to the publication of Orientalism, the progressive critique of colonialism had always orbited around, and drawn upon, Marxism.The basic function of Orientalism was to serve as the justification of colonial rule — as its consequence, not its cause.

Said’s innovation was to be the most significant intellectual who claimed the mantle of radical anti-colonialism, while also denouncing Marx as a purveyor of alien and highly parochial values and analysis. This was significant in several respects. First and foremost, for the rapidly professionalizing New Left — now tenured and looking for acceptance in the American academy — it provided an ideal instrument to distance themselves from Marxist theory while still identifying as radicals. It was now possible to reinvent colonial critique so that it defended the idea of self-determination while eschewing any association with socialist or Marxist ideas. Indeed, the preferred motif now became criticizing the Marxist legacy as not radical enough — hence outflanking it rhetorically from the left.

These strategies were neatly exemplified in an influential series of essays on Marxism and colonial critique by the Indian historian Gyan Prakash. Writing in the early 1990s, when Said’s influence was well established, Prakash upheld the banner of anti-colonialism, calling for a root and branch excision of Orientalism from colonial historiography — in which one of the main targets turned out to be Marx and his followers. What was significant here was not just the novelty of turning Marx into a proponent of the “colonial gaze” (to use a bit of postcolonial jargon) but, equally, for Prakash to draw explicitly on Said, on Orientalism, and to drape his argument in that book’s conceptual vocabulary. This strategy was soon just about ubiquitous in all the fields in which area studies played any significant role, so that by the second decade of this century, it was taken for granted that the only way in which Marxist theory could have anything to offer in colonial critique was if somehow it could be rid of its Western bias and its putative endorsement of colonialism — for which Said’s work was, and still is, taken to be the remedy.

Second, a central implication of Said’s description of Marx as an Orientalist was that the analytical categories associated with him were similarly demoted. It had been common, even typical, in the critical anti-colonial tradition to approach the subject through the prism of political economy — even if the analyst did not mobilize its categories, the deep and enduring relation between colonial expansion and capitalist motives was at least assumed, if not highlighted. But in a book devoted to the explication of colonial ideology, and to the connection between that ideology and the colonial project, Said studiously distances himself from any reference to capitalism. Neither the word nor even its cognates makes an appearance in Orientalism, except in reference to others’ works or in irony. The entire issue is presented and analyzed through the framework of cultural analysis, in which the thinker who receives a positive endorsement is not Marx — nor Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote the two most influential analyses of imperialism in the twentieth century — but Foucault.

What made the marginalization of political economy all the more significant was the framework Said seemed to offer in its place. At the core of the traditional materialist understanding of colonialism was the analysis of capitalism and the wider theory bound up with it — the manner in which class interests shaped imperialism, the relation of laboring classes to it, the question of whether and how much they might have benefited from it, the mechanisms by which local elite interests were harnessed to the project, and, of course, the role of the state. But few of these concerns make their way into Said’s framework. The categories that drive his analysis are civilizational and geographical: East and West, Orient and Occident. Capitalists and workers, peasants and landlords — the normal concepts of political analysis — are displaced by the very categories that Said ought to have been anxious to set aside. Rather than interests, what motivates colonialists is the West’s “will to power,” a concept that is connected to interests only semantically, if at all.

The evacuation of materialist categories, the turn to culturalism, the positing of what appears to be a cognitive divide between West and East, the pillorying of Marx as another in a long line of European Orientalists — all these elements in Said’s great work were entirely in line with the evolution of critical scholarship in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As social theory went from materialist to culturalist, and from culturalist to postcolonial, overtures to Orientalism remained a fixture throughout. And Said, a humanist and lifelong critic of cultural essentialisms, became associated with an intellectual turn that has resurrected the very Orientalist tropes he spent much of his career trying to undermine. Said was apparently never entirely at ease with this circumstance, as Timothy Brennan has observed. But Said did little to overturn it, and far less to resist it. For better or worse, he not only tolerated but presided over his enshrinement as one of the foundational thinkers of the postcolonial turn.

For those who seek a return to the materialist roots of the anti-colonial tradition in scholarship, the dimensions of Said’s great work that I have highlighted — his second argument, the essentialism it entailed, the demotion of political economy, and the positing of an East-West dichotomy — will have to be set aside. This means that one of the tasks is to revive the critical approach endorsed by scholars such as al-Azm and Ahmad, against the mountainous and deplorable calumny to which they have been subjected. Most of all, it will mean placing the questions of class and capitalism back at the center of political and historical analysis of colonialism — and of the postcolonial states that followed in its wake. This does not, by any means, entail a rejection of Orientalism itself. The materialist core of Said’s work remains valid, untouched by the infirmities of his “Orientalism in reverse,” as al-Azm correctly described his second argument. It still offers an imposing edifice upon which the anti-colonial tradition can build. It is just that this dimension of Said’s great work will have to be embedded in an analytical framework that draws upon, and returns to, those categories that are missing from Orientalism, and that postcolonial theory has worked for more than a generation to either bury or forget — back to political economy, for which, even today, Marx remains the indispensable starting point.

Republished from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

The Sepoy Rebellion — Forgotten History
https://www.forgottenhistory.me/war/the-sepoy-rebellion
2019-06-07 · Jun 7 The Sepoy Rebellion. Matthew Jarrett. Going by many names such as The Sepoy Rebellion, The Sepoy Mutiny, The Indian Mutiny and in India is known as the First War of Independence, the war that saw a dramatic shift in British rule in India has a long and storied history. While ultimately unsuccessful it proved to the British that India would require more …

Indian Rebellion of 1857 - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
Overview
East India Company's expansion in India
Causes of the rebellion
Onset of the rebellion
Supporters and opposition
The revolt
Consequences
Nomenclature


The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the Company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 mi (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted into other mutinies and civilia…